by Naima Coster
Robbie decided he ought to offer her something to look forward to, a promise. Maybe it would help her, carry her through the treatments. Maybe it would even be true.
“I can get clean,” he said. “I know you need me now. Lacey, if you need me—”
She shook her head and shushed him. “I have what I need from you, my love.”
Robbie felt his heart in his ears. He was breathing hard. “What are you saying, Lacey May? Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”
Lacey May took his hands, pressed them to her heart.
“You’re not listening, Robbie. I’m not trying to say anything. There’s nothing I’m trying to change.”
The taxi ride from the airport was more beautiful than Nelson remembered. The trees were green and amber, lustrous. They sheltered the road from the construction on either side, the tractors churning through sunken sand pits. He stared at the leaves, the unbroken sky. It filled him with momentary ease to behold something so beautiful. Soon, he was passing downtown, its meager small-town skyline, the light-up billboard beckoning drivers to take the exit toward Main Street. The car pushed on west, toward the edge of the county. It turned off the freeway and rattled down a gravel driveway. Nelson willed his calm to return. He would need it to convince her, to convince himself that everything would be fine. He repeated his intention, over and over to himself, like a mantra, I am here to get my wife. We’re going home.
He paid in cash, the multicolored fan of euros still clipped inside his wallet. The taxi was climbing back uphill when the door to the brick ranch house clattered open, and there stood Noelle. She was mostly undressed, in a silver camisole and shorts, and a fat flannel robe that didn’t belong to her, or hadn’t the last time he had seen her. It had been nearly eight weeks, the longest they’d gone without each other. It was unnerving to look at her, to see how familiar every inch of her was, even from across the yard: the hair piling on her shoulders, the silhouette of her thighs, even the way she was twisting her lips into a frown, holding her arms close to her chest.
He strode toward her, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He had missed her. He loved her, and she still loved him. That would be enough to see them through.
She didn’t move from the porch, didn’t uncross her arms, not even when he reached her, wrapped himself around her. He kissed her cheeks. She was stiff and still, didn’t say anything as she opened the screen door and led him into the house.
It was warm and bright inside, the windows facing the woods and the lawn, the crop of crimson and orange leaves on the grass. The remains of breakfast were on the table, different items of women’s clothing flung around the house on hooks, the backs of chairs. It was ordinary and disorderly, more inviting than anywhere he’d been in weeks.
“What are you doing here?” she asked finally. She flung herself down at the table, where she lifted a piece of toast to her mouth, bit the edge, took a long time to swallow it down.
Nelson explained that he’d spoken to Hank; he had told him she wasn’t at the hospital this morning and given him the address. Noelle looked at him, bewildered. She’d never known him to be one to contact her family, let alone Hank.
“I thought it better not to involve your sisters. If I told them, they might have warned you, and you’d have left.”
“Don’t I have that right? This is bad timing. My mother is dying, maybe.”
“How are you feeling?”
Noelle laughed. “A feelings question? From the man who never lets himself feel a thing?”
Nelson refused to take the bait and said nothing, although she was wrong about him. He could feel, and feel, and feel, even when it did no good, even when there was no bottom.
Noelle went on. “It was a lot easier enduring my family when I knew you and I had our own. I could tell myself we’d made something different. It was like having a back door.” She poured herself orange juice from the carton. He reached for her trembling hand.
“Nells,” he said.
“I’m surprised you’re here. I know how you feel about North Carolina.”
“I came for us.”
Soon, she was crying, and Nelson wiped her eyes with his fingers. It was a little thing, but the gesture made her cry harder. He caught her fingers and kissed them, and she crawled into his lap. He held her as she wept, and then she was kissing him, and Nelson was kissing her back. She was frantic, quick, and Nelson helped her to slow down. His tongue touched hers, and she tasted of the morning, her sleepiness, the sour juice. Her shampoo, her lotion were different, but they weren’t enough to have changed her smell, the one he knew: the composite of her scalp and her skin, the particular funk of her sweat. She wrapped her legs around his waist, wet his face with her tears. He picked her up, with effort, and carried her down the hall. She shed her robe, her top, and directed him into the bedroom where he could lay her down.
They didn’t discuss it; they didn’t use anything. He was still her husband, she his wife. They moved together for a short time. It was all liquid and soft muscle, a warm mess. He kept his eyes open, and Noelle’s face was somber, focused. He wanted to make her feel better, to offer what pleasure he could. He came with a groan, and Noelle started crying again. He wanted to keep going, and he said so, but she rolled away from him and covered her face with her hands.
He tried to lift her fingers away to kiss her. “I’m sorry,” he said. She stared at the ceiling and shook, and, eventually, he resigned himself to shut up, lie beside her, and let her sob. It wasn’t easy. He could sense her feelings creeping into him. They were indistinct, amorphous, and they seeped like a poison. He closed his eyes and breathed. Eventually, her crying subsided to hiccups, and she turned to him.
“I’ve been trying to find an answer. I won’t let this be one of the things in life that you just never understand. Is it because you never got the chance to be with other women? Were we too young? Did you get tired of our life? What was it?”
Nelson tried to shush her, and Noelle snapped.
