How did he even know what eggnog was? Why did he always know things that nobody had told him about?
“Watch.” He picked up another egg, swung his arm back, and hurled it at the center of the wall, whooping as it splattered. “Fastball!”
“What is wrong with you?” she said.
He flinched and dropped the egg in his other hand.
She tried to modulate her voice. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed a bit frightened.
She tried to calm herself. “You’re going to have to take a bath now. You know that, right?”
He shuddered at the word. Egg was rolling down his face, oozing into the hollow of his neck. “Don’t go,” he said, blue eyes nailing her to the wall with his need.
He was no fool. He had calculated that the thing he hated most in the world was worth tolerating in order to keep her home. He had wanted her there that much. Could Bob, who had never even met her, compete with that?
No, no, no; she would go! For god’s sake: it was enough! She wouldn’t succumb to this kind of blackmail, especially from a child! She was the adult, after all—wasn’t that what they always said in her single moms’ group? You make the rules. You need to hold firm, especially because you’re the only adult. You’re not doing them any favors by giving in.
She lifted him in her arms (he was light; he was only a baby, her boy, only four). She carried him into the bathroom and held his squirming body tightly in her arms as she turned on the water faucet and checked the temperature.
He was writhing and screeching like a trapped animal. She stepped to the edge of the bathtub and placed him on the bath mat (legs sliding, arms flailing), somehow managing to pull off his clothes and flip on the shower.
The scream could probably be heard all the way down Eighth Avenue. He fought as if his life depended on it, but she did it, she held him there under the water and squirted shampoo on his head, telling herself again and again that she wasn’t torturing anybody, she was only giving her son a very-much-needed washing.
When it was over (a matter of seconds, though it felt endless) he was lying in a heap on the floor of the bathtub, and she was bleeding. In the midst of the chaos, he had craned his neck and bitten her ear. She tried to wrap him in a towel, but he wrenched away from her, scrambling out of the tub and into his bedroom, skidding on the floor. She took some antibiotic from the medicine cabinet and applied it while she listened to the howls reverberating throughout the house, filling every cell in her body with woe.
She looked in the mirror.
Whatever she was, she was not a woman going out on a first date.
She walked to Noah’s room. He was on the floor, naked, rocking, with his knees clasped between his arms—a puddle of a boy, pale skin glimmering in the green light cast by the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d pasted on the ceiling to make the tiny room feel bigger than it was.
“Noey?”
He didn’t look at her. He was crying softly into his knees. “I want to go home.” It was something he said in times of distress since he was a toddler. It had been his first full sentence. She always answered in the same way: “You are home.”
“I want my mama.”
“I’m here, baby.”
He looked away from her. “Not you. I want my other mother.”
“I’m your mommy, honey.”
He turned. His doleful eyes locked onto hers. “No, you’re not.”
A chill ran through her. She was aware of herself as if from a distance, standing over this shivering boy under the eerie light of the fake stars. The wood floor was rough beneath her feet, its knots like holes a person could fall through, like falling out of time.
“Yep. Your one and only.”
“I want my other one. When is she coming?”
She pulled herself together with an effort. Poor kid, she thought; I’m all you’ve got. We’re all we’ve got, the two of us. But we’ll make it work. I’ll do better. I promise. She squatted by his side. “I won’t go, okay?”
She’d send Bob an apologetic text, and that would be the end of that. For what could she say? Remember that adorable son I mentioned? Well, he’s a little unusual.… No, theirs was too fragile a connection to withstand those sorts of complications, and there was always another lonely New York woman waiting in the wings. She’d cancel the sitter and pay her anyway, because it was the last minute and she couldn’t afford to lose another one.
“I won’t go,” she said again. “I’ll cancel Annie. I’ll stay with you.” She was grateful, not for the first time, that no adult was there to witness this weak moment.
But who cared what other people thought? The color rose to Noah’s face, a blossoming of pink on clammy skin, and his lopsided grin knocked her sideways, blotted out the room. It was like looking at the sun. Maybe her mother was right after all, she thought. Maybe some forces were too strong to resist.
“C’mere, you goof.” She held out her arms, throwing all of it to the wind: the dress, the date, this thrilling night and perhaps all the thrilling nights left to her, a woman aging by the moment, squarely in the middle of her one and only life.
Here, in her arms, was what mattered. She kissed his sweet, damp head. He smelled nice, for once.
He lifted his face. “Is my other mother coming soon?”
Four
Anderson opened his eyes and looked around the room in a panic.
His pages. Where were they? What the hell had he done with them?
The room was dim, the air swirling with dust. Boxes half-packed with files flanked every wall, rising up around him as if he’d fallen six feet under instead of drifting off on the cot in his office again. The window was high and narrow, like a slit in a fortress; now it cast a spear of light on the wooden floor and the books piled here and there and the manuscript pages scattered where he’d tossed them angrily the night before. He got up quickly and gathered the pages one by one. When he was finished he sat down again, holding the manuscript in his lap: a bulky thing, like a cat. He straightened the edges with his hands, the ends tickling his palms. It didn’t seem like much, this bundle, and yet it contained the sum of his life’s work. He set aside the title page and looked at the dedication.
