In All Deep Places (13 page)

I was draping the last wet towel across a tree branch to dry when I heard movement behind me. Norah was working her way across the narrow branch that reached to within a foot of Nell’s garage roof. I took a seat on the dry part of the beanbag and waited.

She didn’t say anything at first. She just made her way in and sat down on the floor, using the old sofa cushion as a backrest. I thought I saw a red mark on her cheek, but it was dark so
I wasn’t sure, and I was afraid to ask.

“I take it Nell got her phone bill,” I said quietly.

Norah sort of grinned. It was not a true grin, though. It was a
sad one. I don’t think there is a word for it.

“You heard, huh?”

I nodded.

“I am now not allowed to even
touch
the phone,” she continued in a hushed, mocking voice. “But all evening long, I’ve been walking past that phone and touching it. I’ve been touching it for
hours. And neither one of them knows it.”

I didn’t know how to respond to this. “So what are you
going to do?” I finally asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked
out the opening where I had seen the storm’s approach. “My dad told me this thing between him and Mom is
nobody’s business but his. He said if I go messing around in his business again, he’ll leave me here and he’ll take Kieran and he’ll go
somewhere I won’t be able to find them.”

Two tears worked their way out of Norah’s eyes
and slipped
silently down her cheeks.

“He can’t do that,” I said.

“Oh, yes, he can. Adults can do whatever they want.”

“He can’t keep you from finding your mother. He can’t keep
you from your brother.”

She turned to him. “Yes, he can, Luke. You don’t know any
thing.”

Anger welled up inside me. “I know I’d like to punch
his lights out.”

“Be my guest,” she said, but then quickly added, “But it
wouldn’t do any good. He’d still get his way. He always does.”

A few seconds of silence passed between us.

“So what’s going to happen when that lady from the embassy calls back?” I asked.

Norah just shook her head. She looked hopeless. Like she was dying a little inside.

“I know what you should do,” I said, leaning forward. “How many phones does Nell have?”

“Two,” she said lifelessly.

“Where are they?”

“One’s in the kitchen, one’s in her bedroom.”

“Okay. She sleeps most of the day, right? And your dad works days, so he’s gone from morning until five, right?”

She nodded her head but added, “Four-thirty.”

“Okay, when you wake up in the morning, tiptoe in her room and unplug her phone. Then if you get a call while she’s asleep, it’ll only ring in the kitchen, and you just answer it right away. Or have Kieran answer it right away.”

“I won’t have any trouble answering it right away,” she said and I could picture her walking by Nell’s forbidden kitchen phone earlier in the evening and stealthily caressing it.

“Then when Nell wakes up to go to work, sneak back in her room when she goes into the bathroom and plug her phone back in.”

Norah nodded. “I guess that might work. That lady may call me later in the day, though. What if tries to call me after three o’clock? That’s only one
pm
in Baja.”

“Yeah, but the embassy’s in Mexico City, right? That’s where this lady is. And Mexico City is on Central Time, just like us.”

“It is?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

She pursed her lips together. “But she still might call me after three.”

“Well, we’ll just… we’ll just have to pray that she doesn’t,” I replied.

“Pray?” Norah said, as if the thought were wholly foreign.

“Well, yeah.”

“Will that work?”

I didn’t answer right away. I knew enough about God to know you never could tell what He might do. Or might not do. And yet I usually prayed anyway, about all kinds of things, and had for as long as I could remember. My parents had always told me God answers every prayer. Every one. Sometimes, though, the answer is “no.”

“It might. If God wants it to, it will,” I finally replied.

Norah seemed to ponder this for a moment. I thought I saw in her eyes a sad understanding that, just like all the other adult figures in her life, God, too, was someone who always got His way, regardless of what she wanted. I felt an itching urge to explain that with God it was different, but I hadn’t a clue where to begin. I didn’t even know why I knew that. Nor why it was okay. I said nothing.

“She’ll probably call when we’re at the swimming hole,” Norah said, “and I’ll miss it anyway.” The dying look came back.

I licked my lips. I had another idea.

“Or I could ask my parents if they would let the lady call back here. At my house.”

She turned her head toward me. “What if they say no?”

“What if they say yes?”

She turned away and sighed. “I’ll try unplugging her phone, first,” she said. “We’ll see…

A few seconds of silence followed.

“Where were you guys?” I finally asked. “You missed the Festival.”

