Noah's Wife (20 page)

T
he basements fill first.

The water flows over concrete floors, slowly rising toward the stairs. Outside, the rain rushes down roofs, cascading through gutters and dripping through windows. The cattle stand stock-still with their heads bent in the downpour, unable to free their hoofs from the mud that rises to their knees. When the animals indoors sense the water rising beneath them, they panic. The birds fly against the windowpanes, the monkey screams for hours without ceasing, the penguins refuse to eat. Leesl's cats throw their weight against the door, over and over again, trying to escape, rubbing at their bruised faces with tufted paws.

Mauro cannot find his peacocks. They were in his bedroom when he fell asleep last night, he knows it; he remembers that they were there with him while he suffered through a nightmare
of the creditors who drove him out of his hometown. In his dreams the men had crooked fangs and hungry eyes. They howled in pursuit of him and Mauro trembled in his sleep, reached out for the birds. When his hands brushed feathers he settled down again and reverted to his more habitual dreams of angels.

And yet when the first few beams of weak gray light come washing through his window blinds, the peacocks are gone. Mauro swings his feet to the floor, so worried over the birds that he does not notice the fact that when his toes touch the floorboards at the bottom of the stairwell they are instantly cold and wet.
“Pavoni!”
he calls, splashing toward the front door and wrenching it open. “Where are you? Where would you be going?”

He barrels in his striped pajamas out beneath the awning that extends along his stretch of sidewalk. While the water soaks into the cuffs, slowly seeping up toward his knees, he stands frozen in place, his unshaven jaw hanging low, staring at the commotion in the streets. His peacocks are not out there—he can see that at once—but all the rest of the townspeople are rushing out of their shops and their houses, bearing armloads of their belongings. If Mauro were in a better mood, he would be curious to see which objects his neighbors have chosen as the most important. The photo albums? The wedding china? The baby clothes? At the moment, however, everything is a soft, damp blur of colors and sounds: the colored raincoats, the cardboard boxes, the suitcases, the umbrellas. Cars are idling in the streets
while their owners load up the trunks, and on any other day Mauro might have panicked at the sight of them, might have understood by his neighbors' frantic movements and their hysterical voices that they intended to leave this town, and leave Mauro behind with it—but all he can think about now are his peacocks. He does not reflect upon the water rushing through the streets, the puddles leaking through the cracks in doors and windows. He does not see anything but the absence of the two shimmering beings he has come to love so dearly.

He pulls his keys off the hook where they hang just inside the door to the general store and, yanking it shut behind him, he strides toward his truck. His pajamas are sopping by the time he climbs into the driver's seat, but he doesn't care.

“Mauro!” yells one of his neighbors, startling him by banging on his windshield. “My car has stalled! Are you leaving? Take me with you!”

Mauro whips his gray head from side to side, rolls down the window so that the man can hear him. “I am not leaving!” he yells. “I am looking for my peacocks!”

The man—an insurance salesman, remembers Mauro now—stares at him in disbelief. “What do you mean, you're not leaving? You've got to leave. The whole place is going under! Some of the sandbags have fallen in already, and the wall won't last much longer. What do you think we're all doing out here?” He steps back, a little unsteadily, and Mauro takes advantage of the moment to slam his bare foot on the gas and peel forward. Water sprays up from beneath the tires, flying through the open
window before Mauro has a chance to close it. He purses his lips, swears a little, and careens around the corner.

On the next street over, the situation is much the same. The cars' engines are purring while the townspeople rush up and down their sidewalks and driveways, preparing for departure. The rain slams onto the hood of Mauro's car with more force than he has ever seen from it—excepting, perhaps, for the night when the zoo flooded. He remembers lugging tanks of reptiles through the mud, packing penguins into the cars. The animals had been fortunate, he reflects, to have had people willing to carry them out and settle them on safer ground. The townspeople are now the ones in trouble, but there is no one left to deliver them.

The wind is pulling at his car and he tries to return his attention to the road, guiding the sputtering vehicle up one street and down another, flicking his gaze out the window every few feet in the hope of finding his peacocks strutting through the streets. The penguins are out on the side porch of the bakery, waddling between the railings and squawking to one another in shrill tones. The toucans, accustomed to roosting in the trees, are shivering and cowering in bushes. Glancing up, Mauro sees why: the wind is too strong. Branches are cracking and falling, tumbling down onto telephone wires. As he drives, he must avoid debris in the streets—lost pieces of luggage, floating slickers. He startles at the sight of a large cat in the road, only to realize after he passes that it is already dead, its body limp, its fur matted with mud. At once Mauro feels both stricken and
relieved: appalled, of course, that an animal has died, but glad at least that it is not one of his birds. His turkeys are still alive, he realizes, when he sees them scavenging through overturned trash cans with the red fox and the badger hovering behind them. And the ostrich—she is a survivor. It is only the peacocks he is worried about, delicate and otherworldly as they are.

