“Noelle,” I whispered. “Why?”
It’s amazing what you can miss when you’re an emotional wreck. The note was right next to me on her night table. I’d had to reach past it to use her cell phone to call for help. The phone had been inches from her hands. She could have called me or Tara. Could have said, “I just did something stupid. Come and save me.” But she didn’t. She hadn’t wanted to be saved.
The police and emergency team poured into the room, taking up all the air and space and blurring into a sea of blue and gray in front of me. I sat on the straight-backed chair someone had brought in from the kitchen, still holding Noelle’s hand as the EMTs pronounced her dead and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive. I answered the questions volleyed at me by the police. I knew Officer Whittaker personally. He came into Hot! early every morning. He was the raspberry-cream-cheese croissant and banana-walnut muffin, heated. I’d fill his mug with my strongest coffee, then watch him dump five packets of sugar into it.
“Did you call your husband, ma’am?” he asked. He always called me ma’am, no matter how many times I asked him to call me Emerson. He moved around Noelle’s claustrophobic bedroom, gazing at another framed photograph of her mother on the wall, touching the spine of a book on the small bookcase beneath the window and studying the pincushion on her dresser as though it might give him an answer to what had happened here.
“I did.” I’d called Ted before everyone had arrived. He was showing a property and I had to leave a message. He hadn’t received it yet. If he had, he would have called the second he heard me stumbling over my words as if I were having a stroke.
“Who’s her next of kin?” Officer Whittaker asked.
Oh, no. I thought of Noelle’s mother. Ted would have to call her for me. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t and neither could Tara. “Her mother,” I whispered. “She’s in her eighties and…frail. She lives in an assisted-living community in Charlotte.”
“Did you see this?” Officer Whittaker picked up the small piece of paper from Noelle’s night table with gloved fingers. He held it out for me to read.
Emerson and Tara, I’m sorry. Please look after my garden for me and make sure my mother is cared for. I love all of you.
“Oh.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Oh, no.” The note made it real. Until that second, I’d managed to avoid thinking the word suicide. Now there it was, the letters a mile high inside my head.
“Is it her handwriting?” Officer Whittaker asked.
I opened my eyes to slits as if I couldn’t stand to see the entire note again, all at once. The sloppy slope of the letters would be nearly illegible to someone else, but I knew it well. I nodded.
“Was she depressed, ma’am? Did you have any idea?”
I shook my head. “No. Not at all.” I looked up at him.
“She loved her work. She would never have… Could she have been sick and not told us? Or could someone have killed her and made it look like suicide?” I looked at the note again. At all the pill bottles. I could see Noelle’s name on the labels. One of the EMTs noticed that some of the prescriptions had been filled the month before, but others dated back many years. Had she been stockpiling them?
“Did she talk about her health lately?” Officer Whittaker asked. “Doctors’ appointments?”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to wake up my memory.
“She injured her back in a car accident a long time ago, but she hasn’t complained about pain from it in years,” I said. We’d worried about all the medication she was taking back then, but that had been so long ago. “She would have told us if something was wrong.” I sounded sure of myself, and Officer Whittaker rested a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Sometimes people keep things bottled inside them, ma’am,” he said. “Even the people we’re closest to. We can never really know them.”
I looked at Noelle’s face. So beautiful, but an empty shell. Noelle was no longer there and I felt as though I’d already forgotten her smile. This makes no sense, I thought. She’d had so much she still wanted to do.
I needed to call Tara. I couldn’t handle this alone. Tara and I would figure out what to do. We’d piece together what had happened. Between us, we knew everything there was to know about Noelle.
Yet in front of me lay the evidence—our gone-forever friend—that we really knew nothing at all.
4
Noelle
Robeson County, North Carolina
1979
She was a night person. It was as if she were unable to let go of the day, and she’d stay up into the early hours of the morning, reading or—her mother didn’t know this—walking around outside, sometimes lying in the old hammock, trying to peer through the lacy network of tree branches to find the stars beyond. She’d been a night person all thirteen years of her life. Her mother said it was because she’d been born exactly at the stroke of midnight, which caused her to confuse day and night. Noelle liked to think it was because she was one-eighth Lumbee Indian. She imagined the Lumbees had had to stay alert at night to fend off their enemies. She was also part Dutch and one-eighth Jewish, according to her mother, and she liked shocking her classmates with that element of her heritage, which struck them as exotic for rural North Carolina. But her mother sometimes made things up, and Noelle had learned to pick and choose the parts of the story she wanted to believe.
She was reading The Lord of the Rings in bed late one summer night when she heard the rapid-fire crunch of footsteps on the gravel driveway. Someone was running toward the house and she turned out her light to peer through the open window. The full moon illuminated a bicycle lying in the driveway, its tires and handlebars askew as though some nor’easter had tossed it there.
“Midwife?” a male voice yelled, and Noelle heard pounding on the front door. “Midwife?”
Noelle pulled on her shorts and tucked her tank top into the waistband as she rushed into the pine-paneled living room.
“Mama?” she shouted toward her mother’s room as she headed for the door. “Mama! Get up!”
