I was five years old and lost. Lost at the yearly Lawn Party held by Mount Saint Mary, and overcome by heat. All around me, families laughed and hopped aboard rides set up on the fairgrounds below the Academy. Vendors sold refreshments, but I didn’t have money for a drink or a snow cone. I looked everywhere for my father and big sister, but I just got hotter and hotter, and more scared.
I don’t know how I came to be lost, wandering in ever-expanding circles among strangers. I wanted my family, and I wanted shade. Somehow I found that shade inside the big building on the hill. It was Mount Saint Mary Academy, and there was a dark basement floor where, finally, I was cool.
They were showing a movie in one of the dark basement rooms, and there were long benches to sit on. I sat, trembling, and then I noticed the red spots all over my arms and legs.
A mother and her children sat nearby. I looked up at her, hoping she would notice me and take care of me, as my mother would have done if she’d been there. Instead, the woman shot one glance at me, pulled her children close, and yelled, “Get away!”
I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Other strangers looked at me and moved farther off. The mother gathered her family and left the room.
By now I was crying. I wanted my mother to hold me in her lap, close to her heart, or my father to carry me in his arms, as he often did, because I was so little and so afraid of everything, including the ants on the black-topped lane behind our street. I didn’t know what the red spots were. I was more afraid than ever, trembling more than before, and longing for my parents who loved me, who would never abandon me on a bench in a dark basement room, as that woman had, just because I had spots.
I know why my parents safeguarded me so urgently. Their first child, a healthy boy, was birth-strangled by his umbilical cord. My twin sister, at the age of three months, had been given medicine by the family doctor on a house call one night, and the next morning, my mother found her, stiff and blue, in her crib. I learned years later from a health care professional that the medicine was not safe to give to an infant and the dose was too high.
My father gave Kathleen mouth-to-mouth resuscitation despite the obvious. Then he raced through every red light to the ER with his dead child.
The doctor charged my parents for the home visit and the medicine. I still have the bill my mother kept. $11.00 to murder a baby. With impunity.
I don’t remember how my father found me, or I, him, at the Lawn Party five years after that. I do remember that the spots disappeared after I went home, because I wasn’t spreading the measles. I’d had a heat rash. But I’ve never forgotten those confusing, terrifying moments when I was a baby pariah, and grown-ups scrambled to get away from me.
Sometimes I still feel small and lost, and long for my mother and father. Sometimes I wonder, where did my parents go? Yes, I know, I’m a grandmother now, so, of course, they’re gone, but I ask again, where did they go? I want the answer to a question that is as old as mankind. Where are my parents?
Why have they left me the way that woman did, adrift in the dark hold of a plague ship?
The day before my mother died, she told me about a dream she’d just had. She and my father had walked into a room many stories above the ground, and I was sitting on the open windowsill. Mom stood frozen, sick with fear that if she moved or made a sound I would fall or jump from the window. She gestured to Dad to be very still so that nothing would alarm me. That’s all she told me of her dream, but within twenty-four hours she herself had fallen off the face of the earth, and I was alone again, lost in a happy crowd of summer people who didn’t realize, or care, that my last anchor had been unmoored.
I don’t know how I came to be lost, wandering in ever-expanding circles among strangers. I wanted my family, and I wanted shade. Somehow I found that shade inside the big building on the hill. It was Mount Saint Mary Academy, and there was a dark basement floor where, finally, I was cool.
They were showing a movie in one of the dark basement rooms, and there were long benches to sit on. I sat, trembling, and then I noticed the red spots all over my arms and legs.
A mother and her children sat nearby. I looked up at her, hoping she would notice me and take care of me, as my mother would have done if she’d been there. Instead, the woman shot one glance at me, pulled her children close, and yelled, “Get away!”
I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Other strangers looked at me and moved farther off. The mother gathered her family and left the room.
By now I was crying. I wanted my mother to hold me in her lap, close to her heart, or my father to carry me in his arms, as he often did, because I was so little and so afraid of everything, including the ants on the black-topped lane behind our street. I didn’t know what the red spots were. I was more afraid than ever, trembling more than before, and longing for my parents who loved me, who would never abandon me on a bench in a dark basement room, as that woman had, just because I had spots.
I know why my parents safeguarded me so urgently. Their first child, a healthy boy, was birth-strangled by his umbilical cord. My twin sister, at the age of three months, had been given medicine by the family doctor on a house call one night, and the next morning, my mother found her, stiff and blue, in her crib. I learned years later from a health care professional that the medicine was not safe to give to an infant and the dose was too high.
My father gave Kathleen mouth-to-mouth resuscitation despite the obvious. Then he raced through every red light to the ER with his dead child.
The doctor charged my parents for the home visit and the medicine. I still have the bill my mother kept. $11.00 to murder a baby. With impunity.
I don’t remember how my father found me, or I, him, at the Lawn Party five years after that. I do remember that the spots disappeared after I went home, because I wasn’t spreading the measles. I’d had a heat rash. But I’ve never forgotten those confusing, terrifying moments when I was a baby pariah, and grown-ups scrambled to get away from me.
Sometimes I still feel small and lost, and long for my mother and father. Sometimes I wonder, where did my parents go? Yes, I know, I’m a grandmother now, so, of course, they’re gone, but I ask again, where did they go? I want the answer to a question that is as old as mankind. Where are my parents?
Why have they left me the way that woman did, adrift in the dark hold of a plague ship?
The day before my mother died, she told me about a dream she’d just had. She and my father had walked into a room many stories above the ground, and I was sitting on the open windowsill. Mom stood frozen, sick with fear that if she moved or made a sound I would fall or jump from the window. She gestured to Dad to be very still so that nothing would alarm me. That’s all she told me of her dream, but within twenty-four hours she herself had fallen off the face of the earth, and I was alone again, lost in a happy crowd of summer people who didn’t realize, or care, that my last anchor had been unmoored.