The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

1. Darien

Chance of thunderstorms was the forecast and so naturally Simon offered to drive Melanie and the children into town. All the mothers in Bayside made a social thing out of daily shopping, nothing more than a status notch in my humble opinion — my viewpoint being that of observant neighbor — and the Goldbergs certainly cared about status in a conspicuously nonchalant way. The daily trip to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, and the beeswax-candle-maker signified leisure and summer and Long Island and the right sort of environmental angst. The mothers shopped for locally grown vegetables and free-range chickens and fresh-baked artisanal bread. The town market was a half mile inland from the Goldbergs’ house, the dunes and the beach 200 yards the other way.

People walked or rode bikes. Bayside was so tranquil, the summer regulars said, that you could hear the cedar shakes swell when it rained, yet Simon could always imagine 101 forms of harm. He was a city boy, used to knowing what to watch for, what to listen for. Serenity made him nervous. I can vouch for this. I visited them once (before the event) in their unnecessarily large apartment on the Upper West Side. There I saw Simon almost at ease.

I visited their Manhattan place afterward too, just once, to offer condolence.

There was an edgy quality to that meeting, although it was before the police declared me a “person of interest.”

It is perhaps relevant to explain that I was not the owner of the house next door in the Hamptons. For that momentous year I was subletting. I am a nomad by instinct, I come and go, and for that very reason I adapt quickly to each new address. I am a listener and I am a watcher and I’d wager that within a few weeks I know as much of everyone’s business as the long-term residents know.

“You could get drenched,” Simon said to Melanie on that day in Bayside, the day that would make headlines in the News and the Post.

“So?” she said.

Simon sighed and rolled his eyes at me. We were on opposite sides of the hedge between the summer houses, both spraying for powdery mildew and black sooty mold. “The long walk in wet clothes,” he explained as to a child. “Pneumonia.”

“Nonsense.” Melanie was clipping the rain cover to the double stroller, each fastener snapping shut with a thock, a very satisfying and reassuring sound. “If it rains, I’ll roll this down and they won’t get a drop on them. See?” She demonstrated and Simon set down the sprayer and walked over to the shell-grit path. “And as for me,” Melanie said, “I’ve always adored walking in the rain.” She began humming that old Johnny Ray song and they both peered through the plastic windshield at their children. I couldn’t see very well from beyond the hedge, so I’m guessing here. Six-month-old Jessica was fast asleep, her little soft-boned form slumped low in the canvas seat. Joshua, whose second birthday they had so recently celebrated, pawed at the plastic from inside.

“He doesn’t like it,” Simon said. “He feels trapped.”

“Don’t be silly.” Melanie made a funny face at Joshua through the plastic and Josh laughed and perhaps he made a funny face back. “Anyway,” she said, rolling the plastic back up and securing it in two canvas loops, “we probably won’t even need it. You know how incredibly local these thunderstorms are. It can be raining on one side of the street and not on the other.”

That, Simon thought — and I always knew what he was thinking; I zeroed in on him as a confider of secrets within twenty-four hours; I have a talent for picking victims — that was precisely what was so alarming: the sheer arbitrariness of harm, the way it could touch down like the flick of a whip, random, focused, and deadly. “I wish you’d let me drive you,” he said. “If there’s lightning, you’re not to shelter under a tree.”

Melanie laughed. “You want to keep us all in cotton wool.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Poor Simon. Here we are giving you a whole morning to work on your book and you’re going to waste it on worry.”

“I’m spraying for mold,” he said. “And then I’m mowing. You’ll be back before I get to my book.”

“We’ll go to Joan’s for lunch. We’ll spend the afternoon there. You can have the whole day.”

I watched Simon bend over to kiss the sleeping Jessica on her forehead. When he leaned toward Joshua, his son squirmed and giggled and pulled his T-shirt up over his face.

“You haven’t shaved,” Melanie said. “You’re scratching him.”

Simon tugged at the soft cotton shirt, pulled it back from over his son’s eyes. “I see you,” he said, and his son squealed with hyperexcited glee.

“Say bye to Daddy,” Melanie said.

Simon waved. He watched till they turned the corner before he came back to the hedge.

“I know you think I’m neurotic,” he said, “but they seem intolerably fragile to me.”

I went on spraying. It wasn’t the kind of statement that required a response.

Simon steamrollered on in his melancholy academic way, as he usually did and does. “Harm seems so arbitrary. So... malevolent. It terrifies me.”

“I’ve got a dental appointment in town,” I said, as much to shut off the spigot of his pathetic and privileged anxiety as anything else. “Later this morning. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.”

2. Melanie

“I don’t like that man,” she tells the children. “He watches us. We’re going to have to get shades on our windows.” She wipes a thin film of salt from her cheek. The sea breeze, deceptively cool on the beach, turns sticky on the landward side of the dunes. Her sweat is dripping into her eyes. It stings. “Maybe we should have taken your daddy’s offer, Joshua,” she says. “It’s so hot. I hope it does pour. Wouldn’t that be lovely, punkin? I just adore walking in the rain.”

