“I hear nothin’ from you in two years—two years—and then you just show up on my doorstep! That’s one heck of a surprise, Darrel. Are you in trouble? Is that why you came?”
“Come on, Ma! No, I’m not in trouble. Me and Belinda have been doin’ really good.”
“Congratulations.”
“I mean it. I’m startin’ a new job in two weeks, it’s a good job. Benefits and everything. We’re doin’ great, Ma. I just wanted to see you before I start this new job. I won’t get vacation time for a while. ’Sides, I thought you might want to see your new grandson. You know, we gave him Kenny’s initials.”
I heard Nell sigh.
“You could have at least called me, Darrel,” she said, in as gentle a voice as I had ever heard her use.
Darrel stepped forward and put his arm around her. “But I wanted to surprise you! And I did!”
“Yeah, you did.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Nell was smiling.
“I would have washed the sheets in the guestroom if I had known you were coming,” she said, and I heard the van door open again. Darrel was pulling some cardboard boxes out.
“Ah, that’s no big deal, Ma.”
Nell was looking at the boxes. So was I. The boxes were full of clothes.
“Are those your clothes? Don’t they use suitcases in California?”
Darrel laughed heartily. “Well, I’m sure they do in Hollywood! But we just make do with boxes from the grocery store. Look! They got handles!”
The two of them carried the boxes inside.
“I’m tired of drawing,” Ethan said, getting to his feet and walking toward the front door. After a few minutes alone on the cement, I got up and followed him inside.
That night, while Nell was at work, and while I tried to fall asleep in my bedroom, Darrel and the lady named Belinda sat on Nell’s porch, drinking beer and smoking. They were laughing, too, and I couldn’t fall asleep. I got up and went downstairs to announce my problem. My parents were sitting at the kitchen table having ice cream. I stood at the foot of the stairs. They did not see me.
“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 something?”
“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! Mermaid 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.
Seven
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 comeback, 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 wintert
ime, 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.
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