The Noah Confessions (8 page)

They named me Catherine, but they kept my hair short as I was growing up and they dressed me in boy clothes and called me Cat because it was more boylike. That was how I ended up following my father around and hearing his stories and learning his games.

By the time I was five, my mother had come to accept that she wasn't getting her son back (he was almost grown, anyway) and her life was going to be about raising these two girls and living with a man who had completely and thoroughly lost her respect. She didn't know the whole story, but let's face it, on some level she did. But because it was too painful to really know, she shut down and smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of iced tea.

In the meantime, something had happened. My father had been lured away from his job at the bank and had been given a job in the carpet factory that was just opening up in town. A managerial position. He was offered more money and an opportunity to move up in the world. There was nothing that tempted my father more than moving up in the world. My grandfather Will probably instructed him to take the job, and he did. But it was a lousy job, where he was forced to work long hours and answer to men he didn't respect. It offered him a certain kind of social status, but it didn't fulfill his lifelong dream, which was to be completely accepted as an important member of society in Union Grade. He was allowed to join clubs and be the deacon in the church and all that, but my parents were still shut out of the best parties, the best cliques, the inner sanctum of Union Grade. By now he could see that his deal with the devil had not entirely paid off. Yet he was still in league with the devil because he had this secret. And he had an angry wife and two daughters. It was not how he saw his life playing out.

My sister and I paid the price for being daughters. My mother never really knew what to do with us. We weren't an adequate substitute for her son. And we hadn't solidified any agreement with her husband, or sealed any contract she had with her own fairy-tale vision of her life.

My sister Sandra became the focus of my mother's attention, and meanwhile, I belonged to my father. I was his last chance, his “idea,” and I had certain obligations to fulfill. Because I belonged so completely to him in his mind, and because I was the closest he was ever going to get to having a son, he confided in me. He took me everywhere with him. My mother didn't mind. She was basically done with having children. She had no protective instinct toward me, so she just gave me to him. For a long time I didn't mind. I was the apple of my father's eye, his idea, his creation, his invention.

My mother was tired of it all. Tired of him, tired of missing her son, tired of raising my sister. She had no energy left for me so she let him take over. And that is why he took me with him wherever he went. And that is why I saw things I shouldn't have seen. And it's why when he decided to become a criminal, I became one, too.

         

All families have things they do together, like board games or silly rituals or picnics in the country. My family is no exception. From the earliest time that I can remember, whenever the town's fire alarm went off, my father woke the whole family up and said, “Let's go find it.” We'd grab coats and blankets and follow him into the car. After that, we followed the trail of water that the fire truck left behind. The fire trucks in this town are really old and they leak like crazy, so that's our trail. Sometimes. And sometimes he just seemed to know how to get there.

I don't know if my mother enjoyed the adventure. I know Sandra did. It was one of the few times she actually felt like my father's daughter. She was always angling for us to act like more of a family and this did the trick for her.

My mother was just glad to get out of the house and glad that my father was in a good mood. It was unsettling how happy it made him, going to watch the fires.

For me, it was a little bit of everything. It was a completely different experience from where I was sitting.

Sometimes when we'd visit the fire, it would be a place I'd never seen before. I felt strangely happy when that was the case. My father would get out of the car and go chat with the cops or the firemen, all of whom he knew—they went to our church or belonged to the same clubs—and then he'd come back and say, “Lightning,” or “Electrical system,” or “Cigarette in the couch.”

But many times, at least half the time, it was a place I had seen before, earlier in the day. A place he had taken me to and told me to wait in the car while he walked around it. And then it was night and the whole family was in the car and we were watching it burn. Once when I was very little, I actually said out loud, “Daddy, you took me here!” The look he gave me shut me up and made me realize I couldn't ever talk about such a thing again. The things we did together were for us to know. That's what made it a secret life.