Norah picked at a cuticle. “My grandma wanted to see her sister—my dad’s Aunt Eleanor. She lives in Albert Lea. In Minnesota. So my dad took us there in the camper. They didn’t ask Kieran and me if we wanted to come, they just said, “Get in the camper, we’re leaving.”

I waited.

“It wasn’t so bad. My dad’s aunt is kind of nice. She’s a widow, but she has a little dog Kieran likes. Her kids, my dad’s cousins, have all moved away. She never sees
her grandkids, so she was kind of happy to see Kieran and me. She bought us each a long rope made of red licorice. Kieran ate his in ten minutes. I still have part of mine.”

“Kieran and I got to sleep in the camper by ourselves,” she continued. “That was nice. Grandma slept in the house, and Dad took Aunt Eleanor’s little car to Minneapolis for a couple days. I don’t know why.”

“So, I guess it was like a vacation?”

She looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said, as if considering this for the first time. “It was kind of like that.”

She did not ask me about my vacation or the Festival.

“Is Kieran doing all right?” I asked.

Norah looked away again. “I guess. Nothing has changed, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”

“I still have until Christmas,” she said, rising to sit on her knees. “I better get back. They may want to come in where Kieran and I sleep and yell at me some more before they go to bed.”

She scooted past me and eased herself out into the canopy of branches. I watched her pick her way across the limbs, sometimes crawling, sometimes climbing, until she reached the pitched roof of Nell’s garage. She made her way across it to an open window with a beige curtain fluttering out of it and she disappeared inside.

July eased into August, and still there was no call from the embassy in Mexico. After two fruitless weeks of sneaking into Nell’s room and unplugging and re-plugging the phone, Norah
announced she was ready for me to ask my parents if they would let her receive a phone call at our house. We decided we would ask my mother first. A mother would better understand Norah’s plight, I thought—especially a mother who is a drama teacher and deeply drawn to the theater of real, human pain. At least it seemed likely she would be quick to understand. Then, hopefully, the three of us could convince my dad that it wasn’t meddling to let Norah receive a phone call from Mexico about her mother. My dad
hated meddling.

My mom was a little shocked at first to hear that Belinda was mixed up in the murder of a Mexican policeman. I left out the
part about Belinda’s apparent addiction to heroin. One problem
at a time seemed like the smart way to go. But my mother readily
agreed that Norah needed to know where her mother was and if
she needed help. That evening, I invited Norah and Kieran over to watch reruns of
Hawaii Five-O
and eat caramel corn. While
Ethan and Kieran munched on the caramel corn and watched
Steve McGarrett cleanse Honolulu of crime and lawlessness, Norah, my mom, and I quietly convinced my dad to allow the call to
come to the our house.

I could tell my dad was a little uneasy about the whole thing. He did not want to cause trouble or be accused of sticking his nose in other peoples’ business. But in the end, he reluctantly agreed. Compassion for Norah and Kieran won him over. It was decided that the following day, Norah would make another call to the embassy, this time from our house. She would let the lady there know she wanted any information about Belinda to be given to Jack, MaryAnn, or Luke Foxbourne and would give her
the new number.

The following morning, a few minutes before eleven, Norah made the call. The woman at the embassy had not been able to devote much time to the case and had nothing new to tell her. She promised to make a concerted effort within the next few weeks.

But the long days of summer wound down and there was no call. Darrel Janvik registered his children to attend school in Halcyon. He continued to tell his mother he was saving for that down payment on a little farm site, though he was a frequent and generous patron of bars all over the county. Norah and Kieran continued to sleep in the little bedroom above Nell’s garage and swim every day at Goose Pond. Kieran continued to have whispered conversations with his invisible playmate, and Nell continued to smoke, complain, sleep all day, and bowl on Saturdays. Summer
ended and school began. And there was no call.

I
began my sophomore year at Halcyon High School doing something I had not done before: I spent the first
month looking over my shoulder at the younger students. As often
as I could, and without drawing too much attention to myself,
I stole glances at chattering groups of squirrelly junior-high students, looking for signs that Norah was finding her way all right. Most of the time she was where she needed to be, but I noticed she always seemed to be a few paces behind her classmates. I rarely saw her giggling with the other thirteen-year-old girls. She did not seem to be bothered by her own aloofness or apparent inability to attract new friends. Or maybe it was that she had quickly taken inventory of the eighth-grade girls at Halcyon and deter
mined none of them were particularly interesting or worthy of
friendship. Either way it seemed to be of no consequence: Norah
appeared to be quite comfortable by herself.

