In All Deep Places (7 page)

“I bet you ten dollars
she’s
not Dutch,” my mother was saying,
scraping up the last bit of ice cream from her bowl with her spoon.

“Well, I bet you ten bucks those aren’t cigarettes they’re
smoking,” my dad replied, pushing his empty bowl toward the center
of the table.

“Jack! Are you serious? Should we call the police or some
thing?”

“I think they’ll be gone in a few days.
That takes care of
that
problem. We still have to live next
door to Nell when they go, you know.”

“But Jack, what about those kids?” my mother said. “When they go, they’ll take their problem’ with them
and
those kids. Don’t you think maybe we should do something? Tell somebody?”

I heard my father sit back in his chair. “I don’t know what kind of father
Darrel is, MaryAnn. I don’t know if his legal troubles necessarily make him a bad one. And I don’t know his wife, or whatever she is,
at all. I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

“Well, I think we should keep our eyes open while they are
here.” My mother rose from her chair, grabbed the bowls, and walked to the sink with them.

“Always a good idea to keep your eyes open—unless you’re sleeping,” Dad said, and I heard his mother chuckle.

I decided then to make my way quietly back to my room without saying anything. As I climbed the stairs I wondered
what it was my parents would be looking for.

I wondered why they would be keeping their eyes open when it came to those kids. And even though I didn’t know why, I
decided I would, too.

The following day began hot and humid and got worse as it wore on. At two o’clock, when Ethan and I began quarreling
over who had the biggest scab, Mom sent us outside to run
through the sprinkler, promising us a Popsicle if we could manage to get along for twenty minutes without fighting.

After cooling down for a few minutes, I went dripping into the garage to get a box of plastic cars so I could sit in the spray of water and pretend the cars were being swept away in a hurricane. When I came back Ethan was standing on the edge of the wet grass talking to Nell’s granddaughter. The girl was wearing green
shorts with white dots and a purple shirt with blue stripes. She
must’ve slept in her braids; wispy, blonde hairs were poking out of
the twists every which way.

“I have to stay outside because Grandma and Kieran and my
mommy are all sleeping,” she was saying to Ethan. “Daddy went to
see friends. He said if I bother them, I’ll get it.”

Ethan stuck his tongue out to catch a drop of sprinkler water falling off the tip of his nose. “What will you get?”

“A spanking, maybe,” the little girl said, looking toward the
house.

I was standing there holding my cars, and she turned to me.

“What’s your name?” she said. Her unkempt hair and crazy
fashion sense didn’t hide her luminous gray eyes
.
I had never seen eyes
that gray before. They were as gray as an old person’s
hair.

“Luke,” he answered.

“My name is Norah Andromeda Janvik. I’m six. Are you six?”

“I’m eight,” I replied, miffed she would think me a candidate for kindergarten. For Pete’s sake. I was going into third
grade in two weeks. And what kind of name was
Andromeda?

“Are you six?” Norah said to Ethan.

“He’s four,” I said quickly.

“Oh.”

“You want to run through the sprinklers with us?” Ethan said.

“Okay.”

Before I could say or do anything else, Norah jumped into the arc of water waving back and forth on my front lawn. She didn’t go inside to put on a bathing suit or to get a towel or to even ask if she could. She just did it. Ethan followed her. They started laughing and squealing. I was still standing there with my box of cars in my hands a few moments later when Mom came outside to see who had joined us. My mom seemed pleased that
Nell’s granddaughter had come over.

“Hey, let’s get the wading pool out!” Mom said. “Luke, come help me.”

Ethan started cheering, and Norah, watching him, started cheering, too.

I set my cars down, followed my mother into the garage, and
steadied a ladder as she reached for a plastic wading pool resting on
the rafters in the garage.

“Here it comes,” Mom said, and the yellow pool half floated, half fell to the garage floor. She climbed down the ladder.

“You grab one end and I’ll grab the other,” she said, and
I obeyed.

We set the pool down on the grass and Mom walked over
to the spigot and turned off the sprinkler.

“Take off the sprinkler and put the hose in the pool, would
you, Luke?” she said. And again, I wordlessly obeyed. Mom turned the spigot back on and the pool began to fill.

“Can I get the bath toys?” Ethan asked.

