The Forgetting Time(27)

“Noah, please—”

“It’s okay.” Anderson sighed. “I’m a stranger. We need to get to know each other better. It takes time.”

“Please, Mommy-Mom? It’s opening day.”

“Oh, fine.”

They watched him leap out of his seat.

“So.” She looked at him forcefully, as if closing a deal. “You’ll take him on?”

“On?”

“As a patient.”

“It doesn’t work quite like that.”

“I thought you were a psychiatrist.”

“I am. But this work—it’s not a clinical practice. It’s research.”

“I see.” She looked puzzled. “So, what are the next steps, then?”

“I need to keep talking to Noah. See if we can find something concrete that he remembers. A town, a name. Something we can track down.”

“You mean, like a clue?”

“Exactly.”

“So he can go to see … where he used to live in his previous lifetime? Is that it? And that will cure him?”

“I can’t promise anything. But subjects do tend to calm down after we solve a case and find the previous personality. He may well forget on his own, you know. Most do, by the age of six or so.”

She took this in warily. “But how can you find the—previous personality? Noah hasn’t said anything that specific.”

“Let’s see how it goes. It takes time.”

“That’s what they all say, all the doctors. But the thing is—” Her voice quavered and she stopped abruptly. She tried again. “The thing is, I don’t have time. I’m running out of money. And Noah’s not getting better. I need to do something now. I need something to work.”

He felt her need across the table, taking hold of him.

Perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps he should go back to his house in Connecticut … and do what? There was nothing to do but lie on the couch that was his bed now, under the paisley comforter that Sheila had bought twenty years ago and that still smelled very faintly of citrus and roses. Only, if he did that, he may as well be dead.

She frowned and looked away from him, clearly trying to regain control of herself. He wouldn’t comfort her with false promises. Who knew if he could help her son? Besides, the case was weak. There wasn’t anything to go on, unless the child suddenly became a lot more talkative. He looked down at the table, at the remains of the brunch, the boy’s half-eaten pancake, the dirty place mat.… “What’s that?”

The woman was wiping her eyes with a napkin. “What?”

“That place mat. What’s written on it?”

“This? It’s a doodle. He was doodling.”

“Can I see it?”

“Why?”

“Can I see it, please.” He held his voice steady with great effort.

She shook her head, but she moved the plate and the orange juice glass and handed him the thin rectangle of paper. “Watch out, there’s syrup on the edges.”

Anderson picked up the place mat. It was sticky under his fingertips and smelled of syrup and orange juice. Yet even before he properly examined the marks on the paper, he felt the blood beginning to tingle in his veins.

“He wasn’t doodling,” Anderson said quietly. “He was scoring the game.”





Ten

Janie stood in the middle of her living room. The room was dark, except for the headlights from passing cars, there and gone, a flash on the wall. She could make out the familiar shapes in the dimness: couch, chair, lamp. Yet the objects looked different to her, slightly ajar, as if there had been a tremor in the earth.

She heard Anderson moving around in the kitchen. She cracked the window and the air came alive with the damp freshness of early spring. The gas lamp shimmied in the darkness, its flame always moving, here, then here, then here.

One thing had led to another. Noah had scored a baseball game without being taught how to do it, and so she had invited Anderson to come to her home to work with Noah in a quieter place, and they had spent the afternoon engaged in her son’s favorite activity: Noah threw his bouncy ball against his wall and caught it, while Anderson, standing by his side with his yellow pad, judged the accuracy of the pitch. (“Eight.” “Only an eight?” “Well, maybe a nine.” “A nine! Yesssss! A nine!”) Noah’s spirits rose under Anderson’s attentions, as she had not seen him in months, and Anderson himself seemed a different man entirely. He laughed easily and seemed truly interested in Noah’s skill at throwing and catching bouncy balls (amazing to Janie, who always found this game to be an unbelievable bore). He was so natural with the boy that she was surprised when he’d responded, in answer to her question, that he had no children of his own.

How could you not like a man who played so joyfully and with such obvious affection with one’s son? When was the last time any man had done that?

But it didn’t matter how many times Anderson asked him questions or in what manner. Noah was done talking to doctors about anything that didn’t involve catching or throwing. Anderson’s pad had acquired no new notes.

By late afternoon, it was clear to Janie that they weren’t getting anywhere. Even Noah seemed to feel the dejection in the air and started throwing the ball around the room in a hyper, desultory way until it joined the two others in the lighting fixture on the ceiling and Janie put an end to the game. To relax him (and herself), she resorted to the mother’s last trick: she put on his favorite movie, Finding Nemo, about the lost fish looking for his father, and they sat together, Janie and Noah and Anderson, side by side on the couch. Janie focused on the colorful fish and tried not to think about anything else, but the images couldn’t hold her attention. Dread was dripping slowly through her, filling her with its paralyzing poison of what-now-what-now-what-now?