In All Deep Places (20 page)

I knew this was no test. The high-pitched wail meant a severe
thunderstorm was on its way—or worse, a tornado.

“Get inside!” I yelled again to Ethan.

Just then Norah appeared at Nell’s front door.

“What s going on?” she hollered.

I ran over to her. “Where’s Kieran?”

“I’m right here!” her brother called out from behind her.

“C’mon!” I yelled, holding the door open and motioning them out.

“What is it?” she exclaimed.

Kieran’s eyes were wide with fear. I was sure they’d heard the siren go off before during tests—hadn’t they?

“Bad storm! We need to get to the basement. Go inside our house with Ethan!”

“I need to close the windows!” Norah yelled. The wind was getting stronger. The sky turned a sick shade of green.

“No time!” I yelled. I yanked Nell’s door shut and ran with
Norah and Kieran across the lawns and into our house.

Ethan was standing at the top of the basement stairs and his eyes
were also wide with panic.

“Go!” I yelled to my brother.

He ran down the stairs while I fought with the front door.

“Go!” I yelled over my shoulder to Norah and Kieran.

I heard the door click, and then I, too, ran for the stairs.

“Keep going!” I yelled to Ethan, who had stopped by the couch
in the middle of the room. “Go into Mom’s canning closet!”

Ethan pulled open the bi-fold doors and ran inside the unfin
ished part of the basement, the others behind him. The concrete floor felt cold on our bare feet. Then the single light bulb winked
out, and Ethan gasped.

“It’s just the power,” I said calmly, but my heart was pounding. “Sometimes the winds snap the lines.”

“Is… is it a tornado?” Norah whispered.

“Maybe,” I replied, and Ethan whimpered behind me.

“I hate tornadoes!” said my brother, and his thirteen-year-old man-boy voice was thick was dread. “I hate ’em! I hate ’em!”

As I watched Ethan, Kieran leaned into his sister.

Outside the siren continued to moan. The tiny window above
our heads revealed nothing but flashes of branches and who knows what else, and the howling wind made the house creak. Something
hit the window, and everyone jumped.

Suddenly Kieran shouted.

“Tommy! I forgot Tommy! I have to go back and get Tommy!”

He ran for the doors, and Norah screamed. I reached out and grabbed him. Ethan took a step back in astonishment.

“We have to stay here, Kieran! It’s not safe to go up yet,” I
yelled.

“But I forgot Tommy! I have go back and get him!” He fought
to free himself from my grasp.

“No! Don’t let him go!” Norah cried.

“Kieran! We can’t leave the basement until the siren stops! Not
until the siren stops!”

“Tommy! Tommmmmyyyyy!” Kieran yelled, tears coursing
down his cheeks.

Help me, God!
I
breathed a prayer. Or maybe I yelled it.

I went for the first idea that came into my head.

“Kieran!” I yelled, holding onto the squirming boy. “Listen to me! Listen to me! Tommy came with me! He ran down the stairs
with me. He’s right here.”

Kieran stopped thrashing. My brother’s face
was pale in the dusky half-light. He surely must think the world
was indeed crashing in all around us. Not just outside the house,
but inside it, too. In that room.

“No, he’s not! I left him,” Kieran said, resuming his struggle.

“Kieran! Listen to me! I was the last one at your grandma’s house! I closed the door, remember? And I closed the door at my house, too. I was the last one in! Tommy came with me. He’s already here. He’s… he’s in the corner over there and… he’s scared, too.”

“He is?” Kieran relaxed in my arms and looked over where
I was pointing.

“Yes,” I said, easing up on my grip.

Norah was staring at me, fixing me with a gaze that I couldn’t interpret. I couldn’t tell if she was mortified or relieved at what
I’d just said to her brother.

Despite the shrieking outside of wind and siren, Kieran stepped away from us, walked over to the corner, and sat down.

“It’ll be okay,” he said to the wall next to him.

His sister walked over and sat down next to him. I joined
her. A dazed Ethan followed.

Sitting down by me he whispered, “What is going
on?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I breathed.

The four of us huddled together, and I began to whisper a three-word prayer I repeated over and over.
God, protect us! God, protect us!
As
I prayed, I felt Norah’s hand search for mine. I let
her find it.

Within five minutes the horrible howling stopped, quickly replaced by a pelting sound.

“What’s that?” Kieran said, breathless.

“Hail,” I answered, looking at the window and seeing the blurry white shapes hit the glass. Then the pelting stopped. A few moments later the siren blew the all-clear sign, and I stood up.

“Is it over?” Norah asked.

“I think so,” I said, listening for any sounds above that would indicate the house had fallen in on us. But it was quiet.

