What Pettway required, once she had taken the baby, was a story that could hold together across time — a story that explained why the child had no birth certificate, why she had no family history before a certain point, why she looked different from the people around her. The story Pettway eventually settled on, and told Carlina when she could no longer avoid the questions, was the one about abandonment: a woman who used drugs, who had left the baby and never come back. It was a story constructed to foreclose further inquiry. You cannot ask a woman who is gone and who left you behind for your records. There is nothing more to know.
The forgery Pettway produced when Carlina asked for a birth certificate to get prenatal care in 2005 was the story’s first documented failure. The document did not hold up to official scrutiny. Connecticut’s vital records system found no record of Carlina’s birth under the name and date on the document. A state agency was notified. And yet, even at that point, the investigation did not immediately resolve the question of who Carlina actually was. It established that the document was false, and that Pettway was not Carlina’s birth mother. It did not tell Carlina who she really was.
That part she had to find herself.
The gap between learning that Pettway’s story was false and learning the true story is a period of several years — from approximately 2005 to December 2010 — during which Carlina lived with the knowledge that her official identity was invented, without having discovered what her real identity was. She had a daughter. She had a name she had grown up with and a nickname she had claimed for herself. She had a household she had been raised in and a network of people who knew her as Netty. None of this required official documentation in daily life. People live without legal identity documentation, at cost and with difficulty, but they live.