Chapter 32 Gayle
G AYLE
Gayle unplugs her phone from its charger on the dresser and logs in to her Facebook account . Four of Noah’s friends have already seen her message, but not one has replied. It’s hopeless.
She puts earbuds in and watches an old episode of her favourite show, Say Yes to the Dress . Those pretty Atlanta brides, so excited for their wedding day, always manage to make her smile, no matter how frayed her nerves are.
Part way through the show, a message from an unknown number pops up on the screen. Gayle’s heart stops.
Jackson Parker says you’re looking for me. Here I am.
I miss you too, Mom x
Gayle hugs the phone to her chest.
Can I call you?
Sure.
She knows she should wake Mike. She knows he’d want her to talk with Noah on speakerphone. Instead, she leaps up and stubs her big toe on the leg of a chair, letting out a yelp. Mike doesn’t stir. He’s sleeping the sleep of the just.
Fumbling in the dark, she wraps the fluffy Il Cuore robe around her and slides her feet into woolly slippers. She leaves the suite, gently clicking the door closed behind her.
In the hallway, she leans against the wall and avoids the eyes of the Pope staring at her as she makes the call.
‘Mom.’
‘Boa,’ she says through her tears, using the name her daughter Susan coined when he was born.
He chuckles and she eases her grip on the phone.
‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she cries. ‘I’m so sorry for everything.’
‘Feels good to hear that.’
She asks him where he’s living – Montecito. Where he’s working – for a Hollywood animation studio. And, with a dry throat, she asks about Chris.
‘He’s doing great. He’s good to me, Mom. He makes me happy.’
She nods as the tears keep falling.
‘Pop there?’ he asks.
‘He’s asleep, sugar.’
‘He know you’ve been trying to reach me?’
‘Kinda.’
‘Hmm. You gonna tell him we spoke?’
‘Eventually. He needs some time, your pop. This is hard for him.’
Noah breathes down the line. ‘It shouldn’t be hard. It should never have been hard.’
‘I know, sugar.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘Are you gonna come home soon? I miss you so much. So do your sisters and Justin. Lizzie was just telling me at Christmas how much she misses you. It’s not the same without you, Noah. I feel like I’m breathing with one lung.’
‘I miss everyone too.’ He sighs. ‘But I’m not coming home until Pop apologises. I can’t see him until then.’
Her head hurts. ‘What about the rest of us? What about me? I want to see you.’
Noah takes a long time to reply. ‘It’s not just him I’m mad at, Mom.’
Her stomach twists.
‘Listen, I have to go. I’m at work. You’ve got my number now. You can give it to the others. When my husband can be properly welcomed into the family, by all of you, then you give me a call, okay? I’m not coming home just to sneak Chris around behind Pop’s back.’ He pauses and when he speaks again, his voice cracks. ‘You shouldn’t have let him make me dig that hole. You should’ve defended me. I was only a kid. I deserved better than how y’all treated me.’
The line goes dead before she can say, ‘You’re right.’
She casts her mind back to the day everything changed, the day she was changing the sheets in the boys’ room and something moved inside Noah’s duvet cover. He was sixteen then. Justin was twenty-two and living away at college.
That day she unzipped the duvet cover and a magazine fell out, landing at her feet. The magazine was full of photographs of men in the most ungodly scenarios she could ever have imagined. She didn’t know how to handle such a situation, so she went to Mike.
Mike sure was angry. Noah, as scared as she’d ever seen him, confessed that he’d bought the magazine because he was tempted by the sealed section at the newsagents. He was curious, he said.
Gayle had grounded Noah, the naughtiest, most wilful of all her children, more times than she could count, but Mike said this time it was different. This time Noah wasn’t just messing around like young boys were prone to do, this was sinning on a whole new level and it had to be stamped out of him quick smart.
For all the trouble Noah got himself into, Mike adored that boy, and Noah idolised his dad. It was the first time that things weren’t right between them.
Why wasn’t a boy his age curious about seeing naked women in magazines instead of naked men? they wondered aloud to each other. They weren’t able to come up with an answer that didn’t make them fret, so they resorted to what always helped, God.
God couldn’t give them direct instructions Himself, so they turned to their local pastor, the next best thing. Pastor Bob told them that Noah needed time away to reflect on his sins and reconnect his spirit with the Lord’s.
Mike sent Noah to a Christian military camp over the summer. Mike’s friend Ron Wilson had a boy, Jeremy, who’d been in trouble with the law years earlier. Jeremy had been sent to the same camp. After six weeks, Jeremy had returned a reformed young man and was now happily married with two children and his own accounting firm.
Noah didn’t want to go to that camp, not one little bit. But they made him go. Three weeks in, Noah was sent home in disgrace when he was caught kissing one of the boys.
Mike and Gayle once again turned to Pastor Bob, who said that Noah had to repent. The pastor said the Lord had spoken to him and told him that Noah’s punishment should be to dig a hole out the back of the Dawsons’ land. Noah was to use his digging time to cleanse his heart and mind from the sinful ideas he’d gotten from that ungodly magazine.
Mike made Noah set his alarm and go out to the backyard every morning to dig that hole before school, and then made him get back out there again every afternoon when school finished to keep digging until dinner time. Nobody in the house was allowed to speak to Noah while he was digging. He wasn’t allowed to complain about it either.
Noah took Mike’s big shovel out into the yard every day and he dug for a whole month. Some days it rained on him when he was digging, other days Gayle heard him crying in the shower after he came in at night. His hands were covered in blisters and scrapes.
