Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

  Copper-colored sunbeams lean against headstones. The grass is soft and spiked, and here and there a tree sends gnarled, branching shadows toward the tombs. The sun is only partly up the sky but already it promises to be a warm and heavy day, the air thick with the heat and humidity of the bay. Noah’s wife wanders among the rows of stones with no sense of where she is headed. She does not want to go home to Noah; she cannot go back into the church. She remembers the last cemetery she was in, the one on the hill in the rain when she stood beside Noah and heard him promise that everything would be all right. How appalled she had been when the townspeople had not believed him! Can she blame them now for their doubt?

  There are other mourners, here and there. A woman with a hawklike face hurries down one row with a parasol to shield herself from the sun; three aisles over, two men with canes and bowler hats murmur in low voices. As Noah’s wife passes a mother and a little girl, the child throws her hands over her eyes and suddenly bursts out crying. Noah’s wife looks for what it was that could have scared her, but there is nothing frightening in sight.

  “Some people are afraid of cemeteries,” says a squat and mustached man standing a few feet away from her. He indicates the girl and shrugs. “But what is there to be afraid of here? The worst has already happened. You’ve already lost someone.”

  Noah’s wife glances at the stone that he is standing in front of. The man sees her read the dates, watches the numbers tick across her face. He is already prepared with his answer when her head snaps back in surprise.

  “Our son,” he says. “Sixteen. Car accident.”

  Noah’s wife is shaken. She remembers the night the police cars appeared at her front door, blue lights flashing through the living room windows, bearing the news that her mother had been killed. “I’m so sorry,” she says, the words feeling painfully inadequate.

  But what else is there to say? She thinks of those first few weeks after her mother was gone, remembers the shower of cards and phone calls, the warbling cry of the doorbell and the front porch crowded—or so it seemed—with sympathetic faces drifting above black coats. It unsettled her then, as it also did when her sister disappeared, to realize that someone could slip from her life so quickly, so fully. Since then, she has made a point of holding on more tightly to the people she loves.

  The man bends over the grave, ducking his head so that his expression is hidden. “Yes,” his voice husky. He lays a spray of drooping lilies over the tomb. “Well. What can you do? I come and see him every morning.”

  Noah’s wife hesitates. “My mother,” she says after a moment, “died in a crash when I was young. But after she was gone, I couldn’t bear to go to the cemetery to see her. I know I should have. But the reminder was too much.”

  “Not everyone grieves the same way,” says the man with a shrug. “My wife doesn’t come here either. We’ve got a friend who recently lost his wife, maybe a few months ago—I’ve thought about asking if he wants to join me here, but I don’t think he has it in him. Instead he seems to cope in his own peculiar way—by doing magic, of all things.” The man laughs, low and kind.

  “How does your wife grieve?” asks Noah’s wife.

  “Nancy?” says the man. For a moment he considers. “She grieves by trying to live more loudly, more boldly than before. She doesn’t know how else to do it. I think that if you asked her, she’d tell you that this is what it means to make the best of things. Or she’d tell you to mind your own damn business. It’s hard to say.”

  He grins, weakly, his eyelids twitching. Noah’s wife attempts a smile in return.

  “What about you?” she asks, hoping she is not out of line. She is so grateful to have someone to talk to. “Do you think she’s making the best of things?”

  The man tilts his head toward the grave. “Sometimes there isn’t any way to make the best of things,” he says. “And I think that to insist that there is—that everything happens for a reason, et cetera—well, oftentimes that’s nothing but a good-looking lie.”

  His expression is pained. He pauses and glances in the direction of another mourner, her blond head bowed over a plot near the corner. “But that makes me sound as if I’m criticizing Nancy,” he says, “which is absolutely the last thing I want to do. I believe in Nancy, and I even believe in those good-looking lies. Sometimes that’s what we need to tell ourselves in order to get by. If some people want to believe that this is all part of some great plan that’s meant to make us stronger, well, I won’t stop them. I’m not going to stand here and say I know best just because I think I see all the bad that could and does happen, just because I recognize the imminence of death and darkness and I’m afraid. It’s not like I’ve got it all figured out, either.”

  Something about his tone—the sympathy, the intelligence, the tranquillity—reminds Noah’s wife of her husband as he used to be, before they went into the hills to that sad little town. And yet how can this man be so calm in his uncertainty? How can he stand in front of her and tell her that he has no idea why things like this happen without admitting that this perspective has no hope?

  “But if you don’t believe in a greater plan,” she says carefully, “and if you don’t believe that everything happens for a reason—then what keeps you going?”

  The man stares at her. Perhaps she should not have asked the question; maybe the subject is too serious to discuss with a stranger. Then again, when one makes an acquaintance in the cemetery, what else would one talk about besides death?

  “What do you mean, what keeps me going?” he asks.

  She shrugs. She thinks of Noah, remembering the dead weight of him on her arm as she led him out of the church two days before. “If you don’t believe that there’s some purpose behind all this,” she says slowly, “and if you don’t believe that there is some force for good at work, even in times of hardship or sorrow—then how can you not feel despair?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s because I believe in Nancy,” the man says simply. “With Joseph gone, I believe that she and I have got to take care of each other.”

