In All Deep Places

by Susan Meissner

  Knowing this made me long to find respite in the tree house. It was almost exclusively mine now, as Ethan had long since lost interest. But when basketball ended in March, snow still covered the ground, and the limbs of the tree outside my window were often still glazed with ice. I had made a cubby of sorts for myself in the attic, but I found I could not write there. The chill of the unheated room was the smaller of two distractions; the inability to look out a window was the larger one.

  In late April, the last of the snow melted away, and the earth renewed itself as it always does. And I began to climb into the tree house again, to escape and to dream.

  The day after my fifteenth birthday, on the last day of school, I came home to find an old Chevy pickup truck with a beige camper shell parked in Nell Janvik’s driveway. Somehow I knew as I neared my house that the pickup would have California plates. I was right.

  Darrel was back.

  There was no one in the Janvik yard, no sounds coming from the open windows. Darrel had probably arrived several hours ago, and the hoopla or the hullabaloo over his return, whichever it had been, was long over. I walked into my house wondering if Darrel had brought his kids with him. I grabbed a Pepsi from the fridge and a bag of Fritos and headed upstairs to my room. I didn’t have to work at the paper that day, and Ethan was helping our mother clean out her classroom for the year, so I had the house to himself.

  My room was stuffy inside from the early June heat, and I opened the window before I plopped down on my bed. I drank the soda and munched on the Fritos, all the while contemplating the long, lazy summer that awaited me. Then I heard the sound of a child crying. It was a mad cry. The cry of someone who had not gotten his way. It was coming from one of Nell’s upstairs windows. I turned my head toward the sound.

  “Will you just go out to the camper and get it!” a man’s voice yelled. He cursed the camper as he bellowed. Darrel.

  Cautiously, I got off my bed and walked over to the window. I could hear Nell’s front door opening but couldn’t see who was coming out. Then from under the cover of the porch roof, a teenage girl with honey-blonde hair emerged. She stepped barefoot onto the grass between Nell’s house and her driveway. Even from the back I could see it was Norah.

  She opened the back door of the camper, went inside and then came back out with a stuffed toy dinosaur. When she turned I could see her face. She had matured in the last three years. She looked up then at my tree house—looking for me, it seemed—and then her eyes naturally traveled to my bedroom window. There would be no point in moving away. She had already seen me. The corners of her mouth raised a fraction of an inch, and she cocked her head slightly. She raised one hand and kept it still, just like she had three years ago when she was ten and I was twelve and she had said goodbye. This time, however, it was hello.

  I raised my hand in return.

  She paused for a moment, like she was considering coming to me, climbing my tree, ambling across the branch that led to my room, and filling me in on the last three years. But then she turned back toward the house, went inside, and all grew quiet again.

  That night just after supper, my parents started talking about Darrel’s return. Dad was still at the table with Ethan and me. Mom was at sink starting to fill the sink with soapy water.

  “I see Darrel is back,” my dad said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are the kids and Belinda with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I knew.

  “The kids are with him. I don’t think Belinda is,” I said. My parents seemed surprised I knew.

  “Did you see them?’ my mother asked.

  “Saw one. Heard the other one,” I rose and took my plate to the sink.

  “Can I go to Ryan’s tonight?” Ethan said, oblivious to the human drama next door and taking his plate to the sink also.

  “I guess so,” my mother said. “We can take you over there on our way to the Nelsons’ if you want. Luke, you have somewhere you want to go tonight? Do you mind being home alone?”

  Matt had asked me to come to a last-day-of-school party at one of his new friend’s houses that night, but I knew there was going to be a keg there. I had declined, feigning family obligations.

  “I’m fifteen. I can handle being alone.”

  “Okay. Just making sure.”

  Forty-five minutes later the house was quiet. I went downstairs into the basement, where it was perpetually cool, but there was nothing good on TV. I came back up to my room, climbed out the window, and scooted along the branch to the tree house. I would listen for sounds from Nell’s house so that the next time my parents speculated about the goings-on there, I would be able to clue them in. If nothing happened, I would write.

