“He says he misses his mother. His other mother,” Janie added quietly. “He cries about it all the time.”
“Look, I don’t know why your son says these things. If something is wrong with him, then I’m truly sorry. But this is nonsense, a bunch of half-baked coincidences, and you’re telling all this to the wrong person, because to be honest, I don’t care.” Denise laughed again, if you could call it a laugh. Anderson could sense her pain behind that clear, furious facade, like lightning flashing in the distance. There was no way in. “Look, I’m not a minister and, far as I can see, neither are you. And I’m not going to stand here in my own living room and speculate about the hereafter, because none of it makes any difference. Because none of it brings my boy back to me. Tommy is—” Her voice caught. She shook her head and tried again. “My son is dead.”
The words rang out in the room. She looked from one to the other, as if one of them might actually contradict her. He wished suddenly that he was a resident again, armed with his white coat, curing the sick; anything but who he was, where he was: in this room, agreeing with this mother that her son was dead.
“I’m so sorry,” Janie said. Her voice was thick with tears.
Denise Crawford was not crying, though. She was continuing on, speaking in a voice so frozen Anderson felt its chill penetrating deep into his bones: that cold grief he knew so well. “He’s dead. And he’s not ever coming back. And you—you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
“Mrs. Crawford—”
“I think you ought to go now. You’ve done enough. Just—go.”
Janie tried to smile. “Mrs. Crawford—we’ll leave, we’re fine with leaving, if you could see Noah for a few minutes—you don’t have to say anything, if you just sit with him and be … friendly—”
“You convinced this child that he’s someone else. And you dragged him here all the way from god knows where—”
“New York.”
“Why does that not surprise me? You brainwashed this poor child and carted him all the way from New York. And now you want me to play along like this is some kind of game.” She shook her head. “It’s not a game to me. Now get out of my house.”
“It’s not a game to us, either,” Anderson said slowly, steadily. “Listen, Mrs.—I know you’ve had a loss. A terrible loss. I understand how you feel.”
“You understand? Why? Who did you lose?”
“I lost my—my—” He reached for the word but it broke beneath him like a step on a ladder, sending him tumbling into darkness. He saw his wife’s face in his mind’s eye. It was disappointed in him. “My others.” It was all he could find. He’d lost the name of his own wife. His own son.
Denise Crawford stood up to her full height. She was almost as tall as Anderson. “I said, ‘Get out.’”
This is why I spent so many years in Asia, he thought. This was what happened with American cases. He stood there. He couldn’t think.
Janie looked at him, and he followed her down the hall.
I’m sorry, he thought. Sorry for pulling you into this. Sorry for making you believe in such a pathetic sack of bones.
“So what do we tell Noah?” she whispered fiercely. Her closeness in the hallway, the breath of her whisper in his face, hit him hard, and he recoiled instinctively from the intensity. “How can I make this right with him?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“That’s all you can say? That’s it? I’ll figure it out?”
From somewhere nearby, a drumbeat began, ominous, inexorable, as if leading his army to its defeat. He forced himself to lift his head and look into her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
She turned away from him and opened the door of the kitchen. But it wasn’t necessary for her to figure out anything, because Noah was gone.
Twenty-Five
It was like a house of cards collapsing, Anderson thought. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. And he, watching the hysteria unfold, more helpless than any of them. He had reached for the words and they weren’t there.
This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn’t. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted the monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense.
Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn’t help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn’t go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit.
Himself included.
Which was as good an explanation as any for what happened that afternoon.
But you couldn’t really blame America, could you?
Because things in India went wrong, too, sometimes, didn’t they?