Noah's Wife (22 page)

W
hen Dr. Yu's father attempts to pull a handkerchief from a candlestick, the whole thing goes up in flames.

Noah's wife had been half expecting it to happen. She is sitting stiffly, perched on one of the battered lawn chairs he and Noah have arranged for spectators on one side of the gazebo, holding her breath as he shouts his abracadabra. The audience gasps at the sight of the fire and she gasps with them, but unlike the people who clap and cheer as he leaps to put it out, she is certain that this effect was not intended. From her position near the aisle she can see Noah standing off to one side with a look of dismay. By the time he makes up his mind to take a few steps forward onto the makeshift stage, Dr. Yu's father has already doused the flaming handkerchief in a bucket of water that was meant to be turned into wine.

The show has been disastrous so far, and they are only thirty
minutes in. During the first demonstration with the hat, Noah dropped one of the eggs that he palmed. Meanwhile the flowers that were made to disappear did not reappear when they should have, and when Dr. Yu's father attempted to show the audience that the rope they had seen him cut was still in one piece, the two ends fell apart in his hands. Even his quick-change went awry. He stepped into the cabinet in his tuxedo and should have emerged in his wizard's gear within seconds—but instead it took him six or seven minutes and when he finally stumbled out he was red-faced and panting and only partly successful. His hat and his shoes were in place but his bow tie and coattails poked out from underneath a skewed cape.

Fortunately, the audience members do not seem to mind. The children gape at the colors and the lights while their parents slap their knees and laugh at what is quickly devolving into a comedy routine. While a few of the spectators grow bored and wander away to other parts of the pier, new people amble in every few minutes.

Noah's wife is here because Noah asked her to come and because it did not occur to her to refuse. How familiar it is, she realizes with a deep ache in her chest, to sit within a rapt crowd and gaze up at her husband. She misses the old Noah: his charisma, his drive, his extraordinary certainty that his path had been chosen for him and that as long as he followed it, all would be well. This man whom she sees standing now on that makeshift stage, this man who looks and sounds like her husband but lacks all of his grace and power—he is a lesser version of
himself. As she watches the colored scarves flying, she finds herself resenting her husband for being up on that platform, standing behind the curtain that he rigged up with a system of pulleys and ropes. What is she supposed to do when he has made himself a stranger to her? And if he is no longer the Noah that he was, what does that mean for her, his wife, whose sole purpose for so long has been him?

She wishes that she had been able to express something like this to Dr. Yu, something of this profound sense of loss, rather than saying what she did about Dr. Yu's father. She glances across the aisle, sees the rigid figure of her best friend seated three rows in front of her. The two of them have not exchanged a word since their heated encounter last night. After leaving the kitchen, Noah's wife retreated to the guest room and lay down on the bed, dizzy and short of breath, the loneliest she has been since her mother died.

They make an odd pair, the minister and the magician. Noah towers over Dr. Yu's father, his dark beard thick and untrimmed, an old charcoal-gray blazer hanging loosely over his gaunt frame. The floodlights Dr. Yu's father attached to the gazebo cast stark and angled shadows across his features. Visibly embarrassed by his own show thus far and determined to succeed at something marvelous before the intermission, Dr. Yu's father instructs Noah to retrieve the aluminum pan from their trunk of props. Noah's wife watches the magician flash the pan at the audience to prove to them that it is solid; she watches him pour a small amount of kerosene into it, senses the people around her
instinctively draw back when he drops a match into the oil to ignite it. He claps the lid over the sudden flame and for a long moment he pauses, holds it there, gazing out over the dusky harbor with an expression of triumph. When he flings the lid from the pan, the fire is gone but a bird has appeared—a slender white dove that goes winging over the heads of the spectators, soaring three or four times around the gazebo before darting toward a patch of trees and vanishing from sight. The audience cheers while Dr. Yu's father takes a quick bow and signals for the curtain to fall.

During intermission, Noah's wife leaves her seat, walks to the back of the gazebo, and climbs up behind the curtain. She finds Dr. Yu's father pacing back and forth across the platform while Noah stands to one side, leaning against a post with a deeply furrowed brow.

“Is everything all right?” she asks. “Your last trick was beautiful.”

“That dove was a rental,” snaps Dr. Yu's father over one shoulder. “I was supposed to return her first thing in the morning.”

“We'll get her back,” says Noah, lacking conviction.

“How?” demands Dr. Yu's father, halting in his tracks and throwing his hands in the air. “You saw her—right into the sky. She could be miles from here by now!”

Noah's wife sees the long shadow of Dr. Yu rounding the gazebo and crossing the grass to meet them. “I'll go look for the bird,” she volunteers, hurrying to descend the platform in order
to avoid an encounter with her best friend. “Perhaps she hasn't gone far.”

