Noah's Wife (18 page)

W
as it wrong of Noah's wife to leave that town the way she did?

In the moment, she felt she had no choice. When Mauro surged into her living room, when he seized her elbow and brought her running out into the night to find Noah unconscious in the passenger seat of the truck, his head falling limply against the window, his clothing soaked, the skin on his face sagging and gray—well, her heart sank to her toes and ever since then her chest has felt so empty that she has found herself believing that she must have left it there, glistening on the gravel driveway in the rain.

Her husband needed help, and so she sought the only help she knew. But Dr. Yu insists that there is nothing she can do, her tone growing terser and more distant every time Noah's wife
asks for her advice. Noah, meanwhile, has not left the living room since she brought him home from church the afternoon before. He alternates between napping in front of the television and paging through Dr. Yu's old textbooks, marveling over the intricacy of the organs and telling his wife that there is nothing he can do but wait for his next call. The elders will find a place for him, he is convinced; until then, he and she must bide their time.

“Please don't worry so, my love,” he tells her when she wakes at dawn, his gaze unnaturally bright and his beard wild and unkempt. “This, too, shall pass.”

For the first time since she's known him, his words ring hollow in her ears. She pauses, waiting for him to say something more meaningful, but he doesn't look up again. That's it? she wants to know, her exasperation increasing. She is tired of listening for calls, tired of waiting for a voice from on high to declare where they will go and what they will do. What if there
is
no voice on high? What if they are waiting for a call that will never come? Who will make the decisions then?

She cannot help but wonder what Mrs. McGinn would do.

Before the thought has fully formed in her mind, she is already out the door, across the yard, and turning her key in the ignition of their car. If Noah won't take action, someone else should, she mutters, her knuckles white around the steering wheel. She will demand some answers—that's what she will do. If the problem is that God is no longer speaking to Noah, then
Noah's wife will simply have to go and speak to Noah's God on his behalf.

Once she arrives at the church, she parks at the same curb where she parked yesterday. She cuts over the lawn and holds her breath as she crosses the threshold. It is still early morning, and inside the building is empty and cool. Her footsteps resound against the stone as she hurries down the aisle to the altar and slides into her old familiar pew, setting down her handbag and bowing her dark head in prayer.

At first, when nothing comes to her, she worries that she must not be doing it correctly; the truth is that she has never tried to pray on her own. She had always assumed that it would be enough to follow Noah, that she could absorb his light and faith simply by being near him. She loved the ritual, liked knowing exactly what would come next. She felt reassured by the fact that in the church her path was predetermined, that everything she said and did fulfilled a certain purpose—even if she didn't fully understand what that purpose was. But now when she knits her brow and tries to picture God, she can see nothing but human portraits: Mauro's loose brown jowls, Leesl's pinched expression. The faces of the townspeople tick through her mind like snapshots, each one of their gazes more piercing than the last.

“Excuse me,” says a voice beside her, banishing the procession from her thoughts. “Aren't you Noah's wife?”

Her head jerks up with a start. “I am,” she says. If for half a second (despite her better judgment) she mistook the voice to be
the voice of God, the thought evaporates when she sees the warm human form beside her. She widens her eyes, recognizing the head elder. “Yes, I'm Noah's wife.”

“I thought so.” The elder leans back into her pew, his robes draping full over his clothes and his hands clasped in his lap. For a few minutes the two of them sit side by side in silence. Finally the elder says: “I don't think I've ever seen you here without your husband.”

Noah's wife nods. “This is the first time.”

“Ah,” he says, and nothing more.

She tries to interpret his silence. Is he waiting for her to say something else? If she confided in him, would he know how to help her husband? But the elder interrupts her thoughts before she can compose a question.

“Would you consider yourself a believer?” he says abruptly.

She is taken aback. To believe or not to believe—that has never been her role.

“My husband believes,” she says automatically, and at this the elder raises his eyebrows.

“Does he?” he says. He smiles without showing his teeth. “Come now. You must know as well as I do that he's not the man he was. I don't think I've ever seen a person so changed as he is, in such a brief span of time. Something happened to him in that town: he lost the grace of God. Anyone can see that.”

She stiffens. “No, he didn't.”

“Yes, he did. Although—” Here the elder pauses, as if deep in thought. “He might have been lost before he went. Why else
would he have left here in the first place, when we counseled him against it?”

“Counseled him against it?” she repeats.

The elder shakes his head. “We asked about you,” he tells her. “We told Noah—think of your wife, think of your family. But he insisted that this was the right decision.” The elder lets this sink in. “Listen,” he says after another minute has passed. “We can't in good conscience send him to another church, given his condition. He needs to spend some time away.”

“There's nothing wrong with him,” insists Noah's wife, weakly. She thinks of her husband where she left him on the sofa, his clothes disheveled and his hair unwashed, and knows that this is not the truth. “Maybe he's not as confident as he used to be, but—”

“That's the crux of it exactly,” agrees the elder, rising to his feet. “It is only natural to doubt, but Noah needs to learn to conquer it. Right now, he's simply giving in to it.”

The elder inclines his head and then he leaves her there, reeling. There can be no praying after this. Once he has gone, she stands, too, and stumbles up the aisle. In her agitation she reaches for the first door she sees, which is not the one she entered by. Instead of stepping out onto the front lawn, she emerges into the light at the far end of a cemetery, one that begins at the church and sprawls a mile or two down in the direction of the ocean. Noah told her the first time he brought her to the church that this cemetery was one of the largest in the area; this is where most of the city comes to bury their dead.

