The Forgetting Time(91)

The water was still pouring down over and through her fingers, changing moment by moment. As a child, she’d seen a movie about Helen Keller, how she had felt water running from a pump and had finally connected the name to the source of the name—but now she was going in the opposite direction, and names were losing their sense. What was Noah or Tommy, and who was she? Her head roared with a bright confusion.

“Hey, look!” He was calling for her. Whatever she was to him, she wasn’t a stranger. There were no strangers.

“Look,” Noah said. “Look at this bubble!”

The shine of the faucet pierced her eyes. Denise looked over, a beat too late.

“Oh! Popped. Sorry,” Noah said.

“Okay.”

“Look! Bubble!” This time she looked over quickly.

“I see it,” Denise said. “That’s a big one.”

It was a big one. It spanned the distance between his knees, growing bigger and bigger as he moved his legs apart, shimmering like crazy for its split second of existence.

“Look!”

The bubble grew larger still. In the ever-changing map of its colors, someone was drowning and someone was being born.

“Oh! Popped.”

“Yes.”

There was nothing to hold on to anymore. Only everything.

Noah looked down, then, and put his whole face in the water. He lifted his head. He had a bubble beard and a bubble mustache and he was grinning away like a demonic baby Santa Claus. “Guess who?” he said.

Denise smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “Who?”

“Me!”





Forty-Two

It was late by the time they got home from the airport. Charlie sat next to his mom as they pulled into the driveway. Another night on Asheville Road; same old sounds of crickets and the Johnsons’ TV playing an Indians game. Crazy that it seemed the same when what was in his head had changed so much. He guessed that was how life was. Who knew what was in anybody’s mind? And meanwhile people died and had whole new lives, like the fireflies that arrived in June, flashing here, then gone, then here again. It was like some kind of batshit magic trick.

Charlie had spent hours catching fireflies with his brother when they were little. Tommy would run around the yard with a jar, Charlie right at his heels. Once they’d caught a few, they’d put the jar on the steps and sit, watching them buzz and spark. They always pitched a fit when it was time to let them go. They wanted to keep them as pets, even though their mom explained that they’d die that way, that they belonged in the wild. One night Tommy and Charlie couldn’t take it anymore—they lied and hid the jar under Tommy’s bed, and the next morning they had woken up to find themselves the owners of three dead bugs in a jar: dry, ugly, black-winged things that looked like ordinary beetles, as if someone had come in the night and drained the mystery right out of them.

Now Charlie wondered if the kid, Noah, ever saw fireflies in the city. Or if he remembered them. Even though he wasn’t Tommy. Not really.

He looked sideways at his mom. What was she thinking? He knew it was probably about his brother, but sometimes, lately, she surprised him. She’d ask his opinions about things, like what kind of food they should serve at the reception or whether they should ask his dad over for dinner. Why so curious what I think all of a sudden, he wanted to say, when you haven’t given a rat’s ass for the last seven years? And it was a problem, too, because it meant he couldn’t get stoned as much. He’d had a quick toke or two in the garage the day before the burial and she’d noticed in, like, half a second. Not even. She’d looked him right in the eyeballs and he was grounded before he even knew what hit him.

*

Denise stared out the windowshield into the darkness, pondering gradations of loss.

She would always miss Tommy—there was no stray piece of her that wasn’t always missing him. But this other child, this child who was not Tommy, had brought a sweet taste to a mouth that had been filled with bitterness. They had been through it, the two of them, and there was that bond that she knew would always be between them.

When they’d said good-bye at the airport he had held on to her for a long time, and she was surprised to realize she couldn’t speak for a minute. Finally she’d said, “I’ll see you in Brooklyn.”

“Okay.”

“Will you show me your room?”

He nodded. “I’ve got stars in my room.”

“Stars? Really?”

“They’re glow-in-the-dark stickers. On the ceiling. All the constellations. My mom put them up there.”

“Well, I can’t wait to see them.”

She made herself smile. She was still holding Noah by the shoulders and he had his hands on her waist, as if they were dancing. She didn’t want to let go of him. She wasn’t sure she could. Around her the other figures were insubstantial, blurry: she saw Janie glancing at her watch and Dr. Anderson speaking softly to Charlie. Then Charlie put his heavy hand on her back and said, “C’mon, Mama, they’ve got to get to their gate,” and she knew she had to do it (Let go) and she let him go.

The three of them walked away from her and stood at the end of the security line: Dr. Anderson, a stiff man like her father had been, of that same breed—farmers and doctors who took their jobs seriously, who had kindness in them under all that proper bearing; and Janie, another mother who was doing her best with the job she was given; and that little boy with the yellow hair for whom she had some love in her heart, no use denying it. (Let go.)