‘You’re the one who’s babying him,’ Melanie accuses. ‘You’re drip-feeding him a steady diet of anxiety. You’re conditioning him to be a nervous wreck.’
‘No I’m not.’
‘Yes you are. It’s in your genes, I guess.’
‘Maybe it is in my genes, it probably is, which is exactly why I want to toughen him up. That doesn’t mean that I can stop worrying, but he doesn’t have to know I keep watching. He’s learning independence when he sleeps in his own room.’
‘When we’re all cuddled up together in the same bed, he’s learning safety and happiness. What’s wrong with that?’
‘It’s tempting fate. It’s creating an illusion. It makes me nervous.’
‘You know,’ Melanie says, ‘most of the time things turn out well.’
‘You’re wrong. Most of the time things do not turn out well, and when they do, it’s dangerous to expect that to last.’
Of course it is precisely Simon’s obsessive and protective anxiety that Melanie finds so attractive, so much more appealing than the thuggish frat boys she dated in college. She loves the way he needs her, she loves his gentleness, his passion for music (classical and jazz), his scholarly mind, the sheer and vast volume of his knowledge about – it seems to her – just about everything. She loves his city-boy’s awed attention to their pocket-handkerchief garden on Long Island and to the plants on their balcony in Manhattan. Simon is the grandson of immigrants, blue-collar urban. His grandfather was a cellist in the Old Country, a delivery man on the lower east side.
Melanie comes from rural Midwestern stock and has the small-town top-of-the-heap gift of self-confidence, possibly a little misplaced, but boundless. She won a scholarship to an Ivy League college and that is where she and Simon met. They despised the preppies, of course, but picked up the bohemian variation, which is why they have a summer place on Long Island and why Melanie is buying baguettes.
The bakery is such a small and intimate place that the five customers constitute a crowd.
‘Doesn’t this place smell heavenly?’ someone asks, and the general response is a murmuring so low and contented and prolonged that it sounds like a Bach chorale.
‘Ryan, what do you call these crispy little flaky-pastry things that look like butterfly wings?’
‘Those are palmiers,’ Ryan says, offering a sample. ‘Take, take,’ he urges. ‘Irresistible, don’t you agree?’
The women love to ask questions and Ryan loves to expound: on whole grains, on sunflower seeds, on the requisite buttery nothingness of French croissants, on madeleines, on baguettes. Melanie browses the racks of loaves. She and Jenny Nelson exchange chit-chat while they wait, and then it is Jenny’s turn. Jenny watches as Ryan wraps her fragrant loaves in a tissue scarf then places them in brown-paper bags. ‘Got to run,’ she says. ‘Listen! That’s Jason’s mommy-siren. It’ll get louder by the second and we’ll see the stroller rocking like a ship in a storm if I’m not quick.’
Both Melanie and Jenny look out through Ryan’s streak-free plate-glass window. In the spaces between the large gold-leaf letters of his decal, the strollers – or more accurately the canvas hoods – are dark blocky shapes that look like garbage bins or thunderstorm clouds. There are now only two toddler conveyances. The wide gap in the middle corresponds to the gap between the Ryan’s and the Bakery peel-off words.
‘I’m parked in front of you,’ Melanie says. ‘Under the R.’
‘Yours are enviably quiet. How do you manage that?’
‘Pure luck of the draw, and liable to change any second.’
‘Patience is definitely not a Jason thing,’ Jenny says. ‘Oh jeez, will you listen to that wail?’
‘Believe me, mine can outdo him. They’re capable of sounds that would leave police sirens for dead.’
‘You’re just saying that to make me feel better. I’ve never once heard Josh throw a tantrum.’
‘Oh believe me, he can and he does. In fact, the quiet’s unnatural. But Jessica’s asleep and Joshua’s watching the dogs. He loves puppies.’
‘Bye.’ Jenny pushes open the door with one shoulder.
‘Bye. See you later at Joan’s?’
‘Not sure. I’ve got my in-laws visiting this week.’
‘All the more reason.’
They both laugh.
Melanie buys a baguette, half a dozen croissants, four palmiers, and two little strawberry tarts. She pays. Someone is coming in as she leaves, there’s a delivery van pulling out from the curb, and Jenny is already halfway down the block. ‘Hey Josh!’ she calls as she stuffs her purchases into the shopping-bag pocket behind Joshua’s back, ‘I’m all done. Aren’t those puppies cute?’
‘Josh, are you asleep …?
‘Joshua …?
‘Josh …?
Very suddenly, the earth lurches out of orbit, the sidewalk tilts, and Melanie is sliding at a sickening heart-stopping speed toward a free-fall into the void.
5. Darien
I was the one who had to break the news to Simon. It wasn’t planned. I happened to drive by the bakery very shortly after the event (in my car, not in the delivery van) when the police were everywhere, sending out radio alerts. I couldn’t see Melanie.
‘What happened?’ I asked a policeman.
‘A child has been stolen,’ he said. ‘A two-year-old.’
‘Stolen? That’s a strong word. Not just gone missing, the way kids do?’
‘A two-year-old can’t unbuckle himself from a safety harness. It’s been cut.’
