Travel Horrors: When Bad Thing Happen to Good People on Vacation : Kidnaped in Denver: a Child’s Fantasy

I have a disturbing knack of getting stopped by cops for stealing things that belong to me. One of New York’s finest once pulled me over on suspicion of stealing my own car. It turned out to be a computer error. A couple of years ago, in Denver’s Stapleton Airport, I was suspected of stealing my own child.

We were standing in line at the ticket counter, she and I, our bags piled up along the stanchions so we wouldn’t have to shove them ahead of ourselves each time the line advanced. When it got to be our turn, I handed our tickets to the agent, hoisted my daughter onto the counter and went to get the bags.

“Who’s Sylvie?” the agent asked when I returned.

“This is Sylvie right here,” I said, indicating the 3-year-old perched on the counter beside me.

“She says her name is Christina.”

Ah, Christina. A few months earlier, Sylvie had begun telling people her name was Christina. I didn’t know why.

“You’re half-Jewish,” I would tell her. “Jews don’t name their daughters ‘Christina.’ ”

But if she wanted to tell waitresses, sales clerks and flight attendants her name was Christina, it was alright by me.

I tried to explain to the ticket agent that my daughter has this fantasy that her name is Christina, but really, her name is Sylvie. The agent looked skeptical.

“Sylv,” I began explaining in what sounded even to my own ears like my best kidnaper’s voice, “it’s OK to pretend your name is Christina, but there are certain times when it’s important to tell people your real name.”

“Christina is my real name,” Sylvie insisted.

I tried to flash the ticket agent one of those what-we-parents-have-to-put-up-with looks, while saying, “Good thing we’re not going through customs. They might be a little suspicious.”

To which the ticket agent replied, unsmilingly, “I’m a little suspicious.”

And with that, she disappeared. For 10 minutes. I should mention that the flight we were ticketed on had been canceled and we’d been switched to another airline--just the kind of complication that could cause a ticket agent to go wherever ticket agents go when complications arise. So when she came back at last and checked our bags and assigned us our seats without another word about little Christina, I thought that was the end of it.

By this time my wife had returned from calling the friends who were to pick us up. As we made our way to the gate, I told her the story and we had a good laugh over it.

No sooner had we put our stuff down than I heard my name over the P.A. system, being asked to report to the counter. There, we were received by two Denver police officers and an official of the airline. The official began questioning me about the apparent discrepancy between the name on one of our tickets and the name the child claimed was hers.

“What can I tell you?” I said. “She has this fantasy that her name is Christina.”

This time, Sylvie didn’t contradict me. Abruptly, the official and the two policemen began apologizing and explaining that with the high incidence of child kidnaping these days, you can’t be too careful, etc.

That was fine with me. I told them I thought it was a good thing they checked such things out. But I was puzzled: What reassured them that this little girl was, indeed, my own?

“The behavior of the child,” one of the officers answered.

I looked down at Sylvie, who had her arms wrapped around my leg and her face buried in my thigh. Nice going, Sylv. I picked her up and held her face next to my face.

“Also, we kind of look alike, dontcha think?” I said.

Once on the plane it occurred to me they had no way of knowing if I’d lost her in a custody battle and was stealing her from her mother, a common enough occurrence in our divorce-ridden society. True, my wife was standing right beside me, but since she still uses her own last name, she could have been “the other woman” with whom I was absconding with poor Christina.

Perhaps the behavior of the parents was also taken into consideration: We didn’t bolt when my name was called and we were not nervous, though I was wondering just how we would set about proving this was our daughter in the absence of any documentation to that effect.

What we parents have to put up with. I haven’t even told you about the fit Sylvie pitched when we had to run her Barbie doll through the X-ray machine.