The Noah Confessions (2 page)

• 3 •

Jen Connor was sitting under a tree, ignoring everyone and being ignored, flipping through a magazine. I didn't know her well. At Hillsboro she was considered an underachiever, one of those rare girls who didn't care about her grades or if she got into any college, let alone an Ivy League. She was a surf bum. One of those people who made it look as if surfers never thought about anything but water and wind.

My father and I lived in the Palisades, in the hills staring down at the ocean, and I could see them floating out there like sea mammals. When my mother was alive she would take me for walks on the beach and we'd stop and sit on the sand and watch them catching waves. She rooted for them and clapped and yelled, which embarrassed me even then, but my mother had great and noisy enthusiasm for things.

“If I were younger I'd try it,” she'd say.

I didn't think it had to do with being younger, though. It had to do with this strange sense of longing and sadness my mother had, as if she'd missed out on something, as if there were a party she had not been invited to.

I remembered her reading “Cinderella” to me when I was little and I asked her why the stepmother was so mean and why the father didn't come home and she said, “Oh, sweetie, sometimes people just lose their way in the world.”

I wasn't any expert in child psychology, but it seemed like a complicated answer to a simple question. I would have been happy with “It's just a story.”

“Hey, Lizard,” Jen said without looking up. She gave me that nickname last year when we were science lab partners. I had already forgotten why. I just remembered I had done all the work.

“Hey, Jen.”

“Happy birthday. I saw your locker.”

“Thanks.”

“What are you, seventeen?”

“Sixteen. I skipped a grade.”

“What'd you get?”

I held up my wrist.

She squinted at the bracelet and said, “I mean, the ride.”

“Didn't get one,” I said. “My dad has a hangup about driving.”

She stuck out her lip and nodded as if this were vaguely interesting.

“What did you get?” I asked.

“My birthday was last March. I got a Toyota truck. Throw my boards in the back. You know.”

“Yeah.”

I hesitated, swaying on my feet.

“So I was thinking. Since it's my birthday and I feel like doing something crazy, would you teach me how to surf?”

“That is so random,” she said.

“Are you going out today?”

“Yeah, I'll probably hit Sunset. If you want to go.”

“I do.”

She laughed, tossing her sun-bleached hair over her shoulder.

“Dude,” she said, “way to get your father back. If he won't let you drive, I gotta think he hates you surfing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That occurred to me.”

She closed her magazine and glanced at the big diving watch she wore on her tanned arm.

“No time like the present,” she said.

I laughed nervously. “What do you mean? We're a minute away from first bell.”

She cocked her head at me and said, “Do you feel sick? You look sick to me.”

“No, I'm not sick. Wait. What are you suggesting?”

First bell sounded and she stuffed her magazine into her backpack.

“Meet me in the parking lot. We never had this conversation, of course.”

She stood up and walked away.

I stood in the quad and felt all the students rushing past me, running to their homerooms, and there was a very strong pull to be where I was supposed to be. But the birds were dancing against my arm, and I could barely hear my mother's voice anymore, and I knew I had to do something different. It was my birthday, after all, and if I wasn't getting a car, I needed to do something outrageous, something to prove that it wasn't me who had died in the bad car wreck.

I ran to my decorated locker and stuffed my belongings into it. Then I glanced around to see who was watching. No one was. I walked calmly away from the front of the school, crossed the street, and found myself in the upperclassmen parking lot, surrounded by all those cars that were not mine.

Jen was leaning against her black pickup truck, her board jutting out like a natural appendage. She raised her chin when she saw me approaching.

“You're saving me,” she said. “I was totally unprepared for my geometry quiz.”

“You'll get an incomplete,” I said with a sense of alarm I should have disguised.

She laughed. “I learn more about math in the water than I do in class. Climb in.”

I got into her truck and she turned up the tunes and I felt all loose and crazy, as if we were on our way to rob a bank or make some other misstep from which I'd never recover. I thought of my father in his office, assuming everything was right with the world. I never defied him this way. I felt the sweat breaking out on my forehead but I was too embarrassed to tell Jen.

