The Noah Confessions (4 page)

• 2 •

I caught the early bus after school. My dad was at work. The house was still and quiet. I stood at the window and looked at the ocean and thought about Jen being out there and about my future in surfing and how I wished I were just a girl whose biggest problem was that she didn't get a car. But the box was waiting under my bed.

I looked at a picture of my mother that I kept on my desk. She was frozen in that smile I remembered so well, the face that was full of fun ideas and soothing words and whatever I needed in the moment. Until it wasn't there anymore.

But at least it had been frozen in perfection. How could I begin to change that? Why would my father ask me to?

I pulled down the shades and put on my iPod and then I picked up the manuscript.

         

To look at me, as you almost never do, you would say that I'm a reasonably, even boringly normal person. Long brown hair, parted down the middle, just like all the girls in
Seventeen
magazine. Levi's and T-shirts or sweatshirts identifying some band or food product, a nice sweater on a dress-up day, a skirt when all the girls get together and plan it (we never dress up unless we all agree on it—just like we never go to the bathroom alone). Lip gloss, earrings, knit hats or turquoise belts when I'm feeling fancy. I don't drink or smoke. I get good grades and I belong to the Beta Club and the Future Teachers of America (girls do that—no one really wants to be a teacher), and I listen to all kinds of music and I even play the piano a little and I'm on the tennis team. (That's a
lot
less exciting than it sounds. We only got the team last year and anyone who could identify a racket could be on it.) I don't have a boyfriend but I've been on plenty of dates. My best friends are Mary Gail Crider and Sunny (real name Sunshine, hippie parents) Hughes. Mary Gail is the skinny, bubbly one, always laughing, big teeth, potential valedictorian. Sunny is the long blond curls, vacant smile, violet eyes, future artist of some kind. I'm the one in the middle. The sturdy girl. The one who's going to do something really smart and practical like open a business, even though I secretly dream of being in a rock band or being a poet in San Francisco. I don't know why I think of California all the time. It just seems like a place I could live. I don't know why I've never been comfortable here in the South, even though I've never known anything else. It just seems like some place has to be better. Maybe that's just my circumstances. I'd like to get your impression, but that is not going to happen. We aren't going to meet and chat like normal people. I'm never going to do anything like a normal person except impersonate one for a little bit longer.

         

Back to the criminal thing, I'll bet you're saying. That is if you're still reading, if you haven't decided it's all a big tasteless joke and thrown the whole mess into the fire.

I'd like to say it all started last summer or the summer before or anything neat and tidy like that, a perfect date I could mark off on my calendar every year, like an anniversary. It's nothing like that. It all started a long time before me. That's what I realize now. All criminals are a long time in the making. They don't just spring up. They gestate like babies. No, more complicated and more deliberate. They are carved out of history, like a custom-made table out of a big piece of oak. Care and precision. The right place at the right time, and everything working in its favor, like the elements of a storm coming together.

It didn't start with me and it didn't even start with my parents. It might not even have started with my grandparents. That's why I have to give you a short history of Union Grade.

You could probably use that, since the rumor is you're from up North. New York, some say. D.C. according to others. I can't tell from looking at you, though the long hair and the cool hats and the ripped jeans and the leather bracelets and the general aloof swagger make me vote for New York. You're really handsome but not stuck-up, probably because, where you come from, a lot of guys looked like you and it was no big deal. Down here at Union Grade High, you are stirring things up if you haven't noticed. Which you don't seem to. Girls bruise each other's ribs when you walk past, and you must notice that sudden flurry of whispers that trail you like a lapdog. You must but you don't appear to. You just walk along, looking for your class numbers and speaking when spoken to. Jimmy English, who's been my friend since the sandbox, says he has phys ed with you and that you're the only guy there who can do twenty pull-ups, and that you ran the second-fastest mile, after Kirby Dwight, who's a track star. You wouldn't know it to look at him, Jimmy said, but the dude is fast. So you've already earned the respect of your male peers, if you care to take advantage of it. And the drop-dead-at-your-feet admiration of any girl you want. Please don't get too aware of that.

Oh, what do I care? Do what you want. Just try to choose someone good. Like Mary Gail. She's so nice if you can get her to stop talking. Sunny's a bit too artsy vague. She'd drive you crazy.

And I, of course, am going to jail.

So back to the history of this place you've moved to.

