Noah

The rain, just moments before an April shower, pounded in earnest now and wind drove it

in horizontal sheets across the windshield. Spring in southwest Ohio – tomorrow it might be eighty degrees. Relaxing her grip on the small bag of groceries, Nola settled in to wait out the storm. She watched, mesmerized, as heavy drops drummed an erratic rhythm on the garbage cans in the alley beside her gate. Movement caught her eye, breaking the spell; then ceased. A heartbeat later, a flash of pale hair appeared in the gap between the cans.

She opened the car door and covered the distance to the cans in three long strides. 

     That’s how Noah came in to her life: soaked and shivering, hunkering behind the trash.

      He couldn’t go home, he told her, because his mom and Dirk had locked him out. They did that when it was “their time.” 

     She wrapped a towel over his wet clothes and made hot chocolate. Mottled shades of purple and green marked an old bruise on his left cheek. He held up four fingers when she asked how old he was.

     When he saw the light go on in the third row of trailers across the alley, he said he could go home, and he left.

     He came back the next day. She made more hot chocolate and they talked about the yellow cat that roamed the neighborhood. She told him she put food out for it, but it ran when she tried to approach. He had tried to pet the cat, and it ran from him, too. Dirk had tried to catch it to put gasoline on its tail and set it on fire, he told her, but the big yellow kitty got away.

     Noah came often after that. Nola made sure she had cookies on hand. Sometimes they watched TV - Disney movies or PBS Kids. Sometimes they just talked. Over a game of Candyland she’d picked up at a garage sale the tale of his life trickled out. Dirk had lived with them since they’d moved to Cincinnati; before that they’d lived with Smitty in another town. Noah’s mom worked at a store, but Dirk just rode his motorcycle.

     “Where do your grandparents live?” she asked one day.

     “I don’t have a grandma and grandpa. Just a mom.”

     On another rainy afternoon she watched as he crossed the alley and headed not toward his mother’s trailer, but in the direction of the park at the end of the street. When she asked about it the next day, Noah told her that Dirk had been at home, working on his motorcycle. Did he not like being at home when his mother was gone?

     “It’s ok. Mostly Dirk goes on his motorcycle in the morning and I play.”

     What about meals? Noah made his own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes he ate donuts his mom brought from the store where she worked.

     Nola opened a can of alphabet soup and toasted bread for cheese sandwiches. Noah slurped and crunched his way through the meal, tipped the bowl to his mouth to drink the last few drops of broth, and asked for more.

     When he left each day, the house felt huge and empty, like an abandoned warehouse. Or perhaps that was just an echo of the hollowed-out space inside her. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?

     Nola was used to being alone. An only child, she found herself on her own at twenty, when her mother died just a year after her father. She’d met Ken nine years later, on her morning run. Failing to negotiate a fallen limb, she’d tripped and landed hard, scraping both knees and arms. Before she could get up, a hand reached for hers, and she’d looked up into a handsome face clouded with concern.

     “Better let me have a look at you,” he said. Her eyes widened. She stepped back.

     “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m a doctor. Here . . . . “ He pulled a lanyard from his shorts pocket, holding the photo id so she could read it: Kenneth Childs, University of Cincinnati Medical Center. Nola was familiar with the red and white badge. As a medical device sales rep, she called at the hospital regularly.

     They headed to the parking lot, where he pulled a first-aid kit from his trunk, and treated her wounds. She thanked him and began walking toward her car.

     “Wait! Would you like to go for coffee?” he called.

     They married six months later. Ken finished his residency and joined a family practice with two older physicians, very caring men who had been a couple since medical school and had married recently themselves.

     When the two retired just three years later, they offered to sell the practice to Ken in a very attractive package. Ken and Nola leapt at it.

     Now in their thirties, it was time they started a family. Their first pregnancy lasted twelve weeks. Heartbroken but determined, they tried again. The second miscarriage came at five weeks. Nola hadn’t yet told Ken she thought she was pregnant. They stopped monitoring her ovulation and having “dutiful” sex – though sex with Ken was far from a duty.

     Six months later, Nola missed her period. She waited a week, then took a pregnancy test while Ken was at work. Five minutes later two bright pink lines confirmed what she already knew.

     She and Ken had cried and held each other for hours after the last miscarriage. She couldn’t bear to get his hopes up. Better to wait until she was sure she would carry this baby to term. But two weeks later, while making breakfast, she ran to the bathroom to vomit. Ken, lost in an online medical journal, mumbled something about a stomach bug going around.