Running on adrenaline, he weaves through the streets for an hour at least. He is so distracted that he does not even notice how far he has gone, does not see that he is on the highway that runs through hills out of town until he is already several miles down. The peacocks cannot be here, he says to himself, preparing to twist the wheel and swing his car back around. How would they have been able to walk so far on their own?

He tells himself that it is impossible, and yet he stops in his tracks, the car shuddering to a halt, when he sees a glimmer of turquoise a little ways up the road. He waits for a moment in his car, his pulse racing with the anticipation of reunion and success, watching the spot of color move toward him. The figure moves like a bird—awkwardly, abruptly, as if made for flight and unhappy to be earthbound—but when it draws closer the realization begins to dawn on Mauro that those are not wings, but jutting elbows and knees; not feathers, but an emerald-green umbrella and a shimmering blue raincoat. He does not want to admit it to himself, but he has no choice. That is not one of his birds. He opens the door to his car and steps out.

“Angela Rose?” he calls. “That is who?”

In the car on the way back to town, Mrs. McGinn's daughter lets her head fall back against the headrest and tells him the story of her intended departure. Her face is wan, with half-moon shadows pressed below her eyes. Even wrapped in the additional layer of Mauro's coat, her shoulders are shaking and her teeth are clattering together.

“You should not be walking so far in the rain,” he says sternly. “Why are you not thinking more of the baby?”

Her expression grows even more haggard. “I
was
thinking of the baby, Mauro,” she replies. “Why else do you think I was trying to leave?”

To Mauro, this does not make sense. The girl's family is here. The father is here. Why should the baby not be here with them?

“I would have made it, too,” she says. “If the road hadn't been flooded. I waited for a while, but it was so cold. I figured I might as well begin to walk back. Better than freezing to death out there.”

Ah yes, says Mauro to himself. The road. He is not looking forward to relaying the news to the townspeople. He would rather not be the one to tell them that no matter how tightly they have packed their lives into their cars, they are not going anywhere. With the road submerged, no one will be getting in or out. He thinks about his general store, tries to calculate the amount of canned goods he has left on his shelves. How many days will that buy him?

“We'll call for help when we get back,” says Mrs. McGinn's
daughter, as if reading his mind. “Maybe someone can send a helicopter, or a few planes. There aren't all that many of us.”

Mauro admires her practicality, her calmness, in the face of so much chaos. He would like to ask her what the zookeeper will say about this, but he decides against bringing it up.

“Mauro,” Mrs. McGinn's daughter says to him, her gaze level and cold. “I don't intend to die here.”

Neither does he! Mauro wants to retort. He would have said as much if they had not rounded the curb into downtown right at that moment, if they had not seen the telephone lines fallen with their wires tangled in what is left of the trees. The townspeople are screaming to one another over the sound of the rain, shielding their eyes from the water and heaving the last few loads into the trunks of their cars. Many of them have left their front doors open in their haste, and the animals are bounding down the driveways, paddling through the drowned lawns. Mauro hits the brakes just in time to avoid a kangaroo that is leaping past his front bumper and then yanks the wheel to the left when he sees one of the gray wolves paddling in his direction, aiming for a possum that is hanging from underneath a mailbox. The zookeeper sprints across the sidewalk in pursuit of an otter, and when Mrs. McGinn's daughter sees him she tenses and grips the door handle. Mauro pulls to the curb and the zookeeper catches sight of her through the window. He stops short and stares at her while she gazes mutely back, her eyes wide with an emotion Mauro cannot read.

Mauro pushes open the driver's-side door and leaps from his
seat. As much as he would like to witness it, this is no time for a passionate reunion.

“Adam!” he shouts, breathless. “The highway—it is underwater. If people are going that way, they will not be getting out!”

“What did you say?” demands the zookeeper in disbelief. Several of the townspeople pause with their car keys in hand, having caught snatches of Mauro's warnings even through the pounding rain. Those who are farther down ask their neighbors to repeat what they heard, and the news goes soaring down the street with the speed of the African swallow. For half a moment, they stop their running and their yelling and they wait, their skin clammy, their feet soaked and cold.

“I am saying, do not try to drive out,” repeats Mauro. “There is no point. You will not be getting anywhere at all.”

