“I don’t know, bug. What time is it?”
“It’s time for another brownie!” He pulled his head back, his eyes brimming with his customary, mischievous joy, and she knew that the other child was gone for now; he’d thrown the fish back into the ocean.
Forty
After the guests had left, and Janie and Anderson had helped Denise and Charlie put away the leftover food, and Janie had wiped the table down while Denise vacuumed up the brownie crumbs; when the place at last was neat again, the subjects of Anderson’s last case sat on the couch, side by side, Charlie and Denise and Noah and Janie.
Anderson settled into the armchair across from them. He felt the chair holding his body. He let himself sink into it.
It was dusk. The five of them were silent, strangers bound with strangeness.
“So you’re leaving tomorrow?” Denise said at last.
“We are.” There was a note of apology in Janie’s voice. “Our flights are in the afternoon.”
They had had their visit; they had been interviewed by the police; they had attended the funeral. Now there was life to be resumed, jobs, responsibilities. For all but him, Anderson thought. Oddly, the thought didn’t trouble him. He wondered why.
“What do we do now?” Janie asked Anderson.
Everyone looked at him.
There was some more paperwork to be done. The paperwork had once mattered to him greatly but didn’t anymore.
Anderson shrugged.
“We just leave here, then? That’s it? We don’t”—she looked at Denise—“keep in touch?”
“There can be visits. If you like.” He smiled. “It’s up to you.”
“Oh.” Janie looked around the living room. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“It’s up to you,” Anderson said again. It sounded flippant, even to his own ears. He was experiencing an emotion that was unusual for him. Was this what relaxation felt like?
“I could visit you,” Denise said suddenly to Janie. “I could come to Brooklyn.”
Janie looked relieved. “Oh. That would be nice. Wouldn’t it, Noah?”
“Not right away, of course,” Denise added quickly. “I mean, I think we all need a little time … but I’d like to come and see where you live someday,” she said to Noah. “To see your room. Could I do that?”
He nodded shyly.
“So. It’s settled then,” Janie said.
Anderson watched them. Everything was settled, and nothing was, he knew that. Things would change. Noah would change. Anderson would need to follow up, of course. Yet he had no hunger for it. Maybe the connections would hold and maybe they wouldn’t, or they would transform into other ways of being. He hadn’t realized how much he missed silence. They sat for a long time this way, the sunlight shifting into a deeper, heavier light, Noah quiet between Denise and Janie. Anderson lifted his face to soak in the last rays of sun like a sleepy animal.
“I think we need to get back to the hotel now, honey,” Janie said to Noah at last, stirring all of them. “It’s getting late.”
Noah stretched. “I want to take my bath here,” he said drowsily.
Janie started in her seat. “You want to take a bath?”
He pushed out his lower lip. “I want a bath here. In the pink bathtub. With her.”
He pointed at Denise, who shrugged a little and looked to Janie for direction.
“Oh.”
Anderson watched the resistance rise in Janie, and then he felt her let it go. “All right,” Janie said.
“And you can give me a bath next time, okay, Mommy-Mom?”
She hesitated only briefly and then she grinned right back at him. “Sure, Noey. Whatever you want.”
Forty-One
Noah wanted a bath, so Denise was giving him one.
That was the task, the last of this long day, and then she could rest. She had buried one child today, what was left of his body, and now she was going to bathe another.
Another child. That was how she thought about it to herself at that moment, and how it seemed to her as she smiled at the boy and set him on the lid of the toilet with one of Charlie’s old Garfield comic books while she rummaged around in the bathroom closet for some bubble bath.
There was a Mr. Bubble bottle in the back—she had used it when her boys were little and there was a bit left, so she had kept it, years past the time of her children’s baths, the way people keep such things—because some part of her thought that maybe she could also keep some piece of Tommy’s childhood intact, as if it was bottled, too, in the bright pink container.
When the truth was, it was already gone. Gone where?
Mr. Bubble grinned at her, an insane smile.
She turned on the water. It thundered in her ears. Her mind flashed back to Tommy, gasping for air, calling out for her in the watery blackness. Mama!
Focus on the water. You’ll be all right.
She put her hand under the stream to ground herself and poured the remains of the Mr. Bubble into the water, the bubbles proliferating in the tub, bursting to life.
“Is that—bubbles?” Noah jumped off the toilet and leaned over the side of the bathtub.