The sounds in the cafeteria, the rumbling of voices, the ding of the register, the clattering of trays—these sounds slowed down, and underneath them he heard the incessant staccato drumbeat that was his future, coming right at him. Perhaps Ravel had created another masterpiece, a better Bolero. Perhaps he had built it in his mind, bar by bar, and yet found himself unable to write a single note, to mark a single melody. All day long those melodies would loop through his mind, interlocking and separating with a precision only he himself had mastered, and no one knew. All day long, melodies steamed up out of his coffee cup, poured from the faucet into his bath, hot and cold, intertwined and separate: imprisoned, unstoppable.
Wasn’t that enough to drive anyone mad?
Wouldn’t it have been better if he had died out there in the ocean?
If he hadn’t cried out—if they hadn’t seen him—he would have started to sink. His limbs would have stopped flailing eventually, the natural impulse to fight easing out of him by the lull of the waves, the glory of the light sifting down through the water. He could have relaxed, then, let his body take him down—take, too, all the unwritten concertos … all of them gone, at once.
It wouldn’t have taken much, Anderson thought. He could have simply loosened his hold on life. He could have given up.
For a moment, Anderson felt relief flooding through him, cooling his anxious mind. He didn’t have to read the article, he thought. He didn’t have to do anything.
He could simply let it all go.
But the desire to continue beat on in him, like a boxer who was losing his hold on the floor but couldn’t orient himself enough to get the hell out of the ring. He spread out the pages in front of him, focused his mind, and began, again, to read.
Seven
The gas lamp flickered in the wet March mess like a beacon of far-off sanity as Janie half-dragged, half-cajoled Noah down the block. He had lost his mitten somewhere along the way and his icy hand clutched hers and pulled her down, like dead weight.
She grabbed a hunk of damp, unexciting mail from the box (more bills and second notices) and shut the door fast against the snow.
Inside, it was warm and almost disturbingly quiet after the rush of the subway and the white noise of the wind. They both stood, adrift, in the room; Noah seemed dazed, subdued. She closed the wooden shutters, trapping them in the yellow half-light of the floor lamp, and settled him on the couch in front of a DVD (“Look, honey, it’s Nemo! Your favorite!”), putting his binder of baseball cards in his lap. He’d been like this more and more lately, his jubilance muffled, as if the dour tone of the doctor’s office had seeped into his bones. He sat and watched his shows without comment; he didn’t want to play or throw a ball around his room.
She couldn’t shake the chill; her teeth were still chattering. She’d had such hopes for this one. She’d been sure this would be the doctor who would change everything for them.
She put a kettle on and made tea for herself and butterscotch hot cocoa for Noah, filling the mug with so many marshmallows you could barely see the liquid. She stared for a moment at the tiny confections bobbing cheerfully in the frothy brown like small white teeth, then ducked down beneath the border of the pass-through to the living room, sitting on her haunches, so Noah couldn’t see her cry. Pull yourself together, Janie. It was like pushing a yowling cat into a bag, but she did it. She quelled the sobs, let them roil in her stomach, and stood. Out the back window, the snow fell into the yard and kept on falling.
* * *
Noah was sitting quietly, watching the movie with his small hands flat on the plastic binder, his blond head tilted back against the couch, when she brought the hot chocolate. The last four months had been trying emotionally and disastrous work-wise, but she had to admit that she’d gotten used to seeing that blond head always bobbing in her peripheral vision, the comfort of knowing he was right there. Three nannies and two day care centers had failed to stick, and after the last fiasco (Noah bolting out the door of Natalie’s Kids and down Flatbush Avenue, a few feet away from the rushing cars), she had given up and invited him and his latest nanny to play at her office. They sat quietly enough (too quietly!), building things with his Legos while her assistant scowled and drafted and Janie tried to move the projects she still had going a few steps closer to completion.
