by Naima Coster
12
October 2002
The Piedmont, North Carolina
When Lacey May realized Noelle was missing, she ran out to the yard to tell Hank. He was hosing down the dog, its hide covered in bubbles.
“She’s gone,” Lacey May said. “I can’t find her.”
Hank seemed unalarmed as he turned off the water. “It’s the middle of the day. Maybe she stepped out.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Lacey May said. “I’ve got a feeling. A mother can tell when something is wrong.”
“Let’s go and find her then.”
She had already checked the living room, the kitchen, the front and rear of the house. Margarita and Diane were giggling in the bathroom, putting mayonnaise in their hair. But she hadn’t seen Noelle all morning, and she would have assumed she was sleeping in, but when Lacey May poked her head downstairs, the girl was nowhere.
They returned to the house, and Jenkins padded after them, trailing soapy water. Lacey May paced in the living room, wondering where to check first. She knew it was possible Noelle had simply gone somewhere without telling them, and she’d come back with a new black T-shirt and a frozen Coke, evidence she’d been at the mall, although she’d still refuse to answer any of Lacey May’s questions. But Lacey May couldn’t shake the sick feeling she had. It was like that time she went to collect the girls from Robbie’s motel, and they weren’t there. Diane had needed stitches. Lacey May felt as if she’d swallowed a stone, its weight in her stomach.
Noelle was dead. Noelle was pregnant. No, it was neither of those things. If she was honest, she knew what it was that worried her. Noelle had been sleeping late and skulking around. Noelle was high. There had been warnings in those pamphlets, the ones they’d given her so long ago, that first time Robbie was hospitalized, before the cop car and jail. He’d been babbling, senseless, and she’d driven him to the emergency room, only for them to tell her he was coming down, and she had yelled, From what? She’d felt ashamed that the doctors and nurses, who didn’t live with Robbie, didn’t love him, had known something about him that she hadn’t. They’d warned her—Addiction runs in families. She had folded up the fact and stowed it away for some other year. The girls had been small then. If there was one of them who was susceptible now, it was Noelle—she was the oldest when Robbie left, the most likely to be ruined.
Margarita strode out of the bathroom, laughing and wringing her hands with a towel. She went to the refrigerator and retrieved a lemon, sliced it in half on the counter. As she crossed through the living room, she was struck motionless at the sight of her mother pacing.
“Mama?” Margarita inched toward her, the split lemon in her hands. “What’s the matter?”
Hank answered. “She can’t find Noelle.”
“Did you check downstairs?”
Lacey May shot her a look.
“She’s probably downstairs,” Margarita said in defense of herself.
Lacey May pointed a finger at her face. “You know you live with your head in the clouds, Margarita. The rest of us are living down here.”
Margarita stood quietly, holding her lemons.
“Just go on and carry out your beauty experiment. We’ll figure this out.”
Lacey May turned away from her, and Margarita knew she had been dismissed. She found Diane back in the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet, her clothes soaking wet. She reeked of eggs.
“Margarita,” she sang, still giggly from the cold water, the fun they’d been having. “¿Qué pasó, Margarita?”
“Shut up and put your head back,” Margarita said. She squeezed the stinging lemons over her sister’s scalp.
In the living room, Lacey May had collected herself and decided they should make a round of calls before they left to search. They tried Duke and got no answer, so they called Ruth. She answered right away.
“I haven’t seen her in a couple days,” she said. “Lacey May, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me you’d decided to sell the house?”
“What’s that about the house?”
“You lied to me. I saw the old tenants move out, and you told me you had new ones lined up.”
“I do. They needed until November, and I told them that was fine.”
“Well, this morning a man came by for an inspection. I went out to meet him as soon as I saw him pull up in his truck, and he told me the new owner was coming by in a few hours.”
“Oh God. What else did he say?”
“He said the house was sold.”
“Robbie,” Lacey May said. “Goddamn it. It was Robbie.”
