by Andrew Roe
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It is a great website. May our lord keep blessing everyone who sees this website.
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I am very interested in the “victim soul” designation. My son is autistic and disabled. He recently underwent surgery for kidney cancer, and the pathology report confirms the malignancy of the tumor. I am concerned that a child, my own or anyone else’s must suffer so very, very much. Is that the philosophy of the “victim soul?” I admire the faith and love of those who surround Anabelle.
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This is a very beautiful site. Enjoyed the articles and pictures. What an amazing God we have! He is with us always and in a special way with souls like Anabelles’. Thank you Lord!
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needs more pictures and more info.
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I find that is very inspirational.
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Congratulations this website is really god. I feel really touched, I will continue to visit it and praying for Anabelle’s and all ill people.
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God Bless You AnaBelle! I continue to pray that you will be healed.
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I believe that this is true. I do pray that she may be healed. My pain for her mom and her family is felt here. what Hardship they have felt I’m sure. When I heard of her story broke my heart. my daughter is three and I lost my son who lived for 2 da .s in nov of 96. The comfort of knowing that the Lord os working threw her I has given me some comfort threw my own sadness. But I still pray for her healing God willing. Thank you, Donna
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I am thrilled to see so much information about Anabelle on her own website. I have already printed out most of the information so that I can share it with others who do not have access to a computer. Thank you for enabling me to find out answers to so man things through your site. I pray that I may someday be able to actually get to visit Anabelle and pray with her.
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Anabelle’s vocation as a victim soul is a story that the world needs to hear. Your website is a good tool to help accomplish this. She has been a source of an increase in my faith. I’m sure many can say the same. Pray for us, Anabelle.
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I found it helpful in understanding what is happening. And have come to realize that life is to short and to live life to the fullest. Everyone should love there neighbors and respect each other. It is so touching to see this & what Little Anabelle has given.
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a friend sent me a video about little Anabelle,and it was wonderful.The facts were very infomative.I think that little Anabelle and her family are a wo derful statement for life in this culture of death i
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Really nice site. I heard about Anabelle from some friends of mine in Los Angeles. We plan to visit soon. Our son David has CP and relates to her also.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the site. Hopefully no one is taking advantage of this little girl’s misfortune.
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It’s a magnificent website. I teach religious education to children in grades 1-6. I will share Anabelle’s story with them this afternoon. I am glad I saw it on 20/20 this Monday, or I would not have known about her and wouldn’t be able to share her story ith my classes. We will pray for her.
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I am a 13 yr old girl from PA. I first learned about anabelle’s extraordinary case on 20/20. Her story moved me so much I decided to look it up on yhe internet. I told my mother about it and all we could think about was my grandma. She has been blind or 27 years. It’s heartbreaking when your grandma can’t see how her grandchildren and children have turned out. Therefor, I would give anything to see Anabelle. She’s a saint. She’s the hand of God. Thank You
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I saw Anabelle on 20/20 and I was deeply touched not only by the grace of God but by the love and devotion Karen has for her daughter.
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My Grandmother and I saw the 20/20 episode on Anabelle and were compelled to find you. The show did not list a mailing address or web address so we found you on our own. We were very moved by the story of Anabelle. We have had many problems in our lives bu our faith keeps us strong. We pray for you and Anabelle. Please keep us informed of updates on the web and personal. Stay strong God loves you! In our prayers, Marcella and Anita Rivera
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People feel the need to believe. I understand, it’s part of human nature. But people please!!! If you’d like another view of miracles, weeping statues, etc. please check out my Website: www.smilingskeptic.com. Thanks!
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VERY INSPIRING. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS.LOVE ELAINE
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The website is a beautiful site. I pray a small prayer for her and her mother that she be able to have the joyful strength to bear the burden of her daughters care. Also that maybe one day Anabelle will come back and tell us about her journey. I also submit to her my little niece Julia who suffers epilepsy. She is a brilliant little girl but is emotionally spent. Please Anabelle intercede on her behalf. My 2 boys are healthy thank God and Anabelle I pray you do come back.
