The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  “Why does that not surprise me? You brainwashed this poor child and carted him all the way from New York. And now you want me to play along like this is some kind of game.” She shook her head. “It’s not a game to me. Now get out of my house.”

  “It’s not a game to us, either,” Anderson said slowly, steadily. “Listen, Mrs.—I know you’ve had a loss. A terrible loss. I understand how you feel.”

  “You understand? Why? Who did you lose?”

  “I lost my—my—” He reached for the word but it broke beneath him like a step on a ladder, sending him tumbling into darkness. He saw his wife’s face in his mind’s eye. It was disappointed in him. “My others.” It was all he could find. He’d lost the name of his own wife. His own son.

  Denise Crawford stood up to her full height. She was almost as tall as Anderson. “I said, ‘Get out.’”

  This is why I spent so many years in Asia, he thought. This was what happened with American cases. He stood there. He couldn’t think.

  Janie looked at him, and he followed her down the hall.

  I’m sorry, he thought. Sorry for pulling you into this. Sorry for making you believe in such a pathetic sack of bones.

  “So what do we tell Noah?” she whispered fiercely. Her closeness in the hallway, the breath of her whisper in his face, hit him hard, and he recoiled instinctively from the intensity. “How can I make this right with him?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “That’s all you can say? That’s it? I’ll figure it out?”

  From somewhere nearby, a drumbeat began, ominous, inexorable, as if leading his army to its defeat. He forced himself to lift his head and look into her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  She turned away from him and opened the door of the kitchen. But it wasn’t necessary for her to figure out anything, because Noah was gone.

  Twenty-Five

  It was like a house of cards collapsing, Anderson thought. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. And he, watching the hysteria unfold, more helpless than any of them. He had reached for the words and they weren’t there.

  This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn’t. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted the monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense.

  Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn’t help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn’t go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit.

  Himself included.

  Which was as good an explanation as any for what happened that afternoon.

  But you couldn’t really blame America, could you?

  Because things in India went wrong, too, sometimes, didn’t they?

  Humans were so complex, how could you possibly predict how they would react in the face of the impossible?

  You couldn’t.

  He stood in the center of the kitchen, trying to get his bearings. On the fridge, there was a picture of a grinning Little League team. He squinted at it closely, made out Tommy in the bottom left, holding a placard that read, LITTLE LEAGUE CHAMPIONS MILLERTON SOUTHERN DIVISION, “THE NATIONALS.”

  Ah, the Nationals. The missing piece. He’d forgotten they sometimes named the recreation league teams after the Major Leagues. A good piece of evidence, yet it held no satisfaction for him. What good was evidence now?

  He walked out of the kitchen and began to look for the missing boy.

  * * *

  Janie stood in the back door of Denise’s house and looked out at an expanse of nothing.

  She had let her vigilance flag for merely a minute, but it had been a minute too long, and now Noah was gone.

  She’d done another sweep of the pantry, living room, and bathroom on the ground floor and the teenager was rechecking the other rooms in the house, but he wasn’t there.

  He must’ve slipped out the back door when she was talking to Denise and Charlie went off to practice his drums. He must have thought Denise had rejected him and that’s why she had kicked him. Of course he would have thought that. Or maybe he thought that it was his own fault—his fault, when it was Janie’s … well, no time for that now. There’d be plenty of time for regrets later.

  She opened the back door: a stretch of muddy grass, yellow patched with new green coming up like an inversely graying head. A birdbath cradled a dark puddle of water, a leaf turning round and round in its center. The silhouette of a tree, buds at its fingertips. Then the yard stopped and the fields started, stretching as far as she could see.

  “Noah?”

  She’d forgotten how silent the country was. Somewhere, a dog barked.

  “Noah!”

  How far could a four-year-old get?

  Fragments of consoling words flitted through her head: any minute now, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, it always has been, he’s got to be here somewhere. Underneath them, panic rising like floodwaters, obliterating everything else in its path. The grass stretching out toward the low, green stalks of the newly planted cornfields.

  “NOAH!”

  She broke into a run.

  Cornstalks prickled her ankles as she ran across the fields, searching for a blond head. She felt the tender stalks breaking beneath her feet as she ran. “No-ah!”

  He could be anywhere. He could be curled up on the damp ground just beyond her field of vision, surrounded by green stalks. He could be in the trees beyond the fields, in the dark shadows of the woods.

  Maybe it was the name. He was a stubborn boy. Maybe he was making a point and if she used the other name he’d acknowledge her.

  “Tommy?” The name tore itself from her throat, scratching at the air. “TOMMY!”

  “Noah? Tommy? Noah!” The sound reverberated against the flat earth and the gray bowl of the sky.

  “Tommy! Noah! Tommy!” Janie called, scouring the green and gray world. Was she looking for a blond head or a dark one? Was he to be lost a second time, was that his fate? To be lost and lost and lost again?

  No. You’re panicking. He’s around somewhere. You’ll find him any minute.

