Noah's Wife (17 page)

N
oah wishes that his wife had not come with him to the church.

He doesn't want her to see him like this: shaky, uncertain. He stumbled over the threshold on the way out of Dr. Yu's house this morning and suddenly she was right there beside him, lifting up his elbow and guiding him out to the car. I'm not an invalid, he nearly snapped at her—but then again, how could he be certain? The memory of their flight two nights before left him feeling tentative and cowed. He recalled the sound of their tires splashing through puddles the size of small ponds and the image of the headlights beaming weakly through water while he shivered in the passenger seat and his wife tried not to look unnerved. The rain cleared once they were out of the hills, and for the remaining hours of their drive he leaned back against the headrest and peered mutely at the stars.

What the hell had he been thinking?

“There is something strange about that place,” the head elder says now, shaking his silver head with something between compassion and disdain. “You did your best, Noah,” he continues gravely. “Lord knows you tried. It simply wasn't meant to be.”

Around the table the other elders murmur their assent, their clasped hands reflected in the sheen of the great mahogany table. Noah stares at their familiar faces with a flood of deep relief, the tension of the past two days finally easing from his muscles. They are right, of course—it was the town! How can any man be expected to stay sane in a place like that?

The head elder clears his throat and then continues. “Unfortunately we cannot offer you a position back here at the present time,” he says. His eyes are deep-set and unblinking. “In your absence, of course, we called someone else to take your place. But if you are willing to wait a few days—a few weeks at most—I am sure we will have no trouble identifying a new assignment for you in a different church. As you well know, any congregation would count itself fortunate to have you.” The elder pauses and shuffles through the stack of papers before him. “In the meantime, I'm afraid that we cannot return you to your former house, as the new minister and his young family are quite settled in it by now. Do you have a place to stay?”

Noah nods, unthinkingly. It is only when he and his wife have left the committee room and are stepping softly through the nave that he realizes he should have checked with her before responding.

“April won't mind?” he asks her, and she shakes her head, her dark hair swinging across her shoulders.

“No,” she says. “I think it will be fine.” She glances sidewise at Noah, something odd in her expression. “I'm sure that we can stay as long as you like,” she adds, “if you're certain that this is what you want.”

He halts at the back of the church, troubled by her statement. The vaulted ceiling soars above him, the candles blaze upon the altar. This church is twice the size of the one he has just left behind. In comparison, this one is opulent, grandiose, miraculously intact.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

She shrugs, fiddles with the cuffs of her checkered blouse. “Nothing,” she says. “I only meant—” Then she stops herself, shaking her head. “Nothing. I guess I thought that once you were feeling better, we would be going back.”

“Back?” The idea appalls him.

“Most of our things are still there. We left in a hurry,” she reminds him gently. She hesitates, and then she adds: “Besides—we took in so many of those animals. Who will look after them if we're not there?”

Noah pictures the town. He imagines the rain pouring into the streets, the townspeople sealed within their houses, watching from behind closed windows. He can almost hear the howling of the wind, can almost feel the rain slamming against the walls. His hands tremble and sweat soaks the back of his shirt. For a moment his vision tunnels into darkness, and when his
head clears he is unsteady on his feet, supported once again by his wife. He tries to pull away to prove that he can stand just fine on his own, but the earth sways beneath him and he cannot stop himself from leaning on her shoulder.

“Let's get you home,” she says, and he doesn't protest.

He wouldn't have leaned on her so fully had he thought that anyone was watching them; he would have tried to manage on his own. But it is only when they approach the curb that he notices a figure leaning on the hood of their car, considering Noah and his wife from beneath a dark, sardonic brow, and so there is no time for him to straighten up. Noah does not recognize the man at first—the sun makes his head ache, makes the entire day feel like a dream.

“Well,” says the man, striding forward to offer his assistance. “What a coincidence.”

His face strikes an ominous chord, but still Noah fails to place him. It is his wife who speaks first. “The weatherman?” she says.

