The Veil

Chapter One

Who carries a baby for nine months and then just leaves it? Oh right, the woman who gave birth to me. I was only a few days old in the hospital when social services came to get me. Obviously, I had no idea what was going on after all I was just a baby in a pink cap and wrapped in a hospital blanket.

Social services immediately brought me to a loving newly married couple who lived on the outskirts of Seattle. They were crazy me about me, or so I had been told, until they found out about my heart condition. It was only a matter of time until I was moved back into the system because do you know what couples want to adopt? They want to adopt new born babies. So why then was I never adopted? I asked myself that question a lot as I grew up in the dysfunctional system of the government. It was because I was a defect. At least that was how I felt my entire life. But the truth was that I was born with a rare heart defect. So, it wasn't enough that my bio mom gave me life and then just left me, she also had to give me a fatal heart condition.

The condition is called aortic stenosis. I looked it up when I was about ten years old. Basically, I didn't have enough valves in my heart to pump blood to the rest of my body. Some children die immediately and some of them live normal painless lives. I on the other hand was experiencing every symptom there was. Which is not ideal when you go from foster home to foster home and have no real home or parents. The first time I would faint or get sent home from school because I had fainted in the lunch line, the foster parents would call social services to find me another home. I was more trouble than I was worth. I should have died but instead I lived fifteen painful years with this condition, I know I should be grateful for that, but I wasn't. Sometimes I would lay in a bed or on the floor of a foster home and wish that I had never been born; unfortunately for me I had been.

Not one couple wanted to adopt me, which was upsetting enough but being a sick parentless child made me feel even worse. So yes, I guess everyone thought that I was way more trouble than I was worth. I'm shocked someone never ended up killing me. The physical abuse in some of these homes was ridiculous. Not only from the foster parents but the older children were always bullying the younger ones.

When I was only about five there was a boy in one of the homes who always picked on me. I tried to stay out of his way, but I remember one day he wanted to take one of my toys while I was playing with it. It was my favorite toy. It was a red top, one that you spun. This one would light up every time you spun it. It was beautiful and one of the only things that had really made me happy. This boy tried taking it from me and when I went to grab it back from him, he stood up over me and kicked me in the face shoes and all.

After that my cheek was bruised under my right eye and the foster parents never said anything. To me it is a very intense memory that I can never let go of. However, the older I got the more I realized that all these people wanted was more money from the state. No one really cared about me. I learned that from a young age; so that became my reality. No one cared about me, so I was determined never to care about anyone else.

However, there was one person who always seemed to be there for me and in a miraculous way he helped me with all my pain, emotional and physical. So ever since I could remember I had one person who loved me.

His name was Ian and even as a child I was developing a theory that he was my very own guardian angel, if you believe in that sort of thing. I'm not sure where I came up with that theory at such a young age, perhaps it was just wishful thinking on my part. But there was something different about Ian. In a room full of children no one could ever see or hear him except for me. It appears he was invisible to them. I know this because there were many times when the older kids would come up to me and tell me to keep it down while Ian was sitting right there next to me. The first time that happened I was shocked and then I just got used to it. That was when I began to develop my theory about Ian.