He took this in without reacting. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t want to work with us.”
His eyes flashed. “Don’t you know what my colleagues would say if—” He inhaled slowly and with an effort lowered his voice again. “You—” His lip trembled a little, then stilled. There was a cost, she thought, to calming that facade. “You should have told me.”
I don’t care about your colleagues, she thought. I don’t care what happens after people die. I care about the boy in the car. That’s all I’ve ever cared about. “Yes. I should have told you,” she admitted dully. “When your son is very sick, you’re not yourself, you don’t behave in ordinary ways. You can’t see clearly.” She wiped her wet eyes with her hand. “It was irresponsible of me.” She meant all of it.
He shook his head sharply. “Noah doesn’t have schizophrenia,” Anderson said.
She felt the hope begin to buzz up inside of her, and she smashed it fast before it could do any more damage.
“And you know this how?”
“It’s my professional opinion.”
She stood up and smiled thinly at him. “I’m sorry but that doesn’t carry a lot of weight with me right now.” She ignored his wince. “Besides, you saw Noah’s behavior today.”
“It was the wrong previous personality.” Anderson bowed his head. “It was my fault. It’s upsetting. But—”
“It’s over. The case is finished, Jerry.”
“Yes. Of course.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. I just need a…,” he said. Then he walked a few feet away into the grass and looked around him, as if to find his way.
“Mom?”
Noah was waking up. He stretched and cast a shattering smile in her direction.
“How are you feeling, sweetie?” She smoothed his hair, rubbed the red mark from the seat belt on his face. “Are you hungry? I have a granola bar in my purse.”
He smiled sleepily. “Are we there yet?”
“We’re almost to the motel.”
“No, Mommy-Mom,” he said patiently, as if she were daft. “When do we get to Asheville Road?”
Sujith Jayaratne, a boy from a suburb of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, began showing an intense fear of trucks and even the word lorry, a British word for truck that has become part of the Sinhalese language, when he was only eight months old. When he became old enough to talk, he said that he had lived in Gorakana, a village seven miles away, and that he had died after being hit by a truck.
He made numerous statements about that life. His great-uncle, a monk at a nearby temple, heard some of them and mentioned Sujith to a younger monk at the temple. The story interested this monk, so he talked with Sujith, who was a little more than two and a half years old at the time, about his memories, and then wrote up notes of the conversations before he attempted to verify any of the statements. His notes document that Sujith said that he was from Gorakana and lived in the section of Gorakawatte, that his father was named Jamis and had a bad right eye, that he had attended the kabal iskole, which means “dilapidated school,” and had a teacher named Francis there, and that he gave money to a woman named Kusuma, who prepared string hoppers, a type of food, for him … he said that his house was whitewashed, that its lavatory was beside a fence, and that he bathed in cool water.
Sujith had also told his mother and grandmother a number of other things about the previous life that no one wrote down until after the previous personality had been identified. He said his name was Sammy, and he sometimes called himself “Gorakana Sammy” … he said that his wife’s name was Maggie and their daughter’s was Nandanie. He had worked for the railways and had once climbed Adam’s Peak, a high mountain in central Sri Lanka … he said that on the day he died, he and Maggie had quarreled. She left the house, and he then went out to the store. While he was crossing the road, a truck ran over him, and he died.
The young monk went to Gorakana to look for a family who had a deceased member whose life matched Sujith’s statements. After some effort, he discovered that a fifty-year-old man named Sammy Fernando, or “Gorakana Sammy” as he was sometimes called, had died after being hit by a truck six months before Sujith was born. All of Sujith’s statements proved to be correct for Sammy Fernando, except for his statement that he had died immediately when the truck hit him. Sammy Fernando died one to two hours after being admitted to a hospital following the accident.
JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Eighteen
Denise woke up with the name on her lips. The taste of it in her mouth, briny and bitter, like earth and sea at the same time. She allowed herself ten seconds to lie there, which was about seven seconds too long, and then got herself up out of that bed. She dressed carefully, making sure she did the buttons the right way on her blouse and her blazer, checking her stockings to be sure that there were no runs, pulling and twisting her hair back into a bun and clipping it so that it would stay put. The dress code at the home was relaxed to the point of ludicrous (jeans and tracksuits, for goodness sakes), but she had dressed professionally all her life, even in those early years as a student teacher, and she surely wasn’t about to stop now. Besides, it was important for the patients and their families: it sent a message of respect.
She made the bed, collected her nightclothes, and put them in the hamper, and only then allowed herself to head to the bathroom. Hidden above the sink, behind the aspirin and tampons, was the bottle of pills Dr. Ferguson had given her. She took out a pill and cut it in fourths with the butter knife she kept on the shelf. Even a half gave her a loose, slightly dizzy feeling she didn’t like, and a whole one made her foggy all day, but a quarter was usually enough. She gulped it dry and put the bottle back carefully, closing the cabinet until it clicked.
There. And there she was. That familiar blur of skin and wet brown eyes and black hair. Her hair was going back at the roots; she was way past due at the hair salon. She wished she could do what plenty of other black women did and just shave it close to her head and let it be. She couldn’t help staring when she saw women with hair like that, marveling at the simplicity, the sleekness, the lack of fuss. She herself wouldn’t have felt right with a look like that, though, would have felt—unprepared.
Downstairs, she started the coffee and turned on the radio, broke some eggs on the frying pan. She heard Charlie thumping around upstairs, doing whatever fifteen-year-olds did in the morning. Couldn’t take him but a moment to throw on a T-shirt and some jeans.
“Charlie! Breakfast!”
She stood watching the eggs in the pan and listening to the news on the radio, leaning against the counter. Outside the kitchen window, Denise saw a layer of frost gleaming on the stubble of the newly planted cornfields. It had been a long winter and it kept on coming, continuing its victory laps halfway into spring. In their yard a lone bird tried and tried again to drink from the half-frozen birdbath.
Charlie pounded down the stairs. Always a shock to her, that this huge body with its bouncing dreads could have come from her slight frame, that he was hers, this hulking form that passed quickly in and out of her day. He sprawled onto a kitchen chair and started banging out a beat on the table with his knife and fork.
She placed a plate of steaming eggs in front of him and sat down. “Made you some eggs.”
“Thanks, Mama.” He jumped up to pour himself some juice.
“Charlie, sit, you’re making my head spin.”
“You sleep okay? That dog keep you up again?”
She paused; had she called out again in her sleep? Is that why he was asking? “I slept fine.”
“Good.” He slammed down in his seat.
No, Charlie hadn’t heard a thing. She exhaled quietly. This didn’t mean she hadn’t yelled out, of course.
She sat still, listening to the sound of the radio without focusing on the words. The pill was kicking in; she allowed herself to fall into the cadences of the voice, a man’s voice oozing sanity and sameness, s
moothing out the wars and the earthquakes and the hurricanes with its peaceful and predictable rhythms. The world could end, it did end, and you could count on that voice still being there to tell you how it all went down.
“Mama?”
“Hmmm?”
“I was asking if there’s any bacon left?”
She made herself stand and felt dizzy; she opened the refrigerator door and stood there for a moment, holding on to it, looking inside at the bright, cool things. There it was, the shiny package. She took it out.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.” She made her way to the stove, placed the bacon on the pan. It sizzled, spitting tiny droplets of oil on her good brown skirt. She knew the second the first waft of it hit her she wasn’t going to be able to eat a bite herself. She hadn’t realized how unappetizing bacon could be.
The news finished and some classical music came on. She always put the radio on the classical station when Charlie was around. She thought it was good for him to hear it, the same way she watched the news programs or nature documentaries at night when he was home when what she really would have liked was one of those reality soap operas, the escape of watching rich, silly people behave badly. Dr. Ferguson thought that after everything that had happened she might loosen up about these kinds of things, but it had gone the other way.