Our paths did not cross much at school, though we shared many of the same hallways and ate in the same caf
eteria. On occasion I would pass her on the way to the library or
the gymnasium and I would offer a nod of my head or a soft-toned
“hey.” I thought she seemed quietly at ease. And while I cleverly hid my sideways glances in her direction, she never seemed to
likewise seek me out, never seemed to be looking past her junior-high world to catch a glimpse of me. I didn’t know if she was purposely keeping herself from becoming dependent on me or if fending for herself socially was something with which she was already very familiar.

Sometimes Norah would come to the tree house in the evenings and share a few highlights of her day or week with me, but she usually kept the focus off herself and on other people. My parents didn’t seem to mind that Norah often joined me in the tree house, at least they never said anything to indicate they minded. I was pretty sure Nell and Darrel had no idea how often Norah snuck out her bedroom window to crawl into the tree house. I was also pretty sure that if either of them were to find out, they would put a stop to it, if for no other reason than to rob Norah of a little joy. When she did come she always asked if the lady from the embassy had called—she hadn’t. She always asked if I would be spending any time with Kieran—I did sometimes. And occasionally she would ask if she could read one of the stories I was writing. I usually and sheepishly declined.

One crisp evening in mid-October, however, I agreed to read her the first chapter of the science-fiction story I was working on. It was about a family whose car had gotten stuck in a snowdrift during a blizzard when they were just a few hundred yards from their farmhouse. They left their stranded vehicle, and as they groped through the blinding, icy whiteness, they had come upon a barn. Thinking it was their own, they had opened the door, relieved to be able to wait out the storm in its safe confines. But once they were inside they realized it was not their barn. And then they were somehow transported to another time, another place—a place where they were not safe. A place where they were being hunted. The strange barn was still their hiding place, but not from a snowstorm. From something else. Something far more dangerous.

“That’s a really good story,” Norah said when I was finished.

Inside I was beaming, but I pretended to shrug off the compliment. “I’ve got a ways to go,” I said.

“Yeah, but I can almost feel the snow, I can almost feel their fear. It’s almost like you know what it’s like to be afraid.”

I didn’t know what to say to this observation. Of course I knew what it was like to be afraid. Every kid grows up being afraid of something—big dogs, the bogeyman, shots. But I also sensed that Norah was somehow seeing past all that; past all the little childish things to what everyone eventually learns to fear no matter
how old they are: the bad things that happen over which they have no control.

“Um, thanks,” I mumbled.

“Did I ever tell you I like to write poems?” she said after a long
pause.

As she spoke, a chilly early fall breeze swept though. I wrapped my arms around my knees. I remembered sitting in the tree house on a long-ago, disquieting day when she was ten, and giving her a piece of paper from my notebook because she wanted
to write a poem.

“Maybe,” he answered.

“Not all of them rhyme, but some of them do. My seventh-
grade English teacher told me not all poems have to rhyme. Do
you like poetry?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I did not. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“Do you want to see one? I mean, I could go get one and you
can read it.”

I was envisioning a trite roses-are-red-violets-are-blue
nursery rhyme and was already dreading trying to pretend I liked it. But I nodded anyway. “Um, sure.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Norah scrambled out of the tree house, picking her way back across the limb to Nell’s garage roof. I watched her crawl back
inside her bedroom window.

It seemed like she was gone a long time. When she finally emerged from the window she held a plastic bag in her hand. A corner of a blue paper stuck out of her pants pocket. She made her way back and set the bag down. Inside were two chocolate cupcakes. Then she pulled out the piece of blue paper and handed it to me.

“I wrote it for my mom. It’s about whales.”

I took the paper and held it up to the light of my battery-powered camping lantern. The evenly spaced writing flowed across the page.

Underneath the rocking sea

In the shadows of the deep

The mighty kings in silent rule

Swim the lengths of the salty pool

Blast of steam
,
plume of spray

Tails and fins like pennants wave

But barely touch the world of man

Content to stay where time began

No show of force to change or scorn

Nature’s way, Earth’s slow turn

Unconcerned or unaware

That a world of light and air

Is not far; just there it lies

Just above their hooded eyes.

I read it again, seeing the giant fins, tasting the salt water, and feeling the deep vastness of the ocean. It scared me how good it was. It suddenly seemed—to my surprise—that Norah had an innate talent for writing that outmatched my own. And she was younger than I was. I felt a tiny coil of jealousy wrap itself around my awe.

