His mind felt as clear as ever. It was simply the word that eluded him. It was there, right in front of him, taunting him, and yet his brain balked, refusing utterly to reach out even a finger to touch it. He felt like Tantalus, parched and hungry, striving fruitlessly for the cool water and the grapes that were always just out of reach.
Tantalus, punished by the gods for telling humans their immortal secrets. Tantalus had high hopes for humans, and where did that leave him? Doomed, that’s where. Banished to Tartarus. And how was it that he could remember the name and the story of Tantalus, but not the name he needed? Ah, the brain: who knew why it remembered what it remembered, or lost what it lost. And here he was: Jerome Anderson in Tartarus, the deepest region of hell.
Things were falling apart rapidly. The woman’s name was in his folder, of course: on the yellow pad in his briefcase, which lay at his feet. He could bend down right now and retrieve it. This particular bit of information could be attained. Yet who knew when he would lose it again, or what else he would lose? He shouldn’t be here at all, especially since the case was not proceeding according to protocol. Perhaps he should stop. The boy would forget, eventually. But Anderson didn’t know how. He was the man who didn’t stop, that’s what he was, all he knew how to be, from the moment he had returned home from his first cases with Angsley in Thailand.
He had walked in the door two months later, electrified.
Sheila was waiting for him on the couch, her strong legs curled up beneath her. She looked the same: that moon face, as fine as ever, with its sprinkling of freckles across the nose, that heavy cloud of blond hair. He, on the other hand, was a different man.
She looked at him with a piercing, assessing gaze—he hadn’t written her those two months except to cable her when he was coming home—and he was struck with tenderness for all of it: the old red couch with its stuffing showing at the seams and the young wife who was trying to figure out if she still had a husband, the concreteness and sheer flair that constituted life as you were living it, the vibrancy of the illusion. Before he kissed her or took off his jacket he was taking his files from his briefcase and laying them out on the coffee table.
The photographs weren’t pretty, but he wanted her to see. He spread them before her, the dead and the living: the deformities and birthmarks and the coroners’ reports of the previous personalities’ death wounds. The girl with deformed fingers on one hand, the woman who had been killed when she had burned the rice. When he had finished with the last brutal and improbable detail he looked at Sheila and drew in his breath, wondering what she’d say. He felt his whole life, his whole marriage, the only thing aside from his work that had ever meant anything to him, hanging in the balance.
“You certainly did surprise me, Jerry,” she said.
She looked baffled and shocked and amused all at once. There it was, the thing he loved most in her, right there—that shadow of amusement that this was how her life was turning out. “For a moment there when you walked in I thought you were going to tell me you found another woman.”
“This is what I want to do with my life. I want to go back, interview them all again in a year or two. Find more cases.”
“You know that people are going to give you a hard time about this? That nobody is going to take you seriously?”
“I don’t care about what other people think. I only care what you think.” This wasn’t, as it turned out, entirely true.
“You’re giving up a very promising career.”
“I’ll make it work, somehow. For us,” he added, the word dangling awkwardly between them. “So, what do you think?”
She paused, and he held his breath so long he felt light-headed from lack of oxygen. “I don’t know, Jerry. How can I know? What you’re telling me—” She shook her head. “How can it be possible?”
“But you see the data. I’ve shown it to you. What other explanation can there be? You think they’re lying? But what reason would they have to lie? These families aren’t getting any money from this, they’re not looking for attention, believe me.… And, yes, it’s possible that these kids have some kind of super ESP, I’ve thought of that, but these kids aren’t just talking about other people’s lives, they’re saying they are these other people. And if you rule that out—I mean, what other explanation is there? And the birthmarks, the deformities, the way they match up to the modes of death, not always perfectly, no, but there is a connection, a visible connection, and I’ve only just started—there are too many instances for it to be random. It can’t be random—”
“This is about Owen, isn’t it?”
For the first time, he stopped talking. She always saw right through him.
She pored, perplexed, over the papers spread out across their coffee table. The notes, the faces, the bodies with the marks on them, the other bodies with deformities, though none as bad as Owen’s. “You think that our son was born the way he was because of—something that happened in a previous lifetime? Is that what you think?”