Saving Noah

by Lucinda Berry

I tried not to be angry about Lucas’s attitude toward him. His response was better than some fathers’. He didn’t react like Jamar Pickney’s father, who’d shot his son in the head when he learned he’d been sexually abusing his sister, or the father in Detroit who’d slit his son’s throat for taking naked pictures of his cousins and selling them online.

He was like curling up on the couch with a blanket and stepping into my favorite book.

“Our son molested your daughters during swim practice,” Lucas announced.

I fell in love with him instantly, marveling at his perfection and that I’d grown him cell by cell in my body. My feelings stemmed from the deepest parts of me, parts I didn’t know existed until I had him. He wasn’t a stranger when they placed him in my arms. It was like a missing piece of myself had been returned.

If you did everything right and it still turned out wrong, then what was the point?

had tried to fight his registration as a sex offender, but it was useless because of the Adam Walsh Act. I’d never heard of the act until Noah’s conviction. It was formed in response to the kidnapping and brutal murder of Adam Walsh. Adam’s father hosted America’s Most Wanted after his son was kidnapped and fought for stricter registration laws after he was found murdered

years later by a known sex offender.

Time had dragged. Nobody told me time slowed down with tragedy and how each minute became excruciating when it was painful to merely exist. Just when I was gaining my footing, something would remind me of it and send me into an emotional tailspin. Most of the time it was the little things, like a college admission packet in the mail, an email about ordering hot lunches for the next month, or lyrics to a song he liked. The grief would pummel me, and I had no choice except to succumb to it until it passed.

There’s a strange hierarchy of crimes here, and I still don’t understand it. I’m not sure I want to.

She vehemently shook her head. “Yes, I do. You think I don’t know what’s going on?” She stared at me, daring me to speak. I turned away, putting the rest of the things that she’d need for tomorrow in her backpack. “He hurt those little girls. He touched them on their private parts. I don’t care if he touches me on my private parts.” I froze. Still as a statue. We’d never told her he touched the girls on their private parts.

“What’d he do?” I asked. I didn’t want someone who committed a violent sex crime in my home. During group, I listened in horror about kids who’d committed unspeakable crimes against other kids. They were the types of offenders who scared me—the predatory, sadistic sex ones. They were the worst kind and the most dangerous. They took pleasure from inflicting pain on others just for the enjoyment of watching them suffer. There was no way I was letting one of them into my house.

You couldn’t experience the soul-sucking fear of losing your child and come out the same way. You just couldn’t.

He leaned over and let out a cry of grief so raw I felt it in my body. I rushed to his side, taking him in my arms like I’d done so many times in the past. But unlike all the times before, I didn’t tell him that it was going to be okay because it wasn’t. He’d always known that. I held him in my arms while he came apart and sobs ripped through him. I refused to let go as his wailing moved from violent waves to soft whimpering, to jerking breaths of nothing

“There’s nothing more terrifying than almost losing your child.” “If you let him out and he kills himself, I’ll sue the hospital.” I’d never threatened

He gave me a halfhearted smile. “You’re right. I’ve got something worse. At least when you have cancer people still love you.”

He’d started looking at me again when he talked. For so long, his eyes had stared through me or past me, but never at me. Now, he really looked because, for the first time since he confessed, I finally saw him and understood. He was my son, and he was also a pedophile. I accepted his truth, but just because I accepted it didn’t mean he needed to die because of it.

All he did was touch the girls. There was no penetration or insertion of any kind. Each of them had been taken to the pediatrician for an examination, and neither showed signs of sexual assault, because he hadn’t assaulted them. He’d touched them, and they’d touched him. That’s all. It didn’t make it right. It was disgusting and wrong, but he didn’t physically hurt them. Not even close to how he’d been brutalized and stripped of his dignity.

If he’d been their age, it would’ve been labeled innocent fun. Playing doctor. It wasn’t as if he’d forced himself on them. He hadn’t. They’d been the ones to touch first. I didn’t blame the girls, though. It wasn’t their fault. They had no idea what they were doing. None. Their touch and exploration was completely innocent. Nothing sexual about it, but it hadn’t been innocent for Noah, and he wasn’t their age, which made it a crime. I understood that, but their lives weren’t going to be ruined forever. They just weren’t. But, the world wouldn’t be satisfied until they’d annihilated him. He was more of a victim than those girls, but society would never see it that way. They saw it as him getting what he deserved.

I crouched in front of him and took his face in my hands. I looked directly in his eyes. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?” He nodded his head while he spoke. “I’m more than sure—I’m so ready.”

“Dear God, please help us. Help my baby boy. Let this be easy. Please let him leave this world in peace.” A sob caught in my throat. “And please meet him there. Take care of him for me.”

I’m not sorry Noah’s dead. I know that makes me a terrible father, but I can’t help it.

I spent years burying the memories of what I’d done and convincing myself I was cured. It

To this day, I still don’t know how it happened the first time. It was like I was possessed. One minute we were playing hide–and–seek in the barn, and the next minute I was behind the hay bales rubbing myself on Jamie. I told her it was part of the game, and she didn’t ask any more questions after that. I swore I would never do it again. But I did. Again and again and again. To both of them. I’d lie in bed at night and promise God that it was the last time, but I couldn’t stop myself. I just couldn’t. I was out of control. My dad unexpectedly came into the barn one afternoon and caught me molesting Jamie. He flung me off her and whipped me with his belt until I passed out. Jamie wouldn’t stop screaming. I still hear her screams in my dreams.

never forgot there was a monster buried inside me, but as long as I didn’t feed it, it stayed dormant.

It had been almost a year since Noah died and it was a lie that time healed all wounds. Whoever said it originally never lost a child. The wound cuts too deep to ever go away. I felt the magnitude of his loss as if it was yesterday—the paralyzing grief of losing a child. It came in waves, spastic sobs reverberating throughout my entire body, shaking me to my core. It was unrelenting and constant in the beginning. It held me in its grips and refused to let go. I felt like I would die, but I didn’t because you can’t die from grief even if it feels like you might. I stayed alive because my lungs kept breathing and my heart kept beating through no effort of mine. I didn’t have any other choice.

But I had to go on for Katie, because being a mother means you live your life as a living sacrifice.

Being his parent didn’t stop after he died, and it was my job as his mother to protect his memory in the same way I protected him while he was alive.

There had to be a God, because there had to be a heaven. A time when I got to see him again, and he was the one to walk me home.