The Noah Confessions

by Barbara Hall

  But this one day, when I felt courageous, about twelve days from school letting out, I sat down next to her and said, “Cat, we have to talk.”

  “We have been talking.”

  “No, not really.”

  She stared at the ground and shook her head.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I’m not giving up.”

  “You should.”

  “Look, I believe you. The fact that my parents couldn’t believe you doesn’t mean it’s over.”

  “It’s over, John.”

  “Only if you say so.”

  Finally she looked at me. “I’m saying so.”

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  She didn’t say anything. She picked up a strand of hair and started inspecting the ends. I wanted to grab her.

  “How can you do this?” I nearly yelled at her. She looked up at me calmly.

  “Do what?”

  “Act like it’s all okay…it’s all normal.”

  “For me it is normal.”

  “Not for me.”

  “You’ll have to learn to live with it.”

  “I get it that you’ve worked out a whole system. But I’m not there yet. This is driving me crazy.”

  “Get used to it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Play along.”

  “I won’t live like that.”

  Now I was yelling and now she was looking at me, and so were some kids standing nearby, but I ignored them. There were tears in her eyes. I had gotten a reaction. I had broken through the mask.

  She said, “Your family…Jackie’s family…they’re the only reason I told in the first place. For her. To make it okay for her. Because I knew her and I wanted to help and I…”

  She stopped talking and put her face in her hands.

  I hated to see her cry. I didn’t know what to do. I knew enough not to touch her, though.

  “I think we should go to the cops.”

  She laughed. She said, “My dad is the cops.”

  “He is?”

  “The town council oversees the cops. They all know him. They play golf. They go to our church. Don’t make me explain how this all works.”

  “I know how it works. But there has to be one honest guy in Union Grade.”

  She actually smiled at me, brushing away tears. “I think it might be you.”

  I was so happy to see her smile I could barely form a thought. But I knew I had to keep her on track.

  Cat said, “Like those ridiculous five minutes when your parents thought I was pregnant. Remember what your dad said? These things can be handled.”

  “Yeah, I remember. But…”

  “That’s how everybody sees everything in this town. It can be handled. My father is a first-class handler. And he’s not even in the inner sanctum. He’s just acquainted with it. It goes deep. That’s all I’m saying. And I don’t even know why I’m saying this much.”

  She stood up then and I had to stop her. It felt like my last chance because I knew it would get harder and harder to talk to her about this or anything.

  “Just go with me. I’ll do the talking. I’m an outsider so they’ll have to listen to me.”

  “You’re not an outsider. Your dad’s rich.”

  “We’re from up North.”

  “He’s a doctor. You’re in.”

  “All we can do is try, Cat. If we tell the cops and nothing happens, then we can know that nothing was supposed to happen.”

  “Nothing was supposed to happen? Body down the well and moving on?”

  I stood and touched her arm and she let me. I said, “Her parents are gone. They moved away. They might have adjusted to a new life somewhere. My mother has lost it and she just wants to believe Jackie’s alive somewhere. If nothing happens it might mean that the damage is done and everybody’s better off. I don’t think so and neither do you. We have to try. We don’t have anything to lose.”

  “If my father finds out, I have something to lose.”

  “What’s he gonna do, ground you?”

  “Kill me, John. Just like he promised a long time ago.”

  “It was a threat. To a child.”

  She thought about it. I could see her remembering. And then updating, seeing herself as she was now, almost an adult.

  I said, “If we don’t try, it’s going to follow us for the rest of our lives. I believe that.”

  She looked at me just as her father’s car drove up.

  “Tomorrow afternoon. We’ll meet here,” I said.

  “I have a game,” she answered.

  “I do, too.”

  She nodded. The games didn’t matter.

  And my last act of defiance, or reassurance, was to kiss her on the cheek right there in front of God and her father, and her mouth dropped open and I knew I would take care of her forever if she’d let me.

  • 9 •

  There was only one police station for the entire town of Union Grade, Virginia, and we sat in the waiting chairs for a long time. Finally a uniformed police officer came out to greet us. We stood up and shook his hand. His name was Billy Campbell. He was all of twenty-eight. He wanted us to call him Officer Campbell. And he wanted us to know he was very busy and asked if it would take long. I said it might. He stared at me, sizing me up, because the real question was whether or not it was serious and my eyes told him it was.

  Then he looked at Cat and said, “How’re your folks doing, Cat? I saw your dad on the golf course Saturday.”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Haven’t seen you on the course in a while.”

  “I have tennis.”

  “I guess that takes up time. You on the tennis team, too? Sorry, I forgot your name.”

  “I never said it,” I told him. We were following him to his desk. Cops were watching us and I could feel Cat shrinking into her clothes.

  “John Russo,” I told him, “and I run track.”

  “Russo, that’s Italian?”

  “American. By way of Italy, I guess.”

  “Your dad’s the dentist.”

  “Yep.”