“Calm down, maybe I misunderstood. He can’t just sell the house on his own. Isn’t it in your name, too?”
“Maybe that didn’t stop him. I’ve got to go, Ruth.”
Lacey May hung up the phone, her heart thumping. She sensed one of the girls enter the room. Noelle had her hair tied into a knot on top of her head, the skin under her eyes plump and pink, like bruises.
“Where the hell were you?”
“I was downstairs listening to music in the closet.”
“In the closet?”
Noelle nodded, and Lacey May was too numb to lecture her daughter, her mind too foggy. She stood, and Hank stood with her.
“I’ve got to talk to him,” she said. “But I ought to go alone.”
She could see now that feeling inside her hadn’t been about Noelle. It had been a premonition of this catastrophe, whatever Robbie had done with the house.
“I didn’t think he was capable of a thing like this,” she said, staring at the kitchen table, the grain of the artificial wood. “You think you know a person,” she began, but she didn’t say anything else.
The rehearsals for Measure for Measure were in full swing at Central, and Noelle was grateful for the long hours. As stage manager, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave, which was exactly what she needed. She helped Mr. Riley with blocking and cataloged the props. She directed the group to the appropriate pages of the script. But there were long breaks, too, when she wasn’t needed, and she sat with Gee in the auditorium.
She was the one who had started going and sitting with him. And while he didn’t seek her out on his own, he didn’t object. When they talked, he sat stick straight, facing the stage, peering at her sideways, as if he didn’t want to look at her head-on. She didn’t mind that or the way he never spoke more than a sentence or two at a time. He listened to her go on and on about her theories about the play, the classic rock albums she was listening to in order to edify herself. She talked about everything besides what was going on with Lacey May and Robbie, the phone calls she’d overheard between her mother and a lawyer. She didn’t know why, but she had a feeling that if she ever decided to tell him the truth, he wouldn’t look at her the way Duke did: as if she were no good, destined to be bad because of her family. Lately, she’d been wondering if that was the only reason Duke wanted her: he saw her as broken, easy.
Gee seemed like a boy with his own secrets. He was smart and staid; he had the air of a man, except for when he drew the hood of his sweatshirt tight around his face, started chewing on the strings. All his quiet didn’t make her think there was nothing there, but the opposite. Inside, Gee was stirring.
Besides, he was cute. He had long dimples, sparse, unruly eyebrows, skin that was mostly clear for a teenage boy. He wore the beginnings of a mustache, neat and trim. He had long lashes, deep-set eyes. And while most of the boys at school reeked of too much cologne and deodorant, or musty towels that had never finished drying properly, Gee smelled like green soap: grass and limes.
He had been perfectly cast as Claudio, who was at the center of the drama, but silent for most of it. Without him, there’d be no plot to act out, no problem for the other characters to solve. When he was set free, the play found its resolution. He had one big speech and a few occasional lines that he had to deliver with heart. The rest of the time, he had to crouch behind bars, fall to his knees, and beg f
or his life. He hadn’t done any good acting yet, but neither had anyone. He had mumbled his lines at the read-throughs, and Mr. Riley had told him over and over to e-nun-ci-ate. But the key to Claudio was quietly transmitting endurance and fear, and Gee could do it.
They were sitting together, sharing a peanut butter sandwich. Noelle handed half to Gee, and he accepted it without saying anything, which seemed to her a sign that they were almost friends. Mr. Riley had called five, and the rest of the cast was onstage, miming actions with props from an old chest. Adira wore a plastic gilded crown and made nonsense pronouncements using hither and thither and prithee and thou. A knot of boys surrounded her, laughing, charmed. They were Shawn, who played Angelo; Beckett, who played the duke; Alex, who played Lucio, a friend to Claudio; and a few cast as townspeople. They watched her admiringly, and jousted at the air with rubber swords, striking each other underneath the arms.