You're probably thinking, Oh, now I get it, her father was an arsonist. That's her confession. I really wish that were the whole story. It would be terrible to have a father who was an arsonist, but it wouldn't make me feel like the criminal that I am. After all, many of the fires he started weren't important. Just old, worn-out buildings that probably needed burning down anyway. It was a way for him to demonstrate this power he had, the power he had been sitting on for all those years, the skills he had learned in the army that he could never reveal. It was a strange kind of shout to the people who wouldn't let him in.

I don't know how it made him feel better to do that. I can just barely understand it. But I know he needs it and he's going to keep doing it, just to show that he can.

There were other things, too, other parts of our secret life. I knew about the hidden family. He occasionally went to visit the woman who had his baby. She had been paid off but she had had the kid anyway, and sometimes he took me to visit them. She lived in a trailer and I would wait in the car while he went in to see her. Once she came out. She was blond and fat and looked nothing like my mother. She leaned into the window and said, “Oh, Clyde, she looks just like you.” Then a girl a little older than Sandra came out and looked at me with this blank expression and told me her name was Amy. I didn't know who she was but I knew.

“This is between us,” my father told me later. “We have a different connection, you and me. We're not the same as the others.”

I knew he meant my mother and sister. He didn't get specific then. When I was older, he told me more.

“Your mother is crazy,” he said. “Doctors have told me that I should have her put away. I think it was Sandra who did it to her. That whole experience broke her. I thought maybe having another baby…”

He got sentimental and sad when he talked about it. His eyes welled up. And I was young and I loved him and I wanted to make it better, but it also somehow gave me a stomachache.

“But after you she was just as crazy, and I was afraid of raising two girls by myself. So I'm just trying to make her comfortable, help her get along.”

I waited for more. He wiped a tear. I didn't know what to do.

“And Sandra will never be right, I'm afraid,” he said.

I didn't know what to do with any of this.

Then he turned to me with a big smile and said, “But you and me, we're the same. We're going to be okay.”

We're the same, he said. He just made up his mind. I never had a choice.

I kept the secret of the fires. No one was really getting hurt. Then I let myself not think about it. Then it was exactly like it wasn't true.

But Jaqueline was different. That was a thing that never left me and never will.

I'm tired now, but tomorrow I will tell you about Jaqueline.

         

I put the manuscript down and sat on my bed, taking yoga breaths through my nose. It was a lot to absorb, for sure, but I had finally gotten to a point in the manuscript that made my blood stand still in my veins.

I walked down the hall to my father's room. It was dark in there. He had turned off the light and gone to sleep. But I switched it on and he sat up, looking around, all confused.

“What's happening?” he said.

“You tell me.”

“Lynnie?”

“Who's Jaqueline?”

He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus on me.

“Oh,” he said. “You got to that part.”

“Yes, I got to that part.”

He patted the bed and said, “Sit down.”

“No. Just tell me.”

He sighed and said, “It's in the letter. Who Jaqueline is.”

“You know what I mean.”

He said nothing.

“That's my name.”

My real name was Jaqueline Julia Russo. Lynne was the nickname they agreed to call me. Jaqueline was so far in the past I didn't even put it down on forms anymore. But I knew it in the back of my mind.

“There was another Jaqueline before me?”

He nodded.

“Am I named after her?”

“Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

“Why?”

“It's in the letter.”

“Stop with the letter. Just tell me.”

“Please sit down,” he said.

I sat on the edge of the bed, but just barely, as if the bed had the power to burn me or suck me into hell.

He thought for a moment, rubbing his eyes.

Finally he said, “Jaqueline was a girl who was very important to your mother.”

“So I'm about to understand, if I keep reading.”

“You should keep reading.”

“I will, but I want to know.”

“She loved Jaqueline very much,” my father said. “She wanted to validate her memory.”

“So I have another girl's name.”

He thought some more and finally said, “She considered it a great honor, to pass that name on to you.”

“Well, what if I don't want some other girl's name?”