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Good, you have put alot of effort into this, Please pray for me and boyfriend kenny estep and I to to stay together. Thank you, God is w/ you, Barbara Seligman.
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I think that the website is fine. I originally heard about anabelle’s store on the news, I have a brother name Tommy who has been in a coma for almost 20 years, his was the result of a motorcycle accident which occurred on May 9,1981.Please pray for HIM!
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You’re doing a super job, Bryce ... can’t wait until more articles are up, as well as pictures. I wonder when the Church investigation will be done. Have you heard anything? I have been telling as many people as possible about your website. God Bless!!
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More people should know about this.
19
| John and Karen |
THEY MET AT a party. The house and the backyard overflowing with people, so many people, so many drunk people, from high school and also the recently graduated, a mix of those who were free and those who were not, not yet. A party that turned out to be one of those parties that was discussed and dissected for the rest of the summer and beyond and later became the measure for other parties, all of which forever failed to live up to Mike Rico’s kick-ass summer of ’87 party, you know, the one where Ginny Thompson and Adam Hupp supposedly did it in the bathroom and the music was so loud a stereo speaker blew and then Steve Silva saved the day by backing his truck up on the lawn and blaring heavy doses of the Stones and Led Zeppelin (a heroic feat that, according to legend, earned him a complimentary blowjob from Trish Vanderwende). A Saturday night, late June, that feeling of the summer never ending. Multiple pukings, hookups. A window was broken, a bathroom trashed. Of course the cops came. And later there was disagreement about who saw who first, but over the years Karen stuck to her version: she spotted him not long after arriving, camped out on the couch, plastic red beer cup in hand, his hair still wet from a shower, his body slim and dangerous and muscular underneath a white T-shirt and baggy chinos, looking like he was charmed, chosen for some princely adventure. Dark hair, dark eyes. She recognized him, knew that he went to the rival high school (sports, notoriety for his prowling black Mustang and dreamy smile), or rather had gone, because he was a year older, had graduated, worked somewhere, and that was about it, all she knew at that point in time. He, on the other hand, always contended he noticed her the moment she walked in the door. Played it cool. Acted, for a while, like he didn’t notice her staring, too, but did. He’d worked all day at the dentist’s office, making molds of people’s teeth. It was a shit job but it paid pretty well and he could show up stoned and get away with it. Now it was the weekend, and he tasted the promise of that. It had been only a week or so since he broke up with Karla Bloomquist (Karla with a “K,
” she liked to say, Karla who worked at Winchell’s Donuts and could tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue), so he looked forward to new beginnings, maybe a hookup, someone he didn’t know perhaps. The girl who walked in jumped right to the top of his list. He made the mental note. He thought of possible lines. But she looked like a girl that required more than a line. Something in the eyes. An intelligence that both excited and frightened him. Mike Rico was two years older, John knew him from sports, and Mike had just moved into a new place. A little housewarming party, he told John on the phone. Word spread.
THEY TALKED ABOUT people they both knew, the lack of furniture in Mike’s house, the ongoing renovations at the Whittwood Mall, the merits of the Who without Keith Moon (unlike other girls, she had an opinion here), how they didn’t want the summer to end. Yes, summers were magical. Warm and long and magical. And it was technically her last, the summer between her junior and senior year, when she wore shorts and tank tops and learned what it meant to have hips, actual hips, womanly shapes and contours and smells that bestowed a power, a place in the world that had been there waiting for her and now, finally, had arrived. She practiced a certain smile in the mirror. She smoked cloves and, when those weren’t available, cigarettes. That, plus the right pair of sunglasses and enough cherry-flavored lip gloss, and you were somebody else, the movie version of yourself. Nights were the best. Each one an adventure, a promise. Somebody usually could borrow a car and then they were good. Tanya and Beth and sometimes Lisa Frosch when she wasn’t being a bitch. And if no car was to be had, they made do. They stayed in the neighborhood and sat on someone’s porch steps and made phone calls to boys they’d met the previous weekend. She did not, like most of her friends, drink wine coolers or Vodka Dews. She drank beer like the boys. This also gave her a power. This guy at the party, John, cute, also commented: Wow, that’s cool, you drink beer. From the couch they moved to the backyard and then the kitchen, where the keg was, touring the house and its mostly empty bedrooms (Mike had several roommates). The music got louder. You had to raise your voice, practically yell, to be heard, their throats growing raspy from that and the alcohol. Right before they kissed for the first time, she said, “I’m kind of intense.” He said, “I like intense.” And she said, “Then you can’t say you weren’t warned.” Hips locking together as their lips met, bodies falling in place, a gentle, inevitable fit. She stayed out all night with him. But she didn’t have sex with him, that wouldn’t happen until weeks later, but they slept in his car, in the backseat, like children, a Mexican blanket wrapped around them, it came from the trunk, smelling of sand and grease. Nothing had ever felt so warm or beautiful. She caught hell at home in the morning, her mother awake and fuming, what kind of girl does this, but it was worth it, worth it, and she knew something had changed, and he felt it, too: a beginning.
