The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  They took the second baby away from her instantly.

  Stillborn, they had said later, but she had known better, she had heard the cries.

  When she accused them of killing her baby daughter they had beaten her, kicking her in the face and stomach that very night, so soon after giving birth. When she felt the pain she thought maybe it hadn’t happened and the baby was still inside her, but she gave birth this time to a black sorrowful thing made of blood and tissue.

  Maybe she would have died, anyway. She might have been hemorrhaging.

  In any case, they would never know; she threw herself in the Yamuna River the next morning.

  The girl, Preeta, told them this story; it poured out of her in fluid sentences far beyond the scope of the child she was then, standing hoarse-voiced on the bank of that muddy rushing river while the women slapped their clothes clean on the stones at river’s edge and the pages of his pad rose up and down like a fan, like breathing.

  He had taken notes.

  They had driven back the nine hours to her village in silence. Even the girl was silent.

  He had told them he would come back next time he was in India, to follow up, to see how much she still remembered. He remembered how the father had shaken his hand with a good, strong handshake. How the girl had grabbed him about the legs, startling him, as he said good-bye.

  Preeta, with her glossy hair and sober eyes, waving to him from across the courtyard …

  Nothing to do but let the memory of it fill his mind like the scent of jasmine, like the scent of red mud.

  He tried to follow up with his best cases every few years. But he was busy, at the prime of his life, pursuing cases in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Lebanon, building up the Institute, writing articles, writing his first book, then trying to get it reviewed in reputable places. All of this took time, and it was four years before he made it back to that part of India.

  He wrote them a letter in advance of his visit but received no reply, so he did what he always did in those situations: he traveled across the country to see them.

  The mother came to the door, distracted, a new baby on her hip. She flinched when she saw him.

  They had gone back to the village without him. She explained this to him a short while later, in the same room he remembered with its shuttered window, its brass table glinting in the dimness, its ornately carved wooden Ganesh. This time the mother talked, while the father sat in the shadows, listening.

  Preeta at nine. She showed him a picture. As lovely as ever, long-limbed and graceful, with a melancholy smile. She had been begging them to go back, to see the village again, and after a while the pleas were more than her doting parents could bear. Her father had business sometimes in that area, selling some textiles in a nearby town, so he took her with him. They had stayed in a small house in the village that sometimes served travelers.

  By the time her father awoke the next morning, she was gone.

  The same river, twice.

  The villagers said she hadn’t hesitated. She had walked purposefully to the river and had slid right down the side of the bank, red mud staining the back of her sari, the bright sea-green color waving like a flag in the gray waters. It happened quickly. Not one of the villagers setting up for the morning market said a word. They simply stood in shock and stared down at the dark, pretty head with its set face bobbing on the river’s surface, the green fabric spreading out on the gray water and then sinking under its own weight, losing its brightness to the rush of the gray, as she went around the bend.

  Nobody jumped in after her. They didn’t know her. She was a strange girl in a small village. The river was dangerous. They never found the body.

  Anderson had felt himself suffocating in that dark room. He thanked Preeta’s parents, feebly, apologetically, for taking the time to tell him their story, and stumbled outside, right into a monsoon. He stood there letting the skies fall down on his head. In a moment of confusion he thought that it was his child who had done this. His child that he had lost.

  If he hadn’t come to them, they would never have gone to the village, and the girl would have forgotten.

  There was some follow-up to do in the village, taking down the villagers’ accounts of the death. He did his research, he took it all down, every witness, his hand writing out the descriptions in careful blue ink on yellow paper while his inner eye was always trained on that muddy river, that bobbing head. He couldn’t look at the river directly; he was afraid he might hurl himself in.

  He went on a bender that night, seeking to bathe in oblivion, but the questions flew at him like crows that had been waiting only for him to open the door, crows flying at his face.

  It was his fault.

  His fault that the child’s remains lay somewhere at the bottom of the river. His fault she would never have her own children, her own life.

  His research was useless. Worse.

  He had always believed in lucidity: in looking as clearly as possible at what was, despite the desire to veer off into comforting illusion and projection, and to follow the results rationally. So he couldn’t protect himself now from the questions that followed: What did it signify, to be reborn only to relive the previous life’s anguish? What was the sense in that? What was the meaning?

  He could see, suddenly and for the first time, the appeal of escape, of nihilism. And yet some part of him, even then, the scientist in him, held him together, speaking clearly and steadily under the cacophony of blame and grief: Could the suicidal urge pour like a phobia or a personality characteristic from one life to the next? Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken?

  He was not a praying man, not at all, never, but he said a prayer anyway, standing on the bank of the river he couldn’t bring himself to look at, that her next life would be far from here.

  He had pulled himself out of his despair only with brute will. He had gone cold turkey on the long train ride back to Calcutta, the craving pecking at his nerves, hands trembling in evidence of an addiction he had only dimly realized.

