Noah's Turn (20 page)

Noah got the call just before eight in the morning. This was his worst hour, the time when most productive people were getting up.

He looked at the rack of doughnuts and couldn't decide between the more adult chocolate cream and the Hawaiian, which had a cream filling, a frosted top and sprinkles. He ordered a medium coffee and a chocolate cream, which, because of some weekly special, they rolled in the Hawaiian sprinkles for no extra charge at the customer's request, making it a chocolate Hawaiian cream. Noah picked up the chocolate Hawaiian cream, or was it the Hawaiian chocolate cream, and sat at the Arborite table that was bolted to the tile floor. A few years ago this place would have smelled of cigarette smoke and cleaning chemicals, now it was just cleaning chemicals. He didn't feel he had to open a laptop or a newspaper while sitting here alone. In this place it was acceptable to sit with your doughnut and coffee and stare at nothing in particular. Noah had finished his coffee when a man of his age in a polo shirt, jeans and expensive loafers walked in and directly up to his table. Noah knew right away that this was Andrea Scott's husband and was grateful that the table was bolted to the floor because her husband approached so quickly that Noah sensed his next move could have been to grab the table and smash it over Noah's head. This could kill him or cause brain damage that might leave him drooling in a home for the rest of his life.

“Noah Douglas?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Paul Wharton, Andrea's husband. I'll get a coffee.”

He went to the counter and ordered a coffee, brought it back and sat down across from Noah, who felt slightly ridiculous with a half-eaten chocolate Hawaiian cream in his left hand. Noah was the guy Andrea wanted to fuck, but this childish choice of doughnuts made him feel almost pre-pubescent.

“My wife and I were having an argument about something that had nothing to do with you and in the middle of it, I guess to make a point, she said that she was having an affair with you. She didn't give me your number, only your name and what you do. TV?”

“Sometimes.”

“I'm a partner at Hesseman, DiMarco, Blake, and our firm does some work for the owners of a couple of independent stations. I asked my secretary if she could track down your number. Andrea doesn't know I called you. She doesn't know we are meeting.”

Noah said, “I really think this is something between you and her.” He had no interest in explaining himself, but he didn't know what else Andrea Scott had revealed
so he had to be careful not to antagonize him.

“Think what you want.”

It was clear that her husband had no intention of engaging Noah in a conversation or listening to what he had to say.

“We have three girls. We own a home and a summer cottage and the girls are all enrolled in private school. That is our world. That is what we call a family, and I won't let you or anything else wreck it.”

This guy was like the
Titanic
, Noah thought. One of those people who, for his entire life, had believed he was unsinkable. Then out of nowhere he hit the iceberg, Noah Douglas.

“I don't want you to call or see my wife again. If you do, our next encounter won't be this civilized.” He stood up and left his coffee untouched on the table. “I'm going to get a box of doughnuts for my girls. I'd appreciate it if you waited here until I'm gone.” He went to the counter, ordered a half-dozen doughnuts and left.

Noah sat with his doughnut and thought that if he lived, even peripherally, within the “normal” world, a world that included people like Andrea Scott and her husband, he might react to this confrontation. He might try to explain himself or cover up or go head to head,
mano-a-mano, with this aggressive jerk, but he had fallen so far out of life's grinding gears that he had no conventional options left to play, or at least no interest in playing them. Sitting there in the toxic sterility of the doughnut shop Noah felt he had finally hit bottom and was overcome with a sensation he had never before experienced, as if the impact of his fall had cracked open a vault of unconsciousness and some buried part of him had come loose.

N
oah sat at his laptop and let the first scene of the story in his head play out, then began to type:

It is 8:30 in the morning, July ninth, and I am lying in bed awake with my eyes closed. The birds are chirping outside my window, and I can tell that the sky is blue because I can make out the sun's reflection off the shiny painted windowsill through my eyelids. I think that birds chirp one way when it's sunny and a different way when it's cloudy. I'm sure I could look that up and find out if I'm right. I have been lying here like this for about an hour, thinking one thought. It is a thought I have never had before. I am thinking that I am twelve years old and I am completely alone in the world. I am lying in the same bed I have slept
in every day of my life, except when we have gone away on vacation. I am lying in the same house I have lived in my whole life. And I am thinking that I am completely alone in the world and will most likely be alone until the day I die. This thought doesn't scare me. It feels normal.

   Noah sat back and read the few sentences he had written. He wasn't sure what this was, but he could hear a voice in it. And this he knew was good. He was in no hurry. He finished his beer and fell asleep in front of CNN. He woke up around one-thirty in the morning, turned off the TV, went back to his laptop and read the paragraph he had written earlier, then crawled into bed and let the story continue to run as he fell asleep.

