Norah’s tears were falling freely down her face, making her gray eyes shimmer like rain in a gutter. Her pull on me was difficult to ignore.
“Please?” she said again.
I looked across the water. Kieran was near the beach now; soon he would be where his feet would be able to touch the bottom. The water would no longer be above his head.
I decided in that moment I would give it a shot. For Norah’s sake. I would attempt to make Kieran understand Tommy didn’t exist. But I wasn’t going to be at it forever, no matter how much I was attracted to her. I’d give it three or four months, maybe a little longer. Norah said it had been going on for over a year; I figured there was no way Kieran would just suddenly stop. It might take a while. It might have to happen a little bit at a time. I’d give him six months at the most. But that was it. If by December that kid still believed Tommy was real, I was going to tell my parents.
“Okay, I’ll try. But if it doesn’t work, we have to tell someone,” I said. “I’m giving him until Christmas. If nothing has changed, I’m telling my mom and dad.”
Norah blinked several times as she considered my offer. “All right,” she finally said. “Just be gentle with him, Luke. Please? Don’t try to kill him off in one day.”
“Kill him off?”
“Tommy. Don’t kill him off in one day. Kieran needs time to let go of him.”
I said nothing, just slid into the water. I took even strokes back to the beach. Norah stayed behind me several strokes, though I knew she could outswim me any day of the week.
When we got to the shore, Kieran was sitting on the edge of the beach, making a mountain out of wet sand.
Norah looked to me, nodded to me. You make the first move, she wordlessly indicated.
I took a deep breath, prayed a silent prayer for wisdom, and sat down next to Kieran. Norah sat down on his other side.
“Kieran, you and I need to talk, man-to-man.”
“Dontcha mean boy-to-boy?”
“Okay, boy-to-boy. Kieran, I know about your friend, Tommy. Norah told me about him.”
Kieran whipped his head around to his sister. “You told me we had to keep Tommy a secret!”
“We do, but it’s okay for Luke to know because he’s your best friend,” Norah said.
Kieran swung his head back around.
“Uh, the thing is, there are rules about the swimming hole and since you and, uh, Tommy, are new here, we’re going to give you a break this time,” I said, trying to sound very grown-up. “But you need to know that kids who are younger than twelve can’t swim alone, even if there are two of them together.”
Kieran thought for a moment. “But Tommy’s older than twelve. He’s your age,” he said, like he had just suddenly discovered this.
I gave Norah an exasperated look, and she shot one back at me.
“Yeah, but Tommy is one of those special friends that only you can see, right?” I continued.
Kieran gave me a knowing look. “Yeah,” he said, obviously amazed that I knew this.
“Well, um, special friends that only you can see are always your age, never anyone else’s. Everyone knows that.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“So, Tommy is seven like me.”
“That’s right.”
“So we can’t come to the swimming hole unless you or Norah comes, too.”
I saw Norah visibly relax.
“Yeah, that’s how it is.”
Kieran tossed a handful of wet sand on the little mountain he had made. “Well, okay, I guess.”
I paused for a moment, a question poised on my lips. I was almost afraid to ask it.
“So, Kieran—where is Tommy right now?” I let the question escape.
Kieran threw another handful of sand on his mountain of dirt and didn’t look up. “He went back to Grandma’s.”
“He did? When did he go?” I asked, looking at Norah—but her eyes were on her brother.
“He left when you guys got here and Norah started yelling at me. Tommy doesn’t like yelling.”
At this, I stood up and grabbed my sandals. I was ready in many ways to get away from the pond. “I need to go home and change. I’m late for work.”
Norah stood up, too. “Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay. I don’t think my boss will fire me.”
Norah gave a smile, but it was nervous and forced.
I turned and walked up the grassy area to the parking lot. She followed me.
“That was really great what you did,” she said softly as I reached down for my bike.
I wasn’t so sure it was that great. I felt like I’d just told all the kids who’d finally realized there is no Santa Claus that, hey, there really is one after all.
I swung my leg over the bike seat. “It doesn’t seem right to go along with him, Norah. This had better work.”
“It will,” she said softly but confidently.
“It better. I meant what I said about Christmas. If by then he still thinks Tommy is real, we have to tell somebody. We have to.”
She said nothing. I turned, put my feet on the pedals, and began to ride away.
There was, of course, no way for me to know that by Christmas Norah and Kieran would be gone again.
Twelve
The Foxbourne’s annual mid-July vacation to South Dakota took place right on schedule that year, the week before the Wooden Shoes Festival. As I packed my duffel bag the morning we were to leave, I was aware this was the first year I wasn’t really excited about going. Perhaps it was because I was fifteen and just beginning to realize that family vacations take a person seriously out of their current social world. There would be no Matt or Derek or even Norah or Kieran to pass the time with. I’d be stuck with Ethan for company—not just in the backseat during the long drive, but during every day of our vacation and on every excursion. I packed a fresh spiral-bound notebook to jot down story ideas and character sketches. I would escape into a tree house in my mind if I had to.
