The Forgetting Time(42)

“Oh, my baby boy.” Melissa started to cry into Noah’s hair. “I’m so sorry.”

“Oh!” Noah said. His forehead was turning pink above her arms and the word emerged from him like a peep.

When he was pulled out of Janie’s body, the doctor had held him high up so she could see him. He was still attached by the umbilical cord, smeared with blood and traces of white vernix. His face was deep red, contorted, beautiful.

“I am so, so sorry, baby. I made a mistake,” Melissa said. Her voice was rough. The mascara started to roll down her face. “I know I messed up. I always check the latch. I thought I’d checked it. I messed up.”

Janie could barely see the top of Noah’s head. She couldn’t see his face. “Oh!” he peeped again. “Oh!”

“I left the latch open! I never do that. Oh, I messed up.” She clutched at his arms, which lay rigid on either side of him, and his skin mottled beneath her fingers, becoming as bright as his red Nationals T-shirt. “But why did you drown, baby? Why? You had swimming lessons!”

“Oh!” Noah said.

Only he wasn’t saying “Oh,” Janie realized suddenly. He was saying “No.”

“No,” Noah said again. He craned his neck to shake his head free, and she could see that his eyes were screwed tightly shut. He squirmed but could not get out of the other woman’s embrace. “No, no, no!”

“I didn’t know you’d go to the pool,” Melissa was saying breathlessly. “I never knew you’d do that. But you could swim! You could swim. Oh, God, I messed up, Tommy. Mommy messed up!” She reached up to wipe her eyes with her hands and Noah wrenched himself loose.

He backed up across the living room. He was shaking so violently his teeth chattered. Janie moved toward him. “Noah, are you okay?”

“Tommy.” Melissa reached out with her soft white arms.

He looked from one woman to the other. “Go away!” he screamed. “Go away!”

He moved as far away from both of them as he could, toppling the side table, spilling the cookies onto the floor. “Where’s my mama?” he shouted, turning to Janie. “You said I was going to see my mama! You said!”

“Noah—” Janie said. “Sweetie, look—”

But he shut his eyes and put his hands over his ears and began to hum loudly to himself.

Anderson rushed into the room, followed by John, holding the baby, who was wearing only a diaper. John took in the scene, looking first at Noah, then his wife, the tears like tire tracks down the sides of her face. “What have you done?” he said.

*

In the kitchen, Noah sat at the table with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. He was still humming. He wouldn’t look at Janie, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he wriggled away. Another tray of cookies sat on the gleaming marble counter. Their smell permeated the room, powerful and nauseating, like a mistake it was too late to fix.

Anderson cleared his throat. Janie could hardly look at him.

“It was an error.” He seemed to be addressing all of them or none of them. “It seems to be the wrong previous personality.” Nobody answered him. “Let me explain…,” he said, but didn’t continue. He seemed to have lost his bearings, if he had ever truly had any.

Melissa was slumped at the other end of the table. She had bitten her lip and now it was bleeding. There was a smudge of blood on the collar of her yellow blouse, a smear on her white teeth. “I thought I was going to get some answers,” she mumbled. Janie could see a streak of gray mixed in with the blond sweep of her hair.

Her husband had a packet of baby wipes in his hand and was cleaning her face, the baby tucked under his arm like a giant squirming football.

“There are no answers,” John said. “It was an accident.”

He gently wiped the black marks from the sides of her face and her chin. She let him, her hands dangling loosely in her lap. As he cleared the makeup she looked even younger, like a child.

“You always say that,” Melissa moaned. “But it’s my fault.”

“The pool boy left the latch open.” The baby started to wail. “You know this. It could have happened to anybody. It was a fluke.”

“But the lessons—”

“He wasn’t a strong swimmer.”

“But if I had checked the latch—”

“It’s time to stop this, Mel.”

Time to stop this.

The words woke Janie at last from her spell. This woman has lost her son, she thought. She lost her son. She let the words sink in. She saw, she couldn’t help but see, a sweet-looking blond child struggling at the bottom of the pool. His small dead body floating in that crystal-blue water. A dead child: everything flowed from that fact, didn’t it? Of all the bad things that could happen, that was the worst. And then they had come here and done this thing to her, this woman who had already suffered unimaginably: they had gotten her hopes up and then had dashed them bitterly, and whether they had meant to or not was beside the point. She had done this thing; she couldn’t blame Noah. And Anderson had followed the dictates of his own ethics in a way she couldn’t truly fathom. But she was a mother and should have known better, and instead she had been cruel to this woman. It was unconscionable, what she had done, and all because she couldn’t face the truth. Which was?