The walk seems twice as long on sultry days.

“We’ll go to Joan’s house after the shopping,” she says. “We can all cool off in her pool.”

Melanie has an easy elegance about her. She wears white linen pants and a racer-back navy top. Her sandals are Birkenstocks. She swims and jogs and plays tennis. She has worked on getting her waistline back since Jessica’s birth, but the truth is, already she is toying with the idea of getting pregnant again. There is something so gorgeously languid about that fecund state. It must be the earth-mother syndrome.

She brakes the stroller and leans into the front to fan the children. “Poor babies,” she says. “I thought there’d be more of a breeze. As soon as we’ve got the vegetables and the bread, we’ll get ice creams, Josh, okay?” She bends low and covers their silky little cheeks with kisses. “You’re so delicious, I could eat you,” she tells them. “Even your sweat smells good.”

Jessica sleeps on, oblivious. Joshua is drowsy but smiles at the kiss and the thought of ice cream.

“Chocolate,” he murmurs.

“Okay. Chocolate. It’ll be cooler when we get into town.”

There are spreading trees that make a green tunnel of Main Street. Outside Ryan’s Bakery, two strollers are parked in the shade. Melanie maneuvers to the head of the line so that Josh will have a clear view of the dogs. They are tethered by their leashes to the bike rack and they rub noses and sniff behind each other’s tails. She sets the stroller hard up against the plate-glass window, directly under the oversized decal of the R, and pushes the brake lever with her foot.

Of course she has never stopped replaying that moment. She has never stopped wishing, she has never stopped asking What if?

What if she had nestled her little ones behind the Nelson toddler, at the back of the line, beneath the final gold-leafed Y of Ryan’s Bakery, would the world have tilted a different way on its axis? Would the climate have changed? Would a different child have been taken?

“Mommy will just be inside a few minutes, Josh. If Jessica wakes, you can sing her the lollipop song, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then chocolate ice cream,” Melanie promises. “After we get the baguettes.”

3. Joshua

There are three dogs and one of them is lifting its leg. Joshua watches the little river of sunlight spurt out and twist like string, then fall into a black puddle beside the curb. He tries to see exactly where the yellow turns dark. The puddle smells like Jessica when her diaper is wet.

Right now, Jessica has the sleep smell and the baby-powder smell. There is a little bubble of drool on her chin. Joshua leans over to wipe it but his leather harness won’t let him go. He fiddles with the buckle but it ignores him. He tugs. He manages almost to kiss Jessica on her cheek.

There is always plenty of kissing, Daddy kissing him, Mommy kissing him, everyone kissing everyone all over.

And then something arrives, a swooping thing like a black crow coming at him, the jab of its vicious beak. Abrupt change of weather, end of kissing time, but Josh can’t understand. There is a van that pulls up, dogs yapping, a knife, he knows knife, he sees a knife and his harness lets go. It’s like a fast fierce wind that flattens, that blows everything flat (the bakery smell, Jessica, the dogs), rush, crash, his body seizing up, he can’t breathe... He can’t even figure out who it is, but it’s someone he seems to know and there’s another smell he seems to recognize, not Jessica, not the dogs. Is it the man who watches?

Your mommy said...

This isn’t right. It doesn’t feel right. But he seems to know that face, he knows that smell.

You have to come with me, your mommy said...

“Mommy!” he screams in sudden terror, but a hand is clamped over his mouth.

And then the thunderstorm? The black sky? Black clouds over his head?

Joshua is always trying to remember what he remembers. There are opaque things that swirl around and around in fog like clothes in a washing machine. They are there, he knows they are there, but he can never quite see them clear. He catches glimpses of what he once knew, fragments that tantalize. He remembers Jessica. He remembers baby smell and sleep smell. He remembers car-seat smell and that other smell. He remembers Mama and chocolate. He remembers the dogs.

4. Melanie

The smell of a bakery is like the smell of babies, it’s like pregnancy, that yeasty rising. Tonight she is going to talk Simon into letting Joshua sleep in their bed, all four of them curled up together like fresh croissants. Simon thinks Joshua is too old for this, that it isn’t healthy for him, that it will turn him into something squishy and damageable. And yet when Joshua is in his own room, in his own bed with side rails, it is Simon who wakes every hour and gets up to check. Just in case.

“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 his gentleness, his passion for music (classical and jazz), his scholarly mind, the sheer and vast volume of his knowledge 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 deliveryman 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 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 chitchat 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!” Melanie 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 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 neighbor 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 cozy 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 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.”

“What time of day would that be?”

“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 afterward, 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 ‘punkins.’ 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 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.

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 neighbor 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.

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, overanxious... 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 recognize 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 chitchat 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 neighbor 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 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.

The heart finds what it needs to find.

21. Thanksgiving

When Melanie arrives each November for Thanksgiving dinner, she brings a sweet potato and caramelized 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 nonkosher 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 realize.”

“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 floor 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 Midtown 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’ll stay.”