  We got to Officer Campbell’s desk and it was only a few feet away from a few other officers’ desks, and I saw Cat looking around. Then she looked at me and her eyes were pleading. I could see her losing her nerve.

  I said, “Officer Campbell, we might need some privacy for this.”

  “Privacy?” he laughed. “This is Union Grade. We don’t have any privacy.”

  Cat shook her head at me.

  I said, “Isn’t there another room?”

  He looked at me and said, “There’s the interrogation room, but that’s for interrogations.”

  “You can ask us questions, then.”

  I was trying to be funny so he’d like us. He looked at his watch and finally said all right and he shouted to the other cops, “Boys, I got the interrogation room for the next five or so. Try not to arrest anybody.”

  They laughed.

  The interrogation room was just a room with a table and some folding chairs and a window, but not even a two-way mirror like they had on TV even back then. Cat and I sat down and I started talking while Officer Campbell was still pouring himself some coffee.

  I told him the whole story without stopping and Cat chewed on her sweater sleeve and Officer Campbell looked from me to her and forgot to drink his coffee.

  When I was finished he just pushed the cup aside and put his hands in prayer position and touched his bottom lip and stared just above my head. It seemed to take forever. I was holding Cat’s hand under the table and it was cold and dry.

  Finally, Officer Campbell looked at her but spoke to me.

  “That’s quite a story, Mr. Russo.”

  “It’s her story. But she wanted me to tell it.”

  “The question is whether or not it’s true. Cat?”

  “Why would I make it up?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Your dad grounded you for something. Or he won’t let y
ou go out with Mr. Russo. Or he won’t buy you a new car.”

  “I love my father,” she said.

  “Really. You love him. According to this, then, you love a murdering maniac.”

  “He’s not a maniac. He’s a criminal. And he’s my father.”

  “You love him so much you want him to get arrested and go to prison?”

  “I want to do the right thing.”

  “I see.”

  “Because of her.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She looked at him as if he were crazy or evil or stupid.

  “Jackie,” she said in a whisper.

  He nodded.

  Cat stood and said, “Never mind, I knew he wouldn’t believe us.”

  “I didn’t say that. Sit down, Cat.”

  She sat down.

  “I’ve known your dad since I was little; my father and him are friends, so you can imagine how hard it is to hear.”

  “Not as hard as it was to see.”

  He sat back in his chair.

  “I only brought up these other possibilities because I have to. I can’t just take a teenager’s word for something. Hell, everybody in town would get arrested.”

  “You don’t have to take my word. Go look down the well.”

  “Go look down the well. You know how many abandoned wells there are in those woods? You know what it takes to look down one? Cameras won’t reach that far. We’d have to send a man. With the unstable sides and all, I’d be risking someone’s life. Look down a well, she says.”

  Cat bowed her head, as if she were ashamed. I wanted to hit him.

  She didn’t cry, though. Cat was too proud for that.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do,” Officer Campbell said. “I’m going to get a notepad and pen and you’re going to write all this down and sign it. After that I’ll give it to my supervisor and he’ll make a decision about how to proceed. Does that sound okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you want something to drink while I’m at it? Coke? Water?”

  She shook her head. He didn’t ask me if I wanted anything.

  He excused himself and left the room. Cat and I didn’t look at each other or say anything. I just held her hand and she let me. It didn’t take him long to come back with the pen and paper and he brought her a Coke anyway. Then he said, “I’m going to give you some privacy while you’re doing this. Just write it down like you told me. In detail. Much as you can remember. Then come find me out in the bull pen. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Mr. Russo, it’d be better if you waited outside. We got magazines out there.”

  I looked at Cat and she nodded that it was okay, so I went with him.

  I was looking at a back issue of Field & Stream, trying to stay interested because I didn’t care about fields or streams, when I heard a commotion at the front of the station and I looked up to see Cat’s father.

  I’d never really seen him but I knew it was him.

  She looked like him. That was a scary moment. She had his eyes. He wasn’t smiling, but if he had been, it would have been her smile, too.

  He was wearing a suit and he was talking in a loud voice to the desk officer, and Officer Campbell was hurrying over to him. He gestured for him to keep his voice down. It all came together in that moment and I got up and hurried to the room where Cat was and Officer Campbell saw me and yelled for me to stop right there. I thought I could get shot but I didn’t care.

  I flung the door open and said to Cat, “He’s here. Let’s go.”

  She knew who I meant and her face went pale and she said, “Go where?”

  “Out the window.”

  “And then where?”

  “We’ll figure that out later. Stop arguing.”

  She stood up very slowly and said, “John, there’s nowhere to go.”

  And I said, “Cat, I’ll take care of you, trust me.”

  She gave me this really sad smile with her lips pressed together and she still wasn’t crying and the door burst open and there was her father and it was all over.

  • 10 •

  “Over? What do you mean over?”