She flipped on the porch light and pulled opened the door. A black boy stood there, his eyes huge and frightened. His fist was in the air as he readied it to pound the door again. Noelle recognized him. James somebody. He was a few years older than her—maybe fifteen?—and he used to go to her school, though she hadn’t seen him this past year. He’d been a quiet, shy boy and she once overheard a teacher say there was hope for him, that he might end up graduating. Maybe even going to college. You couldn’t say that about too many of the kids in her school, black or white or Lumbee. But then he’d disappeared and Noelle hadn’t given him another thought. Not until right now.
“Get your mama!” He was all wired up and looked like he might try to rush past her into the house. “She a midwife, right?”
“Maybe,” Noelle hedged. People weren’t supposed to know about her mother. Everybody did, of course, but Noelle wasn’t supposed to say it straight out like that.
“What you mean, ‘maybe’?” James pushed her shoulder, nearly knocking her off balance, but she didn’t feel afraid. He was the one who was scared. Scared and panicky enough to give her a shove.
“Get your hands off her!” Her mother swept into the living room, pulling a robe around her shoulders. “What do you think you’re doing? Shut the door, Noelle!” She grabbed the door and tried to push it closed but Noelle hung on tight to the knob.
“He says he needs a midwife,” she said, and her mother stopped pushing the door and looked at the boy.
“You do?” She sounded as if she didn’t quite believe him.
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked contrite now, and Noelle could see his body shaking with the effort of being polite when what he really wanted to do was shout and beg. “My sister. She havin’ a baby and we ain’t got—”
“You live in that house on the creek?” Her mother squinted past him as though she could see his house through the dark woods.
“Yes’m,” he said.
“Can you come now?”
“Our car’s not running,” her mother said. “Did you call the rescue squad?”
“We ain’t got no phone,” he said.
“Is your mother with her?”
“Nobody’s with her!” He stomped his foot like an impatient little kid. “Please, ma’am. Please come!”
Her mother turned to Noelle. “You call the rescue squad while I get some clothes on. And you come with me tonight. I might need you.”
She’d never invited Noelle to go out on a call with her before, but this whole situation was different than the usual. This was the first time a neighbor had come knocking at two in the morning. Sometimes there’d be a phone call in the middle of the night. Noelle would hear her mother leave the house and she’d know she’d be on her own for making breakfast and getting ready for school. Her mother would probably be back by the time she got home in the afternoon, but she’d be quiet about whatever had gone on. Noelle didn’t really care. She was more interested in reading than she was in how her mother spent her time.
Her mother was ancient—fifty-two years old—and her mousy brown hair was streaked with gray. She had wrinkles around her eyes and on her throat. She was much older than the mothers of Noelle’s classmates and people often thought she was her grandmother. Her friends’ mothers painted their carefully shaped fingernails. They wore lipstick and went to the beauty parlor in Lumberton to get their hair done. Noelle was embarrassed by her mother’s age and unconventional demeanor. But as she dialed the rescue squad and did her best to explain to the dispatcher where James lived, she had the strangest feeling that her perception of her mother was about to change.
She hadn’t known her mother could run. They jogged down the dirt road behind James’s bike. Even carrying her blue canvas bag of supplies, her mother was outpacing her. The air was heavy with the smell of the river, and Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees lining the road. They turned onto the lane that bordered the creek and some of the moss brushed Noelle’s shoulders. When she was little, her mother told her that a Lumbee Indian chief’s wife had disobeyed him, so he chopped off her hair and tossed it over the branch of a tree, where it grew and multiplied and soon began covering the branches of all the neighboring trees. What that had to do with Spain, Noelle didn’t know, but she loved imagining that the Indian chief’s wife might have been one of her long-lost ancestors.
Noelle and her mother followed James around the last bend in the lane. Moonlight flickered on the peeling white paint of the tiny shack, but they heard the screams even before the house came into view. The voice sounded more animal than human, and it cut through the dank air like a sword. The screams made her mother run even faster while Noelle slowed her own pace, a little unnerved. Birth wasn’t completely foreign to her—she’d seen their cat give birth to kittens—but she’d never heard anything like those screams. “Where are your parents?” her mother asked as James tossed his bike to the ground.
“Ma’s up to Lumberton,” he said over his shoulder. He grabbed the knob of the beat-up front door and turned it. “Her sister took sick.”
He didn’t mention his father and Noelle’s mother didn’t ask. They raced into the house, which was no more than two squat little rooms. The first was kind of a kitchen and living room together, with a couch at one end and a sink and stove and half-size refrigerator at the other. Noelle’s mother didn’t seem to notice the room, though. She followed the wailing to the second room, where a girl, slim as a reed except for the giant globe of her belly, lay on her back in a double bed. She could only have been a couple of years older than Noelle, and she was naked from the waist down, her green T-shirt hiked up to her breasts. Her knees were bent and the place between her legs bulged with something huge and dark.
“Oh, my stars, you’re crowning already!” her mother said. She turned to James. “Fill every pot and pan in the house with water and set it to boil!” she commanded.
“Yes, ma’am!” James disappeared from the room, but Noelle stood frozen, mesmerized by what was happening to the girl’s body. It couldn’t be normal, could it? It looked and sounded like she was being torn apart.
