Chapter 19
Maggie grew fast. At six months, she was standing with no help, if only for a few seconds at a time. Anna marveled how advanced she was for a premature baby, and Dr. Rosenthal stayed longer than expected to monitor her growth and achievements. But there was one skill that caught Anna off guard. Maggie seemed to be developing a language of her own.
She was given a set of white toys and blocks, something she could at least hold. Maggie had no use for them. She continued to spend hours chortling and looking around the room for her invisible friends hovering above.
"I'm concerned," voiced Anna to the doctor, "that she may be lacking in areas that are enhancing others. What if her mental state is slowly being impaired by this?" Janet had noticed it also, since the two young women spent every day with the child.
"I will see if Meyer will allow a child psychologist to come see her," said Dr. Rosenthal, and she left the room to call Meyer. Hours later she returned. "Meyer said absolutely not. He does not want anyone that is not connected to this project to know of the girl, unless she's very sick or dying. Those were his words, not mine." Anna and Janet looked sadly back at Maggie.
"What can we do?" asked Janet. "I don't want to be a part of an experiment that fails, only to have a human being at the other end that is incapable of handling life on the outside."
"I think then," Dr. Rosenthal deliberated slowly, "that we carry on and hope this fascination with her imaginary friends disappears in time."
"But the language? What about the language? It's clear she has developed some form of communication that none of us can understand. Any idea what we can do, or how we can fix it?" Anna was agitated and close to telling Meyer off, but she knew it would only make matters worse for Maggie.
The three women sat quietly, their hands on their faces, mystified at the challenge ahead of them. "We can work harder at getting Maggie to speak English," and Dr. Rosenthal tried to reason a way through the dilemma. "I will let Meyer know we're advancing her mechanics and come back with some other blocks and toys that may pull her out of this. I will have to call on the help of colleagues for this. I may have to leave for a few days or a week. Will you ladies be alright if I do so?"
Anna and Janet shook their heads wildly in approval, and the doctor turned and walked out.
Janet looked over at Anna. Her face was beginning to show the signs of stress and anguish over the project that was steeped in false hope. The dam suddenly burst, and Anna wept uncontrollably. Janet knelt in front of her, bending down to make eye contact as Anna had pulled her head into her lap, and smiling in that funny little way Janet could, with the left corner of her mouth pinched up. Somehow, it always worked, and Anna looked up, her face bright red and wet from tears.
"I think you have that disease, postpartum?"
"It's not a disease!" snapped Anna. "It's not post anything. It's this whole stupid experiment." She got up and sat heavily into the puffy white wingback chair. Janet's eyes and hers met again and Anna broke into softer tears. "I had this baby six months ago, and I should feel something. Shouldn't I be feeling something?"
Janet was unsure of what Anna was asking. "You mean you should be thinking of Maggie as if she was yours?"
"Well yes, I gave birth to her! Shouldn't I have a connection somewhere?" pleaded Anna, desperate for any words that could shake her out of the horror show she didn't sign up for.
"We were told not to get overly involved. Maybe you took it to heart."
Anna and Janet's eyes stayed locked for a long time. The wheels were turning in Anna's head at a speed she was unable to sift through. Janet made sense. Perhaps, she was just doing the job she was paid to do. Maybe, she thought, it was time to do the job she was born to do.
Anna glanced over to Maggie at the other end of the room. The baby was standing up against the wall, arms in the air and looking up, babbling in her own language and happy as a clam. She turned and looked at Anna, and crawled over to her, grabbing her pant legs and standing up to have a conversation in a language no one could understand.
"What are you saying child?" Anna pleaded with the infant. "What is this language of yours? Why are you not speaking English?"
Janet suddenly moved over to the pair. "Wait! What if it is a language? Maybe we're not taking this serious enough. What if we had some amazing breakthrough here? Let's start looking at this as if we were doing something valuable, not damaging. Let's see if there really is a language happening and what words are coming through that are consistent. Language has structure. Let's listen."
"I would not be able to do this without you Janet," and the two young women held each other and cried together, with the baby huddled in the middle, pulling on their hair and laughing away as if she knew the two had made a major breakthrough.
"Sometimes it's best to let everything out so you can make space for better things," Janet suggested. "When you find peace, everything falls into place. A quiet inside allows truth to speak and solutions to show up."
"Isn't that a religious thought?" asked Anna. "We're not supposed to do that."
"The heart is not a religion Anna. It's who you are. You know what's right and what isn't. We all carry this inside. No religion can teach it; we find it on our own."
A light bulb went on inside of Anna. Maggie began to grab her and hold her tight, looking up at her with those eyes, like the color of a frozen blue lake in the winter and her black hair flowing forward over them.
"She needs a haircut," and Janet and Anna started to laugh, and they burst into hysterics and rolled on the floor with Maggie.
Janet took Maggie's little hands and looked at her curiously. "What have you got inside there? What are you trying to say to us?" Maggie began to speak an elaborate pattern of words, and Anna grabbed for a pen and paper and began writing.
"She does have some form of speech and it has structure," Janet said as she kept eye contact with Maggie and encouraged her to carry on. "There! Did you hear that? She's said that word a few times already. I've heard that word before!"
"What word? Can you say it back?" asked Anna.
"Eye, eye, eye, sin," and she looked at the tiny girl, hoping to hear the word back.
"Eyyyye sun," chirped Maggie. "Eye sun!" She looked up and pointed around her, then looked back at Janet.
"Okay, that was weird. Did you feel that? That was creepy." Janet pulled away from Maggie and just stared at her.
"Felt it. Take a deep breath Janet. This is very weird, but it's likely just some name she's thought up for her 'friends' she speaks to. After all, what else does she have to do? If you don't see color or play with things, you have to do something. I think this is what's disturbing me the most. We're raising a child that could be damaged for life. I can't help but flip back and forth from positive to negative."
"It felt like there was someone else in the room...you're right, this is tough. And did you notice how quick the doctor left? As if she knows and feels it too, but uses her professional status to walk away when she feels stressed."
"Eyyyyyye sun!" Maggie shouted, and the two women spent the rest of the day writing words they could hear Maggie duplicate. It became clear after a few hours that the child did indeed have a vocabulary all her own. Janet and Anna became very excited, believing they had found a breakthrough that science could investigate further. They made plans to spend as much time as possible to get to know all of Maggie's 'friends' by name and would show it to Dr. Rosenthal when she returned.
"What if she's speaking some form of alien," suggested Janet. "Maybe this light beam that occurred when she was born is an alien implant and you gave birth to it."
"Don't go there!" shouted Anna. "I get what you're inferring, but I don't think Meyer wants a child that's religious, spiritual OR alien. Maybe her blood parents spoke some language and we're deciphering Hebrew or something?"
"Meyer never said anything about aliens," laughed Janet, looking over to Anna, whose face went white as the room she sat in.
April K. Reeves, Author. Copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved. Visit us on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/April-K-Reeves/390530011143987?fref=ts or our website: https://aprilkreevesauthor.wordpress.com/