In All Deep Places

by Susan Meissner

  Luke told his wife good night, clicked off the phone, and then grudgingly turned on his laptop, which was sitting on the bed next to him. He opened his current manuscript to chapter ten, the chapter that refused to be written. The house was quiet, and there was no reason to suspect he would have any distractions. But the words would not come.

  After ten unproductive minutes, he was suddenly struck with an idea. He had a box somewhere in this house of his first stories and rough drafts, written when he was still in high school. In that box were three or four notebooks of stories and ideas as well as a large envelope full of newspaper articles he had read as a teenager that he had thought would inspire great stories. There was no way his mother would have thrown that box out. No way. He thought of calling her at the hotel to ask where it was, but he decided he would look first and then call her if he came up with nothing. Maybe in that box was a story idea that would break the spell, give him back his enthusiasm for writing. He could file this one away or pitch it altogether if he was able to start fresh with a new story.

  Energized, Luke walked into his old room, opening the closet doors and scanning the floor and the shelves above the hangers that held his parents’ winter clothes. No luck. He looked under the bed. No box. Next he tried Ethan’s room. Not there, either. He descended the stairs to the kitchen and then went down into the basement, flipping on a light. The finished part of the basement hadn’t changed a great deal in the seventeen years he had been gone. The Foosball table was gone. In its place was some sort of quilting frame. But the same tired-looking couch and TV set where he had watched scary movies with Ethan were still there, as was his grandmother’s sewing machine and an antique wardrobe full of his mother’s costumes. She had been retired from teaching drama at the high school for five years, but her favorite costumes were still in the wardrobe. Luke saw them when he opened the wooden doors, looking for his box.

  He then went through the bi-fold doors into the unfinished part of the basement known as his mother’s canning closet, stepping onto the cold concrete floor with bare feet. He winced at the chill. As he stood there letting his eyes adjust to the dim light, he remembered the time he and Ethan had fled to this room with Norah and Kieran when the tornado siren went off. The place looked the same as it did that day. Smelled the same. But the beating of his heart had been radically different. He had been scared to death that day.

  Luke mentally moved past the memory as he poked his head into a few large boxes. He moved a few items as he searched for the box, like the rolled-up tent, a box that contained an artificial Christmas tree, the sleeping bags, and an old dehumidifier. He was about to go back upstairs and call his mother when he saw the box sitting atop a set of metal shelves. On the box’s side, in his mother’s handwriting, he saw the words, Luke’s Writings. He walked over and stood on tiptoe to reach it. A plastic bag half full of Christmas paper plates fell on his head as he lowered the box—he closed his eyes as a little cloud of dust arose. He coughed and made his way out of the chilly room, closing the doors behind him.

  He sat down on the old couch with the box and loosened the twine that held its flaps closed. Comic books, old essays from high school, and even a broken kazoo had found their way inside it, but he skipped past these to look for the spiral-bound notebooks-four of them, all blue. He found them at the bottom. He could not help but smile as he pulled them out. He had been so full of ambition and desire when these notebooks were a part of his daily life. He fingered the covers, remembering how he had dreamed of becoming an author, of getting published, of making it big. He slowly opened the first one, ready to feast on its contents, hoping, like he had back then, that there was a best-selling story idea inside it.

  He scanned the first couple of pages, finding nothing of great interest. As he turned another page, he came across a folded piece of paper. It was pale blue, and when he saw it, it literally took his breath away. He knew in an instant what was written on the inside. He had not seen it or even thought about it in years… perhaps he had purposefully forgotten about it.

  He carefully lifted it from the notebook. For a moment, he considered not unfolding it. Just slipping it back into the box—or better yet, balling it up and throwing it away. But it was only the passing thought of a split second. He knew he would read it. And he knew he would probably never be able to throw it away… because he had never forgotten how moved he had been the first time he had read what was written there.

  He had been fifteen then; Norah, just barely fourteen. They were sitting in his tree house. Norah had snuck out of her house while her grandmother, Nell, smoked and watched reruns of Fantasy Island on her downstairs TV. Kieran was already in bed. It was early October, and there had been a twinge of frost in the night air. He’d just read to her the first chapter of a story he was writing. After she told him she’d liked what he’d read very much, she’d announced she’d written a poem.

  “You did?” he had said. •

  “It’s about the whales,” she had replied.

  And she’d given no other explanation, because Luke had already known that Norah and Kieran’s fascination with whales sprang from the good memories they had of their mother—a woman who adored whales, among a bevy of other odd things.

  Norah had crawled back to her grandmother’s house, re-entered her bedroom window, and returned with a piece of blue stationery—Nell’s, no doubt, which Norah surely had had to steal from her.

  “Would you like to read it?” she had said, handing it to him.

  Luke unfolded the paper now in his parents’ basement nineteen years later and read.

  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.

