We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“So why do people say ‘horseplay’?” my brother asked, furrowing his brow. “Horses don’t play. Monkeys play. Puppies play. Why don’t parents say no monkey-play? Or no puppy-play? Horses just stand around eating grass and swishing their tails.”
“I don’t have to answer your dumb questions when I’m on this side of the line,” I said.
“Do I have to answer yours?” Ethan asked innocently.
I turned my back to him, and took a flashlight out of my pocket, shining it here and there until Mom called Ethan in to get ready for bed.
When my brother was gone, I stretched out on the floor of the tree house, peering at the stars that peeked through the slabs in the roof. I imagined I was alone in a great forest and there were elves hiding all around me, waiting to see if I would fall asleep there. Then they would sneak in and cut all my hair off, or steal my flashlight or paint my face with berry juice. I closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of crickets and bullfrogs serenading each other in the early June evening. I could almost forget there was a house on either side of me, one the color of lemon custard and the other the color of snot. I grinned. I could think that here. I could say it here. This was a magical place.
Halcyon sat on an expanse of prairie three hours northeast of Des Moines, two hours south of the Minnesota border and thousands of miles away from the mother country of the Dutch immigrants who settled the town in the late 1800s. Its founders initially chose a fine Dutch name for the town, but the railroad owners couldn’t pronounce it—and since they owned more land than the settlers, the most educated of the railroad magnates changed it to Halcyon. The soothing name was supposed to attract newcomers so that the town would blossom and the railroad would make lots of money selling off its many parcels of land. But every child, and actually every adult, had to be told what “halcyon” meant. Youngsters who thought the town was named after Hal Somebody were set straight at Halcyon Elementary School as soon as they were old enough to understand that there are lots of complicated words that have simple meanings. Adults who didn’t know that “halcyon” meant “peaceful and serene” found out as soon as they were brave enough to ask.
In its best days, Halcyon could meet every household need. It had at least one of everything essential to modern-day living. A bank. A hardware store. A factory. A hospital. A school. A library. A furniture store. A car dealership. A theater. Even a shoe-repair shop. There were half-a-dozen churches, four gas stations, three restaurants, two gift shops, and a drugstore. There were concerts in the park, community ice-cream socials where there was standing room only, and long lines to get theater tickets on Friday nights.
By 1982, however, the year my dad built the tree house, times had changed for small Midwest towns like Halcyon. The ease with which a person could make the trip to Cedar Falls, about an hour’s drive away, and even to Des Moines, changed the way Halcyon High School graduates chose a career. It changed the way their parents shopped. It even changed the way farmers farmed. The theater had long since closed, as had the furniture store, the shoe-repair shop, and two of the gas stations. The hospital had been downsized to a clinic. Typical headlines in the Halcyon Herald, my father’s newspaper, read, “School board discusses problem of declining enrollment” and “Corn prices fall again” and “Another downtown business closes its doors.”
But there were also good things happening at that time in Halcyon. It wasn’t all bad news. The town was still fiercely devoted to its high school’s sports teams. Retired farmers still met for coffee at the downtown cafe every morning at nine o’clock. The churches were still full on Sundays. There were still old businesses on Main Street like Delft Delights, as well as new ones, like Denny’s Movie Rentals. The paint factory was still hiring people. And the grain elevator at the edge of town had added a new metal storage bin that glistened like a mammoth tin can in the Iowa sunshine.
The town still had its newspaper, which was deemed by all as just as necessary to the town’s survival as the school and the clinic. My dad wasn’t the Halcyon Herald’s founder, and he wasn’t a Halcyon native. He wasn’t even Dutch. In fact, his last name was decidedly English. But he had slowly won the town’s collective approval after ten long years of ownership. By then he was allowed to sip coffee with the Tante Anna’s Cafe crowd, where all local news truly began and ended. The shrewd retirees who sipped cup after cup of black coffee and who liked to say to my dad, “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” nicknamed him “van der Foxbourne” that tenth year. And that’s when he knew he was in the loop.
