30. Noel
30
Noel
“I knew you looked familiar to me,” Vivian Wedgewood exclaimed suddenly, pointing at Noel. They were sitting around the table playing what could only be called a rousing game of Scrabble after supper that Sunday evening. Addison had apologized to him when they’d brought out the boardgame, explaining, “It’s tradition. Sunday game night. Scrabble is one of our top three.”
Noel had never played before, but he caught on quickly and found, to his surprise, that he was pretty good at it. Carl kept trying to make up words, which Addison inevitably called him on, and Vivian monitored everyone’s spelling with an enormous old-school dictionary she’d pulled from one of Addison’s many bookshelves.
Vivian stood and went back to the same spot where the dictionary had been and slid out a large coffee table book. She brought it back to the table and sat down again, moving her rack of Scrabble tiles over to make room for the book.
“Oh, Mom,” Addison said, pushing to her feet suddenly. “No. Not now.” She reached out with both hands, wiggling her fingers toward the book in a ‘give it to me’ gesture. “Come on. We’re playing a game.”
Vivian shook her head and opened the book up to somewhere in the middle, smoothing the pages out flat in front of her. “I can still play while I look through this,” she told her daughter. Turning to Noel, she said, “I don’t forget a face very easily, you know.”
Noel looked from Addison to her mother and back again, but Addison suddenly seemed to be avoiding his gaze. “What book is that?” he asked, a little unsettled at Addison’s agitation. He tipped his head so that he could better see the photos on the open pages.
“Addie hasn’t shown this to you yet?” Vivian asked, picking the book up so that he could see the front cover. This Land is Our Land , it was called, and across the bottom, in large blocky letters, were the names of Carl and Vivian Wedgewood. “Why not?” Vivian asked, shooting a curious look at her daughter, who was still standing, both palms now pressed to the table. “Some of my favorite photos are in this book.”
“Sit down, honey. You’re going to see my tiles,” Carl said cheerfully, covering them with one hand and tugging on Addison’s shirt hem with the other. Vivian continued turning pages quickly, clearly searching for something specific.
But Addison didn’t budge. “Mom,” she said, shaking her head quickly, her eyes locked on her mother’s face. It sounded like a warning to Noel.
Vivian seemed to realize that Addison wasn’t just being modest, but she’d apparently found what she was looking for. “I knew it. It is you. It has to be.” With a triumphant look in her eyes, she turned the heavy book around to show Noel, one finger exuberantly tapping the page.
The powerful, terrible image had been so burned into his mind all those years ago that he jerked backward as if he’d been struck. His hand knocked against his rack of tiles, sending the little pieces skittering across the table. A few fell on the floor at his feet.
The room went completely silent, and Noel could see a faint flickering of lights at the edges of his vision. He averted his gaze from the photo of the scruffy young boy offering up a bottle of water to a coal-blackened miner, the image made almost surreal by the eerie glow of floodlights in the background, the air thick with the anguish and uncertainty of a town waiting for news of the men trapped below the surface of the earth.
And suddenly, he was right back there in that tiny clearing, his heart pounding, his blood surging through his veins, his whole body tensing in preparation for the blow that would knock him sprawling, face-first, to the ground at his father’s feet.
And then he’d see her. The scarecrow girl. The almost skeletal creature trying to hide behind her long dark hair that had fallen forward over her shoulder. The otherworldly creature with a camera pointed right at him, capturing forever his deepest wound, that moment of utter and complete humiliation and despair. And on her face, an expression of shock and horror… and soul-crushing pity.
Noel blinked, and the room and its startled occupants came back into existence. He was gripping the edge of the table as if he meant to tear the thing apart.
“Noel?” It was Carl who spoke first. He, too, started to push to his feet, but Vivian laid a hand on his arm to stay him. She’d closed the book and now held it against her chest.
Noel noted the collage of images on the back cover. Carl and Vivian at least a decade younger, standing together under the shade of an enormous tree.
A chestnut tree. The detached thought drifted slowly through his mind—he could actually see the ribbon of words floating around in there until it faded away. Another photo, this one of the scarecrow girl—no, of Addison, he could see now—perched on top of a gaudily painted chicken coop, a camera draped around her neck. She wore a giddy smile as she tossed a handful of feed to the flock of chickens on the ground below her. A breeze swept her long hair back from her face, and the light in her eyes seemed to spill out of her, making her look nothing like the wraith who’d borne witness to one of his darkest nights.
Addison was crouching beside him, near enough that he could smell her tantalizing perfume and see the tiny flecks of brown in her irises. Like freckles , he thought. She has freckles in her eyes.
“Noel? Are you—are you okay?” she murmured gently, reaching out like she was going to touch him, but her hand just hovered in the air an inch or two from his leg. Was she afraid of him?
She was afraid of him.
He met her father’s gaze, and then darted a look at Vivian. They were all afraid of him.
“Noel?” Addison did touch him then, cupping his jaw, and he flinched at the warmth of her palm is if it had seared his skin.
“Excuse me,” he managed to get out, then pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Forgive me. I—I need to go.”
He didn’t miss the gleam of tears building in Addison’s frightened eyes, or the shock and concern on her parents’ faces. No one tried to stop him; or if they did, he wasn’t aware of it. He somehow managed to grab his jacket off the coat tree—thank goodness he’d had the foresight to stick his wallet and car keys in one of the pockets—then he reached for the door, fumbling clumsily with the knob.
Suddenly Carl was there, reaching around to keep the door from openiing. “Son, are you okay to drive?” he asked.
“I’m fine, sir,” Noel said in as steady a voice as he could muster. And he would be, once he got back to the safe confines of his rooms. If he could just hold it together long enough to drive around the lake and lock himself inside his suite at the resort, he’d be okay. Then he could let go and give in to the anxiety rippling just under the surface of his flesh. “Please open the door.”
He had to get out of there, out of the little apartment that had once felt like such a sanctuary for him. Now, all he felt was exposed, shamed, and humiliated.
Carl hesitated a moment longer, glanced back over his shoulder at the women who were huddled together at the table, then turned the handle to let Noel out.
He took a deep, shuddering breath of the crisp night air, remembered his manners long enough to thank the man, then moved like an automaton toward the stairs that would take him down, down, down and away from this place and the people in it.