The Abduction of Mary Rose Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself taken at various stages of her life. At seven, standing with a baseball bat poised for a home run, the peak of her hat casting a shadow over her small face. Next to it, her high school grad picture. She'd worn a blue satin dress she'd ached to wear and her mother had gotten for her, surprising her with it. She went with David Callaghan, a nice kid who had since become a lawyer and married one of their classmates. She had wished them well.
    And there was one of her with her mother that Frank had taken the summer they went to Old Orchard Beach. She had just turned fourteen. They looked happy. It was so long ago.
    Frank's own attention had shifted to the little wooden clown on the parallel bars, sitting on the coffee table, a birthday gift Naomi had given her mother years ago. Sighing again, he idly flicked the top of its red hat and as though on command, the clown went into his series of somersaults. "Naomi…."
    "For God's sake, just say it, Frank, please. I think I'm pretty much past being shocked by anything."
    He looked skeptically at her. "Don't be so quick to say that. But yes, I suppose there is no easy way. I wasn't entirely forthcoming when I told you your birth mother walked out of the hospital never to be seen again."
    This wasn't exactly a revelation. She waited. He was obviously not looking forward to telling her whatever it was he was about to tell her, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know either, but she needed to hear, needed to know all of it.
    "She died just five days after you were born. I knew if I told you that, well, you'd want to know more about her and that would lead to what I'm about to tell you."
    "Then you know who she was. You know her name."
    He nodded his head, barely perceptive, then said, "Yes. Her name was Mary Rose Francis. She was a Native girl … Mi'kmaq. She lived on Big Salmon Reserve with her grandfather. The reserve is no longer there, of course. As you know, the land was confiscated by the government in the late eighties when they built the dam up there, and the band dispersed to other parts of the country after that. Some migrated to the States. But that's where she lived."
    Naomi said, "Then I'm part Native Indian. She must have been ashamed of my origins, not to tell me."
    "C'mon, honey. That's not fair and you know it. Nor true. You know your mother didn't have a racist bone in her body. No. That wasn't it."
    Interesting for him to talk about what was fair. "Then what?" He had steepled his fingers and appeared to study them. His deep sigh seemed to hold all the weight of the world. Then, in a monotone, as if he'd needed to remove himself emotionally from the story, he began to speak again.
    "She'd been visiting at a friend's house after school. It was getting on to dark when she left to catch the bus home. A car drove up beside her, began to follow her. There were two men in the car."
    He stopped and cleared his throat. Naomi sensed what was coming and didn't want to hear it. "Go on."
    "One of them forced her into the car. They drove to the outskirts of town … no point in my trying to sanitize this, you can read the write-ups in the paper yourself … she was beaten, raped. When they finished with her, they tossed her out of the car, left her for dead. I'm sorry, Naomi. I'm so sorry to tell you this."
    "I know. I know you are, Frank. Go on, please."
    He sighed again. He stared down at his fingers in his lap, intertwined, now spreading them helplessly, and resigning to his unpleasant task. "A man out walking his dog discovered her the next morning, lying unconscious by the side of the road. He called an ambulance, and she was rushed into the hospital where she remained in a coma for eight months. At the end of that eighth month, with the help of labour-inducing medications, she delivered a baby girl. Routine tests had already revealed the pregnancy. It was a rare case, but not unheard of. They'd considered a Caesarean section, of course, but it was decided that that would