Noah's Wife (19 page)

The morning sun is growing more formidable by the minute. Noah's wife closes her eyes against the glare, sees once again a host of colored umbrellas. Her soul aches for the old faith she had in Noah, the certainty that he could not lead her astray.

“You know,” says the man, still musing, “for a long time after the accident I asked myself something similar to what you've
been getting at just now. How is it that a man can carry on after something like this? A father's duty is to protect his family from criminals and thugs and truck drivers who fall asleep at the wheel.” His voice is soft and musing, his expression introspective. Noah's wife feels as though he has forgotten she is there. “For those first few months, I was a little ashamed of myself—ashamed that I was able to roll out of bed and stand up every morning, to carry on with the business of living when my only son had descended among the dead. The grief struck me hard, but I used to wish that it had struck even harder. I wanted it to knock me out, flat unconscious, so that I wouldn't have to think about it anymore.” He sighs, shakes his head, seems to come back to himself. “But there was Nancy to consider. Always Nancy.”

She nods in perfect comprehension. How astonished she had been to discover that Noah loved her—how thankful to know that she would never have to be alone again. She chastises herself for doubting him. Her first love and her first duty are to her husband. Is that not what marriage means?

The man smiles at her and turns away from the grave. “I'm sorry,” he says. “You don't even know me, and here I am pouring out my soul to you.” He sighs. “This place tends to have that effect on me. I don't like the quiet here, and so I can't stop talking.”

Noah's wife looks down at the stone, wonders where in this sprawling field lies Dr. Yu's mother. Would Dr. Yu come here, if Noah's wife asked her to? Noah's wife misses her friend as
much as she misses her husband—but then, this is the difficulty of loving people who are so much greater than she is, she reminds herself severely. This is what comes of loving people who dream bigger than she herself has ever dared to, who are determined to save lives and souls and bear the weight of so many earthly troubles on their shoulders.

“My friend,” says Noah's wife, “who lost her mother—I think she doesn't come because she blames herself.” Her eyes fill quickly, unexpectedly, and the stone blurs at her feet. “It's not her fault. She always thought she could take care of the whole world.”

The man nods, his expression grim. “No one ought to try and take that on,” he says. “I don't think it's anybody's job to battle against sadness and death and grief—all the forces of darkness, if you will. Everyone who comes to this place, we come because we've lost what we loved. The darkness is already here. After a while you stop running from it. You find something else to love, something worth holding on to, and you don't let go of it.”

Noah's wife considers him, searching desperately for something to say. “This, too, shall pass,” she finally murmurs, echoing her husband. She wanted words of consolation, and to her surprise these seem to do the trick. The man has already turned to go, but when she speaks he pauses to gaze at her over his shoulder. “Indeed it will,” he promises. “Somehow it always does.”

M
rs. McGinn's daughter says farewell to the penguins before she goes.

Her suitcase safely stowed in the trunk, she eases the family's old station wagon out of the garage and onto the street. Her mother walks everywhere, and her stepfather drives anything and everything but this. She doesn't think they'll miss it.

The rain falls fast and black to the windshield and she flicks on the wipers and the low beams as she splashes through the sleeping town. The lights are off in most houses and the car passes unnoticed from lamppost to lamppost, sliding through the water that rushes hushed and jeweled through the streets. She pulls to the curb outside the diner, hurries around to the back with her keys in her hand. Her feet are snug in her boots but she can hear the water on the floor as she walks through the darkened kitchen to the cooler. For a moment she feels a pang
of alarm, followed by a hard roar of guilt. But what would she do if she stayed here? she asks herself angrily. Whatever the fate of their relationship will be after she leaves, she maintains a dogged faith in her mother's intelligence and her strength, in her ability to overcome any obstacle in her path. She is certain that her mother will know how to deal with the flood in the diner.

As for herself, she steps gingerly until she reaches the door to the cooler, and then she yanks it open and swings herself inside. The light goes on automatically and she pauses for a moment in its fluorescent glare, looking down at the penguins who come waddling out from their nesting places in the shadows. They blink in the light, peering up at her in pairs. That is what she has always loved about the penguins: their fairy-tale monogamy. To her, they stand for loyalty.

“Don't look at me like that,” she tells them in the stern tone she learned from her mother. “You don't understand. I don't have a choice.”

