It was Shanti Devi they kept coming back to, though. The little girl who astonishingly seemed to remember someone else’s life.
If this case existed, and if it was real, they speculated, then there must be others. So for the rest of his undergraduate years, and throughout medical school, Anderson spent his spare time searching for them. He found many things that interested him—mentions of past lives from the Upanishads to third-century Christian theologians to Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, along with many fascinating studies of adult past-life regressions under hypnosis, though he wondered how much useful evidence they could provide. He absorbed the skeptics: the story of Virginia Tighe, the Colorado housewife whose past-life memories of being Bridey Murphy, recalled under hypnosis, bore a striking similarity to the life of a childhood neighbor, and the works of Flournoy, who diagnosed a past-life-remembering medium with multiple personality disorder.
But no matter how carefully Anderson had looked, he had been unable to find another case of a child who spontaneously remembered a previous lifetime.
There was no Internet back then, of course. For a researcher, that changed everything.…
Anderson swore silently to himself and turned back to his computer. He had to try harder. His concentration was not what it had been. He was always on the verge of a flight into the past. At Janie Zimmerman’s his mind had been stimulated into competence by the excitement of being in the midst of a good case; when he was with the child, the right words had leaped to his lips, the way sometimes stutterers can sing. With Noah, he had sung.
Now, though, the words on his computer quivered before his eyes, and he steeled himself. He could not let his energy flag. He had often felt like an archaeologist, sifting through sand looking for shards of bone, fragments of a clay pot. You sat under the hot sun or the chill of the air conditioner and you simply waited for what was there all along to reveal itself. Patience was everything. You whittled yourself down to the words of type. If the words wavered, you sat still until they made sense again.
He was five years back from Noah’s birth.
He glanced quickly through the obits of older Thomases succumbing to flu, pancreatic and prostate cancer, pneumonia, and encephalitis.
T. B. (Thomas) Mancerino, Jr., nineteen, died in a boat collision on Ashview Lake on Memorial Day.
Tom Granger, three, died of measles. (Measles! Why did people stop vaccinating when the data was so impeccable and the autism link so obviously unsubstantiated?)
Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, drowned—
He looked at that one more closely.
Tommy Eugene Moran, eight, the son of John B. and Melissa Moran, of 128 Monarch Lane, died Tuesday in a tragic accident after drowning in his backyard pool. Neighbors say he was a cheerful child, passionate about reptiles and his beloved Nationals.…
He sat back in his chair.
You waited and then at last it happened: that moment when the sand shifted and you glimpsed something white, and the shard of bone was revealed.
Fourteen
In the Baltimore Greyhound station, Janie sat on a bench, buzzed out of her mind on bad bus station coffee, trying to pretend that the plan was a rational one. I can do this, she thought, so long as I don’t focus on what the “this” really means.
Noah at least seemed to take it all in stride: this adventure, this bus station. He had exclaimed at the size of the Greyhound, amazed that a bus could have a toilet in it. “And we get to sit right next to it!”
Now he was thrilled with the video game machine, even though she hadn’t given him any money for it. He didn’t seem to care, happily jerking the handle this way and that, enjoying all the whizzing figures without realizing he wasn’t controlling any of them. Which was pretty much how it was, wasn’t it? You think you’re in control, but really you’re simply staring at the moving lights.
He ran up to her again. “Where are we going, Mommy-Mom? Where are we going?” They had been having this conversation on and off for hours.
“We’re taking another bus to Ashview.”
“Really? We’re really going?”
He hopped from one foot to the other, his face screwed up in an expression that wasn’t entirely familiar to her. It was excitement and something else … anxiety? (That would be understandable.) Fear? Disbelief? She’d thought she’d known all his expressions by now.
“When we gonna get there?”
“In another couple of hours.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Is it okay? Do you want to go there?”
His blue eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? Of course I want to go! What about Jerry?”
The question startled her. “He’s meeting us there.”
“Can I watch Nemo again on the bus?”
“Sorry, honey, I told you, my computer is out of juice.”
“Can I have some apple juice?”
“We’re out of that kind of juice, too.”