“He wasn’t doodling,” Anderson said quietly. “He was scoring the game.”
Ten
Janie stood in the middle of her living room. The room was dark, except for the headlights from passing cars, there and gone, a flash on the wall. She could make out the familiar shapes in the dimness: couch, chair, lamp. Yet the objects looked different to her, slightly ajar, as if there had been a tremor in the earth.
She heard Anderson moving around in the kitchen. She cracked the window and the air came alive with the damp freshness of early spring. The gas lamp shimmied in the darkness, its flame always moving, here, then here, then here.
One thing had led to another. Noah had scored a baseball game without being taught how to do it, and so she had invited Anderson to come to her home to work with Noah in a quieter place, and they had spent the afternoon engaged in her son’s favorite activity: Noah threw his bouncy ball against his wall and caught it, while Anderson, standing by his side with his yellow pad, judged the accuracy of the pitch. (“Eight.” “Only an eight?” “Well, maybe a nine.” “A nine! Yesssss! A nine!”) Noah’s spirits rose under Anderson’s attentions, as she had not seen him in months, and Anderson himself seemed a different man entirely. He laughed easily and seemed truly interested in Noah’s skill at throwing and catching bouncy balls (amazing to Janie, who always found this game to be an unbelievable bore). He was so natural with the boy that she was surprised when he’d responded, in answer to her question, that he had no children of his own.
How could you not like a man who played so joyfully and with such obvious affection with one’s son? When was the last time any man had done that?
But it didn’t matter how many times Anderson asked him questions or in what manner. Noah was done talking to doctors about anything that didn’t involve catching or throwing. Anderson’s pad had acquired no new notes.
By late afternoon, it was clear to Janie that they weren’t getting anywhere. Even Noah seemed to feel the dejection in the air and started throwing the ball around the room in a hyper, desultory way until it joined the two others in the lighting fixture on the ceiling and Janie put an end to the game. To relax him (and herself), she resorted to the mother’s last trick: she put on his favorite movie, Finding Nemo, about the lost fish looking for his father, and they sat together, Janie and Noah and Anderson, side by side on the couch. Janie focused on the colorful fish and tried not to think about anything else, but the images couldn’t hold her attention. Dread was dripping slowly through her, filling her with its paralyzing poison of what-now-what-now-what-now?
Anderson sat on the other side of Noah, his face inscrutable in profile, like the statue of a knight on a tomb. Before the movie was over, Noah had fallen asleep, his head drooping on Janie’s shoulder, but they watched the movie to its end anyway, lost in their separate worlds. She felt a pang of misery when the father found the son, envy at all that fishy happiness. Afterward, she had carried Noah to bed, his legs dangling on either side of her like a huge baby, and tucked him in. It was only six.
* * *
When Janie returned, the tall man was pacing back and forth. It was strange to have him in her apartment without Noah in the room. It was as if the doctor had suddenly become a man—not someone she would have an interest in (he was far too old for her, too aloof) but someone who nevertheless charged the molecules of the air with a masculine difference.
She watched him pace for a few moments; he seemed entirely lost in his thoughts.
“So,” she said at last. “What do we do now?”
He paused midstride; he looked surprised to see her there. “Well, we can try again tomorrow. If that’s all right with you, that is?”
“Tomorrow?” She shook her head. “I’ve got a client meeting.…” But he wasn’t listening.
“And in the meantime we need to corroborate the information we have. We’ll check with the school about the lizards and the other behavior he exhibited there. It’s too late now”—he glanced at his watch—“but I’ll e-mail them in the morning. Can you give them a heads-up?”
“I guess so.” She flinched inwardly at the idea of approaching Ms. Whittaker with this matter. Surely she would have no patience for it, and of course the preschool director would probably tell Anderson that Noah was already seeing a psychiatrist.…
“And a statement as well that they don’t instruct children in the art of baseball scoring, of course.” He chuckled to himself. “Though that would be highly unusual.”
“Why do you need to corroborate, anyway?”
“It’ll be a stronger case with multiple sources.”
“A stronger case?” She wished he’d stop talking about Noah as a case.
“Yes.”
“You mean—for an article or something?”
“Right.”
“Well, I don’t think I want any part of that.”
“Hmmm?”
“I’m a private person. We’re private people.”
“Of course. We’d change all the names in the book.”
The book. His excitement was suddenly becoming clear to her. She’d been wondering what kind of doctor he was, and now she knew: the kind that was writing a book.
“What book?”
“I’m writing up some cases. It won’t be lost in academic obscurity, like the others. This one is for the public,” he added eagerly, as if obscurity was the problem.
“I don’t want Noah in a book.”
He stared at her.
“Does it matter so much to you, Doctor?”
“I—” He didn’t finish his thought. He turned a shade paler.
She couldn’t trust him. He was writing a book. She remembered all those books her mother’s friends had given her when she was dying: everyone trying to make a buck off the hopeless with their special diets and yoga poses. Even when her mother was only briefly conscious, the books kept on coming. In the end there was a closet full of them.