Gee and Noelle saw their classmates horse around onstage, and they knew they were different, too old for childish games. They were better off watching, shoulder to shoulder, from the empty seats.
“It’s such a weird play,” Noelle said, licking peanut butter from her fingers. “I hope Mr. Riley doesn’t get in trouble for putting it on.”
“Nah,” said Gee. “I don’t think anybody’s going to understand it.”
They laughed.
The play was about a duke who pretended to leave Vienna so that he could observe how the citizens acted in his absence. Angelo, the deputy appointed to watch after things, was a pervert, corrupt and cruel. He put Claudio in jail for impregnating his own fiancée, Juliet, who was played by a sophomore named Rosa. Claudio and Juliet were the only ones worth rooting for, although they spent nearly every act apart. They were victims, they loved one another, and nearly everyone else was detestable, too stuck in their own ideologies to ever do what was right.
The star of the play was Isabella, Claudio’s sister, who eventually won his freedom by outsmarting Angelo. Mr. Riley had been wise to cast Adira as the lead. Noelle knew she’d be stunning even in her habit and veil, but it wasn’t only that she was pretty. She was easily one of the more popular new girls at Central. She got invited to senior parties on the weekends, flitted around between groups of friends, old and new, studious and cool, black and white. She would draw a big crowd, and so would Beckett as the duke. He was popular with the kids who went to Duke’s parents’ church. Together, they’d bring plenty of students, as well as parents, concerned and not, to the play. They’d all be in the same audience, subject to the same drama. They would witness Adira’s virtue, and Beckett’s self-righteousness, Gee’s despair, the consequences of legalism and wrongful judgments. The play might be important; it might say something. Noelle said as much to Gee, and praised Mr. Riley’s vision. Gee said nothing.
“The only thing I can’t stand is how much Shakespeare hates women,” Noelle said. “At least, he hates women who have sex. Everybody’s a whore, except Isabella, and she’s a nun.”
Gee didn’t know how to respond at the mention of sex. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend Noelle, or reveal too much. When he’d first read the play, he’d wondered why Mr. Riley had cast him as the man who couldn’t control his impulses, who had impregnated a woman he’d promised to make his wife before it was time. It was as if Mr. Riley knew there was something wrong with him. Gee knew he couldn’t be alone in the things he did: futilely searching for free porn on the internet, masturbating to sleep, masturbating to wake, fantasizing about nearly every girl or woman who so much as looked at him, who brushed past him in line at the supermarket. But it was hard to know whether it was normal. Sometimes, he felt crazed and manic, like he might die if he didn’t find a release, a way to feel good. Other times, it had little to do with his body, and he wanted to watch those pixelated videos so he could be someone else: a man, wanted, powerful.
“Stop that,” Noelle said, and he wondered whether she could read his thoughts.
She reached for his face, cradled his chin in her cupped hands. “You’re clenching,” she said, and traced her thumb along his jaw up to his earlobe. He felt himself shiver and hoped Noelle couldn’t see.
“You know you’ve got the opposite problem I do—I say everything I’m thinking, and you look like you’re always thinking things you don’t say.”
“You think it’s a problem?”
“It’s different. Like a mystery. But it’s cool—not everyone gets to know you.”
Gee shrugged. “I don’t know. Nobody says everything they think.”
Noelle smiled. He had caught her in her own lie.
“You want to go out after rehearsal?” she said, and proposed Cedar’s, the sandwich shop at the bottom of the hill.
Gee wondered what Noelle wanted, why she had picked him.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend? That goth kid?”
“So?” she said.
“My grandma is picking me up.”
“That’s fine. She can come, too.”
Linette drove them to Cedar’s in her grimy golden sedan. The day was bright and breezy, and they sat at a picnic table outside. He and Linette shucked off their jackets and gulped their sodas while Noelle waited in line for their food. Linette didn’t comment, but her eyes on Gee made him squirm, as if he were doing something naughty, and she was happy to be his accomplice.