  Or maybe you won’t.

  “Noah! Tommy!” She ran past the fields, into the woods, until she had lost all sense of direction. How could she help her boy when she herself was lost?

  She thought then, couldn’t help but think, of Denise Crawford. Denise, who must have stood in this same place not so very long ago, calling out this name, screaming it to the indifferent sky until her voice went hoarse, and in her panic and misery Janie knew that the distance between herself and this other woman had shrunk to nothing. They were mothers. They were the same.

  Twenty-Six

  Denise lay on the bed. She had wanted to help find the boy but her legs were unstable beneath her, and that doctor, or whatever he was, had taken one look at her and insisted she lie down. The pain in her head had been bad but was dulling fast, what with the two more pills she had taken. Looking at herself in the medicine cabinet she had been tempted to pour the whole damn bottle down her throat and put a stop to all of it once and for all, but she consoled herself with two more for now, popping them dry in her mouth and swallowing them without water, and put the rest in her pocket.

  And now she was feeling no pain, no pain at all, thank you very much, and she was in a dream, an alternate reality, whereby everything had turned around upon itself and become something else entirely. Some demons had tried to deceive her, and she had injured an angel who had wanted something from her, but they were gone.

  Shards of sharp voices, slicing through the air. Life was a glass that had dropped and shattered and they were the pieces. The people were the pieces.

  Someone
was calling for Tommy.

  But Tommy was gone.

  Tommy was missing. She could hear herself calling out for him. She’d been spun around and dropped back in that place, in that day she had never left.

  She’d thought she’d put it away, thought she had moved past it, around it—not forgetting, never forgetting, but taking the long way around so she could get through, so she could make it through each day, but she was wrong because it had always been there, playing out on the screen of her soul. She had never left it. That day.

  Tommy!

  She’d woken up to the sound of the boys arguing. Henry had come back the night before bearing last-minute gifts he’d found in some airport, and as usual he’d messed it up and Tommy liked Charlie’s better than his own. So the boys were fighting over it and she woke up to that, still half-asleep, and she’d thought, Damn. Not knowing. Not having the slightest idea what the day would bring. Just thinking, damn, because the kids were fighting and Henry was dead tired next to her, sleeping off all those late-night gigs yet another tour that had gone on and on, making her the single mother she’d never intended to be. They’d fought about it the night before, about him going back to teaching, making some steady money, being there for his family, fought about it in front of the boys as they had always tried not to do. “You’re taking away what I love,” Henry had shouted.

  Taking away what I love.

  And she’d awoken to the sound of the boys arguing and thought: damn, now I’ve got to go deal with this, no one else but me, so she stomped to the doorway and yelled out, “Work it out, boys, or you’re going to wake your papa.” And that’s how she’d started that day.

  And Tommy wanted to play at Oscar’s and she said all right, you can go, because Henry was sleeping and the boys were fighting and she thought it might be better with him out of her hair for a while.

  And so she had her day, her day with Tommy out of her hair. Charlie quiet, playing with his new toy. Henry sleeping. In the afternoon they’d had themselves a leisurely lunch and she decided to cook lasagna for dinner. While she cooked she’d looked out the window and the daffodils were blooming around the birdbath, and Henry was home, and the house was quiet, and she felt her own luck. There was Henry home and Charlie and Tommy and her house with the bird feeder and summer vacation soon and she felt her own luck at having this quiet moment, this life, this day.

  Tommy!

  But it was late afternoon, getting on toward evening, and she went to get Tommy to come home for dinner.

  Walking leisurely down the road. There was no rush. It was Saturday. The green fields glowing in the dusk. Summer coming, and the air sweet with it.

  She passed the barking dog next door and the mailboxes of the Cliffords and the McClures and turned into the cul-de-sac that Oscar lived in, a horseshoe of houses under tall trees swaying in the breeze. One of the trees must have been diseased; there was a man high up in it, sawing away at the branches. She stood and watched and thought what a shame it was, the limbs falling off that big old tree that had been around for centuries, while all around it spring was enveloping the world. In the cul-de-sac, the people were outside their houses, riding skateboards, listening to the radio, washing their cars. Oscar was shooting baskets on his driveway, his mom in her garden on the side of the house, watering the tomatoes. Denise could see the tomatoes as she walked up the steps of the house; they were small and round and green on the vine, like a promise.

  She heard the basketball swishing through the hoop. The gush of water from one of the neighbors washing the soap off his car. The buzzing of the saw on the tree and then the slow cracking as a branch began to fall.

  If you could go back—which you couldn’t—if you could go back, she’d go back to that moment, she’d live right there, standing on the driveway in the springtime listening to Oscar’s ball swish into the basket, waiting for Tommy. That moment before Oscar’s mother looked up from her tomatoes and Denise read the surprise written plainly on the other mother’s face, and her life cracked into two.

  From then on there would always be the piece of life she was living and the other piece, the piece lived in darkness, in which something somewhere was happening to Tommy.