  I stretched out along the floor and peeked through open spaces in the roof. Stray starlight, filtering through the branches, greeted me. It was a beautiful evening.

  I had been there for maybe ten minutes when I heard noise at the front door of Nell’s house. I turned my head, and through a gap, I saw Nell and Darrel walk over to the camper. They did not go in. They started to talk. Then I heard Nell’s back door open slowly, and by moving my body slightly I could see that Norah had quietly slipped out onto the back step just below me. She sat down and hugged her knees, leaning forward. It was obvious she wanted to hear what her father and grandmother were talking about.

  “I think I have a right to know what is going on!” Nell said.

  Norah had raised her head. I shifted his weight so I could see Nell and Darrel better. The floorboards creaked. I knew then that she knew I was there. Norah knew I was there.

  “Is she in jail again?” Nell.

  “Ma, it’s worse than that.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well?”

  “Well, first she split on me, Ma,” Darrel said. He sounded angry. “She left me and the kids and moved down to Mexico with some guy. I told her I wouldn’t let her take the kids, and at first she didn’t care. She didn’t care! A couple months later when she decided she did want them, I hid them from her. She was high on something and pulled a knife on me, but I wouldn’t tell her where they were. Well, she went back to Mexico anyway, and she and this guy got messed up in some drug deal and a Mexican cop got shot. I think she’s in jail down there. Some friends told me she’s being charged as an accessory to murder.”

  I sensed my heart beating faster. I knew Norah was hearing all of this, probably for the first time. I crept to my knees and looked at her, staying back as far as he could. Even shadowed in twilight, her eyes were huge, vacant, wet. She held a slender hand over her mouth.

  “So what’s going to happen?” Nell said after a long pause.

  “She’s going to rot in a Mexican prison, that’s what! She and that loser she left me for.”

  Norah’s eyes were closed now, and she was slowly rocking back and forth, but making no sound. Her grandmother and father hadn’t a clue they were being overheard. I had an insane desire to slide down the rope and beat the heck out of Darrel Janvik.

  “So what have you told these kids?” Nell said softly. There was the slightest hint of compassion in her voice.

  “I told them she ran away. I told them, when she gets tired of running she’ll come back.”

  “That’s a bunch of bull.”

  “No, it ain’t! She did run away. She ran away from me, and she ran away from them.”

  Nell was silent for a moment.

  “She loves those kids, Darrel. She loves them, and you know it.”

  More silence.

  “Yeah… well, she loves her heroin more, and you know it.”

  “She doesn’t love it more, she needs it more. She was a prisoner long before she got put in a Mexican jail.”

  “And whose fault is that? Huh? Whose fault is that!” Darrel yelled. “I been clean for ten years, Ma! Ten years! She wouldn’t stay off it. She wouldn’t.”

  “Hush! You want the kids to hear you?”

  “I’ve just had it with her, M
a. I’ve had it. I’m not going back to California. And I don’t care if she’s in prison for two months or two years or the rest of her life, she’s never going to get these kids.”

  “So you want to punish her.”

  “She’s not getting these kids.”

  I could hear Nell sigh.

  “So how long are you stayin?”

  “For good, Ma. I’m gonna get me a job at the paint factory and get a little house on a few acres, and I’m gonna make a good life for Norah and Kieran here. And you’ll get to watch ’em grow up, Ma. You can see ‘em on their birthdays and at their school functions and on Christmas morning. I just need a place to stay until I can afford a place of my own. Just till then.”

  “You get a job here and you better find a way to keep it, Darrel. They won’t give you more than one chance at the factory. You better not blow it.”

  “I won’t!”

