The Noah Confessions

by Barbara Hall

  I can’t go into that right now. First, some history. Mine.

  I’m the youngest of three kids. My brother’s a Methodist minister in North Carolina. He’s married, no kids. My sister is a freshman at William and Mary, majoring in theater. My mother’s a housewife. My father runs the carpet factory here in Union Grade. It’s the main industry aside from the tire plant and the building supply. He doesn’t own it—it’s a big corporate monolith based in Tennessee. But he’s the manager and that makes him the big man in town. He employs a lot of people, parents of a lot of kids who go to school with us. He’s also on the town council and in the Lions Club, and is a deacon in the Methodist church, which we attend regularly.

  Are you still awake? Keep going.

  The reason I’m writing to you is that I have something to confess.

  That’s why it’s important that we don’t get to know each other. As soon as you read this letter it’s going to change your life. It’s going to change mine. It’s way far better if we are strangers when it happens.

  What I want to tell you is that I’m a criminal.

  No, it’s not shoplifting or speeding or taking drugs or buying and selling tests or bootleg records. It’s a lot more serious. They send you to prison until you’re old or dead.

  You’re the first person I’ve ever told and probably the last, unless I decide to go ahead and tell the police and do my time. I’m still thinking of running away. I don’t know how it’s going to work. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me if I go through with this. But I have a pretty good idea of what will happen if I don’t.

  I put the manuscript in the box, the top on the box, and the box under my bed. I walked down the hall to my father’s bedroom and didn’t even knock. He was sitting in his chair next to the fireplace and had just opened one of his precious books about the Civil War or the trade union movement. He didn’t even look up at me.

  I said, “Let me get this straight. This is a letter from my mother to some boy named Noah, when she was sixteen, wherein she confesses to said strange boy named after the guy in the ark that she’s a criminal?”

  My father looked to the ceiling. “I think she was fifteen.”

  “Hilarious. You see my sides splitting.”

  “Just keep reading, Lynne. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  “It’s going to take me a hundred typewritten pages to figure out how my mother became a criminal? You’re not just going to explain it to me? You don’t think it’s worth getting right to the point?”

  “There’s no way to do that,” he said. “If I thought…If she thought…there were another way, she’d have chosen it.”

  I waited but he just stared at me.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I’ve forgotten about the car.”

  SIXTEEN

  and a Day

  • 1 •

  I didn’t read any more that night. I had a history test the next day and since I had spent most of the first part of the year obsessing about Ms. Kintner’s wardrobe (she dressed like Heidi some days, a gypsy or a Portuguese widow on others, and I liked to take bets), I was naturally worried about how I was going to do. Technically I was already grounded until college, even though I was pretty sure my father was using hyperbole to prove a point. Still, I didn’t want to throw bad grades into the mix. I studied as much as possible but it wasn’t easy, not with the letter sitting under my bed like a bomb.

  I didn’t sleep much. I tossed and turned and dreamed of waves one minute and guns the next. I saw my mother robbing a bank. I saw myself walking on water. I saw the car that I didn’t get going over the side of a cliff with me in it. Then my mother. Then Ms. Kintner. It was an exhausting night and I was relieved when it ended.

  My father and I didn’t talk about it on the way to school. All he said was “You aren’t going to do anything crazy today, are you?”

  “If I do, I’ll call you.”

  “Lynnie.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  But I knew he would.

  Everyone was talking about me ditching school. At lunch, younger classmen were pointing and whispering. That’s what it was like at Hillsboro. Being a little bad made you a celebrity. Anything more got you kicked out.

  “You are so my hero,” Talia said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, she could end up in public school,” Zoe said.

  “Her father would never let that happen.”

  “He went to public school,” I said.

  “Yeah, but he won’t even let you drive a car.”

  “What did he do to you?” Zoe asked.

  “He gave me a letter,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s the worst. Like you want to hear them going on about right and wrong and what happened in their day. I have to go to computer lab.”

  “Me too,” Talia said, and they hurried off, still munching on their veggie wraps.

  I watched them go and felt like my whole place in the world was leaking away.

  I pictured my mother sitting in a cafeteria in a bad public school in the South, writing in her notebook. I wondered if Noah had been near her, if she could see him across the room, if he was cute, if he knew who she was. I wondered about her crime, how soon I would know and if it would change me. Or my feelings for her.

  I saw Jen sitting alone in her usual spot. She had her eyes fixed on a surfing magazine while she ate a slice of pizza, folded in half the way a New Yorker does it.

  I kicked the grass in front of her to get her attention. She just looked at my shoes and recognized them.

  “Hey, Lizard. You did good yesterday. But I can’t skip any more for a while. I nearly got caught.”

  “I did get caught.”

  “You’ll get better at it.”

  I sat on the ground and said, “Guess what I got for my birthday?”

  “I think we went over this. A bracelet. No car. You need to move on.”

  “Something else. A letter from my mother.”

  “From your dead mother?”

  “She wrote it when she was fifteen.”

  “To you?”

  “Jen, a little circulation in the brain, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “You’re telling the story,” she said. “I can’t help that it’s all screwed up.”

