The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  “He’s fine. Sit.”

  She sat. The light in the room was blinding. She took the pill she didn’t need and swallowed it. It was not pain that was causing her light-headedness. It was reality. She was sitting on this too-busy flowered bedspread in this other woman’s room—that was real; and the sunlight in her eyes was real; and here was this other woman, who was also real. And the reality of the situation was also bigger than that … but what did she do with it? Even the thought of it made her head spin.

  “I’m sorry.” The words emerged without thought.

  “For what?” Denise’s face revealed nothing.

  “To take you out of the—party.” The word hovered between them painfully. Janie winced. “I mean, the wake … no, that’s not right. I mean…” Wake up.

  Denise took the glass back from her. “Charlie’s good with kids,” she went on, as if trying to draw her back to normalcy with her patter. “I’ve been trying forever to get him to do some babysitting around here. Make a little money instead of siphoning off my wallet for god knows what. Comic books and junk food and video games, mostly. And that’s only the stuff I know about.”

  “Wow.” Janie tried to pull her mind around to what this woman was saying. “Having a teenager, that must be tough.… I’m just trying to make it through preschool at this point.”

  “Charlie’s a good kid. But he hates to study. And he’s dyslexic on top of it. So…” She shook her head ruefully.

  “Dyslexia … when do you know if they have that?” She hadn’t thought about that one. Yet another thing to worry about.

  Denise handed her a tissue and watched while Janie blew her nose. “Usually around first grade—when they start to read—that’s when the learning disabilities start to become evident.”

  “Oh. I see.” She tried to remember if Noah had any issues recognizing letters. He seemed pretty good at that. “Was Tommy also—”

  “Just Charlie.” Her voice was abrupt.

  Janie brooded on it for a moment. There was a hereditary connection, wasn’t there? But could you inherit things from the family of your previous incarnation? Her head began to swirl again. She took a deep breath. Where did Tommy end and Noah begin? What did Henry and Denise have to do with it? She wanted to ask Denise but didn’t have the courage. “I suppose by the time they are teenagers you know them pretty well inside and out.”

  For the first time, Denise cracked a smile. “Are you kidding me? I don’t know half of what’s in Charlie’s head most of the time. He just—disappeared on me.” The words pricked the air. Her face closed up again. Janie wanted to fill up the space between them but couldn’t find the right thing to say.

  She cast her eyes around the room. There was not much to look at except pictures: school pictures of Charlie and Tommy on the wall (she recognized the one from the newspaper article), others on the bedside table. A framed snapshot of a toddler lurching across the floor toward a beautiful young woman with gold hoop earrings and open arms.

  “That was the day Charlie learned to walk,” Denise said simply. She was standing right next to her, looking over her shoulder. “He went from one or two steps to walking clear across the room. It looks like he’s walking to me, but he was really walking to his brother, right behind me. He idolized that boy.”

  Janie looked again at the picture. She hadn’t realized that the woman in the photo was Denise. She picked up the one next to it.

  A picture of Tommy jumping from a wooden raft. It was a snapshot, but the camera had captured the sun sparkling on the water, the rough-hewed wood of the raft. Tommy was caught in midair, legs splayed; she recognized the pure elation on his face. She knew that expression. She couldn’t look away.

  Denise glanced at the photograph. “That was by the lake house. We used to go there every summer.” Her voice was wistful. “Tommy loved that place.”

  “I know,” Janie said. “Noah talked about it.”

  “Did he? Really?”

  “He told his teachers it was his favorite vacation,” Janie said. The words hovered in her mind a moment, and she waited for the jealousy to follow. But she didn’t feel any jealousy, looking at that picture that seemed to contain the distillation of Noah’s joy. She felt something else flooding through her: gratitude. He had had a good life here, with Denise; for the first time, she realized that she couldn’t separate that from the loving, exuberant boy who had been born to her.

  Denise gently took the picture from her hands and placed it back on the bedside table.

  “He used to cry and cry when we had to go home,” she mused. “‘When we going back there, Mama? When we going back?’ In the car all the way back. Drove us all plumb nuts.”

  “I can imagine,” Janie said. “He gets very attached. He’s always been that way.” But what did always mean? When did always begin?

  “We haven’t been there in years.” Denise’s eyes clouded. “Maybe…”

  The idea shimmered there in the room with them, a mirage of a lake with a blond boy jumping into it. Janie averted her eyes from the child in the photo; it was too much to contemplate. The fantasy faded before either one of them had dared to name it.

  “You seem pretty calm about all this stuff,” Janie said.

  “Calm.” Denise chuckled. “Well. We don’t know each other, do we?”

  “No. We don’t.”

  There was a burst of laughter in the living room.

  “I guess I should go back in there,” Denise said. “There’s a lot of people in my house. And they are having too much fun. This is a funeral, after all.” The smile holding up the edges of her lips seemed fixed there by sheer will. She smoothed her hair back toward its bun, though nothing had gone astray.

  “Okay. But— Just one more thing…”

  The woman stood there, waiting. Janie felt all her questions bubbling up within her; she couldn’t hold them back any longer. “What if Noah doesn’t get over this? What if he wants to be here all the time, just like he wanted to be at the lake?”