“Just dry off your feet first.” Then Mom turned to Norah. “I’m Mrs. Foxbourne. I’m Luke and Ethan’s mom.”

“My name’s Norah.”

“Nice to meet you, Norah. Would you like to
go get your swimsuit on, Norah?”

Norah swung her head around to look at Nell’s house.

“No,” she said.

My mother seemed surprised by Norah’s answer. “She can’t go in or she might get spanked,” I said suddenly. I wanted my mother to know I had kept my eyes
open, too. Or
maybe it was my ears.

Mom looked from me to Norah.

“No problem. You can just get your clothes wet. It’s so hot today, they’ll probably dry in no time.”

Ethan came back out of the house with a plastic container of bath toys and dumped the contents into the pool.

“Hey! A whale!” Norah stepped into the pool and plopped down into the water, not seeming to notice the chill. She
picked up a plastic whale in a shade of cobalt blue. “I’ve seen a real
whale. They don’t look like this. They’re gray.”

“I’ve got a giant octopus, too,” Ethan said, stepping into the
pool but easing into the water slowly. He picked up a bright orange
bath toy with sprawling, tentacled legs.

“That’s a squid,” Norah picked up a bucket with a sieve for a bottom and watched the water fall out of out it. “Look! Mer
maid hair!”

I looked over at my mother. She, too, seemed amazed a six-year-old knew the difference between a squid and an octopus.

“You like sea animals, Norah?” Mom said.

“Yup. So does my mom. She was born on the beach. She has a book about ocean animals her daddy gave her. Whales are her favorite. They’re my favorite, too.”

Norah picked up the hose and held it over her head, dousing her crooked braids.

“You going in, Luke?” his mother asked me.

I shook his head.

“I’ll play on the porch with my cars.”

She gave me a look that said,
The pool is plenty big enough for three,
and I gave her one that said,
But I don’t want to go in.

I played in the shade of the porch, lining up my cars on
the top cement step and then sending them crashing off onto the
middle and bottom steps. I pretended not to be interested in
the deep-sea adventures taking place in the wading pool. I didn’t care that Gumby rode the whale. Or that Pokey rode him next. I made crashing noises with my voice as my cars sailed to the cement
walkway.

“Whales aren’t fish,” I heard Norah say. “They breathe air.
They have to come to the top of the water like this.” Norah was bringing the head of the plastic cobalt-blue whale to the choppy surface of the wading pool.

I was watching her, and when I realized it, I tore my eyes
away. I didn’t care what a six-year-old knew about whales. I scooped up my cars and sent them flying off the steps
again.

After a while, my mom came out with a box of Popsicles in one
hand, and a hairbrush and a towel for Norah in the other. While
Norah sat drying in the sun and licking a Popsicle, my mother gently combed out her wet tangled hair and redid her braids.

Then we played Candy Land.

Then we watched cartoons.

All the while, I noticed that my mother kept an eye and ear to the front yard, no doubt ready to explain to Nell or Belinda
that Norah was with us. But no one stepped outside the house
to look for her or call for her.

At four-thirty we went back outside to play. Norah sat on my dad’s old skateboard and scooted around in the
driveway while Ethan puttered around her on a red tricycle. I pedaled back and forth up and down the sidewalk on my new two-wheel bike, waiting for Dad to come home from the newspaper office. At a quarter to five, Belinda opened the screen door of Nell Janvik’s house. She had the baby on her shoulder and a cigarette in
her other hand.

“Norah!” she called.

“’Bye!” Norah scampered off the skateboard and ran back to Nell’s house without looking back. The skateboard rolled
to a stop by a forsythia bush.

Ethan and I watched her go. She didn’t glance back once.

“Hey, baby doll!” Belinda said when Norah reached her. “Did
you have fun with the kids next door?”

They went inside, and I didn’t hear Norah’s answer. I
wondered, though, how Norah’s mom knew she had been with us. I didn’t see how she could. She had to have just suddenly realized it and then been perfectly okay with it. I thought that
was both odd and spectacular. My mother always had to know
where I was. I wondered how long Darrel and his family were
staying and if Norah would be coming over again. I couldn’t decide if I liked that idea or not. She was a girl, after all.

But Norah did come over the next afternoon and the next. And apparently without having to check in with anybody. It was almost
as if she was accountable to no one. As if she were older than I was. Knew more. Feared less.

