The Incredible Life of Jonathan Doe

by Carol Coffey

  “You want to hear the rest or not?” Martinezsaid angrily.

  Brendan nodded and focused his eyes on the young couple who were still smiling at each other as though they were on a date in a fancy restaurant and not in a maximum-security federal prison.

  “Mama stayed on there in that apartment with the kid. I eventually got around to telling her about Mariana. Hardest thing I ever did. I waited one day ’til I was about to leave and told her quick as I could that Mariana was never coming back and that the police thought the kid was dead. Once she knew there was no one looking for him, she wanted to keep him with her for good, especially seeing as I wouldn’t be out in a long, long time and she was sick. He was all she had.”

  “Except he belonged to another family!”

  Rafael ignored the comment and appeared lost in thought.

  “I never saw her again. When I heard that she had been found dead in the apartment, I thought that kid must have got out and got himself killed somehow.” He shook his head in amazement. “But seems like somehow he survived.”

  Rafael sat back in his chair, his story now complete.

  Brendan exhaled noisily, relieved to know now what had happened to his friend and anxious to find out the last piece of information he needed to take Jonathan home. He looked at his father who stared at him from across the table.

  “Why did you choose this life?” he asked.

  “Choose it?You do not choose this life. It chooses you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that when you are poor, when you are not white, when you are an immigrant, everything you want you have to take by whatever means necessary.”

  Brendan looked at the dried-up old man before him.“It didn’t need to be like that. That’s just an excuse, a lie you and those like you tell yourself to ease your conscience – that is, if you have one.You could have worked, bought a house, had a good life. Lots of immigrants achieve that. My mother loved you. It should have been enough.”

  Rafael leant forward again, the familiar glint of anger returned to his thin face.

  “It was not enough. I wanted it all!”

  “Well, what have you got now?”

  “You know, you could have been somebody. I could have seen to it that you inherited everything I built up on the outside,” said Rafael.

  Brendan leant toward Rafael, his fear long since dissipated.“I am somebody,” he said as he stood and stared at the man.

  Rafael’s eyes opened wide for a moment as he realised his son’s visit was over and that he would probably never see him again.

  “You might have to come back. Could be you need more information. Could be what I tell you don’t exactly fit!” He laughed as he rocked back and forward on his chair.

  Brendan made his way to the door and waited for the CO on the other side to unlock it. As the door opened, he walked halfway through and looked back at Rafael Martinez who stood open-mouthed in the room.

  “I am somebody and I will never be you.”

  Chapter 30

  Jonathan Doe lay awake on his bed, listening to Brendan as he recalled his long conversation with Rafael Martinez. When he finished, Brendan dug his hands into his jeans’ pockets and waited for his friend to reply. It was almost midnight and, although exhausted from the long drive back from Attica Prison, he hadn’t wanted to wait until the next day to tell Jonathan what he now knew.

  When he’dleft the prison and returned to the car, his mother had held onto him in the back seat and had cried openly into his chest but, by the time they reached the motorway, she had regained her familiar aloof composure. She moved away from him and he watched her through the corner of his eye as she sniffed and dried her eyes roughly with wet, torn tissue paper. Shehad then turned her face toward her window and hardly uttered another word for the rest of the six-hour journey.

  “Are you alright?” he asked now but Jonathan did not answer.

  Brendan moved closer to the bed but Jonathan turned abruptly on his side and faced away from him. Brendan could hear a low sob coming from his friend who remained motionless on his bed in the darkened room.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Brendan said softly. “We can talk about what we do next.”

  He quietly closed the door of the attic room and made his way home where he hoped he would fall into a deep, peaceful sleep.

  The following morning, Brendan slept in and arrived at the shelter just before one o’clock. He went directly to Jonathan’s room and found his friend standing by the window, staring into thin air. He was dressed in his usual corduroy trousers and heavily patterned woollen vest over a white, collarless shirt. His thick hair was neatly combed back and his rimless spectacles were perched on his nose.

  “Jonathan?”

  Jonathan turned around, his pale face staring at his friend. He had dark circles under his eyes, revealing a sleepless night.

  “You too, huh? I didn’t sleep a wink either,” Brendan quipped to try to ease the tense air in the room. “How are you?”

  Jonathan shrugged and looked back at the window.

  “I’m okay,” he said meekly.