‘Oh my God! And the baby girl?’
I knew instantly that was a mistake but not a fatal one. The policeman narrowed his eyes and paid the kind of attention that has the effect of making me unnaturally calm and alert. I guess the challenge of getting out of dead ends (so to speak) turns me on.
‘What baby girl?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard someone say something about a double stroller and a baby girl.’
‘She wasn’t taken,’ the policeman said.
Later, I don’t doubt he was the one who had me declared ‘a person of interest’ after the abandoned van was found, but before that I drove back to the house to tell Simon. I was as gentle and compassionate and consoling as only a kind neighbour can be. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ I said, when he opened the door.
6. Simon
The second Simon opens the door he knows. All his life he has been bracing himself for this, looking back over his shoulder, waiting for when the moment would arrive.
And he has always known it would. He grew up with grandparents who turned pale and held still whenever they heard a knock on the door, with parents who passed the anxiety on.
‘What?’ he asks, or tries to ask, though his breath makes no sound at all. ‘What? Tell me.’ He grabs a handful of Darien’s shirt as though grasping the nettle. He is spooked by Darien’s eyes.
Nothing, Simon thinks, will ever be more terrible than this moment.
As things turns out, he is wrong.
He does not yet know how wrong he is.
7. Ryan the Baker
The police want to know what Ryan saw but Ryan saw nothing that could help. His morning passed, as all mornings pass, inside the cosy cocoon of ovens and bread and pastries and the pleasing ding of the till.
‘You didn’t pay attention to the strollers?’ the police want to know.
‘There are always strollers,’ Ryan says. ‘They are always parked outside. The store is too small for them, and anyway the mothers can’t push them over--’
‘So you were not aware of how many strollers were parked outside at the time? You didn’t see—?’
‘I see them, I suppose. I don’t pay attention. They come and go but in the season there are always strollers. One, two, three. I can’t recall.’
‘You didn’t see anyone remove a child?’
‘I’m too busy. The only time I see outside my window is when no customers come.’
‘In the season, almost never. In winter, most of the day.’
‘And why exactly did you call 911?’
‘Because Mrs Goldberg, who’d just bought a baguette and croissants and four palmiers and two strawberry tarts, came running back into my store holding her baby girl so close that my first thought was: that baby will suffocate. She’s killing it.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She was sobbing and incoherent and then she fainted. My floors are heart-pine and clean, but she fell on the baby.’
‘Was anyone else in the store?’
‘Yes, another client had just come in. Mrs Goldberg’s baby was wailing, high-decibel, the way babies do, and the woman – the new customer – reached for the baby but changed her mind. So I put a loaf of whole-grain under Mrs Goldberg’s head – it was the only pillow I had to hand – and I got the baby out from under and cuddled it – I’m a grandfather, you know – and then I called 911.’
‘Why do you think your other customer changed her mind?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you think one of your customers changed her mind about taking the baby?’
‘Oh. That’s not something … You know, reasoning was not at the forefront of my mind. It’s just something I happened to notice, the way she reached and then pulled away; or maybe it was something I didn’t notice till afterwards, playing it back. Felt out of her depth, that customer, I would say. And so did I, to tell you the truth. But the reason could have been – if anyone was acting on reason, which isn’t something I’d swear to – it could have been Mrs Goldberg’s face.’
‘Meaning?’
‘She looked deranged.’
‘Yet when the ambulance came,’ the police say, ‘you were still holding the baby. Why?’
Ryan puckers his brow, pondering this. ‘The baby was crying. What else could I do? And Mrs Goldberg was … I think she was in a state of shock.’
‘She was unconscious?’
‘She seemed to be. I think she was.’
‘For how long?’
‘I really don’t know. Probably minutes, just minutes. I was pretty strung out myself. I really wasn’t conscious of time. And then the ambulance came and took them both.’
‘Do you have any other information that might help us?’
‘She always called the children her “pun’kins”. She doted on them. She was a lovely gracious lady, one of my regulars. She came in every day in the season and always bought fresh-baked, which tells you a lot.’
‘Any further comments?’
‘I can’t get my mind around how fast … I mean, ten minutes at most, she wasn’t in the store more than that. She came in with that kind of glow she has – you couldn’t help noticing it, she was so alive, such a happy and courteous …’
‘And then?’
‘And then deranged. It gives me bad dreams, the way she looked. I haven’t slept well since it happened.’
‘We have to ask you this,’ the police say. ‘Is there any chance Mrs Goldberg might have planned this? Faked this?’
Ryan stares at them. Perhaps a whole minute passes before he can speak. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘that if you weren’t cops, I’d land a punch on your jaws that you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. But I know you’re just doing your job. And I suppose you must see a lot of slime.’
‘We understand how you feel,’ one cop says. ‘But can you answer the question for the record?’
‘There is no way in a million years,’ Ryan tells them, ‘that Mrs Goldberg could have or would have faked this.’
8. Melanie
This is like the worst hangover ever. This is like wishing you were dead. This is like having your lungs full of nettles or prickles or barbed wire. No. Worse than that. It is as though your lungs are crammed with broken glass. Breathing hurts.
