The Forgetting Time(60)

They looked together at the sleeping boy.

“You know I can’t promise anything,” Anderson murmured.

“Of course.”

She was lying, though. She thought he had promised her everything.





Twenty-Two

Denise perched at the end of her chair and surveyed the bowl of M&M’s that always seemed untouched on the doctor’s side table. Did anyone ever eat them? Were these the same M&M’s she’d been staring at for almost seven years? Someone, she thought, should do an experiment. Put all the green ones on top and see what happens. Bust the good doctor cold.

“Denise?”

“I’m listening.” She didn’t feel like looking at him but decided he’d probably make a note of it if she didn’t. His elegant, horsey face seemed even more elongated in worry.

“I said, everybody regresses sometimes,” Dr. Ferguson was saying. “It happens.”

She looked back at the M&M’s bowl. “Not to me.”

“You’re too hard on yourself. You’ve done incredible work creating a life for yourself. Don’t forget that.”

“A life for myself.” She said it the way she might say “A half-pound of salami, sliced thin, please,” or: “Time for your meds, Mr. Randolph.” But what she meant, which anyone could see if he was not a fool, was: my life is shit.

Dr. Ferguson was not a fool. She felt him regarding her. “You’re disappointed in yourself.”

She popped a green M&M in her mouth. The sugar turned to dust on her tongue. She couldn’t taste a thing. “I’m done.”

“And what does that mean?”

She might as well tell him the truth. Who else could she tell? “I’m done with it. I worked so hard all these years to pull it together for Charlie, and one phone call puts me right back there and it’s as if it all happened yesterday. And I can’t—” She took a breath. “I can’t do it.”

She felt him choosing his words cautiously. “I understand it must be extremely upsetting to feel that way again.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

He crossed one long skinny leg over the other. “And what other choice do you have?” His Adam’s apple bobbed visibly in his neck, like Ichabod Crane’s in a movie she’d once seen. I guess this makes me the headless horseman, she thought. About right, too. She had no thoughts or feelings left. She was watching herself from a great height, the way the recent dead are said to watch their own bodies.

“Let’s just say I’m considering my options.”

“Are you telling me you’re thinking of suicide?”

She took note of his concern. It was like a thought bubble hovering over his head, meaning nothing. She shrugged. A habit of Charlie’s that always aggravated her, but she saw its usefulness now.

“Because if that’s what you mean, if you’re serious, I have to take some action. You know that.”

That hospital. Those stained sofas, chipped floors, vacant faces watching mindless television. She shuddered.

Anyway, he would never give her a prescription if she seemed suicidal. And she needed the prescription. She didn’t know why she had said it. “You know I would never do that. Never. I would never give him the satisfaction.”

“Him?”

She gave the doctor a withering look. “The man who stole Tommy, of course.” The minute she said it she knew it was the truth, that she couldn’t do it. Damn it to hell. And she’d been feeling so calm, too. “And of course I couldn’t do that to Charlie.”

Of course she couldn’t. And wasn’t there some tiny part of her that still wanted something from this life? To cast these fragments of herself to the winds, to see if they could take root somewhere?

“So what did Detective Ludden say, when you called him?”

“You mean, last night, or this morning?”

All right, Doctor, now you see where we’re at, do you not?

A pause. “Either one.”

“He said that the detectives in Florida were working hard on the case. That’s what he always says, ‘They’re working hard, ma’am,’ so polite, you know. And I know he thinks I’m crazy. All of them do.”

“Who is ‘all of them’?”

“Everybody. You think I’m paranoid? I’m not paranoid. Every time I run into people, they give me this look, even now, it’s subtle but I see it, as if they’re surprised, as if—”

“As if what?”

“As if something’s wrong with me, and I shouldn’t still be walking around, I should be—”

“Yes?”

“Dead. Because Tommy’s dead.”

It was the first time she’d said it and she wanted immediately to take it back. The words had fallen out of her mouth like marbles, rolling this way and that across the floor, irretrievable.

And people were right, she thought. Why should she keep breathing? All these years she’d kept it together not only for Charlie but also for Tommy: so that she would be intact when he came back to her.

But she couldn’t pretend any longer: Tommy was dead and she was a—what? Not a widow, not an orphan. There was no word for what she was.