Noah's Wife

by Lindsay Starck

  What Mrs. McGinn’s daughter would really like to know, she realizes as she makes her way back with the wine, is why her mother kept getting married, over and over again, when she should have known by marriage two or three that the next would be as likely to fail as the rest. Some people are good at marriage, Mrs. McGinn’s daughter had discovered at an early age. But her mother was not one of them.

  Her daughter had hated it. She was humiliated by her classmates’ questions; her mother was the only divorcée in town. She hated the shuffling transitions from one home to another, the solemn, self-conscious parades down the street with her mother while their neighbors peeked out from behind semidrawn curtains. She hated the scratchy feel of new furniture and the stiff spines of new books and the dizzying scent of fresh paint, but most of all she hated the whole idea of it, the whole attempt: the washing away of their personal history as if it hadn’t happened. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter used to threaten to run away from home; she used to call her mother spiteful names. Once during one of their marches from old home to new home she had sworn that when she was grown, she would live her life differently.

  When she reaches the center of the aisle, she bends down to her mother and props her up so that she can drink. Together the two women survey the church. Pillows and blankets are strewn across the aisle and the altar; dirty dishes are stacked in the corners. The electricity is out and the wicks of the candles are burning so low that even the light feels damp. The air reeks of rotten produce and hay and dung. The townspeople are disheveled, unwashed, and they, too, are beginning to stink of musk.

  “Angela Rose,” says Mrs. McGinn to her daughter, her voice becoming more resonant, more regal with every swig. “Look at these people. Depressed. Hopeless. No better than the animals who are trapped up here with them. Do you know what they need?” She pauses, as if considering, but the daughter has lived with her mother too long to be fooled. Mrs. McGinn already has an idea.

  “What is it, Mama?” she says obediently. She is tempted to take a sip of that wine herself.

  “They need something to cheer them, something to take their mind off the situation!” she exclaims. She raises one orange eyebrow, her expression pointed and cunning. “Angela Rose. Why don’t you get married up here?”

  Her daughter stares. “Are you serious?” she demands.

  “I never joke about weddings,” replies Mrs. McGinn. “I know it’s not as lovely as you might have wanted it to be. But the whole town is here! If we rearranged the potted plants, found some hangings for the walls … There are enough canned vegetables and beans to whip up something of a wedding dinner downstairs. Why not?”

  “Because, Mama,” she says, casting a desperate glance around the church and ticking off the reasons on her fingers. “It’s too cold up here, and it’s too dark. I don’t have a dress. It’s raining. The place smells like swine.” She hesitates, stumbles into truthfulness. “And anyway, I don’t think that Adam would take me back.”

  Mrs. McGinn snorts. “That Adam?” she retorts, tilting her head meaningfully to the left. Mrs. McGinn’s daughter looks in the direction that she indicates, sees the zookeeper standing a few pews away, his fingers gripping the wood and his gaze fixed heatedly, unhappily on her. At the sight of him, her whole body aches—and when their eyes meet, he doesn’t turn away.

  “He loves you,” says Mrs. McGinn simply.

  “It isn’t that easy,” snaps her daughter, turning back to her mother. “You should know that better than anyone.”

  Mrs. McGinn shrugs. “Whatever you say about me, whatever anyone says about me—I’ve had a fine life, Angela Rose. I’ve had some good partners, some bad. Did I expect to marry four times? Of course not. No one does. Do I regret any of it? Well, how could I? I don’t believe that there are right choices or wrong choices, only the paths you choose to take, and the ones that you don’t.” She lifts her right arm, wraps it around her daughter’s shoulders, and pulls the girl close. “I know you’re frightened, sweetheart. I want to be able to promise you that your life will have no hardship and that your marriage will be happy and that it will last from now until kingdom come. But I can’t. All I can tell you is that things happen and plans change and we’ve got to change along with them or risk being left behind. The world is an uncertain place, that’s for sure—but if you’ve got someone you love and who loves you back, you ought to hold on to him. I’ve always had you. And I’ve hung on so tight that the rest doesn’t matter.”