Leaving them to their second act, Noah's wife steps off the back of the platform and into the grass. The night air is brisk, the breeze prickly with salt, and she shivers. She is wearing one of Dr. Yu's dresses, layered beneath one of Dr. Yu's coats. For the first time in her life she feels uncomfortable in her best friend's clothing and wishes she had brought more belongings of her own. Turning away from the gazebo, she begins walking along the harbor in the direction of another park several blocks down. As she goes she tilts her head back and looks up into the branches of the small trees that have been planted at intervals along the sidewalk. A few times she thinks she sees the flutter of wings among the leaves—but first it is only a scrap of paper, and then a torn plastic bag.

Three blocks down, her gaze still raised to the sky, she runs into a man who is taking long, blind steps in the opposite direction with his shoulders hunched and his own eyes on the ground. The collision is hard enough that they both take two or three steps back.

“I'm so sorry,” she says with a sharp intake of breath. “Are you all right?”

“Watch where you're going,” the man snarls. “I'm fine.”

She looks at him more closely, hearing something familiar in his voice. “The weatherman?” she asks, dazed. And then, correcting herself: “Jonas?”

This does not look like the person she saw only last week.
The man has none of his cocky swagger; there is no insolent light glinting from that pair of pale eyes. His coat is damp and his shoulders are hunched, and when he speaks to her his tone is dull.

“Oh,” he says. “It's you.”

She laughs a little at the absurdity of seeing him here—her first laugh, she realizes, in weeks. There is a rustling in the branches above him and she glances swiftly up, wonders if it might be the missing dove.

Jonas scowls. “I'm glad you're so amused,” he says. “That makes one of us.”

There is something arresting in his tone—some sense of foreboding that she doesn't understand. She drops her gaze from the trees and looks him in the eye.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“I was fine until I ran into you and your husband,” he spits back. “Then he got under my skin, with all his talk of failure. So I decided to give it one more try.”

He glares at her, his eyes glittering, the lines in his face taut with exhaustion. There is a strange energy crackling between them; she feels a rosy heat rise to her face and course swiftly through her limbs.

“You went back,” she says.

“Yes,” he confirms. “I went back. And you know what? I shouldn't have. I should have followed my instincts and left well enough alone.”

Her heart constricts. “Did you get them out?”

He emits an explosive sigh, shoves his hand through his hair. “No, I didn't—but only because I couldn't get close enough to try. The highway that leads into the hills is flooded. No one is getting into or out of that town until the water goes down, and it's not going down anytime soon. As far as I can tell, it's still raining.”

“What can we do?” she demands. “Shouldn't we go for help? The police, the coast guard—there must be someone who can get through to them.”

“You think I didn't consider that?” Jonas demands. “You think I didn't try? I
went
to the police, and I
went
to the coast guard. That's where I'm coming from.” He flings his hand toward a windowless gray tower looming over the harbor. “They took down my statement, promised they'd look into it. First they'd need to send a scout up the coast to assess the situation, determine what sorts of ships can fit upriver and how many of them would be necessary to take all those people. Then they'd have to call in reinforcements from the next major port to the south. They said that it would be impossible to organize a rescue attempt in fewer than four days.”

She takes a ragged breath. “What if that's not fast enough?”

His smile is scornful. “It'll have to be,” he says. “At the station they told me to go home. There's nothing we can do about that town now—not to mention my career, which is as good as dead, too.” He glares at her. “Don't you see? Those people had their chance, and they missed it.”

This is what it is to be in shock, she tells herself, unable to
speak or move her limbs. What about the town meeting? she would like to know. What about the photographs? If Jonas is not accountable for her neighbors' fate, then isn't she?

“Stop it,” he says, reading her mind. “You're not responsible either. They knew the risks, they made their choice. There is nothing you could have done to save them.”

He takes a step forward so that he is standing closer to her—so close, in fact, that she must tilt her head slightly back to meet his gaze. No one has looked at her like this since she and Noah left the city; no one has considered her as intensely, as gravely as this man is doing now. For several seconds she stares back at him, his face growing more familiar the longer she looks at it. What would her life have been like if she had never met her husband? What sort of person would she have become? She glances past Jonas to the stars that hang, faintly pulsing, in the evening sky. How she missed them in the rain! she recalls. How dark the sky becomes without them!

Jonas narrows his eyes, watching the slow illumination of her expression. He can see the plan taking shape in her mind.

“Don't think I'm going with you,” he says with a grimace.

“I don't,” she says, suddenly spotting movement in the tree above him: the quivering of white wings.