She sat next to him on the couch, cradling her tea in her hands, trying to get warm. She didn’t even mind his scent: that sickly sweet, slightly curdled smell that Noah carried with him wherever he went now.
She supposed Dr. Remson had been kind enough, as well he should be, for three hundred dollars an hour. And he’d taken his time with Noah, with her. But in the end he’d been the same as the rest of them. He’d had no answers for her. He’d cautioned her to wait.
But wait was precisely what she couldn’t do. When she explained this to him, he’d suggested the name of another psychiatrist in case she wanted treatment for herself … as if spending more money on more therapy was the only answer he could come up with.
“We’ve had three months of sessions, now,” she said. “And that’s all you can say to me? He’s having nightmares every night, and crying bouts during the day. And baths are impossible.”
Tapping his black leather sneakers on the Persian carpet, thick glasses perched jauntily on his balding head, Dr. Mike Remson didn’t look like one of New York City’s foremost child psychiatrists, no matter what New York magazine had said. He sat there in his leather armchair, fingers tented, furry caterpillar eyebrows rising over guarded, heavy-lidded eyes. Even after answering his questions in session after session, she still had the impression he was trying to decide if she might be the problem after all.
“Noah’s beginning to trust me,” he said carefully. “To speak more about his fantasies.”
“His other mother?” Her hands were clenching and unclenching. She planted them on her knees.
“That, and other things.”
“But why is he imagining another mother?”
“Often such an imaginative fantasy life is caused by events at home.”
“So you say, but we’ve been over that, there’s nothing.”
“No exceptional stress?”
She let out a small, hoarse laugh. Nothing you aren’t causing, Doctor. “Nothing that predates this situation.” The fact was, she was running through her savings. She’d already cashed in her IRA and spent the small inheritance from her mother she’d put aside for Noah’s college education. (Her goal now was simply to get him safely to kindergarten.) She’d had to cancel four meetings with prospective clients this month alone because she couldn’t take Noah to meetings and site visits, and she didn’t have much time anyway, what with all the doctors. She had no work on the horizon, and no way to pay the bills without work, and no answers.
She’d been taking him to other doctors for months: neurologists, psychologists, neuropsychologists. Noah and Janie both hated it, the long subway rides, the endless wait in crowded offices, Noah paging listlessly through Horton Hatches an Egg while she did the same with a year-old copy of Time. The doctors talked to him, they did tests on his brain, they tested his lungs again (yes, he has asthma; yes, it’s mild), then they sent him out to the next room while they talked to her, and in the end she’d been both relieved and frustrated to find they had found nothing and had nothing to offer, except the promise of more tests. And all along she’d been waiting for the sessions with Dr. Remson, who was supposed to be the best.
“I’ve been to three specialists, two psychologists now, and you. And nobody can tell me anything at all. Nobody will give me even the possibility of a diagnosis.”
“The child is four. That’s young for an accurate mental health diagnosis.”
“Doctor, I can’t even bathe my son.” The last time she’d tried, a week before, he had worked himself into such a state that he’d triggered an asthma attack.
It had been his first attack in eighteen months. As she’d held the nebulizer to his face, his rag
ged breaths amplifying in her ears like the sound of failure, she’d made a commitment to herself: she’d stop waiting for him to get better. She’d do whatever it took to help him now.
“Behavior therapy might help—”
“He’s done that. It hasn’t worked. Nothing’s worked. Doctor—please. You’ve done this for a long time. Haven’t you ever seen a case like Noah’s?”
“Well.” Dr. Remson leaned back, putting his hands on his big corduroy knees. “Perhaps there was one.”
“There was a similar case?” Janie held her breath. She couldn’t look him in the eyes, focusing instead on the toe of his shoe. Dr. Remson followed her gaze, his brows knit together, the two of them watching his black foot tap tapping against the deep crimson squares on the Persian rug.
“It was during my residency at Bellevue, many years ago. There was a child there who spoke often of something traumatic that had happened to him during a war. He drew violent pictures of bayoneting. Rape.”
