He squatted down next to Noah. “I’m going to say good-bye now, my friend.”
“I don’t like good-byes,” Noah said.
“Me neither,” said Anderson. “But sometimes they are … good.” He’d meant another word, but no matter.
“We’ll see him again soon, though, bug,” Janie said, attempting a reassuring briskness. “Won’t we, Jerry?”
“It’s possible.”
“Possible?” Janie’s voice was higher than usual. He kept his focus on Noah. Noah seemed to be managing this separation better than his mom. Maybe by now he was used to it. “You mean, probable, right?”
No, Janie, he thought. This time I said the word I meant to say.
“I think you’ll be so busy having fun you’ll forget all about me,” he said to Noah.
“No, I won’t forget. Will you forget me?” The boy looked anxious.
He put his hand on Noah’s head. His hair was soft beneath his fingers. “I won’t. But it’s okay to forget, sometimes,” he said gently.
The boy took this in. “Will I forget about Tommy, too?”
“Do you want to?”
Noah considered. “Some things I want to. Some things I don’t.” His small clear voice was barely audible among the people milling around them. “Can I choose which ones to remember?”
He’d miss this child.
“We can try,” Anderson said. “But we can’t forget about now, Noah. The moment we’re in. The life we’re in. That’s more important. We can’t forget that.”
Noah laughed incredulously. “How could you forget that?”
“I don’t know.”
Anderson was still squatting, and it was hurting his knees. The boy touched his forehead to his and seemed to peer right into him. He smelled like the lollipop the flight attendant had given him on the plane. “You don’t know a lot.”
“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—”