THEY WENT TO the county courthouse over two years later, a few ups and downs along the way, plenty of doubts never fully tamed, but they were ready, felt ready, for the most part, and it was time. Not the wedding she’d imagined, for sure. Sharing a flask filled with Southern Comfort. Digging through her purse to scrounge up change for the parking meter. No family came: John’s father was dead, his mother in Michigan, while Karen wasn’t on speaking terms with her mother at the time, her father and his second wife couldn’t leave the cats alone, and Tammy was hardly guest-list material, since she’d rendered her verdict on John, nicknaming him BL, or “Beautiful Loser,” after the Bob Seger song. The judge reminded her of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. The witness—a bifocaled secretary who got roped in last minute—kept sneezing. He was hoping for at least Vegas until they checked their respective savings accounts. The room smelled strongly of Pine-Sol. Two other couples were waiting to go next. Outside they were back in the car and a little dazed and a parking ticket graced their windshield: the meter had run out. The wedding dinner consisted of Taco Bell, drive-thru, two Burrito Supremes and Cinnamon Crispas. But they were married, they had done it, they were together, till death do us part and all that, rings, documents, signatures, consummating to Van Halen II. They honeymooned by looking for an apartment to rent, finding a one-bedroom place in La Habra, making frequent trips to KMart to buy things like dish-washing brushes or toilet bowl cleaner, listening to their favorite radio stations, KMET and KLOS, wondering what DJ Jim Ladd looked like, if he was high while he did his midnight show Headsets, getting high themselves, gaining weight, shopping for a new car, sending in sweepstakes forms, and for a while he was working and then she was working, too, and then he wasn’t working. When he came home or she came home, the other person was there, waiting.
THEY TRIED TO have a baby. Similar to getting married, it felt like it was time. So Karen stopped taking the pill, and they had more sex than they’d ever had. They got strategic with their fucking. Morning, night, then morning again. During the day when Karen was ovulating they rendezvoused at home whenever possible, soldiering on like this for months, the bursts of tactical intercourse followed by periods of celibate recovery time. And much to their dismay, the superhuman humping produced no results. They stuck with it, though. Did some research. Karen put pillows under her hips after John came and didn’t move for half an hour, sometimes longer. They monitored Karen’s cervical mucus. “Your cervical mucus doesn’t lie,” they’d read in one book, which also suggested that Karen take Robitussin (which she did, two teaspoons a day, starting four days prior to ovulation), because it not only thins mucus in the lungs but also does the same for cervical mucus, thus potentially assisting the passage of John’s sad, searching sperm. Another book recommended that they refrain from oral sex (bacteria in saliva can “degrade” semen and decrease the chances of conception). Foreplay options were therefore significantly reduced. But again, they had nothing to show for their efforts. Nada. John switching from tighty-whities to boxers didn’t help either. The holidays were approaching. They thought: wouldn’t a special Christmas or New Year’s announcement be nice? So they labored onward, their respective organs resigned to the entrances and exits, withdrawals and deposits. If they hadn’t known the difference between making love and fucking they did now. Another month, another ovulation cycle wasted. They grew to hate the sound of their bodies slapping futilely together, the sheer defeat of their genitals. “It’s like porn,” said John one night, or morning, or afternoon. By then it had become a coitus blur. And when the unfertile holidays came and went, and it was a new year, and they were unable to make that special announcement, John and Karen visited their doctors. Karen was fine, her blood pressure a tad higher than normal, as well as some slight vaginal tissue scarring (due to the frequency of the Mr. Roboto sex), but otherwise very healthy and certainly capable of reproduction. John’s news, on the other hand, wasn’t so good: low sperm count. Oligospermia is what it’s called, the technical name. A common enough male affliction, to be sure, but understandably John took the news poorly, staying up late, alone, eating pistachios and playing Nintendo and watching movies. But just when they’d almost given up, when they’d started talking about things like adoption and in vitro, a miracle: a baby was on the way.
