Noah's Wife (13 page)

T
he weatherman has never possessed much of a talent for prediction.

He has, in fact, never been one to place much stock in the whole idea of prediction, or of expectation in general. Why expect, and be disappointed? he would ask himself. Why try to determine today where you will be tomorrow, who will be with you, where you will go? Where is the adventure in that?

He has spent most of his adult life on the road. He makes no promises, establishes no ties. The job with the weather service is one he has held for over a decade now, and most of the time he loves it. He likes flitting from one city to the next, monitoring winds and tracking severe weather patterns, pursuing storms with the same passion and dedication that other men display in pursuit of women or wealth. The weatherman, for the record,
has never needed to pursue women. He is persuasive, charming. Impossible to resist.

Or at least that is what he has been in the past. He has never encountered a town as defiant or as pigheaded as this one.

He believes that if he can only gather the citizens together to hear his warnings, he will have no trouble convincing them to evacuate. And once that is done, he can return to the city in triumph, his job secure and his name cleared of disgrace. He is growing tired of this particular task: tired of the rain, of the citizens' despair. He hardens his heart and grits his teeth and does his job, but the truth is that he does not relish commanding people to box up their lives and leave all they've ever known behind them. No one is ever pleased to see him coming.

Even today, the townspeople scowl at him when he enters the general store. They congregate near the mops and the sponges, most of them nursing some kind of bruise or bite, and all of them eyeing Mauro's birds with trepidation. Mauro, unaware of their baleful stares, whistles while he arranges olives and cheese slices on a plate and sets it on a makeshift table he has constructed out of cardboard boxes and packing crates. He has been in a markedly better mood since taking in the peacocks, who follow him around the store with their broken wings pinned to their sides. The wary eyes of the storks and the cranes peer between the shelves.

The weatherman presides over the proceedings with an air of mingled incredulity and condescension. He towers above the townspeople on a sturdy metal step stool. In the second row a
man is sitting opposite a birdcage. A few seats down from him, a woman perches on a folding chair with a box beside her, and the weatherman starts when he sees a paw poking out from the holes she has punched into the cardboard. He watches her stuff pieces of her sandwich into the box and then he hears the sound of animal teeth ripping through the bread.

He tries to catch the eye of the minister's wife as she enters, but she avoids his gaze and herds her husband to an empty row near the back. Noah settles down among his neighbors and sits stiffly in place, one eye on the flamingo where she stalks among the lawn ornaments in the corner. His wife is pale and cool beside him.

“Listen,” says the weatherman, once everyone has gathered. A peacock shrieks and Mauro hums a lullaby. “We need to talk about what's going on in this place.” He flings his hand toward the window, directing their attention outside, where the sky is churning violet and the rain is pelting down into the streets.

“It pours when it rains!” exclaims Mauro with disconcerting alacrity. He eats two olives and smiles at the group arranged around him in an attempt at camaraderie. “Isn't it nice when we are all together like this? We should be doing this more often.”

The weatherman ignores the interruption. “I've
been
to the other towns in the hills,” he continues. “It's even worse here than it was there, and most of them have already left. You're no safer than they are. You need an evacuation plan. Let's talk facts: dates, times, locations. How early can you leave? Where will you go?”

“Rabble-rouser,” mutters Mrs. McGinn.

“We're not evacuating,” declares the zookeeper. He stands up, turns around to speak directly to his neighbors. “What would you do with the animals? We've got a responsibility to them. We made a promise. We've got to stay put until the water recedes in the zoo.”

“Don't be so daft,” says the weatherman with a short laugh. “You mean those tigers you've got displayed in the windows? The penguins in the diner? That certainly can't be a reason to stay. It was a stupid idea to begin with, and it's a stupid idea now.”

“Adam,” says Mrs. McGinn's daughter, tugging at his sleeve. “Please sit down.”

“Angela Rose!” exclaims Mrs. McGinn. “You can't honestly be siding with this man.”

“You know,” says Mauro, “where I come from there is a whole town that is living on the water, with bridges and boats and the people there are not so worried as all of you. The people there are not always talking about staying or going. They are just staying. They are enjoying riding on the ferry. People are coming from all over the world to ride on their ferry!”

“Mauro, we don't have a ferry,” someone snaps.

“That's no problem!” exclaims Mauro. “We build one!”

There is a sudden roar of indignation, and the weatherman spends several minutes trying to restore order by pounding his hammer on a crate and grimacing at his audience. “Settle down!” he shouts. “Settle down!”

But they will not settle down, and the sound of his voice in their fray only incenses them further. What does he know of their town, he who only arrived with the rain? He can have no idea of what it was like before, when blue skies slid between the mountains and the trees bloomed silky and full. He has not fallen asleep on the warm and grassy banks of the river, as they have; he has not stayed until the golden light of dusk to see the sun topple over the far side of the western hills. This was once a beautiful place. Wildflowers sprouted between cracks in the sidewalk and people grew tomatoes and basil in their gardens. They raised their children here; they buried their dead. How can he expect them to turn their backs on all that, to give up on this town the way the rest of the world has given up on them?

