“I believe you can do it, you know.”
Julia was surprised by how much that meant to her. She didn’t trust her voice to sound normal, so she didn’t say thank you. Instead, she nodded, then turned on her heel and went into the brightly lit library. Behind her, she heard Ellie sigh heavily and say, “I believe in you, too, big sis. I know you can find the kid’s family.” Then the door banged shut.
Julia winced. It had never occurred to her to return the sentiment. She’d always seen her sister as indestructible. Ellie had never needed approval the way she had. Ellie always expected the world to love her, and the world had complied. It was unsettling to get a glimpse of her sister’s inner nature. There was a vulnerability in there somewhere, a fragility that belied the tough-girl-meets-beauty-queen exterior. So, they had something else in common after all.
Julia walked around a grid of tables to the row of computers. There were five of them—four more than she’d expected—sitting on individual desks beneath a cork bulletin board studded with book covers and flyers announcing local events.
She pulled a legal-sized yellow tablet and a black pen out of her briefcase, then scouted through the interior pockets for her handheld tape recorder. Finding it, she added new batteries, turned it on and said: “Case file one, patient name unknown.”
Clicking the Stop button, she sat down on the hard wooden chair and scooted closer to the screen. The computer came on with a thump-buzz. The screen lit up. Within seconds she was surfing the Net and making notes. While she wrote, she also talked into the recorder.
“Case number one, patient: female child, age unknown. Appears to be between five and seven years of age. Name unknown.
Child presents with limited or no language ability. Physical assessment is severe dehydration and malnutrition. Extensive ligature-type scarring on body suggests some serious past trauma. Socialization impairment appears to be marked, as does her ability to interact in an age appropriate manner. Child exhibited utter stillness for hours, broken by period of high excitability and irritation. Additionally, she appears to be terrified of shiny metal objects.
Initial diagnosis: autism.”
She clicked the recorder off, frowning. It didn’t feel right. She Googled autism, symptoms of, and read through the list of behaviors typically associated with autism. None of it was new information.
? Language delay
? Some never acquire language
? Lack of pleasure at being touched
? Unable/unwilling to make eye contact
? Ignores surroundings
? May appear deaf, due to ignoring of sounds/world around him/her
? Repetitive physical behaviors common, i.e., hand clapping, toe tapping
? Severe temper tantrums
? Unintelligible gibberish
? Savant abilities may develop, often in math or music or drawing
? Failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to age level
The list went on. According to the DSM IV criteria, a patient who exhibited a set number of the symptoms could reasonably be diagnosed as autistic. Unfortunately, she hadn’t observed the child fully enough to answer many of the behavioral questions. Like: did the girl like to be touched? Could she exhibit reciprocal emotions? To these, Julia had no concrete answers.
But she had a gut response.
The girl could speak, at least some, and she could hear and understand some limited amount. Strangely, Julia was convinced that the girl’s responses were normal; it was the world around her that was wrong.
There was no point in running through the related diagnoses—Asperger’s syndrome, Ratt’s syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, or PDD NOS. She simply didn’t have enough information. On her pad, she wrote: Tomorrow: study social interaction, patterns of behavior (if any), motor skills.
She clicked the pen shut, tapped it on the table.
There was something she was missing. She went back to the computer and started searching. She had no idea what she was looking for.
For the next two hours she sat there taking notes on whatever childhood behavioral and mental disorders she could find, but none of them gave her that Aha! moment. Finally, at around eleven, she ran a Google search on lost children. That took her to a lot of television movies and kidnapping sites. That was her sister’s job. She added woods to the search to see how many similar cases there were of children lost or abandoned in a forest or national park.
Feral children came up. It was a phrase she hadn’t seen in print since her college days. Below it was the sentence fragment:… lost or abandoned children raised by wolves or bears in the deep woods may seem …
She moved the cursor and clicked. Text appeared on the screen.