  I kept my eyes on Norah as Nell and Darrel moved on to less explosive matters. I watched her try to gather her composure, watched her dry her cheeks. She stood and then turned toward me, seeking my gaze. I moved so she could see me fully. I wanted to communicate to her somehow that I felt awful for her, that I knew how badly she must be hurting. But to say anything aloud would reveal us both. So I just looked at her, hoping she could tell I felt sorry for her.

  She looked at me for only a second before she turned and quietly slipped back into the house.

  The following morning—my first full day of summer vacation—I woke up late. I came downstairs at ten-thirty to find my parents already deeply immersed in the Saturday rituals of yard work and laundry. Ethan had stayed the night at his friend Ryan’s house. I ate a quick breakfast and then headed back to my room to dress and make my bed. I was supposed to wash both cars today, and I wanted to get them done before I called Matt to see if he wanted to go to Goose Pond that afternoon. It was one of the few things we still enjoyed doing together.

  I stepped outside into the shimmering June heat, grabbing my father’s car keys. I got into my dad’s classic Dodge Dart, eased it out of the garage, and then grabbed the nearby bucket, sponge, and detergent kept inside. I squirted the detergent into the bucket, filled it with water from the hose, and then brought it and the running hose over to the car. I sprayed the vehicle, humming a Three Dog Night song while I squirted. When I turned the hose off, I noticed a boy with dark curly hair watching me. Kieran Janvik.

  “You washin’ this car?” Kieran said.

  “Yeah.” Wasn’t it obvious?

  “Can I help?”

  “Well, um, I only have one sponge, so…”

  “I can get one from my grandma’s garage!” He scampered off, returning a moment later with a faded rag frozen by time and neglect into a stiff, terry-cloth fossil.

  “See, I can help!”

  The sight of him with his ocean-blue eyes and mop of curly dark hair, coupled with his eagerness to help and all that I knew that Kieran didn’t, weakened me. I would let him help.

  “Sure, you can help. You can wash the tires and the hubcaps, okay?”

  “Okay!” Kieran said. He plunged his rag into the bucket of soapy water and brought it back out again, limp with water and suds. “Like this?” he asked, rubbing the tires and hubcaps.

  “Yep, just like that.”

  “My name’s Kieran,” he said as he scrubbed the front tire.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m Luke.”

  “My sister told me you took us swimming once. To a pond with rocks you can jump off of.”

  For some reason I found this strange, that Norah would want to remind Kieran of something that happened when he was four. Something he probably did not now remember doing.

  “Uh, yeah. My brother, Ethan, and I took you there last time you visited your grandma. You were only four then.”

  “How old is your brother?”

  “He’s ten.”

  “Is he home?”

  “No, he’s at a friend’s house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Can you take us there again?”

  Suddenly there was a voice behind them.

  “Kieran, you should wait to be invited.” It was Norah. I whipped my head around. I almost smiled at the thought of her telling her brother to wait for an invitation. She had never waited for one. But then, that was when she was younger. She looked different now. Taller. More slender, with the obvious beginning curves of a woman’s body.

  “Hey, Norah,” I said, rather sheepishly.

  “Hello.”

  “So can you take us there again?” Kieran repeated.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, turning back to the car. My voice sounded awkward. I wondered if I should tell them I was thinking of going there today. I felt Norah’s eyes on me. I looked back at her. Her eyes still had the color of a rain cloud ready to burst. “I’m probably going to go this afternoon. You guys can come if you want.”

  “I want to come!” Kieran said, stopping and turning to Norah. “Can we? Can we go with them?”

  “I’ll have to ask,” she said softly. She had not taken her eyes off me. She was communicating something to me. I didn’t understand what it was.

  “I’ll go ask!” Kieran dropped his rag and sprinted into the house, yelling, “Daddy!” as he opened the screen door.

  I felt a heavy drape of awkwardness fall between Norah and me.

  She cleared her throat, looked back at her grandmother’s house and then at me.

  “Can I talk to you later?” she said, almost in a whisper. She sounded like an adult.

  I pretended to be interested only in the car I was wiping. “Ah, sure,” I said casually.

