The anger dropped from his face as quickly as it had arisen. He was impassive again. Resigned. He picked up his battered briefcase and glanced at her briefly, his eyes glittering with restraint. “Let me know what you decide.”
She sat for a long time in her kitchen, looking over the documents he had assembled. Her questions were too numerous to count. What would Noah want with this other family? What could they do for him? Was it crazy to do this? Perhaps she was the sick one. Perhaps there was a rare syndrome that caused mothers to hurl their offspring into vortices of new age pseudoscience.
But no; she wasn’t being neurotic. She was doing this for Noah. Not because he was wildly disrupting their lives and bankrupting them (though he was) but because the look on his face when she put him to bed, this night and every night (“I want to go home. Can I go home soon?”), was breaking her heart.
Fifteen
On the drive from his home in Connecticut to Ashview, Virginia, Anderson got two speeding tickets. He drove in a state of high excitement, barely catching his breath; he couldn’t keep track of the speedometer, could hardly focus on the GPS. He looked out the windshield, thinking of his new American case, and felt like he was starting out all over again.
He remembered his first case as clearly as if it had happened the day before.
Thailand. 1977. The river.
It was early morning, and the day already warm. He was eating breakfast with his old friend Bobby Angsley on the veranda of his hotel. Up the river, toward the city, buttery sunlight bounced off the Temple of the Dawn, scattering color into the air like a jewel. In front of them, a dog struggled to cross the river, its matted head thrusting above the waves.
Anderson was jet-lagged and three days sober. His sunglasses gave everything a sickly yellow tint. He focused on his friend, who was flirting with the waitress as she arranged a saucer of clotted cream on the white muslin next to a plate of scones. Her face was perfectly symmetrical, like a face in a dream.
“Kap khun kap,” Angsley said, placing his hands together in a parody of a polite Thai, or perhaps he had become one, Anderson didn’t know. He’d seen him only twice since they’d graduated college ten years before, and each time had been a disappointment to both of them. They were on different paths: Anderson rising quickly within the university, en route to becoming chairman of the Psychiatric Department within a few years, and Angsley going in another direction, or rather (as far as Anderson could see) in no direction at all. Anderson had been surprised to find his friend settled anywhere; since college he had seemed perpetually on the move, briefly inhabiting the fine hotels and women of major cities from Nairobi to Istanbul, trying and failing to exhaust all that money born of generations of tobacco.
They watched the waitress go back through the open doors into the lobby bearing her silver tray. Nearby a string quartet was playing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”
“Look what I’ve brought.” Angsley wagged his ginger eyebrows, reached into a paper bag at his feet, and pulled something out with a flourish, plopping it on the table. The thing slumped against the silver teapot, its legs splayed across the white linen: bright red yarn hair, striped legs, red circles for cheeks.
“You brought me a Raggedy Ann doll?” Anderson stared at it dumbfounded; gradually, it dawned on him. “It’s for today. To give the girl.”
“I was hoping for some kind of porcelain number but this is what they had. The stores here…” He shook his head.
“Are you out of your mind? You can’t give a doll to the subject of an experiment.” (Was that what this was? An experiment?)
“For god’s sake, man, loosen up. Have a scone.” Angsley took a bite out of a scone as large as a hand, sprinkling crumbs across the white cloth. His reddish hair was prematurely thinning across the expansive dome of his head, and his features had gone pink and blurry from too much sun and Thai whiskey, giving him a soft, pumpkinish look. Perhaps his brain had gone soft as well.
“It’s bribery.” Anderson frowned. “The girl will say whatever you want her to say.”
“Consider it a gesture of good faith. She’s not going to change her story for a Raggedy Ann doll, believe me. At least, I don’t think so.” Angsley peered at him. “You’re hating me under those shades, aren’t you?”
Anderson removed the sunglasses and blinked bare-eyed at his own white fingers. “It’s just that I thought you wanted a scientific appraisal. I thought that was the point of bringing me here?”
“Well, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, aren’t we?” His friend smiled a broad, slightly manic smile with his crooked teeth, as deranged in its way as that of the doll.