The Noah Confessions (7 page)

• 2 •

When I got home, the letter was waiting, and except for a snack and a quick glance at MTV, I didn't avoid it.

         

September 28

Dear Noah,

You tried to talk to me as we were leaving English class today. You asked if you could look at my notes for the test next week. I told you that my notes were a mess and that you should ask someone else. You looked kind of upset. I realized that you didn't really care about the notes—you were just trying to talk to me and I blew you off. You were aware that I was blowing you off. I felt bad about it and I wanted to explain. What I would have said to you is that we can't get to know each other. The whole idea is that we don't know each other—that's why I can write the letter to you. If I get to know you, I'll have something to protect. After all, I have plenty of friends and relatives and even my pastor whom I could tell this story to. I've had the opportunity but I let it pass because by virtue of knowing me, they will want to disbelieve me. They will want it not to be true. They might even try to tell me it's not true and that would make me completely crazy, crazier than I already fear that I am.

But I'm not crazy. I'm just someone who was born into insanity. I'm sane, and this letter is my last best hope of hanging on to that.

By the way, what I want you to know when you read this is that I'm probably completely in love with you. I don't really know you so it's not entirely accurate to say that. But I love who I think you are, the person I've made up in my mind. That person is warm and funny and worldly and sweet and wise. I know you're handsome; that's not a subjective thing. It's just a fact. I just want you to know I love you for bigger reasons than that. Believe me, I have imagined it so many times—me and you in a perfect world, or at least a world in which I'm not carrying around the secret of my criminal life. In a weird way, I have to keep you at a distance and write this letter to you so you won't make the mistake of falling in love with me, too. Because you can't have me. I can't have you. I'm damaged goods. I'm the wrong girl for reasons you can't even imagine. I am the enemy.

It would have been nice. I want you to know that. You and me holding hands at assembly or at a movie. Us being a couple. Noah and Cat, Cat and Noah. I think about it all the time. It stirs up the same feeling I always had watching kids playing on the playground, on the monkey bars and the swing set and the slide. They get to do that because they aren't me. Because they don't know what I know. They haven't done what I've done.

And I also want to tell you that never in a million years did I ever think you'd be interested in me. That was not in the game plan.

But I digress.

Now for the story of my brother.

My brother Gregory is twelve years older than I am, the product of my mother's first marriage. He's a half brother but that hardly matters. He is a minister in North Carolina and he's married to a very nice woman named Suzanne. They don't have any kids yet. We see them periodically. They come to visit and the visits are always stiff and awkward. He doesn't know my mother well, because she didn't raise him, and he resents (I suspect) me and my sister because my mother did raise us. You can imagine his position. Why were we good enough for her and he wasn't? He doesn't have any perspective on it, that's the problem. The person who does have perspective is his wife, Suzanne. She gave me a lot of the history I'm about to tell you.

I realize I'm bad at creating suspense because now I've revealed that my mother never got her son back. He was raised by my grandparents. My parents had me and my sister, but Gregory's relationship to our family remained sporadic. We saw him when we drove to the farm to see my grandparents every other Sunday. He stayed with us now and then and always at Christmas. But by the time I was seven he was married (he married very young) and in seminary. After that, he moved around a lot because that's how a preacher's life works. He was handsome and charming and charismatic (he looked a little like you, to be honest) and I adored him, but we just didn't have much of a relationship. It took some time, but eventually I understood why, mostly through Suzanne's stories. He has a lot of anger toward my mother, but that's because he doesn't know the whole story. For some reason, I'm the person in possession of the whole story. Maybe that burden always falls on the youngest. And it's a very heavy burden.

Here is what I know of the next part of my parents' lives, after they met in the bowling alley. Some of it I'm guessing at and most of it is culled from family dinners after Suzanne had had too much wine and started to talk, but only to me. Maybe she thought I was too young to remember or understand. But I've always been able to retain things.

My father began to court my mother in the usual way. After several dates, she revealed that she had been married before and had a son. He might have cared about that in the beginning, but by this point he was taken with her and he was willing to accept her history. She took him home to meet her parents and they mostly approved. They saw that he was not exactly their class (laborer versus wealthy landowners again), but he was handsome and had a decent job and, unlike a lot of men in that era, he was willing to take her on. My mother's parents were a little bit nervous because by now Gregory was seven and they had gotten used to having him and secretly had no plans to give him up. He was their son. I can imagine that my grandpa Will had sized my father, Clyde, up and decided that he was too weak to put up much of a fight. Possibly they had had some walks in the backyard and Grandpa Will had let him know that Gregory was not part of the deal. My father must have known that Fern had every intention of taking her son into the equation. But there was probably a part of my father that didn't want to take on a ready-made family. So there was a complicit agreement. Such an agreement, however, didn't make Grandfather Will entirely comfortable. He was examining his arsenal and preparing for a fight, but as it turned out, the ultimate weapon appeared out of nowhere.

About a month before my parents' wedding took place, a woman in Union Grade came forth, claiming to be pregnant by my father. It was a scandal on a plate. Getting a woman pregnant in those days was a dark deed, something that mainly occurred among the lower classes, and this only served to remind my father that he wasn't one of the elite. Suddenly he saw the whole thing slipping away—he stood to lose the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, along with the social status that her family could afford him. It's not clear if my mother ever knew about this. She was very proper and proud, and she had already left one man for cheating on her. But her parents were intent on this marriage taking place, if for no other reason than to get this wayward daughter off their hands, not to mention keeping her son in their home.