“Listen!” bellows Noah, taking advantage of a sudden lull. His neighbors turn to stare. He clears his throat and rises slowly to his feet while his wife looks up in astonishment. “There comes a time in all of our lives when we must be
tested
,” the minister declares. He strides out into the aisle and paces up and down the rows of chairs, warming now to his speech, seeming to enjoy the fact of so many pairs of eyes upon him. It has been a long time. “A time when we are forced to ask ourselves whether the beliefs we have always cherished are true, in fact, or false; when for no apparent reason, through no fault of our own, we realize that suddenly we stand to lose everything that we once held so dear.

“The question, my friends, at a crossroad like this one, is the following: are we to cling to the lives we have always known,
fighting to regain the ground we have lost? Or do we leave those former lives behind, abandon the selves and the world we once knew, and start all over again?” He pauses, his jaw hanging slack, his expression suddenly blank. “We keep moving on, hoping that there is something better out there in the next town, or tomorrow. But maybe there isn't. What if the next town is just as gray, in its own way?”

There is a brief silence after he has finished speaking, when he stops pacing and freezes in place. Once again, the townspeople erupt.

“Are you
kidding
?” several voices demand at once. “What does that even
mean
?”

“Pretty words,” grunts Mrs. McGinn's husband. “How the hell does that help us?”

The librarian scoffs and points. “How are we supposed to take this man seriously when he's got dirt on his face and twigs in his beard?”

The weatherman looks at the minister more closely. Indeed—what she says about him is true. Noah's cheeks turn crimson and he quickly combs at the sticks and the leaves in his hair, but it is too late. The rest of his neighbors are rising now, and he ducks into a different aisle. The weatherman looks at Noah's wife, who has been sitting throughout this scene with her gray gaze fixed upon her husband. When he disappears behind the canned goods, a peculiar expression flits across her face—there and gone before the weatherman has a chance to decipher it.

Mrs. McGinn stands. “The rain is lightening,” she declares. “The weather is already better than it was.”

“Is that right?” retorts the weatherman, gearing up for his final grenade. “I don't think so. Your zoo is already underwater. The river is rising. The puddles are growing wider and deeper. The trees are losing their leaves, and the plants that were alive two weeks ago are dead.”

“That's not true,” mutter the townspeople. “You're making it sound worse than it is.”

“It
is
true!” he exclaims. “And I've got the evidence to prove it.” He throws out an extravagant arm to turn their attention to Noah's wife, the evidence packed into a handbag at her feet. He will show them how, in the lower parts of town and the areas that have already been abandoned, the pools in front yards have begun creeping up mossy porches. He took pictures of the water coursing through gutters, of the buckets set out to collect leaks in shops and storefronts. He will show them the places where the telephone wires are leaning dangerously close to houses, where the force of the wind and the rain has broken windows, tossed mailboxes to the ground. She should have his print of the town cemetery, the headstones crooked and loose as if the water table has risen so high that it is beginning to push them up and out of the ground. The images will frighten them, and they
should
be frightened. By forcing them to face the reality of their situation, the weatherman will ensure that they are gone by tomorrow morning.

He waits for Noah's wife to reach into the bag, to pull out the
prints and pass them through the crowd; but she only sits more tensely with her hands pressed together in her lap and her face angled toward her knees.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she murmurs.

The color drains from the weatherman's face. “What did you say?” he mutters.

She raises her chin and looks him in the eye. Her jaw is square, her gaze like granite. “There isn't anything in this town that the people here can't handle.”

Mrs. McGinn emits an audible, delighted gasp. The weatherman stares at her while the voices of her neighbors explode once more. For the next several minutes, they argue among themselves: some have been swayed by the weatherman's warnings and the fear of the rising river, while others insist that the worst of the rain has come and gone and that the river has never flooded before. Already it is clear that they are becoming irrevocably divided: those who will stay and those who will go. They turn in their seats to quarrel with the people sitting next to them and behind them, proclaiming the point one way or the other.

Meanwhile the weatherman buttons up his slicker, steps off his stool, and storms over to the minister's wife. “What the hell was that?” he demands, leaning ominously over her chair. “Some misplaced attempt at solidarity?”

She looks up at him, her eyes like mirrors. “Noah was called here,” she says. “He was called to rebuild the congregation and to save this town. We can't leave until he's done it.”

“Save the town?” repeats the weatherman with a quick,
sardonic smile. “I'm sorry. My mistake. I thought that's what
I
was trying to do here.”

“No,” she says, suddenly as stubborn as the rest of them. “You're just out to save your own skin, not theirs. That's why you want them to give up.”

