The Noah Confessions Page 9

  Lately, seeing you has reminded me of my sanity all over again. I know it happened just as I remember it.

  For a lot of years after that, I woke up in the middle of the night, scared to death and longing to answer for something I had done. Sometimes I honestly couldn’t remember what it was. But most times I remembered as if I were watching the movie and it was all happening again.

  I became a criminal that day in the woods.

  I am telling you now so you won’t make the mistake of falling in love with me.

  This is who I am.

  Do you still want to date me? I didn’t think so.

  So just stop staring at me in English class and trying to talk to me and hoping to get to know me.

  If you even think about loving me, remember who I am. I’m telling you for your own good. My own good is a thing of the past. It’s a kind of slight memory I have, of smelling breakfast when I wake up and thinking I’ll go down and greet my family and they will be all good and normal. That’s over for me.

  No reason it should be over for you.

  • 2 •

  I sat at the kitchen table in the dark.

  The manuscript was in front of me.

  It was two o’clock in the morning.

  I stared at the letter. I stared at the bird bracelet sitting next to it. I was thinking of lighting the paper on fire and throwing the bracelet on top. I didn’t know what to do. So far that was my only idea.

  Then I had another idea. I decided to light a candle. Then I took a framed picture of my mother that usually sat on the coffee table and I put it next to the manuscript and the bracelet, and the whole thing looked like a sacrifice of some kind, ready to make its way toward heaven, where my mother may or may not have been, depending on what you believe or I believed or the president believed or the latest big celebrity believed on any given day.

  Me, I was admitting to total confusion. I was giving in to it.

  And I was sitting next to this homemade halfhearted offering and I wasn’t moving. I was just staring.

  My grandfather was a murderer. He killed a girl with his bare hands. My mother saw it. She never told anyone. Except Noah.

  Then she died.

  This would make a nice essay on my college application.

  Or a nice opening paragraph on my first date.

  I knew all about DNA. They taught it in school. Made a big deal of it. You are your DNA. Genetic memory.

  The stairs creaked.

  My father came downstairs, as I knew he would.

  He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt and his hair was all over the place and his reading glasses were far down his nose and he looked concerned.

  “Lynnie?” he said.

  “Jaqueline,” I answered.

  He sighed and sat across the table from me and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “You’re not going to insist on being called that, are you?”

  “Why? Would it bother you?”

  “I’m too old to call you another name.”

  “Is that it?”

  “You know it isn’t. Lynne is what your mother and I agreed to call you. It was our agreement.”

  “It’s my name.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I waited for a long moment, letting the time settle down on him like ash, and I enjoyed his discomfort. I was mad at him and I wanted him to know why before I said it.

  “When were you going to tell me the truth?”

  He seemed surprised. “I did. By giving you the letter. And the bracelet. You weren’t ready before.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  He stared at me. I took a breath and wondered if I should bring the whole house down now or save it for later, for when I needed something. But I realized that I was done with all the mystery and the game playing and the whole sorry history of not knowing and not talking about it.

  “You’re Noah, aren’t you?”

  He took his glasses off and folded them and then he clasped his fingers and put them under his chin.

  “Yes, I am.”

  I shook my head and looked away. I felt in control. The next move was mine. And the next and the next. I sat there wondering what to do with all that power. He sat across from me, my strong father with all the answers, and he didn’t know what to do.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did she call you that?”

  This question actually made him smile and then my eyes met his and he wanted me to smile with him and I refused.

  He said, “When I first moved there, nobody knew my name. I was shy and I didn’t make friends right away. I stared at your mother a lot. The first time I saw her I was smitten. I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t know how. She noticed it right away. She wanted a name for me but she didn’t know how to ask. So she decided my name was Noah. Because I had this long hair, like someone from the Bible, she said, and because girls followed me around in twos, like animals following Noah to the ark.”

  I didn’t respond. I just listened.

  His mind was wandering, anyway. I wondered if he even knew I was there anymore.

  “She thought I didn’t know about the nickname but I did. I liked it. Noah seemed like a much more interesting name than John. Noah sounded like a rock star or a private-school boy or someone who was going places. I just let it happen.”

  I waited.

  He smiled some more. He said, “Your mother. She was so beautiful. Not in a way that was trying, you see. She didn’t wear makeup, and her hair just hung down to her waist, parted in the middle, and she had these great eyes and she was always wearing jeans. But it was her smile, really. It lit up her whole face. Your mother had a way of making me feel that everything was going to be fine. Later, when I knew the whole story, I was so surprised by that. She had lived through all this trouble. But she still believed the world was a good place to be and there was something to hope for. No reason for her to think that. It was something that was in her.”

  I gave that a moment to sink in. I always wanted to hear about my mother. But I was mad at him and I didn’t want to make him feel better by being entertained.

  After a respectable amount of time had passed, I asked, “Who was Jackie to you?”

  He wasn’t surprised by the question.

  “She was my cousin.”

  “Did you know her?”

  He shook his head.

