* * *
The next day, Janie was on her way to get Noah from afterschool, thinking a million thoughts at once, when suddenly she stopped. She looked around.
She was standing in a subway car, feeling the motion beneath her feet. The train pulled up from underground, up and out over the Manhattan Bridge, the early evening light shining on the river, on a boat carting its cargo from here to there, on the people in the subway car, every detail leaping forward with a heightened, tender clarity. The Band-Aid on the knee of the teenager across from her. The spiky hair of the woman reading next to him. The Rastafarian’s lips moving beneath his beard as he chewed gum.
Inside the subway car, advertisements for beer, storage space, mattresses: “Wake up and Rejuvenate your life.”
I’ve been wrong, she thought suddenly.
What had happened to Noah had seemed to separate her from other people who didn’t know the story—or, when she tried to explain it to her closest friends, “couldn’t believe in that stuff.” So she had put it away, kept it to herself, as if it was yet another thing keeping her subtly apart, when in fact … in fact, the implications suggested otherwise.
What were the implications?
So many lifetimes. So many people loved and lost and found again. Relatives you didn’t know you had.
Maybe she’d been related to someone in this very subway car. Maybe that guy with the suit and the iPad. Or the Rasta chewing gum. Or the blond man with the polka-dot shirt and the fern sticking out of his bag. Or the woman with the bristly hair. Perhaps one of them had been her mother. Or her lover. Or her son, the dearest of the dear. Or would be, next time around. So many lifetimes, it stands to reason that they were all related. They’d forgotten, that’s all. It wasn’t a hippy dippy campfire song. (Well, okay, it was, but it wasn’t just that.) It was real.
But how was that possible?
It didn’t matter how. It was. She looked around the car. The olive-skinned man next to her was reading a newspaper ad for a matchmaker. The kid across from her was jiggling a skateboard on his banged-up knees. The dearest of the dear, she thought. She was feeling punchy.
It would be hard to live that way. To look at other people that way. But you could try, couldn’t you?
The doors between the cars flung apart and a man emerged, homeless, shuffling into the subway car on grimy bare feet. His hair was matted into a coarse helmet, and his clothes—she couldn’t look too closely at his clothes. He lumbered unsteadily through the car. His smell was like a force field, repelling everything in its path; when the subway finally stopped and the doors opened, new people stepped in with one foot and turned right back around to go to another car. Most of the people already in the car left in droves.
Some stayed put, though. Decided to bear it out. They were too tired to get up or too distracted by their handheld devices or they didn’t want to give up their seats. Their stops were coming up soon. And anyway, that was the car they’d picked, the hand they’d been dealt, this time around. They looked carefully away from him; they were afraid to draw his attention.
She was the only one looking in his general direction, so he walked right up to her. He stood there, swaying in front of her, his smell making her eyes water. He didn’t have a jar or anything. He held out a dirty palm.
She pulled three quarters from her pocket and placed them on his palm, and as she did so, her fingers brushed against his hand, and she looked up. His eyes were a caramel color, bright around the pupils and darker at the edges, and peering into them was like looking into a double eclipse. He had thick lashes, brushed with soot. He blinked.
“Hey, thanks, sister,” he said.
“You’re welcome.” His face seemed to spring forward, his needs and hopes etched clearly there, as if he had been waiting all this time for her to notice him.
* * *
Paul lost twenty pounds that first year. He got shuffled around the prison as if he was a piece of paper on the ground being stepped on with muddy boots. He couldn’t sleep; he’d lie there in the top bunk breathing in the smell of urine from the toilet in the corner and listening to the prison sounds of dripping and snoring and yelling. He didn’t know if the yelling was the other inmates screaming in their sleep or if they were pushed into wakefulness by their own misery, as he was. And underneath it all, the never-ending echo of Tommy Crawford calling him from the bottom of the well. He had long ago stopped trying not to think of Tommy Crawford; what he’d done was in the threads of his prison clothes and the grout between the cement bricks and the cat piss smell that permeated everything. Sometimes he still wished he could go back and do it all differently, but he couldn’t. Other times he wondered why life was like that: you did stupid things and couldn’t take them back no matter how much you wanted to; there were no second chances. He had said that to his lawyer once and the woman had pursed her lips, looking at him across the table like somebody’s sad mother. She was a woman in her fifties, thin, with bushy gray-blond hair tied back with a rubber band and blue eyes that always looked as if she’d been up all night worrying about him. He didn’t know why she would do a thing like that, when he wasn’t even related to her, but he was grateful for her services, and that he would get out of prison someday, though he would be almost thirty by then.
One day after a year or so had passed, they told him that he had a visitor.
He thought it must be his lawyer or his mom.
The guard brought him down the long hallway and into the room where the tables were.
When he saw who it was, he wanted to back up out of the room, but it was too late. She was sitting there, waiting for him. Her hair was grayer now than it had been in the hearing, but her face was the same, and her eyes turning to him looked like Tommy Crawford’s eyes when he was trying to decide whether or not he should go with him into the woods to practice shooting.
He wished he could hide under the table.