     When the scene repeated the next morning and the one following, Ken’s eyebrows lifted halfway up his forehead and his eyes widened as his mouth formed an O. She nodded as he took her in his arms and buried his face in her hair.

     This time the OB prescribed bed rest. It didn’t matter. Just after dinner one evening when she was eighteen weeks along, the cramps began. The physical pain was soon gone, as was their baby, but her emotional pain reflected in Ken’s eyes as he held her hand while they waited to be released from the ER.

     After that, they stopped talking about having a baby. The OB suggested they practice birth control for a time to give her body a rest. Nola filled the prescription for the pill, and got a new one every year, a bastion against the unbearable pain of losing another child.

     They traveled. Nola’s scrapbooks spelled out their adventures: eating hot dogs at a stand in front of Westminster Abbey, stopping on the Ring Road in Iceland and in Dandong, China to allow herds of sheep to cross the road, being invited as special guests to a day-long celebration remembering the liberation by American and Free French forces of two small French towns during World War II.

     And then, on a sunny May morning, it was over. Ken left for a run before going to the office. Nola packed lunch - a turkey sandwich and an apple - for her day at school as a kindergarten volunteer and was tying her red Chuck Taylors, the ones the kids loved, when her phone rang. She looked at her watch; she really needed to leave in the next three minutes. She pulled the phone from her purse and jabbed the pulsing green circle, thinking it might be Ken

     A gentle female voice asked ”Am I speaking with Mrs. Nola Childs?”

     Oh, no! She’d answered a solicitation call.

     “Yes, but . . . “

     “Mrs. Childs, this is Elizabeth Sigman at UC ER. Dr. Childs is here and we’d like you to come as soon as possible.”

     A hundred questions flooded her mind, but she was too afraid to ask. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

     At the hospital, the story came out quickly. Ken had collapsed. A runner behind him saw him fall and ran over to help, but could detect no pulse. She called 911. The EMTs transported Ken to the hospital, where the ER worked to resuscitate him now. She followed the nurse down the hall to a room full of doctors, nurses, and technicians stood over a gurney where Ken lay. As one doctor counted chest compressions, another stood beside her, defibrillator paddles in hand, ready to deliver the next shock.

     Nola’s legs began to wobble. She locked her knees, knowing if she showed signs of being distraught she’d have to leave. “You’ve got to think straight,” she repeated over and over in her mind until loopy lightheadedness gave way to grim determination.

     In the eternity that followed she counted to thirty over and over again as the doctor’s hands pressed into Ken’s chest, holding her own breath every time the defibrillator paddles hovered over his body. After twenty minutes, the doctor shook her head. “Forty-five minutes. He’s not responding.” She turned, seeing Nola for the first time. “I’m sorry.”

     Of course it was not possible that Ken was dead. They’d lain in bed the night before, arms and legs tangled, before falling asleep. He’d made a joke, and she’d laughed before drifting off.

They had plans for the weekend – a hike through the Nature Center, followed by a patio dinner. How could that not happen?

     After the funeral Nola sold the medical practice. She made an appointment with their financial advisor to invest the proceeds, but when he asked her how she pictured her life five years in the future, she stared at him, unable to comprehend the idea. Didn’t he know? The world, once filled with color and light and music, was now shapeless muddiness and gray noise. Nothing could change that.

     The inertia of grief clung to her. Nola shuffled through the years, a husk of a woman. Her two best friends had moved away and she’d forgotten to make new ones. The machinery of routine marked her days.

     At almost fifty and a widow for eight years, she’d come to accept the desert of loss, featureless and parching, inside her. Isolation had become a shield from unwanted interaction at first, and later became an unquestioned feature of her inner landscape.

     Now she soaked in the living water upon which this small boy sailed his fragile life, drenching her in the liquid light of his eyes, infusing her with life. His small, warm hand, on those occasions when it brushed her arm, drove the chill from both her heart and bones.  

     By July Noah had established a pattern, He came every day except Monday, his mom’s day off. “What does your mom say about you coming here?” Nola asked.

     “She doesn’t care.” His eyes slid to the floor.

      So that was it. She’d known he’d not told his mom or Dirk about their visits. He came over only after the motorcycle roared away in the morning and left late in the afternoon when he heard the distinct sound of the Harley engine and his mother’s shift was due to end. She’d known, but had pushed that knowledge down, never allowing the thought to fully form in her mind.

     She’d introduce herself to Noah’s mother, she told herself, at the right moment. But the moment never seemed to come. Dinnertime? Oh, the woman had worked all day and was no doubt rushing to put the meal on the table. Evenings? She probably wanted to spend time with Noah. Far be it from Nola to interrupt that. Mondays, when she was home during the day? Yes, that was the best time.

