The Forgetting Time(84)

Of course, no amount of data could convince someone who wasn’t open to being convinced. People came up with the answers they wanted. Always did. Always would. Anderson had tried to guard against this in his own work, hired researchers to check and recheck his data and colleagues to review his articles, urging the highest standards of skepticism, but it was inevitable there would be some bias. His colleagues were his colleagues; they had wanted to trust him. He had believed for so long that if he rid his work of even the slightest tinge of subjectivity it was only a matter of time before his data was accepted; it was part of the battle he’d been fighting, only now it was late morning and the air was warm and the scent of the soil was rich and fresh and he felt the fight beginning to lift out of him. Let people believe what they wanted to believe.

Detective Ludden, for instance: the answer that made the most sense to Detective Ludden was ESP. It never ceased to amaze Anderson. Here was this rational professional man with his razor-sharp intellect and world-weary outlook, grasping at some idea of Noah’s super extrasensory perception as inherently more likely than that some fragment of Tommy’s consciousness might continue in some fashion after his death. A samosa vendor on the streets of New Delhi, a taxi driver in Bangkok, would laugh themselves silly at such na?veté. But psychic powers were a phenomenon the police departments in America had at least had some experience with—they had all heard stories of clues being generated this way; some had even employed psychics themselves from time to time. So little Noah Zimmerman was an amazingly powerful psychic intuiting the last moments of Tommy Crawford’s life. Whatever floats your boat, Detective.

And he had to admit, once he had made his peace with that aspect of the case, the detective was surprisingly game. Before they had even positively identified the remains, he had interviewed Noah. Taken careful notes and used them to fill in the blanks, to elicit a more comprehensive confession, not that the killer was holding back. But the detective wanted the facts presented as fully and clearly as possible, Anderson understood this, he wanted to know what happened, and isn’t that what we all want?

Everything squared, more or less, with the evidence. The bones, the bullet-shattered ribs.

The father wanted the killer dead, but the mother felt that there wasn’t much point in that. And the prosecutors had taken the death penalty off the table, since he had confessed, and had been a young teenager when the crime had occurred. And, after all, he may as well work through his guilt in this life. No point in bleeding it on into the next. So Anderson had agreed with Denise on the uselessness of the death penalty, although she still refused to use the word reincarnation.

Tommy’s spirit, that’s how she put it.

Whatever floats your boat, my friend. Whatever floats your boat.

*

He had been thinking more seriously about karma lately. He had never focused on it in his work—it was hard enough to find verification that consciousness continued, without getting mixed up in the complexity of ethical ramifications across time—but occasionally he had run searches of the data, trying to see if there was a connection between the kinds of lives people led and their next lives. There was nothing conclusive, although a small fraction of those in peaceful or affluent conditions remembered previous lives in which they’d meditated or behaved in a saintly way. He’d had his own thoughts lately, though, that ignorance and fear and anger, like trauma, could perhaps be transferred from one life to the next, and that it might take multiple lifetimes to overcome them. And if anger and fear could persist—then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children’s memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he’d been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe.

Or maybe not. He’d kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else.





Thirty-Eight

Denise would never get over it. She knew that.

Tommy’s bones at the bottom of the well.

She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photographing them, the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She’d clutched them to her chest, run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There, but not there. Some part of her wanted those bones, wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep, to carry his skull around in her purse so she’d be with him always; she understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things. But another part of her knew that it wasn’t Tommy. He wasn’t there.

Tommy’s bones, where Noah had said he’d drowned; she supposed that was proof, if that’s what you were looking for, but she wasn’t looking. Somehow it had ceased to matter to her.

Yet how could it not matter whether this boy carried some little piece of Tommy deep inside of him? Some fragments of his love. Tommy’s love for her, surviving, inside of Noah. That was something, wasn’t it?

But surely we all carried some little piece of each other inside of us. So what did it matter, whether the memories belonging to her boy existed inside this other one? Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?