“Wow,” I said softly. “This is good, Norah.”

“Really? You think so?”

“Yeah. Sure. Don’t you think it is?”

“I don’t know. I like the way I felt when I wrote it,” she said. “I had to use a dictionary for some of the words. I needed another word for feathers. When whales breach and blow water out their
blowholes, the water looks just like those feathery things knights wear on their helmets. I found the word ‘plume’
in the dictionary. I
love the way it sounds. And I love the word ‘pennants’ too. When
whales wave their tails, it looks like fans waving those triangle-shaped flags at a football game. They’re called pennants. Did you
know that?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, swallowing my envy and handing the blue paper back to her. “I mean it. It’s really good, Norah.”

But she made no move to take the piece of paper.

“You know, the whales don’t know what they’re missing, but they don’t seem to care. They don’t know there’s this whole other world above them. No one knows how to tell them.”

She still made no move to take it.

“Yeah, I can see it all, just like you said you could feel the snow
and sense the fear in my story,” I said, his arm still extended. “Don’t… don’t you want it back?”

She looked at the piece of paper in my hand. “Maybe you can
keep it for me in your notebook there. Sometimes things get lost in my room.”

She didn’t say it, but I wondered if maybe Nell had a habit of
throwing stuff out she could see no purpose for.

“Sure,” I said, withdrawing my hand. I folded the piece of paper and stuck it in the pages of my notebook.

Norah seemed to relax when her poem was suddenly safe from
people who wouldn’t understand why she wrote it. She reached down and picked the little bag up. “Want a cupcake?” she said, opening the bag. “I made them, but they’re pretty good.”

“Okay.” I reached to take a cupcake from her. “Special occa
sion or something?”

“It’s my birthday, “ she said casually. “I’m fourteen today.”

Something in the way she said it, so nonchalantly, made me
pause. “It’s your birthday?” I finally said.

“Yeah. My mom usually makes the cupcakes…” She stopped mid-sentence and turned her head toward the window opening, looking past the houses on the other side of the street, past the
treetops, past the silvery, moonlit Halcyon water tower.

“Well… happy birthday, Norah,” I said clumsily.

She turned her head back to me. Her gray eyes
were moist.
“Thanks.”

“Did… you get anything?” I couldn’t help asking. I hoped
to God she did.

“Grandma’s still mad at me about the Mexico phone call. She gave me some socks today, but she told me it was ’cause I needed
them anyway. My dad gave me a ten-dollar bill. I think I might
give it to Grandma to pay for the phone call. Maybe she’ll forget
about it then.”

Several long moments of silence passed between us. I
suddenly had an idea.

“Sometimes I like to imagine things in here, in the tree house.” I was instantly aware I was blushing. No one else knew this about me. Certainly not Matt or Derek. But he continued. “Sometimes I close my eyes
and pretend I’m somewhere else. That I
am
someone else. It gives me ideas for my stories.”

Norah said nothing. Her gray eyes blinked.

“It’s a good place for imagining things different than how they
are,” I continued.

Still she said nothing.

“Want to try it?”

“Okay,” she said, tentatively.

“Okay. Close your eyes.”

She obeyed.

“Now, picture something you would have liked to have gotten for a birthday present today. Can you picture it?”

“Yes.”

“Can you picture it wrapped up in paper you like?”

“Yes.”

“What does the package look like?”

“Well, it’s… it’s square. The paper is dark blue with silver stars on it. And the bow is made of shining white ribbon that my mom curled with her scissors. She used the whole roll.”

“You want to open it?” I was unable to keep from smiling. Norah knew how to play my game.

“Yes!”

“Okay! Open it.”

Her hands made movements like she was untying a ribbon and tearing away paper.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s Navajo jewelry,” she answered, eyes still closed. “The turquoise stones are creamy blue, and the silver shines like sunlight. There’s a bracelet. And a necklace. And earrings. And they’re just like the ones my mom saw in a store in Arizona, the ones she said she would buy me if she won a million dollars.”

“So put them on.”

And Norah smiled with her eyes
closed and placed the imaginary jewelry on herself. She opened her eyes and laughed.

I snapped off a twig from outside, removed the leaves, and broke it in half. I placed the tiny stick in the middle of her cupcake. “I’ll just light the candle here,” I said.

I pretended to strike a match and then held the imaginary flame to the pretend candle. “Now make a wish.”

