The Noah Confessions (11 page)

I was stone in love with Cat and she was a tennis player. Half the time when I went out behind the school, I was hoping to see her hitting balls against the backboard, wearing her white shorts and a red and white striped shirt. She was exacting about tennis and if she missed a ball or simply hit one in a way she hadn't intended she would swear, then look around to see if anyone had heard her. She saw me sitting there a couple of times and we locked eyes and smiled.

You have to understand this about your mother. She was great at appearing normal. What she called “playing at normal.” She had been doing it since she was a little girl. It was impossible for an average teenage boy in love to see anything beyond that mask. It was a lovely mask, a convincing mask.

I couldn't tell what she was thinking when she looked at me. I didn't know if she liked me or not. I certainly didn't know what she was planning. She was days away from handing me the letter.

But February was a good month and I went to bed in the early days feeling that life was getting back on course, that the bubble was not going to break and it was all going to be fine.

You think the letter was the thing that broke the bubble, but it wasn't.

My mother broke the bubble because someone broke it for her.

I was asleep again one night when my mother came in. This time I woke up when she opened the door so I was already awake when she came in. Even though she was dressed in normal clothes, she looked all wild and crazy. She was smoking, which she had stopped doing in the house, part of the bubble. I sat straight up.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

She put a forefinger to her lips to shush me. She looked around and said, “Today I heard something, John.”

“What did you hear?”

She shook her head and looked around. She waited. No one was coming. She sat down on my bed and her cigarette was burning.

“In the garden club, I heard it,” she told me.

“Okay.”

I could smell on her breath that she had been drinking. My mother did that. Both my parents did that. They went out and they drank. I didn't care. It seemed to be what grown-ups did and I had no fascination with it. I assumed I'd do my fair share of it when I was their age, but I was in no hurry. Still, it wasn't lost on me that my mother smelled like that more often than my father.

Her eyes were blurry but I ignored it. I was focused on her cigarette, which was burning down. Some of the ash fell onto the floor of my bedroom.

She said, “She was having an affair. Jackie was.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, the bad boyfriend.”

“No, not the boyfriend. A married man. Someone well known in the community. They wouldn't say who.”

“Who told you this?”

She put her cigarette out in my Coke can. “Marsha Tomkins. Her husband's a judge. She would know.”

“But she didn't know who.”

“I didn't say that. I said she wouldn't say.”

“So what do you think, she ran off with this guy?”

She shook her head.

“He paid her to leave town?”

She trained her eyes on me and nodded. “It's the only thing that makes sense. She was probably pregnant. Probably living somewhere afraid to come home. He's keeping her. She's raising his bastard child.”

“Mom, calm down,” I remember saying because she was talking faster and creating this whole scenario for which she had no real proof.

But that's how much she wanted Jackie to be alive somewhere in the world, walking around, with a chance of coming back.

Instead of down a well just across town.

She said, “Then the whole town covered the mess up. Because that's what they do here. They protect each other.”

“Can you find out who it was?”

“I can die trying, I'll tell you that. And I will.”

“Well, I guess it's good. That she's alive.”

“Yes, baby,” she said. “It's good.”

And then she left.

That was the last I heard of it. She never talked about it again.

And then I got the letter.

• 5 •

It was Valentine's Day. It was also the day I tried out for track. I placed first in the sprints and first in the broad jump and I was all happy about myself. I sat on the grass and caught my breath. The coach came over and told me what to do and what to expect and how to purchase my uniform. I was half listening and half watching your mother up on the tennis court. I was feeling for the first time that I might have an identity away from Charlie, something I was good at that he'd never tried, and that I had a shot at a normal adolescence.

I sat and watched the rest of the track team doing their mile and their high jump and their hurdles. I drank a Coke. The tennis team finished their maneuvers and I saw your mother sitting in the parking lot, waiting for her ride. I felt brave, so I went up there.

She was sitting on her books and looking at her watch. When I walked up to her she just looked up at me and smiled. It was like she knew I was coming.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said back.

“Happy Valentine's Day,” I said.

She laughed. “You, too.”

“I'm John Russo.”