“I don’t need to be calmed down. I need you to answer me.”
“It just happened. I let it happen.”
“That’s not good enough. I deserve the truth.”
An old line returned to her, but she couldn’t place it—Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning.
“It felt good to be wanted. There’s nothing more to it.”
“Bullshit. I’ve always wanted you.”
She was right, in a way, but Nelson couldn’t see the good in explaining anymore. Jemima had wanted him in a way he found irresistible. She wanted him because of whom she suspected he might become. She wanted his name, a story for her life about the weeks she’d spent in Paris with the artist, the photographer. She was a mirror to reflect the image he had fashioned for himself. With Noelle, he couldn’t be anyone else. He was always himself, in focus, too clear. It was sweet, but it wasn’t titillating. Is that what she wanted to hear?
“I wanted to get away from my life,” he said. It was the mildest version of the truth he could conjure. “I wanted to be someone else. After the miscarriage—”
Noelle sprang up in the bed, naked and fierce. “Is that where it started? You’ve been confused for a long time, sweetheart. And it isn’t my fault.” She rose and dressed quickly, violently. She left the room.
Nelson found her on the beat-up turquoise couch, covered in pillows and blankets, dog hair. The sun stuttered through a spotted window. He sat beside her. She spoke without looking at him.
“I can’t forgive you for this, Nelson. I can’t forget.”
“You can forget anything, Noelle. You haven’t given yourself a chance.”
“I’ve had time to think. I’ve been with my sisters.”
“You mean, your mother.”
“She has nothing to do with this. I haven’t told her what you did, and I doubt I ever will.”
Nelson’s jaw went tight. “I don’t want to live without you.”
“Neither do I, but I’m not t
he kind of woman to just go on after a thing like this.”
“So, you’re going to leave me based on principle? You’re too hard, Noelle.”
“I thought it was the opposite, and I was too soft?”
“You’re both,” Nelson said, and he didn’t intend it as meanness. Neither of them was perfect. She was too brutal and too tender all at once.
“You don’t get to tell me how to be anymore.”
“Why not? We’ve always tried to push each other, to make each other better, haven’t we?”
“I never promised to make you better. I was your wife. I promised to love you, and I kept my promise.”
Her voice was calm and stern, her face swollen and serene. Nelson sat beside her, chastened. He had seen this Noelle—the cool composure that signaled she had shut a door inside herself. He had seen her do it when the doctor delivered the news to them, and she’d gone perfectly still, thanked her for the explanation. He had seen her take note of anyone who had been discourteous to him at a party, or a dinner, and she’d grow taller somehow, superior, turn a chill on them that let them know they’d never be in her good graces again. It was the way she had kept herself apart from Lacey May, without cruelty, but with a vicious, elegant coldness. She had done it even with her father, whom she tolerated but had learned to no longer need. In some ways, it was a comfort to him, to see the old Noelle return; there was that spirit, that steadfastness he’d loved. But it was then that he knew it was all over. For years, she’d had one conviction about him; now she had another. She wouldn’t be weeping Noelle, or rapturous Noelle, or sweet, or naked, or curious Noelle with him ever again. She had closed a door that he couldn’t force open if he tried. In this way, they were alike; Noelle knew how to put any part of herself away.
He reached for her hand, and she let him take it. There was more that he wanted to say to her. He said it all in his head. They sat locked together, as if she were listening, until Noelle took her hand away.
“I ought to go and see my mother.”
“I thought you’d decided not to see her.”
“I was avoiding my father, actually. I didn’t want to feel any worse than I already did, but there’s no point in that now. Besides, what more is there for us to say?”
It was terrifying to hear her speak so matter-of-factly about the end of their life together. He wanted to say so, to beg her not to leave, but it would be pathetic, make no difference. He couldn’t fathom that they’d ever be done talking to one another. He put the thought out of his mind. There was only this moment and the next. There was nothing else that he could do.
“I’ll head to the airport then.”
“You’re going to turn around and go right back to Europe?”
“What else is there for me here?”
Noelle was sunlit and sedate. “I wish you wouldn’t think that way,” she said. “So this is good-bye.”
She walked him to the door; in a daze, he followed; he went to hug her, and she shook her head; she opened the door and shut it, uneventfully; he found himself alone on the porch.
He leaned against the frame of the house to steady himself. He strained to hear Noelle inside the house, just on the other side of the door. He heard only insects and birdsong, the rush of air through the trees. He watched the woods, the lean of the pines. He felt himself sway inwardly.
When he had left for Paris, she cried and cried. Usually, they said their good-byes swiftly, unsentimentally, but she had been crying so hard as she searched for her keys to drive him, he said it was better if she stayed; he’d call a car. The truth was he wanted to leave her quickly, didn’t want to watch her sob. It made him feel desperate, and if he wasn’t careful, he would say something he’d regret: It’s been months or I can’t take away your pain or You’re only hurting yourself. But he had held his tongue except to say he wanted to ride alone.
In an instant, she had calmed herself, tranquil on the bed, her legs folded beneath her. Perhaps that had been the first moment that she started to let him go. I hope you find what you’re looking for over there, she had said, and he had felt that she could see right through him.
