He paused for a moment. “There is sometimes a genetic component. You said you don’t know anything about the father’s family?”
She shook her head miserably. After sporadic, nighttime Googling that had gone nowhere for years, she’d been trying more seriously to hunt down Jeff from Houston. The week before, she’d gone one step farther: she’d spent the better part of two days looking through every recorded Rhodes Scholar for the last two decades. She’d focused on every Jeff and Geoffrey, every scholar from Texas and then from every other state, and there was nobody who’d looked even remotely like the man who had told her his name was Jeff. She’d called the hotel in Trinidad, but it was now a Holiday Inn.
So Jeff—if he even was Jeff—had not been a Rhodes Scholar. He probably hadn’t been to Oxford. (She’d looked him up at Balliol College, too, and found nothing.) Perhaps he wasn’t even a businessman. He’d made it up—but why? She’d thought it had been to impress her, but now she wondered: had he been in the throes of a full-blown psychosis?
Janie felt the doctor’s intent gaze hovering above her like some kind of brown furry bat, but she couldn’t lift her eyes to meet it. She looked at her knees, clad in their gray tights; they suddenly seemed absurd to her, their grayness, their roundness.
“I know you want answers,” Remson was saying. “But this is the best we can do. We can and will reevaluate as the treatment progresses. In the meantime there are various antipsychotic medications we can try. We can put Noah on a very small dose now, if you like. I’ll write you a prescription.”
The words had been slipping slowly through her mind, as if she were quietly, sleepily freezing to death, but at that word—medication—Janie jolted awake.
“Medication?” She lifted her head. “But he’s only four!”
The doctor nodded apologetically, lifting the palms of his hands. “The medication may help him to have a more normal life. We’d reevaluate every few months, once we get the dosage right. And, of course, I’ll keep seeing him. Twice a week.” He pulled a ballpoint pen from a cup on the table beside him and wrote out a script.
He tore the paper off his pad and handed it to her as if this were an everyday thing. His face was awful in its blandness. “Why don’t you take some time to process this,” he said, “and we’ll talk next week.” His outstretched hand still had the prescription for the antipsychotic. Janie had a strange, overwhelming desire to crumple it in his face. Instead she grabbed it and shoved it in her pocket.
Now Janie nestled on the sofa by her son, resisting the urge to pull him into her lap and cover his head with kisses. “Doing okay, bug?”
Noah half nodded, his face mustached by cocoa, eyes on the television screen.
Her phone buzzed—but it wasn’t the psychiatrist, offering Noah a newly discovered miracle dose of Chinese herbs and omega-3s. It was a text from Bob, of all people, her erstwhile Internet flirtation from months ago.
“Hey! Things any easier? Want to try again?”
She laughed briefly at the poor man’s timing, a loud and mirthless sound, like the bark of a depressed seal. Then she shut the phone without responding and sipped her tea. It wasn’t doing her any good, though. She needed stronger stuff.
*
Janie put Noah to bed early that night. He was in a cuddly mood, his arms pulling her head down to kiss him on the lips, his fingers brushing her face in the dark.
“What part of the body is this?” he whispered.
“That’s my nose.”
“This?”
“That’s my ear.”
“And this is your noggin.”
“Yes. Good night, bug.”
“’Night, Mommy-Mom.” He yawned. Then (she’d known it was coming, it was always now, when he was halfway toward sleep already and she thought maybe this time it would be different, maybe this time he wouldn’t say it): “I want to go home.”
“You are home, sweetie.”
“When is my other mother coming?”
“I don’t know, bug.”
“I miss her.” His head was turned into the pillow, away from her. “I really, really miss her.” His body began to shake.
Even though it was a delusion, his grief was real. She knew enough of grief to know that. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she said quietly.
He turned toward her, his mouth crumpling. He flung his arms around her and she held his head against her body while he wept and rubbed his nose into her shirt.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” she whispered. She stroked his head.
“I miss her so much.” He was crying in earnest now, great wheezing sobs that seemed to emerge from his chest fully formed, like tufts of black smoke. Anyone would think this was a brokenhearted child, an abandoned child. Yet she had never once left him overnight. “Make it better, Mommy.”
She had no choice in the matter. “I will.”