Saving Noah

by Berry, Lucinda

  Her eyes filled with compassion. “There’s nothing more terrifying than almost losing your child.”

  “If you let him out and he kills himself, I’ll sue the hospital.” I’d never threatened another person. It felt strange but I’d do anything to keep him safe.

  “Listen, Adrianne.” She rolled up her sandwich and stuffed it back in the bag. “Nobody wants to release your son if he’s a threat to himself. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure he isn’t discharged until we’ve given him the best possible psychiatric care and he’s no longer a danger to himself or anyone else. That’s the role of an inpatient hospital. It doesn’t mean his work is done once we release him. It’s just that we want to treat him in the least restrictive environment, and the hospital is the most restrictive. We’re not going to stop treating him after he’s discharged. We’ll just treat him on an outpatient basis. Has anyone explained our outpatient program to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s a great candidate for successful outpatient treatment. He’ll still come to the hospital every day and participate in all of the groups and therapy. It will be exactly the same except he won’t be sleeping here.”

  It wasn’t good enough. If he was out, he’d have the opportunity.

  “He has to stay in the hospital.”

  Dr. Phillips came to sit next to me. She placed her hand tentatively on my knee. “I hear what you’re saying, and I take your concerns seriously. I’m going to share them with the rest of his care team. I’ll make sure to take extra time with him during our sessions to assess if he’s still acutely suicidal. He’s not going to be discharged in the next couple days, so why don’t you take some time to take care of yourself? Get some rest. You must be exhausted.”

  She had no idea. I’d never been so tired. I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for months. But each time I tried to sleep, my body wouldn’t allow it. My mind raced. I hadn’t been sleeping for more than a few hours. My sleeping pills had no effect. All they did was make me feel foggier than I already was. I didn’t know if I’d ever be rested again, but how could I sleep when my son’s life teetered on the edge of death?

  *****

  Each time they gave me a positive report on Noah, the threat of impending doom increased. It followed me everywhere I went. Dr. Phillips assured me she was thorough in her questions about his mental state. She gave him a host of psychological tests that showed he was no longer suicidal; even his depression scores decreased. More and more our conversations centered on preparing for his treatment once he was out, but I didn’t care what their tests said. He needed to stay in the hospital. It was the only place he was safe.

  “I know you’re scared, Mom,” Noah said as we played our latest card game, Phase 10. We’d grown tired of Uno and let Katie pick out a new one on her last visit.

  “What do you mean?” I shifted in my seat.

  “I know you’re totally freaked out about ... well, you know ... what we talked about before.” He looked over his shoulder at the door to his room.

  It’d been six days since he told me he planned on ending his life when he got out. He hadn’t brought it up since.

  “Are you still thinking about it?”

  “People with terminal illnesses do it all the time,” he said.

  “But you don’t have a terminal illness.”

  “I suffer from a condition that doesn’t have a cure. What’s the difference?”

  He may only have been seventeen but he was no longer a child. He was logical, rational, and smart.

  “You have things to live for.” It sounded so clichéd but I had to say it.

  “Like?” He cocked his head to the side.

  “Katie. Think about how much she loves you. Can you imagine how devastated she’ll be to lose her brother? You’re her hero. Always have been.” It was the first thing that came to me.

  He shook his head. “There will come a day when she hates me. She’s too young to understand now, but believe me, once she’s older and finds out what I did and who I am, it’ll change how she feels about me. Her perception. Who I am to her. All of it. She’s not going to want me around.”

  Was what he said true? How would she feel about him when she was older? Was there any way to know?

  “What about me?” It was selfish to ask him to consider staying alive so I wouldn’t have to go through the pain of losing him, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’d be giving you a gift—you’d get your life back.” He said it with so much tenderness it made me want to weep. “You could help me ...”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You could be there with me this time. Make sure I didn’t wake up.” He said it in such a way that I could tell it wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it. His plans hadn’t gone anywhere.

  I ferociously shook my head. “No way. Absolutely not.”

  “What if I was dying of cancer? Would you help me die if I had cancer and was only going to suffer by being alive?”

  “That’s entirely different. You don’t have cancer.”

  He gave me a halfhearted smile. “You’re right. I’ve got something worse. At least when you have cancer people still love you.”

  HIM (THEN)

  I am finally learning how to retrain my brain. I didn’t think it would ever happen for me, but it is. I made it through the entire round of pictures without a reaction. They even showed me the one with the little girl on the swing. Nothing. I’m so happy I could cry.

  I’ve discovered other tricks too. Whenever my mind starts to wander to places it shouldn’t, I pinch my thigh really hard. I have dark purple bruises on the insides of both legs but I don’t care. It’s working. It stops the thoughts, and I’ll do anything to stop the thoughts.

  It helps that I don’t have to keep talking about what I did over and over again anymore. Most of the talk in group focuses on how I’ll handle temptation once I’m out. I know one thing for sure—I’m not going anywhere near little girls. Ever. I won’t even put myself in that situation.

