In All Deep Places (8 page)

“Ma, I called you to tell you I lost my job. I told you we were
living with friends.”

“Yeah, you told me a year later!”

“Well, we had some rough times. I can’t help that.”

There was a long pause. I waited.

“I am through with getting hurt by people, Darrel,” Nell finally said. “Through with it. It is a heck of a lot easier for me not to see those grandkids than to see them. Because who knows when or if I
will ever see them again!”

“Ma, what are you saying?” Darrel exclaimed. “Of course you’ll see them again! They’re
my
kids. You’re
my
mother. What is with
you?

“What is with me? What is
with
me?” Nell’s voice sounded hard. “Nothing and no one is
with
me, Darrel. I am
alone. I have learned to live this way because I’ve had to. My parents are dead, my sister ignores me, your daddy abandoned me, your brother lies dead and buried in the cemetery, and you’re two thousand miles away in California and in and out of jail. There is
nothing
with
me.”

“Well, we’re here with you now,” Darrel said softly.

Nell said nothing. I heard her open the screen door and go
back inside the kitchen. Darrel followed. I stood up and put the tire pump away. Listening to Nell and Darrel’s conversation made me feel angry and ashamed. I didn’t think I wanted to play any more tricks on Nell Janvik.

But I did have to get that envelope to her. Maybe Darrel
would answer the door and I could just give it to him. I
just wanted it to be over with.

Ethan came out of the house with the backpack. Two towels
were sticking out of it.

“I’ll be right back,” I said and I stepped back into the
house, into the kitchen and grabbed the envelope. I came back
out and Ethan looked at me. Something like compassion fell across Ethan’s face.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, and we crossed the
lawn to Nell’s house.

I stepped onto the porch and couldn’t help but notice the
empty hook where wind chimes had once hung. I looked away
and rang the doorbell.

Seconds later, Norah came to the door. Even through the screen, I could see she hadn’t changed much in four years. She was taller, of course, and any traces of baby fat were gone. Her blonde hair had darkened some, but her eyes were still two circles of liquid pewter.

“This… this came to our house by mistake,” I said, holding out the envelope. “It belongs to… to your grandmother.”

Norah cocked her head, and it seemed to me she was sur
prised I knew who she was. Then a smile broke across her face.

“I remember you,” she said slowly. “I played at your house the last time we came.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Well, here’s the letter.”

“Who’s there, Norah?” Nell’s voice rang out from somewhere
in the house.

“It’s, um… I can’t remember your names,” she said, looking at
Ethan now too.

“Luke. I’m Luke. This is Ethan.” My brother had a rather silly look on his face. But then
it occurred to me that Ethan had only been four the last time Norah was here. He didn’t
remember her.

“It’s the kids next door,” Norah yelled over her shoulder. “They got some mail of yours by accident.”

“Here,” I said again, extending his hand.

Norah opened the door and took the envelope. I saw her eyes
travel to the backpack Ethan was holding and the towels
sticking out of it.

“You guys going swimming somewhere?”

“We’re going to the swimming hole,” Ethan happily volun
teered.

“Oh? Where is it?”

“You gotta go past the water tower and then there’s this dirt road that goes to it,” he continued. I wanted him to shut up.

“Can I come with you?” she said.

I opened my mouth to say something—I didn’t know what—but Ethan said, “Sure!” and Norah let the screen door fall
closed and turned to head back into the house. I shot Ethan a look, but he was pushing the towels farther into the bag and wasn’t
looking at me.

“Can I go swimming with the kids next door?” I heard
Norah ask.

“Where at?” Darrel’s voice. “The pool? The swimming hole?”

“They said the swimming hole. Can I go?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. Take Kieran, though. And keep your eye
on him. Grandma and I need to talk.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head. A girl and a toddler.
I hoped to heaven none of my other friends were there to see me
arrive with a girl and a little kid. This whole day was turning out
to be a disaster.

I turned to Ethan. “Why did you say yes?” I said through
my teeth.

But my brother just gave me a blank look that said,
Why wouldn’t I say yes?

A few minutes later Norah appeared at the door wearing a
turquoise-blue swimsuit and carrying two, faded pink bath towels and a paper sack. Behind her was Kieran, a little boy with a head full of dark, curly hair. I wondered if the kid had ever had a
haircut—ever. He looked like a little girl.