  My pulse was thumping like I was in the break zone of a wave. I was caught up in the story. I was seeing my mother, just the way I remembered her, all happy and optimistic and singing, getting into a car with a criminal, a killer no less, and I actually thought she might die. I mean, long before she actually did die, long before she married my father and had me.

  All of it was such a shock, it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that the woman I knew was not my actual mother. My father wasn’t my father. I was adopted. Left on the doorstep. He was in the CIA. We were actually aliens. Where did it end?

  “What do you mean over?” I asked again.

  “The fight,” he said. “That was over.”

  “How could you have kept this from me? I didn’t get a chance to know my mother as she really was. I loved some imposter.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “She was just acting the whole time.”

  “Of course not. It was a defense.”

  “Is that lawyer talk for phony?”

  “There were things she chose to keep to herself. She had that right. You were too young to understand. Loving her family, that was not an act.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “By not telling me, you were lying.”

  He said, “Lynnie, try to think it through. I know it’s a lot but you’re a smart kid. Think it through.”

  I wanted to kick his chair out from under him. I loved him and all, but what was this think-it-through business? It was at times like this that I missed having a woman in the house the most. My father, like all men according to our group discussions at Hillsboro, was about thinking, not feeling, and he thought all things could be solved by logic. He was not going to be able to logic his way out of this one, though. This was going to require some down-and-dirty emotions.

  “Okay, I’m thinking. I’ve got nothing.”

  “You were in the third grade when she died. You could barely add.”

  “I was multiplying in the second grade.”

  “You were a child. You slept with a night-light.”

  “I did not.”

  He raised his chin at me.

  Maybe I did.

  “You could have found some way to tell me,” I argued. “Or she could have. For God’s sake, she told me about sex when I was four.”

  “Because you asked.”

  “I wasn’t ready to know. It completely freaked me out. I think that’s when I started sleeping with a night-light. She was always doing that to me, Dad. Remember when I loved the Beatles in preschool? I asked her where John Lennon was now and she told me. In detail. I remember going to school and explaining it to my classmates. Their mothers called her and yelled. Don’t you remember that?”

  He laughed, looking off. He remembered it but not as something traumatic or even disturbing. For him it was just a nice memory, an example of who she was and what he loved about her.

  “She was so completely truthful about everything. That was what you always told me. And the whole time, she had this big secret she was keeping from her own kid.”

  “We made a judgment call, Lynnie. We decided not to let you know until you were a teenager. Now, if she had lived, we might have changed our minds. But she didn’t live. And I had to abide by our original agreement. I’m sorry if you think I made a bad decision. It wasn’t the first, it won’t be the last. But I’m doing the best I can.”

  I hated the best-I-can speech. He gave it to me a lot. And when it happened I felt too guilty to listen. Because underneath it I felt the message was: I never bargained on raising you alone. I miss my wife. I was in it for her. I know he didn’t really feel that way all the time. I’d also had to endure on numerous occasions the you’re-all-I-have speech, and that one made me feel resentful. It made me feel he love
d me too much and I was responsible for his happiness, and I couldn’t live up to it.

  I said, “Do you have any idea what it feels like to find out that your parents aren’t who you thought they were?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Every teenager finds that out. Nobody is who you think they are when you’re young. You have a childish view of them. Your own parents are the first victims of your burgeoning ability to see things as they are. The scales fall off your eyes by degrees. And the first thing in front of you are the people who raised you and they can never bear up to your scrutiny.”

  He was raising his voice now and had gotten a little fancy on me.

  Probably because I wasn’t having the reaction he’d expected. I knew he wanted me to be all sentimental and weepy over my mother now. He was imagining me throwing my arms around him and saying, “Thank you for not getting me a car, it’s so much better to have criminals in the family.”

  I was feeling a lot of things but that wasn’t one of them.

  “What’s the point of it all, then?” I asked, my throat tightening, but I was still raging against the tears. “I’m supposed to realize you guys had a hard time in life? And that’s supposed to make me want to have a hard time in life, too? Well, guess what, Dad, I’m having it. I’ve been having it since the bad car wreck and this isn’t helping.”

  I threw the manuscript across the room in an ugly way that made me feel at once like a brat and also a hell of a lot better.

  He stared at the scattered papers. I could tell he wanted to start picking them up. I could tell he also wanted to hit me. I knew because I wanted to hit him, too. I wanted us to get into a boxing match now.

  “You don’t know how to do this,” I screamed at him. “You don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “About what?”

  “This,” I said, making a wild gesture. “Everything. Raising me. The way she would have.”

  “No, of course not. I’m not her.”

  “Doing your best? You aren’t even trying!”

  “Trying what? My God, Lynnie…”

  “You’re not trying anything. You just work and come home and read and think about her. Like she’s still here. Like she’s walking around somewhere. You don’t even date. You don’t even think about it. And now this, showing me this, thinking it’s going to change things somehow. Did you think giving me the letter was going to make something happen? It was going to conjure her up? Make her come back to life? Or did you think it would make her some kind of saint? Somebody would build a statue to her?”