  Brendan sat wearily down on the bed.

  “Did what I told you last night trigger any memories?” he asked quietly.

  “Some.” Jonathan cleared his throat and moved his shoulders up towards his neck. “She said ‘Stay with me, Jonathan, and hold my hand until I take my last breath. When I’m gone, you run from here and don’t you ever come back!’”

  “Abuelita?” Brendan asked.

  Jonathan nodded.“She was real sick. She could hardly breathe. She told me that when she was gone I should run as far away as I could get. She begged me not to give the police his name. Even when she was dying she was trying to protect him. She also said that he had friends, lots of them, and that even if Rafael was in prison, he’d find a way to get to me if I told. So I ran.”

  “That’s when you were found in the park?”

  Jonathan nodded. “I didn’t know where else to go. I took whatever clothes I had. There weren’t many, just a couple of pants and that – I threw them in a bag together with some food. I stayed there for days, afraid. I had almost nothing to eat and I slept up in that tower. I was starving so I went back to the basement to find something to eat and she was gone.”

  “You must have been so scared, Jonathan. I can’t imagine what it was like for you.”

  “I was.”

  They fell silent for a while, Brendan trying hard to think of questions to ask – searching for anything that might be a lead, a clue.

  “Did anyone else regularly call to the house?”

  “Since Rafael went away, the only person that called was the landlord to collect the rent. Once in a while she’d bring him in to do repairs. She always locked me in the box then but I didn’t mind. I knew she’d let me back out as soon as he was gone.”

  “How did she pay for the rent?” Brendan asked, suddenly curious about how the illegal Latina lived.

  “Rafael left a box of money that she had hidden in the kitchen. It was almost gone by the time she died.”

  Brendan cringed, knowing that the money his grandmother lived on had most likely come from the sale of drugs.

  “The whole apartment had been cleared out. All of her furniture, my box, everything.”Jonathan blushed as another memory resurfaced. “I . . . I wanted the box back. I wanted to get into it and sit in the dark.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went back to the park and I stayed there, eating from rubbish bins when it was dark. During the day I’d sit real still on the top of the tower. One night, the police were doing their rounds in the park. They found me drinking water from the pond.”

  “Did you tell them everything?”

  “No. I was afraid. All I did was take them to the house. I hoped it would somehow help them find where I had come from. They got hold of the landlord. None of what I said held up, that’s what they said. They checked missing persons in V
irginia which they said my accent came from and there were no reports on anyone missing of my description. Then they checked further afield but it was the same story. I remember this one cop saying to me – ‘There’s no one looking for you, kid, and with the state they left you in, you should count your blessings you got out alive.’ I . . .” Jonathan blushed again and swallowed. “I told them I was Jonathan Wyatt Nelson so they . . . they phoned the psychiatric hospital and Dr Reiter took charge of my case.”

  “And you never mentioned Rafael?”

  “How could I?There was no way I could ever mention him.”

  Brendan sighed and shook his head sadly while Jonathan slowly traced his breath with his finger on the windowpane.

  “I remember Melibea,” Jonathan finally added. “And I remember that little yellow coat.”

  Brendan waited.

  “All night I’ve been thinking about her, about how it all changed on that one morning and I remembered it. I . . . I wasn’t sure if I had imagined it or not. Dr Reiter said it was just another story I made up. In my memory, she said she was taking me to see the sunrise. It was our thing, something we both loved to do. Each time we’d stand there, she would tell me that the sun was also rising in her village in Mexico that she missed very much. That morning, we walked to the end of the dirt road which I knew was the wrong way. The east side of our property was surrounded by trees and the sunrise could only be seen through a small gap in the clearing. I told her she was going the wrong way but she tugged my arm and told me to walk faster.She kept looking back at the house and she was carrying my father’s travel bag. I felt something was wrong. I asked her what was in the bag but she didn’t answer.”

  Brendan looked away from his friend, unable to bear the look of disappointment in his eyes as he recalled how someone he loved and trusted had betrayed him.

  “She was so kind to me and Cassie.She caredfor us as well as a mother would. I don’t know why she would . . . how she could . . .”

  Brendan returned his gaze to his friend. He could see the side of his face as he stood in the window and noticed his chin quivering with emotion.