I said nothing as I turned and walked back to my
house, wondering if my mother would get after me for riding my bike and making Norah and Kieran run along behind me. I was aware of Ethan, Norah, and Kieran following me.

“Do you have an extra bike?” Norah said. “I can ride with
Kieran sitting in front of me. I do it all the time at home.”

I looked at her. And then I looked in the garage. Well, there was my mother’s bike. My father’s bike. And my own. I
couldn’t believe I was doing this.

“Take mine. I’ll ride my dad’s.” I motioned to my three-speed Schwinn, only a month old, and then headed into the ga
rage to get my dad’s bike.

“Okay,” Norah said, taking the handlebars and sitting down on the banana seat of the best birthday present I had ever gotten so far. She reached down for her little brother. “Here we go, Kieran,” she said, scooping him up and placing him on the tip of the long seat. “Put your legs right here,” she said, pointing to the horizontal bar that made my bike a boy’s bike and not a girl’s. She shoved the bath towels into the paper bag and started fiddling with how to
carry it and steady her little brother.

“Here, I’ll take it,” I said, surprising himself with his spontaneous act of courtesy. She handed the paper bag to me word
lessly, and I tucked it under my arm.

We pedaled away. I kept as much distance between us
as I dared. I knew if my mother saw how Norah and Kieran were riding, she would throw a fit. I wished for a second that she were driving home just then so she could see them. She wouldn’t
allow it. But then she would probably insist on driving us all out to Goose Pond.

Only sissies had their mothers drive them out to Goose Pond.

I took the shortest route to the street that led to the water
tower.

H
alcyon’s swimming hole, also known as Goosen’s
to
the over-fifty crowd but simply as Goose Pond to the younger generations, was the only swimming hole in the county with a maintained beach of playground-sand and side-by-side porta-potties. The swimming hole memorialized Halcyon pioneer and dairy farmer Hans Goosen, who willed the pond to the county’s parks and recreation department when he died in 1950. The gift was partly because the farmland around the pond was untillable, and partly because scores of teenagers were already sneaking out to the pond on hot, humid evenings to splash away the summer heat,
and had been for decades.

Shaped roughly like the state of Texas, the swimming hole was the size of two city blocks. It was home to several varieties of pan fish, a population of snapping turtles, and the occasional legendary
lake monster; a tale spun every now and then to keep youngsters
from visiting the swimming hole unattended.

It was surrounded on all sides but one with prairie grasses and gently rolling knolls. On the farthest edge, however, there was an outcropping of stone, perfect for jumping off of and for creating panic for mothers who liked to worry. The mile-long gravel road
to the pond began at the back legs of the Halcyon water tower at
the south end of Eleventh Street and across from Halcyon High
School.

I left the smooth asphalt and hit the uneven surface of the gravel road, adjusting my speed and tightening my hold on the handlebars of my dad s bike. I glanced back to make sure that
little kid didn’t go flying off the banana seat when Norah switched
over to the gravel, and though the handlebars went every which way as she negotiated the transfer, she maintained control. Ethan
was right behind her.

As I neared the pond I could see two cars parked on the pea-gravel parking lot next to the
Warning! No Lifeguard on Duty!
sign. Two large, pale-skinned women were lounging on the beach, talking and watching their children play in the water. Though the kids—there were five of them—were squealing and yelling and being otherwise annoying, I was actually glad those women were there with their noisy brats because it meant I could swim out as
far as I wanted—though I had a hard time imagining either one
of the hefty women coming to my rescue. Sometimes my mother’s
rules made no sense to me.

I parked my bike against a wooden parking-lot rail, and
Norah and Ethan pedaled in behind me and did the same. It was hot, and I was sticky from riding and the rising humidity.

“It’s so small!” Norah exclaimed as she lowered Kieran to the ground.

I looked across the blue surface of Goose Pond, thinking to myself that you could probably fit a dozen Olympic-size swimming pools in it. It was better than nothing. Wasn’t it?

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

“Where I live you can’t see the other side of the water,” she said.
“We live a block away from the ocean.”

I had never seen the ocean. I had been to the shore of Lake Superior once with my grandparents, but I knew that was
not the same.

I had nothing to say to Norah’s comment, so I just stepped
over the guardrail and walked across a grassy patch to the sand. I slipped off my sandals and pulled my T-shirt over my head. Ethan dropped the backpack on the sand and did the same.

