Had her mother wanted so desperately to keep life going that she’d lost her common sense? Or had she found something at the very end that changed the way she looked at everything? Or was it someone else’s book, someone else’s stars? Janie didn’t know, and she would never know, so she’d put it out of her mind, permanently … or so she’d thought.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. That was one of the things her mother had loved to say. She was a practical woman who worked all day with surgical instruments, but she had always had a soft spot for Shakespeare. Janie had never thought much about the quote; it was something her mother said, usually with a huff of impatience, in moments when she was out of explanations—why her father had never called her, for instance, or, in the hospital, why she had refused to embark on yet another experimental treatment.
The last time Janie had thought of it was the night in Trinidad when Noah had been conceived. That night, after Jeff had left, she couldn’t sleep, so she had walked by herself back to the beach. It was late, and she was conscious as always of her vulnerability, a woman alone, the vulnerability heightened by the nearness of sex, of being seen at one’s most unguarded. That raw moment of closeness with Jeff had been there, she had been in it, and now it was gone, like a lit match flickering out in the humid darkness. She looked at the sky, which made a mockery of the night skies she had mostly known: this was the essence of sky, in its depths of darkness and of light. Its beauty, like a piece of music, stirred her loneliness into something beyond itself, made her look up and out instead of in. She had a message-in-a-bottle impulse to hurl her confusion out into the expanse, in the hope that something (God? her mother?) might be out there, listening.
“Helloooo,” she’d called out, half-comically. “Anyone there?”
She knew she’d have no answer.
And yet, standing by the shore, the waves peeling back to expose the gleaming nakedness of sand pocked here and there with shells and stones and then pushing forward, drawing their eternal curtain over the rawness, a feeling of peace had washed through her. She’d felt something there. Was it God? Was it her mother?
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, she’d thought.
It had been Noah. Noah was her answer, the thing that was there. That had been enough for her.
So it was fitting, she thought, looking out now at a vast expanse of blue sky, that Noah would bring her right back here, to the most abstract of questions, which were now unbearably relevant. For either reincarnation was bunk, or it wasn’t. Either Noah was sick, or he wasn’t. And there was no way to know. There was no way to reason through it, or at least no way she knew, or could imagine.
Despite everything she knew or didn’t know about living, despite the thousands of carefully analyzed, inexplicable cases, despite her moments of panic and her years of good sense, she would have to take a leap.
Twenty-One
“You’re too serious for the beach,” she was saying. She was laughing at him.
“Excuse me, sir?”
It wasn’t Sheila; it was the flight attendant, hovering over Anderson, offering him water and pretzels. He shook himself awake and took the tiny bag but refused the beverage, even though he was parched, afraid to jostle the sleeping child next to him by putting down his tray.
The boy’s mother sat beside her son, looking out the window.
What was her name?
It had fallen down the chute. It was gone.
His mind felt as clear as ever. It was simply the word that eluded him. It was there, right in front of him, taunting him, and yet his brain balked, refusing utterly to reach out even a finger to touch it. He felt like Tantalus, parched and hungry, striving fruitlessly for the cool water and the grapes that were always just out of reach.
Tantalus, punished by the gods for telling humans their immortal secrets. Tantalus had high hopes for humans, and where did that leave him? Doomed, that’s where. Banished to Tartarus. And how was it that he could remember the name and the story of Tantalus, but not the name he needed? Ah, the brain: who knew why it remembered what it remembered, or lost what it lost. And here he was: Jerome Anderson in Tartarus, the deepest region of hell.
Things were falling apart rapidly. The woman’s name was in his folder, of course: on the yellow pad in his briefcase, which lay at his feet. He could bend down right now and retrieve it. This particular bit of information could be attained. Yet who knew when he would lose it again, or what else he would lose? He shouldn’t be here at all, especially since the case was not proceeding according to protocol. Perhaps he should stop. The boy would forget, eventually. But Anderson didn’t know how. He was the man who didn’t stop, that’s what he was, all he knew how to be, from the moment he had returned home from his first cases with Angsley in Thailand.
He had walked in the door two months later, electrified.
Sheila was waiting for him on the couch, her strong legs curled up beneath her. She looked the same: that moon face, as fine as ever, with its sprinkling of freckles across the nose, that heavy cloud of blond hair. He, on the other hand, was a different man.
She looked at him with a piercing, assessing gaze—he hadn’t written her those two months except to cable her when he was coming home—and he was struck with tenderness for all of it: the old red couch with its stuffing showing at the seams and the young wife who was trying to figure out if she still had a husband, the concreteness and sheer flair that constituted life as you were living it, the vibrancy of the illusion. Before he kissed her or took off his jacket he was taking his files from his briefcase and laying them out on the coffee table.
