Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

  Mrs. McGinn’s daughter thinks of the koi in the bathtub upstairs. When she went into the bathroom to feed them this morning, she found one of them dead, his gold belly facing the ceiling, and she had to spend several long minutes trying to fish him out with a pasta strainer. Nothing about her life is normal.

  “The rain isn’t dying down anytime soon,” she says with a scowl that looks much like her mother’s. “You know that, don’t you? Just take a look out there! Things are going from bad to worse! Soon it will be impossible to get through the streets—that’s what Mauro said. And did anyone here even listen to the weatherman, or were all your heads in the sand? What the heck are we going to do when the river flows over?”

  “Ever the contrarian!” replies her mother, unfazed. “We’ve got to make the best of a bad situation, my dear. That’s what gives a person character.”

  Mrs. McGinn’s daughter would prefer that her mother had a little less character, and that she herself had a little more. As it is, she has no income, no job. She has nowhere else to go. “Whatever,” she says. “Just remember what I said about Adam.”

  Mrs. McGinn nods, distractedly, but the next day Mrs. McGinn’s daughter realizes that her mother has turned a deaf ear to her request for privacy. All morning the townspeople come flocking to the diner to express their satisfaction and delight over the news. Mauro drops by first to let her know that he will be returning later with champagne.

  “Of course we will be having the champagne!” he says. “The champagne is the happiest drink! But maybe it is not for you. I will be bringing, too, the juice, also.”

  Mrs. McGinn’s daughter isn’t certain why champagne is the happiest drink, but when she pictures it she thinks she understands: the good cheer, the optimism conveyed by a glass of liquid gold with bubbles rising ever upward. In general, the people in this town tend to find great comfort in elements that rise up toward the sky rather than fall down from it. They are particularly fond of balloons.

  “Blue and pink!” says Leesl. “I brought both!”

  “Please keep it down,” says Mrs. McGinn’s daughter to her visitors. “I’d like to be the one to tell my fiancé.”

  “Well, yes!” they say. “Why wouldn’t you? Mum’s the word!”

  The penguins, curious about all the commotion in the main dining area, come wandering out of the walk-in refrigerator every time the bell chimes above the front door. When Mrs. McGinn’s daughter sees them, she scolds them and takes them back to the cooler, settling them among the plastic tubs of butter and vats of heavy cream with ten open cans of tuna fish. She drops down onto a low stool beside them, hides her forehead in her hands, feeling sick to her stomach and wishing she could hide in here all day.

  She is overwhelmed by the outpouring of emotion from her neighbors, particularly because she feels that theirs is an enthusiasm she does not share. For the townspeople, however, this news is exactly what they need after the weatherman’s disastrous meeting and the subsequent exodus of approximately one-half of their number. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter is surprised to find how relieved they seem to be; how ready they are to accept this unborn child—the first infant this town has seen in at least four or five years—as a sign that they have not been forgotten, that although some of their neighbors have been swept from their midst, they have gained one in return.

  “Providence,” says Leesl, somewhat cryptically.

  “Remember,” remark some of the middle-aged couples, waxing nostalgic, “when you used to babysit for us? Now our children can babysit for you!” One of them hands her a stuffed giraffe.

  Mrs. McGinn’s daughter clasps it to her chest in the cooler and considers the summers she used to spend with her neighbors’ infants when she was in high school, pacing with one or the other of them from oven to refrigerator across the white stone floor of the kitchen, trying to lull them to sleep by crooning off-key versions of “Oh My Darling Clementine” and “A Bicycle Built for Two.” Her arm had been molded around those babies for so many hours at a time that by autumn, the nerves in her hand would feel knotted and tangled. Every once in a while she is woken still by a pulsing ache in her wrists, recalling a phantom child the way that soldiers speak of the dull pain of phantom limbs.

  Is this what motherhood means? Mrs. McGinn’s daughter would like to know. She has always lamented the way that her life has been so forcibly stamped by her mother, but she wonders if she might have had it wrong. Who molded whom? Which of them is living a life shaped by the other?

