The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  Only nothing wasn’t nothing. The nothing had crawled inside of him like those parasites he’d read about in biology class, like that worm in Africa that crawled into your toe when you were swimming and before you knew it had eaten you whole. Every time he heard Tommy’s name or saw his face, every day at first and then less and less as the months and years went on, he’d feel that worm gnawing away at another piece of him. It rotted his brain so that he couldn’t focus in school anymore. Once when he was really fucked-up he saw Tommy’s face on a poster and thought it was his own dead face smiling at him. That’s what the nothing was like.

  Until today, when he had heard Tommy’s words coming out of the little white kid.

  The people were moving closer now. He could hear them rustling through the brush. He should be running. He lay still, listening to his own steady, easy breaths. Staring up at all the stars. This must be what it feels like to lose your mind, he thought, but he felt clearer than he had been in a long time. He had wanted to be a good person once, or at least not a bad one, but then he had shot Tommy Crawford and he had been so afraid that he’d let him die in the well. He hadn’t wanted to do it, but he had done it just the same.

  The flashlights’ beams crossed the dirt and the tree roots and moved up to his face. He blinked into the blinding lights. It was the police. He’d know their flat robot voices anywhere.

  He closed his eyes and saw the stars again. All the pressure in his mind was loosening; he breathed it out into the sky. He had held on to the words for so long (it was me; I did it) and now he could release them. All he had to do was speak.

  Thirty-Five

  Janie saw the flashlight first, swooping across the road. When she drew up next to Anderson he looked at her through the car window without recognition, his shirt untucked, his eyes wild. The sight of him shocked her. She hadn’t realized he’d cared so much for her son. She opened the door and he blinked and then got in without a word.

  “I’m going to check the house again,” she said. She would not let herself stop moving, or think.

  “Right.” He nodded. They drove on to the house in silence.

  A detective in a brown suit was standing by a car in the driveway as Janie pulled up. He was pacing with his back to her, yelling on the phone. Janie stepped out of the car and his words flung themselves at her. “We need to drain it right now, goddamn it. I don’t care how deep it is, if he says the child’s body is in there—”

  The phrases echoed in Janie’s mind, chopped in pieces. Jumbled.

  Drain it—

  The child’s body—

  She felt herself slipping away. This wasn’t real. She wouldn’t let it be real. She would go far away from wherever it was that this was happening.

  “Come into the house.” She heard Anderson’s voice, but the words didn’t mean anything to her.

  “Come on.”

  It was good not to understand words. If you let yourself understand words, then you would feel them and there was no telling what might happen.

  Anderson was taking her hand and trying to lead her forward but she had no feeling in her feet. That’s what flesh was like in the unreal world. Like shadows. The man next to her was a shadow, and the detective was a shadow, and the figures moving slowly toward her across the yard, two tall shadows, one short, like a child, like—

  Noah! Janie’s heart exploded. She hurled herself forward.

  He was clinging to Denise Crawford’s waist and looking up at her. Beautiful, dirty Noah, swirls of snot across his cheeks. Janie was standing right in front of him now, but he didn’t move his eyes from the other woman’s face.

  “Noah?”

  He wouldn’t look at her. Why wouldn’t Noah look at her? How could that be possible? She felt her knees buckling. She was falling, only something was behind her, holding her arms, keeping her up. It was Anderson. She let him hold her up.

  “Noah! It’s me! It’s Mommy!”

  Noah turned, then. He took her in quizzically, from very far away, the way a bird deep in the forest might look down at a passing human.

  They all watched as he looked, and sought a breath, and couldn’t find it.

  * * *

  Breathe, Noah, breathe.

  It had never been this bad. Janie held him in her lap in the car, the inhaler pressed against his mouth. Didn’t even bother with the car seat.

  Blue and red lights flashing through the windshield, leading the way. If Noah was alert right now he would have loved that. His own police escort, complete with siren and flashing lights.

  Breathe. His head lolling back against her as if he were an infant. Even through the new worry she felt the relief of having him in her arms again, when she’d thought she might never have another chance. Breathe.

  “He’s going to be okay, right?” the Crawford boy asked.

  He’d insisted on coming and was sitting next to her, tapping his fingers on his knees in a frenzy of percussive nervousness. Janie wished his mother would tell him to stop, but Denise seemed oblivious. She was sitting up front in the passenger seat, giving Anderson directions in a dazed voice.

  “He’ll be fine,” Janie said, speaking to herself as much as anybody. “He could use some more powerful albuterol, but he’ll get that at the hospital.”

  “This happened before?” the teenager said.

  “Yes. He has asthma.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “So it’s the asthma?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow, that’s a relief. I thought maybe he was having some kind of flashback about what happened last time and he was, you know … drowning all over again.”

  Janie didn’t say anything for a moment. She held on to her baby boy, who was struggling to breathe and had nothing to do with that story or any story. Anderson piped up from the driver’s seat, “It doesn’t work like that. Though there is sometimes a connection between the mode of death and … abnormalities. Sometimes subjects who have asthma had a previous personality who drowned or was somehow asphyxiated.”