My parents had moved to Halcyon from South Dakota in 1972 when I was two. Dad, who had been the editor, but not the owner, of a little newspaper in a town north of Sioux Falls, bought the Halcyon Herald from Abe DeGroot. The DeGroot family had owned the paper since its inception in 1902, and the passing of the torch had been tough for the older Halcyon generations. But Abe DeGroot’s four children had all gone away to college and not come back, and no one else in town knew anything about running a newspaper. It was either welcome the newcomers or let the paper die. They opted to welcome Jack and MaryAnn Foxbourne simply because the other option was too frightening to consider. Besides, the newcomers had wisely kept Lucie Hermann, a Halcyon native, on staff, proving they weren’t completely incompetent.
Two years after dad took on the paper, my parents had a second son, whom they named Ethan Abraham. The movers and shakers in town believed my brother’s middle name was a sign that the Foxbournes were honoring Abe DeGroot and the newspaper’s rich Dutch history. Jack wisely never let on that MaryAnn had picked Abraham as a middle name in honor of the great patriarch of Genesis.
My parents faithfully attended every community event, volunteered at the pancake booth at the Wooden Shoes Festival every July, taught Sunday school at the Christian Reformed Church on Tenth Street, and cheered at basketball games. My mother became the new high school speech and drama teacher the year Ethan turned three, and the panache with which she helped Halcyon teenagers successfully pull off Broadway musicals earned her own fair share of admiration and respect. It had taken a decade, but the Foxbourne family had won Halcyon over.
Mom and Dad were content with the way things had turned out, and Ethan seemed comfortable with his birthplace, but as I grew, I began to feel slightly detached from my Iowa home. Though I’d been born in South Dakota, and summer trips to see my grandparents had given me ample opportunity to see the state where my life began, I was familiar with no other life than this life. And because I knew no other life, I wasn’t entirely sure why I had this yearning to live in a big city, in a place far from Halcyon, and to do big things. Like write a book. Like write lots of books.
I knew from the first day I sat in it that the new tree house would be the beginning of leaving for me, though I did not say anything of this to my parents. I knew that whenever I would need to escape, whenever I’d need to travel somewhere faraway in my mind, all I’d have to do would be climb out my bedroom window, scoot along the thick branch that beckoned me, and lose myself to my imagination within the crooked walls of the tree house. I knew I would look forward to those times. And then some day I really would escape.
Six
Nell Janvik already lived in the house next door when my parents moved to Halcyon in the early fall of 1972. She had lived there since 1948, the year she and her husband, Karl, and their son, Kenny, moved to town from the spare room at her parents’ farmhouse. She had married Karl Janvik at the age of twenty, four months after they realized she was carrying his child. They had lived with Nell’s parents for the first two years out of necessity since Karl seemed to have bad luck when it came to keeping a job. At least that’s how he saw it.
When Nell’s Grandmother Brooten died, she left her enough of an inheritance for a down payment on a small two-story house in town. It was common knowledge that Nell and Karl got a good deal on the house because it was in a mortgage foreclosure—the previous occupants had fl
ed from their debts in the middle of a nameless night while Halcyon slept.
The following year, 1949, Nell and Karl had another son, whom they named Darrel, and the year after that the paint factory was built. Suddenly, there were jobs for everyone, even for unlucky people like Karl Janvik. Nell got a job there, too. But that was the last year friends and relatives remembered Nell Janvik being happy. By the time we became her neighbors, she had spent twenty-four years in the snot-green house on Seventh Avenue, most of them as a single mother. She had lived there longer than anyone else on the block, which meant none of the neighbors had known her in better times.
The day the we moved in, my mom told me she was given a pan of lasagna by the family across the street, a plate of brownies by the retired couple who lived on the other side of her new house, and a loaf of homemade bread by the widow who lived three doors down.