  “There was a car parked on a straight piece of road not too far from the end of the driveway,” Jonathan went on. “It was a large black car and I had never seen it before. I remember asking Melibea who owned it and she said it belonged to a friend. She opened the back door and lifted me onto the seat. Melibea sat in the driver’s seat. I suddenly became very afraid although I didn’t know why. I just instinctively knew something was wrong. I shouted for my daddy and when she turned around she was crying. She opened the bag and pulled out a blonde wig that she put on her head. She also put on a woman’s fur coat that had been in my father’s wardrobe. Cassie would sometimes put it on and she and Nella would play games in Daddy’s bedroom. Daddy’d get so mad with them and would hang that coat back up so carefully like it was priceless. I guess it must have been my mother’s. It made Melibea look so different that I was frightened so I cried. She pleaded with me to be quiet and promised me that everything would be okay in a couple of days, that she had something she needed to do. She asked me to be a good boy and to be quiet so I stopped crying. Then she started the car and drove. I had never seen her driving a car before. I looked back. I remember now. I looked back at my road and everything I knew disappeared in the rear window.”

  Jonathan looked up and turned to Brendan with wild, large eyes.

  “I remember something else!” he said, the vision of his trusted nanny in a blonde wig triggering another memory. “The first time I ran away, Rafael made Melibea dye my hair black. I guess so it wouldn’t look strange when he was carrying me back to the house after I’d run away. I would look like I was his son. He dyed it himself lots of times after that until he went away. It just grew out then.”He shook his head. “And you say Melibeadid that to me just to make my father marry her?”

  Brendan had no answer to offer.

  “Do you remember Rafael?” he asked after a pause.

  “Yes!” Jonathan replied sharply. “He was thin and he had tattoos all over his arms. I can’t believe he is your father and that you ended up here at this shelter with me. It’s like . . . like you were sent to undo the wrong that he did. Alice said that. She said you were sent here to help me.”

  Brendan shrugged self-consciously and looked away. Until now, he didn’t really believe in fate the way that Alice did but his friend was right. It was strange that he had ended up here in the same place as Jonathan.

  “Maybe,” he replied sceptically.

  It was still hard for him to grasp that his own family had been behind Jonathan’s abduction, still less grasp the horrific life they had forced him to lead.Jonathan returned his gaze to the window.

  “So Rosa was good to you?”

  “Yes, she was. I thought she was my grandma.”

  “When she was actually my grandmother . . .”

  Jonathan turned from the window and nodded.“It was she who sat me in front of that TV show and told me that the Nelsons were my family. I remember I was very small when she said that. She kept saying it over and over. She’d point at the TV and say: ‘Jonathan – see, your family, your family!’ I don’t know how long I’d been there when she said that but I don’t think it was very long. In the beginning, when Rafael had men calling to the house, he’d go into the kitchen and lock the door so Abuelita couldn’t come in and hear them. He didn’t need to worry. She hated those men coming and would hide in her bedroom until they left. Then she would shout at Rafael about how they were devil men. When I got older, I’d got to understand how long he’d be busy for so if Abuelita left the door unlocked, I’d get out and find my way to the park to climb the tower. It reminded me of the little tree house my father made me although the tower was a lot higher! I felt safe there. I’d wait and wait, hoping to see my daddy somewhere on the ground but he was never there. Rafael would find me and take me back to the house. After it happened a few times, Rafael kept me locked in the box and the only time I got out was when he went out and Abuelita let me out. When Rafael would get me back to the basement, he’d take his belt off . . . Once I bit him on the leg. I was older and I dug my teeth into him hard. It was at the bottom of the tower and he yelled out. He held onto me with one hand and pulled up his trouser leg with the other. His leg was bleeding badly. I paid for that.” He fell silent for a few moments.

  Jonathan’s eyes opened wide as though he was watching Rafael loosen his belt for yet another beating. He exhaled loudly and ran his hands through his thick mop.

  “I think I now know what Abuelita meant when she said the Nelsons were my family. The series was set on an apple farm and she wanted me to remember as much as I could about my roots and my family – about my language and the type of place where I belonged. I remember that I would shout at her and say they weren’t my family. I’d cry for my daddy and she’d put me on her knee and try to comfort me the way Melibea used to do.”

  “Why didn’t you run to the police or stop a passer-by on the street?” Brendan asked.

