The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  She shook her head. “I can’t go back.”

  He gave a resigned shrug. “All right.”

  “How’re you doing, Roberto? You look—tired. Your health okay?”

  “I’m good, actually. I’ve—my wife had a baby.”

  “A baby?”

  “Two months ago.” He smiled in spite of himself, the pure blue light of his joy flaring through the tension in the car, as startling to her as if a bird had flown out of the glove compartment and circled around her head.

  “I mean, I’m tired—you know how it is. But it’s—it’s good. Real good.”

  “You got back together with Cheryl, then?”

  “You didn’t hear? I married Anika. Anika Johnson? Anika Ramos now. She taught—”

  “But she’s—”

  “Yes?”

  He was watching her.

  “She’s lovely.”

  “Yes.”

  She’s so ordinary, is what she meant to say. Plain Ms. Johnson with her straight mousy brown hair and her sallow face, her thin little lips set in a line. And you’re—anything but. But she could keep her mouth shut. She could do that.

  Ms. Johnson had been Tommy’s teacher, had sent a predictable flower arrangement with the predictable note … sorry for what you are going through. Tommy is such a nice boy. If there’s anything I can do, blah-blah-blah. Life continued to move faster than she could keep track of it. A new baby in the world. The world kept going on, and going on, how could it be, while she was—while she was—

  “Are you doing all right, Denise? Can I help you in some way?” He glanced anxiously in her face, as if looking for some pain there he could brush away like an eyelash with his cool, gloved fingers.

  She pulled back from him, arranging her features into the face she used day in and day out, the face that was her face now. “I’m just fine, thanks for asking.”

  * * *

  Sitting alone in the cold car. She’d turned the heater off the second he’d left, the door yawning open to the freezing and fresh night air and closing back upon her, Roberto’s broad back hurrying away into the darkness. She saw him burying his face in his baby’s soft warm skin in gratitude and fear. She carried that everywhere with her now, that fear she sparked in other parents’ eyes.

  The cold kept her mind focused, alert. She was going to do it. She knew as she sat there she wasn’t going to resist today. She was going to call.

  She’d put it off all day, talking to Henry and seeing Roberto and doing everything she always tried not to do, except for the real thing, the thing she stopped herself from doing every hour of every day, checking the day off on the calendar if she’d successfully resisted, months and years of black Xs until her weekly sessions with Dr. Ferguson were a thing of the past and she’d almost forgotten what it was she was marking. But now none of that mattered, it was the thing that needed to be done, so she picked up the phone and called that number which was carved jaggedly into her heart.

  “Lieutenant Ludden speaking.” He had picked up the phone in the middle of telling someone something, some story; his voice was light, joshing. She could hear voices in the background—brusque, workaday. She could almost smell the burned police station coffee.

  “A lieutenant, now.”

  He knew her voice, of course, even though a few years had passed. You don’t call someone at 11:00 PM and then again at 8:00 AM and then again at noon every day for years and not burn your voice into their consciousness. That had been the point. “Yeah.” She felt the exhaustion bleeding into his voice at the sound of hers.

  “So, when did that happen?”

  “I was promoted last year.”

  “It’s Denise Crawford.”

  “I know. Hello, Mrs. Crawford. How are you?”

  “You know how I am.” This was her true self, her true voice, hoarse and unwavering. Maybe that’s why it had been so hard to stop herself from calling him.

  “And what can I do for you this evening?”

  “You know what you can do.”

  He exhaled.

  “If there was news I’d call you, you know that, Mrs. Crawford.”

  “Well, I wanted to check in. On the investigation. On how it’s going.”

  “How the investigation is going.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long pause. “You know it’s been seven years.” His voice thin, almost pleading. She’d worn the man out. She considered this a kind of victory.

  “Six years, ten months, eleven days, to be exact. Are you telling me you’ve closed the investigation? Is that what you’re saying to me?”

  “As far as I am concerned, Mrs. Crawford, this case will never be closed until—until we find your boy. But you must—you’ve got to realize that we have new cases every day. People keep on dying in Greene County, Mrs. Crawford, and they have mothers, too, and those mothers, they call me, too, and I have to account for them.”

  “Tommy’s not dead.” The words were flat, automatic.

  “I didn’t say he was.” His voice was heavy, despairing; this was how they talked to each other, the only true relationship she had in the world.

  She looked out the window. All she could see was her own reflection, those eyes that were her real eyes all right, not fierce like the voice but tired, tired. Her mouth was full of that taste that had been in her mouth all day, the taste of something burned.

  “I still keep my eyes peeled, though. I don’t forget. All right? I don’t forget any of ’em, but especially Tommy. All right?”

  “Maybe you could search the files again. Maybe there’s something you missed there that you’d only realize now, after all this time has passed. Or maybe something small has come up somewhere else that might have some bearing—”

  There was a pause.

  “There is something.”

  She felt her pulse quickening. Oh, she knew him. She could feel it in his silence. “What is it?”

  “No. It’s nothing.”

  “There’s something.”

  “No.”

