The ‘we’ sounds out across the table, the simple promise of it. I feel a cool hand at my forehead. Perhaps he is not like the others. I need to know.
‘Noah,’ I look at my accidental benefactor sitting across from me, our mosaic of IOUs visible behind him. ‘Why do you have people come stay with you?’
Franklin skulks at my feet, licks my bare ankle.
‘I don’t, usually,’ Noah answers after a time. His smile is small, wry. ‘Most times, Alice, people would show up at the door and I would turn them away. I even paid one or two to leave—for their troubles.’
‘Oh!’
I see myself at the door that first night, bags and camera and hopefulness hanging off me, and watch as the door clicks shut in front of me. No blue eye, no bay windows or piano, or Franklin, knocking against my knees. Turning with my six hundred dollars in cash toward—what?
‘I have so much, you see,’ Noah continues, opening out his hands toward me, ‘and I had a thought that someone else might need a little of it. However’—he brings his hands back together now, clasps them—‘the people who showed up were never quite what I had in mind.’
‘But you made it so easy for me,’ I push. ‘No references needed, no credit card deposit like all the others asked for. You must have known someone like me would come along.’
‘Indeed,’ Noah sighs, his expression inscrutable. ‘I suppose, Baby Joan … you were what I had in mind.’
Then much more quietly, so I am not sure I hear him correctly.
‘To be precise, you reminded me of a girl I once knew.’
Later, I will understand that when he opened the door to me, Noah thought, suddenly, of an open, eager face so oddly like his own. His one improbable, glorious attempt at immortality, many years ago. A girl gone to the other side of the world while still a child, address long since lost. For a time, before, the child used to visit with her mother. They would show up unannounced one day or another and she would clunk down on the piano, and he would give money to the woman for clothes, school, holidays. No room, no desire for a family back then, but he had reserved a pocket of himself for the girl, and when they went away so suddenly, the girl left an echo, an emptiness around what might have been. No life is without secrets, without doors closed. When I showed up at Noah’s front door—young, dirty, hopeful—things inched open again.
Of course, he doesn’t say this tonight. He merely makes to tip his cap at me, his smile widening to meet mine across the table.
I breathe.
‘Not to mention the fact, Baby Joan, you clearly had nowhere else to go.’
Lucy Lutens wants us to throw a birthday party for her anxious Schnauzer, Donut. ‘Nothing over the top, just cake and those tiny hats, and perhaps you could send me a few snaps of the festivities!’ She has never missed his birthday before, but her cousin is getting married in Maine, and really, her own mother missed almost every birthday she ever had, and she turned out just fine, didn’t she?
I am in the kitchen, listening through the wall to this woman’s nervous chitter. I never meet with the clients—‘We don’t want any unnecessary questions,’ Noah said when I first started working—but I feel like I could match owner to dog all the same; it’s as if the animal becomes a mirror of the person, picking up all their quirks and emotional ticks. Franklin for instance, is watchful. Attentive from a distance like Noah is, and then he will surprise me with a gesture that feels like affection. A wet nose against my ankle, or a nudge of his head against my leg. Just a brief touch, and then he’s back to his side of the room. Lucy Lutens’ dog is definitely not fine. Donut is skittery with other dogs, and resentful of me, as if it’s my fault whenever Lucy leaves him. He sits at the door after she goes, little whining noises trembling out of his body, and when he has convinced himself she is never, ever coming back he puts his face against his paws and refuses to look at me for the rest of the day.
Noah says dogs produce the same kinds of emotions us humans do, but they think like a three or four-year-old at best. ‘Imagine yourself at your most vulnerable,’ he once explained. ‘When you feel more than you can ever make sense of feeling. That’s a dog’s reality, every day.’
It makes me think about what I was like at four years old. I don’t remember being in my own skin, looking out at the world, but I do sometimes see myself at that age. I think you generally experience memories in this way, from the outside in, like your old life is a movie you once starred in. But sometimes something bad happens, something bad enough to make it feel like you’re perpetually looking out from that bad thing, living inside it, instead of watching the movie version. Then, it gets hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Noah said you can try to tap those kinds of memories out, shake them loose, ‘But wouldn’t that just leave you with a body full of holes?’ I asked him, and he laughed at that, but not unkindly, and the next day he left a book about something called EFT on my pillow. Unfortunately, the book had a picture of a nebula on its cover, so I put the book in my closet, cover facing the floor, and never looked at it again.