The Forgetting Time(97)

One night she woke up in a panic, sure she was losing something precious, and she went to Noah’s room and watched him sleep (the nightmares, thank goodness, had stopped long ago). Once she was content on that score, she turned on her computer and checked her e-mail.

There it was, at last: Jerry Anderson’s name in her in-box. No subject heading. She opened it quickly. BEACH, he had written. All caps. Nothing else. The word resonated through the silence of the apartment, causing ripples of alarm and relief. “Are you all right?” she wrote. The screen cast a strange, pale light in the darkness, and she felt his presence rise up at that moment as if he were right there with her. “Jerry?”

I’m fine. She imagined him saying this, though he’d written nothing back. It was a feeling she had, though whether it was true or made up, she didn’t know. Still, it calmed her to think she could feel him there, across that vast space.

*

The next day, Janie was on her way to get Noah from afterschool, thinking a million thoughts at once, when suddenly she stopped. She looked around.

She was standing in a subway car, feeling the motion beneath her feet. The train pulled up from underground, up and out over the Manhattan Bridge, the early evening light shining on the river, on a boat carting its cargo from here to there, on the people in the subway car, every detail leaping forward with a heightened, tender clarity. The Band-Aid on the knee of the teenager across from her. The spiky hair of the woman reading next to him. The Rastafarian’s lips moving beneath his beard as he chewed gum.

Inside the subway car, advertisements for beer, storage space, mattresses: “Wake up and Rejuvenate your life.”

I’ve been wrong, she thought suddenly.

What had happened to Noah had seemed to separate her from other people who didn’t know the story—or, when she tried to explain it to her closest friends, “couldn’t believe in that stuff.” So she had put it away, kept it to herself, as if it was yet another thing keeping her subtly apart, when in fact … in fact, the implications suggested otherwise.

What were the implications?

So many lifetimes. So many people loved and lost and found again. Relatives you didn’t know you had.

Maybe she’d been related to someone in this very subway car. Maybe that guy with the suit and the iPad. Or the Rasta chewing gum. Or the blond man with the polka-dot shirt and the fern sticking out of his bag. Or the woman with the bristly hair. Perhaps one of them had been her mother. Or her lover. Or her son, the dearest of the dear. Or would be, next time around. So many lifetimes, it stands to reason that they were all related. They’d forgotten, that’s all. It wasn’t a hippy dippy campfire song. (Well, okay, it was, but it wasn’t just that.) It was real.

But how was that possible?

It didn’t matter how. It was. She looked around the car. The olive-skinned man next to her was reading a newspaper ad for a matchmaker. The kid across from her was jiggling a skateboard on his banged-up knees. The dearest of the dear, she thought. She was feeling punchy.

It would be hard to live that way. To look at other people that way. But you could try, couldn’t you?

The doors between the cars flung apart and a man emerged, homeless, shuffling into the subway car on grimy bare feet. His hair was matted into a coarse helmet, and his clothes—she couldn’t look too closely at his clothes. He lumbered unsteadily through the car. His smell was like a force field, repelling everything in its path; when the subway finally stopped and the doors opened, new people stepped in with one foot and turned right back around to go to another car. Most of the people already in the car left in droves.

Some stayed put, though. Decided to bear it out. They were too tired to get up or too distracted by their handheld devices or they didn’t want to give up their seats. Their stops were coming up soon. And anyway, that was the car they’d picked, the hand they’d been dealt, this time around. They looked carefully away from him; they were afraid to draw his attention.

She was the only one looking in his general direction, so he walked right up to her. He stood there, swaying in front of her, his smell making her eyes water. He didn’t have a jar or anything. He held out a dirty palm.

She pulled three quarters from her pocket and placed them on his palm, and as she did so, her fingers brushed against his hand, and she looked up. His eyes were a caramel color, bright around the pupils and darker at the edges, and peering into them was like looking into a double eclipse. He had thick lashes, brushed with soot. He blinked.

“Hey, thanks, sister,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” His face seemed to spring forward, his needs and hopes etched clearly there, as if he had been waiting all this time for her to notice him.

*

Paul lost twenty pounds that first year. He got shuffled around the prison as if he was a piece of paper on the ground being stepped on with muddy boots. He couldn’t sleep; he’d lie there in the top bunk breathing in the smell of urine from the toilet in the corner and listening to the prison sounds of dripping and snoring and yelling. He didn’t know if the yelling was the other inmates screaming in their sleep or if they were pushed into wakefulness by their own misery, as he was. And underneath it all, the never-ending echo of Tommy Crawford calling him from the bottom of the well. He had long ago stopped trying not to think of Tommy Crawford; what he’d done was in the threads of his prison clothes and the grout between the cement bricks and the cat piss smell that permeated everything. Sometimes he still wished he could go back and do it all differently, but he couldn’t. Other times he wondered why life was like that: you did stupid things and couldn’t take them back no matter how much you wanted to; there were no second chances. He had said that to his lawyer once and the woman had pursed her lips, looking at him across the table like somebody’s sad mother. She was a woman in her fifties, thin, with bushy gray-blond hair tied back with a rubber band and blue eyes that always looked as if she’d been up all night worrying about him. He didn’t know why she would do a thing like that, when he wasn’t even related to her, but he was grateful for her services, and that he would get out of prison someday, though he would be almost thirty by then.