If he hadn’t cried out—if they hadn’t seen him—he would have started to sink. His limbs would have stopped flailing eventually, the natural impulse to fight easing out of him by the lull of the waves, the glory of the light sifting down through the water. He could have relaxed, then, let his body take him down—take, too, all the unwritten concertos … all of them gone, at once.
It wouldn’t have taken much, Anderson thought. He could have simply loosened his hold on life. He could have given up.
For a moment, Anderson felt relief flooding through him, cooling his anxious mind. He didn’t have to read the article, he thought. He didn’t have to do anything.
He could simply let it all go.
But the desire to continue beat on in him, like a boxer who was losing his hold on the floor but couldn’t orient himself enough to get the hell out of the ring. He spread out the pages in front of him, focused his mind, and began, again, to read.
Seven
The gas lamp flickered in the wet March mess like a beacon of far-off sanity as Janie half-dragged, half-cajoled Noah down the block. He had lost his mitten somewhere along the way and his icy hand clutched hers and pulled her down, like dead weight.
She grabbed a hunk of damp, unexciting mail from the box (more bills and second notices) and shut the door fast against the snow.
Inside, it was warm and almost disturbingly quiet after the rush of the subway and the white noise of the wind. They both stood, adrift, in the room; Noah seemed dazed, subdued. She closed the wooden shutters, trapping them in the yellow half-light of the floor lamp, and settled him on the couch in front of a DVD (“Look, honey, it’s Nemo! Your favorite!”), putting his binder of baseball cards in his lap. He’d been like this more and more lately, his jubilance muffled, as if the dour tone of the doctor’s office had seeped into his bones. He sat and watched his shows without comment; he didn’t want to play or throw a ball around his room.
She couldn’t shake the chill; her teeth were still chattering. She’d had such hopes for this one. She’d been sure this would be the doctor who would change everything for them.
She put a kettle on and made tea for herself and butterscotch hot cocoa for Noah, filling the mug with so many marshmallows you could barely see the liquid. She stared for a moment at the tiny confections bobbing cheerfully in the frothy brown like small white teeth, then ducked down beneath the border of the pass-through to the living room, sitting on her haunches, so Noah couldn’t see her cry. Pull yourself together, Janie. It was like pushing a yowling cat into a bag, but she did it. She quelled the sobs, let them roil in her stomach, and stood. Out the back window, the snow fell into the yard and kept on falling.
*
Noah was sitting quietly, watching the movie with his small hands flat on the plastic binder, his blond head tilted back against the couch, when she brought the hot chocolate. The last four months had been trying emotionally and disastrous work-wise, but she had to admit that she’d gotten used to seeing that blond head always bobbing in her peripheral vision, the comfort of knowing he was right there. Three nannies and two day care centers had failed to stick, and after the last fiasco (Noah bolting out the door of Natalie’s Kids and down Flatbush Avenue, a few feet away from the rushing cars), she had given up and invited him and his latest nanny to play at her office. They sat quietly enough (too quietly!), building things with his Legos while her assistant scowled and drafted and Janie tried to move the projects she still had going a few steps closer to completion.
She sat next to him on the couch, cradling her tea in her hands, trying to get warm. She didn’t even mind his scent: that sickly sweet, slightly curdled smell that Noah carried with him wherever he went now.
She supposed Dr. Remson had been kind enough, as well he should be, for three hundred dollars an hour. And he’d taken his time with Noah, with her. But in the end he’d been the same as the rest of them. He’d had no answers for her. He’d cautioned her to wait.
But wait was precisely what she couldn’t do. When she explained this to him, he’d suggested the name of another psychiatrist in case she wanted treatment for herself … as if spending more money on more therapy was the only answer he could come up with.
“We’ve had three months of sessions, now,” she said. “And that’s all you can say to me? He’s having nightmares every night, and crying bouts during the day. And baths are impossible.”
Tapping his black leather sneakers on the Persian carpet, thick glasses perched jauntily on his balding head, Dr. Mike Remson didn’t look like one of New York City’s foremost child psychiatrists, no matter what New York magazine had said. He sat there in his leather armchair, fingers tented, furry caterpillar eyebrows rising over guarded, heavy-lidded eyes. Even after answering his questions in session after session, she still had the impression he was trying to decide if she might be the problem after all.
“Noah’s beginning to trust me,” he said carefully. “To speak more about his fantasies.”
“His other mother?” Her hands were clenching and unclenching. She planted them on her knees.
“That, and other things.”