He glares at her. He had expected the rest of this town to be foolish, but he had not expected it of her. Indeed, from the look of her—that delicate face, that colorless expression—and from the way she so passively accepted the favor that he asked of her, he was under the impression that she was the sort of woman who always did as she was told.

He soars toward the exit, his raincoat flapping in his wake. After the door slams shut behind him he pauses for a moment in the middle of the street, staring at the road that brought him into this silent, murky town—the same road that will take him out again this afternoon, as soon as he has packed up his car. The rain thuds against his shoulders and a mountain goat wanders past him, braying.

He is finished with this place. He is done with these strange people, and their strange little faith that all will be well if only they believe in it, if only they turn their backs on the facts. The world can only be the way that it is, the weatherman knows. It is rarely the way that one wants it to be.

S
tan is afraid to go out beyond the breakwater.

“Look at those waves!” he says to Nancy. He stands with his feet spread wide on the rickety pier beside their boat, clutching his orange life preserver in two fleshy hands. His eyelids twitch, as they always do in direct sunlight. “Just look at them! I don't think we'd survive out there, I really don't—not for five minutes, even.”

Nancy looks. The sea is full of soft white peaks that arc against an indigo sky. The wind is high and she can see sailboats leaning to one side, all bowed in the same direction. The sun is pink and growing pinker, dropping like a stone toward the surface of the water.

“We don't have much time, Stan!” she says. “Didn't you say you'd go with me for a sunset cruise? The sun is almost setting! Now, come on—we have cocktails on the boat. A stiff drink is
all you need. When we go on our trip we're going to have to keep you drunk, that's all.”

She laughs. Stan laughs, too, but less convincingly. This was not his idea.

In the beginning, when he was nervous about setting foot on the pier (as if those boards could hold a person's weight above the water! he said to himself), it was Nancy who coaxed him out, day by day and inch by inch, until they were finally able to sit on the end of it—their toes dipping into the water, tempting the fish—and have a picnic. Nancy made cream cheese and tomato sandwiches (Stan's favorite) for the occasion.

“Hurray!” she said to him, with a loud kiss on the lips. “We made it!”

It was kind of her, Stan thought at the time, to say “we” instead of “you.” It was kind of her to pretend that this was
their
obstacle, and not
his
obstacle alone. He is her husband, after all; he wants to be her protector and her provider (though he knows full well that Nancy would say she can both provide for and protect herself, thank you very much), but how is he supposed to do either of those things, how is he supposed to fulfill any of his roles if he continues to let his fear dominate him in this vexing manner? He can't help it. He is an anxious man.

But Nancy loves him anyway.

After they made it to the end of the dock, the next step was to set foot on the boat. This took him several days—several days of pacing nervously on the dock just beyond the ladder to the boat while Nancy climbed aboard and worked at cleaning
and sprucing, as she called it. From time to time she hailed him from the boat as she washed the portholes with warm soapy water or as she sat on the wooden benches near the helm, soaking up the sun and sewing white eyelet curtains for the cabin.

“How are you doing, my dear?” she would say, casting a loving look in his direction.

“Oh I'm just fine, Nancy, I'm fine!” he would say. He would continue to pace. “Any day now I'll be right up there with you, I promise. I'll help with the cleaning and everything.”

“There's no rush, Stan,” she would respond. “We've got all the time in the world.”

Sometimes it seemed to them that their days were as long and empty as the ocean. Stan's great-aunt had recently passed away and left them several very full bank accounts to be spent however they pleased. The day they heard the news, they quit their jobs and sat down together at the kitchen table to decide how best to use the money.

“Is there anything you've always wanted to do, Stan?” asked Nancy. She poured lemonade into a tumbler and reached for a wafer cookie.

Stan was surprised by the question. “No,” he said finally. “I can't think of anything. I have everything I need right here.”

He patted her hand thoughtfully and then said, in a rather absentminded way, “What about you? Is there anything you've always wanted to do, Nancy?”

“Well—” she said. She pursed her lips and hesitated. Her tone was at once hopeful and concerned. “Well—this may
sound crazy, Stan. And I know that you're not a big fan of boats and so I suppose it could be a little bit of a problem—but to be perfectly honest with you, what I've always wanted to do is sail around the world.”

“Sail around the world?” repeated Stan, stunned. “You never told me that.”

“Well, we could never do it before!” she said. “But that's what I'm saying—now we could! Think about it . . . the open seas, the wind at our backs, only you and me in the middle of the ocean, miles away from everything, stopping at exotic ports whenever we felt like it . . . wouldn't that be
amazing
?”

“Amazing” would not be the word Stan ever would have chosen to describe such a venture. He finds the whole notion completely terrifying. He doesn't like the water but he does love Nancy, and so after a few minutes of thinking about it silently (Nancy ate another wafer and considerately looked away while she waited for him to reach his conclusion), he heard a voice—that sounded suspiciously like his own—agreeing.

