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, over-anxious … 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 recognise 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 chit-chat 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 neighbour 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.
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 photographs that you don’t even realise 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.
And 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 o
ver 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 of the truth: 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 unravelling. 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 axe 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 wellbeing. He consulted paediatricians 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 email came she was magically cured. I’ve tracked you down, the email 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 email 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.
The heart finds what it needs to find.
21. Thanksgiving
When Melanie arrives each November for Thanksgiving Dinner, she brings a sweet-potato and caramelised-pecan casserole and a bottle of wine.
‘You were too young to remember, Jess,’ she says each time, ‘but that’s what I did for the last Thanksgiving on Long Island, before, you know …’
‘I know, Mom.’
‘Your father’s parents always came and your grandmother had extremely strict rituals that had to be obeyed. The only non-kosher element was my casserole. It was the last time …’
‘I know, Mom,’ Jessica says, embracing her. ‘Mom, I want you to meet a friend of mine from Iowa.’
The name means nothing to Melanie though the guest vaguely reminds her of someone she might once have known. ‘Have we met before?’
‘Possibly,’ he says.
She watches the way he cavorts on the carpet with the children, the way he plays Cowboys and Indians from behind the sofa-fort and the circled wagons of cushions.
‘You are very good with children,’ she tells him.
Halfway through dinner, she asks: ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, blushing and looking away. ‘I didn’t realise.’
‘I think I missed your name.’
‘That wasn’t my real name,’ he says. ‘My real name is Joshua.’
Melanie goes very white and still. Her hands tremble. After some minutes she says quietly: ‘You are a very nice man, but you are not my son. Jessica, I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down for a while.’
Melanie drifts into sleep and uneasy dreaming. She is in a vast and confusing railway station, bigger than Grand Central, and it is essential that she not miss her train, yet every platform is blocked with No Entry signs. Somehow she has wandered from the concourse into the lobby of a huge hotel – the Hyatt Regency, perhaps?– and there is a room she must find. Yet every elevator she takes will not stop at the flo
or she needs. She tries the floor above, the floor below, and frantically hunts for stairs but they don’t exist. She walks miles of corridor, then begins running because time is almost up. She climbs out a window onto a fire escape which is moving the way an escalator moves except that it moves very slowly and only goes down. It tips her into a back alley near the mid-town tunnel and she descends into dark.
Vehicle headlights blind her.
She makes her way along a treacherous catwalk meant only for emergency workers.
She runs and runs and runs.
I will be lost forever, she thinks, but I will keep on going until I find my way home.
And then, suddenly, there is sunlight ahead and the tree-tunnel of Main Street and puppies tethered to bike racks and she is inhaling the most glorious smell of fresh-baked bread. Without any effort on her part, she is inside Ryan’s and through the window she can see the stroller.
She sees the van pulling up.
There is still time.
She rushes outside and scoops her babies into her arms.
‘Thank God,’ she tells Ryan, bursting back in through his doorway. ‘I’ve found my way home.’
Ryan cannot tell if she is sobbing or laughing but he wraps all three of them in tissue and perfumes them with cinnamon and yeast.
Melanie covers Joshua and Jessica with kisses and whispers in Joshua’s ear: ‘We’ve found our way home and we’ll never leave again. I promise that this is where we will stay.’
MOON RIVER
A MEMOIR
Moon River
You cannot step into the same river twice.
(Heraclitus, fragment 41)
Midnight. It is now official: New Year’s Day 2008. The sky is fretted with glitter trails and the soft pop of slow-falling balls of burning gold, but I am fixated on a gilded arc of the Brisbane River. Though the moon is waning, one week past full, the water looks like the bullion-sluice at the Mt Morgan mine, a Midas-flow I saw once and will never forget. Gold Rushes – Kalgoorlie, Mt Morgan – figure in family history on both sides, and at times like this memories tumble as from an overstuffed drawer, colliding and merging. Not much of the river is visible in the space between the new construction (iron-spiked and rising daily), the elegant roofline of Moorlands House, and the tree line on Coronation Drive, but from the glass-enclosed elevated walkway that links the main entrance of Wesley Hospital with its Moorlands Wing, I can see the City Cat cutting its sleek swift way through the liquid gold. The Cat is bound for the wharf at the Regatta. In other circumstances I might have been joining the revels, but I am badly jetlagged, having barely arrived in Australia, and my flight was grabbed at short notice. Behind me, hospital gurneys pass silently back and forth. Visitors – their faces drawn, some of them weeping – carry flowers. The flowers give off a sad and desperate smell.
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