  “So it’s an obligation,” says Noah’s wife, her tone as hollow as her husband’s. “That’s what keeps you going.”

  The man raises his eyebrows. “It’s love,” he replies. “But if you want to call it that, sure. A reciprocal obligation. Fine. But I don’t resent her for it. To tell you the truth, I’m glad about it, I’m glad I’ve got her as my responsibility. What would I do without her? If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn after thirty-odd years of marriage, it’s that a man’s life is not his own. We all belong to someone else, in one way or another. There’s all kinds of people who have shaped us, made us who we are—not just the people we keep close to us, but also tens and hundreds of other people we don’t even remember, strangers we stood behind in line and talked to for a minute. Do you know what I’m saying? I’m saying that if I didn’t crawl into a hole and die on the day of Joseph’s funeral, it’s because I believe that I owe something to each of those people, to all of them, and to Nancy most of all.”

  The morning sun is growing more formidable by the minute. Noah’s wife closes her eyes against the glare, sees once again a host of colored umbrellas. Her soul aches for the old faith she had in Noah, the certainty that he could not lead her astray.

  “You know,” says the man, still musing, “for a long time after the accident I asked myself something similar to what you’ve been getting at just now. How is it that a man can carry on after something like this? A father’s duty is to protect his family from criminals and thugs and truck drivers who fall asleep at the wheel.” His voice is soft and musing, his expression introspective. Noah’s wife feels as though he has forgotten she is there. “For those first few months, I was a little ashamed of myself—ashamed that I was able to roll out of bed and stand up every morning, to carry on with the business of living when my only son had descended among the dead. The grief struck me hard, but I used to wish that it had struck even harder. I wanted it to knock me o
ut, flat unconscious, so that I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore.” He sighs, shakes his head, seems to come back to himself. “But there was Nancy to consider. Always Nancy.”

  She nods in perfect comprehension. How astonished she had been to discover that Noah loved her—how thankful to know that she would never have to be alone again. She chastises herself for doubting him. Her first love and her first duty are to her husband. Is that not what marriage means?

  The man smiles at her and turns away from the grave. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You don’t even know me, and here I am pouring out my soul to you.” He sighs. “This place tends to have that effect on me. I don’t like the quiet here, and so I can’t stop talking.”

  Noah’s wife looks down at the stone, wonders where in this sprawling field lies Dr. Yu’s mother. Would Dr. Yu come here, if Noah’s wife asked her to? Noah’s wife misses her friend as much as she misses her husband—but then, this is the difficulty of loving people who are so much greater than she is, she reminds herself severely. This is what comes of loving people who dream bigger than she herself has ever dared to, who are determined to save lives and souls and bear the weight of so many earthly troubles on their shoulders.

  “My friend,” says Noah’s wife, “who lost her mother—I think she doesn’t come because she blames herself.” Her eyes fill quickly, unexpectedly, and the stone blurs at her feet. “It’s not her fault. She always thought she could take care of the whole world.”

  The man nods, his expression grim. “No one ought to try and take that on,” he says. “I don’t think it’s anybody’s job to battle against sadness and death and grief—all the forces of darkness, if you will. Everyone who comes to this place, we come because we’ve lost what we loved. The darkness is already here. After a while you stop running from it. You find something else to love, something worth holding on to, and you don’t let go of it.”

  Noah’s wife considers him, searching desperately for something to say. “This, too, shall pass,” she finally murmurs, echoing her husband. She wanted words of consolation, and to her surprise these seem to do the trick. The man has already turned to go, but when she speaks he pauses to gaze at her over his shoulder. “Indeed it will,” he promises. “Somehow it always does.”

  thirty

  Mrs. McGinn’s daughter says farewell to the penguins before she goes.

  Her suitcase safely stowed in the trunk, she eases the family’s old station wagon out of the garage and onto the street. Her mother walks everywhere, and her stepfather drives anything and everything but this. She doesn’t think they’ll miss it.

  The rain falls fast and black to the windshield and she flicks on the wipers and the low beams as she splashes through the sleeping town. The lights are off in most houses and the car passes unnoticed from lamppost to lamppost, sliding through the water that rushes hushed and jeweled through the streets. She pulls to the curb outside the diner, hurries around to the back with her keys in her hand. Her feet are snug in her boots but she can hear the water on the floor as she walks through the darkened kitchen to the cooler. For a moment she feels a pang of alarm, followed by a hard roar of guilt. But what would she do if she stayed here? she asks herself angrily. Whatever the fate of their relationship will be after she leaves, she maintains a dogged faith in her mother’s intelligence and her strength, in her ability to overcome any obstacle in her path. She is certain that her mother will know how to deal with the flood in the diner.