“Are there jellyfish?” Kieran asked, looking across the strange
water that had no tide.

“Nope. No jellyfish,” Norah said, helping him take his T-shirt
off.

I started to head to the water’s edge but turned back around. “Can you swim?” I said to Norah.

“Of course I can swim. I’m ten!”

“Well, you can jump off those rocks over there but you can’t
dive. Parents don’t like it, and it’s a park rule.” Then I turned to Kieran. “Can he swim?”

“I can swim!” Kieran said.

“No, not really,” Norah answered.

“I can so!”

“Kieran, don’t be a liar.”

“I’m not a liar!”

“Kids who can’t swim have to stay at knee-deep water,” I
said.

“Is that a park rule, too?” Norah asked.

I didn’t want to baby-sit Kieran Janvik. Nor did I want my mother to come down on me for not having been the respon
sible, oldest one in the group.

“It’s
my
rule.” I strode into the water and didn’t look back.

I plunged through the water, the chill sending shock waves
throughout my body. I took wide strokes, wanting to be far
away from the beach, the big women, their noisy kids, and Nell’s grandchildren. I swam out to the stone outcropping and arrived breathless several minutes later. I climbed out of the water and sat on the first ledge, my chest rising and falling heavily. The rock was warm from the sun, and the clammy breeze kissed my wet
body. On the other side of the pond I could see Ethan standing
in ankle-deep water, dashing about as if in pursuit of something—a
frog perhaps. Norah was sitting in the water watching Kieran splash about. He had found an abandoned Frisbee and was scooping water with it while one of the other children watched him. I leaned back on the rock face behind me, letting the warming rays spread
across my body.

I lost track of time. I didn’t know how long I had been
reclining there when I heard the sound of someone swimming toward me. I opened my eyes. It was Norah. I sat up quickly,
looking past her to the beach across from us. Ethan had the
Frisbee now and was playing with one of the other kids. Kieran was sitting at the shoreline, playing in the wet sand. Norah climbed
onto the rock next to me.

“You left your little brother?” I asked.

Norah looked across the water. “He’s okay.” She turned back to me and then to the rocks above us. “I’m going to jump.”

I moved aside, not wanting her to use my shoulder to climb to the jumping rock above me. But Norah climbed past me and
past the jumping rock to the lip of the outcropping twenty feet above my head.

“You’re jumping from
there?
I asked.

She peered down at me. “Yeah. You said I could.”

“I meant you could jump from the jumping rock,” I said. “That
one.” And I pointed to the second ledge a few feet above me.

“What’s wrong with jumping from here?”

“Well, that’s not where people jump from.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause it’s… it’s high. I don’t know how deep the water is.”

“It looks deep to me.”

“You can’t tell how deep a swimming hole is by
looking
at it,” I replied.

“Here I go!” Norah said, and before I could say anything else, Norah stepped off the top ledge, falling into the water at my feet and dousing me with spray. I sucked in my breath and waited for her to surface. It seemed like a long time, before her head broke
the churned surface of the water. I felt strangely relieved when she turned and looked at me with those steel-gray eyes
.

“It’s deep enough,” she said. “I tried to touch the bottom but I
couldn’t see it. Too deep.”

I was suddenly afraid she would challenge
me
to jump off the top of the rock and try to touch the deepest part of Goose Pond. I didn’t want to do either, and it bothered me that it was fear
that kept me from wanting to. She was a girl. She was two years younger than me. I shouldn’t be afraid to do what she had just done, but I was—and there was nothing I could do about it.

Norah climbed back onto the rock beside me and as she did,
I noticed movement on the other side of the pond. The women
were gathering their things and their children. They were leaving.

“I have to go back to the other side,” I said, slipping back into the water. “Not allowed to be this far out when there aren’t any adults on the beach.”

Norah followed my gaze to the other side of the pond. The
women were getting into their cars. “Is that your rule, too?”

I pushed off the rock with my feet. “My mom’s,” I said,
swimming away.

I didn’t care if she followed me, but I had to admit I wanted her to. I didn’t want to have to insist she keep to my
mother’s rules but I knew that since she was my so-called guest,
my mother would expect me to insist on it.

I heard her swimming behind me, though. In fact, she overtook me halfway across the pond, arriving at the shore several
seconds ahead of me.

“Take me swimming!” Kieran said to her when we arrived back
at the water’s edge.