“Come on, Linette,” he said finally.
“What’s that? What did I do?”
“She’s just my friend.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“How could it be a date if you’re here?”
“That’s a good point.” She winked at him. “How could it be?”
Linette paid for their food, and Noelle thanked her profusely. She did it like it was nothing, although Gee knew she hadn’t earned an income in years. But Linette seemed more awake than he’d seen her in a long time, enlivened and pleased to be out, even if the food Noelle had ordered wasn’t the kind she favored: chili dogs and Tater Tots, wings, and soggy fried okra.
“You know I used to own a bakery not far from here. Long before Cedar’s, or any of these other businesses opened up. Superfine—you ever heard of it?”
Noelle shook her head.
“Gee’s father was my baker. He was very talented, you know. Right after he died, there was a story in the paper about us. There was no picture of him to run with the article, but they had photos of all the things he made his last day in the shop—morning buns and biscuits and devil’s food. Was it cake or doughnuts? I can’t remember.”
“Doughnuts,” Gee said.
If there was something he remembered clearly about Ray, it was the food he would make for him—roast beef with melty cheese and onions, oatmeal cookies and steaming cocoa, red pepper soup, and hot cereal with mashed banana, a heap of brown sugar in the center.
“Your father died?” Noelle said.
“He looks just like him, too. When you’re looking at Gee, you’re looking at Ray.”
Gee’s eyebrows went up, disbelieving.
“I’m serious,” Linette said. “Do you know that when you love somebody it changes your brain? The shape of it. Why couldn’t it change your face, too?”
“It changes your brain?” Noelle shuddered.
“That’s why you’ve got to be careful who you love.”
Gee felt his face go hot; he started chewing on the gummy inside of his cheek. First, Ray, and then all this love talk. He shot a look at Linette.
She seemed to get the message, mumbled something about condiments, and got up to give them some room. As soon as she was gone, Noelle leapt at him with her thoughts.
“I can’t believe your father died. You seem so normal.”
“Thanks.”
“What I mean is, something tragic happened to you, and you’re all right. So solid. No one in my family is like that. My father’s a big loser, and my mother’s worse cause she keeps forgiving him. Even if she’s married to someone else. I swear it’s like a tragedy. Every
body’s so pathetic and weak.”
“You don’t seem weak.”
“It’s the all black,” Noelle said, flipping up the collar of her trench coat, and they both laughed. “I don’t even have a reason as good as yours, and I’m all messed up.”
Gee liked the way she talked about herself, so naked, so open. He had the same feeling—he had no reason to be the way he was, not after everything Jade had done, the person she had managed to become, the years that had passed, and how little he remembered.
“Maybe I’m the same way, and I’m just good at hiding it.”
“Then you’re really good,” Noelle said, her eyes the color of honey in the afternoon light. He felt an unexpected pang. She didn’t seem to notice.
“You know my favorite part of the play?”
“You really like this Shakespeare stuff.”
“Don’t you? Otherwise, why are you doing it?”
Because you asked me, he wanted to say. She had been so determined, so direct, but he hadn’t felt she was trying to push him around. It was natural to be near her, even then, standing by the vending machine while she punched in the numbers, handed him his candy.
“Okay, what’s your favorite part?”
Noelle described a part of the play Mr. Riley had cut, and Gee was amazed she’d read the whole thing. There was a scene where the drunken prisoner Barnardine refuses to be executed. The duke wants his head to play a trick on Angelo. But Barnardine simply refuses. I swear I will not die to-day for any man’s persuasion. And miraculously, everyone listens. He is left alone in his cell, and the play goes on.
“All he does is say, No, I won’t be the one. I won’t be caught up, and it saves him. It saves him.”
“That’s nice,” Gee said. “But it doesn’t sound like real life.”
“It’s real for Barnardine.”
“It’s all made up anyway.”
“You’re too serious.”