“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.