She was so appealing, with her bright blond hair and wide smile … like Noah. Any stranger would assume she was the boy’s mother. She was the mom you’d pick from a catalog: I want that one. Anyone would want to go back to this big house and sweet-faced, cookie-making mom. Janie crossed her arms. The skin on the backs of her upper arms was slightly nubby, a medical condition that never quite went away. Noah had the same problem. She wanted to reach out and feel the familiar roughness on his upper arms. He’s mine, she thought. There’s the proof.
“Sit down, won’t you?” Melissa implored, and they all sank as one into the curving couch. Melissa put the baby on the floor, and they watched him pull himself around the furniture on his pudgy, wobbly feet. Noah pressed himself against Janie, subdued, his head bent down, eyes unreadable beneath half-closed lids. She tried to soak in the warmth of his body against hers.
Anderson opened his briefcase and took out a piece of paper. “I have a list of statements that Noah made, if you wouldn’t mind going over them to see what corresponds—”
Janie glimpsed the page:
Noah Zimmerman:
—unusual knowledge of reptiles
—can score a baseball game
—likes the baseball team the Washington Nationals
—speaks of a person named Pauly.…
Melissa picked it up and looked at it, blinking a few times.
“I must admit—I was skeptical when you e-mailed me. I’m still skeptical. But there are so many … similarities.… And, well, we try to remain open-minded, don’t we, John?” John said nothing. “Or at least I do. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching since.…” Her voice trailed off. Janie felt her eyes moving automatically out the window, to the covered pool. When she looked at Melissa again, the woman was gazing at her with intense, misty eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. She flicked away a tear and leaped to her feet. “Hey. Why don’t I go get those cookies? Keep an eye on Charlie, will you, hon?” John nodded curtly.
“Excuse me,” Anderson said suddenly, standing as well. “May I use the—”
“That way.” John nodded in the direction of the hall. Anderson excused himself again, and the room fell into silence. Noah looked at his sneakers. Janie watched the baby try to negotiate the tricky gulf between the couch and the armchair. The baby took a step, wobbled, and fell. He started to cry. John ambled over and picked him up. “Come on, now,” he said, jiggling him in an automatic way. “Come on, now.”
*
Anderson walked down the hallway, past a half-open door revealing a pastel yellow room filled with stuffed animals and a crib, and another door, closed, with a sign on it saying KEEP OUT in childish crayon letters. The letters looked cheerful, as if they were really only joking. He paused, glancing in either direction, and then cracked it open.
It was a boy’s room. It looked like it might have been used yesterday, instead of five and a half years before. The bedspread, embroidered with baseballs and bats, was tucked neatly under the pillow; the baseball and soccer trophies on the bureau shone in all their fake gold splendor, as if they’d just been won; there was a bin with baseball gloves and another with balls, under a Nationals pennant and a framed poster of different kinds of snakes. A child’s blue backpack sat in the corner, monogrammed TEM. It looked to be still filled with schoolbooks. On the bookshelf in the corner of the room there were a handful of Harry Potter books, along with a baseball encyclopedia and three reference books on snakes.
Anderson shut the door and hurried to the bathroom.
Inside, he locked the door, splashed water on his cheeks, and looked with alarm at the gray face in the mirror.
It wasn’t them.
He had suspected it since the moment they entered the home, but he was sure now.
Charlie was a baby—far too young to have been alive during the previous personality’s lifetime—there was no way Noah could remember him. Tommy liked snakes, not lizards. And Noah seemed not to recognize any of it. It was the wrong family.
It was his fault, of course. His faculties were not fully operational. He couldn’t find the word lizards and had written reptiles instead. He hadn’t asked the age of the younger brother, Charlie. Small, crucial, uncharacteristic errors that led him in the wrong direction, to disastrous effect.
He had been too eager. The forward motion had been so pleasurable to him, he’d almost forgotten about everything that was happening to him in the desire to move and to keep on moving.
He ran his hand through his hair. The case was finished. He was finished. His faith in words was shaken at last, and with it all remaining confidence in his professional abilities.
What now? He’d erred, and now he’d go into the living room and make it right. And then he’d go home. Go back and resume? No resumption; he was done. That was clear. A fitting end to a long and ignoble career. Oh, but he had worked hard for his obscurity.
He leaned against the sink, steeling himself for the inevitable.