“Because I'm not. I want nothing more to do with that town. The people there are willful and thoughtless and sometimes they are downright selfish, just like everybody is, and you will never be able to change them because they have always been this way. Even if you saved them, they would still be this way.
That's how people are. You do not owe them a thing. They deserve whatever comes to them.”

She remembers her neighbors, their animals, her fox curled up on the love seat at her feet. She thinks of Noah in the little wooden gazebo, standing behind the makeshift curtain at this very moment with his arms folded across his chest, the skeleton keys tucked within the cuffs of his shirt. It was not so long ago when she thought that he walked with God, when she believed that he possessed a kind of power and authority that no one else ever would, that there was a call in the world that could be heard by him alone. And yet here is the revelation that has been creeping up on her over all those long, gray days as the rain drummed against her shoulders and slid into her boots: there is nothing special about him at all. Nothing heroic, nothing superhuman, nothing divine. He is as fragile as anyone, as frail and as brokenly human as she is, as all the rest of them are. And yet, she realizes with some surprise, struck by the force of the emotion: she loves him all the same.

What Jonas is saying—it is far too simple. The townspeople do not deserve a watery fate any more than she does, or Noah does. No one asked for the rain. No one wanted the old minister to walk into the river, or Dr. Yu's mother to fall ill; no couple wants their son to meet his death on the road before he has a chance to finish high school.

Although it is true that Noah's wife has endured her own fair share of loss, she has spent most of her adulthood marveling over her happiness and asking herself what she ever did to
deserve someone like Noah. And yet the truth, she sees now, is that people do not
deserve
their good fortune any more than they deserve their heartache. A person's fate simply comes to her, unbidden—a white dove in the dark—and her only task is to accept it, to reach out and make it her own.

H
ere they are.

The fragments of their lives have been washed away and there is nothing left to gather besides stacks of canned goods and jugs of fresh water. Nothing left to preserve besides jars of olives and jams.

The remaining telephone poles drop like dominoes. The townspeople can hear the thuds and the splashes as they topple, one after another, to the water. The wires are tangled below the surface, the crackle of voices buried in a roiling silver sea. It is clear to everyone now that the decision to abandon this town should have been made long ago: before the basements filled, before the sidewalks flowed.

“But how were we to know?” the townspeople ask themselves, shivering in the soaked candlelight of the church. They were only being optimistic. They never once imagined that it would come to this. What they see now is that the problem has
always been, essentially, one of hope. Of misguided, misplaced, mistaken
hope
—which had bled from their hearts to their organs and then corroded their minds. Hope had affected the soundness of their judgment.

“Hope!” they mutter now in condemning tones. “Hope! How damaging it has been, all this time. And no one ever told us. We never knew.”

They know now. They hunker down in their pews and wrap their blankets more tightly around their shoulders while the rain thunders to the roof and the wind howls at their door. Some of them snack on rations of bread or small bowls of pasta while others rearrange their sleeping bags, shuffle and reshuffle their stacks of playing cards, or page through tattered hymnals. Although many of them were baptized or confirmed in this church, it is a long time since they have been up here. They cannot remember exactly when they stopped attending, or why, although some of them do remember trudging despondently home after the last few services when the old minister had them pray for change that never came.

At the organ Leesl plays the opening bars of a song that sounds vaguely familiar to Mrs. McGinn's daughter, although she never came here as a child with her stubborn Quaker mother. When Mrs. McGinn starts humming along, the girl stares at her.

“‘Amazing Grace,'” Mrs. McGinn murmurs, below the music. “It's soothing. I used to sing it to you as a lullaby when you were a baby. Knocked you right out.”

Mrs. McGinn is lying flat on her back in the middle of the aisle that runs from the altar through the nave. Leave it to her mother to choose the most prominent and obtrusive spot in which to have her breakdown, reflects Mrs. McGinn's daughter, propping another pillow underneath a heap of curls. When her mother heaves a theatrical sigh and requests a tall glass of Communion wine, Mrs. McGinn's daughter takes this as a sign that the woman has begun to regain some of her old spark. There is nothing Mrs. McGinn loves more than a good crisis, after all. As much as she claims to dread her neighbors' anger, the truth is that she will not be able to resist taking control of the situation for much longer.

Mrs. McGinn's daughter rises to her feet and begins to make her way toward the boxes of Communion wine that are stashed behind the altar. Her gaze roves across the church as she goes, instinctively seeking out the zookeeper. When she sees him on the far side of the building she pauses to watch him swing a bale of hay into the nave, feeling a surge of sudden and possessive affection. She is proud of him. Look at what he has accomplished here already!

