*
In the kitchen, Noah sat at the table with his eyes closed and his hands over his ears. He was still humming. He wouldn’t look at Janie, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he wriggled away. Another tray of cookies sat on the gleaming marble counter. Their smell permeated the room, powerful and nauseating, like a mistake it was too late to fix.
Anderson cleared his throat. Janie could hardly look at him.
“It was an error.” He seemed to be addressing all of them or none of them. “It seems to be the wrong previous personality.” Nobody answered him. “Let me explain…,” he said, but didn’t continue. He seemed to have lost his bearings, if he had ever truly had any.
Melissa was slumped at the other end of the table. She had bitten her lip and now it was bleeding. There was a smudge of blood on the collar of her yellow blouse, a smear on her white teeth. “I thought I was going to get some answers,” she mumbled. Janie could see a streak of gray mixed in with the blond sweep of her hair.
Her husband had a packet of baby wipes in his hand and was cleaning her face, the baby tucked under his arm like a giant squirming football.
“There are no answers,” John said. “It was an accident.”
He gently wiped the black marks from the sides of her face and her chin. She let him, her hands dangling loosely in her lap. As he cleared the makeup she looked even younger, like a child.
“You always say that,” Melissa moaned. “But it’s my fault.”
“The pool boy left the latch open.” The baby started to wail. “You know this. It could have happened to anybody. It was a fluke.”
“But the lessons—”
“He wasn’t a strong swimmer.”
“But if I had checked the latch—”
“It’s time to stop this, Mel.”
Time to stop this.
The words woke Janie at last from her spell. This woman has lost her son, she thought. She lost her son. She let the words sink in. She saw, she couldn’t help but see, a sweet-looking blond child struggling at the bottom of the pool. His small dead body floating in that crystal-blue water. A dead child: everything flowed from that fact, didn’t it? Of all the bad things that could happen, that was the worst. And then they had come here and done this thing to her, this woman who had already suffered unimaginably: they had gotten her hopes up and then had dashed them bitterly, and whether they had meant to or not was beside the point. She had done this thing; she couldn’t blame Noah. And Anderson had followed the dictates of his own ethics in a way she couldn’t truly fathom. But she was a mother and should have known better, and instead she had been cruel to this woman. It was unconscionable, what she had done, and all because she couldn’t face the truth. Which was?
That Tommy Moran had died and wasn’t coming back.
And Anderson’s case was finished.
And Noah was sick.
It’s time to stop this.
The baby was still wailing. “Mel.” The husband was stroking her head like a puppy. “Charlie’s hungry. He needs you.”
Melissa took the baby from her husband mechanically. She pulled up her shirt and bra with a quick, deft gesture, and her round breast popped into view, its large, pink nipple as unexpected as a spaceship. Janie felt Anderson avert his gaze, but she couldn’t look away. Melissa settled the hungry baby on her breast, and after a few moments her face took on a quieter expression.
Shame trickled down Janie’s neck. She had put Noah through this, too, confusing him even further for no good reason. “I’m sorry,” she said to Melissa.
Melissa closed her eyes, focusing on what was happening in her body, and Janie remembered the prickling sensation of breasts becoming heavy and alive with the flow of milk, the tug at the nipple with small sharp teeth, and then the deep inner sigh as the baby sucked the milk into his mouth.
“You people ought to leave now,” John said, though it hardly needed saying. He led them silently through the house, Janie steering Noah with both hands on his back, his hands still covering his ears, Anderson following behind. John opened the front door. He wouldn’t look at them.
The three of them stumbled down the steps and out into the pretty street. Trees waved in the breeze; the golf courses glowed in the distance. A boy on a bike whizzed by them on the sidewalk, ferociously focused, nearly hitting them. Janie watched him continue down the street, tires wobbling.
*
They drove away in silence. Janie sat in the back next to Noah’s car seat. Noah wouldn’t open his eyes or remove his hands from his ears. After a while his hands fell to his sides and she realized he had fallen asleep.
Noah is sick.