  “She wrote it to somebody else when she was about my age.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy named Noah.”

  “Is it a love letter?”

  “No, it’s a…confession.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “I haven’t gotten to that part.”

  “It’s probably boring. Our parents thought they did all this rad shit but it was totally lame. Marijuana. Oooh. I’m scared.”

  “You don’t do drugs.”

  “Don’t need to. I surf. That’s my point. Smoking a joint makes you lose your ambition, my father says. I’m like, okay, the wrong break at the wrong time, you’re toast.”

  “Don’t scare me. I’m just getting started.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Can I really read this letter? I mean, do I want to know what she’s going to confess?”

  Jen pointed to a page in the magazine and said, “Look at that red and yellow Hobie. Sweet.”

  “Well, thanks for listening.”

  “Everybody’s got a past. You’re just trying to keep your mom perfect,” she said. “You have that option because she’s dead.”

  This was hands down the smartest thing I’d ever heard her say.

  “So you think I should read it.”

  “Look at it this way, Lizard. Moms are supposed to drive you crazy around this age. Why should yours be different?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  “Wanna hit Sunset around four o’clock?” she asked. “It should glass out around then, this time of year.”

  “No, not today.”

  I wanted to go home and read.

  • 2 •

  I caught the early bus after school. My dad w
as at work. The house was still and quiet. I stood at the window and looked at the ocean and thought about Jen being out there and about my future in surfing and how I wished I were just a girl whose biggest problem was that she didn’t get a car. But the box was waiting under my bed.

  I looked at a picture of my mother that I kept on my desk. She was frozen in that smile I remembered so well, the face that was full of fun ideas and soothing words and whatever I needed in the moment. Until it wasn’t there anymore.

  But at least it had been frozen in perfection. How could I begin to change that? Why would my father ask me to?

  I pulled down the shades and put on my iPod and then I picked up the manuscript.

  To look at me, as you almost never do, you would say that I’m a reasonably, even boringly normal person. Long brown hair, parted down the middle, just like all the girls in Seventeen magazine. Levi’s and T-shirts or sweatshirts identifying some band or food product, a nice sweater on a dress-up day, a skirt when all the girls get together and plan it (we never dress up unless we all agree on it—just like we never go to the bathroom alone). Lip gloss, earrings, knit hats or turquoise belts when I’m feeling fancy. I don’t drink or smoke. I get good grades and I belong to the Beta Club and the Future Teachers of America (girls do that—no one really wants to be a teacher), and I listen to all kinds of music and I even play the piano a little and I’m on the tennis team. (That’s a lot less exciting than it sounds. We only got the team last year and anyone who could identify a racket could be on it.) I don’t have a boyfriend but I’ve been on plenty of dates. My best friends are Mary Gail Crider and Sunny (real name Sunshine, hippie parents) Hughes. Mary Gail is the skinny, bubbly one, always laughing, big teeth, potential valedictorian. Sunny is the long blond curls, vacant smile, violet eyes, future artist of some kind. I’m the one in the middle. The sturdy girl. The one who’s going to do something really smart and practical like open a business, even though I secretly dream of being in a rock band or being a poet in San Francisco. I don’t know why I think of California all the time. It just seems like a place I could live. I don’t know why I’ve never been comfortable here in the South, even though I’ve never known anything else. It just seems like some place has to be better. Maybe that’s just my circumstances. I’d like to get your impression, but that is not going to happen. We aren’t going to meet and chat like normal people. I’m never going to do anything like a normal person except impersonate one for a little bit longer.

  Back to the criminal thing, I’ll bet you’re saying. That is if you’re still reading, if you haven’t decided it’s all a big tasteless joke and thrown the whole mess into the fire.

  I’d like to say it all started last summer or the summer before or anything neat and tidy like that, a perfect date I could mark off on my calendar every year, like an anniversary. It’s nothing like that. It all started a long time before me. That’s what I realize now. All criminals are a long time in the making. They don’t just spring up. They gestate like babies. No, more complicated and more deliberate. They are carved out of history, like a custom-made table out of a big piece of oak. Care and precision. The right place at the right time, and everything working in its favor, like the elements of a storm coming together.

  It didn’t start with me and it didn’t even start with my parents. It might not even have started with my grandparents. That’s why I have to give you a short history of Union Grade.

  You could probably use that, since the rumor is you’re from up North. New York, some say. D.C. according to others. I can’t tell from looking at you, though the long hair and the cool hats and the ripped jeans and the leather bracelets and the general aloof swagger make me vote for New York. You’re really handsome but not stuck-up, probably because, where you come from, a lot of guys looked like you and it was no big deal. Down here at Union Grade High, you are stirring things up if you haven’t noticed. Which you don’t seem to. Girls bruise each other’s ribs when you walk past, and you must notice that sudden flurry of whispers that trail you like a lapdog. You must but you don’t appear to. You just walk along, looking for your class numbers and speaking when spoken to. Jimmy English, who’s been my friend since the sandbox, says he has phys ed with you and that you’re the only guy there who can do twenty pull-ups, and that you ran the second-fastest mile, after Kirby Dwight, who’s a track star. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Jimmy said, but the dude is fast. So you’ve already earned the respect of your male peers, if you care to take advantage of it. And the drop-dead-at-your-feet admiration of any girl you want. Please don’t get too aware of that.