As you can see, we're right on the North Carolina line, but that doesn't mean we're anything like the Carolinians—far from it. We're wickedly territorial on both sides, deeply offended if we're mistaken for the other. It's a history of grudges and resentment and one state thinking it's classier than the other. We're both hicks, let's face it, and even though I'm not given to taking sides, you have to admit Virginia is the Home of the Presidents. We have George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and all those people who started the whole country, so I think we do win in the classier category. Not that the founding fathers had anything to do with Union Grade. They were in Williamsburg and northern Virginia, mostly. Union Grade was not even a spot on the map until well after the Revolution. It existed but it was nothing more than a store and a church and a village. It didn't have a name. It finally got a charter in 1780 and it was called Competition, because that's what it hoped to be—real competition for the next town over, a place called Schoolfield, because it had a school and is now called Danville, after the river it sits on, the Dan River.

Then came the Civil War. We lost. That's all you need to know about that.

Then came Reconstruction. Competition, like any small Southern town, was at the complete mercy of the North. When the Union soldiers, the Reconstruction workers, the “carpetbaggers,” as they were known around here, came down to divide up the goods, they had a system of grading what they found—everything from land to horses to houses to women. Top-notch stuff was marked “Union Grade.” There was so much good stuff in Competition that it basically became known as a Union Grade town, and then, after the horrors of Reconstruction were ended by President Rutherford B. Hayes, it started regaining its independence but kept the name.

Hold on, freak, you're thinking. What's a sophomore doing with all that information? Listening in class? Not likely. My teacher, Mr. Roberts, is so boring we can hardly keep our eyes open, except to stare when he's writing on the board because he does have a nice butt. (He's the football coach. I won't continue with this train of thought.) The thing is, my father is a history buff. He reads it all the time. He retains it. Then he talks to me about it when I'm helping him in the garden, or when he's pointing out birds to me, or when we're playing golf. He has a lot of interests and he shares them with me. That's because I'm his favorite. “My idea,” he tells me. Which means my mother didn't want to have me. He doesn't get why that might be a sensitive subject to me. I've never let on that it's painful.

My father shares all these things with me because I was supposed to be a boy. The fact that I wasn't didn't stop him from raising me as one. Sometimes it's confusing, even hurtful, but I'm grateful for the stuff I've learned. I can identify just about any variety of plant, I can build a birdhouse, I can drive the green with a four iron on a three par with a good tailwind. I can tell you about different kinds of wood or how to start a fire or how to stop one or how a printing press works or how to get paint off the floor. I can name a lot of presidents and I know what the Marshall Plan was. It goes on and on like this. I usually keep it to myself. You're the unwilling recipient of everything I've learned from him.

What's funny (funny strange, not funny haha) is that by casually telling me about history—of this place, of the country, of our family—he was inadvertently responsible for helping me understand what I needed to know to put the whole puzzle together. Even though he never dreamed I'd put it together.

He still doesn't know.

I realize I'm not going to finish this in one sitting. I have created this space behind a board in my closet for when I have to put it aside. I know I am going to worry about it whenever I am away. But there's no other choice. That's the thing about a dead end. When you get to it you can only look two ways—back where you've come from, or up. Up is the sky, the only way to go, but you can't entirely see how to get there. Then you find the ladder.

I have to stop now. My mother is calling me to dinner.

         

I put the letter aside and leaned back on my bed and felt exhausted. U2 was singing about something to do with God and I took the iPod off because I couldn't stand it, couldn't absorb anything else smart or sensitive.

I took deep breaths into my stomach the way the yoga teacher at school told us to do. We all made fun of her, but I had to admit, it made my heart stop racing and I felt these weird chemicals going off in my brain. I needed to calm down and put things in perspective. I had to keep telling myself that this was my mother talking. It didn't sound like her. But she sounded like someone I would have wanted to hang out with. She was smarter than me. She knew things about history and she could put them in order and relate them to herself. When I was taught California history in the fifth grade, the only thing that seemed to affect my life was the founding of In-N-Out Burger. I couldn't draw a line from the Spanish missions or Lewis and Clark or Woody Guthrie to my existence in the Pacific Palisades.

But my mother had an understanding of how the Civil War affected her. She was on the wrong side of it, obviously. And in American History, we didn't waste much time on the losers. No one cared what happened to the people who fought and died to protect slavery. So I had never really learned much about Reconstruction in the South. I tried to imagine her ancestors having their homes and families raided by opportunists from the North, being marked up and graded and divided. Regardless of their political positions, these were actual people, families with children, and whether I liked it or not, these were my relatives. I shared their DNA.

I liked this girl (my own mother, actually) who knew and cared about her history. It made me want to know and care about mine. But I was afraid to look.

