fic: Wherever I Am, You'll Always Be
Title: Wherever I Am, You'll Always Be
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Beth Corcoran, Shelby Corcoran, Puck/Kurt
Genre: family, some angst
Spoilers: Season 1
Warnings: none
Summary: Noah doesn't need to be there to be a presence in Beth's life.
Word count: 3000ish
Author's note: This is a companion to two of the drabbles that I wrote for the June Daily Drabbles challenge. Title comes from the Flogging Molly song "If I Ever Leave This World Alive".
“Mommy,” Beth says, staring down at her toenails, which look pink when she looks at them through her Jelly sandals. She’s afraid of asking this question, because she thinks it might make her mommy sad.
“What’s up, ladybug?” Her mommy looks at her in the car’s rearview mirror.
“Everybody at school has mommies and daddies. Except Max Watson-Rogers, he has two mommies. But I only have you.”
“That’s true.” Beth’s mommy nods, and she doesn’t look too sad. “That’s because you’re adopted.”
“Adopted?” Beth tries out the new word. She’s not sure what it means.
“It means that I went to the hospital one day and picked you specially because you were my favourite.”
Beth didn’t know hospitals let people pick the babies they wanted, but she was her mommy’s favourite. That makes her special. Maybe even specialer than Max Watson-Rogers, and everybody thinks he’s really lucky having two mommies.
* * *
“Mom,” Beth looks up from her homework. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and Mrs. O’Connor wants them to make a drawing of their family tree to decorate the classroom with. Beth is eight now, not a baby anymore, so knows what adopted really means, knows that somewhere in the world she does have another mom and a dad. Another mom and a dad who didn’t want her, but Beth doesn’t like to think about that part.
“Yeah, Bethie?”
“Mrs. O’Connor wants me to make a family tree. I put you and Nana and Aunt Stacey and Uncle Jim and Peter and Molly on already. But do you think I should put my other mom and my dad on it? The ones who didn’t want me?”
Her mom does look sad this time, and Beth wishes she hadn’t asked, just left her family tree the way it was.
“Their names are Noah and Quinn.” Her mom comes to sit next to her at the table. “They would have done anything in the world to keep you, ladybug, but they were very young.”
“How young?” Beth frowns. Moms and Dads aren’t young. They’re not old either, not like grandmas, they’re in-between.
“Sixteen. The same age as Molly.”
Beth tries to imagine her cousin Molly as a mom. She can’t do it. “Noah and Quinn.” She says, testing the names out. “What did they look like?”
“I have some pictures. Do you want to see?”
Beth nods, even though she isn’t really sure. She’s curious though, curious what a sixteen-year-old mom looks like. Her mom goes into her office, and Beth hears her opening a drawer. When she comes back, she’s holding a small stack of photos. Only three. Beth feels disappointed, because she doesn’t think three pictures is going to tell her enough.
The first one is a pretty blonde girl in a hospital bed. She’s holding Beth and looking at the camera with tired eyes. She isn’t smiling, but she doesn’t look angry either. Beth isn’t sure that this is really her mom, because she doesn’t really look like her at all. The next picture is a boy with almost no hair and a black shirt with a shiny tie. He’s sitting in a chair, holding Beth and smiling down at her.
“That’s Noah.” She says and her mom nods. There’s something about him that’s familiar; it takes her a few years to understand it’s because she looks so much like him.
The third picture is another of Noah, holding her again. He isn’t smiling this time.
“Do you want me to keep these pictures out?” Her mom asks.
“No.” Beth says quickly. Looking at them gives her a twisty feeling in her stomach that she doesn't think she likes.
“Okay.” Her mom goes and puts the pictures back, and Beth decides to leave her family tree the way it is.
* * *
Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn-their names are at the back of Beth’s mind almost all the time. When she’s ten, she decides that it doesn’t matter that she has more parents than other people. She doesn’t know Noah and Quinn. She probably wouldn’t recognise them if she saw them in the street, unless they look the same now as they do in the pictures from the hospital. They aren’t her parents. They’re teenagers who had baby. Her mom is her mom, and that’s what matters to her.
