Sometimes Elaine dreamt of a small, red house sitting in a pretty garden with a lot of flowers. In this garden she was as a small child in the company of someone with two kind hands holding her and patting her head. There was no face to go with the hands and when she came to the point in the dream where they appeared she almost always woke up, feeling sad and worried. However, the night before her 22nd birthday she had a more extended dream:
She went up the garden path with her small hand in this unknown bigger hand and she had a very strong sense of herself being a child walking with a grown-up who loved her very much and whom she also loved. They passed the beautiful roses and for the very first time in the dream they went into the house. At that point she woke up, quite disappointed at not having seen much of the interior of this mystery-house and not to know anything about who that grown-up person was. She wasn't even sure of the sex of him or her, but the hand was very soft so she felt that this loving person by her side most probably was a woman.
A couple of times she asked her Mom about the house and the person from her dream, but she never got any answers by her as to whom the woman was and where the house was to be found. Actually, it seemed that her mother didn't like to talk about it. She looked sad or worried when she mentioned it so she stopped doing it and simply put it in the narrow room in her mind labeled "childhood memories". Here the small house, the garden and the loving person lived side by side with fairy tale characters like Snow White, Cinderella, hordes of fairies, as well as hags and trolls of all descriptions.
The night before her 23rd birthday the dream once more took her past the threshold of the small house, but this time they ended up in a small, but cozy sitting-room. An old woman with white hair greeted her in the most loving manner, but she wasn't the one who had held her by hand. Happy to see this old woman she ran to her yelling "Grandma".
When she woke up from this dream she felt very confused. Her grandmothers, both of them, were wealthy and well conserved women who paid fortunes to keep what was left of their youthful looks, and nothing like this blatantly old woman who flaunted her white hair and aged looks without any pretence of not being 70 or maybe even more.
After this dream she decided to mention it to her mother once more. She started by telling her about it over the phone to prepare her. Then she at once went to see her in the beautiful house she and her late husband had lived in for many years and where she herself had grown to adulthood.
However, when she arrived, she was met by her mother's physician, Doctor Adair, and he didn't look very happy. As to the house it was abuzz with people she didn't know.
"What's going on?" Elaine exclaimed.
"We tried to reach you over the cell phone ..."
"Yes, yes, I didn't answer it as I was driving, but what is this, what has happened?"
"Your mother has had a stroke. The maid told me that she had a phone call and as she hung up she suddenly fell to the floor."
"A phone call? At what time?"
"Around 11.00 AM ..."
"That may have been my call, but I don't understand. She seemed quite all right ..."
"It may not have been the call itself that led to this, but it did happen right afterwards. Unfortunately it doesn't look too well ...
"No!" she exclaimed. "My Mom is strong and not that old, only 62 years old, she will be all right."
He didn't answer, but started up the stairs to her mother's bedroom. She followed him and was relieved to see that a nurse was tending her.
"I want her committed to the hospital right away," the doctor said, "Nurse Kennedy simply was in the car with me when I was called and she wanted to help, but the patient can’t stay here."
Elaine couldn't agree more and she accepted the commitment at once. She followed her mother in the ambulance, holding her hand all the time, but not even that physical closeness made her realize that she had died before they arrived at the hospital.
"And I just sat there, patting her hand," she cried when she told her boyfriend, Frederick, what had happened. "I didn't feel it when she died."
"Nonsense," he said, hugging her lovingly. "On the contrary, you felt too much to see what happened ..."
She cried in his arms and he did his best to console her, but she felt miserable, both over her loss and over her suspicion that it was her phone call which had led to this. Doctor Adair ordered her to take some medicine to help her through this awful time of her life and she went on taking it for some weeks after the funeral. Now that both her parents had died she often felt a special surge of love for both of them, even more than she had felt before. However, they had always been there for her, had loved and protected her and she knew only too well what she had lost.
That is, she knew what they had been to her until she went with Frederick to meet with her mother's lawyer who was working on her papers. He told her that she could have all her personal papers, but that he couldn't find them.
"It's strange," he said, "your parents must have kept all the papers from your birth, your baptism, and so on separate because they are not to be found anywhere. As their only child you inherit everything, no doubt about that, but ..."
She looked at him in amazement. "But where can they have kept the papers? Didn't my parents talk of them?"
"No, never, and it didn't occur to me to ask them." He looked at her, obviously very confused at this development in the case, then he said: "Not to worry, because they have played safe by writing a will so that you are secured in every way. However, that's strange too as you are the only child and thus the sole heir anyway."