  “I had heard about her for years, of course. After the accident. That’s what we called it in my family. I’m not sure why. There was never an accident. My mother always understood that. There was a disappearance. An incident. But calling it that left things so wide open. Calling it an accident meant that it was over. My father insisted on it. He wanted my mother to understand it was over.”

  I waited.

  He looked at me. “Wait, I want to be honest. I did know her. Apparently I met her on several occasions. Christmases and family reunions. But I was much younger. Six or seven years younger. I don’t remember her at all. Your mother knew her much better.”

  I waited for more. I saw him shifting in his chair. He wanted to go back to bed.

  Still I waited.

  He said, “Lynne, I’m glad you know all this. I think I did the right thing. Sometimes it’s hard for me to know. I need guidance from your mother but I don’t have that anymore. So I’m just winging it. The hard part is over now, though. You’ve read the letter. I’ve been waiting for that moment my whole adult life. Now I think we can move forward and get things accomplished.”

  “What things?”

  He shrugged. “It’s going to be the truth from now on.”

  “Oh, really, is that how it’s going to be?”

  He nodded. He stood. He pushed his chair in.

  “We should go to bed. It’s late.”

  I shook my head at him.

  “I want to hear the rest.”

  My father looked at me, completely caught in the net, th
e battle plan unraveling in front of him.

  “It’s late, Lynnie.”

  “You gave me the letter. You can’t leave me alone with it now. You think I’m going to go upstairs and set my alarm and go to bed and get up for school as usual?”

  I could see he did think that. Or more accurately, he hadn’t thought past this point.

  “Lynnie, we have obligations.”

  “You wanted me to read the letter. I’ve read it. Now I have some questions, Dad. And we’ll stay up all night if we have to.”

  My father was not the kind of man you could boss around. I saw his shoulders hunching up and his facial features collecting in the middle. But I wasn’t afraid. I hadn’t asked for the letter. Or the bracelet. I had asked for a car.

  I could see his resolve was weakening and I waited. He tried once again.

  He said, “This could take all night.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He thought about it and sat back down. The candle was flickering between us and the letter was between us and we had reached a crossroads. He had always known this day was coming and I had never known. But now I did and I had to know more.

  So he began talking. He told me the story. Not as he was—a grown man, a widower, with a teenage daughter and a job in a law firm and a house and a car and a college fund and obligations, as he put it, and places to be and people to see and a whole made-up life to attend to. He told me the story as he experienced it then. Just a boy, a little younger than me, who moved to a small town and met a pretty girl with long hair parted in the middle and a smile he couldn’t forget. It was there that he met his past and his future and it all came together and fell apart and eventually turned into me.

  • 3 •

  We were a happy family. Everybody thinks they are. Everybody assumes they are. Nobody asks questions. I had no reason to ask any. We lived in Manhattan. East Side. My father was a dentist. My mother was a housewife. She was a little nervous—that’s the worst that can be said of her during that time. My older brother, Charlie, was a star athlete. He was five years older than I was and he might as well have been twenty. I adored him and I hung around him and tried to be like him, but he had plans and commitments. My parents put all their hopes in him. There was never any question of him being anything but spectacular. While other families sat around at night and watched TV, we just watched Charlie.

  We watched him mimic his friends or recount his athletic stunts of the day, and I was quiet, watching and waiting to prove myself.

  There wasn’t much in the way of extended family. My father’s parents had come over from Italy and had died young. All we had left of them was their surname. My father couldn’t remember what they had expected of him other than to live in America and become a success. He had achieved that. The youngest of some sprawling immigrant family, he felt cut loose.

  They didn’t care who he married. No one was watching or holding him accountable. He met her in a restaurant; she was his waitress. He told me he fell in love with her before she ever spoke a word and I dreamed of falling in love with some woman that way, and eventually I did.

  Her name was Ella and that was an exotic-sounding name to him because he’d never met anyone from the South. Growing up in Brooklyn he was surrounded by Mary Catherines and Mary Louises and Mary Theresas and just plain Marys. Ella wasn’t a saint at all. Ella was from somewhere else, and she spoke slowly and with an accent and her manner calmed him down. And for some reason she was in Manhattan, the Lower East Side.

  Ella was displaced. She had run away from home, a place called Union Grade. She missed her family, but she had vowed never to go back to the place. She didn’t say why, but he knew. They were poor. It was the South. There was probably a trailer involved and a bad uncle and maybe even a bad father or something she was running away from that chased her for a while but wouldn’t go as far north as Manhattan. She had left behind a sister, a younger sister, the only one she really talked about. Her name was Charlene. Ella missed her and worried about her all the time, but she couldn’t risk going back for her. Charlene was a beauty, she said, with auburn hair and blue eyes and bone china skin.

  My dad started dental school and Ella, my mother, kept working as a waitress and eventually they got married. Dad scraped together enough money to send a bus ticket to Charlene. She came out and stayed with them and she was beautiful and quiet and sad and damaged. Ella was happy to have her little sister with her, but there was something broken about her and they couldn’t fix it. There was something broken like that in my mother, too, but it took a while to come out. It hovered like a ghost most of the time and she was all right.