Copper-colored sunbeams lean against headstones. The grass is soft and spiked, and here and there a tree sends gnarled, branching shadows toward the tombs. The sun is only partly up the sky but already it promises to be a warm and heavy day, the air thick with the heat and humidity of the bay. Noah's wife wanders among the rows of stones with no sense of where she is headed. She does not want to go home to Noah; she cannot go back into the church. She remembers the last cemetery she was in, the one on the hill in the rain when she stood beside Noah and heard him promise that everything would be all right. How appalled she had been when the townspeople had not believed him! Can she blame them now for their doubt?

There are other mourners, here and there. A woman with a hawklike face hurries down one row with a parasol to shield herself from the sun; three aisles over, two men with canes and bowler hats murmur in low voices. As Noah's wife passes a mother and a little girl, the child throws her hands over her eyes and suddenly bursts out crying. Noah's wife looks for what it was that could have scared her, but there is nothing frightening in sight.

“Some people are afraid of cemeteries,” says a squat and mustached man standing a few feet away from her. He indicates the girl and shrugs. “But what is there to be afraid of here? The worst has already happened. You've already lost someone.”

Noah's wife glances at the stone that he is standing in front of. The man sees her read the dates, watches the numbers tick
across her face. He is already prepared with his answer when her head snaps back in surprise.

“Our son,” he says. “Sixteen. Car accident.”

Noah's wife is shaken. She remembers the night the police cars appeared at her front door, blue lights flashing through the living room windows, bearing the news that her mother had been killed. “I'm so sorry,” she says, the words feeling painfully inadequate.

But what else is there to say? She thinks of those first few weeks after her mother was gone, remembers the shower of cards and phone calls, the warbling cry of the doorbell and the front porch crowded—or so it seemed—with sympathetic faces drifting above black coats. It unsettled her then, as it also did when her sister disappeared, to realize that someone could slip from her life so quickly, so fully. Since then, she has made a point of holding on more tightly to the people she loves.

The man bends over the grave, ducking his head so that his expression is hidden. “Yes,” his voice husky. He lays a spray of drooping lilies over the tomb. “Well. What can you do? I come and see him every morning.”

Noah's wife hesitates. “My mother,” she says after a moment, “died in a crash when I was young. But after she was gone, I couldn't bear to go to the cemetery to see her. I know I should have. But the reminder was too much.”

“Not everyone grieves the same way,” says the man with a shrug. “My wife doesn't come here either. We've got a friend who
recently lost his wife, maybe a few months ago—I've thought about asking if he wants to join me here, but I don't think he has it in him. Instead he seems to cope in his own peculiar way—by doing magic, of all things.” The man laughs, low and kind.

“How does your wife grieve?” asks Noah's wife.

“Nancy?” says the man. For a moment he considers. “She grieves by trying to live more loudly, more boldly than before. She doesn't know how else to do it. I think that if you asked her, she'd tell you that this is what it means to make the best of things. Or she'd tell you to mind your own damn business. It's hard to say.”

He grins, weakly, his eyelids twitching. Noah's wife attempts a smile in return.

“What about you?” she asks, hoping she is not out of line. She is so grateful to have someone to talk to. “Do you think she's making the best of things?”

The man tilts his head toward the grave. “Sometimes there isn't any way to make the best of things,” he says. “And I think that to insist that there is—that everything happens for a reason, et cetera—well, oftentimes that's nothing but a good-looking lie.”

His expression is pained. He pauses and glances in the direction of another mourner, her blond head bowed over a plot near the corner. “But that makes me sound as if I'm criticizing Nancy,” he says, “which is absolutely the last thing I want to do. I believe in Nancy, and I even believe in those good-looking
lies. Sometimes that's what we need to tell ourselves in order to get by. If some people want to believe that this is all part of some great plan that's meant to make us stronger, well, I won't stop them. I'm not going to stand here and say I know best just because I think I see all the bad that could and does happen, just because I recognize the imminence of death and darkness and I'm afraid. It's not like I've got it all figured out, either.”

Something about his tone—the sympathy, the intelligence, the tranquillity—reminds Noah's wife of her husband as he used to be, before they went into the hills to that sad little town. And yet how can this man be so calm in his uncertainty? How can he stand in front of her and tell her that he has no idea why things like this happen without admitting that this perspective has no hope?

“But if you don't believe in a greater plan,” she says carefully, “and if you don't believe that everything happens for a reason—then what keeps you going?”

The man stares at her. Perhaps she should not have asked the question; maybe the subject is too serious to discuss with a stranger. Then again, when one makes an acquaintance in the cemetery, what else would one talk about besides death?

“What do you mean, what keeps me going?” he asks.

She shrugs. She thinks of Noah, remembering the dead weight of him on her arm as she led him out of the church two days before. “If you don't believe that there's some purpose behind all this,” she says slowly, “and if you don't believe that
there is some force for good at work, even in times of hardship or sorrow—then how can you not feel despair?”

“Well, I suppose it's because I believe in Nancy,” the man says simply. “With Joseph gone, I believe that she and I have got to take care of each other.”

“So it's an obligation,” says Noah's wife, her tone as hollow as her husband's. “That's what keeps you going.”

The man raises his eyebrows. “It's love,” he replies. “But if you want to call it that, sure. A reciprocal obligation. Fine. But I don't resent her for it. To tell you the truth, I'm glad about it, I'm glad I've got her as my responsibility. What would I do without her? If there's one thing I've come to learn after thirty-odd years of marriage, it's that a man's life is not his own. We all belong to someone else, in one way or another. There's all kinds of people who have shaped us, made us who we are—not just the people we keep close to us, but also tens and hundreds of other people we don't even remember, strangers we stood behind in line and talked to for a minute. Do you know what I'm saying? I'm saying that if I didn't crawl into a hole and die on the day of Joseph's funeral, it's because I believe that I owe something to each of those people, to all of them, and to Nancy most of all.”