The Forgetting Time(41)

“Excuse me,” Anderson said suddenly, standing as well. “May I use the—”

“That way.” John nodded in the direction of the hall. Anderson excused himself again, and the room fell into silence. Noah looked at his sneakers. Janie watched the baby try to negotiate the tricky gulf between the couch and the armchair. The baby took a step, wobbled, and fell. He started to cry. John ambled over and picked him up. “Come on, now,” he said, jiggling him in an automatic way. “Come on, now.”

*

Anderson walked down the hallway, past a half-open door revealing a pastel yellow room filled with stuffed animals and a crib, and another door, closed, with a sign on it saying KEEP OUT in childish crayon letters. The letters looked cheerful, as if they were really only joking. He paused, glancing in either direction, and then cracked it open.

It was a boy’s room. It looked like it might have been used yesterday, instead of five and a half years before. The bedspread, embroidered with baseballs and bats, was tucked neatly under the pillow; the baseball and soccer trophies on the bureau shone in all their fake gold splendor, as if they’d just been won; there was a bin with baseball gloves and another with balls, under a Nationals pennant and a framed poster of different kinds of snakes. A child’s blue backpack sat in the corner, monogrammed TEM. It looked to be still filled with schoolbooks. On the bookshelf in the corner of the room there were a handful of Harry Potter books, along with a baseball encyclopedia and three reference books on snakes.

Anderson shut the door and hurried to the bathroom.

Inside, he locked the door, splashed water on his cheeks, and looked with alarm at the gray face in the mirror.

It wasn’t them.

He had suspected it since the moment they entered the home, but he was sure now.

Charlie was a baby—far too young to have been alive during the previous personality’s lifetime—there was no way Noah could remember him. Tommy liked snakes, not lizards. And Noah seemed not to recognize any of it. It was the wrong family.

It was his fault, of course. His faculties were not fully operational. He couldn’t find the word lizards and had written reptiles instead. He hadn’t asked the age of the younger brother, Charlie. Small, crucial, uncharacteristic errors that led him in the wrong direction, to disastrous effect.

He had been too eager. The forward motion had been so pleasurable to him, he’d almost forgotten about everything that was happening to him in the desire to move and to keep on moving.

He ran his hand through his hair. The case was finished. He was finished. His faith in words was shaken at last, and with it all remaining confidence in his professional abilities.

What now? He’d erred, and now he’d go into the living room and make it right. And then he’d go home. Go back and resume? No resumption; he was done. That was clear. A fitting end to a long and ignoble career. Oh, but he had worked hard for his obscurity.

He leaned against the sink, steeling himself for the inevitable.





Seventeen

Janie could smell the cookies all the way across the room. “Hope you like ’em warm!” Melissa cried, holding the plate aloft like the cover of a book on entertaining. She had emerged from the kitchen cheerful and somehow brighter, her cheeks flushed and her lips newly slathered with pink lipstick. She handed a cookie to Noah and placed the rest of the plate on a side table. The sweet scent masked the citrus-and-ammonia odor of cleaning supplies and the sour Noah smell that traveled with him everywhere. Janie wondered if the other woman had noticed it.

John looked at Melissa over the baby’s head. “Charlie’s wet,” he said, and made a face.

Melissa laughed sharply. “Well, change him, then.” The couple’s eyes met, and Janie got the distinct impression that more than one dispute had preceded this visit. John sighed; father and son left the room.

Noah sat still on the couch, his hands between his legs, his mouth full of cookie. He wouldn’t lift his head.

“So.” Melissa turned to Janie brightly. “I hear Noah’s something of a Nationals fan.”

“Yes.”

“Who’s your favorite player, Noah?”

“The Zimmernator,” Noah said to the carpet, his mouth full.

“He likes Ryan Zimmerman. Because of the name, of course,” Janie added.

But Melissa’s eyes widened. “But he was Tommy’s favorite, too!”

At the sound of the name, Noah jerked his head upward. It was impossible not to notice.

Melissa turned pale. She looked at Noah. She licked her lips nervously. “T-Tommy? Are you Tommy?”

He nodded hesitantly.

“Oh, god.” She put her hand over her throat. Her pink smile seemed to float in her face, disembodied, as if it bore no relation to the wet, blinking blue eyes.

Was Janie dreaming? Was this actually happening?

“Tommy. Come here,” the other mother was saying. Her white arms were wide. “Come to Mommy.”

Noah gaped at her.

The woman crossed the small distance between them and pulled him up out of the chair, lifting his body into her arms like a rag doll.

But it couldn’t be, Janie thought. He had the same rash on his arms that she had on hers. She had held him moments after his birth upon her breast and he had suckled instantly, “like an old pro,” the nurse had said proudly.