“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 neighbor 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, 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 center 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 center 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.