The man told her his story: His name was John Rhodes and he’d grown up in Florala, Alabama, the sole son of a single father. They’d lived in a small cinder block house out on a state highway. This father had worked in construction and taken odd jobs on weekends and evenings to make ends meet. To make sure there was food on the table and clothes on the boy’s back. A good man, one who would pick up a hitchhiker no matter how filthy she was. John remembered that the man had taken his work boots and taped them up rather than buy new ones so that John could have new clothes for school. He said he couldn’t remember much from his early life. Some images, disconnected from one another. Not even images, but shards of feelings, something deep and hidden. It wasn’t something that had ever bothered him. No one remembers everything about their early years — he just couldn’t remember more than most. His father had tried to give him everything and John had worked hard, though he’d only done average in school and he’d grown up and graduated high school and started working in construction like his father.
Had he said father? Or daddy? Pa? Father felt wrong, but that’s what she remembered. Had he called him the old man?
A few months ago, his father had passed away and when John was going through the old man’s belongings, he’d found several articles from Kentucky newspapers about a boy that had gone missing. At first, John hadn’t thought anything of it, other than being interested in the story. After finding the tenth or so story he began to wonder about his father’s interest. That night, when he was lying in bed, in his father’s bed actually, having taken the larger room for himself, John began to think about his own childhood and the story of the missing boy and it was like when you hear a song and can almost remember what its name is and with a quake you remember and it just falls into place. Before that moment, for the whole of his years, John said he’d felt like his life had been flat, like it existed only in two dimensions, like he was a drawing, but that was all he’d known so he hadn’t realized that there was any other way to exist, but once he recognized that melody, his life had lifted up into a new realm. He couldn’t sleep and his skin capered with electricity.
When he was growing up, his father never talked about John’s mother. The old man said that she’d died when John had been a young baby, and John never bothered his father about it because it was clearly painful to him and the old man just wasn’t the type of man who talked about such things, even though he didn’t even know what his mother’s name was or what she looked like. He couldn’t remember her at all and there weren’t any pictures in the house. Yet, as he cleaned out the old man’s ranch house, John found nothing about his mother. Maybe his father had gotten rid of it all after she died in some explosion of grief, but the man had receipts and notes and cancelled checks going back decades, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have been able to remove all trace of his deceased wife from the house. Not only were there no pictures of her, there were no pictures of anyone at all. There weren’t even any pictures of John from when he was very young. He found a letter from a landlord in Crow Station, Kentucky, returning a deposit on an apartment and some pay stubs from a warehouse there as well. His father had never talked about living in Kentucky and as far as the man knew, he and his father had always lived in Alabama. John couldn’t find anything from before he was seven years old in the house.
His whole life until two weeks ago, he’d thought of himself as John Rhodes, but now, in the span of a few short days, he’d not only lost his father, but he’d lost himself. He tried to imagine his father as a kidnapper and it seemed outrageous to him. While the man had been emotionally aloof and stern, he’d been a good father. The man had broken himself working to provide for John and John felt guilt thinking such terrible things about him. Yet the evidence was, if not irrefutable, painfully intriguing. So he decided to take some time off work and come up to Kentucky to see if he could prove to himself who he was, one way or the other.
He’d been in Crow Station for three days, trying to find more information before he showed up on the Shepherd doorstep and announced himself as the long lost son. One of the first things he’d done was to go to the town cemetery and look for his grave. One of the last articles that his father had was a short piece about how the Shepherd family had finally had Jacob Shepherd declared legally dead. John walked around the cemetery in the growing dusk, looking at the marble and granite, the names and years, the elderly and the infant. He’d looked for Jacob’s grave, hoping that if he saw it, there would be some shock of recognition if he was indeed, Jacob Shepherd. As he walked it got darker and darker and he became more and more desperate to find the grave. He heard some voices and looked across the cemetery and saw a group of children running around and hollering at each other, laughing and screeching like children just on the cusp of growing up do, unable to keep anything in, and he watched them and thought about how he’d never had that life. He’d never been young. He’d never been a child. He’d only ever worked and slept. A terrible desire to run at the children swelled in him, to begin to scream and yell, to shout at them — for what? For enjoying themselves? For being disrespectful in the graveyard? He didn’t know and he didn’t do anything but stand in the path of the evening’s shadows. Out there among those stones that the children wound through was one that had his real name on it, he knew it, a marker not for a dead child but for a lost life and in that instant, he knew for sure. He left without ever finding his own stone.
He didn’t want to cause anyone any unnecessary pain if he could help it, but he had to claim his life. The next morning, as though God had finally given up on the joke, John saw her photograph in the newspaper, where she’d won her award for service, and seeing her, he knew she was his sister and he had to see her first. He’d been trying to get hold of her at her office for a few days, but was happy that he hadn’t been able to because he wasn’t sure what he would have said on the telephone.
Leah listened. The restaurant around them had disappeared. She looked at the man sitting across from her. Did he look like her father? She couldn’t tell if he did or if it was the power of suggestion. The waiter came and refilled her sweet tea and John Rhodes ordered a coffee. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked, but the waiter was already gone, so it didn’t matter what Leah thought. “No,” she said.
“Thanks, I didn’t—”
“No, I mean, you aren’t him. You aren’t Jacob.” Her voice was shaking. She rose, drawing some bills from her purse, and tossing them on the table, began to walk out. He leapt up and followed her. “Leah, hold on. Leah,” he said, but she didn’t stop. He grabbed her arm. It was dull and weightless, like a change in air pressure. She was at her car in the parking lot and he ran up behind her, grabbed her shoulder, “Listen, don’t run away from me. I know how this sounds—”
“This is bullshit,” Leah said, her voice flat. “My brother is dead. He’s been dead for a very long time. You can’t do this to me and you can’t do this to my family.”
The man’s face flashed and he pushed himself between her and the car but said nothing. She watched his lips writhe, seeking something there and then pushed him aside, got in her car and drove off.
When she thought about it later, Leah tried to remember his face but couldn’t, instead only able to conjure something from family photographs that adorned her parents’ den. She’d wanted to always remember, but the objects kept to serve as shrines quickly crowded everything out. Silver platters of food clanging loudly on the hardwood floor. Laughter. Great links of meat. Great quantities of cold clear liquor flowed briskly. Her mother in the next room singing hymns. She woke in her bed in her one-bedroom apartment. She woke still hearing the singing. The organ’s staccato jabs and a bass’s bubbly bursts. The heat kicks on. Wool is quiet. The window wasn’t open. Had Jacob been living somewhere all of those nights of her mother’s bloodless keening? Had he been living somewhere all of those mornings when her father stood at the window and didn’t speak? Had he been living somewhere while they fed on nothing but his death? Black milk in pools on dark ground. She fell asleep on her futon and did not dream.