Simple as that.
“To use my computer?”
He glanced up. She seemed annoyed with him.
“Oh! I’m so sorry. I wanted to get online—” He gestured at the computer, his attention catching on the town of Ashview’s home page.
The Nationals were a D.C. team. There was an Ashview in suburban Virginia. All he needed were some death notices; a dead child would always make the papers.… He would have a name by the end of the week, maybe sooner; he was sure of it now. It was as if Tommy had wanted to be found.
“So I’m guessing it was helpful, then? Those things Noah said?”
He looked at her more closely. She was pale, her lips tightly compressed. He ought to sit down with her and help her process what had happened, but his urgency was so powerful. It was like trying to stop a wave. “It was very helpful,” he said, trying to sound relaxed. “It was a good break. We’ll find Tommy now, I feel it.”
“Tommy. Right.” She shook her head vigorously, as if she could shake off her thoughts. “So, Doctor, which is it? Drowned or shot?”
“Excuse me?”
She shook her head again, and he wondered for the first time if she was mentally sound. “You think Noah’s this—other person, this Tommy, right? So I want to know: which is it? Was he drowned, or was he shot, or what?”
“It’s not clear.”
“Nothing’s clear.” She hurled the words at him.
Anderson sat back from the computer. “Science rarely is,” he said carefully.
“Science? Is that what this is?” She choked out a laugh and cast her eyes around her kitchen, lingering on a dirty pot half-filled with water in the sink. “Perhaps it’s unclear,” she said, “because Noah is making it up.”
“Why would he do that?”
She turned on the tap and began scrubbing the pot fiercely with her bare hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, over the rushing water. “I’m not sure I can do this.”
He looked at her back, groping for the approach that would work, the tone, the context, the possible benefits to her son.… He had employed it a thousand times.… How could he doubt himself now? He who had once been able to convince a Brahmin mother in India to let her daughter visit untouchables in the previous personality’s family. He could see it as if it had only just happened: her glistening orange sari gliding through the doorway of a hut made out of mud. At one point he had felt he could convince anyone at all through the sheer force of his will.
“Okay,” he said coolly. “I’ll leave, if you like. But what are you going to do?”
Her body went still. “Do? What do you mean?”
“You said you can’t go on this way,” he kept his voice soothing, reasonable. “That you’re running out of money, that the doctors haven’t helped. So—if I leave now, what is your plan for Noah?”
He felt a bit of chagrin; he was using her desperation against her. But it was in her best interest, wasn’t it? And her son’s? And his own best interest, and even Sheila’s, for hadn’t she wanted him to finish and publish this book? He wondered how much effort it was going to take to convince Janie to let him write about Noah. No matter.
“I’ll—” But she couldn’t get the words out of her throat. She turned to face him with raw, red, dripping hands, her fear written plainly on her face, and he felt sorry for her.
“Come here. Let me show you what I’ve found. It’s not much, but it might be a start.”
He patted the seat near him. She wiped her hands on her jeans and sat down. He turned the computer screen toward her: pretty houses clustered around a shiny green golf course. Welcome to Ashview!
“Do you know anyone from a Virginia suburb called Ashview?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s good. So we have someplace to begin. Of course, Thomas is a common name, and we don’t know what year Noah is referring to, though we can use the Potter books as evidence that it’s in the recent past. We’ll scour the local papers for any obituaries of a shooting or a drowning related to a child named Thomas. It may take a little time before we locate him. But I think we are off to a decent start. You know the Nationals,” he added, “are a D.C. team.”
“Are they?” She squinted warily at the screen, the green expanse. She didn’t trust him, he knew that; and yet he was necessary to her. They were necessary to each other.
Mahatma Gandhi appointed a committee of fifteen prominent people, including parliamentarians, national leaders, and members from the media, to study the case [of Shanti Devi, a young girl who, starting at the age of four, seemed to remember a previous lifetime as a woman named Lugdi from Mathura]. The committee persuaded her parents to allow her to accompany them to Mathura.
They left by rail with Shanti Devi on November 24, 1935. The committee’s report describes some of what happened:
“As the train approached Mathura, she became flushed with joy and remarked that by the time they reach Mathura the doors of the temple of Dwarkadhish would be closed. Her exact language was, ‘Mandir ke pat band ho jayenge,’ so typically used in Mathura.
“The first incident which attracted our attention on reaching Mathura happened on the platform itself. The girl was in L. Deshbandhu’s arms. He had hardly gone fifteen paces when an older man, wearing a typical Mathura dress, whom she had never met before, came in front of her, mixed in the small crowd, and paused for a while. She was asked whether she could recognize him. His presence reacted so quickly on her that she at once came down and touched the stranger’s feet with deep veneration and stood aside. On inquiring, she whispered in L. Deshbandhu’s ear that the person was her ‘Jeth’ (older brother of her husband). All this was so spontaneous and natural that it left everybody stunned with surprise. The man was Babu Ram Chaubey, who was really the elder brother of Kedarnath Chaubey [Lugdi’s husband].”
