We’re guilty of every kind of betrayal, she said instead. I can’t live with this. You’re my dad’s best friend.
And he said, I can’t leave my wife and my children, but I won’t let you go.
You have to, she said. Or I’ll tell my dad.
Something happened then. Something turned ugly. She could instantly tell from his voice.
If you do, he said, I’ll tell him it was you who seduced me. I’ll show him the photographs that you don’t even realize I took. I’ll let him know what a slut you are.
You’ll never see me again, she said.
It was like sinking into deep still water with chains on her feet. She did not want to come up for air. She hibernated. She moved. She got an unlisted number.
An old friend, bumping into her on the street, was shocked by the smudges beneath her eyes. “My God, what’s happened to you? You look like a refugee.”
“I’m depressed,” Melanie confessed. “And I’m in hiding. Bad judgment, bad love affair.”
The friend dragged her out to a party and Simon was there. Simon and Melanie danced and he took her home. A change in the weather set in.
Yet always Melanie has had the sense that somebody’s watching. She looks over her shoulder a lot. She fears that her father’s best friend is a stalker and that he took back his son.
15. I, Joshua
I toy with this as a possible scene, a tentative reason for why the marriage of Simon and Melanie went down the drain. Advantages: it would neatly explain certain details, the awkward details, for instance the detail that my official father, the midwestern farmer, is my biological progenitor (as I fear that the tests would insist). It would explain the age gap between my older siblings and myself. And it offers this additional appealing fact: I would be the son of Melanie and her father’s best friend, which would amount to a double connection. My heart flutters. It warms to this idea.
Beyond that, there is the huge and purely narrative temptation of Melanie as Mary Magdalene.
But the theory does not compute — there are too many holes — and it runs counter to my profound and instinctual knowledge that my mother — Melanie — was pure and was struck down by my disappearance, by grief, and by consuming but irrational guilt.
16. Darien
I could see when I visited their place on the Upper West Side that things were unraveling. The marriage was falling apart. I confess it gave me an indecent frisson, to be the unknown cause of so much havoc.
Melanie could have been drugged (though I don’t think she was). It excited me to think I had the power to drain her vivacity so rapidly and so utterly. If women attracted me, I think I would have found her irresistible (the fragility, the vulnerability, that sense of asking to be destroyed). But of course it was the replication in her son that seduced me.
I remember picking up a framed photograph from the mantel in their Manhattan apartment. “What a beautiful child,” I said.
Simon was without affect of any kind.
They were polite and offered Scotch, a single Highland malt, very fine.
I thought of saying — just to throw an ax into their oh-so-immaculate lives — After I fucked his little ass, I buried him in the backyard next door, not fifty feet from your sandbox and swings and from the powdery mildew on your hedge.
17. I, Joshua
Of course the most terrible thing for all of us — for Simon, Melanie, Jessica, myself — is the not knowing, the never being able to know.
Yet the need for hope is so desperate and so bottomless and so ravenous that the siren song of substitution is ever audible, its haunting melody calling, calling, luring us toward a tolerable end.
Blessings come where we least expect them, and shared loss has brought Jessica to me.
18. Jessica
Except from photographs, she has no memory of Joshua, but what her body remembers is another thing altogether.
After the divorce, after her mother’s lengthy and numerous sojourns in a series of clinics, Jessica remained with her father, who filed for custody — a suit that was uncontested. Simon, both before and after his remarriage, before and after his brand-new children, was devoted to Jessica’s well-being. He consulted pediatricians and family therapists and orthopedic specialists, one after the other. No cause could be found for the constant pain in Jessica’s right shoulder and along her right hip.
It feels, she told multiple specialists, as though my arm and my leg have been ripped off, as though one side of my body has no skin.
“Amputation fantasies,” one therapist wrote in her file. “Not an uncommon disorder. For the patient, the pain is real.”
For years she got by on cortisone shots, but when the first e-mail came she was magically cured. I’ve tracked you down, the e-mail said. I think I might be Joshua. Could we meet?
She waited all of ten seconds before responding: Yes, yes, yes. When and where?
And when he rang the doorbell, her body knew.
She had been waiting for him for fifty years.
19. Darien
I keep cyber tabs on the names of all the children, and I admit I get a certain kind of thrill at the frequency with which those names crop up in the news. (I get e-mail alerts whenever my tracking engine picks up a name on the list.) It excites me and mystifies me that twenty years, thirty years, fifty years later, there are people who still claim to be suffering pain. I ask myself, Could this be true?
I confess to a certain kind of envy.
I myself would not even remember the names, and certainly not the faces that went with them, if I did not keep a digital and photographic record, but the buzz from browsing the album grows ever more faint. On the other hand, the images that do still grab me are the burial spots, on each of which I have kept a pictorial and topographical notation, and sometimes I think — in the interests of posthumous fame and immortality — that I should arrange to have the archive mailed to the police or to the press in the wake of my death as evidence — like framed degrees on a wall — of superior intelligence and skill.
So many graves? Yet never caught? Destination Guinness.
For the record, I got no particular pleasure from the killing. It was simply necessary to shut them up.
Here is a tip for mothers, offered free: it has been scientifically shown that the decibel level of a toddler crying is equal to the decibel level of a chainsaw and only slightly lower than the cacophony of a jet plane taking off. I leave it to the mothers to do the math. Silence is golden. It could save your child’s life.
20. I, Joshua
According to DNA, my official father is indeed my biological father, though we are strangers. Jessica, who has a cordial though distant relationship with her father, visits her mother regularly and often has her mother stay with her. Melanie as grandmother is both doting and nervous. When she is reading Where the Wild Things Are to the children, she will sometimes fall silent for one minute or ten.
She is waiting for Joshua, Jessica says.
There is, according to DNA tests, no genetic link between Jessica and myself. Nevertheless, we are inseparable now. We speak on the phone every week. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, her children climb all over me and call me Uncle Josh.