  When he emerged at last, shaken and sober, he had known that there were questions he couldn’t ask himself. That there were attachments he couldn’t make. It was the only way to continue. And he had continued in this way, steadily working.

  Until now.

  In the motel minibar, there were more tiny bottles—a whole row of them. Anderson turned the key and opened the door again and stared. It seemed only days earlier that he had stopped drinking, not decades. Oblivion had been waiting patiently for him all these years. All right then, he thought. He reached for another little vodka.

  No.

  He ran to the bathroom and spat and washed his mouth out, brushing his teeth twice. Not that way. Not after all this time. He threw the key to the fridge in the toilet and flushed, but it remained in the basin, glinting like treasure at the bottom of the sea.

  He made his way back to the bed and stretched his body out, trying to revive the feeling of warmth the vodka had generated under his skin. He could taste the alcohol on his lips under the Crest. On the other side of the wall, the boy was still sobbing.

  Damn.

  He liked him. The boy. Noah.

  Damn. Damn. Damn.

  * * *

  When Anderson dozed off at last, he dreamed of Owen. He dreamed that his son was whole. Owen was whole and Sheila was happy and there was no need to go to Thailand, no matter what Angsley had said on the telephone. He could stay in Connecticut with his family and his lab rats.

  He awoke suddenly, to a feeling of loss so pure that at first he couldn’t speak.

  He sat up in bed. The room was still dark. His mind was clear.

  I can help him, he thought. I can help this child. I got it wrong, but it’s not too late to change that. So we had the wrong previous personality. Okay. That’s happened before. I have the information I need now. I’ll convince his
mother. For Noah, I’ll get it right.

  But he had given up. Hadn’t he?

  He got up and opened the blinds, looking out the window at the dawn beginning to assert itself across the indifferent parking lot, pale light illuminating the street. Another day, whether anyone liked it or not. Yet he felt himself despite all his apprehensions hungry to begin it.

  He walked over to his computer and turned it on. He could hardly wait for it to boot up. He opened the search window and typed in Tommy Asheville Road.

  Twenty

  Janie buckled in Noah and then herself with a feeling of grim determination.

  In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped the others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.

  What kind of idiot came up with that rule? They didn’t understand human nature at all.

  She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two entities with separate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn’t realize that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.

  And meanwhile, she was lying to her own son, and this was making him howl in distress, disturbing the other passengers on the plane, disrupting their ability to hear how to fasten a seat belt, and seriously addling her already compromised good sense.

  Noah wanted to go to Asheville Road, and they were going to Asheville Road, but he couldn’t know that, not yet, not this time. Brooklyn by way of Dayton, that’s what she’d said to him, grateful that he was still too young to make sense of a map. She was not about to make the same mistake twice. She’d make a new mistake instead, if need be.

  “I want to see my mama!” Noah was yelling, and the other passengers looked at her as if she were lying to them, too.

  The plane readied itself for takeoff and began wheeling forward, barreling down its runway. She had never been afraid of flying, but now she felt something like alarm at the plane’s initial tremors as it rose.

  When she was pregnant, she’d read studies that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol could cross through the placenta and into the fetus, affecting fetal development and causing low birth weight. This made sense to her: it wasn’t just the carrots she ate, the vitamins she took: what she felt, her baby felt. She had tried to remain as calm as possible, turning down a plum job with a big corporate firm so as not to adversely impact her developing baby with long hours and maximum stress.

  Now she felt the cortisol spiking through her system and wondered if Noah could still somehow feel it, if tiny particles of her stress surrounded the air he breathed and made everything worse. She couldn’t help it, though. The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of a world?

  From the moment she’d stepped on the Greyhound bus until the moment she’d walked onto the plane with Noah and Jerry at Dulles Airport, she’d had the feeling of rolling down a steep hill. She couldn’t stop. If she put her hands out on either side to slow the momentum, they would scrape themselves raw.

  The plane lifted into the sky. Noah’s voice rose to a high, keening wail. And she was left with herself. What was she doing? How could she revisit this idea, after the fiasco they had so recently encountered? How could she risk hurting yet another mother?

  How could she imagine that Noah was not hers and hers alone?

  And yet, as if in response, the line came suddenly into her head:

  Your children are not your children.

  Where had she heard that? Who had said it?

  Janie leaned her head briefly against the seat in front of her and patted her shrieking son’s knee.

  Your children are not your children.

  She remembered now, as she listened to the cries overtaking her in waves of sound and saw the flight attendant frowning down the aisle in her direction: it was a song. A Sweet Honey in the Rock song she’d heard with Noah last summer at a free concert in Prospect Park.

