Perhaps this was a mistake. Perhaps he should go back to his house in Connecticut … and do what? There was nothing to do but lie on the couch that was his bed now, under the paisley comforter that Sheila had bought twenty years ago and that still smelled very faintly of citrus and roses. Only, if he did that, he may as well be dead.
She frowned and looked away from him, clearly trying to regain control of herself. He wouldn’t comfort her with false promises. Who knew if he could help her son? Besides, the case was weak. There wasn’t anything to go on, unless the child suddenly became a lot more talkative. He looked down at the table, at the remains of the brunch, the boy’s half-eaten pancake, the dirty place mat.… “What’s that?”
The woman was wiping her eyes with a napkin. “What?”
“That place mat. What’s written on it?”
“This? It’s a doodle. He was doodling.”
“Can I see it?”
“Why?”
“Can I see it, please.” He held his voice steady with great effort.
She shook her head, but she moved the plate and the orange juice glass and handed him the thin rectangle of paper. “Watch out, there’s syrup on the edges.”
Anderson picked up the place mat. It was sticky under his fingertips and smelled of syrup and orange juice. Yet even before he properly examined the marks on the paper, he felt the blood beginning to tingle in his veins.
“He wasn’t doodling,” Anderson said quietly. “He was scoring the game.”
Ten
Janie stood in the middle of her living room. The room was dark, except for the headlights from passing cars, there and gone, a flash on the wall. She could make out the familiar shapes in the dimness: couch, chair, lamp. Yet the objects looked different to her, slightly ajar, as if there had been a tremor in the earth.
She heard Anderson moving around in the kitchen. She cracked the window and the air came alive with the damp freshness of early spring. The gas lamp shimmied in the darkness, its flame always moving, here, then here, then here.
One thing had led to another. Noah had scored a baseball game without being taught how to do it, and so she had invited Anderson to come to her home to work with Noah in a quieter place, and they had spent the afternoon engaged in her son’s favorite activity: Noah threw his bouncy ball against his wall and caught it, while Anderson, standing by his side with his yellow pad, judged the accuracy of the pitch. (“Eight.” “Only an eight?” “Well, maybe a nine.” “A nine! Yesssss! A nine!”) Noah’s spirits rose under Anderson’s attentions, as she had not seen him in months, and Anderson himself seemed a different man entirely. He laughed easily and seemed truly interested in Noah’s skill at throwing and catching bouncy balls (amazing to Janie, who always found this game to be an unbelievable bore). He was so natural with the boy that she was surprised when he’d responded, in answer to her question, that he had no children of his own.
How could you not like a man who played so joyfully and with such obvious affection with one’s son? When was the last time any man had done that?
But it didn’t matter how many times Anderson asked him questions or in what manner. Noah was done talking to doctors about anything that didn’t involve catching or throwing. Anderson’s pad had acquired no new notes.
By late afternoon, it was clear to Janie that they weren’t getting anywhere. Even Noah seemed to feel the dejection in the air and started throwing the ball around the room in a hyper, desultory way until it joined the two others in the lighting fixture on the ceiling and Janie put an end to the game. To relax him (and herself), she resorted to the mother’s last trick: she put on his favorite movie, Finding Nemo, about the lost fish looking for his father, and they sat together, Janie and Noah and Anderson, side by side on the couch. Janie focused on the colorful fish and tried not to think about anything else, but the images couldn’t hold her attention. Dread was dripping slowly through her, filling her with its paralyzing poison of what-now-what-now-what-now?
Anderson sat on the other side of Noah, his face inscrutable in profile, like the statue of a knight on a tomb. Before the movie was over, Noah had fallen asleep, his head drooping on Janie’s shoulder, but they watched the movie to its end anyway, lost in their separate worlds. She felt a pang of misery when the father found the son, envy at all that fishy happiness. Afterward, she had carried Noah to bed, his legs dangling on either side of her like a huge baby, and tucked him in. It was only six.
*
When Janie returned, the tall man was pacing back and forth. It was strange to have him in her apartment without Noah in the room. It was as if the doctor had suddenly become a man—not someone she would have an interest in (he was far too old for her, too aloof) but someone who nevertheless charged the molecules of the air with a masculine difference.
She watched him pace for a few moments; he seemed entirely lost in his thoughts.
“So,” she said at last. “What do we do now?”
He paused midstride; he looked surprised to see her there. “Well, we can try again tomorrow. If that’s all right with you, that is?”