“I know who you are,” she said.

“You call me Noah,” I told her.

She laughed again. She laughed a lot. But not a nervous laugh. It was relaxed and it made you relax. I can't explain it. It was just a good sound.

“Where did you hear that?” she asked.

“I listen. I'm an eavesdropper.”

“Nice. Pervert,” she said.

“I like that name,” I told her. “Noah.”

“Then I'll keep calling you that.”

We remained that way for a while. Her sitting on her books and me kicking up the gravel, still in my track gear, her still in her tennis gear.

She said something like so you run track and I said yeah, I do sprints and jumps and she said the track uniforms weren't as retarded-looking as the baseball uniforms, and we laughed about that. We kind of ignored the fact that we'd been circling around each other all year. Well, we didn't ignore it. We just understood it. There was no reason to discuss it.

“You're from up North,” she said. “But nobody's sure where.”

“New York.”

She nodded, her eyes working, as if she were trying to picture it.

She said, “I'm just biding my time here.”

“Oh, really,” I said. “Where are you going to?”

She said, “I want to live in California.”

“Why?” I asked.

She laughed. “Why? Because the sun shines every day. And because it's three thousand miles from here.”

“I get that,” I said.

I looked at her. I looked at her dark wavy hair cascading down her back and her light eyes and her big smile. I looked at her legs, all tanned and muscled, and her sneakers, all beaten up from charging the court, and I didn't know what to say. I certainly couldn't tell her that I'd seen her first thing at the drugstore and that I was going to marry her.

“I don't think I'll make it, though,” she said suddenly. Her voice scared me. She was staring at her sneakers and twirling her racket between her fingers.

“What do you mean?”

“To California. I don't think that's in the cards.”

“Why not?”

And then she stood up, as if she heard the gravel stirring in the distance, though there was no car in sight. She unzipped her backpack and took something out of it. It was a manila envelope and it contained something that looked like a really long English essay.

But of course it was the letter.

She shoved it at me and continued to look at the ground.

“What is it?”

“It's for you. Just take it.”

I didn't move. She waved it emphatically and still wouldn't look at me.

“Valentine's Day,” she said. “It's appropriate.”

Later she told me that she hadn't decided to give it to me until that very moment. What made her decide, I asked? She wasn't sure. The way I was looking at her. The fact that I was standing so close and having a normal conversation and she felt happy and then realized she didn't have the right to feel happy.

“And the talk of California,” she admitted much later, when she realized it. “The promised land. I didn't deserve to reach it.”

I held the envelope in my hand. Our eyes locked again and I wanted to say, Look, I love you, and I didn't know what to say after that. I felt I had to thank her or ask a question.

Her father's green Ford LTD pulled up and I said, “What is it?”

“Just read it. I've explained everything. But don't talk to me.”

“Don't talk to you when?”

“Ever. I have to go.”

The green Ford LTD pulled up right in front of us and her father was at the wheel and I watched her get into the car and then the car drove away. I hardly even noticed him. Because I didn't understand it yet, I didn't know what I was looking for.

         

I read the whole letter that night. I didn't entirely get it, so I put it under my mattress and went to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night and read it again.

I knew it was all true.

How do you know the truth, even when it sounds bizarre? It's a matter of discernment. That's what religious people call it. It's what lawyers call it, too. You have to be able to know when someone is lying to you.

The best I can tell you is this: The truth always settles on you very quietly, and it sits in a pocket inside you and doesn't displace anything and it just feels right but not always logical. Logic is something else. The truth is quiet and simple but not painless.

The truth just is.

And this just was.

I wish I could tell you I was shocked or I saw my life flash before my eyes or I felt some grand emotion or had an epiphany. Maybe that's all true. I just don't remember it. I remember reading the letter once, reading it again, and knowing it was true. I guess I thought about what it would do to my mother, but I probably thought more about what it would do to my chances with Cat.

I couldn't get a clear picture of that. After all, the last thing she had said to me was not to talk to her again. I knew that wasn't possible so I didn't even entertain the idea. I knew I was going to find her as quickly as I could, and probably I was concocting some kind of grand scheme or speech. I was plotting a way for us to run off together. Maybe I fantasized about buying bus tickets. I honestly can't remember.