  I’m going keep to myself. I’ll focus on my schoolwork and nothing else. Maybe if I try really hard I can graduate early. I’m not going to talk to anyone at school. I’m going to do my best to make myself invisible just like I’ve done here. I’ve gotten really good at it. Sometimes I feel like I’m just a ghost.

  I want to go to college early. I don’t know how my mom will feel about that but I want to get as far away from home as possible. I can’t start over there, and all I want is a new start. I want to put this behind me. Bury it somewhere so I never have to think about it again.

  If only I never had to sleep. I can’t control my thoughts in my sleep. My dreams take on a life of their own and sometimes they move into old behavior. I dream about what it felt like. How much I liked it. I told my counselor about the dreams. She says it’s normal and just my unconscious working things out, but I didn’t tell her what I’m doing to myself when I wake up. That part is too embarrassing.

  16

  I spent each visit trying to help Noah find reasons to stay alive. It was like he was standing on a ledge getting ready to jump and I was the person who found him there. I reminded him of things that made him feel happy and tried to convince him that he was still valuable. I rehearsed what I would say on the drive, trying to come up with things I hadn’t thought of before.

  I grappled with recording our conversations and sharing them with Dr. Phillips. It would be easy to do. All I’d have to do was wear my baggy linen pants with the deep pockets, put my phone in one of them, and press record. She’d have no choice but to keep him in the hospital, but he’d never trust me again if I did that. Besides, there would come a time he had to leave even if I convinced them to keep him longer. I’d finally accepted that he couldn’t stay forever and if I betrayed him, he’d stop talking to me and I’d lose any possibility of helping him. At least if I knew what he was planning, then I could stop him.

  He’d started looking at m
e again when he talked. For so long, his eyes had stared through me or past me, but never at me. Now, he really looked because, for the first time since he confessed, I finally saw him and understood. He was my son, and he was also a pedophile. I accepted his truth, but just because I accepted it didn’t mean he needed to die because of it.

  “What if they find a way to cure it within the next ten years? Like they can give you a drug to take every day, and it wipes it all out?” I asked.

  “Do you honestly think anyone is going to spend money trying to fix us? Taking hard-earned cash and spending the resources to fix people they hate? Who’s going to fund the research? And how are they going to test it? Send a bunch of pedophiles to a playground and see what happens?” He snorted. “Besides, they’ve already found out a way to chemically castrate people, and that hasn’t helped.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep, I looked it up.”

  I did the same when I got home, and he was right. Although many of the drugs decreased libido and the number of urges, their primary effect was on increasing impulse control and helping them resist acting out. Doctors described the drugs as turning down the volume on the radio. They may have found a way to turn down the volume, but nobody knew how to turn it off.

  I shifted my focus the next day. “Can’t you find a way to make some kind of meaning out of your suffering? Form a group to help others? Write a book?”

  He laughed and rolled his eyes at me. “What kind of help would I offer people? Hey, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I like kids too. Then what? We sit around and drink coffee talking about the fact that we’ll never be better? The point of support groups is to help people get better.”

  When I had nothing left, I pulled things out of the sky. “What if you have the cure to cancer, and you don’t know it yet? You could save so many lives.”

  “That’s about as likely as me figuring out a way to get to the moon.”

  I was running out of solutions that didn’t include losing him forever.

  He locked his eyes with mine. “I’ll spend every day that I’m alive hating myself. Tell me the truth—if it was you, would you want to live that way?”

  I wanted to lie and say I would if it meant he’d stay, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that to him. I swallowed the tears in my throat and whispered, “I don’t know.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”

  “If I had cancer and was going to die a slow painful death, would you respect my choice to end my life?”

  I shook my head. “We’ve already had this conversation. It’s not the same thing, not even close. You don’t have cancer. You’re not going to die from it.”

  “Really? How long before someone beats the shit out of me again? You think that was the last time?” He paused before whispering as an afterthought, “You don’t even know what they did to me.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled, looking away. “Forget about it.”

  I stood, putting my hands on my hips. “What did you say, Noah?”

  He glanced at the door. “Mom, please, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I heard you—you said that I didn’t even know what they did to you. What did you mean?”

  He gulped. “You can’t tell anyone. No one. Not even Dr. Park.” His body tightened, and he worked his jaw as he spoke. “If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. I’ll swear you made it up.”

  Fear rose in my throat.

  He got up and shut the door, a privilege he was allowed since he was no longer on suicide watch and could be trusted alone in his room. It seemed like he was moving in slow motion as he took a seat on his bed. He pulled his legs up to his chest, clutching them with his arms.

  “They didn’t just use the bat to beat me.” His eyes stared through me.

  My head swirled, threatening to roll off my neck. The walls were breathing—inhaling and exhaling around me. “What—but I ... you didn’t ... how–I–wh-wh ... you mean, they, they ...”

  “Raped me.” The color drained from his face.