He had left, longing for Europe as an interlude. The book, the play, and the other woman were all meant to be temporary. He had planned to come home. Noelle was his life.
He had kept the truth hidden for so long; it had been his fortune to keep it from her. But now it was out in the open, and he couldn’t hide. He was no good, and she knew it.
Hank was sitting on the curb when Noelle arrived at the hospital. He drank from an enormous coffee cup and squinted across the lot. He didn’t turn to Noelle, and she wasn’t sure whether he genuinely couldn’t see her or whether he wanted to be left alone.
“Hey,” she called. “What are you doing out here?”
“I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Nelson found me.”
“Must have gone well if you’re feeling better and decided to come here.”
“Is that why you’re here? Cause you feel so good?”
Hank chuckled, and Noelle sat beside him. They stretched their legs into the street, watching the cars that rounded the curb to make sure no one ran them over. Noelle peered into the cup and saw Hank was nearly done. She’d never known him to drink more than half a cup of coffee in the morning and finish the rest once he got home.
“Are you avoiding my father?”
“It’s that obvious?”
“I was avoiding him, too,” Noelle said. “And my husband, until you interfered.” She reached for Hank’s cup, took a long swallow of the cold, stale coffee. “My marriage is over. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”
Hank made a disbelieving face. “You think you’re through with a person, but you’re never through, not when you’ve loved someone like that.”
“You know, I used to hate you and Mama for shacking up as fast as you did. I thought, How could you leave someone you’d vowed to never leave? But I see it now. I don’t care what I promised. Nelson didn’t care if he was ruining our life, and that tells me everything I need to know.”
“I won’t ask you what he did. I suppose you wouldn’t tell me anyway.”
“I should be heading back to Georgia. Get my affairs in order.”
Hank frowned. “I’m not looking forward to you girls leaving. I’ve got a feeling about your mother—that she’ll only last as long as you all are here. You all keep her strong.”
“We keep her mad. That’s her life source,” Noelle said. “Rage.” She laughed. Hank didn’t seem amused, and she tried to comfort him. “Don’t go and assume the worst. She’s just getting started with her treatments.”
Hank shook his head. “I’m not so worried about her dying. You all think about that because you’re leaving—you’re trying to tell yourself she’ll be here when you come back. But I’m thinking about what’s ahead right now, for days and days. Probably longer. Mood swings and appointments and treatments. I’ll be the one who’s with her. I’m the one who’s been with her all along.”
Noelle hadn’t given much thought to all the years Hank and her mother had spent together after she and her sisters left. She hadn’t thought about the conversations they had likely had in the dark, or all their mornings and afternoons together, the quiet hours they’d spent in the unceasing, secret waltz of marriage.
She had seen Hank mostly as an interloper; she had never cared to look at him as a husband, a man in love. She reached for his hand.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and see them.”
“I don’t know,” Hank said, but Noelle was firm.
“You belong there,” she said. “That’s enough.”
14
November 2002
The Piedmont, North Carolina
If there had been a provisional harmony at Central before, as much as could be expected of any high school teeming with kids from across the county, it started to fracture after the posters. There were two assemblies: the first about the concerned
parents, whose actions the principal called shameful. She didn’t say the word white; she didn’t say black. She said instead that schools were a place for students’ ideas, and not their parents’. After, a league of black girls founded a club called Concerned Students for Justice, but they couldn’t get a room assignment for their meetings because they weren’t recognized by the school as an official group. Adira started a petition, and the signatures surged toward one hundred before the administration granted them club status, claiming all they’d needed to do in the first place was fill out a form. There was no uproar from the students whose parents had papered the hall. It seemed they mostly wanted to go undetected; they didn’t want to upset their parents or be found out by their peers. Still, there was talk, and everyone knew.
The high school carried on with its usual life of cliques and crews, flirting in the lunchroom and kissing in the stairs. There was a pie sale to raise money for the senior trip. The new students came and left by bus; the teachers oversaw their arrivals and departures. In the classrooms, they conducted courteous debates about history and war, clashes that seemed faraway. Mr. Riley counted down the weeks until opening night.
The first instance of graffiti was the N-word in permanent marker inside a stall of the boys’ bathroom. The principal called the second assembly to announce an investigation, how seriously they were taking the vandalism, and how it was their duty not to jump to conclusions. It could have been a custodian, a visitor, a student scrawling out rap lyrics, unaware. Then a swastika appeared on a white wall facing the athletic fields, and there were articles in the city paper, a disquieted hush.
The play was an alternate universe where they put on costumes and spoke funny words, and the drama was about whether Claudio would live or die, whether he’d marry Juliet, whether the duke would win Isabella, and Angelo would finally get what he deserved. It was peaceful, mostly, except for the rehearsal when Shawn confronted Beckett, whose father owned the print shop where the concerned parents had made their posters. Beckett had lurched at Shawn, waved a finger in his face and shouted, Free speech! I’ve got free speech, don’t I? Shawn had warned him to calm down, his own fists clenched at his sides, until Mr. Riley stepped between them, called everyone to sit in a circle.