A broken marriage.
A new job.
She works as a Personal Assistant on the ForNoah Youtube channel.
Noah is on the autistic spectrum and she fixes things for him.
He's a shipwright and creates beautiful works of art.
She's a woman starting over who meet...
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On rare occasions, once every twenty years in hot Sacramento, the sky opens and snowfalls. Each flake is perfect and unique, with little bits of ice. For a moment, as the snowflake floats down to my hand, I get a tiny moment of grace. The cold flake kisses my open palm and melts as if it never existed.
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"Snow, snow," my daughter screams at the top of her lungs.
"ozhOoooo," Ade screams in a non-descriptive reply. It's all of our first snow. In our part of California, it's normally too hot to get snow.
The kids play in a building mountain of snow. I head to his workshop. Noah's beautiful art pieces moved to the Crocker museums for staging in January. I leave the contracts color-coded on his drafting desk for him to sign later. His bedroom is plain but overlooks his workshop. You can see straight down from the side on whatever his current project is. But now it's empty. Noah pulls a henley over his broad back next to his bed. That bid of fabric hides his thick body from me. Shut down that thought process, Tari! I try my hardest not to run from the room like a schoolgirl. I janky crooked walk out the door like a poorly animated run cycle.
Yes, I want to touch and feel. I want more, but I need to think. Maybe? I pull my phone out of my pocket with another message from Zoey. The text that I need to meet with her at Christmas dinner about my decision for what I'm doing next year.
I shove my stupid phone back into my pocket and sit down on the porch with my notebook. My finger stabs at the power button like it did something to me. The notebook fires up for a day of work. Noah walks out of the workshop door and my kids yell at him to come to play. And Noah? Well, Noah does what Noah does. He creates. His hands dive into the ice and sand. He carves into the sandy ground with a Celtic pattern. He looks up at the kid's footprints paths. His pattern shifts to match the children's play. He speeds up his sand design. Snowflakes fall down, adding to the thin crust of snow on the sand. The beautiful bluish Folsom Lake and dock with a wooden dinghy in the background bobbing on the lake.
The moment is like something that should be on a hallmark card. Stupidly thick brawny man playing in the snow with two kids who are loving it. Laughing their heads off. If Little Man had wings, he'd be flying. Drawn, my eyes skim to the last page I had opened before I closed the notebook last night. Pages I've been looking at every night since Noah's meltdown at the Crocker. The light from the notebook paints my guilty face. The google search for autism cures feels like a betrayal while the entries build up. Every snake oil cure and semi-scientific false promises to cure Autism fill up the pages. His sister's words rattle around in my brain. "No two cases of Autism are the same." Her words sound a lot like snowflakes.
It's funny because in California we depend on the snow. Without the snowpack in the mountains, we are in a drought. Cruel people throw around the word snowflakes like it's a derogatory term. But snowflakes are breathtaking.
Inside, Noah is a vast sea of unique beauty. Maybe that's why the world hates and fears the unique? I push out the anxiety and guilt. I dive through another look instead of the work I should have done. I comb through the pages for answers to this man. This man who captures a piece of my mind, and my heart, but can so rarely look me in the eye. This man who can't tell me he likes me, let alone loves me, and might never. I'm almost out of time. Do I sign the contract to work for Noah for another year? No simple answers.
My kids love it here and they love Noah. The longer I'm here, the harder it will be for them to leave. In the back of my mind, I hear the whisper, and the harder it will be for me to leave, too. And what if this is just sex for him? Sex isn't forever. The end would crush the kids again.
A large snowflake sticks to the back of my notebook. I've lived in Sacramento my entire life, and this is my first snowflake. And they are so goddamn beautiful. He is so goddamn beautiful. And I am so goddamn confused. The kids sit at the end of his sand, drawing as engrossed with his creation as I am with him. The red light from the camera blinks as it takes video for his Saturday episode letter to his sister.
My son bounces up and down in delight, and my daughter smiles. How he managed to please both of them at the same time like that is like magic. What the Death Star and a NASA space rocket to Mars have to do with Celtic patterns is beyond me, but they really love that man.
But what happens when this is over? When he touches me, I feel like I'm everything to him. His hand runs over my body as if every touch is the most precious moment of his life. But what if it's just me pushing what I want into him? My teeth clench in frustration. What if the Noah I see isn't him? There is no fixing Noah, and even if I could, would that man be the Noah I see?
No.
He looks up from his drawing done. His blue eyes make one of his rare contacts with my brown. I catch my breath. He smiles at me and I smile back. For a moment in time, mere seconds, I relax into his big smile. Then the clouds in my mind return, rolling in with all the chaos of doubt. I break contact with him, hide my eyes. And the tears find a path down my cheek and drop to keys. Search results blur into a mosaic. The pain of my betrayal of him bursts in my chest and carves one name into my heart.
Noah.
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A/n
It snowed was one of the first chapters I wrote of this book. It came instantly because it snowed. That's when I knew, oh Noah. You could say this one chapter could have been a whole short story in itself. A micro fic, maybe. But I remember watching this scene in my head, thinking. Oh shit. I know them. Thank you for sticking with the book so far.
A snowflake is a snow at its best. Let no one shame you out of your uniqueness.
ps. lol, I'm baking cookies. You know what that means when I break out the baking for long-term readers.
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