The Forgetting Time(24)
M.D.: Harvard Medical School
B.A.: Yale University, English Literature
Psychiatry Residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine Robert B. Angsley Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at The Institute for the Study of Previous Personalities, University of Connecticut School of Medicine The meaning of these words was clear enough, and she clung to it: an educated man. She was simply getting another expert’s opinion. That’s all it was. And it didn’t really matter what his methods were, as long as he got results. Maybe this doctor had some sort of especially soothing approach with children, the way some people could placate horses. It was an experimental procedure. You read about things like that all the time. It didn’t matter what Noah had, or what Anderson thought he had, so long as he was cured.
She flipped through the binder she’d put together for him. It was the same type of binder she used when courting new clients, except instead of town houses and apartments, each section was marked by a colored tab signifying a year in Noah’s life. The binder had all of Noah’s information, the odd things he’d said and done: everything, except the crucial thing. She hadn’t mentioned Dr. Remson or his possible diagnosis, worried that Anderson might balk at working with a child who might be mentally ill.
It was odd to be meeting him at a busy diner. Dr. Anderson had suggested meeting at her home—it was his usual protocol, it makes the children more comfortable, he’d said—but she needed to get a sense of the man first, do a quick kook check, so they’d compromised on the place at the corner. Still, what kind of a doctor made home visits? Maybe he was a quack, after all— “Ms. Zimmerman?”
A man stood over her: a tall, lean figure wearing an oversize navy blue wool sweater and khaki pants.
“You’re Dr. Anderson?”
“Jerry.” He smiled briefly, a flash of teeth in the crowded room, and extended his hand to her, then Noah, who glanced away from the TV just long enough to brush Anderson’s huge hand with his tiny one.
Whatever she’d been expecting (someone professional, maybe a bit geeky, with the sharp profile and dark, curly hair she’d glimpsed in the video), it wasn’t this man. This was a person pared down to his essence, with the high cheekbones and glittering eyes of an Egyptian cat deity and the weathered skin of a fisherman. He must have been handsome once (the face had a fierce, elemental beauty) but was now somehow too austere for that, as if he had left handsome by the side of the road many years back, as something for which he had no use.
“I’m sorry if that sounded rude. It’s just on the video you seemed—”
“Younger?” He bent slightly in her direction, and a whiff of something came off of him: she had a sense of something unruly running beneath the elegant, contained surface. “Time does that.”
Just pretend it’s a client, she told herself. She shifted modes, smiled professionally. “I’m a little nervous,” she said. “This isn’t exactly my sort of thing.”
He settled himself across from her in the booth. “That’s good.”
“It is?”
His gray eyes really were unnaturally bright. “It usually means the case is stronger. Otherwise you would not be here.” He spoke crisply, enunciating each word.
“I see.” She was not used to thinking of Noah’s illness as a “case” that might be “strong.” She might have objected but the waitress (purple-haired; harried) was handing out menus. When she turned back toward the kitchen, a YOLO tattoo in Gothic letters stood out against the pale skin of her shoulders.
YOLO. A slogan, a rallying cry, carpe diem for the skateboarder set: You only live once.
But was it true?
That was the problem, wasn’t it? She had never thought about it in any deep way. She hadn’t had the time or inclination to speculate about other lives: this one was hard enough to manage. It was all she could do to pay for their food and rent and clothes, to try to give Noah love and an education and get him to brush his teeth. And lately she had barely been managing any of it. This had to work. She didn’t have another option, aside from medicating her four-year-old. But what had she been thinking about?
Oh, right. Other lives. Which she wasn’t sure she believed in.
And yet: here she was.
Anderson was looking at her expectantly across the table. Noah was watching the television, doodling away on his place mat. The waitress who only lived once came and took their orders and left again like a purple cloud of surliness.
Janie reached out and lightly touched her son’s shoulder, as if to protect him from the man’s quiet intensity. “Listen, Noey, why don’t you go stand by the counter for a minute and watch the game from there? It’s much closer.”
“Okay.” He squirmed out of his seat, as if happy to be released.
With Noah out of earshot, her body seemed to wilt into the booth.
On the television near the counter, someone hit a home run; Noah joined the regulars in cheering.
“He likes baseball, I see,” Anderson said.
“When he was a baby it was the only thing that could calm him down. I used to call it baby Ambien.”
“Do you watch as well?”
“Not on purpose.”
He pulled a yellow pad out of his briefcase and scribbled a note.