In All Deep Places

by Susan Meissner

  Eden’s deafness, however, was like Aaron Spaulding’s allergy to the sun—a characteristic he felt would lend itself to creativity. It also made her adept at espionage when lip-reading was required and allowed her and Aaron to communicate with each other in a room full of suspects without making a sound. And it allowed Eden to turn off the world if she wanted to by simply turning her head. This came from Norah, too. Norah was not deaf and had never been able to turn off the world, but Luke was certain there were many times she had probably wished she could.

  Luke now stroked the hand that lay under his. To not tell Téa the real reason he had been so distracted on stage tonight seemed somehow like being unfaithful to a small degree.

  He kept his eyes on the road but continued to caress her hand.

  “It wasn’t the speech. I mean, it’s not because I’m bored with it that I botched the speech,” he said.

  “What was it, then?”

  He looked over at her, wondering for a moment if she would think he was nuts when he told her. Or would she be offended? Would she be mad? Jealous? It suddenly seemed like a dangerous thing to admit having been rendered nearly speechless by a woman other than your wife.

  But not telling her was starting to needle him. Better to just get it out in the open. Surely Téa would understand that he had not been attracted to another woman. He had been distracted by one. He hoped there was an obvious difference.

  “There was a woman at the banquet that looked just like Eden Damaris,” he said as casually as he could. “I mean, she looked just like I imagine Eden Damaris looks. Face, hair color, build—even the way her hands move. It totally distracted me from my speech.”

  “Really?”

  She didn’t sound mad. She sounded interested. So far, so good.

  “Yeah. She was, like, seated just off to my left. So she was in my line of vision for the whole speech. It was very unnerving. It was like seeing a ghost.”

  “Who was she? Which woman was it?” Téa said, smiling.

  Luke got the distinct impression his wife thought this news was remarkable.

  “I don’t know who she is. I haven’t seen her at these gatherings before. I don’t know if she was someone’s date or if she is a writer or a new agent.”

  “Wow, that’s… that’s kind of cool, don’t you think?” Téa said. “I mean, I feel bad that seeing her threw you off, but, wow… how bizarre!”

  Bizarre, yes. Cool, no.

  “I finally had to just avoid looking at her table completely until I finished,” he said, glad they seemed close to being done with this conversation. For some reason he wanted it to be over.

  “I wonder who she is.”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter. There are probably a lot of people who look like my characters. I just happened to be unfortunate enough to run into one while at the microphone and in front of three hundred people.”

  “Really? You think there really are lots of people who look like your characters?”

  “Well, I guess so. I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it before.”

  “I wish you’d pointed her out to me,” Téa said, squeezing his hand. “I would have liked to have seen her. You know, to see if she matches how I imagine her.”

  Luke wondered for the first time why he hadn’t pointed her out to Téa. Why hadn’t he?

  “Sorry,” he said, like it was no big deal. It wasn’t.

  A few seconds of silence passed between them.

  “Funny, isn’t it, how characters in books can seem like real people,” Téa finally said.

  Luke stroked her hand. “It’s essential,” he said with a smile.

  They fell into an easy silence. Luke reached to a console in front of him to slip in a CD of Spanish guitar music.

  “You don’t have to stay awake to keep me awake. I’m too keyed up to feel drowsy.”

  “I don’t mind,” she replied. “I like this CD. I can almost imagine a violinist playing some of this stuff.”

  They both smiled.

  Sometime later they passed through the outskirts of Hartford. The rolling countryside of rural Connecticut looked welcoming in the violet starlight.

  As they neared their house, Luke realized that talking about his characters had soothed him somehow, had taken the edge off the frustrations of the evening, and had reconnected him to that place in his mind where his characters lived.

  Perhaps it was a sign that tomorrow they would start speaking to him again.

  Two

  Luke sat back in his chair, his hands clasped around his coffee mug as he saw Noelle and Marissa through the window playing with the family cat in the morning sunlight. Before him on a wide desk sat his laptop, open to an e-mail inbox. Displayed there were several unopened messages. Two, several days old, were from his agent, Carmen Templer. Another one, from the day before, was from his editor, Alan Porterman. Near the keyboard was half a toasted bagel, already cold. The room where he sat was spacious, the ceiling high, and the wooden floors and walls glistened as sunny rays filtered in through paned windows. Built-in bookcases lined the walls, and Ansel Adams prints dotted the spaces between the shelves. Luke called the room The Lab. Téa called it the carriage house because that’s what it had been back when the well-to-do banker who built it and their house had filled it with a fleet of personal carriages. Noelle and Marissa simply called it Daddy’s office.

  It was the perfect working environment, much more conducive to writing than the crowded coffee shops he’d haunted when he wrote Slight Imperfections. The comfortable townhouse in Boston had been a nice step up, but even it paled in comparison to The Lab. When he and Téa had bought the manor house and its outbuildings, she had assumed he would want the guest cottage for an office. But Luke had grimaced at that suggestion.

  “Cottages are for tea and naps,” he had said. “The carriage house is perfect. It’s got style. Intrigue. Character.”

  “It smells,” she had commented.

  “I like the smell. Besides, after I fix it up, you won’t recognize it.”