She wrapped the bacon in a paper towel and carried the thing to Charlie’s plate, dumping the glistening sticks on top of the eggs, and sank back into her chair.
“You’re not eating, Mama?”
“Wait. Don’t you have your civics test this morning? We didn’t go over—”
“That was Friday. But I think I did pretty good.”
“Charlie Crawford!”
“Did well. I think I did well.”
“Is that how you talk in English class? Is that why she gave you a C plus?”
He ducked his head and began shoveling the bacon into his mouth. “No.”
“’Cause you know you need to do better than that if you want to get into a good college. That’s what the college counselor—”
“I got it under control.” He glanced up at her, then down at his plate again, scraping up the rest of his food. Who knew what the truth was? Charlie had always been a pretty good student, but kids that age were unpredictable once the hormones started hitting; Maria Clifford’s son, down the road, had gone from the honor roll to flunking out and working at the gas station as soon as you could bat an eye.
“Here, Mama, have some bacon. It’s good.” He dumped a morsel on the table in front of her and watched her until she picked it up.
“Why are you at me this morning?”
“’Cause you don’t eat.”
“I eat. See?” Denise took the spike of bacon and put it on her tongue. Her mouth filled with the taste of something burned. She moved it to the inside of her cheek; she’d spit it out when he left. “Look. I’ll try to get out on time today and we’ll have a proper dinner together, okay?”
“Can’t. Got practice.”
“Practice.”
“Yeah.”
“Shouldn’t you be studying instead of banging drums in someone’s basement?”
“Garage.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shrugged, pushed himself away from the table. Grabbed his backpack from the floor. The neighbor’s dog started barking again. You could hear it all the way down Asheville Road, probably as far away as the highway.
“Someone should kill that thing, do the world a favor,” Charlie said. He was already moving toward the door.
“You be nice,” she said.
He grinned at her through the dangling veil of his dreads. “I’m always nice.”
And he was gone.
First thing she did was spit out the bacon. Second thing was shut off the radio. How she hated that music. They played it all day in the home, too, forcing the old people to take their music like their meds. Swallow it down, good for you, even if all it did was numb you through your day. At least the Hispanic people brought their own music, drumbeats and brassy melodies you could dance to, not that she’d ever do such a thing. Still, she knew she lingered too long in Mrs. Rodriguez’s room, washing down those plump tan limbs with that music playing and the flowering plants on the table and the woman’s daughter sitting there placid as you please doing crossword puzzles right next to the bed, though Mrs. Rodriguez hadn’t recognized her own kin in at least two years. She liked the washing up. She’d inured herself by now to the smells, and Mrs. Rodriguez’s flesh was less fragile than most; she didn’t have to worry about every fingerprint leaving its mark the way she did with so many of the white people. There was something calming about being able to touch someone this way, without any hunger or discussion. Just skin on skin. A body and a washcloth and usefulness. So she lingered. It wasn’t fair, she knew, to the other patients, who had no relatives, or plants, or music. She made a mental note to move faster today.
She stood now, relishing the silence, washing up the dishes, picturing Mrs. Rodriguez’s room. Once she put the dishes away, she leaned against the counter and watched the clock, trying not to think of anything. 7:00. 7:30. She knew the name was still running loose somewhere in the back of her mind, but the pill muffled it enough so that she couldn’t hear it. When the second hand at last hit 7:55, she finished her cup of coffee and exhaled with utter relief.
For it had begun. Her long, long day.
* * *
The Oxford Home for the Aged had once had aspirations. Anyone could see this from the tall fake plants and the columns and the pictures on the walls of mountain vistas—even from the name itself, which had no relationship to the institution of higher learning; someone had thought it sounded good. But somewhere along the line, something had gone terribly wrong. The linoleum floors were violently patterned by scuff marks from too many wheelchairs and stretchers and canes; the lobby smelled only a little like Lysol and the cigarettes the security guard smoked and a lot like the stale, slightly rank skin of the very old and the very sick. The ceiling directly above the elevator bank hung in strips from water damage, which had gone unrepaired for so long that the wound itself had turned black, like a skinned knee gone gangrenous.