  Jonathan shrugged. “Nothing around me looked familiar. I think I understood that I was a long way from home. Most of the people in that area were Hispanic and I thought everyone would know Rafael and would take me back to him. All that time, I thought that Melibea would come back for me like she said she would or that she’d tell my daddy where I was. I used to dream of him knocking on that door and taking me away from Rafael.”

  Jonathan stopped speaking and looked at his friend.

  “Brendan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why do you think my daddy stopped looking for me?”

  Brendan shrugged and clasped his hands in front of him.“I guess he thought you were dead.”

  “But my family didn’t know for sure. There was no body,” he said worriedly.

  “I’m sure we’ll find out when we find them,” Brendan said.

  Jonathan shook his head gently from side to side as though another memory had r
esurfaced.

  “When Rafael went away again, Abuelita sat me down and asked me to try to remember the name of the place I was from. I remember her voice sounded so . . . so . . . urgent. But I didn’t know. You said I was four or so when Melibea took me. I doubt if I knew even then. I was too young.”

  Jonathan turned again from the window and glanced shyly at his friend.

  “After a while I guess I just wanted to believe that TV family was mine. I was so afraid and sad all the time and the Nelsons were so happy and safe. Well, aside from the father spanking the kids from time to time. I wanted so badly for it to be true. I became a part of that TV show and I began to believe I was part of that life.When Dr Reiter began to see me, he called it a parocosym but I refused to believe it.”

  “And now?” Brendan asked.

  Jonathan blushed and looked towards the ground. “I’ve had times before when I’ve accepted what he had to say . . . for a while anyway. He’d give me medication that he said would help and it did, but sooner or later those happy memories of that family would creep back in and I’d think Dr Reiter was trying to take them from me.Course, I never got this far before!”

  He grinned at Brendan, then the smile slowly faded from his face. He turned his face slowly back to the window.

  “Some of those memories were really mine, Brendan. They just got mixed up, that’s all,” he said quietly.

  “My father . . . Rafael . . . he didn’t know anything about Cassie,” Brendan said awkwardly.

  Jonathan bit down in his lip and closed his eyes tightly. “I’ve waited so long, Brendan. I don’t think I can face the idea that there might not be anyone out there waiting for me. I really hope my sister is real.”

  “I hope so too.”

  Brendan watched as Jonathanshook his head and knew that his friend was trying to dispel his worry that his imminent return would bring disappointment.

  “I’ve had this dream Brendan. Ever since I was found in that New Yorkpark, I imagined the day when I would walk up the driveway to the clapboard houseunder a pre-dawn sky. No matter how often I dreamt it, the dream was always the same. When I’d reach the garden, I could see myself gently runningmy fingers along the bark of the big oak tree at the entrance. The old tyre would be still hanging on a threadbare rope. I’d sit on that tyre and I’d swing higher and higher like I did when I was a small boy until I could see the mountains through the silver streaks of the sky welcoming the morning sun. I’d let the swing of the rope slowly die down and then sit there in the silence, sucking the fresh mountain air and sweet scent of the apple blossoms in the front yard into my lungs. I would wait thenin anticipation to hear her there. It was always the best part of my dream. After a few moments, I’d hear the squeak of the old screen door and then I’d see her standing there, my sister with her long dark braids and her white cane. She’d wait until she heard me speak and I’d run to her and squeeze her tight in case she’d disappear from my life again. And Nella. Nella would be standing in the background, glad to see me come home. And my father, in my dream he is an old, old man but he’d be waiting there for me to return like he has since the day I disappeared. Then we’d all sit at the large wooden table and eat breakfast together before climbing the steep ridge to the clearing where we’dsit in silence and wait for the sun to rise above the tall mountain range and when the land around us finally filled with sunlight, we’d celebrate my safe return to them. They’d tell me about all the things that had happened while I was gone and I sit there and listen, thankful to hear their voices again. In my dream I do not talk about Rafael Martinez or Melibea or the woman Icalled grandmother. I do not tell them of the things I endured when I was gone from them, the beatings, the drugs Rafael sometimes made me take to quieten me, the taunting from him that I would never find my way home. I never tell them about the long, lonely years that I was locked away in a tiny apartment. Instead, I talk about the future, about working in the orchard and about Eileen, the woman I love. I cherished that dream, Brendan. It is what has kept me going all these years and now that it’s finally going to come true I am afraid. Afraid that it might not be as I imagined.”