What I can remember was feeling like the other shoe had dropped. All the theories were evaporating into the ether and the thing I had always known to be true was coming into focus. Only I had never pictured Jackie's murderer as someone I knew. I had never pictured him driving a green Ford LTD or being the father of the girl I loved.

I had never pictured her witnessing it. I didn't know that you could see such a thing and get up in the morning and go about your business. And eventually become a beautiful high school girl who doesn't wear makeup and whose laugh could set people at ease. I didn't see a normal attractive girl coming out of that scenario and making the tennis team. It's just not the way we are trained to see the children of monsters emerging.

I don't know why, though. We've seen enough photos of the Nazi children in their crisp school uniforms holding pets and smiling at the camera. I must have known it was possible. It's just a paradox, I suppose. The impossible task of holding two opposing thoughts in your head at once. We think it can't be done, yet we do it all the time. The way children of crazy alcoholic mothers think it's all going to be fine tomorrow. The way an entire nation can nuke another country across the Pacific and still believe in patriotism and humanity. The way a self-made businessman can kill a little girl and think it is all in the best interest of his family.

We live with opposing thoughts. As if it is what we were born to do.

I suppose you do it even better when you're young.

And the reason for that is, you think that your youth negates your behavior and your knowledge because it is only age that is going to qualify your experience. You think it's only what you do once you're an adult that matters. And what you're going to do as an adult is be perfect.

Perfection looms. Even though no one else has achieved it.

No one else has ever been you.

And I was so sure of all this flawed logic that I didn't even toss and turn or worry about what it would do to my existence as I knew it or to my history as I would perceive it later. Certainly not how it would sound to my daughter a couple of decades later.

I just knew the truth was under my pillow and I went to sleep.

• 6 •

“What are we going to do?”

This was your mother.

She was sitting under a tree in the woods behind the high school. It's where people went to smoke cigarettes and dope and drink beer during lunch. We weren't doing any of that. We were yards away from that group and we felt their eyes on us occasionally, but because we weren't snitches and we didn't want their stash, we were invisible to them.

She was wearing a faded bandanna over her long hair and a Danskin leotard and sailor jeans and gold hoops in her ears. A gold cross fell right between her breasts and I tried not to look at that. Oh, sorry, honey, I forgot. You don't want to hear about your mother's breasts. What I'm trying to say is that I was so in love with her. And she wasn't having any of it. It wasn't on her mind. Because your mom was a warrior and a crusader. She was a brave person. I was a teenage boy in love.

And because I was a teenage boy in love, I had chased her down the halls, stood outside her classes, passed her notes in English, until she finally relented and agreed to see me during lunch. I had approached the day with nothing but the determination to wear her down. I wasn't going to accept her plan of never speaking to me again. It seemed dramatic and girly and it just wasn't going to stand.

Not that your mother had no resolve. She had plenty of it. But she hadn't met mine yet. She had simply reawakened it.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How are we going to fix it?” she said, a little impatient with me. “I mean, your idea was to fix it. That was your pitch. That was how you got me to talk to you again.”

“Right,” I said, “because I have a plan.”

“Yeah, so? Let's hear your plan.”

I was momentarily silent.

Then she said, as if I needed reminding, “My father killed your cousin.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I saw him do it.”

“You didn't do anything wrong.”

“How can you say that? I was there. I helped.”

“You were a little girl.”

“I kept his secret. I've been keeping it. I'm not a little girl now.”

“But you did say something. You told me. You must have told me for a reason.”

“I'm culpable,” she said, and her eyes were full of tears.

I was trying to remember what culpable was.

Don't laugh, Lynnie. Don't think I was an idiot, either, or someone without a soul. It's just that I had always known Jackie was dead and I had always known someone had killed her and I didn't know Cat's father at all but I knew her. It didn't surprise me that he was a criminal because I was from New York, where everybody knew all powerful men were most likely connected and there was corruption everywhere and people tried to work around it. Nobody in Manhattan thought that crime was confined to the gutters. Only a certain kind of crime. The high-level stuff happened in the boardrooms and the churches and the schools.