* * *
She borrows her mom’s computer to write her history paper on Cleopatra. She doesn’t really like Cleopatra, but she was home sick the day everybody picked their topics so when she got back, Ms. Perry said she had to do Cleopatra because it was the only topic left. Beth tried to get Kitty Williams, who got the 1960s, to switch with her, but Ms. Perry overheard and said switching wasn’t allowed.
She’s just getting to the part of the paper where Cleopatra gets rid of Julius Caesar for Marc Antony when her mom’s email pings. She’s going to ignore it, but a little bubble appears in the corner of the screen. New message from Noah Puckerman. Beth blinks at the name. It’s the first time she’s ever heard the last name Puckerman, but she just knows this is the Noah of Noah and Quinn.
Beth slams the laptop shut. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling. Angry that her mom didn’t tell her, confused about why the guy who gave her up still keeps in touch, hurt that she was even given up in the first place, frustrated at Noah suddenly being back in her thoughts after three years, and somewhere, buried beneath everything else, curiosity. Why is it Noah and not Quinn who emails her mom? How often to they talk? What do they talk about? Where does he live? He’s almost thirty now, is he married? Does he have other children? Beth pushes the curiosity aside roughly. She doesn’t care. He didn’t want her.
But when her mom gets home from work, Beth can’t help bringing it up.
“You got an email today,” Beth says as coldly as she can manage. “From Noah. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we didn’t keep secrets from each other!” Beth isn’t sure when she started yelling. She doesn’t know why it makes her so angry.
“Ladybug,” her mom says quietly, and something about her childhood nickname calms Beth. It belongs to them; it doesn’t have anything to do with Noah or Quinn. “You told me you didn’t want to know about them.”
“But you never said that you were keeping in touch with them.” Beth protests, desperately trying to hold on to her anger. She wants to yell and throw things, because she doesn’t know how else to handle this.
“I’ll tell you everything if you sit down, okay?”
Beth sinks onto the couch and crosses her arms tightly over her chest.
“When you were born, Noah didn’t leave the hospital for four days, even after Quinn was discharged. He wanted to keep you so badly. I was almost positive he was going to, but instead he agreed to an open adoption. We agreed that I’d send him pictures twice a year, with some updates about how you’re doing.”
“What about Quinn? Do you email her?”
“No.” Beth’s mom shook her head. “Quinn wanted a closed adoption from the beginning.”
Beth is surprised how much it hurts, hearing that. Quinn is a complete stranger to her and so it shouldn’t matter, but it’s like someone has slapped her across the face.
“How can somebody do that?” Beth frowns. She feels bad the moment she asks, because she knows from the look on her mom’s face that she’s thinking about Rachel. Beth’s met Rachel a few times, but she lives in New York so they don’t see her very often.
“It’s different for everybody, ladybug. But you should know that Noah has always thought of you as his daughter, even though he doesn't get to be a real dad to you..”
“Does this open adoption thing work both ways? Does he tell you stuff about him?”
“Not at first. But we’ve been talking for almost fourteen years now, so yes, I do know quite a bit about him.”
“Oh.”
“I can tell you the things I know.”
Beth shakes her head. The twisty feeling in her stomach is back, and it means that she doesn't need to know anymore. “No. I'm good.” Beth lets her mom pull her into a hug. “Can I maybe have the pictures from the hospital though?”
“Of course.”
Later that night, after Beth has finished her Cleopatra paper and is getting ready for bed, her mom appears in the doorway to her room. She’s holding a folder and the hospital photos. She sets them both on Beth’s desk.
“Those are all the emails I’ve ever gotten from Noah. You can read them whenever or not at all.”
Beth nods. “Okay.” She waits until her mom is out of the room to shove the folder into the bottom drawer of her desk. She flicks through the three photos, keeping the one of Noah smiling and putting the other two in the drawer with the folder.
* * *
The folder in Beth’s desk gets forgotten in the wake of starting high school and deciding to start taking guitar lessons and getting her learner’s permit and a boyfriend. She’s digging through her desk drawers in search of stationery to send thank you cards to her grandma and her aunt and uncle for her birthday presents when she finds the folder again.
She knows what it is the second she spots it, and she pulls it out of the drawer immediately. She’s sixteen now, the same age Noah and Quinn were when she was born, and it feels significant somehow. She sits down on her floor, opens the folder and starts to read.
