I made the sign that she was to meet me in the tree house; a closed fist and a pointer finger raised to the sky.
She nodded.
I raised my other hand and spread my fingers.
Ten o’clock.
She nodded.
By ten that night the storm had moved east to water Illinois, and the July sky seemed especially proud of its clean, freshly washed face. The stars shimmered in the darkness like harnessed, wiggling fireflies. A few minutes before ten, I crawled out to the tree house with an armful of old towels. Rainwater had seeped in through cracks and one of the openings. Part of the beanbag chair was sitting in a puddle. I’d have to bring it down to the driveway tomorrow and let the sun dry it out.
I was draping the last wet towel across a tree branch to dry when I heard movement behind me. Norah was working her way across the narrow branch that reached to within a foot of Nell’s garage roof. I took a seat on the dry part of the beanbag and waited.
She didn’t say anything at first. She just made her way in and sat down on the floor, using the old sofa cushion as a backrest. I thought I saw a red mark on her cheek, but it was dark so I wasn’t sure, and I was afraid to ask.
“I take it Nell got her phone bill,” I said quietly.
Norah sort of grinned. It was not a true grin, though. It was a sad one. I don’t think there is a word for it.
“You heard, huh?”
I nodded.
“I am now not allowed to even touch the phone,” she continued in a hushed, mocking voice. “But all evening long, I’ve been walking past that phone and touching it. I’ve been touching it for hours. And neither one of them knows it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. “So what are you going to do?” I finally asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked out the opening where I had seen the storm’s approach. “My dad told me this thing between him and Mom is nobody’s business but his. He said if I go messing around in his business again, he’ll leave me here and he’ll take Kieran and he’ll go somewhere I won’t be able to find them.”
Two tears worked their way out of Norah’s eyes and slipped silently down her cheeks.
“He can’t do that,” I said.
“Oh, yes, he can. Adults can do whatever they want.”
“He can’t keep you from finding your mother. He can’t keep you from your brother.”
She turned to him. “Yes, he can, Luke. You don’t know anything.”
Anger welled up inside me. “I know I’d like to punch his lights out.”
“Be my guest,” she said, but then quickly added, “But it wouldn’t do any good. He’d still get his way. He always does.”
A few seconds of silence passed between us.
“So what’s going to happen when that lady from the embassy calls back?” I asked.
Norah just shook her head. She looked hopeless. Like she was dying a little inside.
“I know what you should do,” I said, leaning forward. “How many phones does Nell have?”
“Two,” she said lifelessly.
“Where are they?”
“One’s in the kitchen, one’s in her bedroom.”
“Okay. She sleeps most of the day, right? And your dad works days, so he’s gone from morning until five, right?”
She nodded her head but added, “Four-thirty.”
“Okay, when you wake up in the morning, tiptoe in her room and unplug her phone. Then if you get a call while she’s asleep, it’ll only ring in the kitchen, and you just answer it right away. Or have Kieran answer it right away.”
“I won’t have any trouble answering it right away,” she said and I could picture her walking by Nell’s forbidden kitchen phone earlier in the evening and stealthily caressing it.
“Then when Nell wakes up to go to work, sneak back in her room when she goes into the bathroom and plug her phone back in.”
Norah nodded. “I guess that might work. That lady may call me later in the day, though. What if tries to call me after three o’clock? That’s only one pm in Baja.”
“Yeah, but the embassy’s in Mexico City, right? That’s where this lady is. And Mexico City is on Central Time, just like us.”
“It is?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
She pursed her lips together. “But she still might call me after three.”
“Well, we’ll just… we’ll just have to pray that she doesn’t,” I replied.
“Pray?” Norah said, as if the thought were wholly foreign.
“Well, yeah.”
“Will that work?”
I didn’t answer right away. I knew enough about God to know you never could tell what He might do. Or might not do. And yet I usually prayed anyway, about all kinds of things, and had for as long as I could remember. My parents had always told me God answers every prayer. Every one. Sometimes, though, the answer is “no.”
“It might. If God wants it to, it will,” I finally replied.
Norah seemed to ponder this for a moment. I thought I saw in her eyes a sad understanding that, just like all the other adult figures in her life, God, too, was someone who always got His way, regardless of what she wanted. I felt an itching urge to explain that with God it was different, but I hadn’t a clue where to begin. I didn’t even know why I knew that. Nor why it was okay. I said nothing.
“She’ll probably call when we’re at the swimming hole,” Norah said, “and I’ll miss it anyway.” The dying look came back.
I licked my lips. I had another idea.
“Or I could ask my parents if they would let the lady call back here. At my house.”
She turned her head toward me. “What if they say no?”
“What if they say yes?”
She turned away and sighed. “I’ll try unplugging her phone, first,” she said. “We’ll see…
A few seconds of silence followed.
“Where were you guys?” I finally asked. “You missed the Festival.”
