The Forgetting Time(93)

“That’s true.” He looked at Noah. The case was almost complete. There was only one thing left. How fascinating that he had not asked about it before.

“Can you do something for me? I know it’s odd, but can I see your—chest and your back? Just for a second? Would you mind? Is it okay?” He turned now to Janie, who had been listening to their conversation. She nodded. He stood up, pulled Noah away from the people, against a dormant carousel, out of view.

An adult would have asked why, but Noah simply lifted his T-shirt.

Anderson turned the child around carefully, looking at his pale chest and back. Two birthmarks, faintly visible: a faint round circle on the back, slightly reddish, and a ragged star of raised skin in the front. The path of a bullet, written plain on the flesh.

At another moment, he would have taken a picture of it, but now he simply let the T-shirt fall. The evidence was there.

A large family at the next carousel was counting baggage. Two boys in soccer shirts were running gleefully around the carousel. His good-bye over, Noah ran and joined them in an impromptu game of airport tag.

“You can use it,” Janie said in a low voice.

There was a certainty in her voice he hadn’t noticed before; she had seen the marks on her son’s skin. “For your book. You can write about Noah. You can use his first name.”

“Can I?” It was a question for himself.

“I’m sorry I doubted you before. You have my permission,” she said formally, “to use his story any way you like.”

He tilted his head in thanks. Perhaps there was enough juice left in him to finish this chapter, if he did it quickly. He owed that much to the man he had been. The man he was now, though … who was that?

“Do you think Noah is—getting better?” Janie asked haltingly. The trust in her eyes as she looked at him both touched and alarmed him.

“Do you?”

She thought about it. “Maybe. I think so.”

Noah and the soccer boys were doubled over with laughter.

“Why did Tommy decide to come back in the States, do you think?” she said, her eyes on her son. “Why wasn’t he reborn in China or India or England? You said once that people often reincarnate in the same area. But why?” She was puzzling over it earnestly, and he felt a kind of bemusement, as if all the questions that had buzzed about him for so much of his life had found a fresh new field to swarm.

“There does seem to be a correlation.” He spoke slowly, picking each word with care. “Some children speak of spending time in the areas in which they died, picking their parents from the people that pass by. Others are born into their own families, as their own grandchildren or nieces or nephews. We have speculated that may be due to … to love.” There was a different word he wanted, a more clinical one, but it was out of reach. “Perhaps personalities love their countries, the way they love their families.” He shrugged. “How a consciousness migrates is not a question I’ve been able to answer. I’ve been stuck on establishing its existence.” He shifted his feet impatiently. “Listen,” he said. “It’s been—”

“But I’m not sure what to do now.” She touched his sleeve, and the gesture startled him. “How do I go back and raise Noah now?”

“You rely on your intellect and your…” Again, the word eluded him. “… feelings. Your feelings are good.” He was whittled down now, either to banalities or simple truths. Either way, they would have to do. “We have to say good-bye now,” he murmured.

“You’ll need to follow up with Noah’s case, though? Right?”

I don’t know, he thought, but he said, “Sure.”

“So I can e-mail you sometimes? If I have more questions?”

He nodded, but barely.

“Okay.” They eyed each other, at a loss for how to part. A hug seemed out of the question, but a handshake seemed too formal. At last she held out her hand to him awkwardly, and he held it briefly in his own large one and then on impulse raised it to his lips and kissed it. The skin was soft beneath his lips. It was the kiss of a father at a wedding, releasing his daughter from his care. He felt a pang of some obscure loss, either for her companionship or for womankind, so far behind him now.

“Be well,” he said, releasing her hand. He grabbed his battered bag and headed out the doors into the warm night.

He was free.

That’s who he was.

Free. The cars and taxis slowed, pulling over to pick up relatives and customers, and he passed by them as he headed for the parking lot, enjoying his momentum, the way his legs swung smoothly, efficiently, his mind stretching out gratefully in the dark.

He cared about Janie and Noah, but they were receding from him rapidly. His last case, and it was done.

They were back there on the ground and he was—buoyed up.

He had fought with everything he had to hang on to his life as he had once known it, and now it was gone, and he floated on the lightness of his defeat. He had applied the full force of his mind to his attempt to understand the unfathomable, and maybe he’d been able to extract one or two teeth from the maw of infinity, and now he had only to write out this last case.

He had thought that as he grew nearer to his own death the unanswerable questions would pierce him unbearably, and now he found to his shock and delight that he had no need for questions. What would happen—would happen.