He shrugged and said, “It's why we decided to call you Lynne. You're not the same. It's a memory. It's an homage.”

“Did the other Jaqueline contribute to my mother becoming a criminal?”

“You should keep reading,” he said.

“Tell me this: Am I named after someone good or someone bad?”

“Someone very, very good,” he said. “Who never had the opportunities that you have.”

“So she never had a car.”

He smiled at me. “She never even had a chance.”

I decided to let it be. I went back to my room and went directly to sleep and didn't dream.

SIXTEEN
and Technically Three Days

• 1 •

I woke up around one a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep. I was staring at the ceiling as if it were a movie screen, watching all these characters I didn't know move around and play their parts. The strange girl with my name. My mother, who didn't really look like me (I had gotten my father's coloring; some people said I had her smile but I didn't see it), suddenly looked exactly like me in the movie. I was the one who was living in this crazy house with the distant smoking mother and the strange, fire-setting father. And now I had a new friend to think about. I couldn't wait until morning to find out about her. I turned on the bedside light and started to read again.

         

September 29

The girl's name was Jaqueline. She was a teenager. She was the oldest girl of a man who was a machinist in my father's carpet factory. He was divorced and had remarried a younger woman. They had children together, two girls, Dana and Sheryl, who were both roughly my age. They lived in the bad part of my neighborhood—the poor housing. We were allowed to play together, though my parents made it clear that they were beneath us in terms of social status. Jaqueline wasn't on anyone's social scale. She was just a wild teenager.

She tried to be good. She worked hard in school and made good grades. But when her parents weren't looking, which was most of the time, she was wild. She had a much older boyfriend who rode a motorcycle. She wore hot pants and smoked on the streets. When her long hair got in the way, she pulled it back and put on a bandanna. She smiled and laughed a lot. She had a good attitude.

Once when my father was driving home from work, he saw her standing outside a local gas station, in her short shorts, smoking a cigarette, and he said, “If I ever see my girls doing that, I will beat them until they can't sit down.”

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Around this time, my mother had finally reached her limit in terms of living with my father and complying with his rules. My father was an important businessman in town; my mother should have help. My sister and I weren't much trouble, but we were children and she needed to be free to participate in the garden club and church functions. In order for her to do that, they needed help. They had gone through a couple of black women. My father had so much trouble accepting black help that he just canceled the whole thing. My mother was fed up. “I just need someone to look after the girls a few hours in the afternoon. A local girl to help out.” Jaqueline was looking for work and her father was an employee. My father finally consented.

They hired Jaqueline to babysit occasionally and to clean up after us. My father decided to abandon his prejudice and to see it as helping out the lower class. Jaqueline, or Jackie as she was known to us, was the perfect solution. She enjoyed playing with me and my sister. She'd cook on the days my mother felt overwhelmed by the heat. She never complained. They paid her by the hour. It was all good.

Sandra and I loved being babysat by Jackie. She told us great stories about ghosts and aliens from other planets. She played card games with us and scared us silly with her worldview (“the world behind your eyes,” she called it), to the point that we could barely sleep when she looked after us. But we loved her and our parents knew it. Her wild boyfriend with the motorcycle kept his distance, usually. Every now and then he'd stop by, but his involvement consisted of glasses of iced tea on the front porch. Though he often offered to take us for rides on his motorcycle, he never actually did it. His name was Lance and he had a shaved head and tattoos. Jackie stared at him with a quizzical expression, as if she were witnessing physics defined.

He had given her a bracelet that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was silver with birds on it. She used to let me play with it, even though she never took it off her wrist. She held it up and the birds encircled her wrist and I would inspect each one and give them names.

She'd say, “This is to remind me that no matter where you are, you can always fly away.”

That was her plan with Lance. To fly away somewhere better. That was my plan, too, and maybe it still is. But it's getting harder and harder to believe in that idea.

         

I looked at the bracelet and I felt a chill pass through me. Now I had the girl's jewelry as well as her name. Where was this going to end?

