The Forgetting Time(69)

And Tommy wanted to play at Oscar’s and she said all right, you can go, because Henry was sleeping and the boys were fighting and she thought it might be better with him out of her hair for a while.

And so she had her day, her day with Tommy out of her hair. Charlie quiet, playing with his new toy. Henry sleeping. In the afternoon they’d had themselves a leisurely lunch and she decided to cook lasagna for dinner. While she cooked she’d looked out the window and the daffodils were blooming around the birdbath, and Henry was home, and the house was quiet, and she felt her own luck. There was Henry home and Charlie and Tommy and her house with the bird feeder and summer vacation soon and she felt her own luck at having this quiet moment, this life, this day.

Tommy!

But it was late afternoon, getting on toward evening, and she went to get Tommy to come home for dinner.

Walking leisurely down the road. There was no rush. It was Saturday. The green fields glowing in the dusk. Summer coming, and the air sweet with it.

She passed the barking dog next door and the mailboxes of the Cliffords and the McClures and turned into the cul-de-sac that Oscar lived in, a horseshoe of houses under tall trees swaying in the breeze. One of the trees must have been diseased; there was a man high up in it, sawing away at the branches. She stood and watched and thought what a shame it was, the limbs falling off that big old tree that had been around for centuries, while all around it spring was enveloping the world. In the cul-de-sac, the people were outside their houses, riding skateboards, listening to the radio, washing their cars. Oscar was shooting baskets on his driveway, his mom in her garden on the side of the house, watering the tomatoes. Denise could see the tomatoes as she walked up the steps of the house; they were small and round and green on the vine, like a promise.

She heard the basketball swishing through the hoop. The gush of water from one of the neighbors washing the soap off his car. The buzzing of the saw on the tree and then the slow cracking as a branch began to fall.

If you could go back—which you couldn’t—if you could go back, she’d go back to that moment, she’d live right there, standing on the driveway in the springtime listening to Oscar’s ball swish into the basket, waiting for Tommy. That moment before Oscar’s mother looked up from her tomatoes and Denise read the surprise written plainly on the other mother’s face, and her life cracked into two.

From then on there would always be the piece of life she was living and the other piece, the piece lived in darkness, in which something somewhere was happening to Tommy.

But it was happening all over again, had never stopped happening, that moment when Tommy had gone missing. She was locked inside it and there would never be any way out, no matter how many pills she took. She’d always be there, in that day, she had just imagined that she’d gone on, that she’d raised Charlie the best she could, that she’d kept on working.

Denise looked up at the ceiling, her head spinning. Things were rolling too fast now, fragments falling around her like bits of glass. The blue and white lights of the police car flashing in the window. The car she’d called too late, because he had been gone for hours, he’d never made it to Oscar’s house.

She lay flat on the bed, fingering her pills in her pocket. She liked the feel of them, soft and crumbly around the edges. Friendly. She put another one in her mouth, it was dry and bitter, but another bitter pill was nothing to her.

She pulled them out of her pocket and looked at them.

Twelve little friends, winking at her, calling out her name.





Twenty-Seven

Janie came in from the cornfields and sat down at the kitchen table next to Anderson. She put her head in her hands and tried to quiet the rush in her mind. Anderson was speaking to someone very slowly on the phone. She wondered how he could stay so composed when Noah was lost. But Noah wasn’t his child, after all. This was a stranger; a researcher. Like Noah, this particular panic belonged to her alone.

He tried to steady her with his eyes. She avoided him, inspecting Denise’s kitchen. The window overlooking the birdbath and the cornfields. The framed picture of peaches over the stove. The rooster clock, with its loud tick. She didn’t like to think about the suffering that had gone on in this room.

Anderson hung up the phone. “Police are coming.”

“Good.” Her voice was raw from shouting. “Did you—”

“I checked the house.”

“What about Mrs. Crawford?”

“Resting, but the child wasn’t there.”

“And the teenager?”

“Looking.”

“Did you look in the basement?”

“And the attic. We’ll look again soon. We’ll find him,” Anderson said. He looked exhausted, but also focused and awake. He was one of those people, she thought bitterly, who came to life in adversity. She had hoped she might be one of those people, too, but right now she didn’t think so.

“I should drive around the neighborhood,” Janie said. She stood up. “Give me the keys.”

“Take a moment,” Anderson said.

“I’m fine.”

“One moment.”

“No!”

“You can help more if you’re calm.”

She sat down again at the table. Her knees were shaking.

“How did this happen? How did I let this happen? He’s four years old!”