His gray eyes really were unnaturally bright. “It usually means the case is stronger. Otherwise you would not be here.” He spoke crisply, enunciating each word.
“I see.” She was not used to thinking of Noah’s illness as a “case” that might be “strong.” She might have objected but the waitress (purple-haired; harried) was handing out menus. When she turned back toward the kitchen, a YOLO tattoo in Gothic letters stood out against the pale skin of her shoulders.
YOLO. A slogan, a rallying cry, carpe diem for the skateboarder set: You only live once.
But was it true?
That was the problem, wasn’t it? She had never thought about it in any deep way. She hadn’t had the time or inclination to speculate about other lives: this one was hard enough to manage. It was all she could do to pay for their food and rent and clothes, to try to give Noah love and an education and get him to brush his teeth. And lately she had barely been managing any of it. This had to work. She didn’t have another option, aside from medicating her four-year-old. But what had she been thinking about?
Oh, right. Other lives. Which she wasn’t sure she believed in.
And yet: here she was.
Anderson was looking at her expectantly across the table. Noah was watching the television, doodling away on his place mat. The waitress who only lived once came and took their orders and left again like a purple cloud of surliness.
Janie reached out and lightly touched her son’s shoulder, as if to protect him from the man’s quiet intensity. “Listen, Noey, why don’t you go stand by the counter for a minute and watch the game from there? It’s much closer.”
“Okay.” He squirmed out of his seat, as if happy to be released.
With Noah out of earshot, her body seemed to wilt into the booth.
On the television near the counter, someone hit a home run; Noah joined the regulars in cheering.
“He likes baseball, I see,” Anderson said.
“When he was a baby it was the only thing that could calm him down. I used to call it baby Ambien.”
“Do you watch as well?”
“Not on purpose.”
He pulled a yellow pad out of his briefcase and scribbled a note.
“I don’t see how that’s uncommon, though,” Janie added. “Lots of little boys like baseball, don’t they?”
“Sure they do.” Anderson cleared his throat. “Before we begin. I’m sure you have questions for me?”
She looked down at her binder with all the colored tabs. The binder that was Noah. “How does it work?”
“The protocol? Well, I ask you some questions and then I ask your son—”
“No, I mean—reincarnation.” She flinched at the word. “How does it work? I don’t understand. You’re saying all these kids are—reincarnated and they remember these things from their other lives, right?”
“In some cases that seems to be the most likely explanation.”
“The most likely? But I thought—”
“I’m a scientific researcher. I take down statements from children and I verify them and suggest explanations. I don’t jump to conclusions.”
But conclusions were exactly what she had been hoping for. She picked up the binder and held it against her chest, comforted by its physicality.
“You’re skeptical,” he said. She opened her mouth to respond, and he silenced her with an upraised hand. “That’s okay. My wife was skeptical, too, at first. Luckily, I’m not in the belief business.” His lips twisted wryly. “I collect data.”
Data. She clung to the word, as to a wet rock in a raging river. “So she’s not skeptical anymore?”
“Hmmm?” He looked confused.
“You said—your wife was skeptical at first. So she believes in your work now?”
“Now?” He glanced up at her face. “She’s—”
He didn’t finish his thought. His mouth hung open for a moment that seemed to go on, embarrassing them both, and then he snapped it shut. Yet the moment had happened, and there was no taking it back; it was as if his defenses, that ordinary force field shielding one’s basic human nature, had inexplicably shattered.
“She’s gone. Six years ago,” he said at last. “I mean—she’s not alive anymore.”
He was grief stricken, that’s what was wrong. He was lonely; he had been dealt a blow. Janie knew what that was like. She looked around the ordinary room at the children munching on their French toast, their dads fondly wiping away dribbles of syrup; those people were on the other shore, and she was on the side of the aggrieved with this pained-looking man who was patiently waiting for whatever she was about to say.
She kept her voice soft. “Shall we continue?”
“Of course,” he said, more vigorously than she’d expected. He pulled himself together quickly, the elegant planes of his face realigning. He held his sharpened pencil aloft over his yellow pad.
“When was the first time you remember Noah doing something that seemed out of the ordinary?”
“I suppose … it was the lizards.”