The Forgetting Time(56)
When she was pregnant, she’d read studies that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol could cross through the placenta and into the fetus, affecting fetal development and causing low birth weight. This made sense to her: it wasn’t just the carrots she ate, the vitamins she took: what she felt, her baby felt. She had tried to remain as calm as possible, turning down a plum job with a big corporate firm so as not to adversely impact her developing baby with long hours and maximum stress.
Now she felt the cortisol spiking through her system and wondered if Noah could still somehow feel it, if tiny particles of her stress surrounded the air he breathed and made everything worse. She couldn’t help it, though. The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of a world?
From the moment she’d stepped on the Greyhound bus until the moment she’d walked onto the plane with Noah and Jerry at Dulles Airport, she’d had the feeling of rolling down a steep hill. She couldn’t stop. If she put her hands out on either side to slow the momentum, they would scrape themselves raw.
The plane lifted into the sky. Noah’s voice rose to a high, keening wail. And she was left with herself. What was she doing? How could she revisit this idea, after the fiasco they had so recently encountered? How could she risk hurting yet another mother?
How could she imagine that Noah was not hers and hers alone?
And yet, as if in response, the line came suddenly into her head:
Your children are not your children.
Where had she heard that? Who had said it?
Janie leaned her head briefly against the seat in front of her and patted her shrieking son’s knee.
Your children are not your children.
She remembered now, as she listened to the cries overtaking her in waves of sound and saw the flight attendant frowning down the aisle in her direction: it was a song. A Sweet Honey in the Rock song she’d heard with Noah last summer at a free concert in Prospect Park.
It was an early July evening, the air mild and breezy. She had settled on a blanket with some friends and enough hummus and pita and carrots to feed a small city of preschoolers. The singers’ voices had blended in perfect a cappella harmony (Your children are not your children … though they are with you, they belong not to you), and Janie had taken off her shoes and wriggled her weary toes, listening to her friends’ worries (private vs. public schools, thoughtless husbands). She herself couldn’t afford private school and had no husband to complain of, but she was happy, because the song was wrong, and Noah was hers, and it was a beautiful evening, and she couldn’t imagine having much love left inside of her for anybody else, anyway.
How could she have imagined then that she would be here, barreling faster than breath toward a woman who was not expecting them?
Only last summer, and yet it may as well have been another life.
“I WANT MY MAMA!” Noah shouted again, and the whole plane could hear him: as if she were kidnapping him, as if he hadn’t always been entirely hers.
*
When the plane was safely aloft and Noah had finally exhausted himself, crashing into a fitful sleep, Janie reached under the seat in front of her and pulled out the pages that Anderson had printed out the night before. Copies of newspaper articles from the Millerton Journal and Dayton Daily News about Tommy Crawford, who lived on Asheville Road and was nine when he’d gone missing. He was a student at McKinley Elementary, where his mother was a schoolteacher.
The photograph in the newspaper article was from school picture day. American flag on one side, cheesy rainbow backdrop against a fake blue sky. You could almost hear the photographer urging: Smile wide, now. Smile big. Could be any boy, really. His skin was a light brown. He was African American. She didn’t know why this should be surprising to her. He grinned up at her. He had a nice smile.
“AUTHORITIES CALL OFF SEARCH FOR MISSING BOY”
The Greene County police force called off the search today for Tommy Crawford, nine, of 81 Asheville Road, who disappeared from his Oak Heights neighborhood on June 14. Though the child is feared to be dead, Detective James Ludden, who had been leading the search effort, stated that “as far as I’m concerned, this case isn’t over until we find the boy, one way or another.”
Crawford, who attended McKinley Elementary School, is by all accounts a bright and popular boy. His parents describe a cheerful child who loves baseball and is a devoted older brother to Charles, eight. “Charlie misses his big brother,” his parents, Denise and Henry Crawford, said in a statement. “We miss our beloved boy. If you have Tommy with you or know where he is, please, please call—”
She looked away. There was too much pain in this piece of paper.
They were in the clouds now, on their way to a place she’d never been. She was flying on instinct, a mystery even to herself.
Janie believed in consistency. It was something she took pride in. She said, “No crackers before bedtime,” and then she stuck with it. She had been even-tempered (mostly); she had been constant (as much as possible). Kids needed that.
She had tried to create order in Noah’s life the way her mother had created order in her own, after the chaos of living with her father. She didn’t remember much of the time before her father had left them. There was a memory of sitting high up on his shoulders at the state fair—but was that a real memory or something she made up from a picture she had? There was the time the two of them went to the mall on some errand and he had spontaneously bought a huge stuffed polar bear for her, far too big for any room but the living room, and her mother had objected but then laughed and let her keep it there beside the TV. There was the smell of his pipe and his scotch, and the sound of him banging on the door all night long when he drank and her mother wouldn’t let him in. There was her mother holding a water glass filled with red wine (the first and only time Janie had seen her drink), telling her in the matter-of-fact voice she always had that she had asked him to leave and he wasn’t ever coming back, and she was right; he didn’t. Janie was ten then. She remembered that day perfectly, the startling sight of her mother drinking in the afternoon, the way the wine had splashed as her mother talked and Janie had been nervous it would spill over.