The first emails are guarded and perfunctory, mostly just a brief thanks and something along the lines of she’s getting so big or she’s beautiful. Somewhere around Beth’s third birthday, Noah mentions he’s moving to New York, and from that point forward his replies to Shelby are more detailed. He always comments on the pictures of Beth, but he also adds enough information that after reading twenty-six emails, Beth has learned a few things.
He still lives in New York. He’s a songwriter (and, Beth learns later when she Googles him, a pretty successful one at that) and he’s married to Kurt, who he’s known since high school. He and Kurt have a cat named Bob Dylan, but by the last email, dated almost three years ago, Noah doesn’t mention any children.
She gets to her feet and goes to find her mom. It’s summer, so it’s easy to find her in the backyard, pulling weeds out of the landscaping.
“Mom, do you have any more emails from Noah?”
Her mom looks up in surprise, probably because Beth hasn’t asked about Noah for years. “Yes. I do.”
“Can I read them?”
“Of course. You know my email password.”
Beth nods and returns to the house, going into the office and booting up her mom’s laptop. She finds the saved emails easily, but they don’t tell her much more. Kurt got some kind of promotion, Puck is thinking about recording an album, and they moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn last year.
She wants to ask the sort of questions her mom won’t know the answers to. How did Noah become a songwriter? How did he go from sleeping with girls like Quinn to marrying Kurt? His emails never mention Quinn, so does that mean she’s cut him out of her life just like Beth? She wants more details about everything: his house in Brooklyn, his routines, his hobbies, his tastes in music and movies and books and television and food. She wants to know him like a dad, she realises. She wants to meet him too, face to face.
But she doesn’t know how to tell her mom any of this. She doesn’t want Shelby to think Beth feels like she missed out, not having a dad. The truth is, the two of them work really well on their own. She doesn’t need Noah. But it turns out she wouldn’t mind knowing him more personally than the man at the other end of an email address.
* * *
Beth doesn’t avoid the subject of Noah anymore. She gathers all the information she can from her mom over the next year two years. She knows now that the terms of the open adoption end when she’s eighteen (only a few weeks away). Her mom won’t be required to send Noah any more pictures, but since Beth will be an adult, there aren’t any rules to stop Noah from contacting her directly, or vice versa.
Beth already knows she’s going to Eugene Lang to major in writing or music or photography or some combination of the three and she wonders if her mom has told Noah that she’ll be moving to New York. Beth’s motives for only applying to schools in New York City and the surrounding area are pretty obvious.
And apparently so are her reasons for wanting to leave early. She doesn’t move into her dorm until the first week in August, but she’s itching to leave by the beginning of July.
“Do you have a plan?” Her mom asks one night during dinner.
“Sort of.” Beth pushes a piece of broccoli around her plate. “I was thinking I could take the train there a couple weeks early. And then you could come meet me for move-in day?”
“And where are you going to stay those two weeks? You can’t expect to stay with Noah and Kurt, especially if you’re not going to let him know you’re coming.”
Beth’s already explained to her mom that she doesn’t want to tell Noah that she’s planning on getting to New York early. She’s still afraid of getting her hopes up too high, and if Noah doesn’t know she’s coming then he can’t disappoint her. Plus he and Kurt have a baby now. Logically she knows Noah caring about her isn’t a switch that just flips, but it doesn’t stop the doubt from creeping in that the new baby has filled the void in Noah’s life that Beth’s adoption left behind.
“I already talked to Rachel. She says I can stay with her.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to make me drive all the way to New York by myself with all your college stuff.”
Beth knows it’s the closest thing to a yes she’s going to get, so she books her train ticket that night and starts packing her things.
The train ride gives her a long time to think about how she’s going to approach this. When she told her mom she didn’t know what to say, Shelby assured her she didn’t need to say anything.
“Bring the picture from the hospital and show him.” Her mom had said. “He’ll understand.”
Beth has the picture tucked inside one of her notebooks in her backpack and she keeps pulling it out to look at it. She wonders what Noah looks like. The only mental image she has of him is a scared teenager in glee club competition clothes, but he’s in his thirties now, and she's sure plenty of things have changed.
