Mindy Beckman lay quietly in bed waiting. She knew that he would soon be here. As she looked out into the total blackness of her bedroom, her mind went back to the very first time that she had seen him appear in her room.
She was only seven. She didn’t know how old he was then, or if, in fact, age had any meaning for him. In those days, he was just a small boy who appeared to be her same age. He would bring her toys for them to play with, or he would take her to marvelous places that she had never seen before except in videos or read about in books
He told her that his name was Teman. He had dark hair and very dark eyes and looked almost Oriental, but his eyes were not what Cindy typically thought of for a person from China or Japan or even Korea. Perhaps he was from one of the Pacific islands. It really didn’t matter. Where he was from didn’t explain how he was able to come into her bedroom each night.
Sometime in the second week after Teman first appeared, she told her parents about him. They immediately called the police. After a thorough investigation by detectives and a conversation with two social workers and a psychologist, it was decided that he existed only in Mindy’s mind.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” the psychologist told her sweetly. “Many children have imaginary friends who fill a need in their lives.” The woman then softly covered Mindy’s hands with her own and said, “Your parents and I have decided that you will see me once a week for a while so we can investigate more constructive ways to fulfill the needs in your life.”
Mindy went to therapy for five years. It was mostly playing with special toys and talking about anything in her life that bothered her. Mindy learned a lot from those sessions. Primarily, she learned how to lie convincingly to the psychologist and her parents about the mysterious boy who visited her room each night.
Teman continued to come to see her almost every night. Sometimes he would leave one of the small toys behind as a gift to her. Sometimes she would give him one of her drawings and he would take it with him. She was sure that he was real. She was sure that he was really in her room. But whenever the doctor or her parents asked about him, she would say, “He doesn’t visit me anymore.”
The last time Mindy ever mentioned Teman to anyone was when her mother noticed a small, home-made doll on her shelf. She asked where it had come from. “Teman gave it to me,” Mindy answered.
“Don’t lie to me,” her mother said firmly. “We have been putting up with your wild stories for two years now. But now it looks like you are stealing from your friends and lying to cover what you have done.”
Mindy tried to tell her mother that Teman had left the doll the last time he visited, but that only angered her mother more and more. They yelled at each other for several minutes until finally her mother snapped, slapped her hard and screamed, “I never want to hear about this imaginary friend of yours ever again, no matter what he does or what he gives you.”
Neither her mother nor the psychologist nor anyone else ever again heard her speak of Teman After an additional year, the psychologist declared that she had finally outgrown this childish fantasy. Therapy continued for another two years before it was declared no longer necessary. Teman was forgotten by everyone… except Mindy. It is difficult to forget someone who continues to visit you almost every night.
The years continued to pass and Mindy began to grow into a beautiful young woman. Teman also grew. As they both got older, Mindy began to notice that she shared many facial features with Teman. She, too, had dark hair and dark eyes. In fact, she seemed to look more like him than she did her own father and mother or any of her cousins.
Mindy began wondering about the fact that her skin was darker than most of her friends, and strangely darker than her mother or father. In her senior year of high school, Mindy was required to write a paper on her personal heritage, including her family tree, as best as she could reconstruct it. It was while researching ancestors that she accumulated family photos and realized that she did not, in fact, look like anyone in her family.
“Mom,” she asked a few days later as they were sitting around the supper table having desert, “when did you adopt me? … And who am I?”
Her mother’s response was to drop a full cup of coffee onto the floor. Her father nearly choked on the bite of pie that was in his mouth. “Who told you?” her mother asked in a shaky voice.
She so much wanted to say, “Teman,” but instead she said, “I don’t fit on our family tree. I don’t look like anyone in the family. There can be only one explanation. I am adopted.”
Her father tried to laugh and said, “Why would you think that?”
She looked at both of them and said flatly, “Before tonight, I only suspected. Now I know for sure.” Her voice became somewhat agitated as she asked again, “When was I adopted? Who am I? And why have you never told me?”
“You are our daughter,” her mother replied. “You always have been even though I did not give birth to you.”
She had regained her composure. “We were wrong. We should have told you, but your grandparents thought it would be best for you to grow up as a true American. And besides, yours was a very… complicated adoption.”
“Your father was an American sailor,” her father said as he looked at her. “Your mother was from Malaysia. They died in a car accident before you were born.”
Mindy looked at him in amazement. “How could my parents have died before I was born?”
He remained silent as he got up and went over to his desk in the corner of the kitchen. He opened one of the lower drawers and came back with a large, brown envelope. Reaching inside he pulled out several newspaper clippings. The largest was a front page article with a headline which said, “Miracle Baby Born After Mother Dies in Fiery Crash.”
“Your mother gave birth in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” he said quietly. “She was dead when they arrived, but you were born.”
“I was in the hospital giving birth to your brother,” said her mother. Her voice was oddly choked.
Mindy started to say, “I don’t have a brother,” but stopped when she saw the tears flowing from her mother’s eyes.
“He died a few hours after he was born,” she said with a sob. “They usually move a “broken-heart” mother out of the maternity area as soon as possible, but the regular beds in the hospital were full and there had been complications during the birth. Since there were no other mothers in the maternity ward, they decided to wait a day or so to move me.