Norah seemed both relieved and annoyed I would be gone for a week. I imagined the relief came from knowing that the only person capable of squealing on her brother would be gone for seven days. But she also seemed irritated that my absence would prolong Tommy’s hoped-for departure. It might even set Kieran back. Her little brother was becoming very attached to me. Most of the time I didn’t mind. It was kind of cool to be someone’s idol. But then Kieran would laugh out loud at absolutely nothing or whisper long, animated sentences to no one. I even noticed my mother giving Kieran a sideways glance several days after the swimming-hole incident, when the two Janviks were again invited to Sunday dinner and Kieran had whispered, “Use your napkin!” to the bowl of peas on his right. I had quickly asked my mother for the salt.
Norah had climbed up to his tree house on two different occasions since that scary day at the pond—once to tell me the lady from the embassy had not called her back and, at last, another time to tell him she had.
“What did she say?” I had quickly asked.
And Norah had sighed. “She just wanted to let me know she was still looking into it, that she hadn’t forgotten. And she wanted to know my mother’s birth date and where she was born. But when I told her, she just said, ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch.’ And then she hung up.”
“So has Nell gotten her phone bill yet?” he’d asked next.
And she’d only shook her head. That ordeal was still to come.
The vacation turned out to be more enjoyable than I had imagined. My family and my grandparents spent part of the week camping in the Badlands, a place I loved because there was nothing earthly about it. It was like being on another planet. Lots of ideas for stories came to me while hiking with my grandpa and listening to the coyotes howl at night and watching the sun rise over the Mars-like landscape. And Ethan proved to be more of a comrade on the trip and less of an annoyance. He was no longer asking nearly as many questions as he used to, though he did begin a conversation one
morning at the breakfast table with, “So why do we call grapefruit ‘grapefruit’? They don’t look like grapes. They’re huge and grapes are small. Grapefruit grow on trees. Grapes grow on vines. They’re nothing like grapes at all. They’re more like oranges. Except they’re not orange.”
I had excused myself to find a tree to climb.
And though I enjoyed seeing my grandparents and getting out of Halcyon for a little while, the day we packed our car to head back to Iowa I was anxious to get home. I was looking forward to sitting with my friends during the parade at the Wooden Shoes Festival, eating corn dogs, watching my teachers get dunked in the dunking booth, riding the Octopus, playing in the Festival softball tournament, and standing around at the street dance trying to look cool. I had to admit I was hoping to show Norah the Festival. The last time she and Kieran had been in Halcyon they had only seen the parade, nothing else, and they had sat with me and my parents. I no longer sat with my parents during the parade. The parade for me was now a hugely social event where Halcyon teenagers sat in pre-determined cliques along the parade route. I sat with my friends in front of the Texaco station. It was our spot. And I knew it always would be.
So I was understandably disappointed when I got home from South Dakota and found the Janvik house empty. And it surprised me, because Nell never went anywhere aside from work and bowling. When I went to bed that first night home, it was the first time I could ever remember falling asleep without a light burning in a Janvik window next door.
The next day, a Friday—and the day the town crowned the new Miss Halcyon—I waited for the Janviks to arrive back home from wherever they had gone. I thought maybe Norah would like to come to the pageant, and maybe she’d be impressed with watching me take pictures for the paper. Maybe she’d come down to the newspaper office afterward and watch me develop the film. Maybe she would think it was exciting to watch the images appear magically on white paper in the eerie red glow of the darkroom.
But the Janviks didn’t come home. And I developed the pictures alone.
The next day, the first full day of the Festival, I kept an eye out for the family, watching the crowds to see if Norah and Kieran were walking around the city square in a daze, wondering where he and Ethan were. I’d invite them to come sit with me and my friends at the parade. I’d even let Kieran come, though I’d have to pray that God would keep the kid from having a Tommy moment during any lulls between marching bands.
But there were no Janviks. I stood around at the street dance that night with Matt and Derek, hands in his pockets, striking cool poses, but I didn’t see Norah. I walked home at eleven, and while many townspeople were still engaged in revelry, including Matt and Derek, my street was quiet. When I was within sight of my house I noticed with disgust that the snot-green house was dark.
I scowled as I threw open the front door.
Who in their right mind leaves Halcyon during the Wooden Shoes Festival? No one! Leave it to the Janviks to do the stupidest thing in the world. Bunch of morons. I trudged up the stairs to his room.
“‘Night, Luke,” I heard his mother call out from my parents’ half-closed bedroom door.
“Night, Mom,” I mumbled back.
Bunch of morons.
The following morning, the faithful of Halcyon gathered in the park for the community worship service. Folding chairs with stencil-stamps on the backs like TACRC (Tenth Avenue Christian Reformed Church) and ORLC (Our Redeemer Lutheran Church) and HCBC (Halcyon Community Bible Church) were strewn about the shaded grass, making a lopsided half-circle that faced the band shell. Ethan and I sat at a picnic table with Patti Carmichael and her sixteen-year-old cousin, who was visiting from Waterloo. Patti’s father was on stage with the other pastors, and my parents were on the stage, too, along with the other members of the community choir.
Patti kept looking at me. I pretended not to notice. I was in a bad mood.