Rachel meets her in Penn Station and they take a cab to her Upper East Side apartment. Beth dumps her things in the guest bedroom while Rachel chatters excitedly at her. Her…sister (or the closest thing Beth has to a sister, anyway) has always been a little bit too high strung for Beth’s tastes. Luckily, Rachel’s starring in some Broadway show so she leaves in the early afternoon to be at the theatre in time for warm-ups or whatever.
Noah’s address is burning a hole in her pocket, and she already mapped out a route to his house from Rachel’s apartment. She’s been waiting at least two years, maybe longer if she really thinks about it, and she doesn’t feel like waiting anymore.
She gets a little bit lost on the subway, but eventually she ends up in the right place. She stands outside Noah’s house, which is tall and narrow and white with a red door, squeezed between two brownstones. She hesitates on the sidewalk. She’s built this moment up in her head since the day she decided she wanted to meet her dad, and she’s afraid of what might happen if it falls short of her expectations.
She hitches her backpack higher on her shoulders before climbing the three stairs to the door. She presses the doorbell and holds her breath, listening. For a moment she thinks herself no one is home and she’ll just have to try tomorrow, but then she hears footsteps getting closer.
The door swings open and the man standing there has to be Noah. There’s a growth of stubble on his jaw and there are some wrinkles around his eyes, but his hair is still short and his eyes and his nose and his mouth are just like hers.
“Beth,” he says, and his voice is different than she imagined. He steps aside and she crosses over the threshold. He closes the door and they stand staring at each other in the front hallway. Beth shrugs out of her backpack and digs around inside to find the photo. She pulls it out and hands it to Noah.
“Mom says you’d understand why I’m here if I showed you this.”
His expression becomes less guarded as he looks at the picture and his mouth pulls up in a smile. They stand frozen for another moment, before Noah moves slowly, pulling her into a tight hug. Beth is surprised and it’s a few seconds before she wraps her arms around his middle and hugs back.
She has a million questions she wants to ask and things she needs to say, but she’s pretty sure he’s been waiting for this moment a lot longer than she has and she can’t bring herself to interrupt it. This is just a beginning, and Beth knows they’ll have time for everything else.
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Beth Corcoran, Shelby Corcoran, Puck/Kurt
Genre: family, some angst
Spoilers: Season 1
Warnings: none
Summary: Noah doesn't need to be there to be a presence in Beth's life.
Word count: 3000ish
Author's note: This is a companion to two of the drabbles that I wrote for the June Daily Drabbles challenge. Title comes from the Flogging Molly song "If I Ever Leave This World Alive".
“Mommy,” Beth says, staring down at her toenails, which look pink when she looks at them through her Jelly sandals. She’s afraid of asking this question, because she thinks it might make her mommy sad.
“What’s up, ladybug?” Her mommy looks at her in the car’s rearview mirror.
“Everybody at school has mommies and daddies. Except Max Watson-Rogers, he has two mommies. But I only have you.”
“That’s true.” Beth’s mommy nods, and she doesn’t look too sad. “That’s because you’re adopted.”
“Adopted?” Beth tries out the new word. She’s not sure what it means.
“It means that I went to the hospital one day and picked you specially because you were my favourite.”
Beth didn’t know hospitals let people pick the babies they wanted, but she was her mommy’s favourite. That makes her special. Maybe even specialer than Max Watson-Rogers, and everybody thinks he’s really lucky having two mommies.
* * *
“Mom,” Beth looks up from her homework. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and Mrs. O’Connor wants them to make a drawing of their family tree to decorate the classroom with. Beth is eight now, not a baby anymore, so knows what adopted really means, knows that somewhere in the world she does have another mom and a dad. Another mom and a dad who didn’t want her, but Beth doesn’t like to think about that part.
“Yeah, Bethie?”
“Mrs. O’Connor wants me to make a family tree. I put you and Nana and Aunt Stacey and Uncle Jim and Peter and Molly on already. But do you think I should put my other mom and my dad on it? The ones who didn’t want me?”
Her mom does look sad this time, and Beth wishes she hadn’t asked, just left her family tree the way it was.
“Their names are Noah and Quinn.” Her mom comes to sit next to her at the table. “They would have done anything in the world to keep you, ladybug, but they were very young.”