  Within a few months of moving in, the carriage house had been scrubbed, insulated, painted, re-wired, and plumbed. Luke installed a wood-burning stove for chilly mornings and a kitchenette to make strong coffee and simple things like tomato soup when he was on a writing roll and didn’t want to come to the house to eat. He also installed an intercom to the main house so Téa could reach him in an instant. But she still called it the carriage house. And insisted it had a peculiar smell.

  When The Lab was finished and he was spending his first morning in it with his laptop, a mug of Sumatran coffee, and a CD of Ottmar Liebert playing in the background, he had casually mentioned to God that it didn’t get much better than this. The calendar-page-perfect New England countryside met his view from the new French doors, rewarding him with vistas of birch trees and grassy knolls. It was so unlike his Iowa beginnings. There were no cornfields or grain elevators or flat horizons to remind him he once only dreamed of writing books in a room like this.

  He knew he wasn’t a true New Englander, never would be. He was a transplant. But the graft had been wonderfully complete for years. He would never go back to Iowa. Sometimes, even now and without any apparent provocation, he felt like calling Bart Newell, his college roommate at the University of Iowa, to thank him for getting him out of the Midwest. When Luke had graduated in 1992 with a degree in creative writing and no job offers, he had dreaded the thought of returning home to Halcyon, Iowa, where he knew a job was always available for him at his father’s newspaper. It wasn’t the thought of working alongside his dad that bothered him. His father was a gifted writer and every kid’s dream of a dad. But Halcyon had no pull for him. If anything, the pull of his hometown felt like strangling vines that sought to hold him prisoner—a captive of his past. There was no future for him in Halcyon, only a double-sided history that was as heartrending as it was wonderful. When Bart convinced him to move with him from Iowa City to Boston, it had truly been the begin
ning of the rest of his life.

  “We have to be as close to New York as we can get,” Bart, also a writing major, had told him. “We’ll never get anywhere if we stay here.”

  “We can’t afford to live in New York!” Luke had protested. “Where are we going to live? Who’s going to hire us?”

  “We start out in Boston, okay? I’ve got this uncle who owns a swanky restaurant. You can make a hundred bucks a night easy just in tips! A hundred bucks a night! Just in tips! We can sleep in late and then write all afternoon. It will be great!”

  “A restaurant. I spent four years and thousands of dollars on a degree to wait on tables,” Luke remembered saying and shaking his head.

  “You got it all wrong, man,” Bart had said. “You’ll wait on tables to get the money to write classy stuff with that degree you bought. I am telling you, it will be perfect, Luke. Boston is less than two hundred miles from New York. We can meet agents and editors, go to conferences, get some freelance work. It’ll be great. And a hundred bucks a night in tips!”

  It actually hadn’t taken him very long to agree to Bart’s plan. Luke had just broken up with Amy Frendle, the girl he had dated for two years in college and who, as an interpreter for the deaf at their church, had taught him sign language—and who had suddenly decided she was in love with someone else. He didn’t want to go back to Iowa where only an old life awaited. And it wasn’t just the thought of writing obituaries for the Halcyon newspaper that bothered him. It was also the thought of being reminded on a daily basis of the final two years he’d spent at home, trying to be a knight in shining armor to Norah and her little brother, Kieran. Having them and their grandmother for next-door neighbors had been very complicated, for all kinds of reasons. He never really liked thinking about those last days of his senior year in high school.

  He didn’t even enjoy remembering the kiss he and Norah shared, though it had been magical, because the rest of those last few days was the stuff of nightmares. He knew he avoided going back to Halcyon to visit his parents because it meant seeing that house next door—no matter that different people had lived in it since then. It was always easier to invite his parents to come to New England to see him. He hadn’t been home to Iowa in four years, not since his high-school reunion. His brother, Ethan, and his wife, Pamela, had been home on furlough from a mission school in Burkina Faso at that time, too, so it was almost like killing two birds with one stone. One visit to Halcyon, two reasons for going. This past summer when Ethan, Pamela, and their new baby, Charlotte, were again home for a visit, Luke invited them to stay a month with them. In New England.

  Noelle and Marissa shrieking with delight outside the French doors roused him from these thoughts. Then his daughters scampered off, following Arthur the cat, who was chasing a butterfly. He looked at the clock on his desk. It was a little after ten, and he was off to an incredibly late start. He usually worked from 8 am to noon on Saturdays since he took Mondays off completely, but it had been after midnight when he and Téa had arrived home from the banquet last night. And when he’d finally slipped into bed after taking the babysitter home, he hadn’t slept well.

  He had done what he always did when sleep eluded him—he had prayed. Tried to, anyway. But his thoughts were as unfocused as they had been hours before when he had stood at the podium and slaughtered his favorite speech. He could not keep his mind centered on one thought at a time. He began by praying for his children, for their safety and happiness, but before he had barely whispered their names in his mind, he was thinking about the oddest things: the cheesecake he didn’t eat, the young valet who had beamed with pleasure at being inside a Jag for five whole minutes, the balding man at the banquet who’d begged him for advice.

  I’m not getting any younger, you know!