  Shut up, Jerry, Janie thought.

  “Good to know,” Charlie said at last.

  Anderson glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “He talked to you about drowning?”

  “Yeah. In the well. He got himself pretty worked up.”

  “I don’t understand.” Janie turned on Charlie. “He told you he drowned in a well? Why’d he tell you that?”

  “Maybe ’cause he thinks I’m his brother?”

  She looked at him: a teenager wearing a sleeveless Cleveland Indians T-shirt and shorts, his long, wiry body radiating youth. “Do you believe him?”

  “You don’t really have any choice, if you listen to him, do you?”

  She clung to Noah. He was leaning against her chest, his hand tightly clutching her arm. She could feel each of his breaths scraping itself together inside of him. “I guess not.”

  “You don’t believe him?” Charlie was looking at her.

  “No, I do,” she said. It was true.

  “Oh, you don’t want to, though?” He was more perceptive than he seemed.

  “I guess—I wanted him to be all mine.”

  He laughed.

  “You think that’s funny?”

  He had a smile that took up his whole face. Like Noah’s smile. Like Tommy’s.

  “Lady, no offense, but you don’t know anything,” Charlie said. “He was never all yours.”

  Thirty-Six

  Janie thought she’d have that image in her mind forever: Noah lying on the hospital bed, pale but breathing, one hand holding the albuterol mask to his mouth, the other clutching what he had reached for first, which was Denise’s hand. Denise was sitting next to him, holding the small hand in her own.

  Janie sat in the chair next to Denise. She’d thought about asking to take the other woman’s seat by her son, but she couldn’t risk upsetting Noah. At one point, Denise had loosened her hand a bit from Noah’s and shifted, as if to offer Janie he
r rightful place by Noah’s side, but Noah had grabbed her wrist, his eyes meeting hers over the mask. They regarded each other for a moment like two horses recognizing each other across a field, and then Denise shrugged slightly and settled back again, placing her other hand over his.

  After fifteen minutes or so of this, Janie couldn’t bear it any longer.

  “Noah? I’m going to be right outside. Just for a little while. Right outside that door,” she’d said, and the two of them had turned their heads and looked at her as if they hadn’t known she was in the room.

  Janie didn’t want to leave him there like that, but she had to get out. She needed air. She started to back slowly out of the room.

  “Mom?”

  Janie and Denise both turned to him. He took the mask off.

  He looked at Janie. “You coming back?”

  Never had she thought that the sudden spark of fear in her own child’s eyes would be something she could savor. But everything had been turned on its head this day.

  “Of course, sweetie. I’ll be back in a minute. I’ll be right outside that door.”

  “Okeydoke.” He cast her a sleepy, contented grin. “See you soon, Mommy-Mom.”

  “Put the mask back on, sweetie.”

  He settled the mask back on his face with the hand that wasn’t holding on tightly to Denise. Then he gave her a thumbs-up.

  Janie pulled the curtain and closed the door gently and left her palms there, resting her forehead against the door. One breath, then the next. That was how it was done. One breath, then the next.

  “He’s fine, you know.”

  She turned. A gaunt old man was sitting on a chair in the hallway. It was Anderson. When had he become so frail?

  “They’ll let him out soon,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  She sat down next to him, blinking up at the ceiling, at the small dark bodies of dead bugs trapped on the bottom of the bright bowl of light. One breath, then the next.

  “Quite a day,” Anderson said.

  “I should go back in there. I don’t even know that woman.”

  “Noah does.”

  Silence.

  “Most of them forget with time, you know,” Anderson said. “Present life takes over.”

  “Is it bad to hope for that?”

  Anderson’s rigid body seemed to soften. He patted her hand. “It’s understandable.”

  When she closed her eyes, the bright oval of light shone inside her lids. She opened them. Her brain was roiling. “That man … the one the police have. He’s the one who killed Tommy?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Will Noah have to be there? At the trial?”

  Anderson shook his head, a wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “A previous personality isn’t much of a witness.”

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I still don’t understand how they found him.”

  “I expect … it had to do with Noah.”

  She would ask later. She would find out later. There was only so much information a body could handle at one time. One breath, then the next.

  Anderson’s back was straight as a rail, his hands in his lap. At attention, still.

  “You don’t have to wait here, you know,” she said. “You can go to the hotel. Take a cab. Get some rest.”

  “It’s all right. We’ll rest … on the day after today.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Right. Tomorrow.”

  The word lingered in the air.

  “And tomorrow,” he murmured.

  “And tomorrow,” she said. “Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

  He glanced at her, startled. “To the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

  “You know your Shakespeare,” she said. Perhaps he also had a Shakespeare-quoting mother. She felt all of a sudden as if her mother was in the room with them. Maybe she was. Could people be reborn and also be here, as spirits? But that was a question for another hour.