Only one way to find out.

         

Jackie was like a cool older sister we had somehow inherited. Sandra liked to impress her and pretended they were peers. But I just looked up to her and listened and imitated her every move. I imagined myself having a boyfriend like Lance and riding on the back of his motorcycle. I imagined the bird bracelet on my arm and Jackie said she would give it to me when she finally decided to leave town.

“What if you forget?” I'd ask her.

“I won't forget.”

“What if you leave in the middle of the night?”

“I'll know in advance. Getting out takes planning. Lance and I are working on it, but we're not going to just up and disappear.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure, little Cat.”

Then she'd laugh and say, “But does that make sense? Giving my birds to a Cat? You're not going to eat them, are you?”

I assured her I wouldn't. I took the whole thing too seriously to laugh at her joke.

Every day I thought of Jackie and about when I'd see her again and what games we'd play. I never let on to Sandra or anybody how important she was to me. I was afraid they'd be jealous, and when people are jealous, they do desperate things.

But the problem wasn't about me and Jackie. The problem came from some dark place I couldn't have imagined.

There were arguments in my house. There were always arguments in my house, so many that I couldn't pay attention to them all. But these arguments I heard because, over and over, they were saying Jackie's name. My mother loved her at first and defended her, while my father argued against her. He said she was fast and trashy and was a bad influence on the girls. He said there were rumors about her around town. My mother said people in this town just talked for sport and it was none of their business who she hired to help out. She was finally getting some relief and he was just complaining because he didn't want her to have a life. Then it was back to how her people had money and they always had someone helping out and he just didn't know that because he grew up poor.

Then the roles changed. The shift happened slowly. First my father stopped complaining about Jackie. Then he started finding things to like about her. She was smarter than he thought, she was starting to dress better, she was good with the girls. He still hated her motorcycle boyfriend, but he suspected she was trying to make something of her life. It was fine if my mother wanted to keep her on.

Then my mother changed. Sometimes she did that just to spite him. That seemed to be the case again. There were loud fights in the living room after Jackie went home. My mother accused my father of being too interested in her. She said terrible things, like my father had a taste for trailer trash because that was where he came from. My father accused her of being crazy. Loud voices and eventually things being thrown. Sandra and I didn't know what to think. Selfishly I was hoping that if Jackie got fired, I'd still get the bracelet. And that maybe she would think of me and take me with her and Lance. We'd live on the road like a hippie family. We'd fly away to someplace where no one yelled or called people names or threw things. This was my dream.

One day my mother called me and Sandra into the living room and told us that Jackie wouldn't be coming around anymore. We were confused and upset. She told us to stop fretting about a babysitter, there were more babysitters in the world, we'd like the new one just fine. Sandra went with that idea but I threw a big fuss and got sent to my room. That same night, my father called us into the den and said, “Jackie is still going to be your babysitter.”

“Why?” Sandra asked.

“Because I said so. And I'm still the last word in this family.”

My mother sat in the kitchen smoking and drinking iced tea.

I was thrilled about the news but terrified to show it. I still remember my mother glaring at me as I walked past the kitchen. Or maybe I imagined it. That was how it always felt in my house, anyway. You had to take sides, and then someone was glaring at you.

Jackie kept coming and my mother ignored her and my father, oddly enough, was cold to her. She was caught in the middle of a battle that didn't seem to have anything to do with her. She was just a piece of land they were fighting over. Like the Civil War. My father had won, but he wasn't sure what to do with the victory.

One night, when Jackie was babysitting, my father came home early from his business meetings while my mother was still out with her friends. Sandra and I were supposed to be asleep but I always stayed awake until one of my parents came home. I heard raised voices and I got out of bed and crept downstairs. I hovered in the kitchen, which was just a few steps away from the den, where they were talking. I listened.

Jackie was saying this:

“I don't care if I work for you or not, but I know what I know.”

