Janie glimpsed the page:
Noah Zimmerman:
—unusual knowledge of reptiles
—can score a baseball game
—likes the baseball team the Washington Nationals
—speaks of a person named Pauly.…
Melissa picked it up and looked at it, blinking a few times.
“I must admit—I was skeptical when you e-mailed me. I’m still skeptical. But there are so many … similarities.… And, well, we try to remain open-minded, don’t we, John?” John said nothing. “Or at least I do. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching since.…” Her voice trailed off. Janie felt her eyes moving automatically out the window, to the covered pool. When she looked at Melissa again, the woman was gazing at her with intense, misty eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. She flicked away a tear and leaped to her feet. “Hey. Why don’t I go get those cookies? Keep an eye on Charlie, will you, hon?” John nodded curtly.
“Excuse me,” Anderson said suddenly, standing as well. “May I use the—”
“That way.” John nodded in the direction of the hall. Anderson excused himself again, and the room fell into silence. Noah looked at his sneakers. Janie watched the baby try to negotiate the tricky gulf between the couch and the armchair. The baby took a step, wobbled, and fell. He started to cry. John ambled over and picked him up. “Come on, now,” he said, jiggling him in an automatic way. “Come on, now.”
* * *
Anderson walked down the hallway, past a half-open door revealing a pastel yellow room filled with stuffed animals and a crib, and another door, closed, with a sign on it saying KEEP OUT in childish crayon letters. The letters looked cheerful, as if they were really only joking. He paused, glancing in either direction, and then cracked it open.
It was a boy’s room. It looked like it might have been used yesterday, instead of five and a half years before. The bedspread, embroidered with baseballs and bats, was tucked neatly under the pillow; the baseball and soccer trophies on the bureau shone in all their fake gold splendor, as if they’d just been won; there was a bin with baseball gloves and another with balls, under a Nationals pennant and a framed poster of different kinds of snakes. A child’s blue backpack sat in the corner, monogrammed TEM. It looked to be still filled with schoolbooks. On the bookshelf in the corner of the room there were a handful of Harry Potter books, along with a baseball encyclopedia and three reference books on snakes.
Anderson shut the door and hurried to the bathroom.
Inside, he locked the door, splashed water on his cheeks, and looked with alarm at the gray face in the mirror.
It wasn’t them.
He had suspected it since the moment they entered the home, but he was sure now.
Charlie was a baby—far too young to have been alive during the previous personality’s lifetime—there was no way Noah could remember him. Tommy liked snakes, not lizards. And Noah seemed not to recognize any of it. It was the wrong family.
It was his fault, of course. His faculties were not fully operational. He couldn’t find the word lizards and had written reptiles instead. He hadn’t asked the age of the younger brother, Charlie. Small, crucial, uncharacteristic errors that led him in the wrong direction, to disastrous effect.
He had been too eager. The forward motion had been so pleasurable to him, he’d almost forgotten about everything that was happening to him in the desire to move and to keep on moving.
He ran his hand through his hair. The case was finished. He was finished. His faith in words was shaken at last, and with it all remaining confidence in his professional abilities.
What now? He’d erred, and now he’d go into the living room and make it right. And then he’d go home. Go back and resume? No resumption; he was done. That was clear. A fitting end to a long and ignoble career. Oh, but he had worked hard for his obscurity.
He leaned against the sink, steeling himself for the inevitable.
Seventeen
Janie could smell the cookies all the way across the room. “Hope you like ’em warm!” Melissa cried, holding the plate aloft like the cover of a book on entertaining. She had emerged from the kitchen cheerful and somehow brighter, her cheeks flushed and her lips newly slathered with pink lipstick. She handed a cookie to Noah and placed the rest of the plate on a side table. The sweet scent masked the citrus-and-ammonia odor of cleaning supplies and the sour Noah smell that traveled with him everywhere. Janie wondered if the other woman had noticed it.
