The Noah Confessions (9 page)

I saw some bushes shaking in the distance. I followed the shaking.

I was relieved because I knew the shaking bushes meant a person was around. It had to be my father. He had found a tree and was chopping it down. I could help.

“Daddy,” I said.

No answer.

“Daddy,” I yelled.

Still, no answer. I moved through the brush. I felt briars catching my clothes.

I came into a clearing.

I saw my father and I was relieved. I had found him.

There he was. He was yards away from me. I saw his dark coat and his dark cap and his work gloves.

The ax and the rope and the bag were on the ground beside him.

I saw him wrestling a tree. He was struggling with it. He was choking it, as if the tree could fight back.

But it wasn't a tree.

It was Jackie.

I stood and I stared and I tried to make sense of it.

We went to get a Christmas tree.

His hands were around her throat.

I thought, Is she helping us get the tree?

I thought, Is he joking? Are they kidding around?

She saw me. Her arm reached out. The birds were around it. They danced. It was like she was trying to hold my hand. I reached toward her, too, but nothing happened.

She looked at me, as if to say “Save me.”

He was killing her.

The birds. The birds.

Then my father saw me.

I looked at him and he looked at me.

The birds on her wrist made a singing noise.

I turned and ran.

I ran up the hill as fast as I could. The mud made a slurping sound underneath my feet. The briars grabbed at me. Something in my head told me to go back, and something else in my head said, Run as fast as you can. I couldn't run fast. A limb caught my hat and pulled it off. I grabbed it back and then I kept running.

I thought I was next.

I ran until I could see the truck at the edge of the woods. Then I felt some force around my waist. My father had reached me. He picked me up.

“I told you to stay in the truck,” he said.

“I…I was hot.”

“When are you going to learn?” he asked me.

“I don't know.”

“Do what I tell you to do.”

“I'm going to the truck.”

“No,” he said.

He set me down on the ground and I looked at him. Sweat was trickling down his face. He wiped it away, still wearing his work gloves.

He sighed and looked to the sky.

He said, “It's too late. You have to help me now.”

“I'll help you,” I said.

He said, “You don't understand.”

I knew I didn't understand. But I didn't know what to say.

This was my father. This was Jackie. They had some secret understanding. I had interfered.

I don't know what happened next. Maybe we stood next to the edge of the woods for a while, talking.

Imagine my whole world crashing down. I thought back to my mother, dressing me in my new winter wear. I thought back to meeting Jackie, to her promising me the bird bracelet.

I couldn't stop crying.

He calmed me down somehow. He said a million things, probably. He said, “Your mother is crazy and your sister is sick and you were my idea.” He said, “Trust me, don't worry, this is what we have to do.”

He said, “Come back here with me.”

And I knew nothing then of history. He was just my father.

Everything that happened next is unclear.

I think we walked back to where I saw him wrestling with a tree. I think her body was lying there. I think she was faceup to the cold winter sun and she looked just like I remembered her, except that her face was frozen in a stunned expression.

I think he said, “She was not a good person.”

I think I abandoned my idea of her. I think I chose my father in that moment.

She was lifeless. We dragged her body into the truck. Then we drove the truck to another part of the forest. He was quiet the whole time. I made a decision not to speak. Every now and then I glanced at her and I saw the bird bracelet dangling. I wanted to touch it but didn't.

I saw her red hair spilling across her chest and I wanted to touch that, too, but I didn't move.

After we parked again, I helped him take her out of the car. We carried her into the woods. We approached an abandoned well—they were all over and I had been warned against playing near them. I saw the well and I was scared because he had done such a good job of warning me away from such a place. I saw the disorganized pieces of lumber in the middle of the woods and I knew that a dark, forever place lay beneath them.

I think this really happened because I remember holding her by the wrist. I remember looking at the bird bracelet.

We dragged her toward the well and she got stuck on some rocks and a shoe came off. I don't know what happened then. The bracelet was still digging into my palm. I unhooked it and slipped it into my pocket.

It seemed like a lot of time passed.

He told me to go sit on a rock and watch for intruders. I did that. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I had played enough in the woods to know that no grown-ups ever came there.

When it was taking too long I walked back to the well. I saw him leaning over it and he stood up and said, “What did I tell you to do?”

I went back to the rock and watched. No one came.

Finally he came and found me. He looked tired. He touched my hair. He said, “Hey, are you okay?”

I didn't know what to say.

He said, “Let's go home. You need a snack or something.”

Then we drove back home.

Right before we pulled up at the house, he turned to me and said, “What's good about you and me is that we have our own language. Right? We understand each other. You're my idea.”

I can't remember what I said.

My mother met us outside. “What have you been doing?” she asked. “Where's the tree?”

“We couldn't find a good tree,” he said.

“What do you mean you couldn't find a tree?” she asked.

“I think we might have to go to a lot this year,” he said, dusting off the arms of his jacket.

“But you were gone so long,” my mother said.