  Denise pressed her lips together. “Your son will be all right. His mama loves him like crazy.”

  “Mommy-Mom,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m Mommy-Mom. You were Mama. That’s what he called you.” Denise frowned at her warily. I shouldn’t have said that, Janie thought. But it was too late now. “And what about your son?” she said.

  “Charlie will be all right, too,” Denise said, but she didn’t sound certain. She sounded like she wanted to get out of there.

  “I meant your other son.” It wasn’t the right way to say it; she didn’t know if there was a right way. What do you think of it all? is what she wanted to say. What does it mean?

  It was as if Janie had stepped on a broken toe. Denise’s eyes flared. “Tommy’s gone.”

  “I know. I know. But—”

  “No.”

  “But, Noah—”

  “Is someone else,” she said fiercely. Her eyes shone. “Your son.”

  “Yes. Yes, he is, but … but you yourself saw, didn’t you see, you said you did, that his memories—seemed real. They were real. Weren’t they? And the bones were—” There was no way to articulate what she wanted to say. She shook her head.

  Denise stood wincing in the sunlight that sliced across her face.

  “So—” Janie continued miserably—she couldn’t stop now. “Is it some comfort? Does it help?”

  Denise said nothing. She was standing in a ray of sunlight filled with whirling dust. She seemed both transfixed and utterly at sea and Janie was suddenly ashamed of herself for asking.

  “I don’t know,” Denise said slowly.

  “It’s just that … you seem like you know something.”

  “Really?” Denise started laughing. “’Cause I was kind of hoping you did.”

  And then they were both laughing—the kind of hard, helpless laughter that made Janie’s stomach ache, cracking up at this joke the universe had played on both of them. The moment lasted longer than
Janie had thought possible, until finally they both stepped back, gasping. Denise had tears running down the corners of her eyes and she ran her fingers over her cheeks.

  “Oh, my. They’ll think I’ve been sobbing my eyes out in here,” she said. The words fell like a shadow across the room.

  “I won’t tell them.”

  “Better not.”

  They glanced at each other. They were connected and yet they were each on their own with this.

  “I guess I better get going,” Janie said reluctantly. “Before Noah eats all the brownies.”

  Denise wiped her eyes with a tissue. “Ah, let him enjoy himself.”

  “You’ve forgotten what a four-year-old on a sugar rush is like. They turn into tiny maniacs.”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten.” Her face was cool and dry. It was hard to imagine she’d been crying with laughter a moment before. Janie opened the door and let the human sound engulf them.

  “That’s good,” Janie said. It was something to say. Janie lingered at the open door and listened to the noisy room where Noah was sitting. For some reason she felt nervous about going back to him. “I don’t know who he is anymore,” she said. “Or maybe it’s myself I don’t know.” She thought perhaps it wasn’t right to say these things, especially to Denise, but she didn’t know who else she could say them to, or what was right anymore.

  Denise wiped her dry face with a new tissue, tossed it into the wastepaper basket, and looked up. “You’re here,” she said quietly. “And Noah’s in my living room, waiting for you. Isn’t that enough?”

  Janie nodded, pierced by the truth of it. Of course it was enough. She stepped toward the room where her son was.

  “It does help,” Denise said abruptly. Janie turned; Denise’s eyes were full of emotion. “It does. Not with missing him, not with that part, but…” Her voice trailed off.

  They stood together in silence, the air between them alive with the wonder of everything they didn’t know.

  * * *

  Noah looked up when Janie came back into the room. He was sitting on the sofa. Always those blue eyes tore right through her, touched some part of her nothing else got near. She settled down next to him.

  They watched the teenagers standing around the dining room table picking at their potato salad and muttering to each other, their bodies moving jerkily in ill-fitting suits.

  “Can we go now, Mommy-Mom?” Noah said.

  “Don’t you want to spend some time with Tommy’s friends?”

  He shook his head. “They’re all so … old.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s sick,” one of the teenagers said, and they burst into laughter that stopped abruptly, as if remembering where they were.

  She wished she could do something to ease the tension and sadness on Noah’s face, but what could she do? She’d thought she could fix him, but that had always been beyond her power.

  “Everything’s different,” he said.

  “Yes, I guess it is.”

  His mouth twisted.

  “Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Did you think it would be the same?”

  Noah nodded. “Are we going home soon?”

  “You mean, to Brooklyn? Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  He blinked a few times, looking around the room. She followed his gaze.

  She hadn’t taken the room in fully before; she had been too shocked to see it properly. It was nice enough, this interior of a small suburban ranch house. Someone had filled it with comfy brown furniture, piled with pillows in complementary blue. An upright piano stood under the stairs; it was a bit banged up at the edges, but the wood glowed. The rectangular picture window looked out on a leafy street. The mantel on the brick fireplace was populated with mementos and figurines: a curled stone cat, some candles, a small wooden angel holding a wire butterfly, a baseball trophy. It was nothing so extraordinary, this house of Noah’s dreams and her nightmares. It was just a house. He had felt loved here.

  “We can’t stay here, Noah.”

  “I want to go home, but I want to stay here, too.”

