“What we’re both trying to understand here,” D.D. stated, with a pointed look at her partner, “is how you survived such a tragic childhood and how it might impact your current situation.”
I stared at her blankly, not following. “I don’t know how I survived. I woke up in a hospital, my aunt took me away, and I’ve done my best never to look back since. The few things I recall mostly come to me as dreams, meaning maybe they’re not even true? I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to know. The first eight years of my life I’ve purposefully blanked from my mind. And if that means the past twenty years are spotty as well, that’s just the way it goes. You rattle off your first day of school, the dog you had in third grade, the dress you wore to prom. I’ll do it my way.”
Both detectives regarded me skeptically.
“You really expect us to believe that?” Bad cop Detective O spoke up first. “You’ve blanked your entire childhood from your own mind?”
“Please, I’ve blanked most of my life from my mind. I don’t remember things. I don’t know how else to tell you that. The first week of my life, the last week of my life. I don’t know. I don’t dwell on things. Maybe that’s freakish, but it’s also worked. I get up each morning. And from what I do remember of the brief time before my aunt came to take me away, I didn’t want to get up anymore. I was alive, and I was deeply disappointed by that.
“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Eight years old, and I already wished I were dead.”
“Tell us about your dreams,” D.D. said.
“Sometimes, I dream about a baby crying. That one feels real enough. Last night, however, I dreamed of my mother digging a grave in the middle of a thunderstorm. And her hair was filled with snakes, hissing at me, and I grabbed a baby girl out of the hall closet and ran away. Except, obviously my mom’s hair wasn’t made out of snakes, and oh yeah, there’s no way a toddler can climb a tree holding a baby, not to mention that in the dream, the baby’s name was Abigail, when of course, it was Rosalind.”
“Abigail?” Detective O asked sharply. She and Detective D.D. exchanged a glance. “Tell us about Abigail.”
I shook my head, rubbing my temples where a headache had already taken root. “You tell me. Do you have a record of an Abigail? Because I mentioned it to my aunt, and she said no. There were two babies. Rosalind and Carter. No Abigail.”
“No birth certificates, remember? No way to be sure.” D.D. was staring at me as hard as Detective O. “In your dream, what did Abigail look like?”
“Like a baby. She smiled at me. Big brown eyes.”
“Brown eyes,” Detective O interrupted. “What about blue?”
“I don’t know. In my dream, they were brown. But…maybe. Don’t all babies start with blue eyes?”
“But you remember brown,” D.D. said. “Blue eyes could darken into brown, but a baby wouldn’t start with brown eyes, that then turned blue.”
I shook my head, confused by both of them and their intensity. “My aunt said two babies, that’s all the police found.”
“It’s possible there were other babies,” D.D. said softly. “According to the police report, your mother moved around a lot, rarely spent more than a year in the same area. Probably helped her disguise the pregnancies, while keeping people from asking too many questions. The officers searched former rental units, of course, but she might have buried other remains, disposed of them in the woods, that sort of thing.”
“What kind of woman does such a thing?”
“A psychopath.” D.D. shrugged. “Munchausen’s by proxy is all about narcissism, a woman objectifying, then harming her own child in order to receive sympathy. Infanticide isn’t that much different. She would’ve viewed the pregnancies as inconvenient, maybe even considered an infant as a rival for attention. She acted accordingly.”
“What do you think, Abigail?” Detective O spoke up.
“What?”