“How young?” Beth frowns. Moms and Dads aren’t young. They’re not old either, not like grandmas, they’re in-between.
“Sixteen. The same age as Molly.”
Beth tries to imagine her cousin Molly as a mom. She can’t do it. “Noah and Quinn.” She says, testing the names out. “What did they look like?”
“I have some pictures. Do you want to see?”
Beth nods, even though she isn’t really sure. She’s curious though, curious what a sixteen-year-old mom looks like. Her mom goes into her office, and Beth hears her opening a drawer. When she comes back, she’s holding a small stack of photos. Only three. Beth feels disappointed, because she doesn’t think three pictures is going to tell her enough.
The first one is a pretty blonde girl in a hospital bed. She’s holding Beth and looking at the camera with tired eyes. She isn’t smiling, but she doesn’t look angry either. Beth isn’t sure that this is really her mom, because she doesn’t really look like her at all. The next picture is a boy with almost no hair and a black shirt with a shiny tie. He’s sitting in a chair, holding Beth and smiling down at her.
“That’s Noah.” She says and her mom nods. There’s something about him that’s familiar; it takes her a few years to understand it’s because she looks so much like him.
The third picture is another of Noah, holding her again. He isn’t smiling this time.
“Do you want me to keep these pictures out?” Her mom asks.
“No.” Beth says quickly. Looking at them gives her a twisty feeling in her stomach that she doesn't think she likes.
“Okay.” Her mom goes and puts the pictures back, and Beth decides to leave her family tree the way it is.
* * *
Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn, Noah and Quinn-their names are at the back of Beth’s mind almost all the time. When she’s ten, she decides that it doesn’t matter that she has more parents than other people. She doesn’t know Noah and Quinn. She probably wouldn’t recognise them if she saw them in the street, unless they look the same now as they do in the pictures from the hospital. They aren’t her parents. They’re teenagers who had baby. Her mom is her mom, and that’s what matters to her.
* * *
She borrows her mom’s computer to write her history paper on Cleopatra. She doesn’t really like Cleopatra, but she was home sick the day everybody picked their topics so when she got back, Ms. Perry said she had to do Cleopatra because it was the only topic left. Beth tried to get Kitty Williams, who got the 1960s, to switch with her, but Ms. Perry overheard and said switching wasn’t allowed.
She’s just getting to the part of the paper where Cleopatra gets rid of Julius Caesar for Marc Antony when her mom’s email pings. She’s going to ignore it, but a little bubble appears in the corner of the screen. New message from Noah Puckerman. Beth blinks at the name. It’s the first time she’s ever heard the last name Puckerman, but she just knows this is the Noah of Noah and Quinn.
Beth slams the laptop shut. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling. Angry that her mom didn’t tell her, confused about why the guy who gave her up still keeps in touch, hurt that she was even given up in the first place, frustrated at Noah suddenly being back in her thoughts after three years, and somewhere, buried beneath everything else, curiosity. Why is it Noah and not Quinn who emails her mom? How often to they talk? What do they talk about? Where does he live? He’s almost thirty now, is he married? Does he have other children? Beth pushes the curiosity aside roughly. She doesn’t care. He didn’t want her.
But when her mom gets home from work, Beth can’t help bringing it up.
“You got an email today,” Beth says as coldly as she can manage. “From Noah. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we didn’t keep secrets from each other!” Beth isn’t sure when she started yelling. She doesn’t know why it makes her so angry.
“Ladybug,” her mom says quietly, and something about her childhood nickname calms Beth. It belongs to them; it doesn’t have anything to do with Noah or Quinn. “You told me you didn’t want to know about them.”
“But you never said that you were keeping in touch with them.” Beth protests, desperately trying to hold on to her anger. She wants to yell and throw things, because she doesn’t know how else to handle this.
“I’ll tell you everything if you sit down, okay?”
Beth sinks onto the couch and crosses her arms tightly over her chest.
“When you were born, Noah didn’t leave the hospital for four days, even after Quinn was discharged. He wanted to keep you so badly. I was almost positive he was going to, but instead he agreed to an open adoption. We agreed that I’d send him pictures twice a year, with some updates about how you’re doing.”