She picked up the phone on the other side of the heavy scuffed glass, so he did, too. “I got your letter,” she said.
He looked at her. He couldn’t think of any words to say.
He had written a letter about how sorry he was about what happened to Tommy. How he had liked Tommy and wished that Tommy was alive and he was dead. Everything he wrote was true. His lawyer had thought it might help if they went to court, but then they had plea-bargained, and he had sent the letter anyway, thinking the parents would never respond. Why would they?
“You said in the letter that you’re an alcoholic.” Her voice was low. She didn’t meet his gaze through the glass. “Is this true?”
“Mmm,” he mumbled. Then forced himself to say it. “Yes.” He was used to admitting it now, after all those AA meetings in prison.
“But you’re sober now?”
He nodded, then realized there was no way she could see him with her head bent down like that. “Yes.”
“Is that why it happened? Because you were drunk?” She was looking at her hands on the table in front of her.
He swallowed. His throat was dry. There was no water here. “No.”
“Then why?” She glanced up. Her eyes were sad, but they had no anger in them.
“It was an accident,” he said and saw that shadow of skepticism, that downward twitch of the lips, that had crossed so many faces since he had confessed. “But that’s not why,” he added. “It was because I was a coward. A coward and an idiot.” He bent his head, too. He looked down at their hands, the two long brown ones, the two stubby white ones with the nails half-chewed off.
She made a noise on the other end of the phone. He couldn’t tell what kind of noise it was.
“I’m sorry I killed your son,” he said into the phone. The words were garbled because his throat was so thick and so dry. He put his head down on his arms and hoped the guards didn’t think he was crying. He was, a little bit, but that was beside the point.
He felt she was waiting for him to say something else. He wasn’t sure what, and then he knew. He too
k the phone into the cradle of his arms and said the rest: “I know you can’t forgive me.”
Forgive. It wasn’t a word he had ever used before recently. Wanting forgiveness was a part of him now; he craved it like he craved alcohol.
There was a long silence.
“It’s funny,” she said at last, though there was nothing funny in the whole world, as far as Paul could tell. He looked up and her face was calm. “I’ve been thinking about that.” She spoke like a teacher, someone who knew something. “The Bible says ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven,’ … and the Buddhists, of course, believe that hatred only leads to further hatred and suffering. As for me—I don’t know. I know I don’t want to hold on to hatred anymore. I can’t.”
Her eyes lingered on his face, as if she was deciding whether or not he was hideous. It occurred to him that wanting forgiveness meant you had to give it, too. He knew he hadn’t forgiven his dad for some things. He couldn’t imagine doing that.
“Tommy’s teaching me, every day,” she continued, and he nearly fell right off his seat. How could Tommy be teaching her anything? “He’s forcing me to let go of him,” she said, “to surrender to the moment at hand. There’s joy there. If you can do it.”
He couldn’t believe she was sitting there talking about learning something from her dead son, talking about joy, to him. To him! Maybe he’d driven her crazy and he’d have that on his conscience, too.
“How is it here?” she asked quietly. “Is it bad?”
He couldn’t tell whether she wanted to hear that it was or it wasn’t.
“It’s what I deserve, I guess,” he said simply.
She didn’t dispute it, but she didn’t seem happy about it, either. “I’d like you to write me,” she said. “Will you do that? I want to know what it’s like in here and how you’re getting on. I want to know the truth.”
“Okay.” He thought that he would tell her, too, even if she was crazy. He could tell her all the things he’d been through here that he didn’t want his own mom to know about.
“So we’ve got ourselves a deal?” she said. He nodded. She stood up. She belted her coat tightly across her waist—she was thin, like something that could break in two seconds, and at the same time he felt that she was probably tougher than he could ever hope to be. She lifted her hand up to him and waved good-bye, a smile passing across her face, there and gone, so quick he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it.
After the visit, he stabilized a bit. He stopped hating the feel of the scratchy uniform on his skin, and the way one moment slammed into the next moment with no room for wriggling free except for the novels he got out from the prison library and the GED class he was taking and the visits from his mom to see how he was doing. He wrote letters to Mrs. Crawford, telling her the truth. He woke every morning from a heavy, dreamless slumber, still surprised to find himself there.
The people in the novels he was reading lived in peat and stone dwellings in hilly lands covered in mist, and they raised dragons and learned magic. They passed on their secrets from mother to son.
* * *
Anderson felt the warm water licking at his feet.
He walked in slowly, aware at every moment that he could turn back, the water encompassing his calves and his sore knees, his thighs and his chest. He was unsure of what he was going to do until the last moment the sandy ground slid beneath his feet and he was swimming, and even then he glanced back and saw the shore so close and his sandals and his book right there, waiting for him.
The beach was empty. It was too early for tourists and there were no fishermen on this side of the island. It was as if he was the only one in the whole world who was awake. There were a few palm trees scattered here and there, the craggy mountains cradling the water, the sign about the water’s current planted in the middle of the beach. He couldn’t read it anymore, not in any of the languages they had posted, but he knew what it meant.