  She pictured their own apartment, his cozy bedroom, the tigers on the bureau, the stars. “I know.”

  “Why can’t I have both?”

  “I don’t know. We just have to do the best we can with what we have. We’re in this life now. Together.”

  He nodded again, as if he had already known this, and crawled into her lap. He leaned his head back against her chin.

  “I’m so glad I came to you.”

  She turned him around so she could see his face. She thought she had known all the different phases of Noah—the moody and bereaved Noah, the freaked-out Noah, the boisterous, affectionate child she knew best—but this was something new. She kept her voice level. “What do you mean?”

  “After I left the other place.”

  “What place?”

  “The place where I went after I died.” He said it simply. His eyes were pensive and unusually bright, as if he’d caught a fish unexpectedly and was admiring the silver scales shining in the sun.

  “And what was that like?”

  A simple question; yet the answer held worlds inside of it. She held her breath, waiting for his answer.

  He shook his head. “Mom, you can’t describe that place.”

  “And you were there for a while?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t know how long. Then I saw you and I came here.”

  “You saw me. Where did you see me?”

  “On the beach.”

  “You saw me on the beach?”

  “Yes. You were standing there. I saw you and then I came to you.”

  Even when she thought the limits of her mind had been pushed as far as they could go, there was always another level to the vastness.

  He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m so glad you’re my mom this time,” Noah said.

  “Me, too,” Janie said. It was all she needed.

  “Hey, Mommy-Mom,” he whispered. “Guess what time it is?”

  “I don’t know, bug. What time is it?”

  “It’s time for another brownie!” He pulled his head back, his eyes brimming with his customary, mischievous joy, and she knew that the other child was gone for now; he’d thrown the fish back into the ocean.

  Forty

  After the guests had left, and Janie and Anderson had helped Denise and Charlie put away the leftover food, and Janie had wiped the table down while Denise vacuumed up the brownie crumbs; when the place at last was neat again, the subjects of Anderson’s last case sat on the couch, side by side, Charlie and Denise and Noah and Janie.

  Anderson settled into the armchair across from them. He felt the chair holding his body. He let himself sink into it.

  It was dusk. The five of them were silent, strangers bound with strangeness.

  “So you’re leaving tomorrow?” Denise said at last.

  “We are.” There was a note of apology in Janie’s voice. “Our flights are in the afternoon.”

  They had had their visit; they had been interviewed by the police; they had attended the funeral. Now there was life to be resumed, jobs, responsibilities. For all but him, Anderson thought. Oddly, the thought didn’t trouble him. He wondered why.

  “What do we do now?” Janie asked Anderson.

  Everyone looked at him.

  There was some more paperwork to be done. The paperwork had once mattered to him greatly but didn’t anymore.

  Anderson shrugged.

  “We just leave here, then? That’s it? We don’t”—she looked at Denise—“keep in touch?”

  “There can be visits. If you like.” He smiled. “It’s up to you.”

  “Oh.” Janie looked around the living room. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “It’s up to you,” Anderson said again. It sounded flippant, even to his own ears. He was experiencing an emotion that was unusual for him. Was this what relaxation felt like?

  “I could visit you,” De
nise said suddenly to Janie. “I could come to Brooklyn.”

  Janie looked relieved. “Oh. That would be nice. Wouldn’t it, Noah?”

  “Not right away, of course,” Denise added quickly. “I mean, I think we all need a little time … but I’d like to come and see where you live someday,” she said to Noah. “To see your room. Could I do that?”

  He nodded shyly.

  “So. It’s settled then,” Janie said.

  Anderson watched them. Everything was settled, and nothing was, he knew that. Things would change. Noah would change. Anderson would need to follow up, of course. Yet he had no hunger for it. Maybe the connections would hold and maybe they wouldn’t, or they would transform into other ways of being. He hadn’t realized how much he missed silence. They sat for a long time this way, the sunlight shifting into a deeper, heavier light, Noah quiet between Denise and Janie. Anderson lifted his face to soak in the last rays of sun like a sleepy animal.

  “I think we need to get back to the hotel now, honey,” Janie said to Noah at last, stirring all of them. “It’s getting late.”

  Noah stretched. “I want to take my bath here,” he said drowsily.

  Janie started in her seat. “You want to take a bath?”

  He pushed out his lower lip. “I want a bath here. In the pink bathtub. With her.”

  He pointed at Denise, who shrugged a little and looked to Janie for direction.

  “Oh.”

  Anderson watched the resistance rise in Janie, and then he felt her let it go. “All right,” Janie said.

  “And you can give me a bath next time, okay, Mommy-Mom?”

  She hesitated only briefly and then she grinned right back at him. “Sure, Noey. Whatever you want.”

  Forty-One

  Noah wanted a bath, so Denise was giving him one.

  That was the task, the last of this long day, and then she could rest. She had buried one child today, what was left of his body, and now she was going to bathe another.

  Another child. That was how she thought about it to herself at that moment, and how it seemed to her as she smiled at the boy and set him on the lid of the toilet with one of Charlie’s old Garfield comic books while she rummaged around in the bathroom closet for some bubble bath.