Norah picked at a cuticle. “My grandma wanted to see her sister—my dad’s Aunt Eleanor. She lives in Albert Lea. In Minnesota. So my dad took us there in the camper. They didn’t ask Kieran and me if we wanted to come, they just said, “Get in the camper, we’re leaving.”
I waited.
“It wasn’t so bad. My dad’s aunt is kind of nice. She’s a widow, but she has a little dog Kieran likes. Her kids, my dad’s cousins, have all moved away. She never sees her grandkids, so she was kind of happy to see Kieran and me. She bought us each a long rope made of red licorice. Kieran ate his in ten minutes. I still have part of mine.”
“Kieran and I got to sleep in the camper by ourselves,” she continued. “That was nice. Grandma slept in the house, and Dad took Aunt Eleanor’s little car to Minneapolis for a couple days. I don’t know why.”
“So, I guess it was like a vacation?”
She looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said, as if considering this for the first time. “It was kind of like that.”
She did not ask me about my vacation or the Festival.
“Is Kieran doing all right?” I asked.
Norah looked away again. “I guess. Nothing has changed, if that’s what you mean.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.”
“I still have until Christmas,” she said, rising to sit on her knees. “I better get back. They may want to come in where Kieran and I sleep and yell at me some more before they go to bed.”
She scooted past me and eased herself out into the canopy of branches. I watched her pick her way across the limbs, sometimes crawling, sometimes climbing, until she reached the pitched roof of Nell’s garage. She made her way across it to an open window with a beige curtain fluttering out of it and she disappeared inside.
July eased into August, and still there was no call from the embassy in Mexico. After two fruitless weeks of sneaking into Nell’s room and unplugging and re-plugging the phone, Norah announced she was ready for me to ask
my parents if they would let her receive a phone call at our house. We decided we would ask my mother first. A mother would better understand Norah’s plight, I thought—especially a mother who is a drama teacher and deeply drawn to the theater of real, human pain. At least it seemed likely she would be quick to understand. Then, hopefully, the three of us could convince my dad that it wasn’t meddling to let Norah receive a phone call from Mexico about her mother. My dad hated meddling.
My mom was a little shocked at first to hear that Belinda was mixed up in the murder of a Mexican policeman. I left out the part about Belinda’s apparent addiction to heroin. One problem at a time seemed like the smart way to go. But my mother readily agreed that Norah needed to know where her mother was and if she needed help. That evening, I invited Norah and Kieran over to watch reruns of Hawaii Five-O and eat caramel corn. While Ethan and Kieran munched on the caramel corn and watched Steve McGarrett cleanse Honolulu of crime and lawlessness, Norah, my mom, and I quietly convinced my dad to allow the call to come to the our house.
I could tell my dad was a little uneasy about the whole thing. He did not want to cause trouble or be accused of sticking his nose in other peoples’ business. But in the end, he reluctantly agreed. Compassion for Norah and Kieran won him over. It was decided that the following day, Norah would make another call to the embassy, this time from our house. She would let the lady there know she wanted any information about Belinda to be given to Jack, MaryAnn, or Luke Foxbourne and would give her the new number.
The following morning, a few minutes before eleven, Norah made the call. The woman at the embassy had not been able to devote much time to the case and had nothing new to tell her. She promised to make a concerted effort within the next few weeks.
But the long days of summer wound down and there was no call. Darrel Janvik registered his children to attend school in Halcyon. He continued to tell his mother he was saving for that down payment on a little farm site, though he was a frequent and generous patron of bars all over the county. Norah and Kieran continued to sleep in the little bedroom above Nell’s garage and swim every day at Goose Pond. Kieran continued to have whispered conversations with his invisible playmate, and Nell continued to smoke, complain, sleep all day, and bowl on Saturdays. Summer ended and school began. And there was no call.
Thirteen
I began my sophomore year at Halcyon High School doing something I had not done before: I spent the first month looking over my shoulder at the younger students. As often as I could, and without drawing too much attention to myself, I stole glances at chattering groups of squirrelly junior-high students, looking for signs that Norah was finding her way all right. Most of the time she was where she needed to be, but I noticed she always seemed to be a few paces behind her classmates. I rarely saw her giggling with the other thirteen-year-old girls. She did not seem to be bothered by her own aloofness or apparent inability to attract new friends. Or maybe it was that she had quickly taken inventory of the eighth-grade girls at Halcyon and determined none of them were particularly interesting or worthy of friendship. Either way it seemed to be of no consequence: Norah appeared to be quite comfortable by herself.
Our paths did not cross much at school, though we shared many of the same hallways and ate in the same cafeteria. On occasion I would pass her on the way to the library or the gymnasium and I would offer a nod of my head or a soft-toned “hey.” I thought she seemed quietly at ease. And while I cleverly hid my sideways glances in her direction, she never seemed to likewise seek me out, never seemed to be looking past her junior-high world to catch a glimpse of me. I didn’t know if she was purposely keeping herself from becoming dependent on me or if fending for herself socially was something with which she was already very familiar.