He has blocked off the perimeter of the room for the animals, leaving the pews and aisles open for the townspeople. Around the walls are portable cages, easily collapsed and bolted back together, for those animals who already had them. The glass terrariums with the reptiles and the tropical amphibians are stacked four or five high in one of the front corners. The zookeeper built makeshift pens for the rest out of chicken wire
and wood, which are not the most stable but work well enough to contain the taller, flightless birds, the monkey and red panda, the sheep and the boars and most of the livestock. The eagle is chained to a post near the pulpit. Downstairs are the penguins, the wolves whose prowling is confined to the old nursery room, the alligator on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. While he has contained as many of the animals as possible, there are not enough cages for all of them—and so the townspeople have had to accept such things as the peacocks roaming free and the tortoise slumbering beneath the pews. The red fox darts from one shadow to another, peering into people's faces as if looking for someone.

The townspeople have been assigned shifts for cleaning and feeding, as the zookeeper cannot do it all himself. Empty rooms downstairs are stocked with hay, canned produce, and grains. The freezer is packed with all the meat that they had time to collect, although there is not enough to last the carnivores very long. Parked on the driveway between the church and the house is a truck that Mrs. McGinn's daughter remembers well from the zoo: a red metal monster with a five-hundred-gallon tank stocked with fresh water. If they go through all of it, she overheard the zookeeper saying gravely to Leesl, that's when the problems will really start. He told her to begin saving spare containers that could be used to collect rainwater.

Abandoning the task of the wine, Mrs. McGinn's daughter deliberately turns her steps toward him. It feels to her as though it takes an eternity to cross from one side of the nave to the
other, her steps plodding, her heart thudding in her chest. When the zookeeper hears a sound behind him he looks up from the fence he is repairing, but when he sees that it is her, he turns immediately back to his work.

“Adam,” says Mrs. McGinn's daughter. “Hey.” He doesn't respond and so she hesitates, placing her hand on top of the nearest pen and shifting her weight to appear as casual as possible. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

The zookeeper's gaze flicks up to her hand. “Don't touch the wire,” he growls. “Those fences aren't made to withstand any kind of force.” He pokes at a strip of chicken wire with the broken handle of an umbrella to demonstrate how quickly it would give. The wild boar on the other side raises his chin and shows his tusks. The hornbills screech and Leesl's cheetah growls, a low rumble that makes it feel as though the floor of the church is trembling.

“Sorry,” she says. She stuffs her fists in her pockets and repeats her offer to help him. “Just tell me what needs to be done,” she says. “I'll do it.”

At this, the zookeeper glares up at her. “Is that so?” he says. “Is that a promise?”

The left side of his lip is curled in a snarl, and at the sight of it Mrs. McGinn's daughter worries—for the first time—that he might refuse to take her back.

“I'm sorry I left,” she says, kneeling down beside him. She reaches out to touch his arm. “I was scared, Adam. It was stupid. I won't ever do it again.”

He pulls his arm away. “And what about the rest of us?” he demands. “You think you're the only one who was scared? You think that everyone else in here isn't terrified of what's about to come next?” He flings his hand in the air, taking in the entire nave with a broad sweep of his arm. Her gaze follows the gesture and comes to rest on the worn gray faces of her neighbors. “Of course you were scared, Angie. Of
course
you were. But that doesn't give you any right to take off the way you did. And it doesn't give you the right to make decisions as if you're the only one that matters. You owe us more than that.”

“I know,” she says. Feeling queasy, she pauses for a minute to take a deep breath and rest her hand on her abdomen. Her tone turns pleading. “I'm sorry, Adam. I said I was sorry.”

He shrugs. “Sure you are. I'm not worried about that. What I'd like to know is whether or not you'll try to leave again. Because I can handle the rest of this. I can deal with the animals and the rain and whatever the hell happens to us here. But I don't want anything to do with you if you can't promise me that you'll stick around.”

He heaves a sigh and turns away from her, tilting his face toward the window. The light seeping through the stained glass softens the hard line of his jaw. “I want to believe that people belong to each other, Angie,” he says, his voice suddenly thick and weary. “I want to believe that you and I and that baby will get out of here somehow and that we'll be able to build something together—something that lasts. But I don't see how that will ever happen if you don't believe in it, too.”

He looks her squarely in the eye and waits for her response. Several long seconds pass without her knowing what to say, and after several seconds more, the zookeeper heaves himself to his feet and begins walking quickly, unsteadily toward the back of the church. Mrs. McGinn's daughter cannot bring herself to turn and watch him go. Instead she stares at the space where he had been sitting, remaining there until the wild boar jams his snout into the chicken-wire fence. Startled then, she stumbles up and hurries behind the altar, keeping her head down until she reaches the boxes of wine.

