She pulled herself together with an effort. Poor kid, she thought; I’m all you’ve got. We’re all we’ve got, the two of us. But we’ll make it work. I’ll do better. I promise. She squatted by his side. “I won’t go, okay?”
She’d send Bob an apologetic text, and that would be the end of that. For what could she say? Remember that adorable son I mentioned? Well, he’s a little unusual.… No, theirs was too fragile a connection to withstand those sorts of complications, and there was always another lonely New York woman waiting in the wings. She’d cancel the sitter and pay her anyway, because it was the last minute and she couldn’t afford to lose another one.
“I won’t go,” she said again. “I’ll cancel Annie. I’ll stay with you.” She was grateful, not for the first time, that no adult was there to witness this weak moment.
But who cared what other people thought? The color rose to Noah’s face, a blossoming of pink on clammy skin, and his lopsided grin knocked her sideways, blotted out the room. It was like looking at the sun. Maybe her mother was right after all, she thought. Maybe some forces were too strong to resist.
“C’mere, you goof.” She held out her arms, throwing all of it to the wind: the dress, the date, this thrilling night and perhaps all the thrilling nights left to her, a woman aging by the moment, squarely in the middle of her one and only life.
Here, in her arms, was what mattered. She kissed his sweet, damp head. He smelled nice, for once.
He lifted his face. “Is my other mother coming soon?”
Four
Anderson opened his eyes and looked around the room in a panic.
His pages. Where were they? What the hell had he done with them?
The room was dim, the air swirling with dust. Boxes half-packed with files flanked every wall, rising up around him as if he’d fallen six feet under instead of drifting off on the cot in his office again. The window was high and narrow, like a slit in a fortress; now it cast a spear of light on the wooden floor and the books piled here and there and the manuscript pages scattered where he’d tossed them angrily the night before. He got up quickly and gathered the pages one by one. When he was finished he sat down again, holding the manuscript in his lap: a bulky thing, like a cat. He straightened the edges with his hands, the ends tickling his palms. It didn’t seem like much, this bundle, and yet it contained the sum of his life’s work. He set aside the title page and looked at the dedication.
For Sheila
He tried to feel her now, in the room, but couldn’t do it; she was fixed to the page like a pinned butterfly. It occurred to him that Sheila’s death, which was the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, had not substantively changed the course of his days. On the other hand, in the five years since he’d been diagnosed, the aphasia had nearly ruined him.
He flipped to the first page. Ah, there they were: his words.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
It was irrational to think the sentences might have erased themselves in the night simply because he had dreamed it, yet no more irrational than anything else that had been happening to him. Yesterday he had been on the phone with the librarian of the Society for Scientific Exploration in London, discussing the storage of the files he was donating. He wanted to make sure that even though his office was closing, his research would be accessible to any serious scientists that might find it useful. He wanted to tell her about the new cases out of Norway that Amundson had sent him, to ensure that these would be filed properly, but when he came to the place in the sentence where the name of his old colleague should have come up, the name simply wasn’t there.
“The files from up there.” That was the mortifying phrase that came out of his mouth instead. Of course, the librarian had been puzzled.
“What do you mean? Up where?”
Anderson saw the fjords and forests and women of Norway. Amundson’s face rose in his mind, the bulbous nose and the whiskers on his jowls, the cheery, skeptical, but never cynical eyes.
“The new files on birthmarks, you know.”
“Oh. You mean that study from the professor in Sri Lanka?”
“No, no, no.” He felt a momentary surge of despair and wanted to hang up the phone, but he took a breath and willed himself to go on. “The new birthmark research, the research from that guy—that guy up there. Up north. You know who I mean,” he snarled at the poor woman. “In Europe. The ice mountains … the … the fjords!”