The Forgetting Time(43)

That Tommy Moran had died and wasn’t coming back.

And Anderson’s case was finished.

And Noah was sick.

It’s time to stop this.

The baby was still wailing. “Mel.” The husband was stroking her head like a puppy. “Charlie’s hungry. He needs you.”

Melissa took the baby from her husband mechanically. She pulled up her shirt and bra with a quick, deft gesture, and her round breast popped into view, its large, pink nipple as unexpected as a spaceship. Janie felt Anderson avert his gaze, but she couldn’t look away. Melissa settled the hungry baby on her breast, and after a few moments her face took on a quieter expression.

Shame trickled down Janie’s neck. She had put Noah through this, too, confusing him even further for no good reason. “I’m sorry,” she said to Melissa.

Melissa closed her eyes, focusing on what was happening in her body, and Janie remembered the prickling sensation of breasts becoming heavy and alive with the flow of milk, the tug at the nipple with small sharp teeth, and then the deep inner sigh as the baby sucked the milk into his mouth.

“You people ought to leave now,” John said, though it hardly needed saying. He led them silently through the house, Janie steering Noah with both hands on his back, his hands still covering his ears, Anderson following behind. John opened the front door. He wouldn’t look at them.

The three of them stumbled down the steps and out into the pretty street. Trees waved in the breeze; the golf courses glowed in the distance. A boy on a bike whizzed by them on the sidewalk, ferociously focused, nearly hitting them. Janie watched him continue down the street, tires wobbling.

*

They drove away in silence. Janie sat in the back next to Noah’s car seat. Noah wouldn’t open his eyes or remove his hands from his ears. After a while his hands fell to his sides and she realized he had fallen asleep.

Noah is sick.

She tried the words out in her head. They lay there meaninglessly, like an innocent-looking chunk of plutonium.

Anderson turned down one street and then another, and the guard waved them out the gate. They were back in the world now, the confusing, hectic reality. They turned down Main Street, toward the motel. The GPS lady sang her indifferent tune. “Continue point two miles. Then turn left on Pleasant Street.”

Pleasant, Janie thought. The word echoed in her brain, transformed into Psychosis.

Out the window, the local high school was getting out for the day. Big kids slouching toward the parking lot, calling out to each other with loud, exuberant voices.

“Turn left on Psychosis Street. Recalculating.”

Recalculating. Medicating.

“Continue point two miles on Psychosis Street. Medicating. Medicating.”

They were going down a side street now, past a local bank, a sweet street with smaller houses, their porches adorned with American flags. Side street. Side effects.

“Continue point three miles. Turn left on Catherine Place.” Catherine, Catatonic.

“Turn left on Catatonic Place. Medicating…”

Anderson was looking at her in the rearview mirror.

“Janie, I must apologize,” he said quietly. “It clearly wasn’t the right previous personality. I should have caught that. There were things I missed I should not have missed.”

“Things?” Janie tried to shake her head clear.

“Yes, the younger son, Charlie—he is too young for Tommy to have known him.… I thought they had an older child named Charlie.”

How do you stop trying when it is your son? But it has to stop somewhere.

It’s time to stop this.

“Turn left on Denial Road. Medicating. Medicating.”

The car seemed to be roaming the streets with a will of its own. Anderson was still speaking. “And I used the word reptiles. I should have said lizards. It is my mistake. It’s not like me, but that’s no excuse. I was not being precise. I didn’t catch the difference between snakes and liz—”

“Jerry. Stop the car.”

He pulled to the side of the road. He faced the front, beads of sweat glistening on the back of his neck. “Yes?”

“We’re done here, Jerry.”

“I agree, definitely, this was the wrong … home.”

Was the man dense? “No, I mean … I’m done with schools and stores and houses. All of it. Please drive us to the motel.”

“That’s where we’re going.”

“The GPS said left. You turned right. Three times, actually.”

He frowned. “No.”

“Why do you think she keeps saying ‘recalculating’?”

“Oh.” His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “Oh.” He looked through the windshield, as if lost at sea.

She tried to keep her own voice cool. “Jerry. Listen to me. There is no previous personality. Noah made it all up.”

Anderson kept his gaze fixed in front of him, as if the answers lay there, on the asphalt road. “What do you mean?”

She looked at her sleeping boy. He was slumped in his car seat, his shining head tilted on one shoulder, pale lashes fluttering. She could see the seat belt making a mark where it crossed his cheek.

“He made it up. Because he has schizophrenia,” she said.

She had said it, that word that sounded like every bodily function run amok at the same time.