  She recalls a conversation she had with the townspeople earlier this morning while her mother was bringing breakfast platters out to the tables. Her daughter watched her set the plates down with a flourish. Mrs. McGinn was loving all of this attention, she knew. She was loving the flowers and the gifts. She was eating this up.

  “The real question,” called her mother from across the room, “is what you’re going to name the baby. That’s the best part of being pregnant. Coming up with possibilities!”

  “It seems a little soon for that,” said her daughter, leaning over the counter.

  “Nonsense,” replied Mrs. McGinn. “Have you considered Evelyn?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.” Her tone was regal. “It’s a name that’s served me perfectly well over the years.”

  The townspeople who heard this hurriedly swallowed bites of their waffles so that they could chime in. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter half listened to their suggestions, both irritated and amused. All of her neighbors wanted the baby to be named after themselves.

  “I wonder why that is,” she wondered aloud. Mauro heard her.

  “I tell you why!” he said, brandishing his bottle of champagne. He had already offered “Mario,” “Marco,” or “Maurice” as English alternatives. “Because it is as the Romans say! Nomen est omen.”

  “The name is a sign,” translated Mrs. McGinn’s husband, barreling through with a bag full of recyclables. He nodded at his wife and disappeared into the back.

  “The name is a sign?” repeated Mrs. McGinn’s daughter.

  “That is what the Romans are saying,” confirmed Mauro, riffling through the pages of an empty baby photo album that one of the neighbors had brought as a gift. “The name is a sign. The name is the fate. This is why it is important to be choosing the right one. It is determining who you are, and what you are doing, and how the world is seeing you.”

  “I don’t know if I believe all that,” retorted Mrs. McGinn’s daughter. “I’d like to think that we have more of a say in who we are than that.”

  Mauro shrugged. “You don’t have to be believing in it,” he said. “That is not making it any the less true.”

  Recalling this now in the cooler she shivers, draws her knees to her chest and hugs them close. The hair is rising on her arms. That is exactly why she never wanted to be a mother, she reminds herself. It is too much pressure. It is too much for one person—or even two—to bear. What if she does something to ruin the child? What if he grows up to hate her? How can she know if she will be a better mother than she is a daughter? She can be sullen, she knows; she can be sharp and ungrateful. But it is hard to be happy in this town, in this family. More than anything else, the pregnancy underscores the sense she has of being snared.

  It is here that the zookeeper finds her: alone in the cooler, her chin in her hands, her expression withdrawn. One of the penguins, waiting by the entrance, manages to escape as the door is slowly swinging shut behind him. The zookeeper, no small man, covers the distance to his fiancée in four long strides. She has time only to rise to her feet before he has enveloped her in a burly arm and has crushed her against his chest and is telling her in a voice thick with emotion that he has already heard the news, that he couldn’t be more pleased, that she shouldn’t worry at all because she should know by now that he’s in this for the long haul. She can feel his heart hammering against her cheek.

  “Don’t worry,” he murmurs. “Don’t worry about a thing, Angie. I’m right here
with you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

  He keeps soothing her, keeps holding her close, but what he means to be a reassurance comes as a painful blow. Not going anywhere?

  The panic rises in her chest and presses at her lungs, leaves her feeling dizzy and faint. Her blood thrums through her ears and she sways a little on her feet. With her head buried in her fiancé’s shoulder, she can see the bars of her cage materializing before her: day after gray day in a town that is going under, a future no brighter than the tarnished silverware she wipes clean before the lunchtime rush.

  After a moment she frees herself from his embrace, and she follows him out of the cooler and back into the diner. He holds her hand and talks to their neighbors, thanks them for the gifts and chuckles with them over competing pieces of parental advice. Later on, when he leaves for his rounds, she kisses him good-bye and watches him walk out into the rain with an unusually buoyant step. She is surprised that he is so pleased about the news; she had not known that he would feel so strongly about fatherhood.