  It was an early July evening, the air mild and breezy. She had settled on a blanket with some friends and enough hummus and pita and carrots to feed a small city of preschoolers. The singers’ voices had blended in perfect a cappella harmony (Your children are not your children … though they are with you, they belong not to you), and Janie had taken off her shoes and wriggled her weary toes, listening to her friends’ worries (private vs. public schools, thoughtless husbands). She herself couldn’t afford private school and had no husband to complain of, but she was happy, because the song was wrong, and Noah was hers, and it was a beautiful evening, and she couldn’t imagine having much love left inside of her for anybody else, anyway.

  How could she have imagined then that she would be here, barreling faster than breath toward a woman who was not expecting them?

  Only last summer, and yet it may as well have been another life.

  “I WANT MY MAMA!” Noah shouted again, and the whole plane could hear him: as if she were kidnapping him, as if he hadn’t always been entirely hers.

  * * *

  When the plane was safely aloft and Noah had finally exhausted himself, crashing into a fitful sleep, Janie reached under the seat in front of her and pulled out the pages that Anderson had printed out the night before. Copies of newspaper articles from the Millerton Journal and Dayton Daily News about Tommy Crawford, who lived on Asheville Road and was nine when he’d gone missing. He was a student at McKinley Elementary, where his mother was a schoolteacher.

  The photograph in the newspaper article was from school picture day. American flag on one side, cheesy rainbow backdrop against a fake blue sky. You could almost hear the photographer urging: Smile wide, now. Smile big. Could be any boy, really. His skin was a light brown. He was African American. She didn’t know why this should be surprising to her. He grinned up at her. He had a nice smile.

  “AUTHORITIES CALL OFF SEARCH FOR MISSING BOY”

  The Greene County police force called off the search today for Tommy Crawford, nine, of 81 Asheville Road, who disappeared from his Oak Heights neighborhood on June 14. Though the child is feared to be dead, Detective James Ludden, who had been leading the search effort, stated that “as far as I’m concerned, this case isn’t over until we find the boy, one way or another.”

  Crawford, who attended McKinley Elementary School, is by all accounts a bright and popular boy. His parents describe a cheerful child who loves baseball and is a devoted older brother to Charles, eight. “Charlie misses his big brother,” his parents, Denise and Henry Crawford, said in a statement. “We miss our beloved boy. If you have Tommy with you or know where he is, please, please call—”

  She looked away. There was too much pain in this piece of paper.

  They were in the clouds now, on their way to a place she’d never been. She was flying on instinct, a mystery even to herself.

  Janie believed in consistency. It was something she took pride in. She said, “No crackers before bedtime,” and then she stuck with it. She had been even-tempered (mostly); she had been constant (as much as possible). Kids needed that.

  She had tried to create order in Noah’s life the way her mother had created order in her own, after the chaos of living with her father. She didn’t remember much of the time before her father had left them. There was a memory of sitting high up on his shoulders at the state fair—but was that a real memory or something she made up from a picture she had? There was the time the two of them went to the mall on some errand and he had spontaneously bought a huge stuffed polar bear f
or her, far too big for any room but the living room, and her mother had objected but then laughed and let her keep it there beside the TV. There was the smell of his pipe and his scotch, and the sound of him banging on the door all night long when he drank and her mother wouldn’t let him in. There was her mother holding a water glass filled with red wine (the first and only time Janie had seen her drink), telling her in the matter-of-fact voice she always had that she had asked him to leave and he wasn’t ever coming back, and she was right; he didn’t. Janie was ten then. She remembered that day perfectly, the startling sight of her mother drinking in the afternoon, the way the wine had splashed as her mother talked and Janie had been nervous it would spill over.

  After that, her mother had gone back to work as a nurse and they got into a regular rhythm. She started working nights when Janie was thirteen, but she was home to oversee schoolwork, and always made sure there were healthful dinners in the house for her to warm in the microwave and clean pressed clothes for her to put on in the morning before school. And when those nights got a little lonely, Janie retreated to her room, where everything was exactly the way she wanted it to be. She opened the door and saw her framed posters of foggy European castles and horses; her furniture hand-painted in cheerful primary colors; her closets organized by color scheme; her color-coded world.

  A lifetime of creating orderly spaces had followed, and what good had it done? When the world was not orderly.

  Even her mother had been, in the end, a mystery to her.

  When she had gone through her mother’s house that week after her death—those days when she was hardly conscious, her heart frozen over with grief, though words fought their way occasionally to the surface and cracked through (words like why and orphan, though as far as she knew her father was still alive somewhere, and God, whom she had never been taught to believe in but was furious at all the same)—she’d found in the drawer of her mother’s bedside table the kind of book her mom had always made fun of. It even had a rainbow on its cover and a new-agey title: You Can Change Your Life. She flipped through the pages: it had chapters on meditation, karma, and reincarnation, ideas her atheistic mother had never seemed to give a second’s thought—she’d roll her eyes and say, “Who has time to think about that? When you’re gone, you’re gone.” Yet the book was well thumbed and heavily underlined, with passages marked with stars and exclamation points. One sentence, Everything is a projection of mind, had three stars next to it.