Chapter 1
The Discovery
“Mom! Mom!!!!”
The far-off, muffled sounds stirred my consciousness, slightly waking me from a deep and dreamless sleep. I wondered groggily what had awoken me, when I heard them again.
“Mom, it’s over here! Hurry up!!”
I knew those noises meant something, but my brain was not cooperating. I came awake a little bit more, fighting the unconsciousness. My eyelids, however, remained closed. It was like a force was physically keeping them down. I heard footsteps crunching as a person approached, still emitting those syllables. I made an effort, willing myself to understand, and the sounds resolved themselves into words.
“Oh my gosh! I just can’t believe it.” The speaker was very close. I heard the young feminine voice, but no other information was apparent from listening alone. I heard her moving, and then a sharp, stifled yell, as if she had shouted over her shoulder. “I’m over here!!” A keen whistling punctuated her words as a strong wind blew past my face.
I became aware of another voice, quickly drawing nearer. This voice was lower, but still had a womanly quality to it. “Natalie, where is it? I can’t see anything in this snowstorm!”
I heard a sharp intake of breath, only a few feet away. I needed to know what was going on, so I determined to open my eyes. It was like pushing up a giant weight, but I finally succeeded.
Small white flecks floated before my eyes, swirling around as that same whistling pulled them one way or the other. I peered past the curtain of white, and saw two faces staring at me. One was closer than the other, but they were both blurry, the features too indistinct to make out. The closest face leaned over, and my body achieved weightlessness as I was lifted from my resting place. The heaviness on my eyes overwhelmed my meager strength, and my eyelids fell closed as I slipped into the unknown once more.
* * * * * *
As I gained consciousness, my first sensation was the smell of lavender. I also quickly became aware that I was lying down on something soft, with a blanket of some sort covering me. I wasn't sure how I came to be here. I vaguely remembered two featureless faces, but I wasn't sure if those belonged in a dream or not.
I immediately opened my eyes. I wanted to see where I was, and maybe figure out how I got there. The weights that had held my eyes closed from before had vanished completely, leaving me free to visually explore the area around me. My first sights surprised me. It appeared as if I were in a white, oval-shaped room. From my vantage point of where my head rested, I couldn't see any doors or windows. There was a ceiling high above me, probably twenty to thirty feet away, but nothing covering the top of the walls, which appeared to be only six or seven feet tall. I looked closer at the walls, and realized they were draped in cloth. What a weird place, I thought.
I tried to lift my head to examine the rest of this area, and maybe find a door to leave, but my neck refused to cooperate. It was a very odd sensation. My muscles resisted action like I had never moved them before. It took all my strength just to make a fist in my right hand. I felt a small triumph as my fingers closed into position, but that victory was short-lived. I could feel my fingers against the palm of my hand, and the dimensions were different than I remembered. My fingers felt a lot smaller than what I was used to. OK, I thought, this is getting really weird.
Had I just come out of a coma? Is that why my muscles moved differently, due to the atrophy that occurs when you don’t use them? I hoped that wasn’t it. For one thing, this was no hospital bed, unless they had begun making them with walls. But there were no electronic devices monitoring my pulse or breathing; surely, if I had just woken up, a doctor or nurse would have visited me by now. No, that’s not right, I decided. This isn’t a hospital. I didn’t think that I could be in a coma for that long anywhere else, so I began exploring other possibilities of what happened to me.
Maybe I was in a car accident. Maybe I wasn’t able to move because I had received a serious spinal injury. But nothing hurt, so it didn’t seem like I had been injured anywhere. It was just hard to move.
But I don’t remember anything, either. A car accident could explain my memory loss. Hitting the steering wheel with my head could cause amnesia. Oh wait; I do remember those two faces. Now that I was more awake, I could tell that those faces didn’t belong in a dream. The voices had said that they were in a snowstorm. That would make sense, since there was all that white stuff floating around. But what was I doing in a snowstorm in the first place? I mentally shook my head, knowing that I couldn’t answer that now. I continued thinking on the memory. I remembered one of the faces had bent over and picked me up, seemingly without effort. How is that possible? I wondered. Picking up a deadweight is incredibly hard, especially from a bent-over position. Either I’ve found my way to a land of super-strong people, or something else is going on.
As I continued thinking about it, nothing was making sense. I listed off the issues in my mind. I was in a snowstorm, I can hardly move my muscles, someone, a woman by the sound of her voice, was able to pick me up, and I have no recollection of anything that has happened to me before. At that thought, I realized something important. I didn’t even know my name. I racked my brain, spewing off a rapid litany of names. David, Jacob, Travis… But nothing clicked. None of the names felt like they were mine.
