by Carol Coffey
Brendan studied the pins running down the east coast from New York to Virginia and North Carolina and back again.
“How come he doesn’t know? I mean, Pilar told me she couldn’t discuss his history but . . . but how come no one knows what happened to him? There must be some record somewhere . . . a police record of a road accident maybe or something like that?”
Alice looked behind her to ensure they were alone.
“Well, I shouldn’t be saying anything either but, that day you came here and John was so afraid of you, I thought . . . well . . . that you were sent here for a reason.”
“Like Superman!” Brendan joked but the humour was lost on Alice.
“Eileen felt it too. That’s why we came up with a plan to get you here. I retire this year and I’d love to see that boy sorted ’fore I go. Oh, I know you joke when you’re uncomfortable but I mean it. I saw real fear in his eyes as though you had sparked off a memory in him. And maybe . . . maybe he’s got something to offer you too.”
Brendantensed at Alice’s suggestion that a disturbed man like John could help him. It made him feel incomplete, like there was something wrong with him. He also thought about Eileen’s infatuation with the eccentric man. He wanted to ask Alice if she thought their relationship was a good idea but was afraid of what she might say, good or bad.
Alice stopped speaking and looked about the room. Her mouth moved back and forward as though she was trying to make sense of something.
“I mean . . . well, most of what that boy says is pure made-up fantasy but at times . . . at times he’s said things to me that I am sure he’s plucked out of a real memory. Yeah . . . he knows some things, I’m sure of it . . . but . . . Dr Reiter says don’t encourage it, keep him from talking about it and keep him looking to the future. He’s been working with John ever since he was found and he never figured it out. He can’t do it, no one can. Pilar says he’s the best there is.”
“Was it . . . I saw the scar at the side of his head . . . was it an accident or something?”
“I don’t think so. That scar was old when they found him. Reckoned someone had given him a good beating. No one knows for sure how old he was when he was found but somewhere between eleven and fourteenyears old, the file says. He was tall but painfully thin so it was hard to tell. That was 1979. My, all those years of looking for something you ain’t never found. Makes me sad even thinking ’bout it.”
“Where was he found?” Brendan asked, his sense of intrigue deepening.
The front door closed loudly, sending a shudder up to the attic. Alice went to the window and saw Dr Reiter looking around the grounds for a moment, the way he did when John had run off on him. She knew they’d had another disagreement, which usually occurred when the doctor challenged John on some crazy memory. She watched the doctor frown up at the attic window before getting into his car and driving slowly down the driveway.
Brendan woke her from her thoughts. He noticed her expression had changed from sad to resigned in a moment but he could not tell why.
She pursed her lips and folded her arms about her large body. “Look, we probably better not talk about it anymore. I shouldn’t have said anything. Hmm, Thompson says we need someone round here with more head than heart and I told him we need someone with the same amount of both. He’s right though. I love those men so much sometimes I get blinded by it. Love them like they’re my own family. If I don’t, who’s gonna do it?”Alice let out a long sigh. “I guess all the staff get a little infatuated with John when they come here. But they leave and sometimes leave him in a mess . . . all upset again and running off on us for weeks at a time, looking. Forget I said anything. Better to do as Dr Reiter says. Better not to go along with what John says. He thinks you believe him, he’ll latch onto you like you’re his new best friend.”
Alice looked around the room and back to the map. She smoothed her skirt and looked sadly about the room which held everything John Doe owned in this life.
“I got to tell Pilar about that map, much as I hate to. Anyway, can you fix thatbookshelf? It’s real important to him.”
Brendan nodded and set to work. The bookcase needed two new shelves which he went away to cut from the wood Alice had ordered in.
As he cleared up his tools for the evening, John appeared in the doorway and was taken aback by Brendan’s presence, as though he had forgotten about his request for him to fix the shelves. He looked at his bed as though he sorely wanted to lie on it and then back at Brendan who watched the strange man decide if it was safe to come inside.
“Come on in – I’m just finished,” he said, trying to instil calm in the man who was already muttering as Alice said he would.
John stepped quietly into the room and crept slowly along the wall. He stopped at his map and checked that it had not been interfered with.
“I didn’t touch any of your things,” Brendan said quickly, trying to calm John down before he started any shenanigans, but the strange man simply nodded and lay down on his bed, murmuring to himself in Spanish. Brendan lifted the books to replace them on the new shelves. He noticed a book he’d read as a child: Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. He remembered thinking it was a book for girls but it was the only children’s book in the mobile library that he hadn’t read so he brought it home and read it over the weekend. He could still remember the sense of adventure the book gave him and how he imagined himself as a pioneer in the Wild West, fighting Indians and saving women and children from unchristian scalpings. He swept the dust off the cover with his hand and smiled at the memory.
“I read this when I was a boy,” he said aloud, causing John to sit suddenly bolt upright as though he hadn’t even known Brendan was there.