  Once she is certain that he is safely on his way and that her mother is not watching, she returns to her room and pulls her suitcase out from underneath her bed.

  twenty-two

  Ever since the weatherman abandoned this town, the place has been plagued with nightmares.

  “It’s not a curse,” says Mrs. McGinn wearily, when someone asks her what she thinks about it. Dark crescents pulse below her eyes, and her tone lacks its usual vitality. “It’s strain. It’ll pass. In the meantime, you should go sit beside your light boxes. Didn’t I tell you that they were designed to lift low spirits?”

  And because the townspeople do not have another option, that is what they do. Noah’s wife can see the lights winking from a handful of windows as she slogs through the streets in search of Noah, the rain twisting down in strings. She thinks of the dreams she has overheard her neighbors sharing with one another every time they congregate, each person trying to out-terrify his neighbor: monsters and wild dogs, car accidents and plane crashes, skydives gone wrong, final exams they have not prepared for. They spend so many hours comparing notes on the fires and earthquakes of their subconscious that they do not have time to reflect upon the reality in which they find themselves: a town beset by darkness, a rain that will not end. As far as Noah’s wife can tell, none of her neighbors dream of floods.

  The town itself is more deserted than she has ever seen it: front yards are rutted with tire tracks, littered with trash and tattered furniture. Frightened by the weatherman’s dire warnings, half of the town returned home after the meeting to start packing suitcases. The next morning they loaded their cars and pickup trucks, jogging back and forth to the front door with their hoods pulled low over their eyes, their animals watching anxiously from the windows. By the time night fell, most of them were already on their way. Their vehicles were crammed full of suitcases and books, boxes full of cooking supplies, end tables, lawn chairs—everything that they could fit. As they drove slowly past the neighbors who were watching them from behind half-drawn curtains, they felt relieved that they were moving, glad to be leaving this watery world behind. They asked themselves why it took them so long to make the decision, and they pitied the people who were still here.

  Noah’s wife can still hear a few car engines in the distance and through the rain she can see the headlights of the stragglers streaming out into the hills, the sad and luminous parade rolling onto the two-lane highway that links the town to the rest of the world. For a moment she imagines herself to be leaving with them, pictures the highway through the mountains: softly sloping, swift and dark. She cannot blame them for going. Remembering the weatherman’s warnings, she, too, feels a cold rush of panic sliding through her limbs. When she crosses the creaking wooden bridge over the river she hears the water roaring underfoot, sees it clawing at the banks. She steps watchfully over the planks, the ghost of the old minister looming before her.

  She has suffered loss before, as everyone has. Her sister packed her bags and left home the minute she turned sixteen, and, a few months later her mother, driving home from a night out after a gallery opening, wrapped her car around a tree in a fatal embrace. In the weeks that followed, Noah’s wife floated unmoored. She suffered terrible insomnia, and when she did sleep, she was restless. She went days without speaking to another soul. After barely surviving a year of college, she quit school and left her childhood home to move in with the soon-to-be Dr. Yu, to whom she attached herself with all the force and devotion she possessed. She learned to make herself indispensable—first to Dr. Yu, and later on to Noah. She never felt secure when she was on her own; somewhere deep in her subconscious she harbored the fear that if she did not have someone there to really see her, to speak to her, to need her—then she would simply disappear. Her own nightmares have always been variations on this theme.

  The past two nights her dreams have been flooded with gray landscapes and unfamiliar streets that she wanders alone, looking for Noah. She walks into stores to ask strangers for help, the bell chiming above her, but no one answers. She approaches shadowed figures in brightly colored coats, but when she tries to speak to them, they seem to look right through her. The dreams feel so real to her that she is almost startled, during the daylight hours, when her neighbors stop her on the sidewalk to request her presence in their homes. Although the animals have been settled in most of their houses for over a week already, the worries of the townspeople have not subsided. Every time one of the animals does something unusual—eats more or less than its caretaker thinks it should, makes a noise it has never made before, sheds a skin or molts its feathers—Noah’s wife is sought and called. Her neighbors are stubborn in their insistence that she is a better helper than the zookeeper: calmer, kinder. Leesl’s cheetah rubs its tufted chin against the garage fence when Noah’s wife approaches; Mauro’s peacocks flare their feathers in delight at the sight of her. Although she is usually reluctant when the townspeople first accost her, after a few minutes with the animals she always warms to the task, and by the time she leaves she is genuinely sorry to leave the beasts behind.