I breathed in and out, laboring to bring enough oxygen into my lungs. My heart rapped against my ribs. I wondered if this is what a panic attack felt like. However, I forced myself to calm down and take a few deep breaths. Panicking would solve nothing. I needed a clear mind if I was to come up with any answers.
I focused on trying to move my muscles. If I could gain a view of my body, and of the rest of this room, maybe some things could be explained. The weird dimensions of my hand bothered me, and I wanted to see if there was anything different about me. I started rocking my head from side to side. At first, the movement was negligible. But as I persevered, my muscles grew stronger, and I was able to move more. Finally, I was able to turn my head in a complete one-eighty. With my newly-strengthened muscles, I was finally able to lift my head and look at my body.
What I saw completely blew me away, insomuch that I couldn’t comprehend it at first. I flexed my right hand, and saw the fingers move in conjunction with my nervous system command. I blinked a few times. This, this is impossible, I mentally stammered.
The fact that I gathered as I gazed at my arms resting on the blanket, was that I was small. And not just atrophied-muscles or stunted-growth small, but infantile small. As in, my hand looked like it belonged on a baby. The fingers were tiny and wrinkled, the fingernails a delicate pink. I curled my hand again, reeling from this discovery.
I closed my eyes, overwhelmed. On one hand, a lot more things were making sense. My inability to use my muscles, the strange proportions of my hands, and the ability of someone to pick me up with no effort. Of course, these answers didn’t mean much in the face of the much larger issues at hand: where was I, why couldn’t I remember anything, and how in the world did I end up AS A BABY???!!!! I couldn’t help mentally shouting those last words, as the horrid reality hit me full in the face.
But something stopped me before I really started freaking out. I had no memory before this time. How did I know that I wasn’t just born, and this is how all babies are when they first enter this world?
But something about that seemed off. For one, I somehow had a mental image of myself being an adult. I just knew that I should be six foot one. Also, although I couldn’t remember my name, quite a few names came to mind as I searched for mine. I knew about hospitals, car accidents, snowstorms, panic attacks, and comas. There was no way a newborn would be able to know about all that. No, there was another reason for my new state of being.
I looked back at my hand. Judging from standard growth charts, whose information I pulled from somewhere, I gauged my age to be about fourteen days old. Of course, I could have been older or younger, depending on if I was larger or smaller than average. I didn't know for sure, so I decided to just accept the idea that I was two weeks old. I could see a red t-shirt poking from underneath the crocheted blanket, and some kind of diaper covering my other end. I shifted a little. It didn’t crackle like a store-bought diaper. Maybe it was cloth.
The room around me took on new dimensions as well. Where once I assumed the walls to be seven feet tall, now I could see that they were probably eighteen inches. The cloth walls gave me a final clue as to where I lay. This is a bassinet, I surmised. I looked closer at the walls. They looked like they had seen their share of use; the white of the cloth fading into a yellowish tinge.
I wondered if there was anybody around. Since I could form coherent thoughts, I assumed I could talk as well. However, I didn’t want to just start calling for help. I thought I would lay low for a while, and find out as much as possible before I surprised anyone with my very un-baby-like vocabulary.
I made a small noise, just a whimper, and immediately, someone was there, looking over the edge of the bassinet at me. She must have been waiting nearby for me to wake up. I recognized her from my memory in the snowstorm. She had been the one to pick me up. Now that my eyes weren’t as blurry, I could better see what she looked like. She had very fair skin, contrasting nicely with her shoulder-length, chocolate-brown hair. Dark sapphire-blue eyes gazed at me. Her small button nose crinkled as she smiled, displaying even teeth and full lips. She had faint laugh lines around her mouth, and crow’s feet framing her eyes. I gauged her age to be roughly forty-three to forty-five. She was a very pretty woman, with kindness radiating from her eyes.
She reached over the bassinet and picked me up. The swirl of colors as the room whirled nearly gave me a headache, but she soon nestled me in her arms.
“Oh, we were so worried about you! When Natalie came and told me there was a baby in the woods, I didn’t believe her. After all, it is snowing, and I thought that the snow was playing tricks on her eyes.” Her voice matched the older female voice that I remembered hearing. “But something told me to go see, and we found you, in a little blanket at the base of a tree. Thank goodness for Natalie. If she hadn’t have seen you, you probably would have frozen to death.”
The words came out quickly, more like she was talking to herself rather than to me. Even though she was looking at me, she had a somewhat dazed look in her dark-blue eyes, as if she were seeing that snow-covered place instead of me. Those eyes came into focus and she looked into my face.