“We were looking. There was nothing.”

My mother turned her eyes on me. She was beautiful and nervous. Her eyes were black and quick. There was nowhere to hide.

I looked at my father.

“What happened to her?” she asked, looking at me and my frayed clothing.

I already couldn't remember. I had no idea that my clothes were torn and dirty. My mittens were gone, my pixie hat was chewed up, my winter coat was full of briar scratches. I just stared at my mother.

My father said, “We were in the woods. We were looking. Give us a break.”

That night he came to my room and read me the Bible passage in which God asks Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac. He read the passage to me and explained that sometimes it's okay for parents to kill their children.

After he left, I lay in bed and held the bracelet and I talked to Jackie.

When I woke up the next morning, I was sure it had all been a dream.

A week later, there was a search party. The gossip was that Jackie had run away with her no-good motorcycle-riding boyfriend. But the boyfriend showed up, all concerned about her absence. So the search party took place. While my parents were searching in the woods for her, I was in the basement with her sisters, Dana and Sheryl. Jackie was gone and no one knew why, but I knew why. I sat in the basement and knew why.

While I was playing cards, you and your brother came into the room. I know you don't remember this. And it took me a long time to remember it, too, but now I'm certain. Your brother was taller and his hair and eyes were lighter, and he had this confident way about him. You were shorter and quieter and you sort of hung back. I remember our eyes connecting.

Someone in the room asked who you were and no one had an immediate answer. We all knew you didn't live in Union Grade.

Then someone said, “They're her cousins.”

Someone else said, “She doesn't have cousins.”

Someone else said, “That's just what I heard.”

I didn't pay that much attention to you. I'll be honest about that. I mainly registered your face because you were a stranger to our town. I didn't encounter that many strangers. It took me a long time to make the connection. I didn't make it the first day I saw you again, this fall, at Union Grade High. I didn't make it the second or the third time. It was when people started to gossip and I heard the story. I remembered being in that basement and I remembered seeing you and it all fell into place.

But that day in the basement of Jackie's house, I wasn't thinking about you. I was thinking of the bird bracelet. I knew it was my one link to what was happening and I was worried about someone finding it.

I had put it behind a loose board in my closet, where I'm currently hiding this letter in between writing it. It's all I have left of her, and all I really have of my experience that night. Whenever I start to think it didn't happen, I take the bracelet out and hold it.

Holding it has been like holding my own sanity.

Lately, seeing you has reminded me of my sanity all over again. I know it happened just as I remember it.

For a lot of years after that, I woke up in the middle of the night, scared to death and longing to answer for something I had done. Sometimes I honestly couldn't remember what it was. But most times I remembered as if I were watching the movie and it was all happening again.

I became a criminal that day in the woods.

I am telling you now so you won't make the mistake of falling in love with me.

This is who I am.

Do you still want to date me? I didn't think so.

So just stop staring at me in English class and trying to talk to me and hoping to get to know me.

If you even think about loving me, remember who I am. I'm telling you for your own good. My own good is a thing of the past. It's a kind of slight memory I have, of smelling breakfast when I wake up and thinking I'll go down and greet my family and they will be all good and normal. That's over for me.

No reason it should be over for you.

• 2 •

I sat at the kitchen table in the dark.

The manuscript was in front of me.

It was two o'clock in the morning.

I stared at the letter. I stared at the bird bracelet sitting next to it. I was thinking of lighting the paper on fire and throwing the bracelet on top. I didn't know what to do. So far that was my only idea.

Then I had another idea. I decided to light a candle. Then I took a framed picture of my mother that usually sat on the coffee table and I put it next to the manuscript and the bracelet, and the whole thing looked like a sacrifice of some kind, ready to make its way toward heaven, where my mother may or may not have been, depending on what you believe or I believed or the president believed or the latest big celebrity believed on any given day.

Me, I was admitting to total confusion. I was giving in to it.

And I was sitting next to this homemade halfhearted offering and I wasn't moving. I was just staring.

My grandfather was a murderer. He killed a girl with his bare hands. My mother saw it. She never told anyone. Except Noah.

Then she died.

This would make a nice essay on my college application.

Or a nice opening paragraph on my first date.

I knew all about DNA. They taught it in school. Made a big deal of it. You are your DNA. Genetic memory.

The stairs creaked.

My father came downstairs, as I knew he would.

He was wearing his pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt and his hair was all over the place and his reading glasses were far down his nose and he looked concerned.

“Lynnie?” he said.

“Jaqueline,” I answered.

He sighed and sat across the table from me and ran his fingers through his hair.

“You're not going to insist on being called that, are you?”

“Why? Would it bother you?”

“I'm too old to call you another name.”

“Is that it?”

“You know it isn't. Lynne is what your mother and I agreed to call you. It was our agreement.”

“It's my name.”

“Yes, it is.”

I waited for a long moment, letting the time settle down on him like ash, and I enjoyed his discomfort. I was mad at him and I wanted him to know why before I said it.

