Lost Boy

by my own patronus

In September 1999, Pam and James Anderson's world was shattered when their youngest son, Blaine, was abducted from a local park. 12 years later, after pain, healing, and tireless searching, the family is reunited. But the boy who comes home to them isn't the same one they lost so long ago. The Anderson family must learn to change and grow as a lost boy is found once more.

5. Interlude 2

Marilyn spent the next several years after the fire moving in and out of subsidized housing, shelters, and hospitals, with occasional spans of time spent with her mother. Doctors kept prescribing her pills and telling her that it would help with her diagnoses, jargon that she'd never even bothered to learn.

When she complied, she could hold down a job. But inevitably after a few months, she would stop taking the pills, try to clear the clouds from her head so she could figure out where Peter had gone, and the cycle would start again.

Her mother tried to help. She would bring Marilyn to appointments, fill prescriptions, talk to her about Peter. But then her own health caught up to her, and in late 1998, Marilyn's mother died.

She stopped taking her meds once and for all after that.

The clouds cleared and she knew that without her mom, her dad, and her sister, she needed to find her baby. She needed to find Peter.

There was a park around the corner from the apartment she'd been staying in. Parents and nannies would bring their kids to play during the day, and she liked to stand near the fence at the back, hidden by the trees, and watch. She was so sure that Peter would be there. He loved the park.

Once she found Peter, everything would be right again.

It took a few months before she found him, but one day, there he was. He was just like she remembered: small, pink cheeked, a little baby fat, and dark, curly hair. He liked to run and jump and climb all over the playground equipment.

She could sit and watch Peter all day.

Of course, he wasn't there every day. Someone else, someone wrong who wasn't her, always inevitably took him away and then he would be gone.

On the morning of the anniversary of the fire, Marilyn had to drown her sorrows with gin. There was nothing else that would stop the noises in her head and calm her down.

Nothing other than Peter.

So she went to see if he was at the park. He was; it was her lucky day.

And then he was running towards her, towards the trees. Her baby was coming home to her and she knew what she had to do.