The man smirks, slick-haired and red-faced, a patch of dry skin peeling from his sunburned nose. “That's what I used to be, sure,” he says with a fake and brilliant grin. He extends his hand. “But not anymore. I've been fired, so you might as well call me Jonas.”

“Excuse me, Jonas,” says Noah's wife while Noah removes his arm from hers and grasps the man's hand. “I didn't expect to see you here. I'm sorry to hear about your job.”

“Me?” he scoffs. “I didn't expect to see
you
here! I had you
pegged for a true believer—I thought you were determined to stick it out in that ghost town until the bitter end.” He shrugs. “Anyway, I saw your car out here—recognized it as I was heading down the street for lunch. I haven't seen that much mud and rust on a car since I hightailed it out of those hills two weeks ago. The feathers and claw marks in the upholstery were a dead giveaway, too. God, I'm glad to be out of there.”

Noah's wife smiles at him in sympathy, the skin crinkling at the corners of her eyes. She responds but Noah does not hear what she is saying; he only lets his eyes rest upon her face. Her skin is still pale from weeks without sun, and when she smiles at Jonas her soul seems to shine right through it. She is clever and calm, generous and lovely. Noah warms at the sight of her and wonders, as he has wondered before, how she came to be so good.

Their relationship has always worked because the balance is just so: he is the one who guides them, dreaming of a distant point, while she steadies them and keeps them on course. He has never found someone as utterly
devoted
as she is—to her friends, to her work, to her clients, to him. Whenever he forgot his books at home, she would bring them to him. While he composed prayers to say at dinner, she made sure the meal was on the table. And yet although he loves how she supports him, he has not been able to ignore the fact that lately she seems driven to support many people in a similar fashion. He tries to ignore the doubt that tugs at the corners of his mind, but what if the truth is that he and she are not the perfect complements
they appear to be? What if his wife is simply very good at being complementary?

“So,” Jonas is saying, his tone as conversational as if the three of them had been friends for years. “How many people came out with you? Is there anyone left back there?”

“About half the town left after your meeting,” replies Noah's wife.

“The other half is still there?” he exclaims. His eyebrows rise halfway up his forehead. “Two full weeks later, and it hadn't stopped raining?”

She shakes her head. “Not when we left.”

He exhales in a whistle, low and flat. “Damn it,” he says. He squints at her. “Tell me—why aren't you with them? What finally changed your mind?”

Noah's wife glances briefly at her husband. “Things took a turn for the worse,” she says.

Jonas nods. “Listen,” he says after a moment, his tone thick with rancor. “You've got to take care of yourself first, before you try to take care of anyone else. Look out for number one.” He pauses, shoots Noah a look whose significance Noah does not understand. “As for the rest of them, don't give them another thought. They're a bunch of misfits, and they made their choice. How can they expect anyone to help them if they won't help themselves?”

Yes, Noah wants to say—that town, that church, those people. He wants to be able to say that they have ruined him. And yet . . . ? The church towers in the background behind his wife,
its brick walls hard and unyielding, its steeple gleaming as if freshly sharpened. He shivers in the sun. The building that should provide him with that old sense of inspiration and purpose only leaves him with a gut full of dread. He felt this way before he left, he suddenly remembers. The feeling is familiar; it is the reason why he sought a change.

“Stubborn as pack mules, they are,” Jonas continues. “Stupid. Self-involved. Hopeless. If they hadn't been so pigheaded, I could have convinced them to evacuate. Then I'd still have my job.” He shrugs, kicks at a yellow weed spiking out of the sidewalk. “The point is: it's a beautiful day out here. The sun is shining. Might as well sit back and enjoy unemployment while it lasts—isn't that right, Minister?”

Noah cannot listen anymore. “It was a foolish project to begin with,” he interjects, his tone uncharacteristically sour. “We were bound to fail. I couldn't save that town any more than you could.”