  As for herself, she steps gingerly until she reaches the door to the cooler, and then she yanks it open and swings herself inside. The light goes on automatically and she pauses for a moment in its fluorescent glare, looking down at the penguins who come waddling out from their nesting places in the shadows. They blink in the light, peering up at her in pairs. That is what she has always loved about the penguins: their fairy-tale monogamy. To her, they stand for loyalty.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she tells them in the stern tone she learned from her mother. “You don’t understand. I don’t have a choice.”

  She can hear the voice of her mother in her mind as clearly as if the woman were standing right beside her. “You always have a choice, Angela Rose. We’re not animals.”

  But aren’t we? her daughter would like to know. What makes us so different from them? She remembers something her fiancé once told her about the penguins in the wild, something about their long and arduous trek across the snowy Antarctic to lay their eggs and feed their chicks. She would like to think that she is doing exactly the same thing, in human terms: going elsewhere to have her child, since she certainly will not raise it here in the eternal rain, where there is no sun and no hope but only the miles and miles of mud. What kind of mother do these penguins take her for?

  “Besides—there was a plan,” she informs them. “We had a plan. I told Adam that I wouldn’t stay in this town, and he promised that he would get out of here with me. I’m not the one who changed my mind about our life together—it was him.” She pictures her fiancé as she last saw him, lounging in one of the booths of the diner late last night with the red fox nestled on the cracked vinyl seat beside him. The zookeeper was trying to feed the fox frozen berries and earthworms from his fingers. He had glanced up at Angela Rose as she passed, his face coarse and handsome in the shadows. His expression was concerned, although when he looked at her the taut lines softened. “The little guy won’t eat,” he told her. “Not a bite since the minister’s wife has been gone. She should have thought of that before she left him.”

  She twists the ring around her finger—his grandmother’s. He had proposed to her outside the abandoned movie theater where they had been on their first date, had gotten down on one knee and promised never to leave her. He knew that was important to her, knew she craved stability just as much as she craved culture and adventure and escape. It was paradoxical, yes, but he understood without her having to explain it.

  The penguins coo at her, softly but insistently. “Of course I still love him,” she says. “Lay off already, will you? It’s more complicated for us than for you. You can’t always be near the people you love, you can’t always live in the same cooler, or on the ice floe next door. The world doesn’t work like that. If a person isn’t happy where she is, maybe she shouldn’t stay.”

  She opens a couple of cans of crabmeat, strokes the penguins three times each on their heads and down their soft black backs, and then when she is sufficiently saddened, she turns away. The car is waiting where she left it.

  The road out of town feels familiar, although it has been months since the last time she left. In high school she took jobs in the city for the summers, lived in tiny high-rise apartments where the heat was damp and thick. She ordered cheap burgers from chains along the harbor, ate dinner while walking between downtown and the water. She adored the crowds, loved living as a stranger among strangers. They didn’t know her mother there. She could have been anyone.

  At one end of town, the main road slopes down to the river and the zoo, which by now must be completely underwater. At the other end it loops up and out toward the mountains and the coast, the pavement rising and falling over the hills. It is the only way in or out of town. For a moment Mrs. McGinn’s daughter imagines the stars spinning behind clouds that are darker than she’s ever seen them before, draped black and full across the pointed tops of pine trees. Once she’s on the road she pays little attention to where she is going, driving almost by instinct, the car pulling her forward. The wind whistles past the windows and the rain drums against the glass. She turns up the volume on the radio, but finds her old station drowned in static. She tries another station, and another, but there is only white noise.

  The zookeeper used to take her on weekends away to the city once every few months to see concerts. They stayed out until dawn and ate lunchtime breakfasts at crowded cafes and she knew that he tried to like it, for her, but couldn’t. The city lights as seen from their hotel room simply did not capture his imagination
the way they did hers; he did not thrill at the idea of a million other lives blazing just beyond their reach. She could watch the headlights on the highway for hours, entranced by the glowing splendor of the city, but he could not find in it the same beauty he found in campfires or fireflies or the gleam of a wild beast’s eye in the beam of his flashlight. When the situation at the zoo went downhill, when he had to lay off his workers and cut down on the animals, he could no longer take the time to spend the weekends away with her, and although she understood, she hated to think that (at least in part) he was relieved.

  What will he think of her when he discovers that she’s gone?

  When she sees the road vanish before her, she slams on the brakes and the car shudders into a long skid, sending her vaulting forward as a spray of water whooshes past the windows. There is a long moment afterward when she tries to calm her nerves, to stop the trembling of her fingers on the wheel, and to catch her ragged breath. Finally she shifts the car into park and opens the door.

  Once she has climbed out and is standing on the ground beside her car, it becomes clear where the missing road has gone. The front of the car is partly submerged in one end of a long blank lake whose surface is as sinister and as void as the sky. The rain continues to fall into it and the drops disturb the surface in a steady cascade that sends ripples running headlong into one another in their attempt to spread. The night is deep and the clouds are dense, and although Mrs. McGinn’s daughter is certain that the other edge of the lake must exist somewhere, that the road has to rise right out of it again, she cannot see the far side. For all intents and purposes, the road is gone. She cannot pass.