  In his memory, Luke saw himself reading the poem in wonder. “This is really good,” he had said to Norah when he was finished.

  “You really think so?” she’d replied eagerly. “I have some others. Would you like to see them some time?”

  Luke had said yes.

  But she had never shown them to him. It wasn’t too long after that that she and Kieran had been sent to live with Nell’s sister in Minnesota. It was almost a year before they returned, and by that time, Norah had stopped writing poems.

  Luke refolded the blue piece of paper and tucked it back inside the notebook. Memories, unbidden and unwelcome, washed over him—and though he tried, he could not stop them from coming. He didn’t want to think about his unfinished book anymore at that moment. He slipped the notebooks under his arm, climbed the stairs to the kitchen, then to the bedrooms.

  His head was swirling with events from his past, warm snippets of good times, sharp aches from the bad ones. He oddly felt like he did when a new story idea came to him, invading his brain and leaving him restless and unable to concentrate on anything else. Story ideas like that never gave him any peace until he began writing. It was how he had begun all his previous books—except the current one, the one that refused to be written. Or rather, the one he didn’t want to write.

  He made his way back to Ethan’s old room and tossed the notebooks onto the bed. But he found himself staring at their covers. The pages in those notebooks held stories and ideas written during the most difficult times of his teenage years, and yet he had never written anything, not one word, about what he’d actually experienced. And he suddenly found that odd because he made sense of everything by writing about it. He always had. It was as if he wanted to pretend it had never happened.

  He gl
anced at the open laptop on the bed beside the blue notebooks—his new way of writing resting beside the old. He felt something like a shiver course through him as an idea slowly formed in his head. Maybe it had been no accident he’d found that poem today. Maybe it was no accident he was alone in his childhood home—and would be for many days—away from his comfortable life as Mystery Writer of the Year. Maybe it was no accident that now, when he found himself doubting his purpose and vision for his life, he was thrust back in time to the place where his hopes and dreams for his life had begun. And where some of them had ended.

  For years he had thought the niggling voice that every so often called out, “Remember Norah?” was a hellish voice sent to taunt him with the garbage of the past. It was why he had pushed it away, kept his distance from Halcyon, refused to look back. Now, in the surreal quiet of his childhood home, he began to consider that the voice was not hellish after all, but quite the opposite. Perhaps it was not a taunting question meant to chain him to grief, but a command from heaven not to forget her. An instruction.

  Not “Remember Norah?” but “Remember Norah.”

  Remember her.

  He saw in his mind the woman in the green dress from the writer s conference, the silvery hue of her steel-gray eyes. Norah’s eyes. No wonder he could not get the image of that woman out of his head. It wasn’t seeing his fictional Eden that bewildered him. It was seeing Norah. He had been physically confronted with the part of his past he understood the least.

  He was at once aware of a powerful urge to open the laptop and write. He had not felt this way in months. With the desire came the strangest notion that the story he simply had to write was his own. It would mean a departure from the Red Herring Detective Agency. It would mean a vacation for Aaron and Eden. It was quite possible that whatever he wrote would never see printer s ink. Alan might not approve. Might have a fit. And Luke was certain his editor’s words “Tell Luke to take all the time he needs” did not extend to starting a whole new book about himself and doing nothing with his current manuscript.

  But Luke didn’t care. The story somersaulting in his head was a mystery. His genre. It was his mystery. But it was also real. It was real because the story had happened to him. As he envisioned journaling it, he began to sense that some kind of mental cleansing awaited him—that he was on the edge of finally understanding what it was that had suddenly made him feel like he had done nothing meaningful with his life.

  Luke walked over to the bed, sat down, and pulled the laptop toward him. He felt energy churning within him, but he also sensed apprehension. He had never written about himself before. Even in college, he’d written very few nonfiction pieces. And this wouldn’t be just an unimportant piece of nonfiction. It would be the written re-visitation of all the ugliness he’d left behind when Halcyon had ceased to be his home. It would stretch him, cleanse him. And, God willing, making peace with his past would hand him back his focus. If it didn’t, he didn’t know what he was going to do.

  He called up a blank page on his laptop, took a deep breath, and whispered a prayer. As he positioned his fingers over the keyboard, he spontaneously looked across the hall to his old bedroom. He stared at its open doorway for a moment. A second later, he picked up his laptop. He walked into his old bedroom and sat down at the desk by the window that looked out onto his old tree house.

  He whispered the prayer again as the first sentence formed itself in his mind: Though I first met Norah when I was eight and she was six, it is the summer my dad built my tree house—the summer I turned twelve—that speaks “beginning” to me because so much happened within those four crooked walls…

  And as Luke began to write, he fell headlong into the tunnel of his past, into those forgotten days and nights that he had convinced himself—for the last seventeen years—he would never have to relive.

