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Chapter 6

‘What’s your name? Can he hear? Is he listening? Hello? Hey there. Your name?’

‘Michael.’

‘Okay, great, kid. Last name? Can you tell me your last name?’

‘He’s in shock, Detective.’

‘You don’t know your last name? How about your dad’s name? Do you know your dad’s name?’

‘John.’

‘Good, that’s good. And your mom? You remember your mom’s name? Hello? What’s your mom’s name?’

‘Momma.’

‘Okay. Okay. That’s fine. John and Momma. It’s a start, right?’

‘I don’t see how sarcasm’s going to help either of you, Detective. Michael, honey, how old are you?’

‘Four. And a quarter.’

‘Good, kid, that’s good. We need to figure out how to get you home. Do you understand?’

‘I think we should give him some more time, Detective.’

‘Time is of the essence, ma’am. Son, do you live nearby? Do you know – Hey, kiddo, over here. Look at me.’

‘I really think I should complete my assessment before-’

‘What town are you from? Michael? Michael? Do you know the name of the town you live in?’

‘The United States of America.’

‘Jesus.’

Chapter 7

The first year passes in bits and pieces, fragments with sharp edges. It is defined by voices. Conversations. Like this one:

‘How about a street? C’mon, help us out here. You must remember a street sign, something.’

And him pointing to the letter X on an alphabet puzzle. ‘Like that.’

‘Hey, Joe, you know any street names start with the letter X?’

‘How ’bout Fuckin’ Xanadu?’

‘I think that starts with a F.’

And this one:

‘My dad’s coming back.’

‘Sure, shithead. My momz, too. All our parents is coming back. We gonna have a big fat Thanksgiving turkey dinner and fall asleep ’round the fireplace.’

There are flashes, too – light and movement, photographs that can be strung together to form herky-jerky story lines. There is the Trip to the Hospital, him trembling in the sterile white hall, terrified that he’d been brought here to be put down like the neighbor’s Doberman who’d bitten a Sears repairman. (Which neighbor? Why remember a Sears repairman but not his own mother’s name?) The doctor comes for him, towering and imperious and breathing Listerine, and leads him to a tiny room. He goes passively to his death. They count his teeth, assess his fine motors skills, X-ray his left hand and wrist to check bone development. Then they give him a birthday.

A week later he gets a last name.

Doe.

A random assignment by a faceless clerk in an unseen office. The fact that a brand like that, a goddamn name could be yoked to him forever seems the punctuation mark on a lifelong sentence he will have to serve for a crime he didn’t commit. Michael Doe. Reborn and renamed and left to build from scratch.

Over the months he has added to the memories here, amended them there, losing pieces to the shock that preceded and followed. He had rubbed the narrative curve to a high polish, like river rock, wearing in contours, revealing new seams in the excavated quarry, until what remained, what he beheld, may not even have been the same shape anymore, until he’d freed a different sculpture from the same marble block. But this – this bastardized fusion of past and later – is all he has. This is his imperfect history. This is how it lives in his bones.

Then there is nothing but a snowstorm.

When it clears, he is six.

A run-down house at the end of a tree-shaded lane. He is kneeling at a bay window, nose to the glass, elbows on the sill, fists chubbing up his cheeks. Waiting. The yellow plaid cushion beneath his knees reeks of cat piss. Waiting. A car pulls up, and his spirits fly to the stars, but the car keeps on driving, driving away. Waiting.

A girl’s voice from behind him, ‘Shithead still thinks Daddy’s comin’ back.’

He has told no one about his mother. That he suspects her dead. His mind flits like a butterfly over poisonous flowers. Did his father kill her? Did he use a knife? What is his bloody inheritance?

He doesn’t turn from the window, but his thoughts have moved to the kids gathering behind him, sneakers shuffling on worn carpet. One voice rises above the others, boy-cruel and high with prepubescence: ‘Get over it, Doe Boy. Daddy didn’t want you.’

Mike tries to slow time. He makes a conscious decision to form a fist, the steps of curling, tightening, where to put the thumb. He will use this, his hand, to smash. But then anger bleeds in, overtakes him. A frozen expression of surprise on Charlie Dubronski’s face as Mike charges. A fist, fatter than his, blotting out the bright morning. A whirl of rust-colored carpet and a dull ache in his jaw. And then Dubronski leaning over him, hands on dimpled knees, leering red face. ‘How’s the weather down there, Doe Boy?’

Mike thinks, Calmer next time.

And then, weeks later, he is in the bathroom at three in the morning, the one time it is unoccupied. He needs a stool so he can lean forward over the sink, to see his face in the dim nightlight glow. Looking in the mirror, he sees a missing person. He examines his features. He does not have his mother’s high cheekbones. He does not have her beautiful black-brown hair. His skin does not smell like cinnamon, and his clothes do not carry the faintest whiff of patchouli as did hers. With the exception of the final imprint, his memories of his father are all good ones, gentle ones. But memories are weighted by quality, not quantity. He pictures his father’s hands gripping the steering wheel. That splotch of red on his shirt cuff.

He cannot help fearing just how much like his father he might be.

He does not know his last name. He does not know in which state he was born. He does not know what his room looked like or what toys he had or if his momma ever kissed him on the forehead like the mothers in children’s books. But he does know, now, that he is sixish years old and being raised in an overcrowded foster home in the smog-draped Valley of 1982.

Daylight. The Couch Mother lays in her hermit-crab shell of corduroy sofa, bleating instructions, giving off great wafts of baby powder and something worse, something like decay. An ashtray surfs of its own accord between formless breast and thigh, adrift on a sea of gingham. Ginger hair done in a sixties flip, easy smile, that Virginia Slims voice rattling after them down the hall: Charlie dear, pick up the bath mat. Tony dear, wash the dishes. Michael dear, empty my ashtray.

The communal dresser. He hates the communal dresser. Hates when he’s the last one to get dressed for school and winds up with the salmon-colored shirt that is cruelly mistaken – the day long – for pink. He hoards shirts at night, sleeps with them. But this night, when he gets back from brushing his teeth, his pillow is turned aside; the blue-striped shirt is gone. Dubronski, cross-legged on his bed, is smiling. And of course Tony Moreno, skinny sidekick, is laughing with implausible vigor.

Mike says, ‘Give it back.’

Dubronski holds out his fat bully hands as if catching rain. ‘Give what back?’

This, to Tony M, is high comedy.

‘You can’t even fit it,’ Mike says.