He woke up around noon, went directly to his laptop and started to write:

My father backs the vintage Jaguar out of the garage. He is proud of the Jag and drives it only on summer weekends. He and my mom are in the front. I am in the back. The same thought is still on my mind, and it's kind of weird that neither of them knows what I am thinking. I look at each of them—the backs of my parents' heads, that is. I realize that they are strangers. Then I think, “No, that's
not it. They aren't the strangers, I am the stranger.” That is the real thought. I am the stranger. The thought is definitely new to me, but it is also exciting. I do nothing to try to stop it. I don't say, “Hey, everybody, yesterday I felt like a member of the family. Yesterday I knew everybody here. But not today.” Sitting there with my new, private thought, I feel like I have just opened up a great present, something from a sporting-goods store, like a new all-leather Spalding ball glove. I move the thought around in my head like I am quietly working in the glove. I have never had this feeling before, that you can move a thought around in your head. But I have it with this thought, this morning. As we drive, I wonder if a normal kid of twelve might start to feel scared when a thought doesn't go away after getting up and going to the bathroom and having breakfast and getting dressed. It doesn't go away after arriving at my uncle's place, but I don't feel any panic. My uncle and aunt and two cousins have always felt different to me, so this new feeling about them too is no big deal. My mom says they are different, so naturally I feel they are different. None of them ever wear jeans or regular sloppy clothes. They are always dressed in clean, ironed stuff, even on a weekend in their backyard by the river. This is my father's side of the family, and we were never that close to his side because none of us liked
his father, my grandfather. We were taught not to like my grandfather by my mom because she believed he treated my father badly. But this morning what I think about my mom's ideas is irrelevant because I am now a stranger to her. This morning my aunt and uncle and cousins don't just feel not close; this morning they feel like people I have never met before and will most likely never see again.

The next morning I wake up to the chirping birds of another sunny day. The first thing that comes to mind is the “big” thought. I am still alone in the world.

Before I open my eyes, I sniff an unfamiliar smell. At first, I think my mom is cooking something new downstairs. She is a bit of an experimenter when it comes to cooking. But as the smell lingers I decide it's not a cooking smell. I push my nose into my sheets so I won't breathe it in, but there is also an unfamiliar smell to my sheets. They don't smell like my room, they have their own smell. I don't recognize that smell either. I decide to get up because I can't fall back to sleep. I go downstairs to the kitchen, where my mom is drinking coffee and eating toast and reading the paper. “What's that weird smell?” I ask her.

“There is no weird smell,” she says. “I just made your father breakfast and he has left for the golf course. I have
shopping to do, and I want you to go up and make your bed. There are fresh sheets in the laundry room. Do you want to come with me?”

“What's that?” I say, pointing at her hand that was holding the toast.

“Toast with cream cheese. Would you like some?”

“No, on your nails.”

“Polish,” she says without looking up from the paper, as if that is the most natural thing in the world. But she had never, as far as I could remember, worn nail polish unless she was going out to a party at night.

“If you want to come, you'd better get a move on.”

I decide not to go and head upstairs to the second-floor laundry room with a washer and dryer and a folding table where the sheets are piled. The room has a different soapy smell than I am used to, and I figure my mom has changed the detergent brand. On the shelf above the washer is a box of soap I have never seen before. “That explains it,” I think. I pick up the sheets, a contoured bottom and a flat top sheet and a pillowcase. They don't smell like anything I have smelled in our house before, except maybe the smell of my bed when I woke up this morning.

I go back down to the kitchen and ask my mom why she is using new soap. She says it is the same laundry soap
she has always used and asks me why I am so interested in soap. “It smells different,” I say.

“Well, I haven't changed our brand in years and I don't think the company has been playing around with their odour because it smells the same to me. Maybe it's your nose. Maybe you are getting a cold.”

“In the summer?” I ask. “Is that possible?”

“Of course,” she says. “You can get a cold at any time of year. Now, you haven't had a thing to eat and I want you to have something before you go out.”

“Go out where,” I think. If I have a regular thing to do—let me say that again—if I had a regular thing to do, as the old me, I have forgotten what it is. And if I ask my mom what it is, she might think that I am weird, especially if it is a regular thing. I figure I have to do this one step at a time and see what happens. “What's to eat?”

“Whatever you want.”

Now this is a problem, because the list of whatever I want would most likely be short since I'm twelve years old and hate almost everything, but I must have a list and I have no idea what it is. This problem gives me a scary feeling. I am beginning not to recognize myself. Yesterday I thought that was pretty cool, but now not even knowing what kind of food I like is kind of crazy. “How about my
favourite?” I say. I think that is the best thing to say since my mom would know exactly what that is.

“What favourite?”

“I don't care. You choose.”

“You're behaving very oddly today, Noah.”

“Noah?” I say to myself. “My name is Noah?” Either I have forgotten it or I am now living in a parallel universe. I had seen a show something like this on TV, but I can't remember what happens.

“Jeez. ‘Noah,' that's a name a twelve-year-old is going to have a problem with,” I think.

“Where's your ark, Noah?”

“Do you get to see all the animals on the ark fuck, Noah?”

“What kind of wimp name is ‘Noah,' Noah?”

“Hey, Noah, you plugged the toilet with too much bum wad, now we're gonna have a flood for forty days and forty nights, Noah!”

“How about pancakes?” I say.

“I'm not making pancakes at this hour of the morning. I have to get going.”

“Toast?”

“With?”

“Whatever.” That is all she needs and she is off preparing toast and juice and milk and peanut butter and
jam and everything is fine. While I watch her, she starts to look more like someone we have hired to make breakfast than like a mother.

“Would you like some yogurt?” my mom asks.

“Yogurt?” I'm not sure because I have no memory of ever eating yogurt. “Sure. Not too much.”

“It's strawberry, your favourite.”

Finally some information on what I like and don't like.