All the while Nell’s company stayed with her, the lights were always on in the house, and there always seemed to be some kind of yelling going on. Happy yelling, raucous yelling, and mad yelling.
And in between the yelling were the intermittent wails of the baby.

And none of it seemed to faze Norah, who came and went
without comment on any of it.

On the morning of the fourth day, the Janvik house was eerily quiet as Darrel began shoving cardboard boxes back in the van. A few minutes after nine, Norah got into the van, followed by Belinda, Darrel, and baby Kieran. The van’s motor coughed to life, and Darrel backed out of the driveway, honking twice as he drove away. Nell was watching them drive away from just
inside her screen door.

I watched, too, from just inside mine.

I didn’t see Norah again for four years. Not until I was
twelve.

She came again the summer my father built the tree house.

A
July day in Halcyon can be hot and sticky, breezy and cool, or cloudy with haze. It can begin sunny and pleasant and then end in blinding thunderstorms that make the grain
farmers pace their kitchens in worry. It can distinguish an outdoor birthday party or ruin it. Summer days in Halcyon, contrary to its name, are defined by extreme weather that accompanies them, just
like most winter days are.

I would always remember the day Norah came back to visit Halcyon as being breezy and sticky at the same time—an odd combination.

We had just returned from a weeklong family vacation to South Dakota—all of the Foxbourne family vacations were seven days long because my dad would entrust the paper to his employees for one press day, and only one. I awoke
a little after ten that first morning back, glad that my mother let me sleep in because at twelve I was already learning that sleeping
in helped fill long, boring summer days. It was also the day before Halcyon’s annual Wooden Shoes Festival. My dad usually took his summer vacation the week before the festival because there was so much preview information that the paper practically wrote
itself the week he was away.

When I came downstairs that morning, Ethan was watching
The Price is Right
on TV, and Mom was scurrying about in the kitchen, obviously late for something.

“Oh, good. You’re up,” she said when I came in. “I’m running
late. I was supposed to be at the gym at ten to help decorate for the coronation tonight.” She pointed to a box on the kitchen table. “We got our mail from when we were gone, and there’s an envelope in there that should have gone to Nell. It got put with our stuff by mistake. Can you take it over to her later this afternoon? And don’t just put it in her mailbox, Luke. She’ll wonder why it’s so late, and it’s not the carrier’s fault. Just tell her whoever sorted at the post
office that day just made a mistake, okay?”

I rolled my eyes
.
Why did I have to make excuses for the post office? “I don’t see why I can’t just put it in her mailbox,” I
said, grabbing a cereal bowl from the cupboard.

“Because, Luke, it’d be better for everybody if you just tell her what happened than for her to jump to conclusions,” Mom
said, grabbing her car keys.

“It’d be better for everybody if she just jumped off a cliff,”
I
mumbled.

Mom ruffled my hair as she walked past me. “Nice come
back, dear, but you don’t want to grow up to be like her, now, do
you?”

I bristled at the unthinkable and then grabbed a spoon from
the dish drainer.

“Oh,” Mom said, popping her head back through the
doorway. “Don’t go over there until you know she’s up. Oh, and if you and Matt go to the swimming hole today and there’s no adult there, wading only. Don’t go where you can’t touch the bottom.
And take Ethan with you.”

“Mom!”

“I mean it, Luke. I mean ‘em both. Wading only if there’s no adult, and Ethan has to go with you. See you late this afternoon.”

Then she was gone. I heard her yell a goodbye to Ethan in the other room.

As I ate my Lucky Charms I glowered at the envelope my mother had left leaning on a pitcher filled with plastic daisies.

Surprisingly, it was the envelope that annoyed me more than the thought of wading like a four-year-old in the swimming hole—even more than taking Ethan with me. I had long ago vowed to have as little to do with Nell Janvik as possible. My dad made me shovel her driveway every now and then in wintertime, but she was never awake when I did it, so thankfully I never had to talk to her. The only other times I ventured onto her property were to retrieve a ball or sometimes to play the tiniest of tricks on her. The tricks were mostly harmless, and I only did them when Matt, my best friend, was over and we were bored. And when Ethan wasn’t around to tattle.