A question of care, Denise thought. No one cared, so nothing happened. The management had changed so many times no one was sure who or where the current owner was, and the patients weren’t with it enough to complain, and there weren’t many family members that made it out there, though it was only fifteen miles from town. A vicious cycle: the place was so depressing that no one wanted to come, and because no one came and complained, the place got even more depressing. At another point in her life Denise would have taken it upon herself to get the place cleaned up, to start by talking to the janitors about what sort of cleaning solution they were using, if any, but she had no interest these days in taking on responsibilities that weren’t hers.
She did her part; she kept a pleasant expression on her face and did her job the best she could despite the absolute storm of shit that sometimes came down on her (she didn’t like to swear but some situations called for it). She kept on going despite the rotting ceiling and the rampant understaffing that left patients unobserved, sometimes for hours at a time, and the way the storeroom always seemed out of Dilaudid and morphine when it was needed the most. She was grateful for the job, grateful for the salary and that it took so much of her body and her attention and engaged so little of her actual mind. And yet: lately she was feeling her mind going off on its own a bit more than she was comfortable with. For instance, Mr. Costello, who was dying of lung cancer. Why did she ask him if he was scared? Where had that question come from?
Maybe his equanimity had gotten to her. He had tubes going through his nose to an oxygen tank right by his bed, couldn’t eat much more than ice chips and scrambled eggs, slept fitfully most of the day, and yet his sleepy green eyes, overseeing the disintegration of his own body, seemed amused; content, even.
“So how�
�m I doing?”
She was checking the oxygen. “Still going strong.”
“Damn. I was hoping to be dead by now.”
“Come, now.”
“You think I’m lying, but I’m not.”
“You’re not scared?” The words had blurted out of her before she even knew what she was saying.
“Naw. I’m the last of the Mohicans, you know. They’ve all gone.” He waved a hand, as if his wife and friends had just now vacated the room.
“That’s good, then,” she’d said, adding, “I mean, that you’re not scared.”
He’d looked at her curiously. He was a smart old man. Had once been something—a chemist? An engineer? “Now why would I be scared?”
She smiled. “I didn’t realize you were a believer, Mr. Costello.”
“Oh, no, no, I’m not.”
“But—you think there’s something else. After this?”
“Not really. I think this is probably it.”
“I see. All right.” She could feel herself sweating. “And that doesn’t—bother you? You don’t find the thought of it unpleasant?”
“You trying to convert me now? Or the other way round?”
She wasn’t sure what “the other way round” meant, exactly, but she didn’t like it. “I’m sorry to intrude,” she’d murmured, focusing again on the oxygen tank. It was half empty.
“You know what’s really unpleasant, Mrs. Crawford? These tubes in my nostrils. They’re goddamn aggravating. You think you can take ’em out for me?”
“You know I can’t do that.”
He smiled up at her stubbornly. “Why not, though? What difference does it make?”
“A little Vaseline might help.”
“No, no. Don’t bother.”
He looked at his hands. His skin was fragile, she thought, like the kind of onionskin paper used in letters from overseas. She wondered if they still used it, if anyone even wrote those kinds of letters anymore. Probably people just e-mailed now. The only letters like that she’d ever gotten were from Henry, long ago. Those slim blue envelopes coming all the way from Luxembourg and Manchester and Munich to her little Millerton, Ohio, mailbox, the way she’d stand in the driveway, feeling them pulsing with heat in her hand. She’d spent long hours poring over the scrawl of his careless blue ink on the delicate surface, trying to make out the words, lingering on the tender throwaway lines—& wishing you were here to hear it. This was in their very early days, before she and Henry were married, when she was assistant teaching and he was playing the Dayton clubs and touring.
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