The Forgetting Time(44)

She opened the car door and stepped out on the road. She leaned down, hands on her knees, sequestered behind a dense curtain of hair. The vertigo was too strong. She kneeled at the edge of the road. She felt it hard and firm beneath her, like reality.

“Are you all right?” He was shading his eyes and looked unsteady on his feet.

People like the two of them—desperate people—were dangerous, she thought suddenly. She saw the other mother, the black tear-tracks on her face. She felt sick again, this time with guilt. Yet some part of her, she realized, was also relieved. That door was closed. She was back in real life again, however terrible that might be.

Anderson wiped his face with his hand. “You’ve had a diagnosis,” he said at last.

She looked around, as if wanting someone to contradict this: the grass, the asphalt, the cars whizzing by on their way to the supermarket or the mall. “Yes.”

He shook his head. “Who?”

“Not exactly a diagnosis. A suggestion. By Dr. Remson. He’s a child psychiatrist in New York. One of the best, apparently.” This last she threw out to hurt him.

He took this in without reacting. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t want to work with us.”

His eyes flashed. “Don’t you know what my colleagues would say if—” He inhaled slowly and with an effort lowered his voice again. “You—” His lip trembled a little, then stilled. There was a cost, she thought, to calming that facade. “You should have told me.”

I don’t care about your colleagues, she thought. I don’t care what happens after people die. I care about the boy in the car. That’s all I’ve ever cared about. “Yes. I should have told you,” she admitted dully. “When your son is very sick, you’re not yourself, you don’t behave in ordinary ways. You can’t see clearly.” She wiped her wet eyes with her hand. “It was irresponsible of me.” She meant all of it.

He shook his head sharply. “Noah doesn’t have schizophrenia,” Anderson said.

She felt the hope begin to buzz up inside of her, and she smashed it fast before it could do any more damage.

“And you know this how?”

“It’s my professional opinion.”

She stood up and smiled thinly at him. “I’m sorry but that doesn’t carry a lot of weight with me right now.” She ignored his wince. “Besides, you saw Noah’s behavior today.”

“It was the wrong previous personality.” Anderson bowed his head. “It was my fault. It’s upsetting. But—”

“It’s over. The case is finished, Jerry.”

“Yes. Of course.” He nodded slowly. “Of course. I just need a…,” he said. Then he walked a few feet away into the grass and looked around him, as if to find his way.

“Mom?”

Noah was waking up. He stretched and cast a shattering smile in her direction.

“How are you feeling, sweetie?” She smoothed his hair, rubbed the red mark from the seat belt on his face. “Are you hungry? I have a granola bar in my purse.”

He smiled sleepily. “Are we there yet?”

“We’re almost to the motel.”

“No, Mommy-Mom,” he said patiently, as if she were daft. “When do we get to Asheville Road?”





Sujith Jayaratne, a boy from a suburb of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, began showing an intense fear of trucks and even the word lorry, a British word for truck that has become part of the Sinhalese language, when he was only eight months old. When he became old enough to talk, he said that he had lived in Gorakana, a village seven miles away, and that he had died after being hit by a truck.

He made numerous statements about that life. His great-uncle, a monk at a nearby temple, heard some of them and mentioned Sujith to a younger monk at the temple. The story interested this monk, so he talked with Sujith, who was a little more than two and a half years old at the time, about his memories, and then wrote up notes of the conversations before he attempted to verify any of the statements. His notes document that Sujith said that he was from Gorakana and lived in the section of Gorakawatte, that his father was named Jamis and had a bad right eye, that he had attended the kabal iskole, which means “dilapidated school,” and had a teacher named Francis there, and that he gave money to a woman named Kusuma, who prepared string hoppers, a type of food, for him … he said that his house was whitewashed, that its lavatory was beside a fence, and that he bathed in cool water.

Sujith had also told his mother and grandmother a number of other things about the previous life that no one wrote down until after the previous personality had been identified. He said his name was Sammy, and he sometimes called himself “Gorakana Sammy” … he said that his wife’s name was Maggie and their daughter’s was Nandanie. He had worked for the railways and had once climbed Adam’s Peak, a high mountain in central Sri Lanka … he said that on the day he died, he and Maggie had quarreled. She left the house, and he then went out to the store. While he was crossing the road, a truck ran over him, and he died.

The young monk went to Gorakana to look for a family who had a deceased member whose life matched Sujith’s statements. After some effort, he discovered that a fifty-year-old man named Sammy Fernando, or “Gorakana Sammy” as he was sometimes called, had died after being hit by a truck six months before Sujith was born. All of Sujith’s statements proved to be correct for Sammy Fernando, except for his statement that he had died immediately when the truck hit him. Sammy Fernando died one to two hours after being admitted to a hospital following the accident.