A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 27

This is the 9th year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn. It has haunted her ever since.

The woman in the bus depot, the perpetrator, was amiable and chatty, Eleanor Williams tearfully told the police.

This was long ago, after Williams, young and naive, had been tragically preyed upon, investigators said. Today, it’s a cold case.

The woman, whose crime in the terminal that day shattered Williams’s psyche, was African American and appeared to be in her 20s, Williams recalled, speaking publicly for the first time in decades about a mystery that has perplexed D.C. police. Williams said the stranger’s perfidy left her so mired in guilt and shame that she later contemplated killing herself.

The woman, about 5-foot-3 and slender, struck up a conversation with Williams in the passenger waiting area, cooing over Williams’s infant daughter. After a while, in the sweetest voice, she asked whether she could hold the child.

Please? Just for a minute?

She said her name was Latoya.

Which might have been a lie. Who knows?

She said she was headed “out west” — maybe also a lie.

Williams was 18 then, on Dec. 2, 1983, a date that haunts her. She had grown up on a nine-acre farm in southeastern Virginia, and she still lived there. Before that morning, when she set out for Kansas by motor coach with her daughter, she had never ventured more than 30 miles from her home, she said.

Her baby, April Nicole Williams, 3½ months old, was bundled in a pink-and-white snowsuit. The trip’s first leg, 200 miles, brought them to downtown Washington, to the old Trailways depot at 12th and I streets NW, which closed not long afterward.

They were scheduled for a three-hour afternoon stop. Carrying April and her diaper bag, Williams, who had been awake since before dawn, trudged into the station and sat down wearily, with 1,200 miles of highway still ahead of her.

Latoya, if that was really her name, “came over next to me at some point and just started talking to me,” Williams said recently at her Connecticut apartment, sobbing as she described the awful mistake she made 34 years ago. Latoya “was being friendly, asking me lots of questions. Like, ‘Where are you going?’ And, ‘How old is your baby?’ She was nice, you know? Then she was like, ‘Do you mind if I hold her?’ And I was sitting right next to her, right there, so I said okay, and I let her.”

Until lately, Williams, 52, hadn’t spoken publicly about her firstborn child since the week in 1983 when her world fell apart. She kept the memories mostly to herself, buried under a weight of sorrow. In her apartment, she shared the story haltingly, pausing for long stretches to gather her composure.

The woman, cradling April, said the baby needed a diaper change, Williams recalled.

“She said: ‘Oh, I’ll take her to the bathroom. You look tired.’ And I was skeptical, like, “Well . . . okay, I guess.’ Because I was tired. And I thought about it, but I had already said okay, and she had already got up and taken her to the bathroom.

“And then, I don’t know, about 10 minutes later, when she didn’t come back, I started getting nervous.”

Williams struggles every day to live with this: She entrusted her infant daughter to a stranger in a bus station, some woman. Latoya was her name, or maybe not.

“She went to change her,” Williams said, “and I never saw them again.”

What a tragic story. Perhaps having it go public will enable Williams to reunite with her now grown daughter. Imagine the ramifications of such an ordeal:

“Of course I blame myself,” she [Williams] said in her apartment. Her hands were trembling. “I blame myself every minute, right up to this minute. It’s been 34 years, and it’s not something that’s over. I deal with it every day, whether I talk about it or not. . . . It’s always on my mind. It’s always: ‘How could you be so stupid? Why? Why did you do it?’ ”

She lives alone and works as a surgical technician, helping physicians with their instruments in operating rooms. She is “extremely close” to her grown son and daughter, both born after April. She has two grandchildren and hopes for more, she said.

“There were times when I was younger when I wanted to commit suicide, I just felt so bad and so guilty,” she said. “But my other kids were always my strength. Like, what would they do if anything ever happened to me? I remember coming home one night after work and thinking, ‘I could just drive off the road into a tree, and nobody would ever know that I wanted to do this.’ And then I thought about my other kids.”

— —

“I always spend April’s birthday by myself,” Williams said. “I don’t want to be around my other kids, because that’s me and April’s day. I sit and just think about her, hold on to her picture, cry. And I just wonder what she could be doing.”

Her voice was pleading.

“All the stuff they do in school, the awards they get. Did she get any awards? You know, the prom, homecoming, graduation — did she go to the prom? What did she grow up to be? Does she have a career? Does she have kids?”

Williams gazed at the small tabletop in front of her.

“Did she have a wedding? Did she have . . .”

It’s pointless, always pointless.

For answers never come.

The story of a woman who lost her child in such a fashion decades ago… how has she gone about living a life… dealing with grief… self-loathing… bitterness… attempt to be ‘normal’.

Does she find a surrogate daughter? Does she relentlessly pursue evidence on what happened to her daughter and go on a search for her? Or is this simply a story of psychological survival?

There you go, my twenty-seventh story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Here are links for all the previous posts in this year’s series:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.