John took off his glasses and cleaned them with a white tissue that he had shoved up his sleeve, his hand visibly shaking as he replaced the lenses on his face. He swallowed and slowly raised his bright blue eyes to look at Brendan but looked quickly away again.
“It was on television when I was a child,” Brendan added when John didn’t say anything.
“I’m not allowed to watch television – Dr Reiter says it’s bad for me,” John said so quietly that Brendan could hardly hear him.
“Well, I never saw it either. I only ever read books. I grew up without a TV. My mother wouldn’t have one in the house. The only films I saw were in the cinema and that wasn’t often.”
“Kuvic watches TV here all the time . . . and he drinks beer,” John replied as he got up from the bed and took the book nervously from Brendan’s hand.
“Who’s he?” Brendan asked.
“He’s been on vacation,” John twanged in his deep Southern accent. “He’s back tonight. He only ever works nights because he doesn’t get along with Alice.”
Brendan wondered why no one had thought of using John’s accent to trace where he was from or, if they had, why this failed to lead them to his home.
“I don’t rightly get along with him neither cos of the teasing. Usually stay in my room when he comes in at seven.”
Brendan nodded, absorbing what John was saying to him. “You tell Alice about this?”
John shrugged.“Alice knows. There’s nothing she can do. Thompson wants Kuvic to have the manager’s job when Alice retires in the fall. Alice told him Pilar should get it but Kuvic, he’s got an uncle, a politician, who might be able to get a lot more funding for the place. Thompson needs that more than he needs Pilar.”
Brendan listened intently to John, amazed that he spoke with such clarity. He hadn’t expected him to be so aware of what was going on around him.
“Of course, I’ll be gone by then,” John added.
“Where you going?” Brendan asked impulsively, already forgetting Alice’s request that he not encourage John’s ramblings.
“Home.”
Brendan looked towards the door to ensure that Alice or any of the other staff were not around.
“Where’s that?” Brendan asked, his fascination with
the man’s story overpowering the voice in his head that told him to be careful.
“Virginia.”
“Have you got family there?” Brendan asked somewhat, mischievously.
“Some . . . but . . . well . . . I’ve been having some trouble finding them.”John laughed suddenly and slapped his knee, frightening Brendan. “It’s the darndest thing!” He shook his head. “I’m going to find them though. Been looking a real long time.”
Brendan could see a look of desperation in the man’s face.“Well, good luck with it,” he replied, somewhatinsincerely.“It’s John, isn’t it?”
“Jonathan. My name is Jonathan.”
Chapter 7
The following morning Brendan woke early and went to Coleen’s study to use the internet. It was still early and there didn’t appear to be anyone up. He had fallen asleep thinking about the information Alice had given him and knew that someone along the way had missed something that would lead to John’s true identity. The thought of being the one to solve a thirty-year mystery had thrilled him and he had slept fitfully, dreaming of himself walking John up a long pathway to his waiting family. He sat at the computer and typed in a search for children missing in1979. He sighed when he drew a blank. Not a single site reported any missing children that matched Jonathan’s description that year. It didn’t make any sense. He searched some more, frantically typing in the wordsboy and missing andJonathan with various spellings but still nothing came up.
He heard the partly closed door creak and looked up to find Eileen standing there in a quilted blue dressing gown.
“I’ve done that. Over and over. You won’t find anything,” she said as she leaned against the door jamb.
“There must be some record,” he replied.
Eileen came in and pulled over a chair to sit beside Brendan. Sheshooed him overand took control of the keyboard. She typed in the name of a New York newspaper and searched the archives. Within seconds, a photo of a young John flanked by two New York policemen flashed onto the screen. The caption read “Live John Doe found in Marcus Garvey Park”.
Brendan peered at the photo of the half-starved boy with a mop of shoulder-length white hair staring into the photo. He was barefoot and was dressed in clothes that were too short for his long body. Even though it was a black-and-white photo, his face looked deathly pale. He looked much older than the prepubescent boy Alice said he had been.
“That’s when he was found. In an East Harlem park. Guess the name stuck,” she said flatly.
“Jesus,” Brendan said, shocked at his dishevelled appearance.“And there were no reports of children missing before he was found?”
“No one matching his description. It seems like no one was looking for him.”
Brendan leant back on the chair and swivelled around, trying to collect his thoughts. “How can that be?”
“Wherever he was, he’d been there for a long time. Maybe he had no family. Maybe they were dead. There were marks on his body but none of them were fresh injuries. They were very old scars showing that he had been . . .” Eileen’s chin quivered a little but she composed herself quickly, “beaten repeatedly.”
Brendan leant forward and read the report on the left of the photo. “It says he led them less than three hundred metres to abasement apartment at54 Parkview which was a rundown house where he said his grandmother lived – but, when police got there, the apartment was completely empty. The landlord said that it had been rented to an old Hispanic woman who had lived alone there and that she had died a week before.” Heraised his eyebrows in interest.