Then again, it is like being smashed in the surf by a humongous wave, a rogue wave, knowing you are going under but desperately fighting the rip, the tearing, the gaping hole where your babies have been swept from your arms.
Please, please, please, you beseech the ocean, I will willingly drown if that will save them.
Where is she …? And where is …?
What is this bleeding gaping hole?
Melanie’s heart is yammering in vibrato, her eyes flicker from the ceiling to the tube taped to her forearm to the nurse.
Then she remembers but hopes she is just waking, that she is recalling fragments of a horrible dream.
She is afraid to ask anything at all.
‘Your baby is here,’ the nurse says gently. She lays Jessica on Melanie’s chest, but this agitates Melanie.
‘Take her, you take her, she’s not safe with me. Where’s Simon?’
The nurse places Jessica in a crib and attends to the drip, professional, calm, increasing the amount of sedation. ‘Your husband is on his way,’ she says.
‘And my son?’ She makes herself say it. ‘My son, Joshua?’
‘Everyone is looking for Joshua. They will find him.’
9. I, Joshua
Sometimes I configure the script this way, sometimes another, but I am ever more certain that I have the right cast, the right play. I call my script ‘Afterlife of a Stolen Child’ and I am the expert on this case though I have no interest whatsoever in publication, in HBO, in Oprah, or in anything but a missing segment of myself. All my research was done online via websites for missing children. I combed thousands of search engines and these were my constant keywords: male child, blond, blue eyes, same birth month and birth year as mine, case never resolved.
This is the one.
I’ve read everything. I know everything that has ever been put on the record (in police files, in interviews, in print) about the father, the mother, the baby sister, the baker, the baker’s regulars, the creepy neighbour who was ‘a person of interest’.
I have photographs. I’ve had them blown up and framed and hung on the walls of my room. This is Simon, this is Melanie, this is Jessica. The resemblance, I think you will agree, is striking. I’ve tracked the players through cyber-detective and paid by credit card online.
Now I know in advance what you are thinking. What’s the payoff here? Who is the con man? What exactly does he get out of this? And I’ll be the first to confess that I myself have aliases, several in fact, and yes, there’s a certain kind of payoff for me.
I cover my tracks.
And so you suspect I’m impervious, without empathy or pain, but it isn’t so. Believe me, it isn’t so. I ask you this, and I ask you to think seriously before you formulate your answer: why do con men do what they do?
And I leave you this clue: I have been this certain before, but have been wrong, and yet I desperately need to be right.
This time, I believe I am right.
This time, no stone has been left unturned. I know who has died and who’s still living, I know their addresses, their phone numbers, where they work and where they have ever worked. I know that Simon and Melanie split up within a year of the event, that both have remarried, that Simon has had other children and Melanie has not, but that both drink more than is wise, and both are on antidepressants.
I know that Jessica, the little sister, is married and has young children and that she is rostered for duty at a child-care centre one day a week. The other mothers find her neurotically anxious about the little ones in her care. She hovers too much, they whisper. She almost smothers.
What I don’t know – what no one knows, what even Google and Yahoo and Wikipedia don’t seem to know and can’t make up – is what happened to Joshua and how Joshua came to be me.
I have a need – a compulsion, perhaps – to write all the possible scripts, but the three protagonists are constant and essential, though ever-changing within their chameleon selves:
Simon, Melanie, Darien.
I move them around like chess pieces on a board, especially Darien, because somebody did this, but how
was it done so quickly? And what did he do with the child?
Joshua cannot remember.
Hard as I try to insert him, Joshua is always absent from the text.
You think, therefore, that the claimants – all of them, and I know I am not the first – are opportunists or sociopaths. You will point to the recent breakdown of Simon, to his interview with the New York Times following my phone call, an interview first desperately hopeful, then angry, then incoherent.
And you think I was not similarly distraught?
Consider this: I, Joshua (aka Joshua X), can recall nothing before my sixth birthday, in spite of another set of parents (good parents in a standard middle-class way; I hold nothing against them), in spite of siblings, in spite of family albums that record third birthday, fourth birthday, fifth birthday and so on, but nothing earlier. We didn’t have a camera before that, the older siblings say, and it does indeed seem to be true because there are no photographs of the earliest years of the brothers and sisters of my other family, the family of record.
You weren’t expected, they say. You came late. You were something of an accident but everyone adored you, you were such a beautiful child.
Perhaps everyone adored me, probably they did, but I always knew I was the cuckoo in the nest. I wasn’t expected and I didn’t belong.
It is essential, therefore, that I create Simon and Melanie as doting parents because that is what was stolen from me. I was the centre of the world of that beautiful mythical pair. Neither could recover from my loss, I insist on that. My absence destroyed them.
And here is Melanie, enlarged and framed on my wall, glowing mother of toddler and baby, both in her arms. Night after night, I dream myself into that cradle of her arm.
I admit it: I’m in love with my mother. I press my lips, every night, against hers.
In other circumstances, that might be disturbing, but not – given my history – in mine.
When I was an innocent infant, two years old, a wrong so massive was done to me that only Greek tragedy can contain it. I point to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides: they alone are equal to my tale.
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 neighbour 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.
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