  And mingled with these random thoughts was the image of the woman in the green dress.

  Noelle and Marissa burst into the room.

  “Daddy, Arthur really wants to come in here!” five-year-old Noelle said.

  “He does!” chirped Marissa.

  Arthur, sleek and lean in a shade of gray like a November sky, ambled into The Lab between the girls’ legs.

  “All right, he can come,” Luke said, pretending to be slightly annoyed at the intrusion. Fact is, he nearly welcomed it. “And what are you girls up to this morning?”

  “Ballet class, Daddy!” Noelle said, fixing him a perturbed look. “It’s Saturday!”

  “I have a new leotard!” Marissa chimed in. “It’s pink!”

  The intercom squeaked to life on the wall near Luke’s head.

  “Luke, are the girls with you?” Téa’s voice said.

  He winked at his girls as he stood to press the intercom. “They are,” he said.

  “Tell them to get in the car or we’ll be late. I’m coming out.”

  The intercom went silent.

  “Guess you ballerinas better go,” he said.

  Noelle and Marissa skipped out through the French doors.

  “Don’t forget about Arthur when you come out!” Noelle called as she and her sister began to sprint down the brick walkway to the house.

  “I won’t,” he replied, walking to the door with his girls and closing it after them. He watched them disappear into the garage. Then the garage door rose and Téa’s red Mini Cooper began to back out of it. Luke watched it drive away.

  Luke sat down again, letting Arthur jump onto his lap. He stroked the cat and stared at his open laptop. Several minutes later, he clicked on “My Documents” and moved the cursor to the document simply titled “Five.” He opened it.

  Scrolling down to chapter ten, he stopped at the beginning of the chapter to read up to where he had left off. He had done this same thing several times already in the past three weeks, sometimes writing nothing new, sometimes finishing the chapter but then reading it back to himself and erasing everything he’d just written.

  Arthur began to purr in his lap.

  Luke read the text, pictured Aaron, the owner of the Red Herring Detective Agency, sitting in his darkened office away from the shaded windows. He could see Eden, knees drawn up, sitting in the windowsill, where she had been peeking out of the slivered opening in the blinds. Aaron and Eden arguing about a case, arguing about which of them is headed in the right direction. The main office of the Red Herring Detective Agency silent, except for the whispers of sound their sleeves make as they trade words with their hands.

  How can you be so sure of all this? Aaron signed to Eden.

  She looked out the window, resting her head on the oak window frame behind her for a moment. Then she slowly turned her head toward him and raised her hands to speak.

  Because a woman like Clarice Wilburt doesn’t kill for money. She kills for love.

  Luke stared at the blank whiteness following. There was nothing but a yawning space after the words “She kills for love.”

  He sat there unmoving for several long minutes. Then he closed the document, powered down his laptop, and shut the lid.

  He looked at the clock on his desk.

  Not yet noon. The ticking of the clock began to mesmerize him, lulling him into a stupor—then suddenly the same gentle ticking jarred him to attention. The ticking clock. Marking off the hours. The hours of his life. The hours of his full but meaningless life. Something clicked in his mind as these thoughts tumbled within him.

  “God, I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said spontaneously, and it was very much a prayer. Arthur looked up from Luke’s lap and murmured a cat-like greeting.

  “I don’t know what any of this is for. I don’t know why I do what I do,” Luke whispered to the heavens. “I mean, why do I write these books? Why do I write books about people killing other people? Why do people buy books like that? What is it all for?”

  The room was quiet except for the clocks ticking.

  His restlessness was not about the book he couldn’t seem to finish. It was not about seeing Eden in the flesh, though seeing her had certainly sent t
his newfound discontent rushing to the surface of his soul.

  Something was missing from his life. He felt it. And his reason for writing was mixed up with it. He had lost his passion for writing. For writing anything. He knew now why the woman in the green dress had unnerved him. Eden Damaris was not real. The Red Herring Detective Agency was a charade. None of it was real. None of it. And that was what bothered him.

  He suddenly wanted to be anywhere but in that room. He scooped up the cat from his lap, grabbed his laptop, and headed out of The Lab. He set Arthur down on the stone pathway, closed the door behind him, and headed to the house, anxious to find a quiet place where he could think. Maybe he would go for a drive. Maybe he’d call up his friend Mike and they could go out for coffee. He wished Téa wasn’t at ballet with the girls.

  Stepping inside the house, he made for the fridge, opened it, pulled out a Coke, and shut the door, wondering all the while what to do next. At that moment he noticed his cell phone, resting on the kitchen counter, was blinking. He had missed a call. It was probably Alan, his editor, wondering how the manuscript was coming along. Or wondering why Luke hadn’t returned any of his calls. He picked up the phone and called up the ID screen. It wasn’t Alan. It was his mother. He pressed the button for voice mail to see if she’d left a message. She had.

  Luke, it’s Mom. Dad has had a stroke and he’s… he’s… in the emergency room at the hospital in Cedar Falls. I… I’m not supposed to use my cell phone in the ER. I’ll try calling again in a little while. Maybe you can call the hospital and see if they’ll let me talk to you. I… I have to go. I don’t know where they’re taking him.