For Sheila
He tried to feel her now, in the room, but couldn’t do it; she was fixed to the page like a pinned butterfly. It occurred to him that Sheila’s death, which was the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, had not substantively changed the course of his days. On the other hand, in the five years since he’d been diagnosed, the aphasia had nearly ruined him.
He flipped to the first page. Ah, there they were: his words.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
It was irrational to think the sentences might have erased themselves in the night simply because he had dreamed it, yet no more irrational than anything else that had been happening to him. Yesterday he had been on the phone with the librarian of the Society for Scientific Exploration in London, discussing the storage of the files he was donating. He wanted to make sure that even though his office was closing, his research would be accessible to any serious scientists that might find it useful. He wanted to tell her about the new cases out of Norway that Amundson had sent him, to ensure that these would be filed properly, but when he came to the place in the sentence where the name of his old colleague should have come up, the name simply wasn’t there.
“The files from up there.” That was the mortifying phrase that came out of his mouth instead. Of course, the librarian had been puzzled.
“What do you mean? Up where?”
Anderson saw the fjords and forests and women of Norway. Amundson’s face rose in his mind, the bulbous nose and the whiskers on his jowls, the cheery, skeptical, but never cynical eyes.
“The new files on birthmarks, you know.”
“Oh. You mean that study from the professor in Sri Lanka?�
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“No, no, no.” He felt a momentary surge of despair and wanted to hang up the phone, but he took a breath and willed himself to go on. “The new birthmark research, the research from that guy—that guy up there. Up north. You know who I mean,” he snarled at the poor woman. “In Europe. The ice mountains … the … the fjords!”
“Oh. I’ll make sure the Amundson studies are filed properly,” she said at last, coolly, and he felt a flicker of victory that she now thought him a total asshole instead of mentally impaired.
The week before, he’d pulled The Tempest from the shelf in his bedroom and flipped to the end, but when he came to the line “Our revels now are ended,” the words seemed to shiver in his mind’s grasp, like a moment that was even now passing. How could he not know that word, revels? He, who had read and reread this play, this speech, a hundred times? He had to look it up in the damn dictionary. He should copy out his whole library, he thought, until his hands were swollen, copy every last word from every one of his books, so that he would retain a physical memory there in his hands of all those words he couldn’t bear to lose.
He leafed through the manuscript in his lap. He’d e-mailed it to his agent, of course (it was no longer a paper world); but he’d also printed it out so he could feel the weight of it. A lifetime of work; the strongest cases, distilled for the populace. Decades of patient labor doing the casework, years of writing draft after draft, shooting for clarity, always clarity. His last chance at making a difference: he’d worked like a maniac for four and a half years to finish it while his mind was still capable, before the fog rolled in. Some days he’d forgotten to eat.
The academic community would always consider Anderson a failure. He knew that. There was a moment, when he had first left his job at the medical school and his colleagues still valued him, when his books had been reviewed: twice by The Journal of the American Medical Association, and once in The Lancet. But as his colleagues aged they forgot about him, or more accurately they forgot they had respected him once. No one in that world had shown him any attention for decades now. He was famous in the paranormal research community, of course; he was invited to speak everywhere they studied ESP, or near-death experiences, or mediums. But he would never be accepted again by the scientific community, the only community he had ever really belonged to; he had finally given up that battle, decades after Sheila had exhorted him to do so. It was over.
But now he had written something for a different audience: he was aiming for nothing less than the world.
“If people can understand your data—not academics, I mean real people—it might change something for them.” Sheila had said this to him more than once, but only gradually had he realized the force of her logic, when she was already fighting the heart disease that would kill her.
When he considered his future readers now, he pictured a man like himself, back before any of this had started, when he was at the medical school. He saw himself on a chilly Friday evening walking back from his office through the square, puzzling over a study on somatic symptom disorders, tempted by the warmth and light of the bookstore. Stepping in for a quick browse, he glances at the books on the table, searching for something to grab his attention—and the book calls out to him. He picks it up and flips it open to the first page. Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
Evidence? he imagined the man thinking to himself. Impossible. But he sits down anyway on a nearby leather chair, and begins to read.…
Anderson knew it was a fantasy. But he had been a man like that once. He, too, had needed evidence. And now he could provide it. He could leave his mark. He had felt full of confidence, until yesterday. Until he had talked to his literary agent and found that every publisher had turned him down. When he’d hung up the phone, he kicked the manuscript across the room, scattering pages like ash.
