She hoped he was all right. She had seen him only once, when he had stopped by to visit and give her a copy of his book, a few months before he left the country again for good. The reviews of his book had been mixed; some critics had responded to his research by attacking him playfully, as if it was all a misunderstood game of telephone or fraudulence, nothing to take seriously; and others had been interested in his findings but hadn’t known what to make of them. Anderson hadn’t seemed to care, though. He’d been much quieter, and also somehow looser, as if some tight string had been snapped. He was wearing a white shirt with pockets, the kind of thing island people wore. She had mentioned that and he had actually laughed. “That’s true. I’m an island person now,” he’d said.
Janie didn’t want to forget everything that had happened, but she couldn’t help herself. Daily life was too insistent. She was busy with work, the pleasure of creating harmonious spaces, the headache of quibbling clients. To her great surprise and delight, Bob, her erstwhile texting fling, had entered her life, responding to her sheepish text “If you still want to get together, let me know?” with enthusiasm; they had been seeing each other once or twice a week for six months now, long enough for her to begin to believe that it might actually be happening, and to think about (maybe, someday) introducing him to Noah. And, of course, there was Noah to look after: monitoring his homework, handling his dinner and bubble bath (how much pleasure she took now in ordinary life!), keeping up with all the needs of his ever-evolving self. He was getting older. Sometimes, when they were riding their bikes in the park, she let him pull a little bit ahead of her on the path, and as she watched his blond head and narrow back and small pumping legs cycling away from her and around the bend she felt a pang of loss that she knew was only ordinary motherhood.
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?