After a community potluck to beat all potlucks, I did the barest amount of volunteer work to help clean up. I walked home as soon as my dad told me I could. I was out of spending money and out of ride tickets, and I didn’t know where Matt and Derek were. I was scheduled to take pictures at the evening talent show in the band shell, but that wouldn’t start for another four hours.
As I neared my house I saw that Darrel’s camper was back in Nell Janvik’s driveway. So the Festival was nearly over and the Janviks had finally decided to come home. What a bunch of morons!
I stopped walking toward my house. I did not want to see any of them. Not even Norah.
I turned around and walked quickly back to the park, all the while formulating a plan. The high-school food booth always needed more volunteers to work the last shift of the Festival. I’d work it. Then I’d take pictures at the talent show. I’d get home late. I would be tired and would smell like grease from the food booth. I’d take a shower and go to bed, too tired to consider writing or thinking in the tree house. In bed at ten. Lights out. No tree house. I quickened my step.
On Monday morning, an overcast sky greeted Halcyon. Carnival workers, still sleepy from tearing down the rides at midnight the night before, smelled rain in the air and doubled their efforts to hoist the collapsed rides onto their trailers before the storm hit. By noon, the sky was dark and angry, and the trailers of portable amusements and concession stands were making their way out of town. The Wooden Shoes Festival was officially over.
I climbed into the tree house after lunch to wait for the storm to arrive. I loved being there during a storm. My mother flat-out refused to let me sit there when there was lightning, but sometimes I could manage to convince her to change her mind if the lightning was off in the distance, like today. She had relented with the condition that if thunder followed the lightning by less than four seconds, I had to come in.
I had made some improvements to the roof, tacking on a few new boards here and there, which had made the tree house nearly waterproof. I sat under the improved roof now in a lime-green beanbag chair I had bought at a garage sale for two dollars. The leaves in the tree were clattering against each other as an energized breeze hurled itself against them. A low booming sounded far off to the west.
I leaned back in the beanbag, looking out through an opening and anticipating the debut of the first drops of rain. But then I heard a different kind of booming—high-pitched and near. It was coming, not from somewhere off to the west, but from right below me.
It was Nell. She was yelling and cursing. From her open kitchen window her voice carried on the agitated breeze and reached me in the tree house where I waited for the storm.
“Who do you think you are, that you can do whatever you please like you own the place!” she yelled.
Then another booming. Lower in pitch, again from within the snot-green house. It was a man’s voice. Darrel. Curses flowed from his mouth, too. And they were far worse than Nell’s damning of this and that. I had never heard such profanity spoken so loudly and so completely. It made me blush.
“She won’t do it again—I swear she won’t, Ma!” Darrel yelled. “You touch that phone again, Norah, and I swear I’ll break your arm! You understand me? Do you? This is none of your business!”
He cursed again, choosing a particularly profane word to describe the business that was not Norah’s.
I sat up. Nell had gotten her phone bill. I was sure of it.
“And close that window!” Nell yelled. “It’s starting to rain.”
I heard a window being heaved down, cutting me off from the horrors taking place in Nell’s kitchen. I could feel my heart beating faster. I wondered if Norah was going to be hit. Slapped. Beaten. Should I tell my parents? Should I climb down and look in a window? Should I call the police?
“God,” I breathed, “don’t let them hit her.”
I wondered where Kieran was. And I suddenly pictured him hiding with his invisible friend—who didn’t like yelling—in an upstairs closet and having a hushed conversation about whales. I breathed a six-word prayer for Kie
ran, too. I didn’t know how to make the prayers longer, so I just kept repeating them, over and over, as I climbed down the wooden slats.
Raindrops, hard and heavy, pelted my body as I stole across the lawn that separated the two houses. I crouched low in the scraggly juniper bushes that sat under Nell’s side and front windows, wanting to look over them and yet being terribly afraid I’d be seen. If Nell and Darrel saw me, would they haul me in and beat me, too? I suddenly decided I didn’t care if they did. What could fat, lazy Nell do? And Darrel? I had wanted to punch him in the face for a long time. This would be my perfect opportunity. And if I came home from the Janviks with a black eye from Darrel, my parents would call the police. The cops would come and take him away. No more Darrel. I stood cautiously, looking into the large front-room window. Rain fell all around me, obscuring my view somewhat. I saw a figure on the couch. I moved in closer.
It was Norah. She was crying, but not bleeding. And she didn’t appear to be hurt. To my surprise I saw she was folding laundry. I could see Darrel behind Norah in the kitchen, pacing back and forth with a beer in his hand. He and Nell, who I could not see, appeared to be arguing about something. I took another step toward Norah, and my movement caught her attention.
She raised her head to look through the window. Shock at seeing me standing there in the rain was evident on her tear-stained face. She turned briefly toward the kitchen, then swung her head back around.
“Go!” she mouthed to me, waving me away with a hand that held a holey sock.
“Are you okay?” I mouthed back.
She hesitated for a moment, and I wondered why.
She nodded her head, turned her head toward the kitchen and then back to me.
“Go!” she mouthed again.
But I was reluctant to leave her sitting there—and Kieran, too, in that madhouse. That house made of snot. The familiar feeling that I was supposed to protect her and her brother swept over me. I wanted to talk to her.
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