There was certainly no book that could help her now, and there was no mother, either. There was only this stranger with his agenda. She felt the weariness that was washing over her transform suddenly into something else—an emotion that startled her with its ferocity. For months people had been sitting coolly across desks telling her that something was wrong with her son, and she had taken it in, quieting the outward signs of panic as best she could. But this man, with his bright, questioning eyes and ashy complexion—this man had something to lose, too. She felt the anxiety in him as only the desperate can, and the knowledge of it was like a key opening the door on her vast frustration and fury.
“That’s why you were so excited about the fact that he could score a baseball game, isn’t it? It’s not going to help us find any ‘previous personality.’ It’s just a good detail for your precious book.” He winced at the way she said the word. “Do you even care about helping Noah at all?”
“I—” He looked at her uncertainly. “I want to help all the children—”
“Right, by having their mothers buy your book?” She felt even as she said it that this man did not seem motivated by anything so coarse as making money, but she couldn’t help herself.
“I—” he started to say again. And then stopped. “What is that?”
They both heard it, then: from the bedroom down the hall. A whimpering.
“I think we woke Noah,” Anderson murmured.
The whimpering became a whooshing, like the wind wailing up a chimney.
“No. He’s not awake.”
The noise gathered power until it blew through the room: a hurricane, a force of nature, and then slowly the howl took form, became a word. “Mamaaaa! Mamaa!”
Always, it surprised her: that torrent of emotion that seemed beyond what a small boy would be able to summon. Janie stood wearily, on shaky feet. She looked at Anderson. She didn’t trust him, but he was the only one here. “Aren’t you coming?”
And they headed together toward Noah’s bedroom.
Chanai Choomalaiwong w
as born in central Thailand in 1967 with two birthmarks, one on the back of his head and one above his left eye. When he was born, his family did not think that his birthmarks were particularly significant, but when he was three years old, he began talking about a previous life. He said that he had been a schoolteacher named Bua Kai and that he had been shot and killed while on the way to school. He gave the names of his parents, his wife, and two of his children from that life, and he persistently begged his grandmother, with whom he lived, to take him to the previous parents’ home in a place called Khao Phra.
Eventually, when he was still three years old, his grandmother did just that. She and Chanai took a bus to a town near Khao Phra, which was fifteen miles from their home village. After the two of them got off the bus, Chanai led the way to a house where he said his parents lived. The house belonged to an elderly couple whose son, Bua Kai Lawnak, had been a teacher who was murdered five years before Chanai was born.… Once there, Chanai identified Bua Kai’s parents, who were there with a number of other family members, as his own. They were impressed enough by his statements and his birthmarks to invite him to return a short time later. When he did, they tested him by asking him to pick out Bua Kai’s belongings from others, and he was able to do that. He recognized one of Bua Kai’s daughters and asked for the other one by name. Bua Kai’s family accepted that Chanai was Bua Kai reborn, and he visited them a number of times. He insisted that Bua Kai’s daughters call him “Father,” and if they did not, he refused to talk to them.
JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Eleven
A door opened, and she fell through.
That’s what happened, Janie thought afterward, standing in the dark living room. Yet there had been nothing so unusual about the sight of Noah yelling and thrashing about in his Ninja Turtle sheets. His mouth was open, his hair damp, plastered to his cheeks. She moved toward the bed to comfort and restrain him, but Anderson moved faster; he was beside Noah in an instant, leaning over him, holding down the feet kicking at the sheets.
A stranger was touching her son, who was calling out for her. Who was calling out—
“Mama!”
“Noah,” she said, moving toward the bed, and Anderson looked up at her and held her back with his glance.
“Noah,” Anderson said quietly. His voice was very firm. “Noah, can you hear me?”
“Lemme out!” Noah yelled. “Mama! Lemme out! I can’t get out!”
“Noah. It’s okay. It’s a nightmare,” Anderson said. “You’re having a nightmare.”
“I can’t breathe!”
“You can’t breathe?”
“Can’t breathe!”
Janie knew it was the dream, but she couldn’t help saying, “Noah has asthma. We need to get his nebulizer—it’s in the drawer—”
“He’s breathing.” Anderson’s long body was poised over Noah’s small struggling form, his hands still on his feet. Don’t touch my son, she thought, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t say anything. She sent Anderson a silent message: One wrong move, bud, I’ll boot you out of here so fast your head will spin.
“Noah,” Anderson said firmly. “You can wake up now. It’s all right.”
Noah stopped moving. He opened his eyes wide. “Mama.”
“Yes, honey,” she called from the foot of the bed. But he was looking past her. She wasn’t what he wanted.
“I want to go home.”
“Noah,” Anderson said again, and Noah turned his blue eyes on Anderson and kept them there. “Can you tell us what happened in your dream?”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Why can’t you breathe?”
“I’m in the water.”
“You’re in—the ocean? A lake?”
“No.” Noah took a few ragged, shallow breaths. Janie felt the struggle in her own lungs. If he stopped breathing, she would, too.