She shuddered. She could see the drawings as if they were right in front of her, the blood drawn in red crayon, the stick figure with its wide-open mouth.
“He was from a small town in New Jersey, a loving, intact family to all reports. They swore up and down he had never seen any images like the ones he drew. It was very startling. He was only five.”
A case like Noah’s. The puzzle pieces of Noah finally fitting together, forming a picture. She felt relief, and a chill of foreboding.
“And what was his diagnosis?”
The psychiatrist winced. “He was a bit older than Noah. And still far too young for the diagnosis.”
“The diagnosis?”
“Childhood-onset schizophrenia.” He pulled his sweater across his belly, as if his words had caused a drop in temperature. “It’s rare, of course, in a child this young.”
“Schizophrenia?” The word hung high up in the newly cold air for a moment, sparkling like a jagged icicle, before understanding fell. “You think Noah has schizophrenia.”
“He’s too young, as I said, for a proper diagnosis. But we have to consider it. We can’t rule it out.” His eyes watched her steadily beneath the heavy lids. “We’ll know more with time.”
She stared down at the carpet. The crimson pattern was dense, unfathomable, squares within squares within squares.
He paused for a moment. “There is sometimes a genetic component. You said you don’t know anything about the father’s family?”
She shook her head miserably. After sporadic, nighttime Googling that had gone nowhere for years, she’d been trying more seriously to hunt down Jeff from Houston. The week before, she’d gone one step farther: she’d spent the better part of two days looking through every recorded Rhodes Scholar for the last two decades. She’d focused on every Jeff and Geoffrey, every scholar from Texas and then from every other state, and there was nobody who’d looked even remotely like the man who had told her his name was Jeff. She’d called the hotel in Trinidad, but it was now a Holiday Inn.
So Jeff—if he even was Jeff—had not been a Rhodes Scholar. He probably hadn’t been to Oxford. (She’d looked him up at Balliol College, too, and found nothing.) Perhaps he wasn’t even a businessman. He’d made it up—but why? She’d thought it had been to impress her, but now she wondered: had he been in the throes of a full-blown psychosis?
Janie felt the doctor’s intent gaze hovering above her like some kind of brown furry bat, but she couldn’t lift her eyes to meet it. She looked at her knees, clad in their gray tights; they suddenly seemed absurd to her, their grayness, their roundness.
“I know you want answers,” Remson was saying. “But this is the best we can do. We can and will reevaluate as the treatment progresses. In the meantime there are various antipsychotic medications we can try. We can put Noah on a very small dose now, if you like. I’ll write you a prescription.”
The words had been slipping slowly through her mind, as if she were quietly, sleepily freezing to death, but at that word—medication—Janie jolted awake.
“Medication?” She lifted her head. “But he’s only four!”
The doctor nodded apologetically, lifting the palms of his hands. “The medication may help him to have a more normal life. We’d reevaluate every few months, once we get the dosage right. And, of course, I’ll keep seeing him. Twice a week.” He pulled a ballpoint pen from a cup on the table beside him and wrote out a script.
He tore the paper off his pad and handed it to her as if this were an everyday thing. His face was awful in its blandness. “Why don’t you take some time to process this,” he said, “and we’ll talk next week.” His outstretched hand still had the prescription for the antipsychotic. Janie had a strange, overwhelming desire to crumple it in his face. Instead she grabbed it and shoved it in her pocket.
Now Janie nestled on the sofa by her son, resisting the urge to pull him into her lap and cover his head with kisses. “Doing okay, bug?”
Noah half nodded, his face mustached by cocoa, eyes on the television screen.
Her phone buzzed—but it wasn’t the psychiatrist, offering Noah a newly discovered miracle dose of Chinese herbs and omega-3s. It was a text from Bob, of all people, her erstwhile Internet flirtation from months ago.
“Hey! Things any easier? Want to try again?”