We pulled out of the parking lot and she said, “Anywhere you want to go before we hit the water? We could get subs or something.”

“It's barely eight o'clock.”

“Yeah, time is not such an important thing in my world.”

She turned up the volume and drummed the dash.

I thought, Wow, there's a whole world where the accepted structure just doesn't matter. Getting good grades, playing by the rules, pleasing people, none of it mattered. I wondered what did matter in a universe like that, but I didn't feel brave enough to ask.

“Well,” I said, “since we're on the road, there's somewhere I want to go.”

“Yeah? Name it.”

“Westwood,” I said.

“Westwood? What's there besides movie theaters and chain restaurants and creepy UCLA students?”

“There's a cemetery,” I said. I was about to elaborate but I didn't need to. She got it. After all, I was one of the few kids at Hillsboro with a dead mother.

“Sure, I'll take you there,” she said. “But don't get all morose. We'll stop off. But the point is, we're surfing.”

“I'm down with it,” I said, feeling automatically embarrassed. She didn't have a big response to my outdated vernacular. Either she wasn't listening or I just didn't register on her radar.

Jen parked the truck on a side street, right behind the cemetery. It was hidden away behind a Presbyterian church on Wilshire Boulevard, and most people didn't know about it. A few film buffs knew it existed because Marilyn Monroe was buried there. Occasionally you'd see tourists in clumps with their cameras, but mostly it was empty and serene. It was completely devoid of people this time of day. I walked past various graves and Jen lagged behind. I glanced back and saw that she had lit a cigarette and was staring at the clouds. I didn't know what I was doing with her. I didn't know what I was doing at all.

As we approached the grave markers, she suddenly stopped and called out to me.

“Hey, I'm parked in a red zone,” she said. “I'll hang by the truck, but don't be too long.”

I watched her heading back to the street. Her profile looked cool and sophisticated. But she was afraid of the cemetery.

I found my mother's grave without trying. I visited it frequently, sometimes with my father but most times without. It was a small gravestone, off-white marble, and it said nothing more than this: Catherine Russo. Beloved wife and mother. May she rest with God. 1960–1997. I had stared at that headstone a number of times, trying to recall something of my mother while standing in front of her grave. It was still hard for me. She was in the kitchen, making cookies, or she was in my bedroom, singing me to sleep. Dead was a thing I still could not imagine her being. They hadn't let me see her in the coffin. I was too little. Sometimes I tried to imagine it, but the scene always looked like it did on TV, an alive person trying not to breathe.

The message on the stone seemed phony. Even though we talked about God, we never went to church, and nobody could be sure my mother was resting with God.

I felt it should say, “Bad Car Wreck, Bad Drunk Driver.”

“Okay,” I said to the stone, “here I am on my sixteenth birthday and Dad won't buy me a car because you died in one, so I'm doing this unpredictable thing that I know is bad but I have to do it and you'll just have to understand.”

I heard the edge in my voice and for the first time I realized I might be mad at her, too, for dying, for not leaving better instructions, for not telling my father how to raise me. I was sure she'd planned on being around. But she wasn't. And no one had told him how to be a mother.

“If you are where they say you are, and if you have any magical powers there, could you please help change his mind? Dad, that is. About the car. It would mean a lot to me.”

There was no answer.

I glanced up and looked around, and I didn't see anything but a boy about my age sitting nearby, under a tree, drawing in a sketchbook. Our eyes connected and he smiled and I wanted to smile back. His hair was long and too much in his eyes, and it had been years since rocking the army jacket was in style. I thought about saying something. Our looks converged and our expressions stalled and I wanted to walk right up to him. I wanted to say, “Hey, you skip school? I skip school, too.”

But he dismissed me and looked back down at his drawing. He could tell I didn't skip school. I wasn't really a bad girl.

I turned back to the stone.

“Thanks for the bracelet, Mom. I have to tell you, it's kind of ugmo. But I'll wear it because it's yours. I miss you.”

