The Forgetting Time(83)
His eyes seemed silver in the bright fluorescent light. “All right.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I get you something?” he said. “A cup of coffee?”
She shook her head.
“Or if you’re hungry, I could go to the—I could—”
“Jerry?”
“Yes?” He looked—what was it he looked? For the first time, with her own desperation finally waning, she saw him as he was: how hard he had worked in his life, and with what courage; how tired he was now, and how deeply he felt he had failed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For … what you did for Noah.”
He nodded faintly. His eyes shimmered briefly and he closed them. He settled deeper into the chair, stretching his long legs out and to the side, so as not to block traffic in the hallway. She felt the tension flowing out of him, leaving his body and moving out into the air. He leaned his head back against the wall, next to hers, their hair almost but not quite brushing against each other’s.
He let out a soft exhalation. “You’re welcome.”
John McConnell, a retired New York City policeman working as a security guard, stopped at an electronics store after work one night in 1992. He saw two men robbing the store and pulled out his pistol. Another thief behind a counter began shooting at him. John tried to shoot back, and even after he fell, he got up and shot again. He was hit six times. One of the bullets entered his back and sliced through his left lung, his heart, and the main pulmonary artery, the blood vessel that takes blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs to receive oxygen. He was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.
John had been close to his family and had frequently told one of his daughters, Doreen, “No matter what, I’m always going to take care of you.” Five years after John died, Doreen gave birth to a son named William. William began passing out soon after he was born. Doctors diagnosed him with a condition called pulmonary valve atresia, in which the valve of the pulmonary artery has not adequately formed, so blood cannot travel through it to the lungs. In addition, one of the chambers of his heart, the right ventricle, had not formed properly as a result of the problem with the valve. He underwent several surgeries. Although he will need to take medication indefinitely, he has done quite well.
William had birth defects that were very similar to the fatal wounds suffered by his grandfather. In addition, when he became old enough to talk, he began talking about his grandfather’s life. One day when he was three years old, his mother was at home trying to work in her study when William kept acting up. Finally, she told him, “Sit down, or I’m going to spank you.” William replied, “Mom, when you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad a lot of times, and I never hit you!” …
William talked about being his grandfather a number of times and discussed his death. He told his mother that several people were shooting during the incident when he was killed, and he asked a lot of questions about it.
One time, he said to his mother, “When you were a little girl and I was your daddy, what was my cat’s name?”
She responded, “You mean Maniac?”
“No, not that one,” William answered. “The white one.”
“Boston?” his mom asked.
“Yeah,” William responded. “I used to call him Boss, right?” That was correct. The family had two cats, named Maniac and Boston, and only John referred to the white one as Boss.
JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Thirty-Seven
Bones don’t lie. That’s what the archaeologists say, and they’re right.
Bones don’t make up stories because they want to believe them. They don’t repeat something they overheard somewhere. They don’t have ESP. They are verifiable, carrying in their fissures the truth of our flawed materiality and our uniqueness. The crack in the femur, the holes in the teeth. So there could be no greater evidence, to Anderson’s way of thinking, than the bones positively identified as belonging to Tommy Crawford, which were discovered in an abandoned well in the woods not far from the Clifford residence.
Anderson stood next to Janie, Noah, and Tommy’s family, looking down at the hole in the earth into which they had lowered an expensive box covered with expensive flowers already wilting in the heat. He thought he ought to be observing the reactions of the subjects to these proceedings, but he wasn’t: instead he was thinking that when his own time came, he wanted none of that for himself. Let them leave his hacked-up body on a mountaintop to disintegrate and feed the vultures, as the Tibetan monks did, until the corporeal part of Jerry Anderson was nothing but bones on a ledge. He was thinking it wouldn’t be so very long now, that he would never let his body outlive his mind.
The boy’s father, Henry, was standing next to the hole, the shovel in his hands. He filled the spade and threw the dirt high over the coffin, the earth seeming to pause in midair and fall with a scattering thud, and then he scooped another shovelful without pausing, until it seemed like one long continuous movement, the shoveling and falling earth and shoveling, his face slick with sweat.
They all watched him. Noah, subdued, stood between Denise and Janie, holding Janie’s hand. Charlie had an arm around his mother’s shoulder.