The Noah Confessions

by Barbara Hall

  “What was I born to do?”

  She smiled. “Be yourself.”

  “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “You started doing it when you met Mick and later when you heard the rest of my story. Your instinct toward honesty and courage was correct. But you got carried away. You wanted to be something you weren’t. You wanted to know something before you had learned it. That’s not the way.”

  “You saw Mick?” I asked.

  “I see everything.”

  “Do you like him?”

  She reached out for my hand and I could feel her skin, cool and smooth.

  “I like him very much. I like the way he looks at you. He sees you. The real you.”

  “How can he see the real me when I don’t?”

  She laughed again. “Sometimes, most times, it takes someone outside of yourself to help you see who you are. They reflect it back to you. A good friend is like a mirror. They show you yourself. And you do the same for them.”

  “But who do you see?”

  “I see my little girl. Bright and funny and furious and determined. But there are other things in you that I can’t see.

  “Because they are private.”

  She said, “Privacy is the world of things you know about yourself and don’t need to share. It’s your relationship with yourself. The way you cry at sad movies and sing in front of the mirror. The way you believe you’ll be a movie star or win a Nobel Prize. Whatever it is. Those dreams you’re entitled to. The difference is that you’re not ashamed. Your private thoughts empower you. Secrets are something else. It’s the part of yourself that you disown. Even to yourself. Then a strange kind of chemistry occurs and you start to love the secret and you think the secret is keeping you alive. I hope you’ll never do that. I hope you’ll want to take yourself and your private dreams and choose to be part of the dance.”

  I thought about that and I looked around the empty beach and I looked down at my wet suit, which was not wet or even sandy, and I was sure that I was dead.

  “I don’t think I’m going to get the chance to do anything again.”

  “Oh, yes, you will. If you want to.”

  “So death is a choice?” I asked, feeling angry out of nowhere.

  “No, I didn’t choose it. Not in a way you can understand. I had an appointment to keep. I was shown a scenario. A few scenarios. The ones where I stayed alive weren’t as good as the one where I left.”

  “You’re really going to have to explain that.”

  “I can’t, Lynnie. One day you’ll understand, but not soon.”

  She was still holding my hand and I could feel her skin and I had no idea where I was or what was going to happen next.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said.

  “You’ll know when it’s time to know.”

  I suddenly felt restless and jittery. All of my senses came back to me, and the sand was scratchy. The wind was whipping up and my hair was blowing around even though my mother’s stayed perfectly still.

  “I don’t feel so good,” I said.

  My mother nodded. “I know.”

  “Everything hurts.”

  “It hurts because you feel it. Because you’re alive. Make the most of it.”

  “Wait, don’t leave.”

  I could feel my body and it felt heavy. Everything was cold. I had a headache. Something itched and there were sounds I couldn’t identify springing up around me.

  She stood up, turned, and started walking down the beach. I tried to stand up but I couldn’t. My limbs felt as if they were filled with wet sand and all my nerve endings were exposed. The pain was rushing in like the white water, coming toward me at eye level, and there was no escape. I tried to say something. My voice crackled and popped like a voice on the end of a cell phone that was losing its connection. The sky suddenly got very low and the sun was hot and everything ached.

  “She’s waking up,” I heard someone say. “We’ve got her back.”

  I opened my eyes and I wasn’t on the beach at all. I was in some kind of room with machinery all around me. People were dressed in green and someone was holding a mask over my face and I wanted to stand up and scream. But everything hurt and the light from somewhere stung my eyes.

  I saw my father bending over me. He was wearing a shirt and tie but the shirt was soaked with sweat and his face was all wrenched with worry and there were tears.

  He leaned over me and grabbed my hand.

  I felt it.

  It was sweaty and warm, not like my mother’s hand at all.

  “Lynnie,” he said. “Lynnie, come back.”

  I’m back, I heard myself saying. But I wasn’t talking because the mask was over my mouth.

  I stared into his eyes until I really saw him. He was my father. I looked like him. I had always looked like him. And I wanted to get to know him.

  I squeezed his hand and he smiled and laid his head against my chest.

  I closed my eyes and trusted I would know what to say when the time came.

  And I knew the time was coming so I slept.

  SIXTEEN

  and I’ve Stopped Counting

  • 1 •

  So much for that nice moment.

  When I woke up in the hospital my father was angry.

  He started yelling around the time I noticed that I was hooked up to machines and there was a bag dripping some kind of disgusting gunk into my arm.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “What’s what?” he responded, jerking awake in his chair. He had been dozing off, his head rolling to the side.

  “This thing in my arm?”

  “It’s an IV. It’s been keeping you alive. Something you seemed to have lost interest in yourself.”

  “Okay, wow. Happy to see you, too.”

  “Did you really think I wasn’t going to have something to say about this?”

  “I thought you might wait until I was out of the hospital gown.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought you might not make it out of the hospital gown.”

