The Forgetting Time(25)

“I don’t see how that’s uncommon, though,” Janie added. “Lots of little boys like baseball, don’t they?”

“Sure they do.” Anderson cleared his throat. “Before we begin. I’m sure you have questions for me?”

She looked down at her binder with all the colored tabs. The binder that was Noah. “How does it work?”

“The protocol? Well, I ask you some questions and then I ask your son—”

“No, I mean—reincarnation.” She flinched at the word. “How does it work? I don’t understand. You’re saying all these kids are—reincarnated and they remember these things from their other lives, right?”

“In some cases that seems to be the most likely explanation.”

“The most likely? But I thought—”

“I’m a scientific researcher. I take down statements from children and I verify them and suggest explanations. I don’t jump to conclusions.”

But conclusions were exactly what she had been hoping for. She picked up the binder and held it against her chest, comforted by its physicality.

“You’re skeptical,” he said. She opened her mouth to respond, and he silenced her with an upraised hand. “That’s okay. My wife was skeptical, too, at first. Luckily, I’m not in the belief business.” His lips twisted wryly. “I collect data.”

Data. She clung to the word, as to a wet rock in a raging river. “So she’s not skeptical anymore?”

“Hmmm?” He looked confused.

“You said—your wife was skeptical at first. So she believes in your work now?”

“Now?” He glanced up at her face. “She’s—”

He didn’t finish his thought. His mouth hung open for a moment that seemed to go on, embarrassing them both, and then he snapped it shut. Yet the moment had happened, and there was no taking it back; it was as if his defenses, that ordinary force field shielding one’s basic human nature, had inexplicably shattered.

“She’s gone. Six years ago,” he said at last. “I mean—she’s not alive anymore.”

He was grief stricken, that’s what was wrong. He was lonely; he had been dealt a blow. Janie knew what that was like. She looked around the ordinary room at the children munching on their French toast, their dads fondly wiping away dribbles of syrup; those people were on the other shore, and she was on the side of the aggrieved with this pained-looking man who was patiently waiting for whatever she was about to say.

She kept her voice soft. “Shall we continue?”

“Of course,” he said, more vigorously than she’d expected. He pulled himself together quickly, the elegant planes of his face realigning. He held his sharpened pencil aloft over his yellow pad.

“When was the first time you remember Noah doing something that seemed out of the ordinary?”

“I suppose … it was the lizards.”

“The lizards?” He was scratching away.

“Noah was two. We were at the Museum of Natural History. We went to see the lizard and snake exhibit. And he was … just…” She paused. “The only word for it is transfixed, I guess. He stood right in front of the first tank and starting yelping. I thought something was wrong, and then he said, ‘Look, a bearded dragon!’”

She glanced at Anderson and saw how intensely he was listening to her. The other psychologists had never been interested in the lizards. He bent to write a note, and she noticed that his blue sweater, which looked so soft and expensive, had a conspicuous hole in the sleeve. It was probably as old as she was.

“I was pretty surprised, because his vocabulary was limited at that point, he had just turned two, it was all ‘I want Mom-Mom and water and duck and milk.’

“Mom-Mom?”

“He usually calls me that, or Mommy-Mom. I guess he likes to have his own name for me. Anyway, I thought he was making it up.”

“Making what up?”

“The name. Bearded dragon. It sounded fanciful to me, like something a child would dream up, a dragon with a beard. So I laughed at him, thinking it was cute. And I said, ‘Actually, sweetie, it’s a—’ and looked over, you know, at the card. And, sure enough, it was called a bearded dragon.

“And so I asked him, ‘Noah, how do you know about bearded dragons?’ And he said—” She looked again at Anderson. “He said, ‘’Cause I had one.’”

“’Cause I had one?”

“I thought … I don’t know what I thought. He was being a kid, making things up.”

“And you never owned a lizard?”

“God, no.” He laughed, and she felt an uncoiling, a relief at talking freely about Noah’s differences. “And it wasn’t only bearded dragons. He knew all the lizards.”

“He knew their names,” Anderson murmured.

“Every lizard in the place. At the age of two.”

She had been so startled, so proud of his obvious intelligence, of his—why not say it?—giftedness. He knew the names of all the lizards—something she had never known. It thrilled her, watching him stare into each miniature rain forest, so cunning and mossy, its inhabitants barely moving except for the flick of a tongue or a jerky journey across a log, while his high pure voice exclaimed, “Mommy-Mom, it’s a monitor! It’s a gecko! It’s a water dragon!” She had thought with relief that his way in life would be clear: scholarships to the best schools and universities, his formidable intelligence greasing the way to a successful life.