The committee members took her in a tonga, instructing the driver to follow her directions. On the way she described the changes that had taken place since her time, which were all correct. She recognized some of the important landmarks which she had mentioned earlier without having been there.
As they neared the house, she got down from the tonga and noticed an elderly person in the crowd. She immediately bowed to him and told others that he was her father-in-law, and truly it was so. When she reached the front of her house, she went in without any hesitation and was able to locate her bedroom. She also recognized many items of hers. She was tested by being asked where the “jajroo” (lavatory) was, and she told where it was. She was asked what was meant by “katora.” She correctly said that it meant paratha (a type of fried pancake). Both words are prevalent only in the Chaubes of Mathura and no outsider would normally know of them.
Shanti then asked to be taken to her other house where she had lived with Kedarnath for several years. She guided the driver there without any difficulty. One of the committee members, Pandit Neki Ram Sharma, asked her about the well of which she had talked in Delhi. She ran in one direction; but, not finding a well there, she was confused. Even then she said with some conviction that there was a well there. Kedarnath removed a stone at that spot and, sure enough, they found a well.… Shanti Devi took the party to the second floor and showed them a spot where they found a flower pot but no money. The girl, however, insisted that the money was there. Kedarnath later confessed that he had taken out the money after Lugdi’s death.
When she was taken to her parents’ home, where at first she identified her aunt as her mother, but soon corrected her mistake, she went to sit in her lap. She also recognized her father. The mother and daughter wept openly at their meeting. It was a scene which moved everybody there.
Shanti Devi was then taken to Dwarkadhish temple and to other places she had talked of earlier and almost all her statements were verified to be correct.
DR. K. S. RAWAT, “THE CASE OF SHANTI DEVI”
Thirteen
The Thomases of Ashview, Virginia, were not a lucky lot.
/> Ryan “Tommy” Thomas was killed at sixteen after his Honda Gold Wing motorcycle collided with a Dodge Avenger on Richmond Highway.
Tomas Fernandez was dead of unknown causes at six months.
Tom Hanson, eighteen, overdosed on heroin in an apartment outside of Alexandria.
Thomas “Junior” O’Riley, twenty-five, fell off a ladder while fixing his neighbor’s roof.
Anderson sat at the desk in his empty office and clicked through another year of obituaries in the online Ashview Gazette. He started with the month of Noah’s birth and went backward. Without a last name for Tommy, he knew the search would take a while, but he didn’t mind—there was nothing like being back in the game, trying to solve a case. And if he had to read the names a couple of times to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, there was no one there to notice.
He’d hoped initially that by simply Googling Thomas, Tom, or Tommy, Ashview, Child, Shooting, Drowning, Death, he would hit something somewhere, but perhaps the name was too common or the time frame too long—if he could use the Potter books as a benchmark, it went back up to fifteen years. The Social Security Death Index, which was spotty when it came to kids anyway, was useless in this case.
Tom McInerney had an aneurism at twenty-two.
Tommy Bowlton died of smoke inhalation at twelve along with his two sisters during a house fire on Christmas Eve. (The age felt right, but since Noah had no fire or Christmas phobias, and had spoken of a brother, he’d put this one aside for now.)
Thomas Purcheck shot himself while cleaning his rifle, but he was living in California at the time and was a robust forty-three.
He had to admit it: he’d missed being engrossed in a case. He even missed the microfiche machines he’d had to use before everything went online, tucked invariably in a corner surrounded by shelves of dusty atlases and encyclopedias. The machines were like old friends to him, the way the knob fit firmly in his hand, the way the text scrolled horizontally across the screen.
They always reminded him of college, working in the stacks, where he’d first stumbled upon a slim book from 1936 called An Inquiry into the Case of Shanti Devi, and rushed back to Wright Hall to share it with his roommate Angsley. They’d spent hours at Mory’s over the next few years poring over the implications between pints of beer, reading the reincarnation theories of Pythagoras and McTaggart, Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire.
It was Shanti Devi they kept coming back to, though. The little girl who astonishingly seemed to remember someone else’s life.
If this case existed, and if it was real, they speculated, then there must be others. So for the rest of his undergraduate years, and throughout medical school, Anderson spent his spare time searching for them. He found many things that interested him—mentions of past lives from the Upanishads to third-century Christian theologians to Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, along with many fascinating studies of adult past-life regressions under hypnosis, though he wondered how much useful evidence they could provide. He absorbed the skeptics: the story of Virginia Tighe, the Colorado housewife whose past-life memories of being Bridey Murphy, recalled under hypnosis, bore a striking similarity to the life of a childhood neighbor, and the works of Flournoy, who diagnosed a past-life-remembering medium with multiple personality disorder.
But no matter how carefully Anderson had looked, he had been unable to find another case of a child who spontaneously remembered a previous lifetime.
There was no Internet back then, of course. For a researcher, that changed everything.…
Anderson swore silently to himself and turned back to his computer. He had to try harder. His concentration was not what it had been. He was always on the verge of a flight into the past. At Janie Zimmerman’s his mind had been stimulated into competence by the excitement of being in the midst of a good case; when he was with the child, the right words had leaped to his lips, the way sometimes stutterers can sing. With Noah, he had sung.