  Pressed against her mother, Mrs. McGinn’s daughter turns her head slightly to see if the zookeeper is still there. The light in the church is murky and wet, the figures of her neighbors mingled with the shadows. As everything else tumbles down around her, she longs to make an attempt at something permanent, to attach herself to something true.

  thirty-seven

  Noah’s wife assumes that her husband is on board, and Noah doesn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.

  Has he not disappointed her enough?

  He has seen the way she looks at him when she crosses his path in her best friend’s small and sterile house: her lips pursed with worry, her gaze steady with disapproval. He feels terrible for missing the interviews that she set up for him, but he simply could not bring himself to go. He is Noah, after all—he used to walk with God. And now? For him, the days before they left that town were as empty and as bleak as the sky itself. He feels resentful and alone—as if he has been abandoned, as if all his faith and certainty had grown wings and taken flight. But how could he explain that to his wife? He would rather wait, and bide his time, and hope for everything to be restored. He has always been a patient man. He would rather listen for the rustling of familiar feathers, watching the sky from dawn to dusk until what he has lost returns to him. Is that not a kind of faith, too?

  “I thought you were afraid of boats,” he tells his wife as she works beside him in the parking lot of the harbor. She and Noah and Dr. Yu are loading all of the magician’s gear into Dr. Yu’s hatchback in the parking lot. Her father was supposed to help them as soon as he wrapped up the show, but instead he tossed his scarves and cuffs onto the lawn and went flying down the pier in search of his friends who own a boat.

  “I don’t like them,” admits Noah’s wife. “But if the roads are flooded, what other choice do we have?”

  She turns the full weight of her gray gaze upon him, but Noah can’t meet it. Instead he focuses on her fingers, nimbly fastening her coat against the sea breeze. He knows that she is waiting for him to speak, waiting for his reaction to the news she brought back along with the dove; she wants to know if the current crisis in the town has changed the way he feels about going back. This is a chance, at last, to deliver them! Have the old flames finally been lit within his soul?

  He stuffs his fists into his pockets, where his knuckles encounter feathers and ribbons and skeleton keys. He loosens his right hand and closes it again around one of the keys, clenching it so tightly that he can feel its teeth digging into his palm. The end of the performance had gone much better than the beginning. It had been Noah, in fact, who deftly stepped in to save one of the tricks when it looked as though it might be going awry. Perhaps he was getting the hang of it, after all. Noah is no fool—he knows that Dr. Yu’s father believes himself to be helping the broken-down minister by providing him with some sort of instruction, something to occupy his empty hours. But from where Noah stood on the makeshift stage this evening, he wondered if it is he who has been of greater help to the magician. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Yu herself, Noah has learned how to tell if her father has eaten that day, how much he has slept, whether or not he has taken the vitamins that she prescribes for him. During their performances, Noah is the one to lift the trunks, the coffin-box, and the tables when the magician grows weary, and he has begun to take the wheel on their trips to and from the harbor because his companion’s driving is often so erratic. As reluctant as he was at first to be roped into the project one week ago, Noah was beginning to enjoy the tas
k. Perhaps he is not praying, or preaching; perhaps he is not saving any souls. But the work is tangible and practical. Yesterday was the first time in a long time when he did not wake up full of that old sinking feeling, his chest crammed with invisible weights, his throat prickly and parched. This morning he rose early, slipping out of bed so that his wife would not awaken, and even whistled a little as he checked on the canaries and prepared a pot of oatmeal. In the gazebo that evening, as he pulled the curtain in front of the coffin to hide it from the audience and headed around the other side to help Dr. Yu’s father, he stepped lightly over the groaning boards of the platform and felt more alive than he had in weeks.