There is a quick murmuring as his words are passed once more from one end of the road to the other. In the distance they can hear another telephone line topple with a crash.

“But we can't stay here!” someone calls from across the road. “The sandbag wall is crumbling! Our houses are flooding! Where do we go?”

Another tree branch cracks above him and Mauro looks up. In the distance, serene against the roiling sky, is the church. Gold light flares from its windows and Mauro squints, wonders who could be up there lighting lamps and candles now that the minister and his wife are long gone. In the sudden stillness that has followed his neighbor's question he notices that the animals who have fled their houses are all moving, uniformly, in that
direction; and although it takes him a moment to put two and two together, suddenly Mauro knows exactly where his peacocks are.

“We go,” he says slowly, “to the high ground. Where else than that?”

His neighbors turn toward the hill to see what he sees: the steady parade of fur and scales, talons and claws, feathers and tails. There are the mountain goats, scaling rocks with ease, and the bats winging sleepily from tree to tree. There is the zebra, hurrying ahead of the coyote, and the penguins marching single file. There are the elk, the reindeer, the turkeys, the geese. There go the beasts that they have housed in their gardens and homes for all those long, gray, endless hours, ascending as if being pulled by something townspeople cannot hear—the call, perhaps, of something primitive and wild.

T
oday one of Dr. Yu's patients died on her operating table.

She should be there right now, filling out paperwork in her office or talking to his family members or doing
something
, at least, something other than sitting in her car like one of the living dead herself, her face drained of color and her fingers numb around the wheel while streetlights stream past her and voices murmur softly from the radio. It was her supervisors who sent her home. They told her how exhausted she looked, insisting that she get some rest.

“April,” they said. “You know that it wasn't your fault.”

Yes, she knew that it wasn't her fault, but the thought of it consumes her. She can't stop the burden from weighing down her steps or keep the memory from preying on her mind.

When she walks into the house, coming off twenty of the hardest hours she has ever spent at the hospital, she finds her
father on the couch, his wrists clasped into a new pair of handcuffs. Noah is chasing down one of the magician's white mice in the kitchen, a mason jar in one hand and a flattened newspaper in the other. Dr. Yu has never seen him so harried, never seen him looking so unkempt as he does these days with his long hair flying and his rumpled clothing often damp with sweat. Before, he had made it a point to be always presentable, eternally composed.

Dr. Yu's best friend is home, too, watching the spectacle in the living room with visible distress. She corners Dr. Yu in the kitchen. “Do you see him out there?” she says in a whisper, yanking the door shut behind them. “He's been running after mice all day. Can't you try to do something for him? Give him something?”

Dr. Yu considers this, takes a bite of the pear that she had been about to slice up. She feels resentful, vexed. What does her best friend expect her to do?

“I like him better this way,” Dr. Yu says belligerently, and she means it. With his beard ungroomed and his hair graying, with his shifting gaze and his sorrowful tone—Noah seems more human than she has ever seen him. “Before,” she adds, “he was unreal. And anyway, he likes the magic. My father says he isn't bad at it. If this is what he needs to do in order to work out whatever he's working out, then I'd recommend you simply let him be, and let him have it.”

Easier said than done, as Dr. Yu knows from experience. The truth is that she has no idea whether or not the magic is what
Noah needs. But she knows that what her father needs is a companion, someone to watch over him, to keep him out of jail and out of the salty harbor. Dr. Yu cannot always be there for him, and if the presence of the minister helps her father keep his feet on solid ground, then so much the better. Let Noah help him.

“Unreal?” repeats her best friend, bristling.

“You know what I mean,” says Dr. Yu curtly. “Too righteous. Too perfect. No one is that way. Sometimes it seemed like it was all an act. If now he's a little bit damaged, that only means that he's just like everyone else.”

So Noah is not the man he was, Dr. Yu thinks to herself. Neither is her father. In an unexpected flare of nostalgia, she remembers her father's penchant for nature walks during her elementary and middle school years. He used to pick her up after school and take her through the parks around their house. He carried a leather knapsack with sketch pads and bottles of water, and from time to time they would settle themselves down in the shade to share their trail mix and record their observations. She would trace tree leaves and flower petals while he hurled peanuts at the squirrels and explained where the butterflies flew when they migrated north for the summer. She wanted to learn to be exactly like him: curious, precise. He showed her the splendor of science, instructed her in the twin arts of observation and analysis. He was the one, in fact, who encouraged her to pursue medicine in the first place. Who would ever have expected him to trade his field guides for his magic books, his beetle collection for his skeleton keys?