  Anderson smiled ruefully. “Some words I remember.”

  “Everybody forgets words sometimes.” She thought back to the way he seemed to substitute some words for others. The way the GPS had flummoxed him. “But it’s not just that, is it?”

  He was silent a moment.

  “It’s degenerative. Aphasia.” He smiled dryly. “That word I can’t forget.”

  “Oh.” She felt it like the blow it was. “I’m so sorry, Jerry.”

  “There’s more to life than memory. So they tell me.”

  “There’s the present moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “Memory can be a curse,” she said. She was thinking of herself, of Noah.

  “It is what it is.”

  Silence.

  “Maybe I will go, then.” He put his hands on his knees, as if willing himself to stand.

  “Actually … Can you stay a few more minutes?” There was no way to keep the need from leaping out of her voice.

  His eyes seemed silver in the bright fluorescent light. “All right.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I get you something?” he said. “A cup of coffee?”

  She shook her head.

  “Or if you’re hungry, I could go to the—I could—”

  “Jerry?”

  “Yes?” He looked—what was it he looked? For the first time, with her own desperation finally waning, she saw him as he was: how hard he had worked in his life, and with what courage; how tired he was now, and how deeply he felt he had failed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For … what you did for Noah.”

  He nodded faintly. His eyes shimmered briefly and he closed them. He settled deeper into the chair, stretching his long legs out and to the side, so as not to block traffic in the hallway. She felt the tension flowing out of him, leaving his body and moving out into the air. He leaned his head back against the wall, next to hers, their hair almost but not quite brushing against each other’s.

  He let out a soft exhalation. “You’re welcome.”

  John McConnell, a retired New York City policeman working as a security guard, stopped at an electronics store after work one night in 1992. He saw two men robbing the store and pulled out his pistol. Another thief behind a counter began shooting at him. John tried to shoot back, and even after he fell, he got up and shot again. He was hit six times. One of the bullets entered his back and sliced through his left lung, his heart, and the main pulmonary artery, the blood vessel that takes blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs to receive oxygen. He was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.

  John had been close to his family and had frequently told one of his daughters, Doreen, “No matter what, I’m always going to take care of you.” Five years after John died, Doreen gave birth to a son named William. William began passing out soon after he was born. Doctors diagnosed him with a condition called pulmonary valve atresia, in which the valve of the pulmonary artery has not adequately formed, so blood cannot travel through it to the lungs. In addition, one of the chambers of his heart, the right ventricle, had not formed properly as a result of the problem with the valve. He underwent several surgeries. Although he will need to take medication indefinitely, he has done quite well.

  William had birth defects that were very similar to the fatal wounds suffered by his grandfather. In addition, when he became old enough to talk, he began talking about his grandfather’s life. One day when he was three years old, his mother was at home trying to work in her study when William kept acting up. Finally, she told him, “Sit down, or I’m going to spank you.” William replied, “Mom, when you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad a lot of times, and I never hit you!” …

  William talked about being his grandfather a number of times and discussed his death. He told his mother that several people were shooting during the incident when he was killed, and he asked a lot of que
stions about it.

  One time, he said to his mother, “When you were a little girl and I was your daddy, what was my cat’s name?”

  She responded, “You mean Maniac?”

  “No, not that one,” William answered. “The white one.”

  “Boston?” his mom asked.

  “Yeah,” William responded. “I used to call him Boss, right?” That was correct. The family had two cats, named Maniac and Boston, and only John referred to the white one as Boss.

  JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE

  Thirty-Seven

  Bones don’t lie. That’s what the archaeologists say, and they’re right.

  Bones don’t make up stories because they want to believe them. They don’t repeat something they overheard somewhere. They don’t have ESP. They are verifiable, carrying in their fissures the truth of our flawed materiality and our uniqueness. The crack in the femur, the holes in the teeth. So there could be no greater evidence, to Anderson’s way of thinking, than the bones positively identified as belonging to Tommy Crawford, which were discovered in an abandoned well in the woods not far from the Clifford residence.

  Anderson stood next to Janie, Noah, and Tommy’s family, looking down at the hole in the earth into which they had lowered an expensive box covered with expensive flowers already wilting in the heat. He thought he ought to be observing the reactions of the subjects to these proceedings, but he wasn’t: instead he was thinking that when his own time came, he wanted none of that for himself. Let them leave his hacked-up body on a mountaintop to disintegrate and feed the vultures, as the Tibetan monks did, until the corporeal part of Jerry Anderson was nothing but bones on a ledge. He was thinking it wouldn’t be so very long now, that he would never let his body outlive his mind.

  The boy’s father, Henry, was standing next to the hole, the shovel in his hands. He filled the spade and threw the dirt high over the coffin, the earth seeming to pause in midair and fall with a scattering thud, and then he scooped another shovelful without pausing, until it seemed like one long continuous movement, the shoveling and falling earth and shoveling, his face slick with sweat.