“You guys stay here,” I instructed. “I’m going to see if it’s safe
to come out.”

I pulled open the doors and saw that the rest of the basement was untouched. I ascended the stairs slowly, wondering if I would see open sky where a ceiling used to be. The front window was gone, and shards of glass, as well as dirt clods and roof shingles,
were sprinkled about the couch and carpet. A child’s wagon was
sitting half on, half off the coffee table. I didn’t recognize whose
it was.

I headed up the stairs to make sure the house still had a roof. Ethan’s bedroom window was broken, and a large tree branch was resting on the sill and on the bed we’d just moved. But the rest of the house seemed intact. I ran down the stairs to get the others
and then see what the rest of the town looked like.

“It’s okay to come up,” I said as I went down into the base
ment. Ethan appeared at the bi-fold doors, and he brushed past
me. When I stepped inside the canning closet, Norah and Kieran were still huddled on the floor in the corner.

“It’s okay to come up,” I repeated, a little less confident this
time.

Norah looked up at him.

“What is it?” I said.

Kieran raised his head and blinked at me. “Tommy is shrinking.”

“What?”

“Tommy is shrinking,” he repeated, looking at the spot in the corner where I had pointed.

I looked at Norah, but she said nothing.

“He’s… shrinking?” I asked, flabbergasted.

“He’s getting smaller and smaller. I can hardly hear his voice,”
Kieran said gently. “I think he’s leaving.”

Norah implored me with her eyes
. This is it,
her eyes
were saying.
This is the time. I knew all along it would be you.

“Um, maybe that’s because he did the job he was supposed to
do for you, and now he’s going to help some other little boy,” I
said, hoping she’d been right all along.

“No, that’s not it.”

My mouth gaped open, and I fumbled nervously for more words, better words. “It’s not?” Norah was staring at me
… Don’t blow it,
I imagined her eyes saying.

“No. I was the scared one, and he was always the brave one. But then today I was the brave one. And he was scared. He doesn’t like being scared. So he’s going up to heaven where he won’t be scared
anymore.”

“Oh… sure. Of course,” I said.

“He was a good friend,” Kieran continued.

“The best.”

“So, is he gone, then?” Norah ventured.

“He’s very small now,” Kieran said. “All I can see are his clothes… He’s gone.”

I had no idea what to do next. “You… want to put… to put
the clothes in a little box or something?” I asked
.

“Yeah. A box would be good.”

I rummaged around on the shelves until I found a gift box that smelled like bayberry candles.

“How’s this?” I said, handing it to Kieran.

“That’s good.”

Then he paused.

“Can I do it alone?” he said, looking up at me and his sister.

“Oh! Sure!” I said. Norah rose to her feet. “We’ll just be
right outside.”

I led Norah outside the closet, and we waited by the foot
of the stairs.

“Thank you for everything you did today,” she said. Her eyes
glistened with emotion.

“No big deal,” I replied, but I knew how shallow that
sounded. “I mean, you would have done the same for me.”

She nodded. “Yes, I would have.”

Kieran emerged from behind the doors with the gift box in his
hands.

“Can we… give Tommy a funeral?” he asked, looking up at me.

I looked down at the little box. It was no bigger than the box I’d buried a hamster in a decade ago, and its contents weighed even less. But I knew it carried a troublesome weight Norah had
borne for years.

“Sure,” I said.

And we headed up the stairs.

T
he tornado that sent the residents of Halcyon fleeing to their basements took no lives, but it destroyed seven
homes and one business on the south side of town and cut a swath across surrounding acres of juvenile corn plants, flattening them into tattered green ribbons. Many houses, like ours, had superficial damage, and even this to varying degrees. It was almost like Godzilla had walked through the streets of northern Halcyon swishing his tail, smashing a few windows and knocking down trees, but when he got to the other end of town he’d raised
his reptile leg and brought it crashing down.

On my street, Seventh Avenue, the path of the monster was marked just by a broken window here, an uprooted tree there.
Some houses had missing roof shingles, some had portions of siding
peeled away like sections of an orange—and some were suddenly
without clotheslines, American flags, and plastic lawn animals be
cause these things had simply disappeared.

My tree house received little damage, which surprised me. A portion of the roof was gone and was nowhere in sight, but that
was easily fixed the next day with a fresh piece of plywood and a few nails. In fact, that first day after the tornado, it seemed the
whole town was busy putting things back together. With nearly all
of Halcyon distracted, it was easy for three teenagers and one ten-
year-old to drive out to the cemetery unnoticed.

