Janie saw the flashlight first, swooping across the road. When she drew up next to Anderson he looked at her through the car window without recognition, his shirt untucked, his eyes wild. The sight of him shocked her. She hadn’t realized he’d cared so much for her son. She opened the door and he blinked and then got in without a word.
“I’m going to check the house again,” she said. She would not let herself stop moving, or think.
“Right.” He nodded. They drove on to the house in silence.
A detective in a brown suit was standing by a car in the driveway as Janie pulled up. He was pacing with his back to her, yelling on the phone. Janie stepped out of the car and his words flung themselves at her. “We need to drain it right now, goddamn it. I don’t care how deep it is, if he says the child’s body is in there—”
The phrases echoed in Janie’s mind, chopped in pieces. Jumbled.
Drain it—
The child’s body—
She felt herself slipping away. This wasn’t real. She wouldn’t let it be real. She would go far away from wherever it was that this was happening.
“Come into the house.” She heard Anderson’s voice, but the words didn’t mean anything to her.
“Come on.”
It was good not to understand words. If you let yourself understand words, then you would feel them and there was no telling what might happen.
Anderson was taking her hand and trying to lead her forward but she had no feeling in her feet. That’s what flesh was like in the unreal world. Like shadows. The man next to her was a shadow, and the detective was a shadow, and the figures moving slowly toward her across the yard, two tall shadows, one short, like a child, like— Noah! Janie’s heart exploded. She hurled herself forward.
He was clinging to Denise Crawford’s waist and looking up at her. Beautiful, dirty Noah, swirls of snot across his cheeks. Janie was standing right in front of him now, but he didn’t move his eyes from the other woman’s face.
“Noah?”
He wouldn’t look at her. Why wouldn’t Noah look at her? How could that be possible? She felt her knees buckling. She was falling, only something was behind her, holding her arms, keeping her up. It was Anderson. She let him hold her up.
“Noah! It’s me! It’s Mommy!”
Noah turned, then. He took her in quizzically, from very far away, the way a bird deep in the forest might look down at a passing human.
They all watched as he looked, and sought a breath, and couldn’t find it.
*
Breathe, Noah, breathe.
It had never been this bad. Janie held him in her lap in the car, the inhaler pressed against his mouth. Didn’t even bother with the car seat.
Blue and red lights flashing through the windshield, leading the way. If Noah was alert right now he would have loved that. His own police escort, complete with siren and flashing lights.
Breathe. His head lolling back against her as if he were an infant. Even through the new worry she felt the relief of having him in her arms again, when she’d thought she might never have another chance. Breathe.
“He’s going to be okay, right?” the Crawford boy asked.
He’d insisted on coming and was sitting next to her, tapping his fingers on his knees in a frenzy of percussive nervousness. Janie wished his mother would tell him to stop, but Denise seemed oblivious. She was sitting up front in the passenger seat, giving Anderson directions in a dazed voice.
“He’ll be fine,” Janie said, speaking to herself as much as anybody. “He could use some more powerful albuterol, but he’ll get that at the hospital.”
“This happened before?” the teenager said.
“Yes. He has asthma.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“So it’s the asthma?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, that’s a relief. I thought maybe he was having some kind of flashback about what happened last time and he was, you know … drowning all over again.”
Janie didn’t say anything for a moment. She held on to her baby boy, who was struggling to breathe and had nothing to do with that story or any story. Anderson piped up from the driver’s seat, “It doesn’t work like that. Though there is sometimes a connection between the mode of death and … abnormalities. Sometimes subjects who have asthma had a previous personality who drowned or was somehow asphyxiated.”
Shut up, Jerry, Janie thought.
“Good to know,” Charlie said at last.
Anderson glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “He talked to you about drowning?”
“Yeah. In the well. He got himself pretty worked up.”
“I don’t understand.” Janie turned on Charlie. “He told you he drowned in a well? Why’d he tell you that?”
“Maybe ’cause he thinks I’m his brother?”
She looked at him: a teenager wearing a sleeveless Cleveland Indians T-shirt and shorts, his long, wiry body radiating youth. “Do you believe him?”
“You don’t really have any choice, if you listen to him, do you?”
She clung to Noah. He was leaning against her chest, his hand tightly clutching her arm. She could feel each of his breaths scraping itself together inside of him. “I guess not.”
“You don’t believe him?” Charlie was looking at her.
“No, I do,” she said. It was true.