Daddy was saying this:

“Jackie, I can see you want a better life for yourself. I understand that, I do. I want to see that happen for you.”

“Ha, like you care about me.”

“Of course I care about you. I don't want you to do anything unwise.”

Jackie said, “I can't forget what I know.”

“You're a very young girl. Your thinking can be confused.”

“I'm not confused.”

Daddy said, “Jackie, I don't want anything bad to happen to you.”

She said, “I'm not scared of you.”

“Of course you're not. Why would I want you to be?”

She said, “You think you own this town. You think you have people fooled.”

“Why would I want to fool people?”

“I'm not an idiot. I pick up on things.”

“Of course you do.”

“And those girls, they're going to figure it out.”

“Let's leave the girls out of it.”

“I can't. They're in it. Your wife is smarter than you think, too.”

“Jackie, I'm wondering if the stress of your life is getting to you. Going to school, working all these hours, having a boyfriend. And the way people talk about you…that has to be difficult.”

“Talk about
me
? I'm not the one who should be worried about talk.”

He began mumbling and then she mumbled back and I exhausted my hearing. All I could understand was the intensity of their discussion, rumbling like an underground railroad.

Then she left.

I saw her alive only once more.

         

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. My father said he was going to cut down a Christmas tree. We never bought a tree. Why would we? We lived near a forest, and in those days, you could just walk out into it and bring home a tree.

My father was about to embark on this journey to cut down a tree and I wanted to go with him. I was his side-kick, after all. He always took me everywhere. When I said I wanted to go, he couldn't resist. My mother dressed me up in my new winter coat and my new winter hat, a furry pixie deal with a pointed top. I got in the truck with my father and we went to get the tree.

I rode in the truck next to my father, in my new winter clothes. We listened to Christmas songs on the radio. He parked next to the edge of the woods. The heater was blasting and I was starting to sweat. He shut off the engine and turned to me. I can still see him, slipping on his work gloves and adjusting his black wool cap.

He said, “I'm going to chop down the tree. You should wait here.”

“I thought I was going with you.”

“You are with me,” he said, with a smile. He had a nice smile. He made me feel important.

“But I want to help you with the tree.”

“You'll just get cold out there. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

It didn't make much sense, as I was all dressed up in my winter gear, but I agreed. I would have done anything to make my father happy. He always seemed so smart and in charge. I knew he had his bad moments. He had a mean streak and he yelled. But I had a strong sense that he held things together in my family. I had a sense he was in charge.

I was his idea, which meant that I was not allowed to disappoint him. If I disappointed him, I would be left alone with my mother, who never wanted me.

“It'll be okay, Cat,” he said. “Just wait here.”

He got out of the truck and I turned around to watch him. He went to the back and got out an ax and some rope and a big piece of plastic. He flashed a smile at me as he walked by. I watched him disappear into the woods.

A long time seemed to pass. Although it was cold, the winter sun was persistent and as it shone into the truck, I started to get hot. I tried to get out of my new winter gear but my mother had knotted the strings on the hat and buttoned my coat so securely that I felt I was trapped in some kind of puzzle. I managed to get my mittens off, but I was still hot. I got out of the truck and went to look for him.

I went into the woods feeling confident. After all, these were the same woods that my friends and I played in. I knew them like the back of my hand. I could point out the bicycle tire tracks we had made, the pretend houses we had built, the landmarks we had created with rocks and trees. But as I stumbled down the hill, everything looked unfamiliar to me. I wasn't with my friends anymore and suddenly the woods looked dense and scary. The air outside was much colder than it had been in the truck, and I regretted taking off my mittens. My fingers were white with cold and every branch I touched stung them.

I thought of Hansel and Gretel walking through the woods, leaving bread crumbs. Suddenly I wasn't sure I could find my way back to the truck. I had been sure I'd see my father right away, but all I saw were tree trunks and I heard nothing but hollow sounds, the leaves shivering, the few remaining winter birds making desperate chirps.