It was the widow, Ella Liekfisch, who warned my mother not to expect much of a welcome from Nell Janvik.
“Nell’s had a rough life,” Ella had said in low tones, as if the walls in our new house were listening. “Her oldest son, Kenny, was killed in Vietnam last year.”
“Oh, that’s so sad!” my mother replied, telling me she instantly felt compassion for the woman named Nell she had not met yet.
“That’s not all, either,” Mrs. Liekfisch continued. “Her husband ran off on her when her boys were just kids. Never heard from him again. And the younger boy, Darrel, he’s been in and out of trouble since the day his daddy left. He’s living in California with some woman he’s not even married to. I’ve heard there’s a baby and everything. And usually one or the other is in jail for something.”
My mother must have shown on her face that she wondered how Mrs. Liekfisch knew all of this because the older woman suddenly told her.
“Nell bowls. She’s in a league with a friend of mine. When Nell’s drunk, she talks. Or so I’ve heard.”
“Sounds like she could use a friend,” Mom said.
“She could use a friend, but she doesn’t want any more than the two or three she has, and she doesn’t attract any others, I can tell you that. “I’ve never seen her smile unless she’s been drinking—and that’s the honest-to-God truth.”
“Well, thank you so much for the bread, Mrs. Liekfisch,” my mother replied. “It’s wonderful to be welcomed so warmly.”
“You just call me if you need anything, now,” Mrs. Liekfisch said as she turned to go. “And I can sit for that sweet little one of yours anytime!”
My mother said she stepped outside with her new neighbor and watched her walk past the green house, following her with her eyes and dodging the movers carrying in her sofa. Her eyes strayed from the retreating form of Mrs. Liekfisch and stayed on the green house for several moments before she went back inside.
My parents had been in the house for nearly three weeks before either one even saw Nell Janvik. Nell worked the swing shift at the paint factory and slept most mornings away. At 2 PM her TV would come on, and it would stay on until a few minutes before four when she left for work. When her windows were open, the smoke of her cigarettes would waft across the yards and drift into our kitchen. Apparently, my mom did not meet her face-to-face until they both happened to be on their porches at the same time one day, getting the day’s mail.
As my mother tells it, she had called out a cheery “hello!” And Nell seemed to become instantly irritated at having been noticed. She glanced up with a peeved look on her face.
Nell was a few inches shorter than my mom but many pounds heavier. She had let her hair begin to turn gray any way it pleased. Mom supposed that Nell was in her early fifties, but the haunted expression on her face made her look older. She found out later Nell was only forty-six.
“I’m MaryAnn Foxbourne,” Mom had said, as she closed the distance between them.
“Nell Janvik,” Nell said without emotion, a cigarette dangling from one hand.
“Nell. That’s a nice name. Is it short for something?”
“Penelope,” Nell said gruffly, shoving her mail under her arm and starting to open her screen door.
“Nice to have met you!” Mom said, hoping she sounded like she meant it.
Nell grunted a wordless reply and then disappeared inside her house.
My dad did not meet Nell until a week later, when he came home from a Saturday news event to see her struggling with a garage door that wouldn’t open all the way. She was bent over on her driveway, pounding on the lower edge of her garage door with the flat of her hand—and cursing. He noticed for the first time the tattered remains of a net in a basketball hoop attached to the roof of her garage, a tiny reminder that the cantankerous Nell was someone’s mother.
“Can I give you a hand?” my Dad had asked, walking toward her.
She whipped around to look at him. Dad told me she had on a blue button-down shirt with her name embroidered on a patch. He figured she was on her way to the bowling alley. And was late.
“What?” she yelled back.
“I said, can I give you a hand with that?”
“Stupid thing won’t open all the way!” she grumbled.
Dad took that for a yes.
He studied the door, checked the springs, and noticed a piece of rusted metal had wedged itself into the hinge on one side. He worked it loose and then raised the door the rest of the way.