  A nurse came in just as our voices were rising.

  “Oh, good,” she said with fake cheerfulness. “Miss Lynne is finally making sense.”

  “When wasn’t I making sense?”

  “For the last two days,” my father informed me.

  “I’ve been here two days?”

  “Two and a half,” the nurse said gleefully. “Now, let’s look at those stats.”

  She took my blood pressure and stuck a thermometer in my ear and said everything was fine.

  “This might be your first day of solid food,” she said, as if I were about to get a glimpse of my first porn video. She winked at me and went out.

  “What wasn’t I making sense about?” I asked my father, who was standing now, breathing hard through his nose and looking at me the way he did when I hid a grade from him or lied about something.

  “You were babbling, Lynne. You had a head injury. You weren’t making sense and, frankly, nobody was sure if you ever would.”

  I took a breath and looked at my lap, at the oatmeal-colored blanket with fur balls on it. I wondered about all the other sick people who’d gotten covered up by it and it grossed me out. The whole hospital thing was grossing me out, and it wasn’t helping that my dad was yelling and glaring.

  “Was I talking about Mom?” I asked.

  He raised his chin. “As a matter of fact you were.”

  I didn’t feel it was the time to say, That’s because I saw her. So I just kept quiet.

  I remembered it, though. All of it. And that was why the hospital room wasn’t scaring me so much. I knew I wasn’t going to die. It surprised me that my father ever thought I was going to. I tried to see it from his point of view but, as usual, failed.

  I looked at my nightstand and saw some balloons from Zoe and Talia. There was a card with a wave on it. I opened it and it said, “Lizard, the big swell, by yourself? You’re an ass. Get well. Jen.”

  I ha
d a sudden recollection and looked around the room.

  “Where’s Mick?”

  My father moved toward the bed, his hands on his hips.

  “Who?”

  “Mick. The guy I was with.”

  He shook his head and for the first time I was a little scared. Had I imagined Mick, too? Or had he died trying to save me? Or had he just deserted me on the beach and left me to my demise?

  So much for my first date.

  “Mick,” my father repeated. “He introduced himself as Michael.”

  I smiled. “He was trying to impress you.”

  “He didn’t. You can imagine how he didn’t.”

  “What? Why are you mad at him?”

  “I don’t know him, Lynne. I’d never seen him before. I didn’t know anything until the cops called me, and then I was standing on the beach while the paramedics were pumping water out of your lungs and there was some kid with long hair and an army jacket standing nearby, pacing and saying he knew you, and imagine how I felt. I knew less than anybody on that beach about what was going on.”

  Try to picture a man who is always in control of himself, a lawyer, no less, used to making arguments in front of a bunch of strangers where somebody’s life is on the line…picture that guy waving his hands around and yelling at a teenager hooked up to an IV in a hospital bed under a ratty blanket.

  And then picture yourself with a terrible headache and a lingering vision of your dead mother and your five-minute boyfriend and your grandfather the murderer and you might get a mild notion of how I felt.

  Try not to get yourself into this predicament.

  But I was in it and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted my father to calm down. I wanted to see my mother again. I wanted to tell someone who would understand. I wanted to see Mick again but now I wasn’t sure I ever would.

  “Were you mean to him?” I asked.

  “To who?”

  “Mick?”

  “I wasn’t mean to him. I just sent him home.”

  “That was mean.”

  “I don’t know him, Lynnie. I don’t know how you know him. I don’t know what you’re doing half the time. I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  “Isn’t that why you gave me the letter? To tell me who I am?”

  This stopped him cold. I knew it wasn’t fair, but I was tired of him yelling.

  I could see in his eyes a split second of relief that I had that kind of recall. If I could remember the letter then I wasn’t so far gone.

  He stared at me and for the first time I saw that his eyes were watery and I felt shocked at myself and at him.

  “So you do remember,” he said.

  “Yes, I remember. I’m not brain damaged.”

  “Is that why you pulled this stunt? Because of the letter?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to process it.”

  “And what about the boy? How does he fit in?”

  “He’s nice. We had a juice date. He lives in Westwood.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “In the cemetery, talking to Mom. He was drawing. He’s an artist.”

  “It would have been nice if you had told me.”

  “It would have been nice if you were the kind of person I could tell.”

  He wiped at his eyes and I felt even worse than before.

  “No, I take that back,” I said.

  This caught him off guard. He’d never known me to take anything back. I’d never known myself to, either.

  “I didn’t go down there to hurt you. I went to show off for Mick. And for myself. I wanted to be brave.”

  “Brave?” he said as if the word shocked him.

  “Yes, like her.”

  “But you don’t need to be brave, Lynnie. She was brave so you wouldn’t have to be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She fought through all that so you could have a good life. So you wouldn’t have to worry. This is her history, not yours.”

  “How does that work? Her history stops with me?”

  “Of course it doesn’t. She saw her own story ending and she wanted to start another one. God, why are we even talking about this? You nearly died.”