John looked at Melissa over the baby’s head. “Charlie’s wet,” he said, and made a face.
Melissa laughed sharply. “Well, change him, then.” The couple’s eyes met, and Janie got the distinct impression that more than one dispute had preceded this visit. John sighed; father and son left the room.
Noah sat still on the couch, his hands between his legs, his mouth full of cookie. He wouldn’t lift his head.
“So.” Melissa turned to Janie brightly. “I hear Noah’s something of a Nationals fan.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s your favorite player, Noah?”
“The Zimmernator,” Noah said to the carpet, his mouth full.
“He likes Ryan Zimmerman. Because of the name, of course,” Janie added.
But Melissa’s eyes widened. “But he was Tommy’s favorite, too!”
At the sound of the name, Noah jerked his head upward. It was impossible not to notice.
Melissa turned pale. She looked at Noah. She licked her lips nervously. “T-Tommy? Are you Tommy?”
He nodded hesitantly.
“Oh, god.” She put her hand over her throat. Her pink smile seemed to float in her face, disembodied, as if it bore no relation to the wet, blinking blue eyes.
Was Janie dreaming? Was this actually happening?
“Tommy. Come here,” the other mother was saying. Her white arms were wide. “Come to Mommy.”
Noah gaped at her.
The woman crossed the small distance between them and pulled him up out of the chair, lifting his body into her arms like a rag doll.
But it couldn’t be, Janie thought. He had the same rash on his arms that she had on hers. She had held him moments after his birth upon her breast and he had suckled instantly, “like an old pro,” the nurse had said proudly.
“Oh, my baby boy.” Melissa started to cry into Noah’s hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh!” Noah said. His forehead was turning pink above her arms and the word emerged from him like a peep.
When he was pulled out of Janie’s body, the doctor had held him high up so she could see him. He was still attached by the umbilical cord, smeared with blood and traces of white vernix. His face was deep red, contorted, beautiful.
“I am so, so sorry, baby. I made a mistake,” Melissa said. Her voice was rough. The mascara started to roll down her face. “I know I messed up. I always check the latch. I thought I’d checked it. I messed up.”
Janie could barely see the top of Noah’s head. She couldn’t see his face. “Oh!” he peeped again. “Oh!”
“I left the latch open! I never do that. Oh, I messed up.” She clutched at his arms, which lay rigid on either side of him, and his skin mottled beneath her fingers, becoming as bright as his red Nationals T-shirt. “But why did you drown, baby? Why? You had swimming lessons!”
“Oh!” Noah said.
Only he wasn’t saying “Oh,” Janie realized suddenly. He was saying “No.”
“No,” Noah said again. He craned his neck to shake his head free, and she could see that his eyes were screwed tightly shut. He squirmed but could not get out of the other woman’s embrace. “No, no, no!”
“I didn’t know you’d go to the pool,” Melissa was saying breathlessly. “I never knew you’d do that. But you could swim! You could swim. Oh, God, I messed up, Tommy. Mommy messed up!” She reached up to wipe her eyes with her hands and Noah wrenched himself loose.
He backed up across the living room. He was shaking so violently his teeth
chattered. Janie moved toward him. “Noah, are you okay?”
“Tommy.” Melissa reached out with her soft white arms.
He looked from one woman to the other. “Go away!” he screamed. “Go away!”
He moved as far away from both of them as he could, toppling the side table, spilling the cookies onto the floor. “Where’s my mama?” he shouted, turning to Janie. “You said I was going to see my mama! You said!”
“Noah—” Janie said. “Sweetie, look—”
But he shut his eyes and put his hands over his ears and began to hum loudly to himself.
Anderson rushed into the room, followed by John, holding the baby, who was wearing only a diaper. John took in the scene, looking first at Noah, then his wife, the tears like tire tracks down the sides of her face. “What have you done?” he said.