Matt and I had once filled Nell’s gardening shoes with water. They had been easy to get to because, like in most small Midwest towns, there were no fences between the houses and Nell always left her shoes on her back-door step. She had cursed something terrible when she slipped her feet into them, and Matt and I, who were hiding behind the giant forsythia bush between the two houses, nearly suffocated trying not to laugh out loud. And then one time while she was sleeping, Matt and I had twisted into an impossible mess the tiny strands on the wind chime that hung on her porch. She had cursed then, too, when she noticed it the next day. Matt hadn’t been around to hear Nell call down curses on the wind, so I had to tell him how she’d mumbled obscenities and then finally grabbed the chimes and thrown them into her garbage can, sending a cacophony of nightmarish music, for a brief moment anyway, from out of the depths of her garage.

The most recent trick we’d played on her had been just a month earlier. It was actually sort of dangerous, and I’d had the first serious pangs of guilt. Nell’s car had been sitting outside her garage in her driveway. Matt and I had snuck over to it, released the
parking brake, and then slipped the transmission out of park. We scrambled back to my porch as the car slowly rolled down the
driveway and came to a quiet stop in the middle of the street.
Someone driving by had to pull over and get out, and come to the
door to tell Nell her car was blocking traffic.

Matt had still been laughing when he’d gone home an hour
later. But as the day wore on, I couldn’t stop imagining how Nell’s car could have caused an accident. Someone might have gotten hurt. My conscience had needled me the rest of the day.

As I sat at the kitchen table now, a month later, eating Lucky
Charms and looking at Nell’s mail, I still felt it: the shame of
having wronged a person who hardly ever had anything good
happen to her.

Ethan came into the kitchen and ambled over to the kitchen
table, noticing the propped-up envelope.

“Penna… Penna… Penna-Loap. Penna-loap,” he sounded out, looking at the envelope. “Who would name their kid ‘Penna-loap’?”

“That’s ‘Penelope,’ you dufus,” I said, giving my brother a look of hearty irritation. “That’s Nell’s real name.”

“That’s
‘Penelope’? Looks like Penna-loap to me.”

I suddenly had an idea. “Mom wants you to take this over
to Nell’s later.”

“Liar. I heard her tell you that
you
had to take something over
to Nell’s.”

I pushed my chair back and stomped over to the sink with
my bowl. “Well, why can’t you do it?”

“She asked you. Besides, I don’t like Nell.”

“You think I do?”

Ethan grabbed the Lucky Charms box and walked back to the
living room with it. “I’m not doing it.”

“C’mon. I’ll give you fifty cents,” I called after him.

“I wouldn’t do it for fifty dollars.”

“You would so, you little twerp.”

“I would not.”

“Would so.”

“Would not.”

I fumed for a moment longer and then took the stairs, two
at a time, up to my room. I stepped out of my pajama bottoms
and pulled on a pair of swimming trunks and a T-shirt. I hoped Matt remembered we were going to the swimming hole later this afternoon. At least that had been our plan when I had left for South Dakota the previous week. I would call Matt after lunch—after
taking that stupid envelope to Nell. Until then, I’d go into the tree house with my notebook. I had a story idea about a brave
young man with a dolt for a brother who had to live next door to
an evil witch.

I had written a page-and-a-half, had read some of the comic books I kept in the tree house, and then was starting to
write again when I heard the sound of a car in Nell’s driveway. I peered out of a well-placed knothole. The car was silvery blue with a speckling of rust around every wheel rim. It made all kinds of noises when whoever was driving tried to shut it off. The engine finally died, and the driver’s door opened. A skinny man, bald on
top but with lots of hair on the sides, stepped out. Even with his
limited view, I thought I knew him. Behind the man another car door opened, and a girl with honey-blonde hair climbed out.
She turned and then leaned back inside. I couldn’t see what she
was doing. Then she stepped back and helped a little boy get out. The two children stretched and yawned like they had been asleep, though I figured it was after eleven by now. I moved to one
of the window openings in the tree house and cautiously looked out. The car had California plates. The girl looked up then, and our eyes met. I scooted back.

I knew who these people were. I remembered their faces.
At least the man and the little girl’s faces. The baby was now a four-year-old boy.

Darrel. Norah. Kieran.

But where was Belinda?