She can hear the voice of her mother in her mind as clearly as if the woman were standing right beside her. “You always have a choice, Angela Rose. We're not animals.”

But aren't we? her daughter would like to know. What makes us so different from them? She remembers something her fiancé once told her about the penguins in the wild, something about their long and arduous trek across the snowy Antarctic to lay their eggs and feed their chicks. She would like to think that she is doing exactly the same thing, in human terms: going
elsewhere to have her child, since she certainly will not raise it here in the eternal rain, where there is no sun and no hope but only the miles and miles of mud. What kind of mother do these penguins take her for?

“Besides—there was a plan,” she informs them. “We had a plan. I told Adam that I wouldn't stay in this town, and he promised that he would get out of here with me. I'm not the one who changed my mind about our life together—it was him.” She pictures her fiancé as she last saw him, lounging in one of the booths of the diner late last night with the red fox nestled on the cracked vinyl seat beside him. The zookeeper was trying to feed the fox frozen berries and earthworms from his fingers. He had glanced up at Angela Rose as she passed, his face coarse and handsome in the shadows. His expression was concerned, although when he looked at her the taut lines softened. “The little guy won't eat,” he told her. “Not a bite since the minister's wife has been gone. She should have thought of that before she left him.”

She twists the ring around her finger—his grandmother's. He had proposed to her outside the abandoned movie theater where they had been on their first date, had gotten down on one knee and promised never to leave her. He knew that was important to her, knew she craved stability just as much as she craved culture and adventure and escape. It was paradoxical, yes, but he understood without her having to explain it.

The penguins coo at her, softly but insistently. “Of course I still love him,” she says. “Lay off already, will you? It's more
complicated for us than for you. You can't always be near the people you love, you can't always live in the same cooler, or on the ice floe next door. The world doesn't work like that. If a person isn't happy where she is, maybe she shouldn't stay.”

She opens a couple of cans of crabmeat, strokes the penguins three times each on their heads and down their soft black backs, and then when she is sufficiently saddened, she turns away. The car is waiting where she left it.

The road out of town feels familiar, although it has been months since the last time she left. In high school she took jobs in the city for the summers, lived in tiny high-rise apartments where the heat was damp and thick. She ordered cheap burgers from chains along the harbor, ate dinner while walking between downtown and the water. She adored the crowds, loved living as a stranger among strangers. They didn't know her mother there. She could have been anyone.

At one end of town, the main road slopes down to the river and the zoo, which by now must be completely underwater. At the other end it loops up and out toward the mountains and the coast, the pavement rising and falling over the hills. It is the only way in or out of town. For a moment Mrs. McGinn's daughter imagines the stars spinning behind clouds that are darker than she's ever seen them before, draped black and full across the pointed tops of pine trees. Once she's on the road she pays little attention to where she is going, driving almost by instinct, the car pulling her forward. The wind whistles past the windows and the rain drums against the glass. She turns up
the volume on the radio, but finds her old station drowned in static. She tries another station, and another, but there is only white noise.

The zookeeper used to take her on weekends away to the city once every few months to see concerts. They stayed out until dawn and ate lunchtime breakfasts at crowded cafes and she knew that he tried to like it, for her, but couldn't. The city lights as seen from their hotel room simply did not capture his imagination the way they did hers; he did not thrill at the idea of a million other lives blazing just beyond their reach. She could watch the headlights on the highway for hours, entranced by the glowing splendor of the city, but he could not find in it the same beauty he found in campfires or fireflies or the gleam of a wild beast's eye in the beam of his flashlight. When the situation at the zoo went downhill, when he had to lay off his workers and cut down on the animals, he could no longer take the time to spend the weekends away with her, and although she understood, she hated to think that (at least in part) he was relieved.

What will he think of her when he discovers that she's gone?

When she sees the road vanish before her, she slams on the brakes and the car shudders into a long skid, sending her vaulting forward as a spray of water whooshes past the windows. There is a long moment afterward when she tries to calm her nerves, to stop the trembling of her fingers on the wheel, and to catch her ragged breath. Finally she shifts the car into park and opens the door.