The water, a transparent green, took on a deeper, bluer hue as he swam. He swam out until his sandals were two specks on the sand, his book a blur of blue. He enjoyed the feeling of his body exerting itself, helped on by the current. Words floated out to him and he clung to them. Silence. Ocean. Enough.
He should have told someone. He could have told that woman who had e-mailed him, for instance. The one with the son. The thought of his last case was like a strand of hair tethering him to land—all that was left between himself and the open sea. He could go back and try again to e-mail her. He had meant to write “Good-bye” and the word had come out wrong, a different word. He hoped she understood what he meant.
If he stopped thinking of it, if he let the current carry him, the strand would break easily of its own accord.
Think about something else, he thought. He closed his eyes. The sun created dark spots on the pulsing orange inside his eyelids.
Sheila.
The day he met Sheila.
A Saturday. He’d left the lab early and had taken the first train he saw until the end and walked the rest of the way to the beach. Sitting on the damp sand, brooding. A whole universe out there, so many things unknown. Why was he stuck in cages with the rats?
Two girls were sitting next to him on a beach blanket. A blonde, a redhead. Two silly girls eating ice-cream cones and laughing at him.
The blonde was the bold one. She walked up to him.
“Are you religious?”
“Not at all. Why?”
He glanced at her. Her cheeks were pink from the sun, or maybe she was blushing. Her hair was tied back in a band but coming loose around her face in bright fluttery pieces.
“We were thinking you must be religious to be wearing that. Don’t you have a bathing suit?”
He looked down at himself. He was in his usual graduate student attire, long-sleeved white oxford shirt, black pants.
“No.”
“Oh, I see. You’re far too serious for the beach.” She said it lightly, teasingly. She had a strong white body. It hurt his eyes to look at it. Silly polka-dot bathing suit.
He scowled at her. “You’re making fun of me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re far too serious for the beach.” Her blue eyes were both affectionate and mocking. He couldn’t make sense of that. She was making him dizzy.
The ice cream was dripping down the cone in the hot sun over her fingers. He had the strangest urge to lick them.
Why not, polka dots?
“Your ice cream is melting,” he said.
She licked the cone, then her fingers, one after the other, laughing at herself. He had taken her for a giggler, but her laugh came from someplace deeper, it rolled out into the air, taking up space. Ice cream, he thought, giddiness rising up his body from the white soles of his feet. The secret to life is ice cream. Her laugh rang in his ears and kept on ringing.
He had hoped it would never stop.
He was getting tired now. This treading water business was more exhausting than he had anticipated. There was more resistance in him than he’d thought there would be. Just stop moving, he thought. Let go.
He opened his eyes. The current had worked fast. The sandals and book were gone now, blended into the shore.
He felt his heart pounding. He calculated how far he was from the beach. He could probably make it back if he wanted to. And then what? Back to that small, increasingly circumscribed existence of seafood and short walks. Not a terrible life. But winding down …
He didn’t miss language anymore. He liked the concreteness of this new way of living: the briny taste of the crab he was eating, the shy, curious face of the girl serving it, the sand slipping through the toes of his sandals as he walked back to his bungalow, the feel of his breath tickling his nostrils as he meditated. It was as if the earth was holding him in its gaze, cupping his face in its hands. He felt it whispering to him in a wordless language he had forgotten his whole life and only now remembered, speaking to him of a reality so vast he couldn’
t impart it to another human even if he had the ability to do so. He barely recognized himself in the mirror: the brown, careless, leathery face, the wild, much-too-bright eyes—who was this man? He had accepted the simplicity of this life gratefully but knew that soon he would not be able to understand even the most basic transactions. He would be forced to succumb to the only thing he feared: helplessness.
The shore was a pale smudge in the distance. His book was out there, on the sand. He felt bereft without it; he had carried it with him through these last days. At first it was to forestall conversation—dipping his face into those pages he had written and could no longer read—but lately it had become like a friend to him. When he awoke in the night disoriented and afraid, he turned on the light and through the thick bodies of the circling moths sought out its blue cover on his bedside table. It spoke to him without words, assuring him that he had lived.
Perhaps a tourist would find it while out collecting shells. Perhaps it would change everything for her.
His legs ached. He stared in the sunlight at the retreating wisp of shore until it seemed merely a trick of the eyes, an imagined oasis. Here, then gone. Of course the body would resist its demise. Of course; this was how life was. How could he have thought otherwise? It was a lesson he’d learned again and again: no matter how carefully you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn’t it? The depths of what we don’t know?
Maybe he’d see Sheila again. Her face. Or some glimmer of her in another.
Maybe he wouldn’t.
He looked around him at the wide sky, at the ocean that continued now as far as he could see. The water sparkled in the sunlight, dazzling his eyes. Every molecule glistening in the radiant, polka-dotted world. He felt his limbs relax, his body melting beneath the beauty of it.
Blue sky, blue water, and nothing else.
The undiscovered country.
Look at it this way, Jer, he heard Sheila saying. Now you’re going to get some answers. He felt the curiosity beating through him at the thought of it, stronger than his heart.
The Forgetting Time: A Novel Page 30