“No, I haven’t forgotten.” Her face was cool and dry. It was hard to imagine she’d been crying with laughter a moment before. Janie opened the door and let the human sound engulf them.
“That’s good,” Janie said. It was something to say. Janie lingered at the open door and listened to the noisy room where Noah was sitting. For some reason she felt nervous about going back to him. “I don’t know who he is anymore,” she said. “Or maybe it’s myself I don’t know.” She thought perhaps it wasn’t right to say these things, especially to Denise, but she didn’t know who else she could say them to, or what was right anymore.
Denise wiped her dry face with a new tissue, tossed it into the wastepaper basket, and looked up. “You’re here,” she said quietly. “And Noah’s in my living room, waiting for you. Isn’t that enough?”
Janie nodded, pierced by the truth of it. Of course it was enough. She stepped toward the room where her son was.
“It does help,” Denise said abruptly. Janie turned; Denise’s eyes were full of emotion. “It does. Not with missing him, not with that part, but…” Her voice trailed off.
They stood together in silence, the air between them alive with the wonder of everything they didn’t know.
*
Noah looked up when Janie came back into the room. He was sitting on the sofa. Always those blue eyes tore right through her, touched some part of her nothing else got near. She settled down next to him.
They watched the teenagers standing around the dining room table picking at their potato salad and muttering to each other, their bodies moving jerkily in ill-fitting suits.
“Can we go now, Mommy-Mom?” Noah said.
“Don’t you want to spend some time with Tommy’s friends?”
He shook his head. “They’re all so … old.”
“Oh.”
“That’s sick,” one of the teenagers said, and they burst into laughter that stopped abruptly, as if remembering where they were.
She wished she could do something to ease the tension and sadness on Noah’s face, but what could she do? She’d thought she could fix him, but that had always been beyond her power.
“Everything’s different,” he said.
“Yes, I guess it is.”
His mouth twisted.
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry. Did you think it would be the same?”
Noah nodded. “Are we going home soon?”
“You mean, to Brooklyn? Yes.”
“Oh.”
He blinked a few times, looking around the room. She followed his gaze.
She hadn’t taken the room in fully before; she had been too shocked to see it properly. It was nice enough, this interior of a small suburban ranch house. Someone had filled it with comfy brown furniture, piled with pillows in complementary blue. An upright piano stood under the stairs; it was a bit banged up at the edges, but the wood glowed. The rectangular picture window looked out on a leafy street. The mantel on the brick fireplace was populated with mementos and figurines: a curled stone cat, some candles, a small wooden angel holding a wire butterfly, a baseball trophy. It was nothing so extraordinary, this house of Noah’s dreams and her nightmares. It was just a house. He had felt loved here.
“We can’t stay here, Noah.”
“I want to go home, but I want to stay here, too.”
She pictured their own apartment, his cozy bedroom, the tigers on the bureau, the stars. “I know.”
“Why can’t I have both?”
“I don’t know. We just have to do the best we can with what we have. We’re in this life now. Together.”
He nodded again, as if he had already known this, and crawled into her lap. He leaned his head back against her chin.
“I’m so glad I came to you.”
She turned him around so she could see his face. She thought she had known all the different phases of Noah—the moody and bereaved Noah, the freaked-out Noah, the boisterous, affectionate child she knew best—but this was something new. She kept her voice level. “What do you mean?”
“After I left the other place.”
“What place?”
“The place where I went after I died.” He said it simply. His eyes were pensive and unusually bright, as if he’d caught a fish unexpectedly and was admiring the silver scales shining in the sun.
“And what was that like?”
A simple question; yet the answer held worlds inside of it. She held her breath, waiting for his answer.
He shook his head. “Mom, you can’t describe that place.”
“And you were there for a while?”
He thought about it. “I don’t know how long. Then I saw you and I came here.”
“You saw me. Where did you see me?”
“On the beach.”
“You saw me on the beach?”
“Yes. You were standing there. I saw you and then I came to you.”
Even when she thought the limits of her mind had been pushed as far as they could go, there was always another level to the vastness.
He pressed his forehead against hers. “I’m so glad you’re my mom this time,” Noah said.
“Me, too,” Janie said. It was all she needed.
“Hey, Mommy-Mom,” he whispered. “Guess what time it is?”