     But, since Noah didn’t come on Mondays, she shopped for groceries and cleaned the house, then told herself she was too tired. Two weeks passed, and Nola’s resolve began to fade. She and Noah existed in a bubble for those hours they were together, and she couldn’t risk having it burst.

     When had she begun to love him so much? First had come the natural affection for a small child, followed by sympathy for his unhappy plight. Noah was quiet, like her, in the beginning, and she’d identified with that. But in the gentle drift of time spent easily together, he’d revealed a distinct, complex personality. At first somber and assessing, he’d gradually started to smile, then to laugh, more at his own versions of knock-knock jokes than anything else.

     He’d caught her up in this net of laughter and lightness. At the same time, she winced at his stoic acceptance of his circumstances, and marveled at his ability to mitigate those conditions. How did one so young learn to do that?

     As the Dog Days of summer gave way to pleasant days and nights filled with the lulling rhapsody of katydids and crickets, Nola thought about Noah’s future. They’d baked a cake one afternoon. Chocolate was his favorite flavor, he’d told her. “My mom got me a chocolate cake for my birthday. It had orange icing and ghosts on it, ‘cause my birthday is on Halloween.” He’d be in kindergarten in just a year. At least he’d be safe during the day.

     And what will I do without him, she thought. Pain and shame washed over her. How could she be so selfish? But how could she step back into the stifling pall she’d lived in for so long?

      On the last Monday of September, as Nola opened the blinds, noticing the tinge of red on the leaves of the big maple in the front yard, she saw Noah running up the walk. Bursting in the door almost before she could open it, he stopped in front of her, eyes wide and filled with tears, words pouring out of his mouth. “My mom says we’re moving today.”

Nola had never seen him cry before. He tugged the hem of his tee shirt up and rubbed his face.

     “Today?” Her voice rose, thin and high. Nauseating heat raced through her.

      “Yes. Mom said she wanted to surprise me. But I don’t want to move. I want . . . I want . . . “ More tears.

     Frantic, she tried to think. There was nothing she could do. She had no claim to this child, save that of love.

     “I have to go. Mom put T. D. Bear in a box. I have to get him out. He can’t see in there.”  He was out the door, running down the walk before she could speak.

     She felt as if her limbs had become partially detached and were flopping crazily inside the sacks of skin that held them.

     “Think, think, think!” she said aloud. No use. She didn’t have time to think. They might be leaving now. She’d never see Noah again! Strength returned to her at that thought. Nola grabbed her sweater and hurried out.

     What would she say? She didn’t know, but she could not bear the cold gray emptiness that lay before her.

     Making her way at first down a narrow street, then through an even narrower alley, she drew alongside the mobile home where Noah lived. Before she could step into the open, curses bounded scattershot around her. Nola stopped, then crept to the corner where she crouched behind a boxwood.

     A skinny man with a ragged beard was screaming into the face of a small, gaunt woman. At the door of the trailer stood Noah, eyes wide with terror, clutching a stuffed brown bear. Nola, shaking, stepped back.

     “Why the hell can’t he stay with his dad?” Dirk yelled.

     The woman swayed. “I don’t know where he is. He won’t take him anyway.”

     “Well, I don’t want the little sonofabitch hanging around me.”

     “Ok, Dirk, ok.” She backed away, then saw Noah.

     “How many times do I have to tell you not to bother Dirk?”

     “I was just looking for T.D.”

     “Well, make yourself scarce. He’s not in a good mood.”

     Nola wanted to run to the hateful excuse for a man and scream in his face, take Noah by the arm, and flee. But what good would that do? The authorities needed to be notified. But now Nola’s legs were hundred-pound weights. Shock dulled her brain, but each step away from the trailer increased her sense of cowardly, traitorous abandonment. “Call the child abuse hotline,” she said over and over, as if she were afraid she’d forget.

     At her laptop in the kitchen, she keyed in the search for the hotline number, and when it displayed, reached for the phone, then put it down. What would she say? That Dirk yelled at Noah’s mother? That he’d said he didn’t want him around? That Noah looked terrified? Was that enough? But the horrifying scene had affected her viscerally. What must it have done to a four-year-old boy? And what else had he seen and heard? She picked up the phone again.

     She heard the door open, then quickly close. Noah crossed the kitchen and stood beside her, She knelt, and for the first time, took him in her arms, held him close, and put her cheek against his.

     The love that she’d kept dammed up, that until then had leaked out slowly, broke free, washing over her, filling her empty spaces. Noah moved closer, wrapped his arms around her neck, and laid his head on her shoulder.