Jonas does not seem to appreciate the comparison. “I didn't
fail
,” he insists, his face glistening with sweat. He glances at Noah's wife. “I simply stopped trying. If I'd wanted them out, I could have gotten them out, no problem. The fact is that it wasn't worth the hassle. There was nothing worth saving there.”

“You lost your job over it,” Noah reminds him.

“My peace of mind was more important than my job.”

Noah shakes his head. “The truth is you couldn't have done it. It's fine. I couldn't do it, either.” He keeps his gaze fixed on Jonas even though he feels the shadow of the church looming
over him. He is desperate to explain his revelation, but he cannot find the words to share it. The idea that we can change the people around us, that we can help them or save them or make them something other than what they are—it's a delusion. It's the illusion of control. Noah did not see that before, but he certainly sees it now.

“I could have gotten them out,” Jonas repeats. His face remains placid but his grin is sharper than it was. “I could
still
get them out. Sounds like a challenge.”

Noah's wife stands between them, looking from one to the other, all the light gone now from her face. Noah turns away from her and shrugs.

“Life is not a challenge,” he murmurs, as if to himself. “It's not a test, or a choice. It's simply something you're born into.”

His wife is saying something, but he cannot hear her. Before he knows what he is doing he has taken off again, striding through the dappled light that the branches have thrown across the sidewalk, gliding smoothly over pools of shade. His legs are long and he has already gone two blocks before his wife catches up to him, breathless, calling his name. If she had not snagged his sleeve when she did, if he had not looked down into her face and been struck right there on the pavement with all the force of her devotion and all the weight of how he loved her, he might have gone on walking for miles, the church at his back, putting as much distance between himself and that steeple as any man could.

S
omeone must take action to save this sinking town.

And if not Mrs. McGinn, then who? Mauro? He might have pulled the minister out of the river, but he did no more than any lifeguard would have done. Her own daughter worked as a lifeguard at the outdoor pool in the years before it closed, and then the indoor one after that. If she had been at the river, she could have saved Noah's life as well as anyone.

Heroism is all about timing.

“Isn't that right, Angela Rose?” she would like to ask her daughter. Still in her pajamas, she pads down the hallway to her daughter's room and opens the door, but the girl isn't there. Mrs. McGinn pauses, examines the room. Everything is in its place: the shelves of stuffed animals, the plush pink carpet, the canopy bed and the quilt that Mrs. McGinn made herself, sewed
with her own two hands by the light of the living room lamp. And yet something about the room does not seem right.

“Angela Rose?” calls Mrs. McGinn, but again there is no answer.

Mrs. McGinn's mind flashes back to last night, to the dream she had of empty streets and empty houses. The entire town had been abandoned and she was left as its only occupant, bailing water from her diner with a white plastic pail in preparation for the customers who never came. The dream seemed so real that when she woke this morning her arms felt as though they were aching, muscles sorely tried by the task she had imagined for herself.

She wanders back down the hallway to her own room, where she dresses and arranges her hair as best she can. Her husband is already gone, transporting the day's animal supplies from the town hall to the houses. He had woken her with the sound of breaking glass in the kitchen, but she had not ventured downstairs to find out if the crash was accidental or deliberate. Now when she walks through to reach the front door, she sees no sign that anything occurred at all. Say what people will about her husband and his temper—at least he does his best to keep his messes to himself.

Out on the main drag she wades through several inches of water, lifting her boots extra high in a futile attempt to avoid the fallen leaves and twigs that are bobbing around her ankles. The streets are flowing. She sees a lopsided bench, sinking into the
mud, and a herd of elk examining her from the highest point in the park. A small child paddles by in a kayak. When she opens the door of the diner she finds that the water in the streets has begun to seep below the door, coating the main floor in a murky layer. She stabs at it with the toe of her boot and watches the ripples run over the tiles. A quick surge of fear rises in her chest, and she instantly quells it. Who ever heard of a rain that lasts forever?