Earlier in the day, it had been on the tip of my tongue to
suggest Tommy be buried in Nell’s backyard, but before I could
even propose this plan, Kieran told me he wanted to bury his good friend Tommy in between Uncle Kenny—the hero uncle he never knew—and his father. My initial response was to
protest, since the cemetery was owned by the city and I figured
we would get into trouble if we were caught digging in the Janvik plot. But the tiny gift box that held imaginary clothes would require nothing bigger than a small hole. In all likelihood no one would ever know what we were about to do.

Ethan had taken the news of Tommy’s existence and then
sudden nonexistence rather well, I thought, and he actually surprised me by wanting to come to the “funeral.” I told Norah and Kieran after lunch that day that while the adults were busy with insurance adjustors and other clean-up efforts, I would take them to the cemetery at two o’clock. I was prepared to tell my mom, if she asked why I needed the car, that I was taking the
Janvik kids to visit Darrel’s grave, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

At two o’clock, and the four of us headed to the cemetery. It
took only minutes to get there and park the car. I was grateful
that no one else was around. The way to the Janvik plot was fa
miliar; it hadn’t been all that long ago that we’d all been
there on the cold November morning Darrel was laid to rest. I carried a small shovel as we walked up the knoll to the tree that kept the departed Janviks in shaded repose. Norah had plucked a few begonias from Mrs. Liekfisch’s yard, and she held these in her hand. We got to the Janvik plot and stopped.
I waited for Kieran to choose the place.

“This is a good spot,” he said, pointing with his toe to the grass
in between the Janvik brothers’ headstones.

I plunged the blade of the shovel into the earth, scooping out a scalp of sod first and then several more shovelfuls of dirt. Within seconds the small opening was ready. I
stepped back.

Kieran knelt down and placed the box in the hole, touching the lid with his fingers before he stood back up again.

“Shouldn’t we say something?” he said to me.

“Well, sure. You can say whatever you want.”

Kieran looked back at the little white box. “Thanks for being a good friend, Tommy. I will never forget you.”

He stopped and Norah reached down and placed the begonias
on top of the box.

“Can we sing something, too?” Kieran said, turning his head to Luke again.

“Yeah. Sure.”

“I want to sing ‘Away in the Manger.’”

“The Christmas carol?” Norah said as she rose to her feet.

“Not the verse about no crib for a bed or about baby Jesus
never crying. The other one about all the dear children.”

“I don’t know that verse,” Norah said.

“I know it,” I said, quietly.

“So do I,” Ethan said, and I turned to him, oddly grateful.

“Can you sing it? I don’t know all the words,” Kieran said.

I took a breath. I hated singing in front of people. Ethan nodded.
Start and I’ll join you,
his eyes said.

I began, my voice sounding rough and tuneless in my ears. Ethan chimed in on the fourth word:

Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay

Close by me forever and love me I pray

Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care

And take us to heaven to live with Thee there.

“Yes,” Kieran said softly. “That’s the one. Can you sing it again?

So I began it again, Ethan joined me, and so did Kieran,
and by the time we got to “Bless all the dear children,” Norah had
joined in, too.

“’Bye, Tommy,” Kieran said, and he reached down and took a
handful of earth and tossed it over the box. He turned to me and
asked for the shovel. I gave it to him. Kieran put the rest of the
dirt over the box with the shovel and I carefully replaced the first layer of sod I had dug out over the top.

We stood.

A few minutes later the four of them walked back down the
little hill to the parking lot and left.

We went back into town where all around us was the noise of saws and forklifts and hammers putting wrong things
to right.

The summer months passed as the summer months had in years
past, but I felt there was a peculiar finality about them. They
were the last summer months I would spend as a high-school stu
dent. Next May I would graduate. I would head off to college
and the rest of my life. I was impatient for both.

It was different having Norah and Kieran in school and knowing they were actually going to be staying the whole year. At least that was the plan. Norah joined me on the stage crew for the fall musical, which made her a bona fide member of the drama clique and
kept our afternoons and evenings busy.

With a little persuading, my father convinced Nell to let
him help Norah with her behind-the-wheel practice so that in
October she passed her driving test and got her license. She was
happy to have it even though she didn’t have a car of her own to
drive.

In November, my South Dakota grandparents drove down for Thanksgiving and, as in years past, my mother invited the Janviks to join us. To my surprise, Nell accepted the invitation. She was quiet during the meal, and did not stay long afterward but it appeared to me that Nell was almost content with the way things were. Almost. Nell still seemed to regard Norah as a pariah
of sorts—like someone who reminded her of all that was wrong
with her life.

A major snowstorm kept most of Iowa blanketed in their
homes the week of Christmas. We, along with most of Halcyon, stayed home. And while my mom invited the Janviks
to Christmas dinner, Norah declined for them, saying that Nell planned to roast a turkey.