The photographs weren’t pretty, but he wanted her to see. He spread them before her, the dead and the living: the deformities and birthmarks and the coroners’ reports of the previous personalities’ death wounds. The girl with deformed fingers on one hand, the woman who had been killed when she had burned the rice. When he had finished with the last brutal and improbable detail he looked at Sheila and drew in his breath, wondering what she’d say. He felt his whole life, his whole marriage, the only thing aside from his work that had ever meant anything to him, hanging in the balance.
“You certainly did surprise me, Jerry,” she said.
She looked baffled and shocked and amused all at once. There it was, the thing he loved most in her, right there—that shadow of amusement that this was how her life was turning out. “For a moment there when you walked in I thought you were going to tell me you found another woman.”
“This is what I want to do with my life. I want to go back, interview them all again in a year or two. Find more cases.”
“You know that people are going to give you a hard time about this? That nobody is going to take you seriously?”
“I don’t care about what other people think. I only care what you think.” This wasn’t, as it turned out, entirely true.
“You’re giving up a very promising career.”
“I’ll make it work, somehow. For us,” he added, the word dangling awkwardly between them. “So, what do you think?”
She paused, and he held his breath so long he felt light-headed from lack of oxygen. “I don’t know, Jerry. How can I know? What you’re telling me—” She shook her head. “How can it be possible?”
“But you see the data. I’ve shown it to you. What other explanation can there be? You think they’re lying? But what reason would they have to lie? These families aren’t getting any money from this, they’re not looking for attention, believe me.… And, yes, it’s possible that these kids have some kind of super ESP, I’ve thought of that, but these kids aren’t just talking about other people’s lives, they’re saying they are these other people. And if you rule that out—I mean, what other explanation is there? And the birthmarks, the deformities, the way they match up to the modes of death, not always perfectly, no, but there is a connection, a visible connection, and I’ve only just started—there are too many instances for it to be random. It c
an’t be random—”
“This is about Owen, isn’t it?”
For the first time, he stopped talking. She always saw right through him.
She pored, perplexed, over the papers spread out across their coffee table. The notes, the faces, the bodies with the marks on them, the other bodies with deformities, though none as bad as Owen’s. “You think that our son was born the way he was because of—something that happened in a previous lifetime? Is that what you think?”
“Can’t you admit that it’s likely? Or at least possible?” He was pushing her hard, but he couldn’t help it. He needed this.
She frowned pensively. “You’ve always been a sane man, Jerry. A cautious man. It doesn’t seem to me that that has changed, even if—” She shook her head. “So if you think it’s possible, then I’ll admit that it’s possible. I’ll give you that.”
He grasped at her words. “That’s all I ask.”
“You’re going to follow this anyway, until you’re done with it.”
He met her gaze. “I suppose that’s true.”
She sighed, glancing at him sideways with a weary, humorous, reproachful look. It was as if she knew right then and there that he would never be done with it, that they would never have any more children, that she’d spend the rest of her days living in the wake of this obsession until there was nothing more to do but join it.
And he was still at it, wasn’t he?
Despite his compromised capacities, he was going forward. And now he was throwing protocol to the winds. The woman—the one whose name now eluded him—had insisted upon it.
* * *
She had answered the door of her motel room instantly after his hesitant knock. She was wearing the clothes from the day before, and her face looked ashen in the morning light. “We had a bad night,” she said flatly. He’d handed her the pages he’d printed out in the motel’s office, filled with the research he’d gathered—research that indicated a missing child named Tommy Crawford who lived on Asheville Road. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said when she realized what he was giving her. But she took the papers and looked at them while Noah slept soundly in the next bed.
“You think this is the previous personality,” she said at last.
“I do.”
She kept picking up the pages and putting them down again.
“It’s not unheard of for people to reincarnate into a different race or culture.” Anderson spoke in a low voice. He tried to keep his urgency in check. “There have been numerous cases in which children in India remembered lifetimes spent in a different caste. And some Burmese children have seemed to remember previous lives as Japanese soldiers who were killed in Burma during World War II.”
“So. If we do this—” She gave him a sober, warning look. “If we do go to Ohio—”
His heart leaped. He couldn’t help it. “Yes?”
“We go now. Today.”
“That’s not how it works,” Anderson had said reasonably. “We e-mail the family first. Or write a letter, if we can. We don’t just show up on their doorstep.” He had done this, as a matter of fact, in Asia, when the previous personality’s family had no phone or method of contact. But in Asia the families were not like American families, and more likely than not they were at least curious to see him.
“That’s exactly what we are doing,” she had said. “I’m not going to approach some other grieving mother without being sure. Not again. If Noah doesn’t recognize anything, we turn around and go home, and they are none the wiser.”
His calm began to dissipate into the air. She couldn’t be serious. “It’s better to contact the family first.”
“I’m going, with or without you. I’m going to take the next flight out.”
“It’s ill-advised.”
“Then so be it. I am not going to take Noah home only to start this all up again. So I guess it’s now or never. And if we do this…” She sat up straight on the bed. “You can’t write about it. You understand? This is about my son, not your legacy.”