Elaine turned to Frederick, looking so bewildered and hurt that he at once kissed her tenderly, saying: "All right, but then they must be in the house somewhere. We shall find them, no doubt about it ..."
That very same day Elaine started to look for the papers by herself. She had seen to it that there wouldn't be anyone in the house but her although she had told Frederick that she would love him to help her at the same time hoping he would not. She didn't find anything until she came to a couple of boxes with her old toys. On top of the heaps of toys she found her beloved Teddy and she felt like an instinctive drift to take him in her arms for comfort. This large toy-bear her father had given her and she had loved it, almost as much as she loved him.
- I had good parents, loving and kind, she thought to herself as she hugged the Teddy bear and dripping tears onto his furry head. As she tried to dry the tears by wiping the fur with her sleeve she noticed that he had an opening in his back. It was zipped closed, but still, there it was. Without really thinking about it she pulled the zipper and poked inside.
Her finger met with something that felt like papers and she pulled at them. Out came a large mass of newspaper clippings and the very first one she noticed was a newspaper article with a photo of a small, red house in a beautifully kept garden. In this garden a young woman stood, obviously crying, and beside her there was a man and an old woman.
Elaine looked at this old, faded photo in amazement, then she pushed the clippings back in and zipped the bear shut once more. She felt that this was something that nobody but herself should see and she decided at once to go somewhere else to read it where nobody would disrupt her privacy.
The only place she could think of right now was her mother’s bedroom which by now was more or less emptied of furniture. Still, there was her small antique desk with all the family photos and she sat down by it to browse her find.
After having read a few sentences in the newspaper article she had seen when unzipping Teddy she knew much more than she ever had before. The small, red house was the home of a happy family of four: Mrs. Blair, who was the mother of Mrs. Jameson, married to Charles and the mother of a pretty girl of 1½ years by the name of Karen. When Elaine looked at the photos of Karen she knew what had happened to her, because the little girl was the exact duplicate of the little girl she looked at in the family photos on her Mom’s desk. – It’s me, she thought, I was kidnapped. I’m Karen, not Elaine …
The clippings told of the kidnapper as being a man looking as a gupsy or maybe a Mexican. He had entered the garden and in a split second he had grabbed the child and run off in a fast moving car. According to the clippings the police feared that the child would be murdered in some gruesome way or that she already was dead.
Dead, she thought, no, shocked to the core of my being, dead I’m not …
She sat browsing all the clippings when she heard footsteps outside the door and before she could stack the telltale articles back inside the bear the door was opened by her aunt Elaine whom she was named after. For some years she had more or less kept away from the family, and it seemed that she and her sister, Elaine’s Mom, had fallen out, but nobody knew how and why that had happened. Now she startled the young woman sitting at her sister’s desk with a lot of newspaper clippings and looking like the culprit she wasn’t.
“Aha,” she said as she entered the room, “you found them …”
The younger Elaine stared at her in disbelief. “Did you know anything about this?” she exclaimed.
“Yes,” her aunt answered, “it was I who did it and I’ve come for the papers to destroy them.
I’m the “Mexican” who robbed that nice family of their cute baby daughter.”
“But … but … how and why?”
“Because my sister had had seven miscarriages and desperately wanted a baby and I … well, I needed the money she was to pay me.”
They looked at each other, then the younger Elaine said: “And what about my real parents? What happened to them?”
“They had four wonderful kids and even though they miss you, they have come to terms with their grief.”
“How do you know that?”
“I knew them, the old Missis, you grandmother, had been our cook some years before this happened.”
It dawned upon Elaine that the family she had lost might not be all innocent in her loss and somehow that felt as a relief. She looked at her aunt and then she said: “Let’s burn those clippings right away.”
Her aunt smiled and put the heavy ashtray from the desk in front of her: “I have the matches – still a smoker, I’m afraid – so let’s make a bonfire of the past.”
While the clippings were turning into ashes Elaine asked her aunt: “Was my grandmother the only one who knew about this kidnapping?”
“Yes, except for your Mom and Dad. Your birth mother and birth father never knew what had happened, but she both sold you and, perhaps even saved you, as your abduction made them revise their relationship. There was some kind of abuse, but that stopped and you had a good and loving, new family.”
Elaine sat still for some minutes then she said: “Yes, I had and what happened is in the past. I shall live in the present and in the future, not the past.”
Her aunt smiled as their eyes interlocked over the smouldering ashes from the clippings.
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