“Are we done here?”

This was Jen's voice from a distance. She was pointing at her watch.

I walked to meet her, glancing just once to see what the boy was doing. He was drawing.

“Yelling in a graveyard,” I said to Jen. “Now, that's classy.”

She said, “Dude, enough with the dead people. Let's hit the waves.”

• 4 •

She parked the truck in an open parking lot near the beach. She had extra gear, including an extra board and a wet suit, which she taught me how to put on. It was like climbing back into the womb, but as soon as I had it on, I felt official, as if I would automatically know how to surf.

She put her hand up like a shield against the sun and watched the waves.

“It's closing out fast, but the wave itself is slow. You can learn on this.”

She jumped on her board and started paddling into the waves. I climbed on mine and it squeaked and squirreled under my body. It was all I could do to stay on top, and every time I paddled, a wave would come and push me off. The board would shoot out and I would go chasing it like a dog after a giant Frisbee. This went on for a while and I could hear Jen laughing beyond the break.

“Lizard,” she called out, “just arch up and the wave will go under you.”

So I tried it and she was right. The board lifted right up like a little boat and the white water sprayed my face, but I stayed on. A few more of those and I was right next to Jen, where the water was calm, right before the waves re-formed. We had a minute to rest and she spoke quickly.

She said, “You'll hear the wave before you feel it. Look back to make sure it's a good size. Then paddle as hard as you can.

As soon as you get a ride, arch up, then stand up, and let the wave do the rest. Watch first.”

I let the next wave wash over me but she caught it, and I watched as she jumped up and rode it like a magic carpet all the way to the shore. It looked easy and natural, but when I tried to imitate her I found myself barely able to stand. When I did, the nose of the board went down and then I was in the spin cycle and I had sand in my mouth. I came up spitting and Jen was paddling by me and she just said, “Stand farther back on the board.”

We spent most of the day like that, her sailing in like a pro and me blowing the move in some humorous or painful way. Once I rode in to the shore on my knees. That gave me an idea of how great it was going to be when I finally made it. But on the next two tries I missed the waves altogether and I was starting to get exhausted.

Jen paddled up next to me and straddled her board. I was taking a breather. I was cold and I was starting to feel guilty and the surfer's high had not hit me yet.

“You're just scared, Lizard,” she told me.

“Oh, is that all it is?”

“Yeah, the ocean freaks people out. It's too real.”

“It's also loud and mean.”

“It's none of those things. It's just in charge. Soon as you realize that, you'll be fine.”

“Great,” I said. “Yet another way to feel powerless.”

“Why did you want to learn this? Was it really to piss your dad off?”

“I don't know. I think I wanted something that could be mine. That didn't have to do with my mother or him or school or the future. Just a moment in time when I get it, you know?”

“You'll get it. It's called the click. One minute, it all just makes sense.”

“I wish I could find the click in life.”

“You, me, and everybody. Come on, last set. Just let go and ride.”

The last wave lifted me up and I felt empowered and I scrambled to my feet. For a few seconds I was walking on water. I stood tall and saw the shore rushing toward me and felt the rest of the ocean fading behind me, and I was completely suspended in time and space. It didn't last long. I fell off into the restless water and it churned me around. When I came up spitting, Jen was grinning at me.

“That's how it's done,” she said.

She drove me home and we were both quiet from exhaustion. I was feeling mildly euphoric. I had surfed. I was going to surf. I was a surfer. And I wasn't feeling stupid at all. I still had room to think about things. I could see my new life, my own special persona unfolding across the horizon like the ocean itself.

It wasn't until we pulled up in my driveway and I saw my dad's car that reality showed up like an obnoxious guest.

“What's he going to do?” she asked.

“I don't know. He can't kill me. Anyway, it was worth it.”

She smiled and gave me some kind of surfing hand gesture that I didn't attempt to return. I didn't need to fake it anymore.

I turned and the bubble of euphoria burst.

My father's face was at the door and the birds were digging into my wrist.