She feeds the penguins and hangs a sign on the door (
CLOSED TODAY
,
REGRETFULLY
) and steps back outside while she mulls over what to do next. Where is her husband? Where is her daughter? Who can she find to help her clear out the water? From her position on the side porch, she can see past the wooden rocking chairs (rotting and sprouting moss) to the back of the diner, where the river is rising and slamming against the building's foundations. No wonder her business is crumbling. How can anything withstand a force like this, day after day after day?

The fear rises and again she presses it back, tries to remind herself of what her mother used to tell her about being scared. Her mother's theory was that anytime she felt frightened, she ought to channel that emotion into something else: she ought to get angry or passionate instead. This is why, even from an early age, Mrs. McGinn has always been a fighter.

She knows that she will find her troops in the general store. Mauro says that people have been storming in from dawn until
dusk to complain of the slow leaks in their roofs and the water seeping through the cracks of their basement windows. When she marches in, he is in the middle of a tutorial. She stops and pulls up short inside the door, watching as he shows a group of his neighbors how to apply caulk around the windowsills and patch up fissures in the walls. Seeing that the townspeople still seem uneasy, he brings out the shoebox that he keeps on a shelf below the cash register and begins passing out his lucky coins, his lucky stones, and his ball-chain necklaces from which hang medallions with the tarnished images of saints.

“Here,” he tells his audience. “Take these. For the good fortune!”

Although the townspeople have always regarded Mauro's superstitions as old-world and quaint, they take the objects from his oversized palms with ginger fingers and no complaints. Mauro's turkeys glower at them from behind stacks of canned paint.

For Mrs. McGinn, this is as good a time as any. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” she announces dryly, and the townspeople turn toward her. She sees Mauro wrinkle his forehead, trying to commit the phrase to memory.

“We need more than luck, people,” declares Mrs. McGinn. “We need to take a stand. We need to fight back.”

“Who are we fighting?” asks Leesl, who had been attending Mauro's tutorial with a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. Mrs. McGinn glares at her, as fierce as she has always been.

“The elements!” says Mrs. McGinn. “The river! The rain! This is our town, these are our stores and our houses. Don't you want to take it all back?”

“The house is where a heart is, of course,” exclaims Mauro, smiling wildly. He, too, is afraid that this town is on the verge of collapse; he is terrified that his neighbors will all jump ship. And if they leave, what will he do, how will he live? His savings are gone.

The townspeople do not consider themselves to be fighters by nature; usually they leave the fighting to Mrs. McGinn. They are as tired of her as they are of the rain. They do not like each other anymore. They are here because they need to patch the leaks in their roofs, but they would rather be at home, shut up in their own dark houses with their own wild animals wandering through the living room. The animals do not bother them, do not ask them all these questions about the philosophy of staying or going, giving up or fighting. Unlike their human neighbors, the animals leave them alone.

“Do we have a choice?” asks someone in the back, once Mrs. McGinn has finished.

She stares at him. “No,” she says after a brief pause. “No, not really. Do you want the rain to win? Sound the alarm—tell everyone you can find. Mauro, you've got sand in the back?”

“Yes,” he says. “For the bagging!”

“Great. We'll do that, load up your truck. Everyone else will meet us at the river.”

The townspeople go, grumbling and grudgingly. Mrs. McGinn
and Mauro pour sand into canvas sacks and garbage bags and sling them into the back of his truck. Mrs. McGinn is already sweating only twenty minutes in, but Mauro works cheerfully, without tiring. On the way to the river, he turns on the radio and whistles along. He is glad for any chance to buy himself some time, to keep his neighbors in town so that he will not be left here on his own.

The trees near the bank are bent backward in the wind, the rain shuffling through their leaves. There is no sign of the cattle, the goats, or the caribou, all of whom have distanced themselves from the powerful rush of the river to seek food and shelter on higher ground in the town. The houses along the bank stand sober and gray, their windows shuttered, the water pouring from their roofs. Mrs. McGinn swivels her head as she climbs out of Mauro's truck, searching for the flash of a colored umbrella in the streets, but in that moment she sees no one. From here, the whole town looks as though it has already been deserted.