I was hoping when I finally got to the point, her crime would be something really slight, not horrible at all, something that had just grown horrible in her imagination, like the time I was in second grade and was convinced I was going to jail for losing a library book. It took me ages to confess it. My mother found me sobbing in my room one morning and finally coaxed the transgression out of me, and when I blurted it out she started laughing. I remember her hugging me and all that guilt and weight just melted and I felt she had magical powers.

That person could not have done anything really bad.

I thought for a moment about skipping ahead, but I knew I couldn't. I had to read it exactly the way this Noah guy had read it. He probably didn't have to put it down periodically, because it wasn't his mother—just some stranger to him.

I put the letter back under the bed and went for my cell phone to call Jen. Then I looked outside and saw that it had gotten gray and windy. The surf was too big and I didn't actually want to hurt myself.

Another activity came to mind. There was only one place that could make me feel as calm and as connected and as churned up and alive as the ocean.

• 3 •

I never told anyone how much I enjoyed the cemetery. No one even knew I went there. Except Jen, and I let her believe it was a rare event. But it was a routine.

I would take the bus into Westwood at least once a week. I would stop and get flowers and a Snapple and some Twizzlers. (My mom loved Twizzlers.) Then I would walk to the cemetery and sit near her grave and start talking to her as if she were actually present. Nobody paid attention. No one was around in the middle of the day. And I felt everything inside of me calming down. She was very real for me there. I was convinced she could hear me.

I knew it didn't make any sense. If she was in heaven, if such a place existed, then she could hear me wherever I was. The ground and the grave and the ornate marker didn't make her more available. But it worked for me. I let myself be irrational about it.

My father would bring me here on the anniversary of her death, but we didn't talk to her. We just stood and stared at the ground and at the flowers and the sky. Then we left. I wondered if he made his own secret visits. But I didn't ask him. I was too busy trying to take care of his emotions. I was afraid to see him cry.

Enough time had passed now that I felt really young when my mother died. For years it seemed like yesterday, then last week, then last month. Now it felt like a different time. When I was little. I didn't feel little anymore.

In the early days, I'd pray for her to come back, and that was painful. Because I was just old enough to know she couldn't, but young enough to believe in all kinds of magic, like Santa Claus and God.

Then I dropped Santa Claus and got mad at God.

Then I stopped believing in God.

Then I got mad at my father.

Then the guy who hit my mother, the bad drunk driver who was in jail.

Then I stopped being mad at everybody and felt very sorry for myself.

Then I dropped all that and just had a quiet sadness deep down, like the one I remembered my mother having.

Now I could stand there at her grave and not blame anybody. I could just know that life happened that way and some people got unlucky and I was one of them. And she was one of them.

I said to the grave, “Hey, Mom, thanks for the letter. It's really tripping me out.”

I pictured her smiling.

I wondered what she would look like if she had lived this long. I remembered her with perfect skin, flipped-under brown hair and laughing green eyes, freckles on her nose, hands on her hips. She never wore sweats, like the other mothers. She always put on real clothes, even if they were jeans. She used to say, “Lynnie, the end of civilization is when people stop wearing clothes with buttons and zippers.” Then she'd laugh. She understood what that meant. I was just embarrassed because the other mothers wore workout clothes everywhere.

Now I realized she had been trying harder. If she had lived, she would have been one of those cool Hillsboro mothers who dressed well and did just enough work around the school but didn't wear out her welcome or become a nuisance.

“You're just trying to keep your mother perfect,” Jen had said to me. She said it as if it were a character flaw, and maybe it was.

“So look,” I said, “I'm reading it because Daddy said I should and I trust him. I feel like I'm eavesdropping, since I don't know this guy Noah, and I haven't gotten to the part where you explain…” I paused and lowered my voice to a whisper, “why you're a criminal. I guess I'm hoping that part is not really true. And I'm here to tell you that whatever you say, I'm not going to change my mind about you. Okay, maybe I'll change my mind, but I'm not going to stop, you know, loving you.”

I paused and wondered if that were true. I had never stopped loving anyone. I wasn't sure it was possible. I had stopped having crushes on people before, but that was different. Love felt like a thing you couldn't change.

“It's already weird,” I said, “reading your thoughts when you were my age. Well, just a little bit younger. You weren't old enough to drive a car yet. I am old enough but as it turns out, I don't have one. I'm sure you'd disagree with Dad on this point. You guys would have one of your whispery fights that you always tried to hide from me. I didn't mind them. I could tell they weren't very serious.”