Eileen scrolled down to the photo of the dilapidated house. The caption said that it was a four-storey building that had been converted into several apartments. The wrought-iron railings that ran along the front of the basement areas of the adjoining houses had been removedfrom Number 54 and the tiny garden inside appeared to havebeen converted into what was presumably aparking-space, which looked like it had not been used in a long time. Tall weeds and blades of grass poked up through the uneven paving, making the house look so abandoned that it was hard to believe that anyone had been living there for a long time.
“Looks like a really old house,” Brendan said, scanning the photo.
“I’d say it’s gone now. Probably been torn down and replaced with a high-rise,” Eileen replied as she typed in another search on the same newspaper archives.
“This was two weeks later. This report said a woman had been found in that house where they believed she’d been dead for about a week and that the post mortem revealed she’d had a lung disease. It said that the old Hispanic woman was undocumented. The newspapers interviewed some neighbours who said she lived alone and had kept to herself and that she didn’t have any family. They said her name, as far as they knew, was Rosa Soto. Immigration did a check and they had no records of anyone matching that name and age. She had no social security number. Nothing. Guess she was just another illegal using a false name.”
Brendan sighed and ran his hand through his unbrushed hair.
“They didn’t have kinship blood-testing back then,” she went on, “so they couldn’t establish for certain that Jonathan wasn’t related to the woman in the morgue, but his physical appearance alone suggested that he had no Hispanic blood in him so they just thought he was some crazy street kid. Also, Rosa Soto’s neighbours said they had never seen him before – and when police tried to get him to bring them around the neighbourhood, he didn’t know his way anywhere, couldn’t name a street, didn’t know anyone, nothing. The report said that John spoke with the same Southern accent that he does now so police concluded that, wherever he was from, it was hundreds of miles from where he was found.”
Brendan smiled at his cousin. He could tell that she had spent long hours searching for clues on the identity of John Doe.
“And they looked, did they? In Virginia and North Carolina and all those places on his map?” he asked.
Eileen nodded. “Alice said police in four states were working on the case and came up with nothing.”
“What about asking Frank? I know he’d left New York by then, but he still has friends on the force there.”
“No!” Eileen yelled. She put her hand over her mouth and looked up at the ceiling, hoping her parents hadn’t heard her. “We can’t. Please! If Dad gets any way involved in the shelter, he’ll know about . . . about Jonathan and me. Look, Brendan, I’ve looked and looked for him and it’s useless. Please leave it alone – please?”
“I’d have thought you’d want him to find his home?” he asked, surprised.
“One time, yes, but now, now I think it’s better if he . . . stays here.”
Brendan looked closely at his cousin. He realised that if Jonathan found out who he was, he would leave this town and Eileen would probably never see him again.
“But . . . Alice said she and you wanted me to work in the shelter because I’d provoked a memory in him.”
Eileen blew out a long sigh. “Yes, that’s true . . . but all I want is for you to befriend him . . . for him to not be soafraid. That’s all. Kuvic will have him out of the shelter as soon as he’s the manager and he’ll probably go into a housing development. I hope . . . I hope that he’ll settle and that maybe . . .”
Eileen blushed and looked down at her quilted dressing gown. She pulled at a loose thread until the redness faded from her face.
“Please say you’ll stop looking into this?” she begged.
Brendan nodded and looked back at the photo of Jonathan on the screen. He looked terrified and Brendan wondered what he had gone through up until that point.
“What happened to him after that?”
“He went into state care,” Eileen said softly.“Alice says that he then went from foster home to foster home, in and out of state institutions, juvenile centres and . . .”
He noticed her jaw clench and her fingers curl up.
“Sometimes he was admitted to psychiatric institutions,” she said as though those words
held a painful memory for her.
“Alice said his old file is at least eight inches thick with information on the places he’s been cared for and police correspondence but that the case was closed years ago. He was homeless a lot as an adult. Drifted around. Even since he came to the shelter he drifted off for a while now and then, but he always came back when he didn’t find what he was looking for.”
“What brought him to Dover?”
Eileen pushed her bony shoulders towards her neck and shrugged. “I guess he thought he’d find something here. Alice said she was looking out of the window one day and found him swinging on the old swing in the front yard, like a child would do. She went down and brought him inside. She took him into the kitchen for something to eat and he wandered about the house and garden looking at everything and touching things. He was convinced it was his house. Said it had the same clapboard front and bay windows but that everything else was different. The shelter has been the most stability he’s ever known.”
“What do you think about his past?”
Eileen turned off the computer and stared at the wallpapered wall in front of her.
“I think he has . . . or at least he did have a family at some point. I think that the house and the orchard that he remembers are real but that it got mixed up along the way with things he imagined were his own memories. He endured a terrible trauma, terrible cruelty. But . . . I really don’t know why no one ever looked for him. He’s so gentle and kind . . . someone taught him well. At some point in his life somebodycared very much for him. I expect they thought he was dead. I don’t know why they never reported him missing but there has to be a reason for it.”