Why didn't she speak? she demands of herself, yanking out a bottle and tucking it under her elbow. Here she had been worried that he would not take her back, and then when he gave her an opportunity to reassure him, she froze. What is the matter with her?

She
wants
to marry him—of course she does. She has wanted to marry him since their second date at the diner, when he explained to her about the penguins and she leaned over their table to wipe buttercream frosting from his beard. And yet over the past few weeks, as their little world has gone whirling off its axis, she has begun to doubt whether there is anything that is permanent or stable. How does she know that their marriage will last, even if they think they love each other now? How does she know that he will not grow tired of her, that he will always be faithful, that the life they build together will not someday be swept out from underneath them?

What Mrs. McGinn's daughter would really like to know, she realizes as she makes her way back with the wine, is why her mother kept getting married, over and over again, when she should have known by marriage two or three that the next would be as likely to fail as the rest. Some people are good at marriage, Mrs. McGinn's daughter had discovered at an early age. But her mother was not one of them.

Her daughter had hated it. She was humiliated by her classmates' questions; her mother was the only divorcée in town. She hated the shuffling transitions from one home to another, the solemn, self-conscious parades down the street with her mother while their neighbors peeked out from behind semidrawn curtains. She hated the scratchy feel of new furniture and the stiff spines of new books and the dizzying scent of fresh paint, but most of all she hated the whole idea of it, the whole attempt: the washing away of their personal history as if it hadn't happened. Mrs. McGinn's daughter used to threaten to run away from home; she used to call her mother spiteful names. Once during one of their marches from old home to new home she had sworn that when she was grown, she would live her life differently.

When she reaches the center of the aisle, she bends down to her mother and props her up so that she can drink. Together the two women survey the church. Pillows and blankets are strewn across the aisle and the altar; dirty dishes are stacked in the corners. The electricity is out and the wicks of the candles are
burning so low that even the light feels damp. The air reeks of rotten produce and hay and dung. The townspeople are disheveled, unwashed, and they, too, are beginning to stink of musk.

“Angela Rose,” says Mrs. McGinn to her daughter, her voice becoming more resonant, more regal with every swig. “Look at these people. Depressed. Hopeless. No better than the animals who are trapped up here with them. Do you know what they need?” She pauses, as if considering, but the daughter has lived with her mother too long to be fooled. Mrs. McGinn already has an idea.

“What is it, Mama?” she says obediently. She is tempted to take a sip of that wine herself.

“They need something to cheer them, something to take their mind off the situation!” she exclaims. She raises one orange eyebrow, her expression pointed and cunning. “Angela Rose. Why don't you get married up here?”

Her daughter stares. “Are you serious?” she demands.

“I never joke about weddings,” replies Mrs. McGinn. “I know it's not as lovely as you might have wanted it to be. But the whole town is here! If we rearranged the potted plants, found some hangings for the walls . . . There are enough canned vegetables and beans to whip up something of a wedding dinner downstairs. Why not?”

“Because, Mama,” she says, casting a desperate glance around the church and ticking off the reasons on her fingers. “It's too cold up here, and it's too dark. I don't have a dress. It's raining.
The place smells like swine.” She hesitates, stumbles into truthfulness. “And anyway, I don't think that Adam would take me back.”

Mrs. McGinn snorts. “
That
Adam?” she retorts, tilting her head meaningfully to the left. Mrs. McGinn's daughter looks in the direction that she indicates, sees the zookeeper standing a few pews away, his fingers gripping the wood and his gaze fixed heatedly, unhappily on her. At the sight of him, her whole body aches—and when their eyes meet, he doesn't turn away.

“He loves you,” says Mrs. McGinn simply.

“It isn't that easy,” snaps her daughter, turning back to her mother. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Mrs. McGinn shrugs. “Whatever you say about me, whatever anyone says about me—I've had a fine life, Angela Rose. I've had some good partners, some bad. Did I expect to marry four times? Of course not. No one does. Do I regret any of it? Well, how could I? I don't believe that there are right choices or wrong choices, only the paths you choose to take, and the ones that you don't.” She lifts her right arm, wraps it around her daughter's shoulders, and pulls the girl close. “I know you're frightened, sweetheart. I want to be able to promise you that your life will have no hardship and that your marriage will be happy and that it will last from now until kingdom come. But I can't. All I can tell you is that things happen and plans change and we've got to change along with them or risk being left behind. The world is an uncertain place, that's for sure—but if you've got
someone you love and who loves you back, you ought to hold on to him. I've always had you. And I've hung on so tight that the rest doesn't matter.”