Now, though, the words on his computer quivered before his eyes, and he steeled himself. He could not let his energy flag. He had often felt like an archaeologist, sifting through sand looking for shards of bone, fragments of a clay pot. You sat under the hot sun or the chill of the air conditioner and you simply waited for what was there all along to reveal itself. Patience was everything. You whittled yourself down to the words of type. If the words wavered, you sat still until they made sense again.
He was five years back from Noah’s birth.
He glanced quickly through the obits of older Thomases succumbing to flu, pancreatic and prostate cancer, pneumonia, and encephalitis.
T. B. (Thomas) Mancerino, Jr., nineteen, died in a boat collision on Ashview Lake on Memorial Day.
Tom Granger, three, died of measles. (Measles! Why did people stop vaccinating when the data was so impeccable and the autism link so obviously unsubstantiated?)
Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, drowned—
He looked at that one more closely.
Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, the son of John B. and Melissa Moran, of 128 Monarch Lane, died Tuesday in a tragic accident after drowning in his backyard pool. Neighbors say he was a cheerful child, passionate about reptiles and his beloved Nationals.…
He sat back in his chair.
You waited and then at last it happened: that moment when the sand shifted and you glimpsed something white, and the shard of bone was revealed.
Fourteen
In the Baltimore Greyhound station, Janie sat on a bench, buzzed out of her mind on bad bus station coffee, trying to pretend that the plan was a rational one. I can do this, she thought, so long as I don’t focus on what the “this” really means.
Noah at least seemed to take it all in stride: this adventure, this bus station. He had exclaimed at the size of the Greyhound, amazed that a bus could have a toilet in it. “And we get to sit right next to it!”
Now he was thrilled with the video game machine, even though she hadn’t given him any money for it. He didn’t seem to care, happily jerking the handle this way and that, enjoying all the whizzing figures without realizing he wasn’t controlling any of them. Which was pretty much how it was, wasn’t it? You think you’re in control, but really you’re simply staring at the moving lights.
He ran up to her again. “Where are we going, Mommy-Mom? Where are we going?” They had been having this conversation on and off for hours.
“We’re taking another bus to Ashview.”
“Really? We’re really going?”
He hopped from one foot to the other, his face screwed up in an expression that wasn’t entirely familiar to her. It was excitement and something else … anxiety? (That would be understandable.) Fear? Disbelief? She’d thought she’d known all his expressions by now.
“When we gonna get there?”
“In another couple of hours.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Is it okay? Do you want to go there?”
His blue eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? Of course I want to go! What about Jerry?”
The question startled her. “He’s meeting us there.”
“Can I watch Nemo again on the bus?”
“Sorry, honey, I told you, my computer is out of juice.”
“Can I have some apple juice?”
“We’re out of that kind of juice, too.”
She couldn’t wait for the second bus to arrive. So long as they were moving, she was all right. She was carried forward, leaving her thoughts behind her like a tangle of clothes on the shore.
Anderson had given her a sheaf of papers. She had them rolled up in her purse, a rubber-banded scroll. A news story about a little boy who drowned in Ashview, Virginia. The boy had drowned in his own pool. The pool boy had forgotten to latch the sliding doors to the backyard, and the mother had gone soon afterward to the basement to do the laundry, leaving her eight-year-old on his own watching television in the living room. A simple mistake, with terrible consequences.
Tommy Moran: a
stranger’s child.
She couldn’t bring herself to look at the pages. She had the blank side facing out. The clean slate that Noah apparently wasn’t given.
Tommy Moran, Tommy Moran.
“Look at the facts,” Anderson had said on his second visit. They were sitting, again, in the kitchen. It was evening; Noah was asleep. Anderson seemed composed, but there was no mistaking the zeal in his eyes. He pulled the papers from his briefcase and placed them in front of her. “There are strong similarities.”
She skimmed the page on top: a list of comments Noah had made and similarities between Noah and Tommy. Words leaped out at her. Ashview. Obsession with reptiles. A fan of the Nationals. A red house. Drowning.
And where was Noah’s well-being in all this?
She set the page aside.
“How did you get this information?”
“Some of it is…” He gestured vaguely. “On the computer. Also, I’ve been in touch with the mother. She confirmed that her house was red and her other son is named Charles.”
“You talked to Tommy Moran’s mother?” She realized she was shouting and tried to contain her voice. She didn’t want to wake up Noah. “Why didn’t you ask me first?”
Anderson seemed unperturbed. “I wanted to make sure the case was solid. We e-mailed. I told her about my work, about the similarities.…”
“And she responded to this?”
He nodded.
“So—if I say yes—then what?”
“Then we take Noah to the home and find out if he can identify members of the previous personality’s family, favorite places … that sort of thing. We take him around, see what he recognizes.”
She considered everything he was telling her. The logical end of the road she’d embarked on.
She had heard stories of mothers who had worked tirelessly and reversed many of the symptoms of autism in their children; mothers who learned how to build ramps for disabled daughters, who taught themselves sign language to reach deaf sons. But when did you stop, when it was your child?
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