Once she has climbed out and is standing on the ground
beside her car, it becomes clear where the missing road has gone. The front of the car is partly submerged in one end of a long blank lake whose surface is as sinister and as void as the sky. The rain continues to fall into it and the drops disturb the surface in a steady cascade that sends ripples running headlong into one another in their attempt to spread. The night is deep and the clouds are dense, and although Mrs. McGinn's daughter is certain that the other edge of the lake must exist somewhere, that the road has to rise right out of it again, she cannot see the far side. For all intents and purposes, the road is gone. She cannot pass.

For a long time she stands there in eerie calm, her shoulders hunched, staring out across an endless stretch of water. The rain beats against her brow and thrums in her ears, and for a brief moment this is all that exists, all that is left of her world: the water pouring headlong from the heavens, the white beams of her headlights slowly dying in the night, the treetops hidden behind the hills, and her growing sense of foreboding, the fear that it is no longer possible to move forward. They have waited too long.

Was it true that Noah had tried to walk upon water? She places one foot lightly forward, feels it immediately sink. She hurriedly backs up, retraces her steps, returns to the car.

She slides back into the driver's seat and pulls the door shut after her, and she would have swung the car right around and chugged resolutely home (humiliated, of course; but perhaps she could find the note before anyone else did), had the engine
not been killed by its partial submersion in the lake. When she turns the key in the ignition the engine grumbles and sputters and ultimately rejects her plea to start. She might have been angry but all her emotions are spent, and so she leans back against the headrest and closes her eyes.

“And now what?” she says aloud. Of course there is no answer.

Someone will come for her, she says to herself. Once the day begins, a delivery truck will approach from the opposite side or a townsperson will attempt to flee. She knows she won't be stuck out here for long; she has too much faith in the world for that.

She is like her mother that way, she supposes, drifting off to sleep, her arms crossed over her abdomen. She clings to the belief that she deserves something more than the small life that she has been leading, to the hope that there is something grander and better out there for her and for her child. She cannot give up on her hope because, like her mother, she simply loves too much. She loves with too much force.

D
r. Yu's father does not believe in self-pity.

He has lost as much as anyone else, but that does not mean that he will hole up in his house and sandwich himself between the cushions of his couch, eating bowl after bowl of cold cereal and staring at the flickering television screen as if that is the only light left in the world. He may be in mourning, but at least he has more sense than that.

“It is a beautiful day out there!” he shouts at the minister upon entering his daughter's living room. He throws open the blinds with a magician's flair and stands directly in the sunlight as it pours through the windows.

Noah blinks several times, raises an arm to shield his eyes. He stares with a vague sense of recognition at the leathered face before him, tucked within the hood of an oversized forest-green
sweatshirt. Dr. Yu's father wears thick spectacles, and the eyes glinting through them are clever and brown. He is shorter than Noah by a foot, and at least thirty years his senior.

“We've met before, haven't we?” asks Noah.

“Several times, Minister,” says Dr. Yu's father, extending his hand in greeting. His feet are planted far apart and his head is tilted slightly back, his stance as poised as an athlete's. “I'm Ezra. April's father.”

Dr. Yu told her father of the arrival of her unexpected houseguests when she stopped by to bring him breakfast several days before. She comes nearly every morning—insisting on it, despite his protests that he does not always need her there—as if he cannot fry an egg himself. He was eager to see her today, however, because he was curious to know how the minister and his wife were faring.

“I heard,” continues Dr. Yu's father, “that you were feeling rather down.”

The minister doesn't move. “I'm fine,” he says. “I'm waiting for my next assignment.”

Noah's tone is stoic, but his posture suggests defeat. Dr. Yu's father considers the man as if he were a piece of flotsam washed up on the shore. “You've been here a week already,” he announces frankly. “How long do you intend to wait?”

Noah shrugs. “As long as it takes, I suppose.”

For a long while Dr. Yu's father peers at the minister without saying anything. He is surprised to find that he recognizes
something of himself in this man; surprised at the swiftness and the certainty of his realization that the minister, too, has suffered loss. And yet what has he lost besides his job? And why must he wait to be given another?

“You know,” says Dr. Yu's father, helpfully, “those times I saw you before, you had so much energy. You were active. You seemed to be the kind of man who went after things, rather than waiting around to follow instructions. Couldn't you go after your next assignment that way, the way you used to?”

“I can't do what I used to do,” Noah replies, with a strange, indulgent smile. “I used to walk with God.”