Then a backyard talk definitely took place. It went like this: My grandfather had money, and money could make anything disappear. He was willing to write a check to this troublesome young woman and make the whole issue go away. But there would be a certain price attached. One was that my father would go ahead and marry my mother and take her off their hands once and for all. The bigger price tag was that there would be no discussion of taking Gregory from them. Grandfather Will probably threw in some other perks, such as helping my father get set up in a good job, maybe even a financial contribution. But the heftiest part of the deal was that Gregory would remain with them. I can picture my father shaking on the deal, in the backyard of my grandfather's house, overlooking his prosperous farm.

The final part of the agreement was that my mother was never to know.

It was a deal with the devil. And once you make a deal with the devil, your soul is up for grabs.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about evil, if it exists, and if it does exist, how it works. But I do think that once you sell a tiny part of your soul, you may as well sell the whole thing. You may as well have a sign over your head saying, “I can be bought.”

My father was bought.

How did he feel when he walked away from that deal? I want to believe that he was just in love and hopeful and certain that he could somehow make up for it. I want to believe that some small part of his soul was still engaged and hoping for the best. He was betting on a bright future. He wasn't selling the best part of himself to the highest bidder. He had plans.

But the thing about dancing with the devil is this: You're not done dancing until the devil is done dancing. And the devil is never done.

So they got married. It was a small wedding in the Methodist church in Union Grade. My parents were dressed to the nines and they looked beautiful. My brother Gregory was a groomsman. It all looked very good and that's what they were buying into: how it looked.

The first years of their marriage are murky, uncertain years to me. Suzanne didn't provide any information as to how that went, so I can only imagine. What I imagine is this: My mother kept talking about getting Gregory back and my father kept giving her all these rational arguments as to why it was better for him to stay with his grandparents. They'd be taking him away from the life he knows. If my father adopted him, Gregory would have to change his name. They can still see him anytime they want. They're going to have their own family. As the years passed, it got harder and harder for her to get him back and she just got worn down by the arguments.

But in the back of her mind, she knew this: She only married my father to get her son back. Without that, what was he to her? He moved her away from her job in Danville and into a stifling small-town existence in Union Grade. They lived near his parents, and my father's meddling, semi-crazy mother dropped by whenever she felt like it. He wasn't making that much money, so her life was far from comfortable; she had to make sacrifices. And none of this fit in with how she saw her life evolving. She was beautiful, after all. One of the pretty people. The pretty people don't have to suffer. Yet she was suffering.

She missed her son, I imagine. She thought of him living out his life a few miles away, turning into a really spectacular young man, gifted in music and academics, with no reflection on her because she wasn't raising him. She was losing him to her parents. Deep down, her resentment grew. This was not the deal she had made. Unconsciously, she must have been aware that some other deal had been made. Some kind of secret deal that her husband would never admit to her. She lost respect for him. She wanted to go home. But she couldn't. She was trapped.

She was trapped in Union Grade, where the social class was intact. No one acknowledged her pedigree because it came from some distant place, and anyway, a woman's pedigree was only defined by her husband's achievement. They were permanently on the outside looking in. It was a place she had never been to before and she hated it. And because she hated it, she blamed my father. Nothing he could do was good enough for her. The only thing she ever really wanted him to do was get her son back.

Still, she persisted. She hung in there. A second divorce was unthinkable. She smoked, and ate very little and drank iced tea. My father insisted on having more children. She didn't want them, but he told her it was part of the deal. She agreed to get pregnant and my sister was born. She wasn't born in any typical way, though. My mother's pregnancy had been difficult. Mainly because she smoked, and ate very little and drank iced tea. My sister was born two months premature, in the car on the way to the hospital. Everything about my sister's entrance into the world was wrong. First, she was born too soon and should have died. Second, she was a girl. Third, and the most unforgivable sin, she lived.

Because it was 1957, and premature babies mostly didn't pull through back then, they just left her in the hospital and waited for her to die. They tried to get back to their lives. Every evening when he came home from work, my father would ask, “Shouldn't we go visit the baby?” And my mother would say, “I can't do that, I can't get attached, it's too painful.” This went on for months, and finally my mother took a cab to the hospital, walked into the baby ward, and said, “I'm here to take my daughter home.”

They had no idea who she was.

So she took my sister home and named her Sandra and started feeding her with an eyedropper. Sandra lived. But my parents never got over the fact that she lived. It wasn't their first choice. The fact that she lived forced them to confront the guilt they had about wanting her to die. My father confessed to me later that he was worried she wouldn't “look right.” She looked just fine, but they could never see it. In their minds, she was always sickly and pale and flawed and just plain wrong. They also probably couldn't get over the fact that she was a girl. Imagine my mother, knowing that she had a perfectly healthy son somewhere in the world, yet here she was, stuck with raising this sickly girl. Imagine my father, knowing that he had made this deal with the devil, not being able to tell.

Imagine him blaming himself for this terrible circumstance.

Imagine my sister Sandra entering the world as a terrible circumstance, shouldering that burden.

About three years later, my father convinced my mother to have another baby. She had to; she was obligated to. This girl, Sandra, was so weak and sickly (in his mind) that he couldn't be sure she would live. So they had to have another and this one would be a boy. It must have been the boy argument that convinced my mother. She got pregnant with me and they got busy picking boy names. She carried me full term and I was born healthy and happy and squealing. But I was a girl. My father told me later that he was in shock to learn that he had had another girl. He knew it was their last because it had been so hard to convince my mother to have me. He didn't have the boy he wanted, but right then and there, in the waiting room after hearing the news, he decided that there was no reason he couldn't raise me as a boy.