* * *
In the kitchen, Noah sat at the table with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. He was still humming. He wouldn’t look at Janie, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he wriggled away. Another tray of cookies sat on the gleaming marble counter. Their smell permeated the room, powerful and nauseating, like a mistake it was too late to fix.
Anderson cleared his throat. Janie could hardly look at him.
“It was an error.” He seemed to be addressing all of them or none of them. “It seems to be the wrong previous personality.” Nobody answered him. “Let me explain…,” he said, but didn’t continue. He seemed to have lost his bearings, if he had ever truly had any.
Melissa was slumped at the other end of the table. She had bitten her lip and now it was bleeding. There was a smudge of blood on the collar of her yellow blouse, a smear on her white teeth. “I thought I was going to get some answers,” she mumbled. Janie could see a streak of gray mixed in with the blond sweep of her hair.
Her husband had a packet of baby wipes in his hand and was cleaning her face, the baby tucked under his arm like a giant squirming football.
“There are no answers,” John said. “It was an accident.”
He gently wiped the black marks from the sides of her face and her chin. She let him, her hands dangling loosely in her lap. As he cleared the makeup she looked even younger, like a child.
“You always say that,” Melissa moaned. “But it’s my fault.”
“The pool boy left the latch open.” The baby started to wail. “You know this. It could have happened to anybody. It was a fluke.”
“But the lessons—”
“He wasn’t a strong swimmer.”
“But if I had checked the latch—”
“It’s time to stop this, Mel.”
Time to stop this.
The words woke Janie at last from her spell. This woman has lost her son, she thought. She lost her son. She let the words sink in. She saw, she couldn’t help but see, a sweet-looking blond child struggling at the bottom of the pool. His small dead body floating in that crystal-blue water. A dead child: everything flowed from that fact, didn’t it? Of all the bad things that could happen, that was the worst. And then they had come here and done this thing to her, this woman who had already suffered unimaginably: they had gotten her hopes up and then had dashed them bitterly, and whether they had meant to or not was beside the point. She had done this thing; she couldn’t blame Noah. And Anderson had followed the dictates of his own ethics in a way she couldn’t truly fathom. But she was a mother and should have known better, and instead she had been cruel to this woman. It was unconscionable, what she had done, and all because she couldn’t face the truth. Which was?
That Tommy Moran had died and wasn’t coming back.
And Anderson’s case was finished.
And Noah was sick.
It’s time to stop this.
The baby was still wailing. “Mel.” The husband was stroking her head like a puppy. “Charlie’s hungry. He needs you.”
Melissa took the baby from her husband mechanically. She pulled up her shirt and bra with a quick, deft gesture, and her round breast popped into view, its large, pink nipple as unexpected as a spaceship. Janie felt Anderson avert his gaze, but she couldn’t look away. Melissa settled the hungry baby on her breast, and after a few moments her face took on a quieter expression.
Shame trickled down Janie’s neck. She had put Noah through this, too, confusing him even further for no good reason. “I’m sorry,” she said to Melissa.
Melissa closed her eyes, focusing on what was happening in her body, and Janie remembered the prickling sensation of breasts becoming heavy and alive with the flow of milk, the tug at the nipple with small sharp teeth, and then the deep inner sigh as the baby sucked the milk into his mouth.
“You people ought to leave now,” John said, though it hardly needed saying. He led them silently through the house, Janie steering Noah with both hands on his back, his hands still covering his ears, Anderson following behind. John opened the front door. He wouldn’t look at them.
The three of them stumbled down the steps and out into the pretty street. Trees waved in the breeze; the golf courses glowed in the distance. A boy on a bike whizzed by them on the sidewalk, ferociously focused, nearly hitting them. Janie watched him continue down the street, tires wobbling.
* * *
They drove away in silence. Janie sat in the back next to Noah’s car seat. Noah wouldn’t open his eyes or remove his hands from his ears. After a while his hands fell to his sides and she realized he had fallen asleep.