Sometimes Norah would come to the tree house in the evenings and share a few highlights of her day or week with me, but she usually kept the focus off herself and on other people. My parents didn’t seem to mind that Norah often joined me in the tree house, at least they never said anything to indicate they minded. I was pretty sure Nell and Darrel had no idea how often Norah snuck out her bedroom window to crawl into the tree house. I was also pretty sure that if either of them were to find out, they would put a stop to it, if for no other reason than to rob Norah of a little joy. When she did come she always asked if the lady from the embassy had called—she hadn’t. She always asked if I would be spending any time with Kieran—I did sometimes. And occasionally she would ask if she could read one of the stories I was writing. I usually and sheepishly declined.
One crisp evening in mid-October, however, I agreed to read her the first chapter of the science-fiction story I was working on. It was about a family whose car had gotten stuck in a snowdrift during a blizzard when they were just a few hundred yards from their farmhouse. They left their stranded vehicle, and as they groped through the blinding, icy whiteness, they had come upon a barn. Thinking it was their own, they had opened the door, relieved to be able to wait out the storm in its safe confines. But once they were inside they realized it was not their barn. And then they were somehow transported to another time, another place—a place where they were not safe. A place where they were being hunted. The strange barn was still their hiding place, but not from a snowstorm. From something else. Something far more dangerous.
“That’s a really good story,” Norah said when I was finished.
Inside I was beaming, but I pretended to shrug off the compliment. “I’ve got a ways to go,” I said.
“Yeah, but I can almost feel the snow, I can almost feel their fear. It’s almost like you know what it’s like to be afraid.”
I didn’t know what to say to this observation. Of course I knew what it was like to be afraid. Every kid grows up being afraid of something—big dogs, the bogeyman, shots. But I also sensed that Norah was somehow seeing past all that; past all the little childish things to what everyone eventually learns to fear no matter how old they are: the bad things that happen over which they have no control.
“Um, thanks,” I mumbled.
“Did I ever tell you I like to write poems?” she said after a long pause.
As she spoke, a chilly early fall breeze swept though. I wrapped my arms around my knees. I remembered sitting in the tree house on a long-ago, disquieting day when she was ten, and giving her a piece of paper from my notebook because she wanted to write a poem.
“Maybe,” he answered.
“Not all of them rhyme, but some of them do. My seventh-grade English teacher told me not all poems have to rhyme. Do you like poetry?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I did not. “It’s okay, I guess.”
“Do you want to see one? I mean, I could go get one and you can read it.”
I was envisioning a trite roses-are-red-violets-are-blue nursery rhyme and was already dreading trying to pretend I liked it. But I nodded anyway. “Um, sure.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Norah scrambled out of the tree house, picking her way back across the limb to Nell’s garage roof. I watched her crawl back inside her bedroom window.
It seemed like she was gone a long time. When she finally emerged from the window she held a plastic bag in her hand. A corner of a blue paper stuck out of her pants pocket. She made her way back and set the bag down. Inside were two chocolate cupcakes. Then she pulled out the piece of blue paper and handed it to me.
“I wrote it for my mom. It’s about whales.”
I took the paper and held it up to the light of my battery-powered camping lantern. The evenly spaced writing flowed across the page.
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.
I read it again, seeing the giant fins, tasting the salt water, and feeling the deep vastness of the ocean. It scared me how good it was. It suddenly seemed—to my surprise—that Norah had an innate talent for writing that outmatched my own. And she was younger than I was. I felt a tiny coil of jealousy wrap itself around my awe.
“Wow,” I said softly. “This is good, Norah.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Yeah. Sure. Don’t you think it is?”
“I don’t know. I like the way I felt when I wrote it,” she said. “I had to use a dictionary for some of the words. I needed another word for feathers. When whales breach and blow water out their blowholes, the water looks just like those feathery things knights wear on their helmets. I found the word ‘plume’ in the dictionary. I love the way it sounds. And I love the word ‘pennants’ too. When whales wave their tails, it looks like fans waving those triangle-shaped flags at a football game. They’re called pennants. Did you know that?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, swallowing my envy and handing the blue paper back to her. “I mean it. It’s really good, Norah.”
But she made no move to take the piece of paper.
“You know, the whales don’t know what they’re missing, but they don’t seem to care. They don’t know there’s this whole other world above them. No one knows how to tell them.”
She still made no move to take it.
“Yeah, I can see it all, just like you said you could feel the snow and sense the fear in my story,” I said, his arm still extended. “Don’t… don’t you want it back?”
She looked at the piece of paper in my hand. “Maybe you can keep it for me in your notebook there. Sometimes things get lost in my room.”
She didn’t say it, but I wondered if maybe Nell had a habit of throwing stuff out she could see no purpose for.
In All Deep Places Page 14