  All the energy got sucked out of the room. My heart pounded in my temples. The room spun quickly before it stilled again, leaving me nauseous. I sifted through the snapshots of that day. So much blood on his jeans. The way he walked—crooked, hunched over, gripping his stomach. The ride to the hospital. Curled up on his side. The signs were there. I hadn’t looked. Never imagined. It never entered my awareness. It seemed like an eternity passed before I spoke again.

  “Why didn’t the doctors tell me?” I asked.

  “They didn’t know.” His voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

  That was impossible.

  “How could they not have known?”

  “They used the skinny part of the bat,” he explained as if that made any sense. “You packed me clothes, remember?”

  Somehow, I had the presence of mind to throw together some things for him before we left for the hospital that day. I nodded, signaling that I remembered.

  “I stuffed my underwear with toilet paper when I was changing into my gown. I never told anyone.”

  “God, no, Noah—”

  I jumped up, clasping my hand over my mouth, flung open his door, and raced down the hallway to the bathroom. My stomach heaved into my hand, forcing what was already in it to spray through my fingers. I rushed to the stall, kneeling before the toilet, and emptied what was left in my mouth into the toilet bowl. Wave after wave of nausea racked my body. I heaved until there wasn’t anything left but green and yellow mucus snaking its way down the toilet.

  My head pounded when I stood, and I steadied myself against the bathroom stall. My eyes burned, and my throat was raw. I put my mouth under the faucet and washed it out. I splashed water on my face, refusing to look at myself in the mirror. How could they? How could anyone do that to my son? I wanted to curl up in a ball on the floor and sob. I forced myself to move and plodded back to Noah’s room. He hadn’t moved from his position on the bed.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry.” I reached for him.

  He pulled back. “Don’t, Mom. Just don’t. I’m not telling you so you feel sorry for me. I’m telling you so that you’ll understand.”

  “How can people do that? How can they be so cruel?” Just when I thought my heart couldn’t break any more, the last pieces of it shattered.

  “It’s what people do to child molesters. Everyone cheers when they get sent to prison because they know what’s going to happen. Do you think anyone cares? Tries to stop it? No, because nobody cares. I want to die with dignity, Mom. It’s what it’s called—dying with dignity—and I may not deserve anything else, but I deserve that.”

  “You really call swinging from our balcony dying with dignity?” The question flew out of my mouth without thinking.

  “Then help me, Mom. Please, help me.” His eyes begged for understanding, pleading with me. “Please.”

  It was at that moment that I decided I would.

  17

  I lay curled up next to Katie watching her sleep. I was a stranger in my own house. I’d been gone for so long I could smell the house in the same way you smelled other people’s homes when you entered them. I smelled it because it was no longer mine. It was theirs.

  I hadn’t spent any quality time with Katie in over two weeks. I’d seen her during her visits at the hospital but hadn’t spent any time with her alone. Noah encouraged me to spend the night with her because he noticed subtle changes coming over her. There was a new heaviness in the way she held herself, and a cloud of sadness passed through her eyes when she didn’t think anyone was looking.

  Lucas was worried about her too. He pulled me aside after dinner and told me to make sure I put a towel underneath her when she went to sleep because she’d started to wet the bed again. She refused to wear pull-ups, said they were for babies. She hadn’t wet the bed since she was four.

  I tried to f
ocus and give her all my attention while we played with her new Barbie house and read the latest Harry Potter book before bed, but I couldn’t get the images of Noah being sexually assaulted to stop playing. It’d been that way for three days. I couldn’t think of anything else. They pummeled into my consciousness no matter what I was doing. I would be sitting in front of my computer trying to lose myself in work when suddenly I was confronted with the image of a bloody bat or the way his face looked the day he told me about his attack. I wasn’t sure I’d ever forget the look of anguish and utter demoralization in his eyes.

  How many times had I heard “I hope he gets raped in jail” during his trial or seen it written in black Sharpie ink on the flyers posted around town? Or in the stream of comments underneath every article written about him online? It tortured me to think about the pain he must’ve endured in silence. Not only the emotional pain, but he had to be in excruciating physical pain too, and he never said anything. I’d heard all the stories about people getting raped in prison because child molesters were treated as the worst kind of criminals, even behind bars. Rape was wrong unless you were raping a child molester. We forgave murderers, not pedophiles.

  The boys who raped him were the real monsters. How sick did a kid have to be to assault someone with a bat and leave them to die? And he could’ve died that day. They left him beaten, bloody, and unconscious. And yet, they were likely sitting at home preparing for final exams or getting ready for their next big game. The police did nothing to find or punish them as soon as they found out who Noah was. Their job was to serve and protect, but those rules didn’t apply to Noah.

  All he did was touch the girls. There was no penetration or insertion of any kind. Each of them had been taken to the pediatrician for an examination, and neither showed signs of sexual assault, because he hadn’t assaulted them. He’d touched them, and they’d touched him. That’s all. It didn’t make it right. It was disgusting and wrong, but he didn’t physically hurt them. Not even close to how he’d been brutalized and stripped of his dignity.