  “Not when Kieran can hear, though. Maybe after he’s in bed tonight?”

  I scrubbed harder. “Um, yeah. Okay.”

  Kieran came dashing out of the house. “We can go! Daddy says we can go!”

  “So, when are you going?” Norah said plainly.

  “I, uh, have to finish these cars first, then I need to call my friend Matt. So I’ll probably go after Ethan gets back from his friend’s house. And after lunch.”

  “You riding bikes there?”

  “Yeah.”

  Norah nodded. “I don’t think I can ride a bike with Kieran in my lap anymore,” she said. Was she smiling?

  “Oh, well, I am sure you can ride my mom’s bike,” I said. “Kieran can ride Ethan’s old bike. It just needs some air in the tires.”

  “Thanks. Kieran, come in when you’re done there and I’ll make you lunch.” She turned and walked back into Nell’s house. I watched her.

  “I’m ready for the hose,” Kieran announced. I threw my sponge back in the bucket and picked up the hose, wondering why I was suddenly wishing Matt wasn’t coming to the swimming hole that day, too.

  Goose Pond was usually a popular place on warm Saturdays in the summer. When the four of us arrived a little after one in the afternoon, a sizeable crowd had gathered on the beach. Matt and a mutual friend of ours named Derek had already arrived. They had a huge black inner tube with them and were leaning against the Warning! No Lifeguard on Duty! sign. When they saw Norah get off Luke’s mother’s bike they gave each other a funny look. I didn’t like it.

  I made the introductions.

  “Guys, this is Norah and Kieran. They’re Nell Janvik’s grandkids. Norah and Kieran, this is Matt and Derek.”

  Matt and Derek were grinning.

  “Nice to meet you, Norah!” Matt said.

  “Same here,” Derek echoed. They seemed to be sharing a private joke. I was beginning to think it had been a mistake to invite Norah and Kieran to the pond.

  “Let’s swim out to the rocks and get away from all these people!” Matt said, and he turned toward the water, hefting the inner tube onto his shoulder.

  “I want to jump off the rocks!” Kieran said, dropping the towel he’d brought onto the sand and dashing after them.

  Ethan was pulling off his T-shirt. “I’m coming, too!”

  I put my towel down and pee
ked out of the corner of my eye. Norah had slipped out of her shorts and tank top. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit the color of tangerines. Little gold rings held the fabric together. I heard Matt and Derek laughing several yards over. They looked back at me and gave me a thumbs-up.

  I walked to the water’s edge. Kieran and Ethan were already swimming toward the rocks.

  “You want to sit in the inner tube, Norah?” Matt said.

  “And do what?” she said, looking at the black rubber behemoth.

  “I’ll push you!” Matt continued.

  “No, thanks,” she said, walking past them into the water. She plunged in headfirst and swam, gliding through the water like a mermaid. She surfaced several yards out and swam away toward her brother and Ethan. I joined his friends.

  “Man, are you one lucky dog!” Matt said, slapping me on the back.

  “She is one foxy chick!” Derek grabbed the inner tube away from Matt and plunged into the water with it.

  “Hey!” Matt yelled, splashing after him.

  I fell in behind them, unsure of just about everything.

  Norah didn’t climb to the top of the rock face like she had when she was ten, nor did she mention having jumped off of it. She took turns with the rest of us jumping off the jumping rock, and seemed to be oblivious to or unmoved by Matt and Derek’s attempts to flirt with her. When the beach area had cleared out a bit, the six of us swam back, and Matt and Derek decided to see which of them could stand astride the floating inner tube and jump off before falling off. I wondered if I was the only one who could see that they were putting on quite a show.

  When they had exhausted that idea, Matt suddenly turned to Norah, who was floating on her back in the water, and challenged her to a race to the other side of the pond.

  “A race?” she said, in a rather blasé tone.

  “Yeah. A race,” Matt said, smiling.