In the end, he was glad he did. He had not seen Nancy so delighted in years. She clapped her hands, childlike, and parted her lips in a girlish grin. Her teeth were even and gleaming.

And so this is what they have been doing, every day for the past two months. Taking small steps—
very
small steps—from the shore to the sea. Once Stan made it onto the boat, Nancy persuaded him to allow her to lift the anchor and drift for a few minutes unmoored beside their pier. After this they began to take short cruises in the harbor, during which Nancy practiced
zigzagging around other boats as if they were orange cones on an obstacle course, while Stan gripped the railing with aching fists and stared intently at the muddy green water, trying to calculate precisely how many feet he would have to fall before he hit bottom.

“Five feet,” he muttered to himself, glancing at the depth meter. “No, six. Seven. Six.”

The numbers fluctuated with the waves.

The other sailors in the harbor cast uncertain glances in their direction. In the beginning Stan found this embarrassing, but Nancy has done her best to reassure him.

“They're not
judging
us, Stan,” she says. “They've all got their own problems to work through.”

She ties a violet cardigan across her shoulders and then lifts her arm to wave to the harbor magician, as she so often likes to do. She has a ring on every finger and her whole hand glitters in the sun.

“Hellloooo!” she calls. “Hellllooo there!”

Ever since meeting the unusual magician, Nancy has made it a point to invite the man in for dinner every few days. She will watch for the breaks in the afternoon when he finds himself without an audience, and then she will climb down from the boat with a swish of her white silk skirt and march over to speak with him. In general she tends to worry about people who stand alone for too long. Everyone needs a little company.

“Now, what do you think about tonight?” she will ask him. “Would you prefer the moussaka or the roast lamb?”

Nancy is a gracious hostess, as she loves having company, and she is conscious that she must get her fill now before taking off for the empty ocean. She has begun to serve all of their meals on the boat, and while the plastic folding table can be somewhat of a problem when it buckles or leans, she says that it is worth the trouble to be able to eat in the open air. The three of them shuffle feta and olives onto their forks as they watch thin white clouds waltz through blue skies. Seagulls cry, looping in great pinwheels above their heads.

The magician remarks on the beauty of the ocean and politely inquires how much time the two of them spend on the water. His uncovered forehead is growing pink in the sun.

“Well,” says Nancy, reaching back to adjust the tortoiseshell clip in frizzy hair that—despite her best efforts—has blown wild again in the wind. “We're taking small steps from shore to sea. In a few months we're leaving to sail around the world.”

“Really?” says the magician. “That's unbelievable!”

“Yes,” says Stan with a profound sigh, his eyelids twitching again. “It is, isn't it?”

Nancy shoots him a look. “We were fortunate enough to come into a little money,” she explains. “And then we thought—why not! Life is short! You never know what might happen to you tomorrow—so you've got to do everything now. Live to the fullest!”

Nancy's cheeks are flushed with excitement. The magician glances toward Stan, but Stan is staring at Nancy, seemingly transfixed. His gaze is always steady when he looks at her.

“So far,” continues Nancy. “So far we've been scuba diving, we've gone swimming with sharks, we tried hang gliding, we jumped from a plane—”

“Your hands cuffed or no?” the magician wants to know.

“Our hands weren't cuffed,” Stan assures him.

“And you've done all of this recently?”

“All of this in the past four and a half years,” says Stan.

Nancy nods. “Four and a half years,” she repeats. She stands abruptly and picks up the plates, carries them from the deck to the galley. Stan and their guest rise and begin to help her—collecting the silverware, the cloth napkins, the serving dishes—and once everything is cleared the magician thanks them and excuses himself so that he can practice some of his newer tricks of light and fire at the other end of the pier before the night grows too cold.

Nancy waves at his diminishing back until the magician has disappeared from sight, and then she turns to the sink. As she reaches for a sponge she bumps a ceramic vase on the ledge and it plummets to the floor, cracking in half and spilling a spray of lilies. Stan bends and reaches for them, a dish towel slung over his shoulder, and when he rises again he finds that Nancy is watching him with damp eyes.

“Everything breaks,” she says, suddenly seeming very, very small.

“Nancy,” says Stan. “You know that if you want to, I'll sail around the whole world. And I'll jump out of whatever you want to and scuba dive on down as far as you want to because
I love you. We can keep on running and diving and hang gliding, but when it's all over we'll always end up right back here, right where we are now, and you know as well as I do that the weeks and weeks of sailing won't have changed a thing.”

Yes—Nancy knows. She moves toward Stan and before he is prepared for it she has tumbled against him, her hair crumpled against his chest, her body heaving with her grief, her soapy fists pounding weakly on his shoulders. Stan wraps his arms around her while she cries.