And Darien?
Perhaps I need him even more than I need my mother. I need to know what he did and I need to understand why. He is the one player I have not been able to trace. This much I have established: that there was a summer neighbor who was briefly — as far as the local police were concerned — “a person of interest.” He was brought in for questioning, but there was not enough evidence to hold him. He vanished. He has left no aliases, no cyber tracks, though there has been speculation, over time, that he could be a serial killer and pedophile.
One more thing: my family, my other family, the ones who have me pinned like a butterfly within the frame of the family album, that family (officially mine) claims to recall my unanticipated (though joyfully greeted) birth. Lately, as they have become more bewildered and then more frosty and then more anxious (and sometimes angry) about what they call “my obsession,” they have begun to urge a certain kind of test. DNA, they cajole, would settle this thing.
Why do I resist? they want to know.
“Why did you name me Joshua?” I parry.
We didn’t, they lie. They profess to show my birth certificate which indicates a different name, my name of record; they profess to offer swabs of their own DNA. So why do I continue to resist?
Why do I resist? I ask myself.
It’s like this.
I’ve read accounts of anguished boys who were born into female bodies; of tortured girls who emerged, slime-wet, in the obstetrician’s hands and were recorded as male.
A birth certificate is one thing, but it is not conclusive.
I may not know who I am, but I know who I’m not.
10. Simon
He knows Melanie believes that he blames her, but in fact it is himself that he blames. On some level, he knew. Why didn’t he drive them into town? Why didn’t he trust his gut?
Perhaps he blames her a little for mocking his fears.
If she had not been so emphatically self-confident, if she had not given him the sense that she privately found him neurotic, too coddling, overanxious... Of course, she always denies that. She always claims that she found his fearfulness endearing.
He does not entirely trust her with Jessica anymore because she seems to withhold herself from their baby, almost — for a second — to recoil when contact is made. The body language is subtle, a micro-detail perhaps, but Simon takes note. Unseen, he watches his wife studying Jessica in her crib: the way Melanie stands there, blank and quizzical, as though she does not recognize her own child. Simon cannot help noticing and he is profoundly disturbed.
Sometimes Melanie sees him watching and she lets her huge and mournful dark-ringed eyes rest on his face. “You don’t trust me with Jessica,” she accuses, her tone a dull sludge of desolation.
“That’s nonsense,” he lies.
“You’re right not to trust me,” she says. Her voice is flat. “What kind of a mother loses her child?”
When Jessica wakes in the night, which she does much more often now, it is Simon who picks her up and cuddles her and walks up and down the hallway patting her little diapered butt, singing to her the Yiddish lullabies his own grandmother used to sing.
He cannot talk to Melanie about this.
It is true that he begins to ask himself, Is Jessica safe with her mother?
Simon has put a mattress and a sleeping bag on the floor in Jessica’s room. That way he can hear micro-changes in her breathing at night.
11. Melanie
Grief is a great sucking whirlpool, more ferocious than a hurricane’s eye.
Guilt is wildfire, indifferent, implacable, inexorable, foul, and all-consuming.
The battle strategy of the Grief & Guilt Forces is scorched earth. They take no prisoners. They have no mercy. They destroy.
Even in deepest sleep, Melanie’s dreams know the truth. She will never be eligible for parole. How could she have been looking at bread loaves, swapping chitchat with Jenny Nelson, when some pervert was ravaging the stroller outside the window and she never even looked?
By random mischance, channel surfing, weeks later she hears a sliver of debate: “Many species,” a naturalist — a media expert — says, “are known to kill their own young.” He mentions lions, hippos, bears, wolves, domestic cats. “So why should we be surprised,” he asks, “in regard to the recent episode of the stolen child, if we should eventually learn—”
Melanie cuts off the TV. She barely reaches the bathroom before she throws up.
She is afraid for Jessica, afraid to touch her.
She is afraid to sleep because of the dreams that come.
She tries not to remember these dreams, but they swarm her: the dream of the beach that turns to quicksand and swallows her children; the dream of shallows that swirl into a deadly funnel and suck her little ones down; the dream of the neighbor who stalks, and kidnaps, and kills, but only after unspeakable acts.
She knows that Simon blames her, and he is right.
She blames herself.
She has trouble attending to what Simon says. Between the beginning and the end of any sentence, she loses her way. His voice is like announcements at an airport: full of sound and fury, signifying something essential, but not something she is able to understand.
12. I, Joshua
Of course I need her to be distraught. I need her, fifty years later, to yearn for me, to reach for me in her sleep, never to stop mourning, never to stop dreaming of me.
I need her to yearn for me as I yearn for her.
But I do hold her accountable, after all.
She has to suffer.
13. Simon
He has begun to remember small things: her sexual eagerness when they first met, the way it excited him.
Where did she learn that?
Was she already pregnant?
Was Josh his son?
He begins to torment himself with these questions. She had admitted to relationships, several, engaged in as a clueless undergraduate wanting to please.
And had he likewise engaged...? Yes, of course he had, he confessed, though the encounters had meant nothing at all.
Exactly, she had said. Same thing. Those fleeting connections meant nothing at all, although once, with a married man, a friend of her father’s, a breath of rural midwestern air blown into New England, the connection had been not entirely nothing, at least not from her point of view. Indeed, it had been full of nostalgia and a warm sense of going back home.
Until the next morning.
The next morning she was embarrassed and appalled, or so she told Simon.
Now he wonders: was this enticement and entrapment?
How seductively devious she had been.
How hungry and how virtuous and how protective and ravenous he had felt.
14. Melanie
She thinks she possibly knows who did it.
She found out she was pregnant the same day her father’s friend called to say he’d be making another business trip back east. I’m desperate to see you again, he said.
No, she said. We made a terrible mistake. This can’t go on.
It was a dreadful mistake, he agreed, but it happened. We didn’t plan it, but now it’s fate. It’s our destiny. I have to see you.
Of course she should have said I’m pregnant, but she never did.