Now he looked at the words again.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.…
No; he would not let this stop him. He thought of that other Amundson, the Norwegian who had discovered the South Pole, his victory dwarfed by the noble failure of his competitor, Robert Falcon Scott. Scott, who had perished with his men in the frozen tundra. A brave man who had died trying, the cold claiming him toe by toe, foot by foot. Another casualty of the terra nova, the great unknown.
Five
She was late.
The day had started badly. Noah had awoken in the night again, upset from a nightmare and drenched with urine from head to toe. She’d tried in the morning to clean his stinky body with wipes as he squirmed and whimpered but finally gave up, dusting him with baby powder and dropping him sulking and emitting an unmistakable litter-box odor at Little Sprouts.
So: she was late. It would have been fine if it hadn’t been the Galloways. The Galloway renovation had been one of those jobs in which everything that should have gone one way went the other. They had moved in two weeks ago, and she’d been at the house almost daily since then, including a visit on Thanksgiving morning.
Today they had a checklist. They started with the appliances in the kitchen and ended up in the guest bath.
The three of them stood in the small bathroom, staring at a trickle of water from the expensively tiled shower stall to the new checkerboard floor.
“You see?” Sarah Galloway pointed a shiny red talon at the tiny stream. “It leaks.”
Why are you taking showers in the guest bath anyway? she wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead, she popped out her measuring tape and measured the curb of the shower stall, which, as she knew, was standard.
“Hmmm. It’s standard width.”
“But you SEE the LEAK.”
“Yes … I was wondering.…”
Sarah looked over at Janie with the puzzled-owl expression that Janie had come to understand was a Botoxed frown. “Wondering what?”
“I mean, is this a question of the shower stall or the amount of water? Because if there’s a lot of water it might be understandable.…” Janie paused and said it all in one quick breath. “Is this the first shower somebody’s taken here today or the second? Do you take particularly long showers?”
God, she hated this part of the job. She might as well have asked them if they’re having sex in there. And if so, she supposed they ought to have told her, so she could have customized the size.…
Frank Galloway cleared his throat. “I think our shower use is pretty, uh, normal—” he started to say, when Janie’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
“Just a sec.”
She glanced at her cell. Little Sprouts Day Care. Oh, for god’s sake. “Listen, I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this. It’ll just be a moment.” She stepped into the next room. What did the teachers want now? Probably to complain that Noah was smelly today. Which, okay, he was, but—
“This is Miriam Whittaker.” The gravelly voice of the preschool director scraped against her ear.
In a second, her breath caught, her knees jellied—is this the moment between before and after, the one everyone feared? The choking on the apple core, the tumble down the stairs? She leaned against the wall. “Is Noah all right?”
“He’s fine.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Listen, I’m in the middle of a meeting, can I call you back?”
“Miss Zimmerman. This is very serious.”
“Oh.” The tone was unnerving; she gripped the phone tightly against her ear. “What happened? Did Noah do something?”
The silence that followed bled slowly into her consciousness, telling her everything and nothing she needed to know. She could hear the woman breathing on the other end of the phone, Sarah Galloway clucking quietly but not that quietly to her husband in the bathroom. “Inattentive,” she thought she heard.
“Did he cry during naptime? Pull someone’s hair? What?”
“Actually, Miss Zimmerman.” There was a sharp intake of breath. “This is a conve
rsation we need to have in person.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Janie said briskly, but her voice wavered, the fear poking through the skin of her professionalism like bone.
* * *
The Little Sprouts director was a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe all in one. Built like a box, black clad from her hip-granny spectacles down to her pointy ankle-length boots, Miriam Whittaker wore her hair long, a silvery mane grazing those broad shoulders with unexpected eros, like a middle finger to the vagaries of time. She had been running the school-obsessed neighborhood’s premiere preschool for the last fifteen years, and thus had a somewhat outsized sense of her own importance relative to the universe’s grand scheme. Janie had always found Ms. Whittaker’s imperiousness with grown-ups amusing, sensing through its veil a kind of pathos and scattershot warmth.
Now, though, wedged across from Ms. Whittaker in a little plastic orange chair between the potted plant and the Bookworm poster, Janie saw in the older woman’s face something far more disturbing than her usual flashy authority: she saw anxiety. The woman was almost as nervous as she was.
“Thank you for coming in,” the other woman said, clearing her throat. “On such short notice.”
Janie kept her voice level. “So what’s this about?”
A pause ensued, in which Janie tried to keep her breathing as steady as possible, in which she heard every tick of the preschool’s beating heart, the sound of a faucet in the art room, a teacher singing clean-up, clean-up, everybody clean up, a child somewhere, not hers, screaming.
Ms. Whittaker lifted her head, focusing on a spot slightly to the left of Janie’s shoulder. “Noah has been talking to us about guns.”
So that’s what this was all about? Something Noah had said? But that was easy. She felt the tension in her body begin to relax. “Don’t all little boys do that?”
“He’s been saying he’s played with guns.”
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