  “I know you found something. I can hear it in your voice. Tell me what it is.”

  “A boy disappeared a few months back in Florida. Maybe you heard about it?”

  “I don’t read the papers anymore. And they found him? They found the boy?” Her voice quivering with excitement while her guts twisted with envy. That word echoing in her ears: found, found.

  “They found the body.”

  And then she was wrenched, again, with dismay. For herself, for the boy’s parents, for all the parents in the world.

  “You didn’t hear about this?”

  “How did the boy die?”

  “He was murdered.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Detective. You know I can take it. You know that. Now you tell me. How. That. Boy. Was. Killed.” She could barely keep her voice level.

  “No, it’s—it’s part of the investigation. I don’t know myself. It’s not my case, they’re keeping us apprised in case—there are any similarities.”

  “There are similarities?”

  He sighed. “The boy was nine. African American. There was a bike found.”

  “A bike? But—but—but there was a bike. We found Tommy’s bike—by the road.”

  “I’m aware of the details of the case, Mrs. Crawford.”

  “And the man that did that—who murdered this Florida boy—”

  “Has not been caught, no. They’re working day and night on it, I can assure you.”

  “Day and night. Right.” She’d seen how night and day went. Urgently enough for a day, a week, a month, and then it was an hour here, a few minutes there.

  “Look, I’ll keep you posted if we hear anything. Even if they find the perpetrator, there’s no likelihood that there’s a connection. You know that, right? It’s more than likely it was someone who knew him, a relative, friend of the family—”

  “Where was the body found?”

&nbs
p; “Mrs. Crawford.”

  “Where was it found?”

  “In a creek in back of the boy’s school.”

  “But—we’ve got creeks all over the county. We need to get a crew together—”

  “Mrs. Crawford. There’s not an inch of this county I haven’t covered myself. You know this. I will call you personally if there is anything relevant to the case. Look, even if there isn’t, if they find this motherfucker in Florida—I will call you that day. All right?”

  “Personally.” She exhaled bitterly.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s his birthday today.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Tommy’s birthday. He’s sixteen years old.”

  A pause.

  “You take care now. Okay? Mrs. Crawf—”

  But she had hung up the phone.

  Nineteen

  In the motel, Anderson stretched out on the bed, aching with dismay.

  He had made a mistake. His faculties had not been fully operational. He hadn’t found the word lizards and he had written reptiles instead. My god, he couldn’t even follow a GPS anymore; the voice said one thing and his brain heard something else.

  He had been too eager. A solid, well-documented, American case: he had thought that would make all the difference. He had been flying with possibility through the last few weeks, nodding off at night on dreams of validation, only to wake up to … mistake after mistake. And now he was finished.

  He could hear the boy crying in the room next to his, the mother trying to calm him down. The cries fell on him like needles. Through the thin wall he could hear the words Asheville Road.

  * * *

  “When are we going to Asheville Road?” Noah had asked cheerfully when he awoke in the car. “When are we going?”

  Even in his demoralized state, Anderson had felt the words bolting through him, the boy’s excitement igniting his own. Asheville Road!

  “We’re in Ashview now, honey,” Janie had answered.

  “But it’s the wrong one,” the child said patiently.

  “Maybe, sweetie.” She looked pointedly at Anderson, as if she could see his raw exhilaration, and it pained her. “But we’re done here.”

  “So are we going to the right one now?”

  “I don’t think so, baby. No.”

  Noah sat back in his car seat, glancing from one of them to the other with a look of incredulity. He turned to Anderson. “But you said you’d help me find my mama.”

  “I know I did.” He gave a defeated nod. He had hurt them, the mother and the child. “I’m sorry, Noah.”

  “Noey,” his mother said, “would you like some ice cream?”

  The boy ignored his mother. His eyes, piercing Anderson’s, were suffused with a despair that seemed too knowing for a child. “I’m so disappointed.”

  And he had turned his head, blocking out both adults, put his hands over his face, and started to cry.

  * * *

  Anderson got out of bed. He opened the minibar, removed a tiny container of vodka, unscrewed the top, and put it to his mouth, experimenting. He hadn’t drunk vodka in decades. He tipped a bit on his tongue, letting it tingle there, deciding, then gulped the rest of it down.

  The vodka warmed his body nicely, like an invisible hand stroking him in places no one had touched in years. His mind shivered, sensing its coming annihilation. He wiped a hand across his face, brought it back smudged with rust. What now?

  He looked in the mirror. A trickle of dark blood from nose to lips, his cheeks smeared with it. He could not meet his own eyes.

  He shoved some tissues up his nostrils, staggered back to the bed. He was losing control; his roots were loosening under the power of the liquor like a tree in a windstorm, his mind veering suddenly, inexorably, toward the one thing he never let himself think about. The file he would shred to pieces, if it weren’t evidence. His worst case.

  Preeta.

  He lay back in bed and tried to put her back where he had kept her all these years, away from his daily thoughts. Yet now he couldn’t stop seeing her. A girl of five running through the courtyard with her brothers, chasing a ball, her shiny hair flying. He’d been happy to have such a delightful child for a subject, after a long stretch working with the timid, battered children of the mud flats.