“What about Quinn? Do you email her?”
“No.” Beth’s mom shook her head. “Quinn wanted a closed adoption from the beginning.”
Beth is surprised how much it hurts, hearing that. Quinn is a complete stranger to her and so it shouldn’t matter, but it’s like someone has slapped her across the face.
“How can somebody do that?” Beth frowns. She feels bad the moment she asks, because she knows from the look on her mom’s face that she’s thinking about Rachel. Beth’s met Rachel a few times, but she lives in New York so they don’t see her very often.
“It’s different for everybody, ladybug. But you should know that Noah has always thought of you as his daughter, even though he doesn't get to be a real dad to you..”
“Does this open adoption thing work both ways? Does he tell you stuff about him?”
“Not at first. But we’ve been talking for almost fourteen years now, so yes, I do know quite a bit about him.”
“Oh.”
“I can tell you the things I know.”
Beth shakes her head. The twisty feeling in her stomach is back, and it means that she doesn't need to know anymore. “No. I'm good.” Beth lets her mom pull her into a hug. “Can I maybe have the pictures from the hospital though?”
“Of course.”
Later that night, after Beth has finished her Cleopatra paper and is getting ready for bed, her mom appears in the doorway to her room. She’s holding a folder and the hospital photos. She sets them both on Beth’s desk.
“Those are all the emails I’ve ever gotten from Noah. You can read them whenever or not at all.”
Beth nods. “Okay.” She waits until her mom is out of the room to shove the folder into the bottom drawer of her desk. She flicks through the three photos, keeping the one of Noah smiling and putting the other two in the drawer with the folder.
* * *
The folder in Beth’s desk gets forgotten in the wake of starting high school and deciding to start taking guitar lessons and getting her learner’s permit and a boyfriend. She’s digging through her desk drawers in search of stationery to send thank you cards to her grandma and her aunt and uncle for her birthday presents when she finds the folder again.
She knows what it is the second she spots it, and she pulls it out of the drawer immediately. She’s sixteen now, the same age Noah and Quinn were when she was born, and it feels significant somehow. She sits down on her floor, opens the folder and starts to read.
The first emails are guarded and perfunctory, mostly just a brief thanks and something along the lines of she’s getting so big or she’s beautiful. Somewhere around Beth’s third birthday, Noah mentions he’s moving to New York, and from that point forward his replies to Shelby are more detailed. He always comments on the pictures of Beth, but he also adds enough information that after reading twenty-six emails, Beth has learned a few things.
He still lives in New York. He’s a songwriter (and, Beth learns later when she Googles him, a pretty successful one at that) and he’s married to Kurt, who he’s known since high school. He and Kurt have a cat named Bob Dylan, but by the last email, dated almost three years ago, Noah doesn’t mention any children.
She gets to her feet and goes to find her mom. It’s summer, so it’s easy to find her in the backyard, pulling weeds out of the landscaping.
“Mom, do you have any more emails from Noah?”
Her mom looks up in surprise, probably because Beth hasn’t asked about Noah for years. “Yes. I do.”
“Can I read them?”
“Of course. You know my email password.”
Beth nods and returns to the house, going into the office and booting up her mom’s laptop. She finds the saved emails easily, but they don’t tell her much more. Kurt got some kind of promotion, Puck is thinking about recording an album, and they moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn last year.
She wants to ask the sort of questions her mom won’t know the answers to. How did Noah become a songwriter? How did he go from sleeping with girls like Quinn to marrying Kurt? His emails never mention Quinn, so does that mean she’s cut him out of her life just like Beth? She wants more details about everything: his house in Brooklyn, his routines, his hobbies, his tastes in music and movies and books and television and food. She wants to know him like a dad, she realises. She wants to meet him too, face to face.
But she doesn’t know how to tell her mom any of this. She doesn’t want Shelby to think Beth feels like she missed out, not having a dad. The truth is, the two of them work really well on their own. She doesn’t need Noah. But it turns out she wouldn’t mind knowing him more personally than the man at the other end of an email address.
* * *
Beth doesn’t avoid the subject of Noah anymore. She gathers all the information she can from her mom over the next year two years. She knows now that the terms of the open adoption end when she’s eighteen (only a few weeks away). Her mom won’t be required to send Noah any more pictures, but since Beth will be an adult, there aren’t any rules to stop Noah from contacting her directly, or vice versa.
