A nice Norwegian-American couple have a home birth and welcome a screaming baby and call her Annabel. They have a few days at home, then try putting her in the car to see if that will get her to stop crying; nothing else will. They get on the highway. A truck capsizes directly onto the car. The parents are killed instantly; anyone looking at the scene would expect that the baby would be dead too.
The baby is covered in blood and her car seat is destroyed and her onesie is a writeoff but she is, when found by the rescue workers, miraculously unharmed. Not a scratch. There is minor press coverage.
There is a lot of demand among would-be adoptive parents for healthy white babies.
Annabel is not healthy. She's blind, turns out, usual culprit would be neonatal conjunctivitis but her eyes are uninfected; she's always, always crying, and it escalates to bloodcurdling screams at intervals no one can figure out; she hates being held and hates being swaddled and hates lullabies and whimpers even in her sleep. She spends a couple years institutionalized, in and out of bewildered hospitals. Talks startlingly early. She is too hot, she says; and indeed she calms down a lot if she buries herself in ice packs - she says singing hurts her; they toy with an autism diagnosis, at any rate mostly remember not to turn the radio on -
- she's missing somebody, she says, and they tell her that her parents are gone but they will try to find her new ones.
She says new ones won't fix it. She has no reason to doubt the supposed identity of the missing someone, but she knows new ones won't fix it.
They get her new ones anyway. With her mystery conditions manageable she is still not a healthy white baby, but she's a cute toddler, and some people enjoy collecting disadvantaged children. The George family takes her in as a foster kid. She's one of eleven, some internationally adopted, some rescued into the Georges' all-welcoming arms from abusers, a couple children of drug addicts, one brittle bone disorder case. Mrs. George can't have kids of her own and interpreted this as a command from the Lord to shelter those who need her.
The Lord did not specify very much about the quality of the shelter, but the state of Nevada has some opinions on the subject, and takes fully eleven children off their hands. Most of them aren't real siblings and no effort is made to keep Annabel with the rest of them. She doesn't mind. She assures her parade of social services that she wasn't particularly attached.