  Charlene got pregnant that summer in New York. She went back home without telling anybody who or what or where. She went back to Union Grade and made up a story about a husband in New York and had the baby and named her Jaqueline.

  A year after Charlene went back home my mother had my older brother and named him Charles, after her sister with the auburn hair and the sad eyes. I think she always felt responsible for what happened to Charlene in the city. They tried to keep an eye on her, but they didn’t do a very good job. Nobody ever knew who the father was. This isn’t a Tennessee Williams story, so it wasn’t my father. It was just some sailor, my mom told me. Some guy she remembered seeing Charlene with, sitting on the stoop near their apartment in Brooklyn. But he disappeared into the ocean like some character in a Puccini opera, and Charlene went back home.

  Around the time Charlie was born, Charlene met a machinst in Union Grade named Bo Rivers and he was good to her and married her and later they had two more daughters, Dana and Sheryl. Baby Jackie had a father and Charlene was settled and that gave my mother some peace of mind.

  So the story had a happy middle. Not so much a happy ending.

  My mother finally felt brave enough to go back down South to Union Grade, taking Charlie with her. Her parents were dead by then and she’d been gone long enough that nobody thought of her as trailer trash. They thought of her as the dentist’s wife from Manhattan, which was an odd thing to be but perfectly respectable. It was good for her to see Charlene doing so well, and Ella fell in love with Baby Jackie right away.

  The way she told it, Charlie and Baby Jackie looked alike. They could have been brother and sister. Charlie had red hair then. It turned dark later. But they always shared the blue eyes. I wasn’t born yet. I wasn’t even an idea.

  They stayed in touch over the years and Ella had me and I was dark like my dad and reminded her of nobody from Union Grade, so she treated me like a stranger, one she was delighted to raise, but who had nothing whatsoever to do with her. To be fair, the brokenness was kicking in around that time. Those weren’t bad memories, though. My mother just seemed distant but happy and all I cared about was following Charlie around.

  When Charlie was fifteen and I was ten, Baby Jackie disappeared.

  She wasn’t a baby then, of course. She was older than both of us. Charlie and I called her Cousin Jackie but Mom still called her Baby because that was the way she remembered her. It was funny, we didn’t talk about the other cousins at all. Dana and Sheryl, the two girls she had with Bo Rivers the machinist. They were younger than us, so we didn’t care. But Jackie was different to us because she was different to my mother. She was her special niece, like the daughter she never had, like the sister she felt she hadn’t taken care of.

  So it hit her hard when Baby Jackie went missing.

  It was late in the game by the time my parents found out. Charlene and Bo took three days to even report it, which made my mother angry, but Charlene explained. “She has a boyfriend. She’s always running off with him.”

  “For three days?” my mother asked, shrieking on the phone in our living room. Charlie and I sat on our baseball mitts and listened.

  “A day once,” Charlene had said. “She ran away because we wouldn’t let her wear hip-huggers to school.”

  “But three days,” my mother insisted, pacing in our living room and sm
oking. Her hair was unbrushed and her eyes looked wild. “Did you call the police?”

  Charlene said there was no point.

  “No point? No point? How do you people live?”

  When she hung up the phone she looked at us as if we were the problem and said, “She never knew how to take care of herself, let alone a baby.”

  I remember Charlie said, “Jackie’s older than me, Mom.”

  “That’s not the point. My God, what is your point, Charles?”

  That’s how upset she was. She was not only yelling at Charlie, she was calling him Charles. I was usually the one in trouble.

  Charlie talked to her the way Dad did, so he was condescending. Even calling her by her first name. “My point, Ella, is that she’s old enough to take care of herself.” “Oh, is that what you think? I suppose that’s what you both think. Well, let me tell you something you might have missed along the way. She’s a girl. Girls are different. Girls are not safe in this world. Girls are exposed.”

  She stopped talking and started crying into her fingers and then she left the room.

  Charlie and I didn’t say anything because we were afraid of what we had just seen. Charlie was unsettled because he was seeing the future. Our mother was starting to come apart.

  I was seeing the past. Whatever it was that made her that way.

  So that was that and we were heading down South. Her favorite niece was missing and she was going to save her the way she couldn’t save Charlene—at least, that’s what was in her head.

  They took us out of school and we went down to Union Grade to be part of the search party. To Charlie and me it was a kind of adventure, a chance to get out of school. I was sure they were going to find her so there wasn’t any urgency and nothing much to worry about except the frantic way my mother was behaving and how she kept forgetting to brush her hair or put on makeup.

  Did I meet your mother on that trip? I know that’s what you’re thinking and I don’t have an answer. We argued about it. She said yes, she remembered seeing me. I said no, I would have remembered seeing her. She said she looked a lot different. She was only a little kid. I guess we both were, but it felt like I was old. I guess it felt like that to her, too. Which was why she felt so guilty all those years.