The Forgetting Time(33)

But no matter how carefully Anderson had looked, he had been unable to find another case of a child who spontaneously remembered a previous lifetime.

There was no Internet back then, of course. For a researcher, that changed everything.…

Anderson swore silently to himself and turned back to his computer. He had to try harder. His concentration was not what it had been. He was always on the verge of a flight into the past. At Janie Zimmerman’s his mind had been stimulated into competence by the excitement of being in the midst of a good case; when he was with the child, the right words had leaped to his lips, the way sometimes stutterers can sing. With Noah, he had sung.

Now, though, the words on his computer quivered before his eyes, and he steeled himself. He could not let his energy flag. He had often felt like an archaeologist, sifting through sand looking for shards of bone, fragments of a clay pot. You sat under the hot sun or the chill of the air conditioner and you simply waited for what was there all along to reveal itself. Patience was everything. You whittled yourself down to the words of type. If the words wavered, you sat still until they made sense again.

He was five years back from Noah’s birth.

He glanced quickly through the obits of older Thomases succumbing to flu, pancreatic and prostate cancer, pneumonia, and encephalitis.

T. B. (Thomas) Mancerino, Jr., nineteen, died in a boat collision on Ashview Lake on Memorial Day.

Tom Granger, three, died of measles. (Measles! Why did people stop vaccinating when the data was so impeccable and the autism link so obviously unsubstantiated?)

Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, drowned—

He looked at that one more closely.

Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, the son of John B. and Melissa Moran, of 128 Monarch Lane, died Tuesday in a tragic accident after drowning in his backyard pool. Neighbors say he was a cheerful child, passionate about reptiles and his beloved Nationals.…

He sat back in his chair.

You waited and then at last it happened: that moment when the sand shifted and you glimpsed something white, and the shard of bone was revealed.





Fourteen

In the Baltimore Greyhound station, Janie sat on a bench, buzzed out of her mind on bad bus station coffee, trying to pretend that the plan was a rational one. I can do this, she thought, so long as I don’t focus on what the “this” really means.

Noah at least seemed to take it all in stride: this adventure, this bus station. He had exclaimed at the size of the Greyhound, amazed that a bus could have a toilet in it. “And we get to sit right next to it!”

Now he was thrilled with the video game machine, even though she hadn’t given him any money for it. He didn’t seem to care, happily jerking the handle this way and that, enjoying all the whizzing figures without realizing he wasn’t controlling any of them. Which was pretty much how it was, wasn’t it? You think you’re in control, but really you’re simply staring at the moving lights.

He ran up to her again. “Where are we going, Mommy-Mom? Where are we going?” They had been having this conversation on and off for hours.

“We’re taking another bus to Ashview.”

“Really? We’re really going?”

He hopped from one foot to the other, his face screwed up in an expression that wasn’t entirely familiar to her. It was excitement and something else … anxiety? (That would be understandable.) Fear? Disbelief? She’d thought she’d known all his expressions by now.

“When we gonna get there?”

“In another couple of hours.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Is it okay? Do you want to go there?”

His blue eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? Of course I want to go! What about Jerry?”

The question startled her. “He’s meeting us there.”

“Can I watch Nemo again on the bus?”

“Sorry, honey, I told you, my computer is out of juice.”

“Can I have some apple juice?”

“We’re out of that kind of juice, too.”

She couldn’t wait for the second bus to arrive. So long as they were moving, she was all right. She was carried forward, leaving her thoughts behind her like a tangle of clothes on the shore.

Anderson had given her a sheaf of papers. She had them rolled up in her purse, a rubber-banded scroll. A news story about a little boy who drowned in Ashview, Virginia. The boy had drowned in his own pool. The pool boy had forgotten to latch the sliding doors to the backyard, and the mother had gone soon afterward to the basement to do the laundry, leaving her eight-year-old on his own watching television in the living room. A simple mistake, with terrible consequences.

Tommy Moran: a stranger’s child.

She couldn’t bring herself to look at the pages. She had the blank side facing out. The clean slate that Noah apparently wasn’t given.

Tommy Moran, Tommy Moran.

“Look at the facts,” Anderson had said on his second visit. They were sitting, again, in the kitchen. It was evening; Noah was asleep. Anderson seemed composed, but there was no mistaking the zeal in his eyes. He pulled the papers from his briefcase and placed them in front of her. “There are strong similarities.”

She skimmed the page on top: a list of comments Noah had made and similarities between Noah and Tommy. Words leaped out at her. Ashview. Obsession with reptiles. A fan of the Nationals. A red house. Drowning.