I listened as I heard the door of the trunk open and close.

“I want my pillow,” the little boy said.

“Let’s just leave it in the car right now, bud,” Darrel said.
“C’mon. Lets see if Grandma is awake.”

I heard Darrel and the kids walk up to the porch, heard Darrel try the knob, heard it stop in his hands. He began to knock.
“Ma! Ma!” he called.

“MA!” Darrel repeated louder when there was no answer.

Finally, Luke heard the door open.

“Good Lord!” Nell’s voice.

I had never heard Nell say anything about God that made it seem like she thought He was good. It was usually the other way
around. But she said it today.
Good Lord.

“Hey, Ma!” Darrel said. “Hope you don’t mind us stoppin’
through.”

Nell let out a long sigh. “It wouldn’t stop you from comin’ though, would it—if you thought I minded.”

“Grandma’s just foolin’!” Darrel said happily.

I heard the door open wide on squeaky hinges. Then it
shut.

I had to take that stupid envelope over, and
now Nell had company. That weird Darrel. And those kids.

I scooted across the branch to the window and climbed back into my bedroom. I walked out and down the hall to my parents’
room to call Matt.

But Matt wasn’t home.

“He’s gone to his cousin’s house for the day,” his mother said.

“Oh. Okay.”

I hung up.
Well, that’s just wonderful
. None of my other friends lived in town. That meant the only person to go with me to the swimming hole this afternoon was
Ethan. I wasn’t allowed to go there alone, and who could say
if anyone else would be there today? And it didn’t matter that I
could swim circles around my brother. My parents wouldn’t let me go to the swimming hole alone. Ever.

I trudged down the stairs. Ethan was still watching TV, but he had a jigsaw puzzle out and was sorting the pieces.

“So you want to come to Goose Pond with me?” I said, his voice flat.

Ethan whipped his head around. “Why?”

I gave him a look of exasperation. “Because it’s hot and
we’ve got nothing better to do.”

“Yeah, but you called me a twerp,” Ethan said, furrowing his brow and wondering perhaps if I might be planning to
drown him.

“So?”

Ethan threw a puzzle piece into the box and stood up. “Okay.”

“Let’s take some sandwiches,” I said, and Ethan followed
me into the kitchen.

A few minutes later we carefully placed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches into my school bag, empty now since it was summer. A bag of Cheetos went into the bag next along with two
cans of Orange Crush.

“Go get some towels and I’ll put air in the bike tires,” I said, heading out the front door to the garage at the back. The
mile-long dirt road to the swimming hole was best traveled with firm tires. I had nearly finished when I heard Nell’s back door
open and shut. Then I heard voices.

“Bel and me are havin’ a rough time right now,” Darrel said
in a quiet voice. “She’s living with one of her girlfriends. But she’ll
come back.”

“You been sleepin’ around on her?” Nell asked, and I felt
my face grow warm.

“Thanks a lot, Ma!”

“Well, have you?”

There was a moment of silence. I didn’t make a sound as I
listened.

“Hey, it’s not like she hasn’t been sleepin’ around on me!”

“Did you learn
nothing
from the hell I went through with your
father?” Nell snorted.

“She left
me,
Ma. It ain’t the way it was with you and Dad. She
left
me!”

Seconds of silence.

“She left those kids, too? You telling me she left her kids?” Nell’s
voice again.

“She… I… I wouldn’t let her take them. I took them to a friend’s house. She didn’t know where they were. She’s doing drugs again, Ma. I don’t want the kids getting mixed up with all that.”

More seconds of silence.

“Does she know you’re here? Does she know the kids are here?”
Nell said.

“I’m not stayin’ long, Ma. I’ll go back and we’ll work it out. I
know we will. She’ll realize she can’t do drugs and have the kids, and then she’ll come back and she’ll be clean again.”

“So why did you come?” Nell said after a pause.

“Because, Ma,” Darrel said, “Norah and Kieran are your grandkids. Don’t you want to see them?”

“Darrel, did it ever occur to you I might want more than just
a visit from you every three or four years? That a phone call that doesn’t include a plea for money would be nice? That a note to tell me where you’re living would sure be helpful? I sent those kids Christmas presents two years in a row and they came back undeliverable both times because you didn’t have an address and didn’t
even bother to tell me.”