“There you go.” My dad grabbed his camera bag and waited for her to say thanks. When she did not, he added, “I’m Jack Foxbourne, by the way.”
“Nell Janvik,” she said through her teeth, looking at her mischievous garage door.
“Nice to meet you, Nell,” he said. She said nothing in return.
Dad turned to walk back to our house and just as his back was fully to her, he heard Nell say, “Thanks.”
He turned back around. “Anytime.”
When he went into the kitchen, he put the camera bag down and walked over to Mom, who was tearing up lettuce for a salad. He put his arms around her from behind and kissed her neck.
“I met Nell,” he whispered.
She grinned. “I was right, wasn’t I? Tell me I was right.”
“You were right. She does make the Wicked Witch of the West seem as harmless as Auntie Em.”
My mother said she laughed and then shook her head. “Oh, I shouldn’t say such things. She did lose her son last year, Jack. Ella Liekfisch told me his body was brought back in pieces. She must be hurting so bad to be so rude. It’s probably her way of handling grief.”
Dad tightened his embrace. “Maybe some day she’ll come around and the two of you can have coffee together!”
“Well, I seriously doubt that, but perhaps she’ll get to the point where she doesn’t scowl when she sees me coming.”
I would spend my early childhood years in healthy fear of Nell Janvik. My parents knew I feared her, and they thought it was best that I continue to because then I would stay out of her yard and out of her way. As I grew, though, my fear of Nell Janvik morphed into something more akin to disgust. And eventually, pity.
One late summer day, when I was eight and Ethan was four, while the two of us were making chalk drawings on our driveway, a van with a holed-out muffler drove down our street and turned into Nell Janvik’s driveway. A man with stringy hair and a bandanna for a headband got out, followed by a woman with long, dark, curls. She was wearing very short cutoffs and a tank top that revealed too much. Even at eight, I knew enough to look away from her. The man opened the side door and a little girl with blonde braids jumped out. A baby was crying in the backseat.
“What do you think he wants?” the man was saying to the woman, but he appeared to be looking at the baby.
“He’s probably hungry again,” the lady said, opening a macramé purse and taking out a pack of cigarettes, “Here, I can take him.”
I stole another look at the woman. She was wearing large hoop earrings and lots of makeup. Her nails were long and painted purple.
“Nah, I got him
, Bel,” the man said. “I want to show him to my mom.”
“I have to go potty,” the little girl said.
“Well, let’s go inside and see Grandma,” the man said, grabbing the crying infant out of the back of the van. “You can use her potty, Norah.”
The man steadied the baby in one arm and slammed the van door shut. He walked to the front door, and the little girl trailed after him. The lady followed, stopping to cup her hand over the cigarette she was trying to light.
The man didn’t knock on the door—he just opened it and yelled, “Ma! Are you home?” And then the four of them disappeared inside Nell’s house.
Ethan went back to drawing looping circles on the cement. I noticed that the van had California plates. I pretended to draw, but really I was listening to see if the open windows in the Janvik house would reveal what kind of reception the man would get. The man had to be Darrel, I thought—the son Mrs. Liekfisch had said was born to break a mother’s heart. Those little kids must be her grandchildren. I had heard Mrs. Liekfisch tell my mother that Darrel had two kids with that woman he lived with, so I knew Nell was somebody’s grandma—but I’d never really thought of her as a grandmother until that moment. It didn’t seem possible Nell Janvik would know how to act like a grandma.
I could hear noises inside the house, but I couldn’t tell if they were happy noises or sad noises. Then the front door opened and Darrel stepped out. Nell was right behind him. She looked mad. I quickly looked down at the driveway and drew a large circle with my chalk, peering at the two of them with just my peripheral vision.
“Would it have killed you to call first?” Nell said. She had her hands on her hips.
“We wanted to surprise you. Ma,” Darrel said, putting his hands in the front pockets of his jeans.
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