“Okay, you can come out to me,” Norah said, and I watched as Kieran dashed into deeper water into Norah’s open arms.

I was glad Ethan and I had made two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches apiece because we ended up having to share them with Norah and Kieran, who had brought nothing.

“You guys can have my pop,” Ethan said, handing Norah his can of Orange Crush when the four of them finally came out of the water to eat. He ate only half of his one sandwich and then went
back into the water. Kieran followed him.

I did not like being alone on the beach with Norah, but she
didn’t seem to mind in the least.

“Have you ever been to San Diego?” she asked.

“No.”

“I like it there. There are no mosquitoes where
I live. It never gets sticky like this either. My mom’s dad lives on a
boat. Sometimes he just sails away for a while. My mom was born right on the beach. Right by where we live. Her mom didn’t want to go to the hospital. She wanted to have her baby on the beach, so she did. She got into trouble with the police, though, ’cause someone complained. My mom loves whales. They’re her favorite
animal.”

I could tell you other things about your mother,
I thought to
myself. I wondered if Norah knew anything. I wondered if she knew her mother took drugs. Or if Norah knew what it
meant to sleep around. I was pretty sure I knew what it meant, and it made me want to change the subject.

“Kieran thinks he can be a whale when he grows up! I told him he can’t, but you can’t tell a four-year-old anything,” Norah con
tinued. “That’s what Grandma says.”

Nell. When she said “Grandma” she meant Nell. That still
seemed weird to me.

“I never met my other grandma, the one who had my mom on the beach, ’cause she died when I was a baby,” Norah chattered
on. “But I get to see my grandpa sometimes. His boat is kind of old and smelly, but he likes it. He loves the ocean, too. He gave my mom this book on ocean animals when she was little, and then she gave it to me. I am going to give it to Kieran when we get home.
It’s time.”

She said it like it was time to go, and I looked over at her
to see if that was what she really meant, but she was looking at her little brother, not at the sun or a watch or any other device that would give the hour.

“I wish I’d been born on the beach,” she suddenly said. Her
gray-flannel eyes had a faraway look. “And sometimes I wish I had
a boat like my grandpa’s that I could just sail away on. I haven’t
seen my grandpa in a long time. I’m starting to forget what his boat looks like.”

She was silent for a moment. I didn’t know what to say.

“Is it true your dad has been in jail?” I blurted out. Even as I said it I wished I hadn’t. I couldn’t believe I actually
had
said it.

But Norah didn’t seem to be fazed by the question.

“He doesn’t mean to do bad things,” she said, wrinkling her brow and looking out over the water. “He just forgets stuff. He forgets to pay bills. And he forgets how to drive safe. Sometimes he forgets how to keep his temper. You know, when someone hauls off and slugs you, what are you gonna do? He has to slug ’em back. But then he forgets to turn and walk away.” She turned to me. “That’s what you’re supposed to do, you know. Slug ‘em once and
turn and walk away.”

I could hear in my head these words of advice coming from Darrel Janvik. I wondered what my parents would think of this
bit of counsel.

“So have you visited him in jail? Did you go there?” I asked.

“I went a couple times. It’s not so bad. The food is pretty good. I had lunch with him once.”

“So what does your mom do when your dad’s in jail?”

Norah shrugged. “Oh, sometimes she gets mad and goes away for a while. She has some friends who live in Mexico. It’s called Baja California, but it’s really Mexico. I went with her once. We could see the whales from the beach where her friends live. The whales
were migrating. We stayed there for a week. It was great ’cause I didn’t have to go to school.”

“Where was Kieran?”

“Oh, he stayed with these friends of my parents. They have a trailer. I stay with them, too, sometimes. Sometimes all four of us stay with them. They have three cats. The trailer kind of smells like cats but you get used to it. So, has your dad ever been in jail?”

“No!” I said. “I’ve never even
seen
the inside of a jail.”

Norah looked at me, and it seemed she felt sorry for me. “The people there are a little scary. But they’re just people who just… they just forgot to be nice… and then they got caught.”

“Norah!” Kieran yelled from the water’s edge. “Take me swimming!”

She stood up and walked to the water, the conversation abruptly over. She led her brother into the water and pulled him across by his arms to where he could no longer touch.

“Okay, kick your legs, Kieran, or you’ll sink!” she said. “Keep kicking! Don’t stop or you’ll sink!”