“But look at you!” she exclaimed, putting her index finger near my left hand. I obediently gripped her finger. “You are such a cute little baby! You can’t be more than a few weeks old! How did you get here? Who would leave you alone?”
I realized right away that she didn’t resort to infantile baby-talk, something I knew that I would not be able to stand. I decided that I liked her.
She walked around the bassinet and sat down in a chair, rocking me. The feeling was really quite calming. I could see why normal babies would succumb to the motion and fall asleep. I, however, had more important things to do. I glanced around the room, as slyly as I could. I saw that my bassinet was standing close to two bunk beds. The beds hadn’t been made that morning, and I could see red and blue Superman sheets adorning the mattresses (how did I even know who Superman was?). Behind the beds, I could see dark blue wallpaper, with graphics of trains and planes. A window showed heavy snowfall, with dark branches stooping under their added weight. I slowly turned my head to the left, and saw the top of a stand-up basketball hoop, the ones that younger kids enjoy. I deduced from all this that I was in a kid’s room. Two kids, most likely boys, ages ranging from five to eleven years old.
I turned my attention back to the woman holding me. She spoke American-accented English, so I knew I was in the United States. The fact that it was snowing heavily cut off the possibility that I was in the South, Southwest, or Pacific states. Judging by the way she pronounced certain words, like ‘found’ and ‘seen’, I considered that I was in one of the Midwestern states, possibly Iowa or Nebraska. However, other than asking her a direct question, I didn’t think that there was a way to signal what I wanted to know. I decided to stay awake, and see if she would tell me more.
I didn’t have to wait long. She began talking, probably more to soothe me than to convey information, but it told me more of what I wanted to know, all the same.
“I know you don’t understand me, but I’ve found that talking helps a baby feel loved. So, my name is Susan Stillwell, and I’m the wife of Jack Stillwell. We live in the town of Meriwether, which is in the very southwest corner of Iowa. On a good day, you can see into both Nebraska and Missouri. I actually have had the privilege of being in three places at once.”
She laughed, like wind chimes in a gentle breeze. Her laugh was contagious, and made me want to chuckle along with her. However, that act would instantly dissolve my pretenses of being a normal newborn, so I kept my mouth shut.
I heard footsteps running underneath our floor, heralding the arrival of more family members. Multiple pairs of footsteps came pounding up the stairs, and two small boys ran noisily into the room. Susan was not pleased.
“Todd! Jason! You’re lucky this baby had already woken up by the time you came tromping inside, otherwise you would have had to take care of him while he cried.” Her voice was stern, but I could hear the love underlining her words. She seemed more exasperated than upset.
The two boys immediately dropped their heads and murmured apologies. I could tell that in their exuberance, they had forgotten about my arrival. But their heads soon lifted, and they ran over to see me.
“Mom, why was this baby in the woods? Who left him there?” asked one boy, a wayward brown cowlick sticking up from the back of his head. He looked to be about nine years old. His younger brother copied Susan in curling my hand around his finger.
“I don’t know, Todd. There wasn’t a note. All that we know is that the name “Garrett” was sewn on the front of his shirt. Other than that, all he had was a blanket. ”
At the sound of this name, a hazy feeling came over me. I knew that this was in fact my name, though anything else associated with that knowledge remained hidden. Well, that’s one mystery solved. Garrett. I like it.
“Mom, what are we going to do with him? Are we going to keep him?” these questions were put forth by Jason, who was probably two years younger than Todd. There was a space between his two front teeth, which probably resulted in a sibilant ‘s’. I wondered if people thought it was cute.
From the tightening of her eyes, Susan didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. “Jason, your father is in town right now, asking questions to see if anyone has recently had a baby. Maybe that someone didn’t want the baby anymore, and left him outside. Until we know more, we’ll just keep him around. Good thing we kept all your old baby clothes in the attic.”
Right then, a wave of fatigue washed over me. I didn’t know how I got to Iowa, but my body was telling me that it took a lot of energy to get me there. My eyes grew heavy.
“Oh, look at that, he’s falling asleep. We’ll let him take a nap,” said Susan. “Remember, boys,” she admonished, “if you’re going to be loud, take it outside. We don’t want to wake him up when he’s sleeping.” She paused, obviously thinking about something. Her mouth firmed as if she had come to a decision. “In fact, let’s move him to your dad’s office, so you don’t have to worry about waking him up if you play in here.” Susan put me down on the lower bunk bed, and covered me with the blue quilt. As she moved away to pick up the bassinet, the fragrance of lavender surrounded me, and I surrendered to sleep.
So that's the first chapter. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, let me know. It's not a finished project yet, and I'm still making changes.