“Aren’t you going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me?” she said, grinning.

“If you can picture the flame, you can picture me singing. Now, make a wish and blow out your candle.”

Norah smiled and took a breath, deciding on her wish. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.”

She leaned over and blew air over the tiny stick. I clapped. “Well done.”

She laughed. “That was fun!” She picked up her cupcake, and then she shook her head as she took the stick out of it. “That was really fun.”

She paused for a moment, then said, “No wonder.”

“No wonder, what?” I said, picking up my own cupcake
and starting to peel the paper away.

“No wonder Kieran loves Tommy so much. Pretending makes
you happy even if it’s not real.”

We ate our cupcakes in silence.

Later that evening as I was getting ready for bed, I told
my mother that it had been Norah’s birthday that day. I told her
about the cupcakes, the socks, and the ten-dollar bill.

Four days later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, my mother invited Norah and Kieran over for supper. She made Mexican food. And
served cupcakes for dessert.

By the end of October, the weather had turned frosty. It was a time of year that I both loved and hated. I liked sledding,
playing ice hockey on the outdoor rink with my friends, and waking
up to find out school had been cancelled because of snow. But it also meant the end of my evenings in the tree house. By the first part of November, a dusting of snow already covered the ground,
and the tree house was officially closed for the winter. At least it was
according to my mother. I had never thought a little snow and
ice was that big of a problem, but my mother did not allow me to
climb out the window once the first snow fell.

I saw less of Norah and Kieran once the weather changed. With the onset of winter weather—which, in the Midwest, always
arrived before the calendar said it should—and the freezing of Goose Pond, Norah began taking her brother to the indoor pool
at the high school to satisfy Kieran’s addiction to swimming. They went almost every day after classes were let out. I worked at the
Herald after school, so I couldn’t join them, though sometimes
Ethan did. My mother began inviting them for Sunday dinner
every week, and most Sundays they came. Sometimes Norah and Kieran came with us to church, too. The invitation was always extended to Nell and Darrel as well, but they never came.

Norah and Kieran were speechless with wonder when the first real snowstorm blanketed Halcyon in bridal white. Neither of them had ever seen that much snow before, and their amazement amused me. The day of that first big November snowfall instead of going swimming, they joined Ethan and I after school on the snow-covered hills at the Halcyon Golf Course for their first experience with sledding. Half an hour into their fun, when Ethan and Norah were taking their turns on the sledding run, Kieran turned to me and said under his breath, “Tommy really likes the snow!”

I turned to him, noticing he was making a circle of perfectly
formed footprints in the mini-drift under his booted feet. It had
been a couple weeks since I had been alone with Kieran, and not much headway had been made—since then or before then—with regard to Tommy. Norah had told me that her brother was becoming more secretive about Tommy, which was both good and
bad. It was good in that his new teacher hadn’t seemed to notice
anything strange about Kieran other than that he was a bit behind academically. It was bad in that Norah’s brother was still firmly attached to his imaginary friend—attached to the point he felt he had to protect Tommy from being discovered by the grown-ups.
Kieran apparently feared for Tommy’s safety.

I watched him for a few seconds, swallowed, and then casu
ally called his name.

“Yeah?” Kieran answered, still plodding around in the snow.

“I don’t see any of Tommy’s footprints.”

He stopped but didn’t look up. There was a long pause.

“He has magic snow boots so they don’t show,” he finally said, but he sounded unsure of himself, like he, too, was troubled that
his friend made no prints in the snow.

“Too bad,” I said, looking away nonchalantly. “Making footprints is fun.”

Kieran said nothing more, and neither did I. Ethan and Norah returned then with the sleds so we could have a turn.

I didn’t say anything to Norah that day, but I was pretty sure there was no way I was going to pry Tommy out of her brother’s hands before Christmas. No way at all.

A few days later, basketball season began. my schedule got a little more complicated. In addition to schoolwork, basketball practice, and working at the paper, I operated the sound board for my mother’s fall play rehearsals and then the performances in mid-November. Despite my full days, though, I found himself especially looking forward to playing basketball, more so than in years past. First, I was now on the varsity squad, and second, Norah and Kieran had said they would come to all my home games. I’d been working on my three-point shot, and my coach was very pleased with my averages. I was making eighty percent of my attempts during practices. I was looking forward to impressing Norah with a tie-breaking, game-saving three-pointer. I was certain it would happen sometime during the season.