What Was Mine by Helen Klein Ross Read Free Book Online

was impossible—my baby had been kidnapped.
    They took me to a room in the back of the store. A door opened and the store stopped being shiny aisles of colorful merchandise and turned into grim, gray surrounds. The room was airless. There were no windows. I felt as if I were unable to breathe. A detective asked questions: When did I realize my baby was missing? When had I last seen her? Had I ever lost her before? My mind was already crowding with horrible visions. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be tortured by thoughts of what is happening to your child as you are being grilled as if you are a criminal, while whoever took her is being allowed to get farther and farther away.
    I know now that questioning a lost child’s parents as if they are the kidnappers is standard procedure, but I didn’t know it then and it was agony to be made to account for every minute of my day to an angry-looking detective who’d sat me in a room separated from Tom, who was being asked the same questions, to see if our answers matched. At a certain point, I stopped talking, stopped being able to understand what was being asked of me. Voices went too soft to hear, then came at me deafeningly loud. I had to focus on lips to get the meaning of words.
    They dusted the rubber duck—the last thing I gave my baby—for prints. A man in a white coat, wearing plastic gloves, pushed long Q-tips into our mouths and swabbed saliva off the duck, to match DNA with the samples they got from the Q-tips, to confirm that Tom and I were her parents. They said most abductions involve a biological parent, and this about sent me over the edge, because even in my agitated state, I knew they were referring to abductions that happen when parents have separated and Tom and I were still together, which should have been obvious to them.
    Then the press showed up. So many people with notepads and mics wanting to talk to us. We were told it was best to give an exclusive, that would get us the most airtime for our plea. We chose Connie Chung because our lawyer said that CBS had the biggest audience. We wanted to spread the word as fast as we could. This was before social media, before AMBER Alerts. We were told that most abducted children who come home are returned to their parents within twenty-four hours. The alternative was unthinkable.
    How I regretted not having a better photo of Natalie. Babies change fast. The picture we had of her at two months looked nothing like how she looked at four months. But this was before digital. People didn’t snap away at their babies like they do today. I’d made appointments at Olan Mills Studios, but had canceled them because things always came up at work. I could have sent her with Charu, but I wanted to bring her to the studio myself. I didn’t want my sitter to do it. We had plenty of time for a session, I thought. The Christmas-card deadline was still weeks away.
    That TV appearance! I’ll never forget the horror of it. Lights shining on us bright as kliegs as we sat there trying to look like good parents, not crazy, having to plead for mercy from the monster who took our baby, hoping the monster was watching Connie Chung.

12
lucy
    I t felt as if I were walking into someone else’s house, so different did it seem with a baby inside it. The air was strangely charged. The light in the kitchen seemed brighter, sharper. Objects I saw every day acquired new luster, new clarity. The toaster gleamed, vivid in its dark corner. Pastel Fiestaware deepened to the colors of rainbows. Little painted teapots danced on the walls. The house was no different, yet everything had changed. It felt both larger and smaller, shape-shifting around the baby’s presence, her small weight on my shoulder somehow expanded to fill up the space. The narrow corridor widened as I brought her to the nursery. Its windows were street-facing, and once there, I pulled the blinds shut. Not because I was afraid