  Oh, what do I care? Do what you want. Just try to choose someone good. Like Mary Gail. She’s so nice if you can get her to stop talking. Sunny’s a bit too artsy vague. She’d drive you crazy.

  And I, of course, am going to jail.

  So back to the history of this place you’ve moved to.

  As you can see, we’re right on the North Carolina line, but that doesn’t mean we’re anything like the Carolinians—far from it. We’re wickedly territorial on both sides, deeply offended if we’re mistaken for the other. It’s a history of grudges and resentment and one state thinking it’s classier than the other. We’re both hicks, let’s face it, and even though I’m not given to taking sides, you have to admit Virginia is the Home of the Presidents. We have George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and all those people who started the whole country, so I think we do win in the classier category. Not that the founding fathers had anything to do with Union Grade. They were in Williamsburg and northern Virginia, mostly. Union Grade was not even a spot on the map until well after the Revolution. It existed but it was nothing more than a store and a church and a village. It didn’t have a name. It finally got a charter in 1780 and it was called Competition, because that’s what it hoped to be—real competition for the next town over, a place called Schoolfield, because it had a school and is now called Danville, after the river it sits on, the Dan River.

  Then came the Civil War. We lost. That’s all you need to know about that.

  Then came Reconstruction. Competition, like any small Southern town, was at the complete mercy of the North. When the Union soldiers, the Reconstruction workers, the “carpetbaggers,” as they were known around here, came down to divide up the goods, they had a system of grading what they found—everything from land to horses to houses to women. Top-notch stuff was marked “Union Grade.” There was so much good stuff in Competition that it basically became known as a Union Grade town, and then, after the horrors of Reconstruction were ended by President Rutherford B. Hayes, it started regaining its independence but kept the name.

  Hold on, freak, you’re thinking. What’s a sophomore doing with all that information? Listening in class? Not likely. My teacher, Mr. Roberts, is so boring we can hardly keep our eyes open, except to stare when he’s writing on the board because he does have a nice butt. (He’s the football coach. I won’t continue with this train of thought.) The thing is, my father is a history buff. He reads it all the time. He retains it. Then he talks to me about it when I’m helping him in the garden, or when he’s pointing out birds to me, or when we’re playing golf. He has a lot of interests and he shares them with me. That’s because I’m his favorite. “My idea,” he tells me. Which means my mother didn’t want to have me. He doesn’t get why that might be a sensitive subject to me. I’ve never let on that it’s painful.

  My father shares all these things with me because I was supposed to be a boy. The fact that I wasn’t didn’t stop him from raising me as one. Sometimes it’s confusing, even hurtful, but I’m grateful for the stuff I’ve learned. I can identify just about any variety of plant, I can build a birdhouse, I can drive the green with a four iron on a three par with a good tailwind. I can tell you about different kinds of wood or how to start a fire or how to stop one or how a printing press works or how to get paint off the floor. I can name a lot of presidents and I know what the Marshall Plan was. It goe
s on and on like this. I usually keep it to myself. You’re the unwilling recipient of everything I’ve learned from him.

  What’s funny (funny strange, not funny haha) is that by casually telling me about history—of this place, of the country, of our family—he was inadvertently responsible for helping me understand what I needed to know to put the whole puzzle together. Even though he never dreamed I’d put it together.

  He still doesn’t know.

  I realize I’m not going to finish this in one sitting. I have created this space behind a board in my closet for when I have to put it aside. I know I am going to worry about it whenever I am away. But there’s no other choice. That’s the thing about a dead end. When you get to it you can only look two ways—back where you’ve come from, or up. Up is the sky, the only way to go, but you can’t entirely see how to get there. Then you find the ladder.

  I have to stop now. My mother is calling me to dinner.

  I put the letter aside and leaned back on my bed and felt exhausted. U2 was singing about something to do with God and I took the iPod off because I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t absorb anything else smart or sensitive.

  I took deep breaths into my stomach the way the yoga teacher at school told us to do. We all made fun of her, but I had to admit, it made my heart stop racing and I felt these weird chemicals going off in my brain. I needed to calm down and put things in perspective. I had to keep telling myself that this was my mother talking. It didn’t sound like her. But she sounded like someone I would have wanted to hang out with. She was smarter than me. She knew things about history and she could put them in order and relate them to herself. When I was taught California history in the fifth grade, the only thing that seemed to affect my life was the founding of In-N-Out Burger. I couldn’t draw a line from the Spanish missions or Lewis and Clark or Woody Guthrie to my existence in the Pacific Palisades.

  But my mother had an understanding of how the Civil War affected her. She was on the wrong side of it, obviously. And in American History, we didn’t waste much time on the losers. No one cared what happened to the people who fought and died to protect slavery. So I had never really learned much about Reconstruction in the South. I tried to imagine her ancestors having their homes and families raided by opportunists from the North, being marked up and graded and divided. Regardless of their political positions, these were actual people, families with children, and whether I liked it or not, these were my relatives. I shared their DNA.