“No! No!” The boy started shrieking. “Leave me alone!”
“Okay, then. Okay. I got to, um, get going, then. Good luck getting home.” If the boy was going to be a freak about it he wasn’t going to get involved. He probably should call the police about the boy. Maybe one of the neighbors would, though. He started to shut the door.
“Wait—”
He turned around. “What?”
The boy’s mouth was all twisted up. “Why’d you do that to me?”
“Do what?”
His eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. “Why’d you hurt me?”
Paul started to sweat. His sweat smelled like alcohol and made him thirsty for it. “I never met you before. How could I hurt you?”
“You hurt me bad, Pauly.”
How the hell did the kid know that name? Nobody had called him Pauly in years. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I was going to Oscar’s and you stopped me. You were being nice and then you hurt me.”
He started to shake. Maybe it was the dt’s. How was that possible, though? “I don’t know what you mean. I never met you before. I never hurt you.”
“Yeah, you did. With the gun.”
He stood there. He couldn’t believe it. “What’d you say?”
“Why’d you do it? I never did anything bad to you.”
He was going nuts. That’s what it was. It was like that scary shit he’d read in high school before he dropped out, the heart tick-ticking through the floorboards ’til you lost your fucking mind. The boy wasn’t even here. Yet he saw him there, scuffling at the dirt, hands balled into fists, looking scared and furious all at the same time. Little yellow-haired kid. Nothing like that boy that was dead. Was somebody tricking him? But who could know?
“You never even let me try it,” the boy said. “You said you would.”
“How do you know about that? Nobody knows about that,” he said. More likely he was still drunk. Maybe that was it. He didn’t feel drunk at all, though.
The boy stood there with his fists, his whole body trembling. “Why’d you do it, though, Pauly? I don’t know why.”
He felt that feeling again in his mind, it was whirling and whirling like a goddamn roulette wheel, only this time there was no stopping it, this time it landed where it had been heading all along.
Twenty-Nine
Janie drove on, wrapped in a world divided, a world of Noah and Not-Noah. The streetlights turning on one by one, the slight jolt of cracked asphalt beneath her wheels, the split-level houses with their basketball nets, their green lawns shading to gray in the falling dark, the night air itself, cooling rapidly, humming with evening: all of this was Not-Noah, and, therefore, useless.
The world was three feet tall, pale skinned, fair haired, its veins pulsing with life.
That’s all her eyes would see. All they would recognize. She could see, but not register, the shapes in this Noahless world.
Her brain, though; her brain—
Her fault. That’s what she couldn’t stop herself from thinking. So many mistakes, so many places she could have gotten off this path, so many simple things she could have done. She could have not called Anderson. She could have decided that this trip was indeed a bad idea. She could have stayed with Noah in the kitchen while he was watching a video. She could have checked on him. She should have checked. Why hadn’t she? He was only four.
Her fault.
She had thought that coming here might help him, when in fact she should have run hard and fast in the opposite direction. Remembering was not the answer. Forgetting was the answer. No other lives, no other worlds. Just this one, right here, this inexplicable, cracked-asphalt-filled life, with Noah in it. That’s all she was asking for. That’s all she wanted. She had made a mistake, though, and maybe lost him—for good?
No. Of course not. She’d see him any minute.
But it was getting darker now. Her child was wandering in it somewhere, lost and alone. Soon the darkness would swallow his red jacket, his bright blond hair. How would she find him then?
She rolled open the window and the night air filled the car with all its Noahless freshness and density: “NO-AH!”
Her eyes swept the landscape, finding nothing.
*
Anderson stumbled down the road away from the Crawford house, the flashlight in his hand sending its futile trickle against the broad, smirking face of the early evening. Dusk was falling, and Noah was out in it somewhere, and the necessity of making it all right pulsed through him, pumping his body full of the harsh, spiking energy bequeathed by the hormones secreted by the adrenal medulla: adrenaline, increasing his heart rate, pulse rate, and blood pressure, raising the blood levels of his glucose and lipids, and sending his brain ricocheting from the wall of the present back, ten, twenty, thirty years.
Preeta Kapoor.