  “Because I nearly died. That’s why.”

  I considered, for a second, telling him about seeing Mom on the beach. But I knew it wouldn’t help. I knew it was destined to be my private life. And I remembered the difference. A private life is just for you. A secret life involves others.

  My father said, “People have things to overcome. People make sacrifices for each other. For the future. For the sake of their character. That’s what I wanted you to get from it all. People do what’s necessary.”

  I couldn’t listen anymore. I was laughing. Now he really was looking at me as if I had lost my grip on reality. But I wasn’t the one yelling at an intensive care patient, now was I?

  “What?” he demanded.

  “This all started with a car. I wish I’d never mentioned it. And the funny thing is, I don’t even have my license yet.”

  He looked at me for a long time. “You don’t?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “You have to have a car to get a license.”

  “I could have taken you.”

  “You didn’t. Is this really the time, Dad?”

  This actually made him smile. He sat down on the bed. He shook his head, smiling at nothing, and then he put his arms around me and swayed me back and forth with my IV bag swinging and the sudden motion causing a machine to start bleeping and I could feel him crying against my shoulder even though he wasn’t making any noise.

  I stopped myself from crying, too. Honestly, one wrecked person was enough for the moment.

  • 2 •

  “You’re wondering how she got to California.”

  My father talking. Me in and out of a drug-induced haze. Days disappearing into said drug-induced haze.

  We were in my hospital room. It was the third day of my recovery. Everything I owned hurt and every time they started talking about letting me leave, I would throw something up or faint during one of my expeditions down the hall.

  I was getting frustrated and my father was starting to look a little bit old. At least to me. Not to the doctor who came by to check on me every afternoon, one Dr. Penny Torgensen of Norwegian descent, a graduate of USC medical school, originally from Minnesota, who lived alone in Venice with her cat and her African gray parrot. She managed to relay all that information to my dad within five seconds of knowing him and he managed to forget it all in the same amount of time. She looked like an American Idol first-rounder, the one they drop because she’s too good and too smart, and when she saw my dad her whole expression changed and she got a bit giggly. He couldn’t even see it. I liked that about her, and if I were feeling stronger I would have helped the whole process along, but it was pretty much all I could do to stare at crossword puzzles and write down a three-letter word every half hour.

  The other thing about Dr. Penny Torgensen was that she was a surfer and she explained to my dad that this shouldn’t scare him off the sport for life. It was a freak accident, it almost never happened, I shouldn’t have been in that swell, but I’d know better next time. Wouldn’t I, she asked me, giving me what I supposed was the universal surfer’s wink.

  I would know better next time. I could hardly think of surfing again. All I could think of was my mother’s letter and her subsequent visitation and my dark history and my five-minute boyfriend and my head pounding like someone was squeezing it in a doorjamb.

  Dad said, “I learned about it later. When I ran into her. In Westwood.”

  “Learned what? Why are we in Westwood?”

  “About how she got to California. Your mother.”

  “Oh.”

  “You never asked me that.”

  “I figured she took a bus.”

  “Several buses.”

  “Did you know she was there? I mean, when you went
to law school at UCLA?”

  “No. It was one of those things that makes you believe in…I don’t know. Something bigger.”

  I settled back on my pillow and he pulled his chair closer. I was in a mood to listen. The drugs were settling me into a calm, sleepy place. It was like hearing a bedtime story.

  He was a student at UCLA law school. He wandered into the village one day for a coffee at the local coffee shop. She was the one who waited on him. He didn’t recognize her at first. Her hair was shorter and she looked older. Plus she was wearing some goofy uniform. They talked about his order for a long moment before their eyes connected. He said she looked away as if she didn’t want to be recognized and he said, “Cat? Catherine Pittman, is that you?”

  She denied that it was her. She said her name was Lucy. He decided to let it drop and he took his coffee drink from her and went out onto the patio to drink it. But then she followed him out and said, “How did you know me?”

  And he said to her, which you have to admit was a pretty great line, “How could I forget you?”

  At least that’s what he said he said. Maybe he came up with it later. It made a good story. But I decided just to go with it.

  I asked him what happened next.

  He said, “I took her for a walk. I talked her into taking a break from her coffee bar job. I was always talking your mother into things. Breaking the rules, mostly. As you can imagine, she never wanted to break the rules. Daughter of a criminal and all. She was big on law and order. She was big on truth.”

  “I remember this part. She was all about truth.”

  So, he told me, they went walking, and she explained what had happened to her since that day at the police station. Her father had taken her home, hadn’t said much to her that night. He let her walk around for days, suffering, wondering when the other shoe was going to drop. When he dropped it, it was in a subtle but powerful way. He took her out of school one day without warning and drove her to the next town over to meet with a psychologist. Mom said the whole experience was under-whelming. She just did some tests and answered a few questions and they shone a light in her eyes and tested her hearing and that was that.