  Today, however, she refuses to be distracted. “I’ll stop by later if I can,” she promises, shifting her umbrella to her other hand. “By the way, have you seen Noah?”

  Her neighbors shake their heads, their brows furrowed as if in sympathy, but she can tell that they are feigning concern they do not feel. Although her instinct is to defend her husband, Noah’s wife isn’t certain what to say. It is true, she must admit, that Noah has been of little help with the animals or the townspeople since coming up with this plan in the first place. But then, her husband’s calling is to walk with God. How could he focus on the divine if he were down here in the trenches with the rest of them, cleaning cages and transporting feed? He has always been a man who is set apart from other men—something that has never bothered Noah’s wife before. The only difference now is that he has also set himself apart from her.

  Why has he begun to spend his days wandering? What is it that he is looking for? Twice now Mrs. McGinn’s husband has passed him out on the road and given him a lift back; and this morning when Leesl found him pacing through the marshes, she took his arm and brought him gently home. His wife, preoccupied with the care of extra animals, looked up in surprise when he entered, not having realized he was gone. An egg carton fell from her hands and an orchestra of crickets spilled out across the carpet. They leaped behind the furniture and sang their praises from the corners, thankful not to be breakfast for the bearded dragon. Noah strode toward her, apologized profusely for his absence, and continued forward into his office. When she stopped in to ask him something two hours later, he was gone again.

  Outside the diner now she closes her umbrella and pulls open the door, shaking the water off her hood before she enters. Inside, she finds Mrs. McGinn wiping down the tables with her apron askew and her hair completely wild. The hairdresser is among those who have recently left town, and although Mrs. McGi
nn has tried to tame and twist her curls on her own, she has had little success. She looks frazzled, unkempt, and Noah’s wife tries to quell the stirrings of alarm. If Mrs. McGinn cannot keep herself together, what hope is there for the rest of them?

  “Evelyn,” she says. “Have you seen my husband?”

  Mrs. McGinn frowns and jabs her hands into her hips. She always likes to know where people’s husbands are. “No,” she says. “I thought Jackson dropped him off last night.” She scrutinizes Noah’s wife. “Is there something you haven’t told me? Are you two leaving, too?”

  “Of course not,” says Noah’s wife. What monsters she and her husband would have to be, to desert this town after all that has happened! Wasn’t it Noah, after all, who saddled his neighbors with the wild animals? Wasn’t it she herself who refuted the weatherman’s counsel? If they were not tied up in the fate of this place before, then they are certainly caught up in it now.

  “Good,” says Mrs. McGinn. Her face turns hard. “Because the people who left here are cowards. They are afraid of something that will never happen.”

  Noah’s wife does not respond. She remembers developing the weatherman’s photos at home last week, everything in her bathroom bathed in a soft amber glow from the filter she placed over her light box. The baby alligator splashed in the tub behind her while she stood at the sink and watched the shapes materialize on paper, the images appearing faintly at first and then darkening the longer she left them soaking in the developer. It had always thrilled her to see the change occur—to watch the world coming into being on her paper where nothing had been before—but something about these images stamped out her enchantment with the process and left her feeling cold instead. There was water creeping up the steps of the town hall; there were tropical birds shivering on caving roofs, and two drowned raccoon carcasses bumping up against a curb. It was clear from the series that the river was indeed rising ever higher, that the trees were losing more leaves by the day and the telephone and power lines were all in danger. She stopped developing after she rinsed the print of the town cemetery and clipped it up to dry. She felt too disturbed to carry on.