“When were you going to tell me the truth?”

He seemed surprised. “I did. By giving you the letter. And the bracelet. You weren't ready before.”

“That's not what I'm talking about.”

He stared at me. I took a breath and wondered if I should bring the whole house down now or save it for later, for when I needed something. But I realized that I was done with all the mystery and the game playing and the whole sorry history of not knowing and not talking about it.

“You're Noah, aren't you?”

He took his glasses off and folded them and then he clasped his fingers and put them under his chin.

“Yes, I am.”

I shook my head and looked away. I felt in control. The next move was mine. And the next and the next. I sat there wondering what to do with all that power. He sat across from me, my strong father with all the answers, and he didn't know what to do.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why did she call you that?”

This question actually made him smile and then my eyes met his and he wanted me to smile with him and I refused.

He said, “When I first moved there, nobody knew my name. I was shy and I didn't make friends right away. I stared at your mother a lot. The first time I saw her I was smitten. I wanted to talk to her but I didn't know how. She noticed it right away. She wanted a name for me but she didn't know how to ask. So she decided my name was Noah. Because I had this long hair, like someone from the Bible, she said, and because girls followed me around in twos, like animals following Noah to the ark.”

I didn't respond. I just listened.

His mind was wandering, anyway. I wondered if he even knew I was there anymore.

“She thought I didn't know about the nickname but I did. I liked it. Noah seemed like a much more interesting name than John. Noah sounded like a rock star or a private-school boy or someone who was going places. I just let it happen.”

I waited.

He smiled some more. He said, “Your mother. She was so beautiful. Not in a way that was trying, you see. She didn't wear makeup, and her hair just hung down to her waist, parted in the middle, and she had these great eyes and she was always wearing jeans. But it was her smile, really. It lit up her whole face. Your mother had a way of making me feel that everything was going to be fine. Later, when I knew the whole story, I was so surprised by that. She had lived through all this trouble. But she still believed the world was a good place to be and there was something to hope for. No reason for her to think that. It was something that was in her.”

I gave that a moment to sink in. I always wanted to hear about my mother. But I was mad at him and I didn't want to make him feel better by being entertained.

After a respectable amount of time had passed, I asked, “Who was Jackie to you?”

He wasn't surprised by the question.

“She was my cousin.”

“Did you know her?”

He shook his head.

“I had heard about her for years, of course. After the accident. That's what we called it in my family. I'm not sure why. There was never an accident. My mother always understood that. There was a disappearance. An incident. But calling it that left things so wide open. Calling it an accident meant that it was over. My father insisted on it. He wanted my mother to understand it was over.”

I waited.

He looked at me. “Wait, I want to be honest. I did know her. Apparently I met her on several occasions. Christmases and family reunions. But I was much younger. Six or seven years younger. I don't remember her at all. Your mother knew her much better.”

I waited for more. I saw him shifting in his chair. He wanted to go back to bed.

Still I waited.

He said, “Lynne, I'm glad you know all this. I think I did the right thing. Sometimes it's hard for me to know. I need guidance from your mother but I don't have that anymore. So I'm just winging it. The hard part is over now, though. You've read the letter. I've been waiting for that moment my whole adult life. Now I think we can move forward and get things accomplished.”

“What things?”

He shrugged. “It's going to be the truth from now on.”

“Oh, really, is that how it's going to be?”

He nodded. He stood. He pushed his chair in.

“We should go to bed. It's late.”

I shook my head at him.

“I want to hear the rest.”

My father looked at me, completely caught in the net, the battle plan unraveling in front of him.

“It's late, Lynnie.”

“You gave me the letter. You can't leave me alone with it now. You think I'm going to go upstairs and set my alarm and go to bed and get up for school as usual?”

I could see he did think that. Or more accurately, he hadn't thought past this point.

“Lynnie, we have obligations.”

“You wanted me to read the letter. I've read it. Now I have some questions, Dad. And we'll stay up all night if we have to.”

My father was not the kind of man you could boss around. I saw his shoulders hunching up and his facial features collecting in the middle. But I wasn't afraid. I hadn't asked for the letter. Or the bracelet. I had asked for a car.

I could see his resolve was weakening and I waited. He tried once again.

He said, “This could take all night.”

“Okay,” I said.

He thought about it and sat back down. The candle was flickering between us and the letter was between us and we had reached a crossroads. He had always known this day was coming and I had never known. But now I did and I had to know more.

So he began talking. He told me the story. Not as he was—a grown man, a widower, with a teenage daughter and a job in a law firm and a house and a car and a college fund and obligations, as he put it, and places to be and people to see and a whole made-up life to attend to. He told me the story as he experienced it then. Just a boy, a little younger than me, who moved to a small town and met a pretty girl with long hair parted in the middle and a smile he couldn't forget. It was there that he met his past and his future and it all came together and fell apart and eventually turned into me.