Paul Joseph Fronczak - The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, Two Lost Boys, and My Search for the Real Me

Howard Books

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Copyright 2017 by Paul Joseph Fronczak and Alex Tresniowski

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Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

First Howard Books hardcover edition April 2017

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

All insert photos courtesy of the author.

Jacket design by Donna Cheng

Jacket photograph Edward Parker / Alamy Stock Photo

Author photo N.M. Ryan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-4212-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-4214-7 (ebook)

To Emma Faith, my light and my life. Everything I do is for you.

And to all the foundlings and searchers out there. My journey is your journey, my dreams are your dreams. Please know you are worth the fight.

Everything dies baby thats a fact

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

Southern New Jersey

October 8, 2015

A HALF CENTURY OF SEARCHING, of not knowing, of hoping, led me here. To a nameless dirt road in a trailer park. And all I could think wasshouldnt I bring a gift?

The occasion seemed to call for something. I drove around until I found one of those all-purpose gift stores in a mall, and I walked up and down the aisles, past picture frames and tableware and mens jackets. A young woman asked if I needed help and I politely said no thanks. I didnt know how to explain who the gift was for.

Finally, I came to the artificial flowers. I picked up a small brown pot with a white orchid draped around a green plant stake. Looking at it, you wouldnt know it was fake. I took it up front and paid for it$12.99. But as soon as I did, I felt uneasy. Not because I didnt like it, but because it was the final diversion.

There was nothing left for me to do now, except what I came to do.

I got back in my rented Nissan and drove down Evergreen Road. The casinos of Atlantic City, the great gray slabs of glass and concrete, were to the east, the ocean right behind them. A trailer park came into view, then another. They had pleasant, resort-style namessomething Pines, something Acres. The GPS pushed me one more mile, until I was thereSilver Crest Trailer Park. It was just off a traffic circle, with a liquor store, a Wawa, and Joes Bar & Grill nearby.

I pulled into the park through a barely marked entrance. Inside, there were two rows of trailers, on either side of the dirt road. The trailers were about twenty feet apart, and there had to be hundreds of them. I drove at ten miles an hour down the road, trying to catch the numbers on them. No. 6. No. 8. No. 10.

No. 18, on the left, was the one I was looking for.

It was double-wide, with brown and tan siding and an aluminum roof. A tall oak tree shaded the trailer and every now and then shot an acorn down on the roof with a clang. A lime-green Ford was parked in frontthat likely meant someone was home. The surrounding trailers were in different states of repair, some better kept, some much worse. One had Halloween decorations taped forlornly to the narrow windowa cardboard pumpkin, a witchs hat. Down the dirt road a yellow school bus dropped off a little girl.

I parked on the side of the road across from No. 18. This was it. This was finally it. I took a deep breath and walked up to the gate in the chain-link fence that circled the trailer, and passed through. There were potted plants placed along a stone path that led to the wooden deck that led to the door of the trailer. On the deck, a couple of folding chairs and a flowerpot with an American flag stuck in the soil. It was a warm, cloudless day. I walked up the five stairs about as slowly as I could.

I had never been this close before in my life.

For a moment I didnt know where to knock. The screen? The door behind it? In the dull stillness of the afternoon, all the choices felt like intrusions. I settled on the side of the trailer, and knocked lightly three times.

Nothing happened. Not a sound or movement.

I knocked again, a little more firmly. Still nothing.

I knocked a third time, loud enough for anyone inside to hear. I waited two full minutes after that knock, just standing there. Another acorn clanged on the roof.

Could this be how it ends?

After all the setbacks and false leads, the dead ends and desperate nights, and the miraculous twist of fate that brought me here, to this doorcould all of that have amounted only to this? To silence? To nothing?

Id never lost hope, because for the longest time hope was all I had.

Id come close to giving up, but never all that close.

Id stayed strong, but now that strength felt more like delusion.

So I just stood there for a while, outside trailer No. 18. A lost soul with a fake flower in his hand.

Probably five minutes went by. I looked around for where to leave the orchid. I decided to knock one last time, because what was the harm? Three hard raps with my knuckles.

Hello? Is anyone there? This is Paul. Paul Fronczak.

Once again, silence.

But then...

Something.

A shadow, visible through the diamond-shaped glass on the door. Movement. Shuffling.

And then, after a few more seconds, the door swung open.

South Kilbourn Avenue

Chicago, Illinois

December 1974

T HE FIRST STEP of my long journey was into a dark crawl space.

I was ten years old. I was snooping around for Christmas presents in my familys two-story house in working-class South Side Chicago. I snuck down to the basement one afternoon while my dad was at the factory where he worked and my mom was busy, and I pulled an old gray sofa away from the back wall, and I opened a three-foot by four-foot wooden door that led to the crawl space. It was stuffed with outgrown clothes, forgotten books, and holiday decorations. I got on my hands and knees and went inside, searching for anything that looked new.

And there, toward the back, in a corner behind some framed paintings, I found something that changed my life.

Three shoe boxes and a hatbox.