“All right, darling.” Her mother began pulling things out of her bag as she spoke to the girl. “Do not push. I know you feel like pushing, but don’t push yet, all right? I’m going to help you and everything’s going to be fine.”
“Not…fine!” the girl yelled. “I don’t want no baby!”
“Well, you’re going to have one in just a few minutes, regardless.” Noelle’s mother turned to her. “Find me every clean towel and piece of linen that’s in this house,” she said as she wrapped her blood pressure cuff around the girl’s thin arm. “Then wet a cloth with some of that water the boy’s heating up and bring it to me.”
Noelle nodded and began searching in the narrow bedroom closet, grabbing the neatly folded towels and sheets and pillowcases from the shelves. In the other room, she found James trembling over water-filled pots on the stove.
“I need to dip one of these in warm water.” Noelle pointed to the pots. “Which one’s warmest?”
“This one, maybe.” He nodded toward the one closest to her and she dipped the washcloth into the water, then wrung it out in the sink and carried it back to the bedroom.
Her mother partly unfolded one of the sheets and slid it under the girl’s bottom. Then she took the warm washcloth and held it to the bizarrely stretched skin that circled the baby’s head. Noelle leaned down to whisper in her mother’s ear, “Is this normal?” She pointed between the girl’s legs and her mother brushed her hand away.
“Completely normal,” her mother said out loud, and Noelle knew she was trying to reassure the girl at the same time she answered the question. “Why don’t you go help the boy?” she suggested.
Noelle shook her head. “I want to stay here.”
“Then get a chair.” She nodded toward the girl. “Let her hold your hand.”
Noelle dragged a straight-backed chair from the living room to the side of the bed. The girl was gripping the edge of the mattress with her fist, and Noelle awkwardly pried her fingers loose and then pressed them around her own hand. The girl squeezed her fingers hard. Tears ran down the sides of her face and tiny dots of perspiration covered her forehead. Her skin was lighter than James’s, and even with her face contorted with pain, Noelle could see how pretty she was. And how scared.
She reached forward, wiping the girl’s tears away with her fingertips. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Bea,” the girl whispered. “I’m dyin’, ain’t I? This baby goin’ kill me?”
Noelle shook her head. “No,” she said. “My mother—”
Bea interrupted her with another scream. “I’m splittin’ apart!” she yelled.
“No woman’s ever split apart, darlin’,” Noelle’s mother said, “and you’re stretching just like you’re meant to do.”
“My thing’s burnin’ up!” Bea said. She let go of Noelle’s hand to reach between her legs. Her eyes widened as she touched whatever was down there out of Noelle’s line of sight. “Lord Jesus!” Bea said. “Lord Jesus, save me!”
“Yes, Lord Jesus,” Noelle’s Jewish-Lumbee-Dutch mother said with a laugh, probably using those words together for the first time in her life. “Your Lord Jesus is right here with you, darlin’, if you need him to be.” She lifted her head. “Noelle, you want to see this baby come into the world?”
Noelle stood and walked to the end of the bed. The dark circle had grown even larger and she held her breath, wondering how her mother was going to get that baby out of skinny little Bea. All of a sudden, Bea let out a yelp and the dark haired, dusky-skinned head popped from her body.
Noelle gasped with amazement.
“Beautiful!” her mother said. “You’re doing beautifully.” She held her hands above and below the baby’s head, not touching it, not touching Bea, just holding her hands there as if supporting the head in midair by magic. The baby’s head turned
to the side and Noelle could see its tiny face, all scrunched up as if this being-born business was as much work for him or her as it was for Bea. Suddenly, the little squinty eyes and blood-streaked lips blurred in front of Noelle’s face and she realized that for no reason she could name she was crying.
All at once, the baby slipped from Bea’s body into her mother’s hands.
“A precious boy!” Her mother wrapped the squawking infant in a towel and rested him on Bea’s belly, the movement so quick and easy that Noelle knew she’d done it hundreds of times before.
“I don’t want this baby,” Bea moaned, but she was lifting the corner of the towel, touching the damp hair of her son.
“We’ll see about that,” her mother said. “Right now we have a little more work to do down here.”
Noelle watched as her mother cut the cord and delivered the placenta, answering her questions and explaining everything she was doing. Her mother was not the same woman who made their dinner each night, who cleaned their house and fed the chickens and grew tomatoes and mowed their scrawny lawn. In that room filled with animal cries and sweat and blood and air too thick to breathe, her mother became someone else—someone mysterious, part sage, part magician. She was beautiful. Every line in her face. Every gray thread in her hair. Every swollen knuckle in the hands that had brought the baby into the world with such ease and grace. Noelle knew in that moment that she wanted to be like her. She wanted to be exactly like her.
The rescue squad came way too late to be of much use, and the atmosphere suddenly shifted in the little house. There were pointed questions. Shiny medical equipment. Sharp needles and bags of liquid hanging from poles. A stretcher on wheels.
Bea was afraid. “Don’t be.” Noelle’s mother squeezed her hand as two of the men in uniforms moved her from the bed to the stretcher. “You did a perfect job. You’ll be fine.”