“Noah has never been just like everyone else,” replies her best friend stubbornly. “He believes in more, and hopes for more. That's why people follow him: his life is so much larger.”

The kitchen is nearly dark, the only light flickering over the stove. Her best friend leans back against the sink, while Dr. Yu, completely fatigued, drops down onto a low stool beside the counter. From there, she regards her best friend with a mixture of pity and impatience. What makes Noah so different from the rest of them? she wants to know. What sets him apart from the millions of other people who live off groundless hope and grand ideals? The only difference is that when Noah's plans for that little town failed, he fell apart. Meanwhile the rest of the world must keep on spinning.

Dr. Yu narrows her eyes. “You're allowed to criticize him sometimes. You're allowed to say that he is making you unhappy.”

“He's not,” insists her best friend immediately.

Dr. Yu doesn't believe her—in truth, she doubts that her best friend believes herself—but she can understand the knee-jerk reaction. It is difficult for anyone to admit that something that should be making her happy isn't; that the life she waited so long for or worked so hard to achieve has not, in fact, turned out the way that it was supposed to. How does one reconcile the dream of how she imagined things would be with the reality of things as they are?

It is not her fault that her patient is dead. She knows this; her
supervisors know this. She had done everything right. The man had survived the surgery, his chest had been closed back up and he had been sleeping soundly on the table when his heart simply stopped. There was no reason for it, no explanation. He was there and then he was gone.

“If we're not going back to that town,” her best friend is saying, “then we should at least be moving forward.” She squares her shoulders. “I know that your father is having a difficult time, and I'm very sorry for him, but I'm also worried—” She stumbles in her speech, takes a deep breath, and then barrels forward. “I'm worried that he'll only end up dragging my husband down, too.”

Dr. Yu stares at her. Her best friend has never contradicted her so forcefully; she has only ever been supportive. She understands that her best friend's loyalty is to her husband, but to place Noah above Dr. Yu's father, to insist on her husband's well-being over everything else—Noah's wife has gone too far. What has Noah lost besides a congregation? What does he need consolation for? It is Dr. Yu's father who has a real foundation for his grief.

“My father isn't forcing Noah to do anything he doesn't want to do,” Dr. Yu snaps back. Her nerves are frayed; her patience is running perilously low. It has been ten days now that her best friend and her husband have been guests in her house, and not once has Dr. Yu spoken her mind, not once has she said anything unkind about their prolonged stay, their moody indecision, their seeming inability to pull themselves together. “Am I
glad that Papa has the help? Of course I am. Is it my responsibility to pull your husband away so he can go back to being a minister? Of course not! And it isn't yours, either.” She stands, reaches past Noah's wife to the door, and wrenches it open. “Better a magician than a minister, if you ask me. At least
one
of them has the guts to acknowledge that the job is nothing but a lot of smoke and mirrors.”

Her best friend pales at this, but Dr. Yu ignores her. “The world is a whole lot bigger than you and Noah,” she flings over her shoulder as she strides into the hallway. “It's about time you figured that out.”

As she enters the living room her legs are trembling and her heart is beating hard. She feels shaken, close to tears. Her father peers at her as she crosses the carpet to join him and slumps down on the sofa at his side. With his keen eye he can see that something is wrong, and when Dr. Yu's best friend goes hurrying through the hallway with her head down, refusing to make eye contact with either of them, he sighs and shakes his head.

“April,” he says, “you're my only daughter and I love you. But God knows, if you insist on trying to fix everyone and everything all the time, you'll only wind up frustrated.”

“I'm not trying to fix everyone, Papa,” groans Dr. Yu, sliding down on her cushion.

“If you just made an effort to listen to people, to give them some space,” he insists in his earnest way, “I think you'd be surprised to find that these sorts of things will usually heal themselves.”

“What sorts of things?” she asks, leaning her head back, too tired to explain herself to him.

“Melancholy,” says her father. “Grief. The stuff of broken hearts.”

He draws close to her and with a quick, unexpected motion, he reaches behind her ear. When he pulls his hand back, he opens his fist to reveal a pair of glittering jewels—her mother's favorite earrings. Dr. Yu startles at the sight of them. The earrings are made of paste, but they shine. She had assumed that the set had been buried along with her mother.

“Where did you find these?”

Her father takes her hand, gently pries open her fingers, and drops the earrings into her palm. “It would be a sad world indeed, my dear,” he says in the philosophical, mystical tone that he has taken up recently along with his magic books, “if the only things that existed in it were what we could see, and touch, and cut open. Come now, sweetheart. I hope you've got a little more faith in the human heart than all that.”