Chapter 10 #2
Noah drops his gaze and his arms to the table, and before I can stop myself, I’m reaching across the table to offer him my hand, just like I did outside the diner. “You don’t have to keep talking,” I tell him. “You can stop anytime you want, Noah. Anytime.”
He lifts his eyes slightly to look at me. “I know. Maybe that’s why I’m still talking.” He takes in a long breath.
And then he drops a hand into mine, laying his palm right over the edges of my fingers. I hold on to the warmth there as he keeps talking.
“Anyway, the next part of the story is probably the one you’ve heard before.
I tried to take care of her. I tried to keep her alive, keep her eating, keep her going to work.
But I was just a kid, and she kept getting worse.
Stan tried to get her help, but back then there were almost no affordable resources in the area.
Rehab centers were either too expensive or too full.
Stan had some money, and he spent as much as he could trying to help, but the services just… there weren’t enough of them.”
“Oh, Noah.” Tears form at the corner of his eyes, and it’s all I can do not to jump the fucking picnic table and gather him in my arms.
“You probably know what happened next,” Noah says. “One night she got really high, and she pulled out a gun.”
Staying on this side of the picnic table, so far away from him when he’s hurting, is ripping me apart. But Noah’s still got his hand on mine, and I push my palm up slightly, just to remind him he’s not alone. “Breathe, Chucks,” I tell him.
“She tried to kill me too,” he whispers. “She kept saying that we could finally be happy together, in another place. I hid from her, in this tiny vent space in the wall. It was hot and so cramped and I could barely breathe, but I was terrified to come out.”
He swallows, and I feel all the echoes of this terrible, tragic moment in Noah’s past moving through the slight breeze in the square. The echoes grow louder when he says his next words.
“I was listening when she fired the gun.”
I close my eyes as I imagine nine-year-old Noah curled up in a wall vent, all alone as he listened to that sound. “Oh, Noah,” I whisper again.
He curls his fingers down slightly, toward my palm. That’s when I pull his hand firmly into mine and hold on tight. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“Me too,” he finally says. “But it happened. It happened to her, it happened to me, it happened to Uncle Stan. And Pottsville is small enough that everyone knew. After that, I couldn’t walk into a cafeteria or a classroom or a store without everyone staring at me and looking away.”
Ah. That explains the café this morning.
“Everyone worried about me, but no one knew how to talk to me,” Noah goes on.
“I hardly had any friends after that. Uncle Stan was so angry that we couldn’t get her help.
He ran for city council to try and fix things, and he did.
” Noah laughs. “He did! Isn’t that wild?
Pottsville and the surrounding towns have some of the best drug treatment facilities in the state now.
My dad actually made things better for people, just like he wanted to, and he tried to keep my story out of the news when his profile started rising. ”
“But that never works,” I say, because yeah, I have my own family history with politics.
History that I still haven’t told Noah about.
History that he’ll no doubt learn from either me or someone else soon enough.
Because the spotlight’s a double-edged sword: it gives you the attention to do a lot of good, but it also shines so brightly on the darkest corners of your life.
Noah shakes his head. “No, keeping my past quiet didn’t work. My story was too tied to why Uncle Stan went into politics. By the time I got to college, every New Yorker with a phone and an interest in political policy knew about me crawling into that wall vent.”
“Fuck,” I say again. Because what else, really, is there to say?
“Right?” Noah snorts. “Sometimes I have this constant feeling that I can never escape being that kid, you know? That kid who’s terrified all the time, the one who always wants to stay behind his uncle’s back, where it’s safe.
The kid who never quite climbed the rest of the way out of the vent.
” He swallows hard, and I can feel him gripping my hand just a little bit harder.
“What if I never get all the way out of the wall vent, Milo?”
“Oh, Noah. Look at me, please,” I finally say, because his eyes are planted firmly on the table right now, and I want to make sure he’s really hearing me. Noah looks up, his eyes red and shiny with tears that haven’t fallen.
I’m about to spout some lines about how he’s one of the strongest people I know, and he can do whatever he wants in this world, blah blah blah.
But for some reason, when I open my mouth, what pops out is the phrase I haven’t been able to get out of my mind lately. The one from that damn fortune cookie.
I paraphrase it a little, of course, because pedantic-sounding fortunes are the last thing Noah needs right now. “You’ll find the change you’re looking for,” I tell him. “I’m sure of that, Noah Hardaway.”
Noah’s eyes widen at my words, but he doesn’t answer. And then the two of us sit there together for a long time, just holding hands and breathing in the silent air of Devon Falls.