He had tried to smile. He was so tired. “Fuck my legacy.”
* * *
His legacy—oh, he had had high hopes for himself, but he hadn’t gotten very far. There were so many things he still didn’t know. Why were some children born with memories of past lives, their bodies marked with the imprints of past traumas? Was it related (it had to be) to the fact that 70 percent of the previous personalities these children remembered had died traumatic deaths? If consciousness survived death—and he had shown that it did—then how did this connect with what Max Planck and the quantum physicists realized: that events didn’t occur unless they were observed, and therefore that consciousness was fundamental, and matter itself was derived from it? Did that therefore make this world like a dream, with each life, like each dream, flowing one after the other? And was it then possible that some of us—like these children—were awakened too abruptly from these dreams, and ached to return to them?
The blue sky through the window spread out before him, on and on. So many things he’d longed to explore further. He’d wanted to plumb the very nature of reality. He’d wanted to finish this book. But now his mind was shattered, and all he wanted was to help a single child.
He looked at the boy slumped against him, his body nestled on Anderson’s arm. He could have been any child, sweetly sleeping. He was any child.
“He likes you,” the woman said.
“And I like Tommy. Very much.”
She drew in her breath sharply. “Noah.”
“What?”
“His name is Noah.”
Of course. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how that happened.” Jerry. Jerry. Pull it together.
She had turned pale.
“I’m sorry. I’m a little tired—”
“It’s all right,” she said. But she looked away from him and bit her lip.
Noah. Tommy. Everything came down to names, didn’t it? The evidence that one was this person and not that one. And if they got lost, the names—when they got lost—and all you had left was one long, blurry stretch of humanity, like a bank of clouds in the sky—what then?
He’d have to do better. He’d have to keep the names close. Noah, Tommy. He’d roll them up and fill the cracks in his mind with them the way people tucked scraps of paper wishes between the stones of the Wailing Wall.
They looked together at the sleeping boy.
“You know I can’t promise anything,” Anderson murmured.
“Of course.”
She was lying, though. She thought he had promised her everything.
Twenty-Two
Denise perched at the end of her chair and surveyed the bowl of M&M’s that always seemed untouched on the doctor’s side table. Did anyone ever eat them? Were these the same M&M’s she’d been staring at for almost seven years? Someone, she thought, should do an experiment. Put all the green ones on top and see what happens. Bust the good doctor cold.
“Denise?”
“I’m listening.” She didn’t feel like looking at him but decided he’d probably make a note of it if she didn’t. His elegant, horsey face seemed even more elongated in worry.
“I said, everybody regresses sometimes,” Dr. Ferguson was saying. “It happens.”
She looked back at the M&M’s bowl. “Not to me.”
“You’re too hard on yourself. You’ve done incredible work creating a life for yourself. Don’t forget that.”
“A life for myself.” She said it the way she might say “A half-pound of salami, sliced thin, please,” or: “Time for your meds, Mr. Randolph.” But what she meant, which anyone could see if he was not a fool, was: my life is shit.
Dr. Ferguson was not a fool. She felt him regarding her. “You’re disappointed in yourself.”
She popped a green M&M in her mouth. The sugar turned to dust on her tongue. She couldn’t taste a thing. “I’m done.”
“And what does that mean?”
She might as well tell
him the truth. Who else could she tell? “I’m done with it. I worked so hard all these years to pull it together for Charlie, and one phone call puts me right back there and it’s as if it all happened yesterday. And I can’t—” She took a breath. “I can’t do it.”
She felt him choosing his words cautiously. “I understand it must be extremely upsetting to feel that way again.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
He crossed one long skinny leg over the other. “And what other choice do you have?” His Adam’s apple bobbed visibly in his neck, like Ichabod Crane’s in a movie she’d once seen. I guess this makes me the headless horseman, she thought. About right, too. She had no thoughts or feelings left. She was watching herself from a great height, the way the recent dead are said to watch their own bodies.
“Let’s just say I’m considering my options.”
“Are you telling me you’re thinking of suicide?”
She took note of his concern. It was like a thought bubble hovering over his head, meaning nothing. She shrugged. A habit of Charlie’s that always aggravated her, but she saw its usefulness now.
“Because if that’s what you mean, if you’re serious, I have to take some action. You know that.”
That hospital. Those stained sofas, chipped floors, vacant faces watching mindless television. She shuddered.
Anyway, he would never give her a prescription if she seemed suicidal. And she needed the prescription. She didn’t know why she had said it. “You know I would never do that. Never. I would never give him the satisfaction.”
“Him?”
She gave the doctor a withering look. “The man who stole Tommy, of course.” The minute she said it she knew it was the truth, that she couldn’t do it. Damn it to hell. And she’d been feeling so calm, too. “And of course I couldn’t do that to Charlie.”
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