The Forgetting Time(18)
Inside, it was warm and almost disturbingly quiet after the rush of the subway and the white noise of the wind. They both stood, adrift, in the room; Noah seemed dazed, subdued. She closed the wooden shutters, trapping them in the yellow half-light of the floor lamp, and settled him on the couch in front of a DVD (“Look, honey, it’s Nemo! Your favorite!”), putting his binder of baseball cards in his lap. He’d been like this more and more lately, his jubilance muffled, as if the dour tone of the doctor’s office had seeped into his bones. He sat and watched his shows without comment; he didn’t want to play or throw a ball around his room.
She couldn’t shake the chill; her teeth were still chattering. She’d had such hopes for this one. She’d been sure this would be the doctor who would change everything for them.
She put a kettle on and made tea for herself and butterscotch hot cocoa for Noah, filling the mug with so many marshmallows you could barely see the liquid. She stared for a moment at the tiny confections bobbing cheerfully in the frothy brown like small white teeth, then ducked down beneath the border of the pass-through to the living room, sitting on her haunches, so Noah couldn’t see her cry. Pull yourself together, Janie. It was like pushing a yowling cat into a bag, but she did it. She quelled the sobs, let them roil in her stomach, and stood. Out the back window, the snow fell into the yard and kept on falling.
*
Noah was sitting quietly, watching the movie with his small hands flat on the plastic binder, his blond head tilted back against the couch, when she brought the hot chocolate. The last four months had been trying emotionally and disastrous work-wise, but she had to admit that she’d gotten used to seeing that blond head always bobbing in her peripheral vision, the comfort of knowing he was right there. Three nannies and two day care centers had failed to stick, and after the last fiasco (Noah bolting out the door of Natalie’s Kids and down Flatbush Avenue, a few feet away from the rushing cars), she had given up and invited him and his latest nanny to play at her office. They sat quietly enough (too quietly!), building things with his Legos while her assistant scowled and drafted and Janie tried to move the projects she still had going a few steps closer to completion.
She sat next to him on the couch, cradling her tea in her hands, trying to get warm. She didn’t even mind his scent: that sickly sweet, slightly curdled smell that Noah carried with him wherever he went now.
She supposed Dr. Remson had been kind enough, as well he should be, for three hundred dollars an hour. And he’d taken his time with Noah, with her. But in the end he’d been the same as the rest of them. He’d had no answers for her. He’d cautioned her to wait.
But wait was precisely what she couldn’t do. When she explained this to him, he’d suggested the name of another psychiatrist in case she wanted treatment for herself … as if spending more money on more therapy was the only answer he could come up with.
“We’ve had three months of sessions, now,” she said. “And that’s all you can say to me? He’s having nightmares every night, and crying bouts during the day. And baths are impossible.”
Tapping his black leather sneakers on the Persian carpet, thick glasses perched jauntily on his balding head, Dr. Mike Remson didn’t look like one of New York City’s foremost child psychiatrists, no matter what New York magazine had said. He sat there in his leather armchair, fingers tented, furry caterpillar eyebrows rising over guarded, heavy-lidded eyes. Even after answering his questions in session after session, she still had the impression he was trying to decide if she might be the problem after all.
“Noah’s beginning to trust me,” he said carefully. “To speak more about his fantasies.”
“His other mother?” Her hands were clenching and unclenching. She planted them on her knees.
“That, and other things.”
“But why is he imagining another mother?”
“Often such an imaginative fantasy life is caused by events at home.”
“So you say, but we’ve been over that, there’s nothing.”
“No exceptional stress?”
She let out a small, hoarse laugh. Nothing you aren’t causing, Doctor. “Nothing that predates this situation.” The fact was, she was running through her savings. She’d already cashed in her IRA and spent the small inheritance from her mother she’d put aside for Noah’s college education. (Her goal now was simply to get him safely to kindergarten.) She’d had to cancel four meetings with prospective clients this month alone because she couldn’t take Noah to meetings and site visits, and she didn’t have much time anyway, what with all the doctors. She had no work on the horizon, and no way to pay the bills without work, and no answers.
She’d been taking him to other doctors for months: neurologists, psychologists, neuropsychologists. Noah and Janie both hated it, the long subway rides, the endless wait in crowded offices, Noah paging listlessly through Horton Hatches an Egg while she did the same with a year-old copy of Time. The doctors talked to him, they did tests on his brain, they tested his lungs again (yes, he has asthma; yes, it’s mild), then they sent him out to the next room while they talked to her, and in the end she’d been both relieved and frustrated to find they had found nothing and had nothing to offer, except the promise of more tests. And all along she’d been waiting for the sessions with Dr. Remson, who was supposed to be the best.