Every evening when Noah came into the house, Mike asked him if he’d done a good amount of praying out there and every evening Noah said yes, sir, he had.
Pastor Bob found Bible passages for Noah to read to show him the error of his ways, and every night Mike made Noah read those passages and ask for the good Lord’s forgiveness.
At the end of the month you could have fit a station wagon in that hole. Then the pastor said it was time for Noah to fill the hole back up again. Pastor Bob said that once the hole was full, Satan would be driven away from Noah, never to return.
There was no question about it, Noah changed after he dug that hole. He never got into any more trouble. Mike said the pastor was right: digging that hole had been just what their boy needed to find his way back to God.
Gayle’s once rambunctious son who was always looking for the next bit of mischief was well and truly reformed. He became the most godly of all her children. Mike used to have to push Noah into reading God’s word; now he locked himself away in his room and read the Bible for hours at a time.
Noah finished college and took a job as an animation artist at a local advertising company. He was such a handsome, talented young man, and there was no shortage of young ladies who made it a point to go up and talk to him after church every Sunday. Gayle’s other children were all courting by his age, but Noah hadn’t asked out any of the pretty girls who made eyes at him yet. So Mike and his friend Bud Forsyth took matters into their own hands and set Noah up on a dinner date with Bud’s daughter, Kelsey.
Noah went along on the date without argument. In the days before he’d dug the hole, Gayle couldn’t even get him to wear a shirt she chose for him without him giving her grief about it, and here he was letting his pop choose him a girl. She should have known that something wasn’t right with her son, that the spirit had been sucked right out of him, but she was ashamed to admit that she liked the new quiet Noah better than the one who was always getting into trouble, so she stayed silent.
Kelsey was a sweet little thing, and she and Noah grew close. Eventually, they married. Gayle prayed and prayed for them to be blessed with children, but they never did have any. However, Noah had a good job and a lovely home and a wife who loved him, so she was grateful for how his life had turned out, even without the grandchildren.
And then, out of the blue, Noah came to visit without Kelsey. He’d left her, he said. He didn’t love her. Noah and Kelsey had been married for over twenty years by then.
‘You made a covenant before God to be with Kelsey for the rest of your life!’ Mike hollered at him. ‘Now you go on home, son, and apologise to that poor woman.’
‘I can’t live a lie any more,’ Noah said.
As devastated as Mike and Gayle were to lose their sweet daughter-in-law, they couldn’t exactly force Noah to stay married to Kelsey. The most peculiar thing was that when Noah’s marriage fell apart, it was the happiest Gayle had ever seen him.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Mike said. ‘Maybe he was born to be a loner.’
Gayle wasn’t convinced that being alone was why Noah was happy. She had a feeling there was more coming and, sure enough, a year later, more came. Noah came to visit and he sat his parents down. In a measured voice, he told them he was in love with a man named Chris and they were getting married.
‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ Mike shouted. ‘You had a beautiful wife and a beautiful home, and you threw it all away so you could become this?’
Noah took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t become anything. It’s who I’ve always been. It’s who I am.’
‘Who you are is sick. Sick! ’ Mike roared.
‘Mike, please, stop!’ Gayle didn’t want him to say anything else he’d regret.
Mike went on as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘You know what the Bible says, you know you’re a sodomiser. And now you wanna get married too? Marriage is between a man and a woman. The good Lord doesn’t allow marriage between men. And I sure as hell won’t allow it either!’ The vein in his forehead pumped with blood.
Noah didn’t speak for a long time.
Gayle held her breath.
Finally, he cleared his throat. ‘I don’t need you to allow it. You don’t get to decide who I love.’ Then he turned and walked out the front door.
She should’ve followed him, she should’ve said something, but she was too much of a coward to disobey Mike.
Noah didn’t speak to them for a whole month, then he sent her a message, telling her he’d married Chris and moved to California.
She immediately called him, but he didn’t pick up. She messaged him instead.
I love you, Noah, and so does your pop.
It was a shock for him is all. He didn’t mean what he said.
He’ll come around, he just needs time.
Noah didn’t reply. That was in June.
He never replied to a single one of her messages after that, and her voicemails went unanswered. She gave up after a while. Then he also disappeared from social media.
And all of it stemmed back to the magazine she’d found all those years ago in his bedroom. They should have let him be who he always was. Digging a hole didn’t fix him, it broke him.
Noah’s right, she should have defended him. She’s done wrong by her son. Noah was born perfect just the way he was, but it took her losing him to realise that. And now she’s worried it’s too late to ever get him back again.
‘Hon?’ Mike’s voice is husky from sleep. He stands in the open doorway in his pyjamas, rubbing his eyes. ‘What are you doing out here? You had me worried when I woke up and couldn’t find you.’
She’s too upset to tell him what’s happened. She doesn’t only blame herself for losing Noah, she blames Mike. She blames him a lot.
‘I’m sick of your snoring,’ she hears herself snap. ‘I came out here to get some peace and quiet.’
Mike looks as if he’s been slapped. ‘You shoulda said something.’ His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. ‘I’ll look up tips on the internet to help me stop. There are always good tips on the internet.’
She nods. ‘Sorry. I’m just so tired is all.’
He holds his hand out for her. ‘Come to bed.’
As she lies there in the dark, something becomes perfectly clear to her. The cancer in her marriage isn’t the fact that she’s doubting Mike’s word. There isn’t anything to doubt. She knows she’s right. She knows he’s wrong.
And a wife thinking she knows better than her husband is just about the worst thing that can happen in a godly marriage.