LOST BOY NOT FOUND

The FBI releases its test results to all concerned parties. These include: the Detroit papers, the New York papers, the television news programs, the man, the man’s supposed family, and the family his DNA has denied. He could not have shared a mother with the sister he would claim. His other sister, his supposed half-sister, is quoted widely. He lost two families today, she says. He’s always saying something. It is a matter of record that the two of them don’t share a mother, either.

The man does not return now to the local library, does not leave his modest single-story home. He does not open his door to the reporters and photographers who loved him just last week. Then, they’d asked him to cock his head—as the lost boy does in black-and-white snapshots. They’d marveled over the likeness and taken quotes. Always, he told the reporters, he’s suspected that he came from other people. Always he’s felt different from the rest of his supposed family. For years he scoured sleuth sites and ancestry boards, looking for his other life, his real age and name. And then: a birthmark on a missing boy’s calf, a scar on his chin. The man had trembled, tracing these on his own body—features last seen on October 31, 1955. He has the other father’s round face, the other mother’s deep-set eyes. He has, eventually, a swab from the true sister’s mouth. This sister, his sister, is listed by her maiden name in an Iowa phone book, as if she’s been waiting there for his call. Amazing how the years have scattered them! The last time he saw her, outside of memory, she was an infant in a stroller on a Long Island sidewalk. He can’t remember how the kidnappers lured him away from her. He can’t remember why he stepped out of his rightful life, or how he stepped into this one. But the home DNA kit proved what he and she both had felt, that day on the phone: they might be related.

Were his false parents behind the kidnapping? He gave the reporters no comment. His “parents” are long divorced; his “mother” could not be reached. But his false father spoke to the papers at length: That boy was right here beside me in October, 1955. That boy was never out of my sight. How can this be true, when, in all the years since, they have never been close? Let the tests say what they will, let the papers print what they want—but if he isn’t the missing boy, who is? Why not let that boy be found? Think of the sister in Iowa—think of what she’s lived with these fifty-odd years. He could be her brother, now. He could tear up his faked birth certificate and become himself again.

The lost man sits in his yard with his dog and wishes away the publicity that makes it impossible for him to be family to anyone. Just down the road his supposed father is thinking hard thoughts against him, while in Iowa the phone rings and rings. He imagines a woman with eyes like his looking out over a flatter yard. It’s earlier, there. Here, his wife leaves their phone off the hook and all day strange cars drive slowly past. What do they want from him? Disproved, the man has become an unemployed laborer who lives with his wife, 195 miles northwest of Detroit. But the facts haven’t changed. The man is a boy who went missing a long, long time ago—and there for a minute, the world came looking for him.

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