THEY WANTED TO be surprised, so they didn’t find out the gender. During the ultrasounds and checkups, he held her hand and she squeezed back as the doctor said the baby looks fine, the baby is healthy, you can see the baby’s fingers, you can see the baby’s heart, things are moving right along, Mommy, Daddy. The down payment on the house was made and they moved in and brought what little they had and dreamed of more and it seemed like the day would never come.
THEY DIDN’T KNOW what to do. Anabelle, named for a beloved aunt (Karen’s side, a relative who had died early and mysteriously), would not stop crying. It was like she was broken and they’d lost the instructions and the hotline number; they were on their own. She cried when she was held and when she was not held and every variation in between. Rocking didn’t help. Swaddling didn’t help. Begging didn’t help. If you looked at her, she’d cry. They fe
lt like they were doing something wrong, some key piece of parenting information had eluded them completely, and they were horrible, horrible parents. You heard about crying babies, sure, and you heard about sleep deprivation, yes, but this seemed extreme; she wouldn’t stop. Colic, the pediatrician said, prescribing a pacifier and Raffi. Anabelle also had trouble latching. She wouldn’t stay on Karen’s breast, Karen now crying as well because not only was she exhausted but also because her nipples were crusted and tender and this supposedly natural, beautiful, essential, life-affirming experience was fucking hard and it wasn’t fucking working. No one was sleeping. They took turns getting up during the night, though more often than not it was her, Karen was the one. This was not the beauty of parenthood. This was not what you saw on TV or heard from your friends. People came by to see the baby, to ask how the lucky new parents were doing. The lucky new parents wanted to bite their fucking heads off. See? Can’t you see the watery, washed-out eyes? The nails that have been chewed raw? Can’t you see this constantly crying creature we’ve created? Why don’t you try? The grandmothers were the worst, coming to visit and tsk-tsk-tsk-ing. Obviously John and Karen were at fault. They (the grandmothers) had never experienced anything like this, oh my, no, you were a little angel, have you tried a little rum in her bottle yet? They (John and Karen) often barked at each other, too, coming apart instead of coming together, arguing about everything from whether they should pick up Anabelle when she cried (“Is it OK to pick her up every time she cries?” “Crying babies need to be held.”) to how were they going to afford diapers and college and braces. Karen turned away, then John turned away, and after a while it was hard to tell where it had begun, the turning away. “Here,” she said one particularly unbearable night, around 3:00 a.m.—and she practically tossed the swaddled Anabelle at him. “You try. See what you can do.” And he paced the house, bouncing her, his wailing, inconsolable daughter, on his shoulder, in his arms, shushing, humming, singing songs, the only ones he could remember all the words to, inappropriate songs like “Stairway to Heaven” and “Cocaine.” (“If you want to hang out, you’ve got to take her out . . . cocaine,” he whispered/sang, wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into.) He had assumed since he was a mellow person he would have a mellow child, this being the first of many mistakes and misperceptions that would come to define his spotty career as a father. Karen was in the bedroom, head under her pillow, tallying the number of days it had been since she’d showered (four). They’d expected it to be hard but not this hard. This wasn’t normal, was it?