The Forgetting Time(57)

After that, her mother had gone back to work as a nurse and they got into a regular rhythm. She started working nights when Janie was thirteen, but she was home to oversee schoolwork, and always made sure there were healthful dinners in the house for her to warm in the microwave and clean pressed clothes for her to put on in the morning before school. And when those nights got a little lonely, Janie retreated to her room, where everything was exactly the way she wanted it to be. She opened the door and saw her framed posters of foggy European castles and horses; her furniture hand-painted in cheerful primary colors; her closets organized by color scheme; her color-coded world.

A lifetime of creating orderly spaces had followed, and what good had it done? When the world was not orderly.

Even her mother had been, in the end, a mystery to her.

When she had gone through her mother’s house that week after her death—those days when she was hardly conscious, her heart frozen over with grief, though words fought their way occasionally to the surface and cracked through (words like why and orphan, though as far as she knew her father was still alive somewhere, and God, whom she had never been taught to believe in but was furious at all the same)—she’d found in the drawer of her mother’s bedside table the kind of book her mom had always made fun of. It even had a rainbow on its cover and a new-agey title: You Can Change Your Life. She flipped through the pages: it had chapters on meditation, karma, and reincarnation, ideas her atheistic mother had never seemed to give a second’s thought—she’d roll her eyes and say, “Who has time to think about that? When you’re gone, you’re gone.” Yet the book was well thumbed and heavily underlined, with passages marked with stars and exclamation points. One sentence, Everything is a projection of mind, had three stars next to it.

Had her mother wanted so desperately to keep life going that she’d lost her common sense? Or had she found something at the very end that changed the way she looked at everything? Or was it someone else’s book, someone else’s stars? Janie didn’t know, and she would never know, so she’d put it out of her mind, permanently … or so she’d thought.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. That was one of the things her mother had loved to say. She was a practical woman who worked all day with surgical instruments, but she had always had a soft spot for Shakespeare. Janie had never thought much about the quote; it was something her mother said, usually with a huff of impatience, in moments when she was out of explanations—why her father had never called her, for instance, or, in the hospital, why she had refused to embark on yet another experimental treatment.

The last time Janie had thought of it was the night in Trinidad when Noah had been conceived. That night, after Jeff had left, she couldn’t sleep, so she had walked by herself back to the beach. It was late, and she was conscious as always of her vulnerability, a woman alone, the vulnerability heightened by the nearness of sex, of being seen at one’s most unguarded. That raw moment of closeness with Jeff had been there, she had been in it, and now it was gone, like a lit match flickering out in the humid darkness. She looked at the sky, which made a mockery of the night skies she had mostly known: this was the essence of sky, in its depths of darkness and of light. Its beauty, like a piece of music, stirred her loneliness into something beyond itself, made her look up and out instead of in. She had a message-in-a-bottle impulse to hurl her confusion out into the expanse, in the hope that something (God? her mother?) might be out there, listening.

“Helloooo,” she’d called out, half-comically. “Anyone there?”

She knew she’d have no answer.

And yet, standing by the shore, the waves peeling back to expose the gleaming nakedness of sand pocked here and there with shells and stones and then pushing forward, drawing their eternal curtain over the rawness, a feeling of peace had washed through her. She’d felt something there. Was it God? Was it her mother?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, she’d thought.

It had been Noah. Noah was her answer, the thing that was there. That had been enough for her.

So it was fitting, she thought, looking out now at a vast expanse of blue sky, that Noah would bring her right back here, to the most abstract of questions, which were now unbearably relevant. For either reincarnation was bunk, or it wasn’t. Either Noah was sick, or he wasn’t. And there was no way to know. There was no way to reason through it, or at least no way she knew, or could imagine.

Despite everything she knew or didn’t know about living, despite the thousands of carefully analyzed, inexplicable cases, despite her moments of panic and her years of good sense, she would have to take a leap.





Twenty-One

“You’re too serious for the beach,” she was saying. She was laughing at him.

“Excuse me, sir?”

It wasn’t Sheila; it was the flight attendant, hovering over Anderson, offering him water and pretzels. He shook himself awake and took the tiny bag but refused the beverage, even though he was parched, afraid to jostle the sleeping child next to him by putting down his tray.

The boy’s mother sat beside her son, looking out the window.

What was her name?

It had fallen down the chute. It was gone.

His mind felt as clear as ever. It was simply the word that eluded him. It was there, right in front of him, taunting him, and yet his brain balked, refusing utterly to reach out even a finger to touch it. He felt like Tantalus, parched and hungry, striving fruitlessly for the cool water and the grapes that were always just out of reach.