I took a breath and glanced up at the trees, which were bowing and dancing under the low gray skies, so untypical of L.A. this time of year. But it always felt more fitting to be in the graveyard when the weather was gloomy. I was about to start my next speech when I noticed someone nearby, staring at me. At first glance he seemed like a nerdy tourist. He was sitting next to a tombstone with a sketchbook in his lap. He had boxes of charcoal pencils surrounding him, but he wasn't drawing. He was just staring at me. I stared back at him.

He lifted a hand to me in a casual wave, and I remembered him from yesterday. He was sitting in that exact spot, doing that exact thing when Jen and I came by.

I stared at him unapologetically, trying to decide if he was a graveyard freak, a stalker, or just someone with a dead relative, like me.

He was about my age, though it was hard to tell by the way he was dressed. He wore jeans and the same fatigue jacket (thrift shop, it seemed to me, instead of Abercrombie, intentionally distressed) and some ratty denim shirt and Converse sneakers beaten up and written on. His hair was dark blond, somewhere between too long and not long enough, and from this distance it looked as if he actually had a reason to shave. His eyes were a scary, unfinished blue and they were staring right at me.

I walked toward him, close enough to be heard.

“Am I bothering you?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said.

“When will you know?”

He shrugged. “When you bother me.”

I turned away from him, as if I thought I could ignore him. But when I tried to talk to my mother again, I realized that all I could see was his face. I turned back around and he was drawing in the sketchbook.

“I saw you yesterday,” I said.

“Yeah. I saw you, too. And the surfer chick.”

“How'd you know she was a surfer chick?”

“You always know with them.”

“I happen to surf, too,” I said. One day and one good ride counted.

“Whatever clangs your bell,” he said, and smiled. I had to admit, it was an amazing smile.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Drawing,” he said.

“In a place like this?”

He shrugged again. “Sure.”

“Doesn't it occur to you that people come here to talk to their dead relatives?”

“That's okay with me.”

“Why do you like to draw here?”

“It's usually quiet. I like quiet.”

“Have you been listening to me?”

“Not really.”

“I suppose you think it's weird, somebody talking to a grave.”

“Not really. It happens a lot.”

He put his sketchbook aside and looked up at me. He had kind of an angelic face and I wondered for a brief, insane moment if he might actually be an angel. Such strange ideas occurred to me when I was in the graveyard. But I figured angels didn't need to shave.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Mick.”

“Oh,” I said. “As in Jagger.”

“Yeah, I was named after him.”

My eyebrows went up. “Your parents knew him or something?”

He laughed. “My father probably thought he did when he was high. My old man died of an overdose when I was too little to know him. I live with my mom. She doesn't talk about him much.”

I didn't say anything. He got to his feet and walked in my direction. He was taller than me.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Lynne. Where do you go to school?”

“Uni High,” he said, nodding roughly in the direction of the high school a few streets away. A public high school. There were rumors about it. All the kids were wild. But that was the rumor about all the kids who didn't go to private school.

“How about you?” he asked.

“Hillsboro.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, passing judgment.

I wanted to tell him I was a scholarship kid, just to ease the tension. But it didn't seem right to lie, standing on my mother's grave.

He said, “So your parents are what, rich showbiz types?”

“My father's a lawyer. My mother's right here,” I said, pointing to the ground.

“I see. That's who you're talking to.”

“Yeah.”

He was close to me now. We stared at each other. A weird kind of calm came over me as I looked at his face.

“What do you have against Hillsboro girls?” I asked.

“It's what they have against me,” he said. “Not the other way around.”

“What were you drawing?” I asked, not knowing what else to do.

“I'll show you if you want to see.”

I followed him to where he had been sitting. He picked up the sketchbook, flipped through a few pages, and showed it to me. It was a pretty good abstract drawing of a graveyard. The tombstones looked like teeth, all crooked and carnivorous. The limbs of the trees reached down like magical wires.

“I like to look at death,” he said, “and take all the mystery out of it. My goal is to make a drawing of a graveyard and it doesn't look any more interesting than, I don't know, mannequins in a store.”

“You're not there yet,” I said.

He turned the sketchbook toward himself and laughed.

“No, I guess not.”

I laughed, too. It was the first time I could remember actually laughing, standing so close to my mother.

I looked at my watch.

“I have to go,” I said. “I have to catch the bus. I don't have a car.”

He smiled. “That's unusual for a Hillsboro girl.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I'll see you here again.”

“Unlikely,” I said.

He shrugged. “Meeting you was unlikely. I figure we're past the hurdle.”