  And now there was this. When his wife had burst backstage, her face sharp with fear, he guessed at what she had to say before she spoke. He stood frozen while she called hoarsely to Dr. Yu’s father from behind the curtain, his heart sinking in his rib cage as she explained to him and Dr. Yu the situation as she had learned it from the weatherman.

  Noah has never seen her so animated. He watches her face light up with recognition when Dr. Yu’s father finally reappears, his two friends jogging to keep pace with him.

  “This is Stan,” says Dr. Yu’s father, short of breath, pointing to the mustached man two steps behind him. “And his wife—”

  “You must be Nancy,” says Noah’s wife, smiling broadly and extending her hand to each of them in turn.

  “How did you know that?” demands Dr. Yu’s father.

  Stan smiles. “We met the other day.”

  Noah keeps his gaze upon his wife, wondering where she has been going while he stays at home. He takes a step closer to her while she sums up the situation for Stan and Nancy.

  “So you see,” she concludes, “we’ve got to get there as quickly as we can. And we’ve got to go by boat.” She hesitates. “I wish there were another way, but I’m afraid we have no choice.”

  Nancy nods. “Stan doesn’t like boats either,” she says, clasping the hand of Noah’s wife warmly between her own. “So you’re in good company, my dear. But don’t worry! We’ve been living on this boat for weeks. We know the ins and outs of it by now, don’t we, Stan?”

  Stan nods, his smile dimming slightly. Dr. Yu’s father glances fiercely at his watch. As Noah considers the faces of the hardy souls gathered around him, he is struck by the vision of a sinking ship—imagines all five of them pitching into a turbulent sea and vanishing beneath the waves. What would become of him then?

  The simple truth is that he is afraid. He cannot return there; he does not have the strength to witness firsthand the destruction that he was supposed to have prevented. In the days since their departure he has come to believe that he was right about that place from the beginning: there is a darkness to it. It is no coincidence that Noah nearly met the same fate of the old minister who drowned in the river; the clouds that have hung so low over that place for so long must certainly be a sign. He remembers the waters closing over his head, the gentle, insistent tug of the current—he remembers sinking, his body and soul so cold that he could feel his bones throbbing with the chill. He barely survived the town the first time around, and he is only beginning to feel better now. If he returns, there is no guarantee that he will make it out again. There is no guarantee that any of them will make it out again.

  “When you can see that something is doomed,” he says slowly, “what’s the sense in going back?”

  At first he is not aware that he has spoken the thought aloud. When he sees his wife’s stricken expression, he instantly regrets the words. He knows that she loves him because he is confident and unshakable. And he has always taken great pains not to destroy that illusion—not to tell her that he is afraid of stupid things like theme parks and bee stings—but then, what is the sense in hiding his fear now? What right has he to remain silent and let her go when it means that she is certainly going to her death?

  He takes a deep breath, parts two chapped lips, and speaks. “This will never work,” he tells them in the steadiest voice he can manage. “It’s a fool’s errand.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Noah’s wife. Her face is unfamiliar in the shadows. “Noah, if we don’t go now, it might be too late before anyone else can reach them. What if they die there?”

  Noah shakes his head. “And what if you do go?” he says. “You’ll never make it there in time. You won’t be saving anyone, you’ll only lose yourselves in the attempt.” He pauses, shudders. “Trust me,” he adds. “I know.”

  Dr. Yu is examining him, her dark eyes narrowed and her gaze as keen as her father’s. “Noah,” she says, trying in her own way to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t believe you mean it. I’m sure you’ve got a little more faith left in you than that.”

  The heat rises to his face. He is ashamed at his response to the crisis, which makes him all the more desperate to explain to them what they are too hopeful, too naïve to see. “Faith is nothing but a trick of the light,” he says, pulling up his words as if from a great depth. “You think that something can come from nothing, but it’s only an illusion. The dove does not vanish or reappear. She is always already there, hidden in the folds of the magician’s cloak. Isn’t that right?” He glances at Dr. Yu’s father. “Isn’t that what you’ve been teaching me?”

