The Forgetting Time(87)
Her nose running against her fingers, the slickness of snot, the salty splash of tears.
“You all right?”
Denise stood there with a plate in each hand.
She looked up. “I—”
“Come with me.”
*
Denise’s bedroom was sunny. The curtains were pulled all the way back, and Janie had to shade her eyes from the glare. She sat on the bed. She was hiccupping, and her eyes were tearing. Denise brought her a box of tissues.
“I could give you a pill, but it might knock you out.”
“I think I’m already knocked out.”
Denise nodded curtly. She seemed efficient now, a brisk nurse. “Do you want some ibuprofen?”
It wasn’t what she needed, but she’d take it. “That’d be good.”
She lay down on the bed and tried to quiet herself as Denise bustled around in the bathroom. Then she bolted to her feet.
“Oh! Noah. I need to get back—”
“Charlie’s looking after him.” She was back in the room with a pill in her hand and a glass of water in the other. “And that doctor is there.”
“Yes, but—”
“He’s fine. Sit.”
She sat. The light in the room was blinding. She took the pill she didn’t need and swallowed it. It was not pain that was causing her light-headedness. It was reality. She was sitting on this too-busy flowered bedspread in this other woman’s room—that was real; and the sunlight in her eyes was real; and here was this other woman, who was also real. And the reality of the situation was also bigger than that … but what did she do with it? Even the thought of it made her head spin.
“I’m sorry.” The words emerged without thought.
“For what?” Denise’s face revealed nothing.
“To take you out of the—party.” The word hovered between them painfully. Janie winced. “I mean, the wake … no, that’s not right. I mean…” Wake up.
Denise took the glass back from her. “Charlie’s good with kids,” she went on, as if trying to draw her back to normalcy with her patter. “I’ve been trying forever to get him to do some babysitting around here. Make a little money instead of siphoning off my wallet for god knows what. Comic books and junk food and video games, mostly. And that’s only the stuff I know about.”
“Wow.” Janie tried to pull her mind around to what this woman was saying. “Having a teenager, that must be tough.… I’m just trying to make it through preschool at this point.”
“Charlie’s a good kid. But he hates to study. And he’s dyslexic on top of it. So…” She shook her head ruefully.
“Dyslexia … when do you know if they have that?” She hadn’t thought about that one. Yet another thing to worry about.
Denise handed her a tissue and watched while Janie blew her nose. “Usually around first grade—when they start to read—that’s when the learning disabilities start to become evident.”
“Oh. I see.” She tried to remember if Noah had any issues recognizing letters. He seemed pretty good at that. “Was Tommy also—”
“Just Charlie.” Her voice was abrupt.
Janie brooded on it for a moment. There was a hereditary connection, wasn’t there? But could you inherit things from the family of your previous incarnation? Her head began to swirl again. She took a deep breath. Where did Tommy end and Noah begin? What did Henry and Denise have to do with it? She wanted to ask Denise but didn’t have the courage. “I suppose by the time they are teenagers you know them pretty well inside and out.”
For the first time, Denise cracked a smile. “Are you kidding me? I don’t know half of what’s in Charlie’s head most of the time. He just—disappeared on me.” The words pricked the air. Her face closed up again. Janie wanted to fill up the space between them but couldn’t find the right thing to say.
She cast her eyes around the room. There was not much to look at except pictures: school pictures of Charlie and Tommy on the wall (she recognized the one from the newspaper article), others on the bedside table. A framed snapshot of a toddler lurching across the floor toward a beautiful young woman with gold hoop earrings and open arms.
“That was the day Charlie learned to walk,” Denise said simply. She was standing right next to her, looking over her shoulder. “He went from one or two steps to walking clear across the room. It looks like he’s walking to me, but he was really walking to his brother, right behind me. He idolized that boy.”
Janie looked again at the picture. She hadn’t realized that the woman in the photo was Denise. She picked up the one next to it.
A picture of Tommy jumping from a wooden raft. It was a snapshot, but the camera had captured the sun sparkling on the water, the rough-hewed wood of the raft. Tommy was caught in midair, legs splayed; she recognized the pure elation on his face. She knew that expression. She couldn’t look away.
Denise glanced at the photograph. “That was by the lake house. We used to go there every summer.” Her voice was wistful. “Tommy loved that place.”
“I know,” Janie said. “Noah talked about it.”
“Did he? Really?”
“He told his teachers it was his favorite vacation,” Janie said. The words hovered in her mind a moment, and she waited for the jealousy to follow. But she didn’t feel any jealousy, looking at that picture that seemed to contain the distillation of Noah’s joy. She felt something else flooding through her: gratitude. He had had a good life here, with Denise; for the first time, she realized that she couldn’t separate that from the loving, exuberant boy who had been born to her.