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‘Coming,’ Dodge said.

‘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.’

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,
some
thing.’

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.

‘Then why don’t you take it?’ Dubronski says. ‘Oh – that’s right. Because I’ll give you
a beat-down.’

Something hard and gemlike flares in Mike’s chest. It is blue-hot, but this time as controlled as a pilot light. He leans
forward, says, ‘Yeah, but you have to sleep sometime. And my bed is right next to yours.’

Dubronski’s face changes. Tony M stops laughing. Dubronski recovers, quickly, with tough words. He cannot give up the shirt,
not now, not with six sets of eyes watching from the surrounding cots. But the stench of his fear lingers in the room after
dark. The spell has been broken.

The next day Dubronski limps to school. Mike is the Wearer of the Blue-Striped Shirt.

He is in the bay window as usual. Waiting.
Michael dear, go outside and play – you practically
live
in that window
. There is a new kid, skin and bones, with huge feet like a puppy’s paws. When he arrived, his hair was curly and long, but
now it is close-cropped like everyone else’s. Head lice make their rounds with
such frequency that the Couch Mother has ruled for crew cuts; she wields a pair of clippers with the impersonal proficiency
of a bureaucrat denying a request. Function over form, always.

The new kid has a dog name to go with the puppy paws – Shep. Right now Dubronski and Tony M are pummeling him. From his perch
on the cushion, Mike watches him get back up, lips bleeding. Another punch. Dubronski’s mouth moving:
Stay down, ya little faggot
. The neighbor’s kids are at their windows; they are used to the Roman theater that is 1788 Shady Lane. Shep struggles, finds
his feet. Dubronski draws back his fist for the fifth or fifteenth time. The Couch Mother’s voice sails from the living room
– ‘
Diii
–ner’ – terminating the day’s festivities.

The new kid’s voice is funny, too loud –
Hey, Retard Voice, why you sound like such a
ree-
tard
– so he doesn’t talk much. He eats at the long kitchen table, head down, shoveling, his rail-thin body burning off the calories
before he finishes chewing. The Couch Mother arises to refill her jug of Crystal Light, and Dubronski leans across the table
and swats Shep’s fork as it goes into his mouth. Shep emits a faint bark. The Couch Mother whirls. ‘What’s wrong, Shepherd
dear?’ He winces, shakes his head. When Couch Mother disappears again behind the refrigerator door, he dips his mouth into
a napkin, drools blood.

A dream. Beneath flickering eyelids Mike’s mind dances with fantasies of domesticity, of waffle irons and cream-white linens.
He wakes up cramped on the too-small cot, staring at a ceiling blotched seaweed brown from water damage.

Back on the yellow plaid cushion. Waiting. Shep out front. Couch Mother engrossed in a talk show and a cantaloupe in the TV
room. Outside, Dubronski hammers Shep into the dirt. Shep gets up, jeans torn, knees bloodied. Even Tony M can horn in on
the action, can knock the small kid down. Mike can hear Dubronski shouting, exasperated, ‘Stay down, douchebag! Stay down.’
Shep rises again. Mike turns his eyes to the end of the road. There is no station wagon there.

Now it is sloppy-joe night. Zucchini was on sale yesterday, so it substitutes for onions. Zucchini bits are not meant to appear
in sloppy joes, with good reason. But the foster children are hungry; they eat with relish. The Police da-da-da from the crackly
radio by the toaster. Dubronski has just taken his insulin –
Remember, Charlie darling: Cold and clammy, you need some candy. Dry and hot, you need a shot
– so he must wait fifteen minutes to eat. When the time is up, he scrambles to the kitchen. On his way back, he pauses behind
Shep, extends his overladen tray above Shep’s head, lets it clap to the table in front of him. The sound is like a gunshot
in a bank vault, but Shep doesn’t so much as blink. A spray of runny meat spatters his face. Unfazed, he scoops a fingerful
off his cheek and pops it into his mouth. The Couch Mother looks at him sidewise, her chins ajiggle, and the next day Shep
arrives late to school wearing hearing aids from the Shriners Hospital. On the playground at recess, Dubronski heat-seeks
his target. ‘Hey, look at the old man! Shep needs hearing aids like a
old man
!’ A crowd has gathered. Shep pulls the flesh-colored units from both ears, drops them to the asphalt, crushes them under
a sneaker. His stare is level, Zen-like, and for once his voice is even. ‘I don’t need anything.’

A rumor makes its rounds, something involving Shep’s drunk of a dad and a gun with blanks. Like a stubborn shellfish, Shep
will not let himself be pried open, will not let his treasure spill. Whereas Mike has strength, Shep has will, and Mike is
sharp enough to know which is the rarer commodity.

Time scribbles forward a few months and there Mike is, still on the piss-smelling yellow cushion, nose pigged against the
bay window. An unearthly light pervades 1788 Shady Lane, turning it slate gray; it is a black-and-white movie. The street
is empty. A station wagon makes the turn, and Mike feels his heart soar. It nears and –
yes
– pulls to the curb and –
yes
– that is a man, a solitary man who climbs out –
yes
– and makes his way up the walk, and a fall of light breaks through the trees and the slate
gray pall, lighting his face in full color and –
yes
– it is his father. Mike runs to the door and is swept up in strong arms, he and his father spinning like a shampoo-commercial
couple in a field of foxtail yellow, and he hugs him, feels the cheek warm against his own, the grit of stubble beneath the
clean shave, the crinkle of the starched collar. His father sets him down and says,
I am so sorry. I came back for you at the playground, and you were gone. I’ve been looking for you all these months, every
waking hour, for-going food and sleep, and look
– he holds out his shirt cuff with the bloodred blotch –
this is just a splash of cranberry juice, and look
– he points to the car, and there, waving from the passenger seat, his mother, her smile sending out a light all its own
and –

Mike is shaken awake. He tugs away, buries his face in the pillow, rooting out remnants of the dream. But the wide hand is
persistent. He rolls onto his back, stares up at the perfumed face, lax with gravity. ‘Michael dear, come with me.’ Instantly
he is drenched in panic sweat –
another move, another abandonment
– but he is walking, in underwear, on ice-numb bare feet, following Couch Mother to doom or desertion. She moves on hushed
footsteps; the house creaks under the weight of her. Into the kitchen, into a slant of yellow thrown by the outdoor security
lamp, and Mike squints and sees on the table: a cake. His name frilled in frosting. He looks at Couch Mother, but she is watching
the cake, her eyes alight. This is their little secret. His mind sputters. ‘It’s not my birthday.’ ‘No,’ Couch Mother says,
‘it’s
our
birthday. A year to the day I got you.’ His breath leaves him in a huff. He lunges to her, hugs, burying his face in the
soft folds of her nightgown. He says, ‘I love you,’ and she says, ‘Let’s not get carried away.’

The next day he finds himself again on the cushion. Waiting. The bay window, smudged with a thousand marks from his nose and
forehead. A thousand and one. Waiting. He thinks back on the time he has passed on this cat-piss cushion and wonders if this
is all life is, one year after the last, nothing memorable, a sun
baked torment. Outside, Shep is receiving his daily beating. He lies on his back in the fall-gorgeous leaves, Dubronski brandishing
a fist over his face. ‘Stay the fuck down, runt. Stay
down
.’ Shep finds his feet. Mike’s eyes move through the arcade of yellow-orange leaves and their geometric patterns to the end
of the street, to the station wagon that has still not appeared. Waiting. He tries to stop time, to freeze the image like
a photograph, this unextraordinary moment, just to have it, just to have something he can hold on to, something he can keep.
He waits for his father.