The Forgetting Time(14)

Janie kept her voice level. “So what’s this about?”

A pause ensued, in which Janie tried to keep her breathing as steady as possible, in which she heard every tick of the preschool’s beating heart, the sound of a faucet in the art room, a teacher singing clean-up, clean-up, everybody clean up, a child somewhere, not hers, screaming.

Ms. Whittaker lifted her head, focusing on a spot slightly to the left of Janie’s shoulder. “Noah has been talking to us about guns.”

So that’s what this was all about? Something Noah had said? But that was easy. She felt the tension in her body begin to relax. “Don’t all little boys do that?”

“He’s been saying he’s played with guns.”

“He was probably talking about a Nerf gun,” she said, and Ms. Whittaker glanced at her. There was something hard in her eyes.

“A .54-caliber Renegade rifle, is what he said, to be exact. He said the gunpowder smelled like rotten eggs.”

She felt a flicker of pride. Her son knew things—this had always been the case with Noah, some quirk in his brain, like the brains of savants, only instead of numerical equations he knew random facts he must have overheard somewhere. Was Einstein’s brain like this? Was James Joyce’s? Perhaps they, too, had been misunderstood as children. But meanwhile there was the matter of what to say to this woman who sat glowering at her across the table. “I don’t know where he gets this stuff, really. I’ll tell him not to talk about guns.”

“You’re trying to tell me you don’t know where he used a gun? Or how he knows that it smells like sulfur?”

“He didn’t use a gun,” she said patiently. “And as for sulfur—I don’t know. He says funny things sometimes.”

“So you deny it?” She wouldn’t look at Janie.

“Maybe he saw something on television?”

“He’s been watching television, has he?”

Oh, this woman. “He watches Diego and Dora and SpongeBob and baseball games.… Maybe they had an ad on ESPN for hunting, or something?”

“There’s another thing. Noah has been talking a great deal about the Harry Potter books. Yet according to you, you haven’t read them to him or shown him the movies.”

“That’s true.”

“And yet he seems to know them extremely well. He’s been going around saying some sort of killing spell.”

“Look, it’s just how Noah is. He says all kinds of things.” She shifted her legs. Her butt was going numb in the tiny chair. She’d cut the Galloway visit short; Mrs. Galloway was probably calling all her friends right this minute to tell everybody she was wrong, she couldn’t recommend Jane Zimmerman Architecture after all. She was losing clients because of this nonsense. “So that’s why you called me in here from an important business meeting? Because you think my little boy talks too much about guns and Harry Potter?”

“No.”

She shuffled some papers on her desk, ran a knobby, be-ringed hand through her silver hair.

“We were having a discussion about discipline today at school. There was a biting incident … but never mind about that. We discussed our rules, how hurting each other is never acceptable. Noah offered—on his own—that he was once under water so long that he blacked out. He actually used the words ‘blacked out,’ a strange word choice for a four-year-old, wouldn’t you think?”

“He said he blacked out?” Janie tried to process it.

“Miss Zimmerman. I’m sorry, but I have to ask you.” Her eyes, finally focused on Janie’s, were pinpricks of cold fury. “Have you ever held your son’s head under water until he passed out?”

“What?” She blinked at the other woman; the words were so terrible and unexpected that it took a moment for her to absorb them. “No! Of course not!”

“You understand why I’m having difficulty believing you.”

She couldn’t sit in that seat a moment longer. She leaped up and began to pace. “He hates baths. That’s probably what it is. I washed his hair. That’s my crime.”

The woman’s silence was contemptuous. Ms. Whittaker’s gaze followed her as she walked back and forth across the room.

“Did Noah say anything else?”

“He said he called out to his mommy but nobody helped him, and he was pushed underwater.”

Janie froze. “Pushed under?” she repeated.

Ms. Whittaker nodded curtly. “Please sit down.”

She was too baffled to stand any longer. She sunk back into the little chair. “But—nothing like that has ever happened to him. Why would he say that?”

“He said he was pushed underwater,” Ms. Whittaker repeated forcefully, “and he couldn’t get out.”

Understanding washed over Janie at last. “But—that’s his dream,” she said quickly. “A nightmare he has. That he’s stuck underwater and can’t get out.”

A fragment of the night before came back to her—Noah pummeling her with his hard fists, yelling Let me out, let me out, let me out! Their nighttime drama, gone by morning. Remarkable, how completely it dropped out of her consciousness, until the next night. “He’s had the same nightmare for years. He’s just confused.”