“I walked down the hall from my room to the baby window. It was empty except for you lying in one of those little glass baskets. I had read the story in the paper and knew who you were. I asked the nurse if I could hold you, but she said it was against the rules. Then she told me that you weren’t going to make it. Evidently you wouldn’t– or couldn’t– take the bottle and until they could get a court order, they couldn’t put in a stomach tube.
“It won’t come through in time,” the nurse told me. Then she almost cried, “Damn regulations are going to kill her… and there’s nothing I can do about it.’
“‘Yes, there is,’ I told her. ‘Let me feed her.’ My milk had let down and I had nursed Billy once, so I knew that I could do it.”
“The nurse looked around and then said, ‘Slip inside.’ So I did.
Once you felt the warmth of my breast, you began seeking. I rubbed my nipple against your cheek and you turned, clamped down, and began suckling.”
Her father continued the story. “We got ourselves named your foster parents until they could locate your relatives. Your father had no living relatives of record. Your mother was from a small village in Malaysia and had been cast out by her family when she married a sailor. They told the authorities that their daughter was dead and would have nothing to do with you.”
He sighed, “Everyone knew that your mom had gone to the hospital to have a baby, so they thought you were our own child… a twin to Billy.” He sighed again, very deeply, “We raised you as our own and eventually formally adopted you.”
“Teman is from Malaysia,” Mindy said softly.
“What?!” her mother and father shouted in unison.
“Teman is from Malaysia,” Mindy repeated quietly. “He has shown me his village and told me that I am a part of it. He must be from the village that my mother was from.”
She walked over to her mother and took her hands. “I never stopped seeing him. He still comes to see me. I didn’t want to upset you anymore, so I started lying about him… but he still comes, and he is real.”
She stood quietly looking back and forth from her father to her mother. After a very long silence she said quietly, “I love you both and you will always be my parents, but I need to find him. I think he is supposed to be a part of my life.”
“But he doesn’t exist,” her father said softly. “He never has.”
“Once I have the information about my birth mother,” she continued firmly. “I will look for him. I will write to her village and see if anyone knows anything about her family or who this boy might be. Someday I will go to Malaysia and find him.”
Her eyes and her voice took on a tone of desperation, “Please don’t stop me, Dad,” she begged. “And Mom, if a letter comes back to me from Malaysia, please don’t keep it from me. Will you promise me that? … Please?”
Her mom’s face suddenly went very pale and her mouth fell open. “A … letter … from … Malaysia,” she said slowly. She shook her head and continued in a subdued, but more normal tone of voice, “There was a letter from Malaysia in today’s mail. It was addressed to you.”
She rose slowly, almost as if in a dream, and went over to the desk where a pile of mail was sitting in the corner. “I threw the mail on the desk when I got home. I saw the letter and was going to give it to you later.”
Mindy opened the letter and silently read it. Tears were pouring from her eyes. “Can you tell us what it says?” asked her father.
“Oh, sorry,” she answered and began to read. ‘Miss Mindy, I am your aunt, but not by blood. Your mother and I were best friends growing up and considered ourselves to be friend-sisters. Both our families were very old-fashioned and very strict and we did not have happy lives. We promised each other that we would always watch over each other. We used to joke that her daughter would marry my son someday.
‘I was crushed when she fell in love with an American sailor and her parents drove her from the village, but I had hope that she had found happiness. She promised to write and did a few times, but then she stopped. I lost track of her. I searched many times, but was not been able to find out anything until recently.
‘My son, since he was very small, has spoken of his Teman– his companion– who visits him in the night. He has even drawn pictures of this girl through the years. She looked very much like your mother and as the girl in the drawings got older, I realized that his spirit companion must be the daughter of my friend-sister.
‘I hired an investigator who found out about the car crash and your subsequent adoption. I will not contact you again unless you want me to. My son’s name is Rayyan. He is an artist and will be coming to the states to study next year. If you wish to meet him, or allow him to meet you, please write back to me or contact me on the internet.
She looked up and said, “There are some p-h-o-n-e numbers and e-m-a-i-l a-d-d-r-e-s-s-e-s and stuff like that at the bottom of the page.” She laughed slightly, “I guess Teman isn’t his name– it’s what he is. He is my spiritual companion. His name is Rayyan.”
“Honey,” her father said softly. “We will support you in whatever you want to do, but you must be very careful. There are people who will try to take advantage of someone like you who may want to know more about their birth families. They can pull some very sophisticated scams. You have no way of knowing if this woman is telling the truth.”
“Oh, she is telling the truth,” Mindy answered. “I have no doubt of that.”
“How can you be so sure?” her mother asked.
In answer she held up a tattered piece of paper that was in the envelope with the letter. It was a rather childish drawing done in crayon. Across the bottom of the paper it said, “To my friend Teman. From Mindy.”
In words almost too soft to be heard, she said, “I gave this to him when I was seven. We promised that we would always watch over each other. And we always will.”
She looked up at her mother and father and said with a tearful smile, “I’m going to bed early tonight. Teman– Rayyan and I have a lot to talk about.”
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END OF STORY
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Sorry about the dashes in e*** and p****, but for some reason those are banned words on this site and I can’t post the story if the words are actually spelled out correctly.