  Preeta Kapoor, slim and lovely, with large, serious eyes.

  He had thought it would be one of his strongest cases.

  The sunlight pouring through the small windows of the concrete house. The way the mother had stood up and closed the shutters, casting the room into shadow. The brass table glimmering in the dim room, his own hands sweating. The taste of the round, sweet dumplings on his lips—sugar and rose and milk.

  A wooden Ganesh in the corner, removing obstacles. A TV against the wall, flickering with a Bollywood movie no one was watching.

  “Preeta didn’t speak very much the first few years,” her father had said. “Until she was four, she was mainly silent.”

  “We thought perhaps she was…” The mother grimaced.

  “Mentally retarded,” the father continued. “But then at four, she began to speak. She said, ‘I need to go home.’”

  “‘I need to go home and get my daughter,’ that’s what she’d say,” the mother added. “She’d say, ‘This is not my home, I have a daughter, I need to go get my daughter.’”

  “And how did you respond?”

  “We told her, this is your life now, perhaps you are remembering a different life. But she … persisted. And, also, she used unusual words.”

  “Words?” He took another sip of sweet tea. “What sorts of words?”

  “Odd words,” the mother said. “We thought she had made them up. Baby talk, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “So I looked into them, for the family,” their friend, the lawyer, said. He took some notes from his briefcase. “I thought it was interesting, you see. The case interested me.”

  “And?”

  The lawyer wagged a finger at Anderson. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

  Anderson suppressed his impatience and smiled thinly at the lawyer, a plump-cheeked, cheerful man waving a sheaf of thin papers in his hand with a zealousness that Anderson knew well. “Yes?”

  “The words are Khari Boli, a dialect from western Uttar Pradesh, over a hundred fifty kilometers from here.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “Absolutely positive!” His attitude rankled Anderson a bit; nobody deserved to be that certain.

  “And you don’t know this dialect?” He addressed the parents. They looked back at him placidly.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Any relatives? Neighbors from that region who might know it? Any acquaintances at all?”

  “I’ve asked,” the lawyer said. “You can ask as well. The answer is no. They don’t speak that dialect here. I wrote it all down.”

  He handed Anderson his notes. Anderson softened; they were not so unalike after all. The lawyer had documented everything, all the girl’s earliest statements, with dates. “I wish I could continue this work myself, but—unfortunately I have responsibilities.” He watched Anderson, his small eyes glowing. Another man entranced by the facts.

  Anderson looked at the paper. All those Khari Boli words; utter gobbledygook to her family, and yet Preeta had known them as a tiny child.

  The child understood words in a language she hadn’t studied or heard before: his first case of xenoglossy. There had been others, but this had been the strongest.

  Pretty Preeta, with her glossy hair and sober eyes.

  They brought the girl inside, but she didn’t speak. The father spoke, his elegant hands framing the words in the air as he explained, the mother passing another tray of roasted almonds and fruit custard and the round, rose-sugary dumplings he couldn’t get enough of.…

  “She always cries in the evening, cries and cries. She says she misses her daughter.”

  “She worries about her daughter. Who
will take care of her? She says her husband is not a good man. Her in-laws are not good people. She says she wanted to go home to her parents, but they won’t let her. She wants to go home and see her daughter.”

  The girl sitting at the table, listening silently to all this, her head bent down slightly like a penitent pupil, hands pressed in her lap.

  “Did she give the name of the village in Uttar Pradesh?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course they’d go. He couldn’t wait, would have left that afternoon if possible. As it was, they had to wait until the morning. All five of them, crammed in Anderson’s rented truck, traveled across the countryside. It was only a hundred miles as the crow flies, but this was India: the trip took nine hours.

  The in-laws had turned them away at the door. He had spoken to them at the doorstep for a long time, his head bowed in the heat, murmuring in his most respectful and persuasive manner, but they stood there with closed faces and heard him out and shook their heads.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t believe—that’s what Anderson remembers thinking. Oh, they believed it was possible that this was their daughter-in-law, reborn, all right. They wanted nothing to do with her, in that life, or this. They wouldn’t even give them the name of the previous personality’s parents, the town she had lived in before coming here. The little girl stood silently. Her memory had encircled this place only, and no other. Who knew why?

  “May we see the daughter?” Anderson had said as the door was closing. “Sucheta’s daughter? Is she home?”

  “There is no daughter.”

  The neighbors said otherwise. There had been a little girl, years ago. She had died. No one knew how.

  Preeta had taken the news silently. She had thanked the neighbors (identifying two of them by name) and walked purposefully down a path to the bank of the river that flowed through the village, where the women were washing clothing. Anderson stood and took notes rapidly with his blue pen, the yellow pad ruffling in the wind, as in a hoarse child’s voice she told them how her husband and her in-laws had treated her. How all alone in this village, so far from her parents, at the age of fourteen she had given birth to a girl and then, two years later, she had gotten pregnant and given birth to another girl. Her mother-in-law had been the midwife.