  But it was happening all over again, had never stopped happening, that moment when Tommy had gone missing. She was locked inside it and there would never be any way out, no matter how many pills she took. She’d always be there, in that day, she had just imagined that she’d gone on, that she’d raised Charlie the best she could, that she’d kept on working.

  Denise looked up at the ceiling, her head spinning. Things were rolling too fast now, fragments falling around her like bits of glass. The blue and white lights of the police car flashing in the window. The car she’d called too late, because he had been gone for hours, he’d never made it to Oscar’s house.

  She lay flat on the bed, fingering her pills in her pocket. She liked the feel of them, soft and crumbly around the edges. Friendly. She put another one in her mouth, it was dry and bitter, but another bitter pill was nothing to her.

  She pulled them out of her pocket and looked at them.

  Twelve little friends, winking at her, calling out her name.

  Twenty-Seven

  Janie came in from the cornfields and sat down at the kitchen table next to Anderson. She put her head in her hands and tried to quiet the rush in her mind. Anderson was speaking to someone very slowly on the phone. She wondered how he could stay so composed when Noah was lost. But Noah wasn’t his child, after all. This was a stranger; a researcher. Like Noah, this particular panic belonged to her alone.

  He tried to steady her with his eyes. She avoided him, inspecting Denise’s kitchen. The window overlooking the birdbath and the cornfields. The framed picture of peaches over the stove. The rooster clock, with its loud tick. She didn’t like to think about the suffering that had gone on in this room.

  Anderson hung up the phone. “Police are coming.”

  “Good.” Her voice was raw from shouting. “Did you—”

  “I checked the house.”

  “What about Mrs. Crawford?”

  “Resting, but the child wasn’t there.”

  “And the teenager?”

  “Looking.”

  “Did you look in the basement?”

  “And the attic. We’ll look again soon. We’ll find him,” Anderson said. He looked exhausted, but also focused and awake. He was one of those people, she thought bitterly, who came to life in adversity. She had hoped she might be one of those people, too, but right now she didn’t think so.

  “I should drive around the neighborhood,” Janie said. She stood up. “Give me the keys.”

  “Take a moment,” Anderson said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “One moment.”

  “No!”

  “You can help more if you’re calm.”

  She sat down again at the table. Her knees were shaking.

  “How did this happen? How did I let this happen? He’s four years old!”

  “So he can’t go far.”

  “Can’t he?” She turned to Anderson. “I never should have come here. I never should have taken part in your crazy experiment. What the hell was I thinking?”

  “You were trying to help Noah.”

  “Well, it was a mistake.”

  “Look at me.” His eyes were clear. “We’ll find Noah.”

  Noah. The word caused an avalanche of longing. What she wouldn’t give to have him in her arms again. His plump limbs and soft head. She’d never understood people calling their children delicious, but she got it now, she wanted to find him so she could eat him up, inhale him right back into her body so she would never lose him again.

  Anderson stood up and poured her a glass of water.

  “Here. Drink.”

  She took the glass of water and gulped it down.

  “What if he has an asthma attack while he’s out there? What if the man who took Tommy is still out there?”

&
nbsp; Anderson filled the glass again and handed it to her and she drank it down.

  “Now take a breath.”

  “But—”

  “Take a breath.”

  She took a breath. The clock in Denise’s kitchen kept on ticking; it hadn’t stopped ticking all these years.

  “I’m all right now. I can drive.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He handed her the keys.

  “Be careful, Janie.”

  “Okay.” She clutched the keys in her hands and stood. At the kitchen door, she looked back at Anderson. He had filled a glass of water for himself as well and was sitting at the table, looking at it. He looked tired.

  He hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. She felt sorry she’d been harsh with him before.

  “How did you do it?” she said quietly.

  “Do what?”

  “Lose someone? How did you bear it?”

  “You take a breath,” he said. He took a sip of water. “Then you take another.”

  She stood there, the keys rattling in her hand.

  The doorbell rang.

  Anderson looked up. “The police are here.”

  One case that involved several recognitions is the case of Nazih Al-Danaf in Lebanon. At a very early age, Nazih described a past life to his parents and his seven siblings, all of whom were available for interviews. Nazih described the life of a man that his family did not know. He said that the man carried pistols and grenades, that he had a pretty wife and young children, that he had a two-story house with trees around it and a cave nearby, that he had a mute friend, and that he had been shot by a group of men.

  His father reported that Nazih demanded that his parents take him to his previous house in a small town ten miles away. They took him to that town, along with two of his sisters and a brother, when he was six years old. About a half mile from the town, Nazih asked them to stop at a dirt road running off the main road. He told them that the road came to a dead end where there was a cave, but they drove on without confirming this. When they got to the center of town, six roads converged, and Nazih’s father asked him which way to go. Nazih pointed to one of the roads and said to go on it until they came to a road that forked off upward, where they would see his house. When they got to the first fork that went up, the family got out and began asking about anyone who had died in the way that Nazih had described.