Dr. Yu's father waits for more of an explanation, and when none is forthcoming, he says: “And now?”

Noah's gaze flicks up from the television again and settles on him. Dr. Yu's father is so overwhelmed by the anguish of the man's expression that he takes a step back.

“And now I don't,” says the minister.

Dr. Yu's father shakes his head. His daughter is overworked and overwhelmed enough without having to deal with houseguests who need as much care as her patients. He will not have her go to pieces—not on his watch. Last night, as he struggled to free himself from a new set of handcuffs, he made up his mind to come to her rescue. He did not know then that the minister would need rescuing, too.

“Tell you what,” he says, trying to keep his voice brisk. “I'm alone myself, most of the time. I'd be glad to have you—well—‘walk' with me.”

“Excuse me?” says Noah, looking puzzled.

“My shows down at the harbor are getting more popular every day,” says Dr. Yu's father, inventing the plan as he goes. “April doesn't like me going down there on my own, and the truth is that the work is getting to be a little more than I can handle. I could use the help. And I wouldn't mind the company, either.”

He can see the minister struggling to come up with a response. Dr. Yu's father knows that Noah doesn't really want to leave the safety of his sofa—but he also knows that a man who has spent a lifetime helping others is unlikely to refuse to do so now. As soon as Noah nods his head in acquiescence, Dr. Yu's father directs him toward the bathroom.

“Take a shower, you'll feel better,” commands the magician. “Then get dressed. You're coming with me.”

•   •   •

T
HE HARBOR IS
nearly deserted at this hour, gulls wheeling and crying over the docks. The boats rock on soft golden waves, the flags on their masts wilting without wind. Dr. Yu's father hauls a duffel bag out of his trunk and leads Noah to a gazebo set back from the water. He assures Noah that the crowds will come later.

“The families stroll through in the afternoon,” he says, ascending the steps of a creaking wooden stage and dropping the bag down on the floorboards beside him. He stands sheltered by the slats of the gazebo roof, looking over his imagined
audience and thrilling at the atmosphere of expectancy that pervades the sea of folding chairs and picnic tables. “This is the calm before the storm,” he adds.

As he transfers items from the bag to a card table he has set up in the middle of the gazebo, Dr. Yu's father explains to Noah that he has been coming to the harbor every day for several weeks now. At first his intention was only to practice his tricks with fire away from his house and his neighbors, but once he noticed that passersby were stopping to watch him, that children were asking for rabbits and flames, he settled into a routine and began putting on three performances a day. His presence at the harbor has become important to his fans.

But what a godsend it will be, he reflects, to have Noah here for a few days: a pliant, unemployed houseguest who should feel guilty enough about imposing on his daughter that he will have to agree to a favor. If he remains as mute, as shadowy onstage as he is wandering through the chairs right now, the audience will hardly see that he is there. Perhaps he could help Dr. Yu's father rig up a better curtain than the ragged quilt he has hanging off the front of the gazebo now—but for the moment he pushes it aside to reveal the collection of objects he has finished arranging on the card table before him.

“Pay attention, Minister! Here is the secret of the coffin escape,” he calls across the empty rows, pointing to an oversized rectangular box he has leaning against one of the wooden posts. Maybe he could set Noah to the task of locating a more
realistic coffin, as well. “It's the way that all the great magicians used to do it. You simply remove these long screws, here, that hold the bottom of the coffin to the sides. You replace them with this shorter kind of screw so that all you need to do when you're inside is to push as hard as you can against the top. The sides and the lid should lift up and away from the bottom, since they're no longer well secured. And that's it! Voilà! You're out.”

Noah considers the box. “You don't think it's a little macabre, to have a coffin trick at all?” he says. “Couldn't you escape from something else?”

“Minister!” says Dr. Yu's father with a chuckle. “I wouldn't have expected you, of all people, to be susceptible to superstition. I suppose you're not going to like it when I tell you about the dirt I plan to scatter alongside it, either.”

“Why would you do that?” asks Noah, resignedly.

“For effect! A successful magic show is like a good dinner party: it's all in the presentation. Speaking of which, I'm going to need your help with some of this. Perhaps I could send you out later to pick up the rabbits?”