Near the river she is struck by a chill so sudden that it takes her a second to realize that it isn't the wind at all—only her own sense of dread. The rain falls into her eyes and runs down her cheeks and she looks up, glowering at the sky. It is drizzling again today, the clouds lightening in a way that suggests an end may be in sight, but for the first time since the rain began Mrs. McGinn feels as though she cannot trust that kind of sign. The clouds have lightened before, only to twist harder and darker for many days after. She has tried to be so
positive about the situation in this town—she has tried to hold this place together—but things are getting bad enough now to deflate even an optimist's faith in sunny days and happy endings.

And is she not an optimist? Mauro may be singing as he slings the sandbags down the bank, but why should he be happier than she? (Although this is not—she must remind herself—a competition.) She has always considered herself to be a cheerful person. Why else would she have kept getting married, for goodness' sake? Once or twice really should have been enough. And yet she wants to believe that the darkness will always give way to the light, that a person is not handed more sorrow than she can bear, that the universe would not wash away her home and her history without due cause. She has done nothing to deserve this.

When the headlights of her neighbors begin appearing at the top of the bank, she tries to shake off her sudden melancholy, tries to pull herself together. As they come trickling through the grass in their boots and their brightly colored slickers, she grabs another sandbag and hauls it down the hill, slipping a little in the slick and bending cattails.

Mauro shows his neighbors how best to construct the wall—a survival skill he once picked up from an independent, woodsy uncle. He staggers the rows and steps on the bags to compress the sand and seal them more securely together. It is difficult in the rain and the wind, but the pounding of the river against the bank and the perilous rush of the current keep the
townspeople where they are, wiping earth and water from their eyes as they work doggedly and silently at their task. If any of them feel as though they are fighting a losing battle, they do not say so. The wall begins to climb, row by row, sack by sack, leaning into the sky. After only an hour Mrs. McGinn is already so weary, so sore, that she does not even have the energy to notice or admire the way that her neighbors have come together to wrestle with the forces of nature, to take the stand she recommended against the weather and the river and their own unhappy fate. Instead she keeps her head down in the rain, slogs slowly up and down the bank, listens to Mauro's shouted words of affirmation with a mix of misery and detachment.

“If we are doing this so well together,” Mauro yells, “we can be doing anything! There isn't anybody who can be stopping us!”

He makes a second run (and then a third, and a fourth) back to the store to pick up more bags. The wall continues to rise. When the river crashes against it the townspeople stop in their tracks and shield their eyes from the rain and look on, anxiously. So far, it holds. They work all day into the afternoon, long after they are soaked through to the skin and their fingers are numbed by cold.

Mrs. McGinn is taking a quick break, leaning against one of the cars and blowing on her hands to warm them, when the zookeeper comes to find her.

“Evelyn,” he says. His face is drawn tight, his tone strained with worry. “I think that Angela Rose is gone.”

“Gone?” repeats Mrs. McGinn, the word muffled by the rain.

He nods, pulls a sopping sheet of paper from his coat pocket. “She left a note.”

He hands it to her. Although she takes it from him, she cannot read it. Her daughter's familiar script blurs before her eyes while the river rushes past in the background. How did they get here? There is not a particular moment that she can pinpoint; there was never a torrential downpour. There was just the slow accumulation of many days of rain—little by little, drop by drop, so that now it is too late for her to change her course.

If her daughter is gone, what is the point? It is all well and good to save this town, but the heroism feels empty in a way it did not feel before.

When the townspeople see Mrs. McGinn crumple to her knees, when they see her cover her face with her hands and hear her wail, their blood runs cold and their hearts plummet like stones. If
she
cannot hold herself together, what hope is there for the rest of them?

Perhaps it is time, they murmur to one another, watching one of the sandbags slide off the top of the wall and into the water. There is a splash, and then the river swallows it whole. Perhaps we have done all we can, and it is finally time to pack our bags and leave this place behind.