She laughed briefly at the poor man’s timing, a loud and mirthless sound, like the bark of a depressed seal. Then she shut the phone without responding and sipped her tea. It wasn’t doing her any good, though. She needed stronger stuff.
* * *
Janie put Noah to bed early that night. He was in a cuddly mood, his arms pulling her head down to kiss him on the lips, his fingers brushing her face in the dark.
“What part of the body is this?” he whispered.
“That’s my nose.”
“This?”
“That’s my ear.”
“And this is your noggin.”
“Yes. Good night, bug.”
“’Night, Mommy-Mom.” He yawned. Then (she’d known it was coming, it was always now, when he was halfway toward sleep already and she thought maybe this time it would be different, maybe this time he wouldn’t say it): “I want to go home.”
“You are home, sweetie.”
“When is my other mother coming?”
“I don’t know, bug.”
“I miss her.” His head was turned into the pillow, away from her. “I really, really miss her.” His body began to shake.
Even though it was a delusion, his grief was real. She knew enough of grief to know that. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she said quietly.
He turned toward her, his mouth crumpling. He flung his arms around her and she held his head against her body while he wept and rubbed his nose into her shirt.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she whispered. She stroked his head.
“I miss her so much.” He was crying in earnest now, great wheezing sobs that seemed to emerge from his chest fully formed, like tufts of black smoke. Anyone would think this was a brokenhearted child, an abandoned child. Yet she had never once left him overnight. “Make it better, Mommy.”
She had no choice in the matter. “I will.”
* * *
Janie came out of the room sadder than she remembered being at any time since her mother’s death. She brought her computer into the kitchen and pulled out the prescription for risperidone. Then she took out a mug and the bottle of bourbon a client had given her years ago and took a long swig.
The mug had a picture of a kitten chasing a butterfly; it had been a gift from a colleague who thought she had a cat. Tonight it seemed comforting to her, like an optimistic fortune in a fortune cookie that one disbelieved and yet put in one’s pocket anyway. The bourbon swirled warmly in her belly, did a misty rain dance around her panicked brain.
She reached over to the computer, opened the search screen.
Impact of antiperspirants.
No.
Impact of antipsychotics in child
ren.
Psychiatrists prescribe the drugs to kids in some cases of serious illness when they think the benefits outweigh the risks.… At the same time, reports of deaths and dangerous side effects linked to the drugs are mounting. A USA TODAY study of FDA data collected from 2000 to 2004 shows at least 45 deaths of children in which an atypical antipsychotic was listed in the FDA database as the “primary suspect.” There also were 1,328 reports of bad side effects, some of them life threatening.
My god. No.
She clicked out of that page quickly and opened a new one.
On antipsychotics, one loses his sense of self, his mind is fogged, his emotions ruined, his memory lost as a result of the treatment.
She closed the window quickly, tried another window, then another. Opened window after window, each one looking out on some new horror, until the bourbon drained slowly from the bottle into her mug and her eyes felt as if they were bleeding.
She held the liquor in her mouth, feeling it burn her tongue. The kitten on the mug was demonic, or rather, ordinary. At any moment he would pounce and tear the pretty butterfly’s blue wings to pieces with his teeth.
She looked up risperidone and skimmed the list of side effects: drowsiness, dizziness, nausea.… It went on and on. When she was done reading, she felt dizzy, nauseated, agitated, sweaty, itchy, feverish, and fat. Her head was spinning, though it might have been the drink.
You tried so hard to give your kid food that was healthy, she thought. The soy cheese pizza. The organic peas and broccoli and baby carrots. The smoothies. The hormone-free milk. The leafy greens. You kept processed food to a minimum, threw Halloween candy out after a week. Never let him eat the icies they sold in the park, because they had red and yellow dye in them. And then you gave him this?
She grabbed the prescription and crumpled it up, then smoothed it out on the table and stared at it. After a while she got up and put the bottle of bourbon back in the closet.
The Forgetting Time: A Novel Page 6