That kind of crime was protected. It never came out into the open unless someone was brave enough to take a stand. That's what she was trying to do. That was what I was trying to do. And we were both kids.

None of this meant that Cat was a criminal. It meant she was an innocent. More than that, she was an avenger. That was a word I knew from comic books, but I knew it and I took it seriously.

“Does your father know?” I asked her.

She smirked. “Does he know he killed her?”

“Does he know you remember? And that you're talking about it?”

“Are you crazy? He would kill me. I'm risking my life here.”

Maybe that was when it hit me. Maybe that was when I stopped thinking of kissing her and started thinking of saving her. She was staring at me with those big green eyes and I was helpless.

I put my arm around her and pulled her close and she let me. I said, “Okay, we'll tell them.”

“Who? The police? My dad's golf buddies?” she said.

So I told her, “Not the cops. My parents.”

She stared at me. She asked the right question:

“What are they gonna do?”

I didn't know. I shook my head again. I was trying to think, trying to make my brain work as fast as hers, willing myself to be as smart. I was as smart, almost, but my brain had been asleep for a long time. It had been sleeping against the reality of my mother's condition and against the reality of Charlie being gone and sometimes the plain old mundane reality of my hormones. Sorry, Lynne. You have to hear about hormones. It's a story about teenagers.

So I woke myself up from all those forms of sleep, and sitting there on the ground under a tree next to your mother in 1975 with the oil shortage and the price gouging and the aftermath of Watergate and all the good music drifting out of passing cars and the stoners staring at us and final exams looming, I resolved to be a man and face what was coming to me. To us.

And I told her something that I've believed since that day:

“When you have to do the right thing you don't worry about what happens next. You just do it. And you trust that doing the right thing will get you through somehow. And you don't worry about dying because living with it is worse.”

It was a good speech and a good principle, but your mom, who was no idiot, made a good point, too:

“Easy for you to say.”

         

So we decided to tell my parents.

That was the obvious move, but it took courage and resolve and a certain amount of forethought. We met for a few days after our team practices and formulated the plan. We wrote stuff down. We practiced our parts, we role-played, we even prayed. And during that time we also fell in love. Well, I was already in love. Your mother started to come around during those few days. And it wasn't just because I was her rescuer, either. Though that had to have had a certain appeal. It was more because for the first time she was able to trust someone and she was starting to see a way out and a life and happiness and all the things she had given up on when she was a little girl standing in the woods two weeks before Christmas.

In my head, I could already see us married and having children. Down the road, you know. With this story backing up our union, giving it a kind of weight and a platform that no one could undermine. I grew up very fast in those few days. I was only fifteen, about to turn sixteen, and in some ways I felt exactly like that boy, a guy running track and trying to get good grades and get into college and wanting to take this cute girl to the movies. But I also knew that I was a man who had already lived through some powerful difficulties and who was about to face the challenge of a lifetime.

In my head, the challenge was how to keep my parents from blaming Cat.

I didn't think they would. I thought they would be rational and would picture her, as I had no trouble doing, as a little girl running through the woods, away from her own father. She was trying to survive. She hadn't told because of that survival instinct. And now she was telling, even though it was taking every bit of fortitude she had. Even though it meant her father would go to jail and her whole life would be disrupted. I didn't say destroyed, even to myself, because I knew she was thinking it and sometimes I let myself think it but then I remembered that my parents, let alone any kind of merciful God, would never let an innocent girl be punished.

This I told her while we sat in the parking lot, waiting for her father's green Ford LTD to arrive. I always walked away before the car drove up, at her request. She didn't want him to see me. She didn't want him to suspect anything. She wanted to keep me out of it until she couldn't anymore.

It made my blood run cold to see her getting into that car. I'd watch from a distance, near the track field, so far away that I couldn't see her features and I couldn't see him at all. But I knew there was evil in that car, and the girl I loved was getting in and riding shotgun.

Are you okay? You look pale. We can stop now. I can tell you later.

It's very late.

Well, have some water and I'll keep going.