  Dr. Yu’s father stands paralyzed beside Nancy, his expression at once appalled and full of pity.

  “Noah,” he says, “I think you’ve got it wrong.”

  “I know what I’m talking about,” replies Noah, his sense of conviction increasing with every word. For a few seconds he feels almost as unshakable as his old self. “This is senseless and dangerous. There isn’t any point in going back.”

  He scrutinizes his wife, waiting for her to waver. In spite of everything that has happened—as if the last few weeks have been nothing but a bad dream—he is expecting her to do what she has always done: to see that he is right and then step swiftly to his side. But her expression remains opaque, and he is so taken aback when she turns away from him that he must place a hand on the hull of the yacht to steady himself.

  There is little he can do but watch as she gathers her team around her. It is decided that she and Dr. Yu will take the car and make a quick run for supplies while the others prepare the boat and persuade as many people as they can to join them.

  “The more boats we have, the better,” Noah’s wife explains. “It’s not only the people we’re worried about, but the animals, as well. There isn’t any way they’ll all fit on one.”

  Nancy smiles. “We’ve met quite a few people in the harbor these past few months,” she says. “It’s high time we called in a favor or two.”

  While Noah’s wife and Dr. Yu climb into the car, Dr. Yu’s father follows Stan and Nancy down to the boats. Nancy kicks off her neon pumps and climbs up the ladder to the deck of her boat to begin untying knots, pulling the tarps from the helm and the controls. Stan and Dr. Yu’s father pace up and down the piers, knocking against hulls to see who is on board, looking for fellow sailors who are present and willing to lend a hand.

  Noah stands alone, set apart from the action. He watches the shadowy figures emerge from the boats to the dock, scratching their heads or tilting their chins while listening to Dr. Yu’s father’s passionate account of the situation in the town. He is still wearing some of his magician’s gear, and even from a distance Noah can see that the tuxedo lends an air of elegance and authority to his plea. Of course the man has never seen the place, Noah reminds himself ruefully. He has no idea what it will take to get there, or what they will find waiting for them if they ever arrive. Perhaps this is why he and his daughter and the rest of the lot are so willing to climb upon the nearest boat and turn their helms to the north, barreling straight into the heart of the storm. It is easy to play the parts of heroes when they do not know what to expect, when they can imagine the situation as something other than what it is. There is a great power in imagination, in belief, in fiction. It can make a man feel like anything i
s possible.

  Indeed, Noah knows exactly what they are feeling right now, the small crowd of would-be heroes growing slowly but steadily in number as the minutes pass. In the past, he has felt it, too: the rush of adrenaline before a service, before a ceremony; the energy of prayer; the confidence and drive that come from the certainty that he is needed, that there is a force for good in the world and that everything will turn out for the best in the end. It’s fine to believe that now, here on the docks where the lamps glitter against a navy blue sky, where the stars swing over the harbor on their constellated strings and the boats rock quietly on the waves. It is peaceful here. It is beautiful. But it won’t be peaceful there, with the water crashing against the houses and the rain plummeting down to the roofs like hard, translucent stones. People will be wailing, clawing at the walls to get out. Some will be dead; others will be well on their way. There will be nothing left but destruction—and the simple truth is that Noah cannot bear to see it.

  As the time nears for their departure, the energy along the docks intensifies. Noah counts at least twelve boats with their engines running and their navigation lights beaming out across the water. Noah’s wife and Dr. Yu, having returned from their errand, are unloading cardboard boxes from the trunks of their cars and placing them into the arms of their willing volunteers. People he doesn’t recognize are tossing supplies to one another from boardwalk to boat: blankets, tarps, flashlights, jugs of fresh water, crates of bread and crackers. Dr. Yu’s father is bent beside Stan beneath one of the standing lamps, their necks craned together over a map unfolded between them. When Nancy calls out to Stan from the deck of their boat, his head snaps up and he hurries over to join her. Dr. Yu’s father glances away from the map and sees Noah drifting in his direction.