In February, Nell fell on a patch of ice on her driveway and broke both wrists. At first it appeared to be just another stroke of really bad luck for Nell Janvik, but as I watched Norah care
for her it turned out to be best thing that could have happened;
at least for Norah. Nell could do nothing for herself. She couldn’t
work or drive or cook or even light her own cigarettes for several
weeks. Norah did everything for her. And though I never went
over to Nell’s house, I could see how Norah cared for Nell by the silent images I saw in the Janvik windows. I could see—even
when the sheers were pulled and my view somewhat obscured—that Nell had slowly began to see Norah as something other than
a reminder of her losses.

By March, I had decided to attend the University of Iowa,
even though it hadn’t been on my list of “far away” colleges. It had
a great writing program and was close enough to home to keep my mother happy. Plus I was offered a good financial aid package as
an Iowa resident. New York or Hollywood would come later—I was sure of that.

I didn’t go into the tree house much anymore, but every now
and then the branches outside my window would beckon me and I would make my way into the aged wooden refuge. Sometimes
Norah joined me. It was in the tree house that I told her that I’d be moving to Iowa City in August to attend college and that I
was hoping to get an apartment and a job so that I didn’t have to
come home during the summer months.

“Why don’t you want to come home in the summer?” she had
asked.

“There just isn’t anything here for me,” I said, before I had time to consider how that sounded.

“Your family is here,” she said softly, and I could tell there was
deeper meaning behind the words.

“Yes,” I said, looking down at her hands, remembering how on three occasions she had touched me; once at Goose Pond and once there in the tree house when she begged me not to tell my parents about Tommy, and the third time in my mother’s canning
closet when the world above us was being wrenched apart by twisted winds. “But my family will be my family no matter where I am. No address is going to change that.”

“But being away will change other things.”

She didn’t elaborate and I did not ask her to.

It was also in the tree house that I told Norah I was taking
Patti to my senior prom.

She had nodded. But it was a nod of contradictions. Her eyes
betrayed her confusion.

“So, why are you telling me this?” she said when I told her.

“Because I wanted you to know that Patti and I are just friends,”
I replied.

“Just friends,” Norah said absently, like she was tasting the
words.

“It’s not like I am dating her, ’cause I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“Patti thinks maybe I should have asked
you,
but I didn’t think
Nell would let you go since you’re just a sophomore and Nell, well,
Nell—”

“It’s okay,” Norah interrupted me. She had an odd look of satisfaction on her face; like she had just found out she had been right all along about something. “I understand. I don’t think she would
have let me go either.”

“It’s kind of dumb anyway,” I said. “None of the guys like
getting all dressed up like that and parading around in front of our parents at the Grand March.”

“Mmm,” Norah said.

After a few seconds of silence, I decided I was finished talking about the prom. “Heard from your mom lately?” I asked.

Norah shook her head. “It’s been awhile. I don’t think she has anything new to say. That’s why she waits so long in between letters. But it’s okay. When she does write, she tells Kieran and me all
the things we’ll do when she gets out.”

It had been a long time since I had seen Belinda. It was hard to imagine her in jail. It was harder to imagine her showing up on Nell’s doorstep in a year or two to collect her children.

On the day of the prom, Norah didn’t come to the house while Patti and I had our pictures taken, though she had been invited to come over, nor did she show up at the Grand March. In fact, neither she nor Kieran appeared for Sunday dinner
the next day though they had been invited the week before. I
purposely went into the tree house at ten o’clock that Sunday night with a small bag in my hand, hoping Norah would show up. I had something for her.

I waited until ten-fifteen and was about to climb back into my bedroom when I heard the sound of movement on the
garage roof next to me. A few seconds later, Norah climbed in
side.

“I saw your lantern was on,” she said, taking a seat just on the
other side of me.

“You didn’t come to dinner,” I said.

“Kieran had a stomachache.”

“Oh?”

“I gave him some Pepto-Bismol. He’s feeling better now.”

“Oh.”

“I guess I should have called your mom. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was an open invitation. She knows you can’t come
every time.”

She looked at the bag I held in his hands. “What’s that?”
she asked.

I reached into the bag and pulled out a wrist corsage made
of lilies of the valley and silvery-white ribbon. “This was Patti’s
corsage from last night,” I said. “It still looks pretty good, consid
ering. She wanted you to have it.”

I held the corsage out to her and Norah took it, touching the tiny white flowers with her fingertips.

“She wanted me to have it?”

“Yeah, she did.”

Norah pulled the corsage onto her wrist and held her arm out to admire it. “Patti’s probably the only girlfriend I have ever had
who treats me like I’m somebody important.”

I paused for a moment. “Patti’s an exceptional person.”