Beth already knows she’s going to Eugene Lang to major in writing or music or photography or some combination of the three and she wonders if her mom has told Noah that she’ll be moving to New York. Beth’s motives for only applying to schools in New York City and the surrounding area are pretty obvious.
And apparently so are her reasons for wanting to leave early. She doesn’t move into her dorm until the first week in August, but she’s itching to leave by the beginning of July.
“Do you have a plan?” Her mom asks one night during dinner.
“Sort of.” Beth pushes a piece of broccoli around her plate. “I was thinking I could take the train there a couple weeks early. And then you could come meet me for move-in day?”
“And where are you going to stay those two weeks? You can’t expect to stay with Noah and Kurt, especially if you’re not going to let him know you’re coming.”
Beth’s already explained to her mom that she doesn’t want to tell Noah that she’s planning on getting to New York early. She’s still afraid of getting her hopes up too high, and if Noah doesn’t know she’s coming then he can’t disappoint her. Plus he and Kurt have a baby now. Logically she knows Noah caring about her isn’t a switch that just flips, but it doesn’t stop the doubt from creeping in that the new baby has filled the void in Noah’s life that Beth’s adoption left behind.
“I already talked to Rachel. She says I can stay with her.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to make me drive all the way to New York by myself with all your college stuff.”
Beth knows it’s the closest thing to a yes she’s going to get, so she books her train ticket that night and starts packing her things.
The train ride gives her a long time to think about how she’s going to approach this. When she told her mom she didn’t know what to say, Shelby assured her she didn’t need to say anything.
“Bring the picture from the hospital and show him.” Her mom had said. “He’ll understand.”
Beth has the picture tucked inside one of her notebooks in her backpack and she keeps pulling it out to look at it. She wonders what Noah looks like. The only mental image she has of him is a scared teenager in glee club competition clothes, but he’s in his thirties now, and she's sure plenty of things have changed.
Rachel meets her in Penn Station and they take a cab to her Upper East Side apartment. Beth dumps her things in the guest bedroom while Rachel chatters excitedly at her. Her…sister (or the closest thing Beth has to a sister, anyway) has always been a little bit too high strung for Beth’s tastes. Luckily, Rachel’s starring in some Broadway show so she leaves in the early afternoon to be at the theatre in time for warm-ups or whatever.
Noah’s address is burning a hole in her pocket, and she already mapped out a route to his house from Rachel’s apartment. She’s been waiting at least two years, maybe longer if she really thinks about it, and she doesn’t feel like waiting anymore.
She gets a little bit lost on the subway, but eventually she ends up in the right place. She stands outside Noah’s house, which is tall and narrow and white with a red door, squeezed between two brownstones. She hesitates on the sidewalk. She’s built this moment up in her head since the day she decided she wanted to meet her dad, and she’s afraid of what might happen if it falls short of her expectations.
She hitches her backpack higher on her shoulders before climbing the three stairs to the door. She presses the doorbell and holds her breath, listening. For a moment she thinks herself no one is home and she’ll just have to try tomorrow, but then she hears footsteps getting closer.
The door swings open and the man standing there has to be Noah. There’s a growth of stubble on his jaw and there are some wrinkles around his eyes, but his hair is still short and his eyes and his nose and his mouth are just like hers.
“Beth,” he says, and his voice is different than she imagined. He steps aside and she crosses over the threshold. He closes the door and they stand staring at each other in the front hallway. Beth shrugs out of her backpack and digs around inside to find the photo. She pulls it out and hands it to Noah.
“Mom says you’d understand why I’m here if I showed you this.”
His expression becomes less guarded as he looks at the picture and his mouth pulls up in a smile. They stand frozen for another moment, before Noah moves slowly, pulling her into a tight hug. Beth is surprised and it’s a few seconds before she wraps her arms around his middle and hugs back.
She has a million questions she wants to ask and things she needs to say, but she’s pretty sure he’s been waiting for this moment a lot longer than she has and she can’t bring herself to interrupt it. This is just a beginning, and Beth knows they’ll have time for everything else.