Noah is sick.
She tried the words out in her head. They lay there meaninglessly, like an innocent-looking chunk of plutonium.
Anderson turned down one street and then another, and the guard waved them out the gate. They were back in the world now, the confusing, hectic reality. They turned down Main Street, toward the motel. The GPS lady sang her indifferent tune. “Continue point two miles. Then turn left on Pleasant Street.”
Pleasant, Janie thought. The word echoed in her brain, transformed into Psychosis.
Out the window, the local high school was getting out for the day. Big kids slouching toward the parking lot, calling out to each other with loud, exuberant voices.
“Turn left on Psychosis Street. Recalculating.”
Recalculating. Medicating.
“Continue point two miles on Psychosis Street. Medicating. Medicating.”
They were going down a side street now, past a local bank, a sweet street with smaller houses, their porches adorned with American flags. Side street. Side effects.
“Continue point three miles. Turn left on Catherine Place.” Catherine, Catatonic.
“Turn left on Catatonic Place. Medicating…”
Anderson was looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“Janie, I must apologize,” he said quietly. “It clearly wasn’t the right previous personality. I should have caught that. There were things I missed I should not have missed.”
“Things?” Janie tried to shake her head clear.
“Yes, the younger son, Charlie—he is too young for Tommy to have known him.… I thought they had an older child named Charlie.”
How do you stop trying when it is your son? But it has to stop somewhere.
It’s time to stop this.
“Turn left on Denial Road. Medicating. Medicating.”
The car seemed to be roaming the streets with a will of its own. Anderson was still speaking. “And I used the word reptiles. I should have said lizards. It is my mistake. It’s not like me, but that’s no excuse. I was not being precise. I didn’t catch the difference between snakes and liz—”
“Jerry. Stop the car.”
He pulled to the side of the road. He faced the front, beads of sweat glistening on the back of his neck. “Yes?”
“We’re done here, Jerry.”
“I agree, definitely, this was the wrong … home.”
Was the man dense? “No, I mean … I’m done with schools and stores and houses. All of it. Please drive us to the motel.”
“That�
��s where we’re going.”
“The GPS said left. You turned right. Three times, actually.”
He frowned. “No.”
“Why do you think she keeps saying ‘recalculating’?”
“Oh.” His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “Oh.” He looked through the windshield, as if lost at sea.
She tried to keep her own voice cool. “Jerry. Listen to me. There is no previous personality. Noah made it all up.”
Anderson kept his gaze fixed in front of him, as if the answers lay there, on the asphalt road. “What do you mean?”
She looked at her sleeping boy. He was slumped in his car seat, his shining head tilted on one shoulder, pale lashes fluttering. She could see the seat belt making a mark where it crossed his cheek.
“He made it up. Because he has schizophrenia,” she said.
She had said it, that word that sounded like every bodily function run amok at the same time.
She opened the car door and stepped out on the road. She leaned down, hands on her knees, sequestered behind a dense curtain of hair. The vertigo was too strong. She kneeled at the edge of the road. She felt it hard and firm beneath her, like reality.
“Are you all right?” He was shading his eyes and looked unsteady on his feet.
People like the two of them—desperate people—were dangerous, she thought suddenly. She saw the other mother, the black tear-tracks on her face. She felt sick again, this time with guilt. Yet some part of her, she realized, was also relieved. That door was closed. She was back in real life again, however terrible that might be.
Anderson wiped his face with his hand. “You’ve had a diagnosis,” he said at last.
She looked around, as if wanting someone to contradict this: the grass, the asphalt, the cars whizzing by on their way to the supermarket or the mall. “Yes.”
He shook his head. “Who?”
“Not exactly a diagnosis. A suggestion. By Dr. Remson. He’s a child psychiatrist in New York. One of the best, apparently.” This last she threw out to hurt him.
The Forgetting Time: A Novel Page 13