Noah squirmed into a sitting position. Anderson didn’t need to hold on to his feet anymore. He was holding his attention. “He hurt me.”
“In your dream?” Anderson spoke quickly. “Who’s hurting you?”
“Not in my dream. In my real life.”
“I see. Who hurt you?”
“Pauly. He hurt my body. Why’d he do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d he do it? Why?” Noah grabbed Anderson’s hand, his eyes troubled. Janie herself had become invisible, a shadow at the foot of the bed.
Anderson looked back at him intently. “What did he do?”
“He hurt Tommy.”
“Tommy? Was that your name?”
“Yes.”
Janie was listening to her son, but the words echoed oddly in her mind, as if she were hearing them from somewhere far away. And yet she was here, in this familiar room, with the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d pasted on the ceiling, one by one, and the bureau she’d hand-painted with elephants and tigers, and Noah, her Noah, and the door in her mind opening and closing and opening again.
“I see,” Anderson said. “That’s great. Do you remember your last name?”
“I don’t know. I’m just Tommy.”
“All right. Did you have a family, when you were Tommy?”
“Of course.”
“Who’s in your family?”
“There’s my mama and papa and my little brother. And we have a lizard.”
“And what are their names?”
“Horntail.”
“Horntail?”
“He’s a bearded dragon. Charlie and I named him that ’cause he looked like the Horntail Harry fought.”
“I see. And who’s Harry?”
Noah rolled his eyes. “You know, Harry Potter?”
At the foot of the bed, Janie heard herself inhale. She caught the breath in her chest, let it burn there. This familiar room, this unfamiliar tableau: the tall man leaning over Noah, the round bright face almost grazing the angular one.
“And where do you live, with your family?”
“We live in the red house.”
“The red house. And where’s that?”
“It’s in the field.”
“And where’s the field?”
“Ashvu?”
“Ashview?”
“That’s it!”
“That’s where you live?”
“That’s my home!”
Janie felt herself exhale, a wisp of sound in the room.
“I want to go back there. Can I go back there?”
“That’s what we’re trying to do. Can we talk for a moment about what happened with Pauly? Can we do that?”
He nodded.
“Do you remember where you were when this happened? When he hurt you?”
He nodded.
“Were you by the water?”
“No. By Pauly’s.”
“You were in his house when he hurt you?”
“No. It was outside.”
“Okay. It was outside. And what did he do, Noah?”
“He—he shot me,” he cried, looking up into Anderson’s face.
“He shot you?”
“I’m bleeding.… Why’d he do that?”
“I don’t know. Why do you think he did it?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!” Noah was getting agitated. “I don’t know why!”
“All right. It’s all right. So what happened next? After he shot you?”
“Then I died.”
“You died?”
“Yes. And then I came to—” His eyes searched the room. “Mommy-Mom?”
Somehow she must have slid down; she was squatting by the bed. She was breathing in and out. He was looking at her.
“Are you okay?”
She looked at the boy. Her boy. Her child. Noah. “Yes.” She flicked at her wet eyes with a finger. “It’s just my contacts.”
“You should take them out.”
“I will, in a moment.”
“I’m tired, Mommy,” Noah said.
“Of course you ar
e, sweetie. Shall we go back to sleep?”
Noah nodded. Anderson moved away, and she sat down next to him on the bed. Noah put his sweet, sweaty Noah-hands on her shoulders and she leaned her forehead against his. They sunk down together like the single entity they once had been.
* * *
Anderson was in the kitchen when Janie emerged from Noah’s bedroom for the second time that evening. She moved around the dark, quiet living room, looking at the objects that were not as they had been an hour earlier.
I’m Janie, she told herself. Noah is my son. We live on Twelfth Street.
A car passed, flashing white against the dark wall.
I’m Janie.
Noah is my son.
Noah is Tommy.
Noah was Tommy was shot.
She believed and she didn’t believe at the same time. Noah was shot, and was bleeding—the words wounded her.
She wished suddenly that she’d never called this man, that she could go back to a time when it was merely Janie and Noah, making a life together. But there was no going back, was there? Wasn’t that the lesson of adulthood, of motherhood? You had to be where you were. The life you’re living, the moment you’re in.
Twelve
Anderson sat in the kitchen, Googling Ashviews.
It was all coming back to him now. The excitement. The energy. The words.
He’d found it at last, a strong American case.… Perhaps the case of his life, the one that would connect. If he found the previous personality (and he was optimistic that he would), perhaps he could even get the media interested. In any event it was the American case he needed to finish the book properly. He was sure he could convince Janie to let him publish it.
He had what he needed now. Ashview, Tommy, Charlie. A lizard, a baseball team. He’d put together bigger puzzles from less.
“You could have asked,” Janie said. He hadn’t noticed her coming into the kitchen.
“Hmmm?” There was a town called Ashview in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C., where the Nationals baseball team was located.
The Forgetting Time: A Novel Page 9