  Part Two

  Five

  The nightly ballet of fireflies had just begun when my father drove the last nail into the tree house of his my dreams. It was early June, the summer of my twelfth year, and despite my mother’s dire predictions that a leg or two would soon be broken, this longed-for retreat was at last finished. It was made in two Saturdays—with scrap lumber and used nails—on the hefty limbs of the giant elm that stood outside my upstairs bedroom window. It was lacking in engineering and design—there wasn’t one 90-degree angle to be found anywhere in it—but it was not a bad effort by a small-town newspaper editor whose chief desire was to please his older son.

  The elm itself was tall and robust, towering above our house and the house next door, so that it kept the nearest side of both homes in perpetual shade. The tree was actually on our property, but its stout branches reached across the little expanse of grass to the second-story windows of the green house next door, as if it begged to be shared. That detail about the elm bothered me. I didn’t want to share the tree with the lady who lived in the green house next door. Penelope Janvik—everyone called her “Nell”—was perpetually in a sour mood. Her house was painted the color of green-goddess salad dressing, a kind of dressing I detested. To me, the house and the dressing looked like snot. It was an observation I had to keep to myself, since I was forbidden to say that audibly about either, especially at the dinner table.

  The tree was one of the oldest and tallest in the quiet farming town of Halcyon, Iowa. My mother, who was admittedly melodramatic on occasion (and this partly because she was the local high school’s drama teacher), panicked every time straight-line winds descended on the town, or worse, when the tornado siren began to wail. She always said a prayer for the elm tree when either of those things happened. She was not worried that the tree might get uprooted and then topple onto our house, crushing it like a pop can. She was just worried it would get uprooted. Period. Because that would mean the end of the tree.

  “A house you can rebuild in a month or two,” she had once said to me. “It takes one hundred and twenty years to grow a tree like this one.”

  When the tree house was finished, my dad told me there would be two rules: One, I had to share it with Ethan, my little brother. Not all the time, but sometimes. I’d rolled my eyes at this. Eight-year-old Ethan asked too many questions. About everything. And Ethan hadn’t been begging for the tree house the past year and a half. The tree house was my idea, not Ethan’s. But my dad had pretended not to notice the eye-rolling and proceeded to announce Rule Two: There was to be no horseplay—no pushing or shoving, no dares, no show-off moves.

  “You fall and break anything important, and out it comes,” my dad said. “That’s how I got your mom to agree to me building this at all.”

  “What if we break something not important?” asked Ethan, who was also listening to the rules. I’d given my dad a look that said, See what I have to live with?

  “I suggest you break nothing at all,” my dad said.

  The tree house was accessible by a series of planks driven into the mighty trunk and also from my bedroom window. It had taken my father many hours of persuading before my mother would let me access the tree house the second way. I had to first prove to her I could climb into the tree house by crawling—without the slightest jiggle—onto the thick branch just outside my window. It was a monstrous branch that had to be cut back every year so it wouldn’t punch a hole in the yellow siding of the house. The first time I tried to show her—the day the tree house was finished—she wouldn’t look.

  “See, Mom?” I said from just inside the tree house after I’d made it across on the first try. My parents and Ethan were standing in the bedroom watching me. At least Ethan and my dad were watching. “It’s easy.”

  But my mother hadn’t seen anything because her eyes were closed. I had to do it again.

  “See?” I said, when again I was speaking to her from within the safe confines of the tree house.

  She shook her head and tapped her foot. Not usually a good sign.

  “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this,” she said between her teeth, surprising me.<
br />
  I restrained myself from hooting, hollering, or doing anything that might be mistaken for horseplay.

  “But Ethan, so help me,” my mother continued, “if you put so much as one finger on that branch outside that window, you will be grounded for the rest of your life. You use the little steps. Got it?”

  Ethan pursed his lips together while he considered our mother’s threat.

  “How can you ground me when I’m an old man and you’re already dead?” He was completely serious.

  “The little steps,” my mother replied authoritatively and turned to descend to the kitchen, where supper dishes waited.

  “I’m comin’ up!” Ethan yelled to me, sprinting after our mother to head down the stairs and out the front door.

  “You want to come in, too?” I’d said to dad.

  Dad smiled. “Thanks, anyway. Every bone is important when you’re my age.”

  “Thanks for the tree house, Dad.”

  “My pleasure.” My father turned away from the window and walked out of the bedroom.

  Ethan began to climb up through the opening in the floor of the tree house. I scooted back, crawling on my hands and knees to the half I planned to claim as my own. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket, and I took it out and drew a wiggly line on the uneven floor.

  Ethan poked his head through the opening.

  “You’re not allowed to cross this line,” I said to his brother.

  Ethan climbed in the rest of the way, looked at the part of the tree house that was left, calculated that it was certainly less than half, but shrugged. “Okay,” he said as he sat down cross-legged and put his hands under his chin.