Noah remains silent, which Dr. Yu's father takes as an affirmation. He will tell the minister later about the assortment of other animals to be collected: a crateful of birds, a chicken, seven white mice, two snakes, and two kittens.

“You will make a wonderful assistant!” exclaims Dr. Yu's father encouragingly. “I can tell already.”

“An assistant?” repeats Noah.

“Of course! Why do you think I brought you all the way out here?”

“I don't know,” says Noah. He blinks into the light. “I don't think my wife—”

“She wants what's best for you,” insists Dr. Yu's father, remembering what his daughter has told him about her best friend's unswerving commitment to her husband. “We all do. And right now, you need something to keep you busy while you're waiting. You need a little fresh air. Why don't you come join me here in the gazebo, and I'll show you some of the tricks I've got up my sleeve for the show.”

Noah seems disconcerted, but he obeys. What excuse does he have not to? He rises from his picnic table and then climbs the steps onto the battered wooden planks. As he walks over to join Dr. Yu's father, one of his footsteps rings hollow.

“Be careful,” says Dr. Yu's father. “Not every board is as sound as it should be. All right, here is one of the tricks that—as my assistant—you'll need to know very well. I'll ask for a white handkerchief from someone in the audience, and as I'm coming back up on the stage, I'll exchange it for this other handkerchief I'll have in my coat pocket. I'll call for you to bring a candle, but I don't want you to come. That way I'll have to come looking for you, which allows me a moment away from the stage to secretly hand you the first handkerchief. The audience will hear me instruct you again to bring a candle, which you finally will do, after concealing that handkerchief in a hollow space in the candlestick specifically designed for this trick. When I cut up
the substitute handkerchief, I'll stuff the pieces in my ‘magic pistol' and shoot at the candle, telling everyone that this way the cloth will ‘pass through' the flame to become whole again. When we break the stick, there it will be, completely restored. And voilà!”

While he speaks, Dr. Yu's father picks up the objects in question and places them in Noah's hands for examination. When the explanation of the trick is over, Noah sets them down again on the white tablecloth. One of its corners looks as though it has been seared.

“Oh, just a little accident,” says Dr. Yu's father. “The flame got away from me while I was practicing. Occupational hazard, I suppose!”

Finding Noah to be insufficiently impressed by the handkerchief trick, Dr. Yu's father tries a different tactic. He holds up a classic black top hat (a little frayed around the edges) and, without explaining what he intends to do, he reaches inside and pulls out an egg. He tilts the hat forward over the stage, turning it upside down to prove that it is empty, and when he flips it back up he plunges his hand again inside and retrieves a second egg from the folds. On the third try he finds a quarter, which he places into Noah's hand with a flourish and a bow.

This time Noah shows more curiosity. Dr. Yu's father takes it as a good sign when the minister requests an explanation, and so he teaches Noah how to palm a coin, a card, an egg. To the audience it looks as though the object appears from nowhere, but in reality it is already in the magician's hand by the time he
reaches into the hat. The success of the effect is in the act of concealment, not the revelation.

Noah has understood since he was a child that things like magic hats and vanishing tricks are only make-believe, and yet the explanation of the mechanics behind the illusion seems to deflate him once more. Dr. Yu's father sees the cloud return to the minister's face.

“Something wrong?” he asks.

“No,” says Noah. “But I think I preferred magic when I didn't know the secrets.”

Dr. Yu's father nods and takes a few steps to the right, gently rests his hand upon the coffin. For a moment he is silent, reflecting. “What people want from a magic show,” he finally says aloud, “is the same thing they want from a movie, or a book. They want that suspension of disbelief. They want to believe that the world could be different from what it is, that ordinary objects could become extraordinary at the snap of their fingers if only they knew the right words. That's the whole point of the illusion.”

Noah moves over to the table, picks up a coin and tries to palm it. It immediately falls from his hand and rolls beneath the table, a momentary flash in the shadows.

“I thought I knew the right words once,” Noah says. “But either I've lost them somewhere along the way, or they never existed at all.”

Dr. Yu's father studies him in silence, truly sympathetic for the first time today. “Oh, I don't know, Minister,” he says softly.
“I think it's too soon to be giving up already. You'd be surprised at the kind of things that can be made to reappear. Perhaps the only thing you're missing is a little more practice.”

He takes the black top hat and tosses it to the minister, who instinctively reaches out to catch it.