In All Deep Places

by Susan Meissner

  The message ended. Luke stood motionless for only a second. Then he frantically looked up the number for the hospital in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Minutes later he connected with the hospital reception. Finally after being placed on hold for several more agonizing minutes, he found out his father had been moved to Intensive Care. A few seconds later, a woman’s voice greeted him on the other end of his phone.

  “ICU.”

  “My name is Luke Foxbourne. My father is Jack Foxbourne. He… someone told me he’s in the ICU. I need to talk to my mother, MaryAnn Foxbourne. Is she there?”

  “Can you hold a moment, please?” the voice said. So calm. Luke wondered for one crazy second what it would be like to work in a place where you saw lives changing in horrible ways every minute… and for you it would be just a normal day on the job.

  Then a voice came over the line.

  “Luke?”

  His mother.

  “Mom! What happened? Is Dad okay?”

  She began to cry.

  “He… they re doing some kind of test right now. The doctor in the ER said he’s probably out of the woods but, Luke, he can’t talk and he can’t… he just has this blank look on his face like he doesn’t know who I am!”

  Her voice broke into sobs.

  “Mom! Tell me what happened!”

  He heard her sniffling on the other end.

  “I don’t know when it happened, Luke! I was at a ladies retreat and I got home after our own sunrise service at about ten-thirty. He was lying in the living room when I came in. I don’t know how long he’d been lying there!”

  Luke was now wildly pacing the kitchen. His dad was only sixty-two. Too young. Too young to be lying in a hospital bed in that condition. His mom was too young to have this happen to her husband. He had to get there. Fast.

  “I’m coming, Mom. I’ll get on the first flight I can, okay?”

  “Yes, yes. I don’t know how to get you here to the hospital. I don’t know where—”

  “Mom, I’ll rent a car,” he said, cutting her off. “I’ll get there. Don’t worry about that. Do you want me to call Ethan?”

  “Oh, yes. I don’t have his number with me!”

  “I’ll take care of it. And I’ll get there as soon as I can. What’s Dad’s room number?”

  “Oh, it’s two… thirty-six. But he doesn’t have a phone in his room!”

  “I’ll call you at the nurses’ station just before I get on the plane, okay?”

  His mother was sobbing again.

  “Mom?”

  “Okay, yes… yes.”

  “See you soon.”

  He clicked off the phone.

  “God,” he said aloud, but nothing else came. His hands were shaking, and he couldn’t think. He needed to call a travel agent or go online or something. Just then he heard a car pull up in the driveway. He glanced out the side door window. Téa and the girls were home.

  He stepped into the dining room, hiding from his girls and mentally focusing on steadying his breathing. He knew Téa would send them upstairs to change into play clothes. He needed to talk to his wife alone. And he wanted to be calm when he did. The door opened and voices filled the silence.

  “Okay, you two,” he heard Téa say. “Put those leotards in your dresser, not on the floor.”

  He heard the sound of his daughters scampering upstairs. He came around the corner, startling his wife.

  “Luke!” she yelled playfully, at first thinking he had hidden to play a trick on her. But then she saw his face and her playful shock turned to concern. “What is it?”

  “My mom called. Dad has had a stroke. Mom says he can’t talk or move. She wasn’t there when it happened, so no one knows when it happened, if it was this morning or last night before he went to bed…”

  His voice choked up. He reached for Téa and she came to him, laying her head on his chest.

  “I have to go to him,” he whispered. He felt her head nod.

  “Of course,” she whispered back “Of course you do.”

  He held her tighter. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone.”

  She looked up. “We’ll just take one day at a time, okay?”

  Luke sighed. “I’ll miss Noelle’s graduation from kindergarten on Friday. I might miss her birthday next week, too.”

  Téa reached up and touched his cheek. “She’ll understand. She loves her Grampa Jack. And the girls and I can join you after school gets out if you’re still there, okay?”

  He wrapped his hand around hers. “Maybe.”

  She broke away. “You go pack. I’ll call the travel agency. Then we’ll tell the girls together.”

  He nodded, grabbed the address book from a basket near the phone, and punched in the number for Ethan’s school in Burkina Faso.

  While he waited for the call to go through, he began to climb the stairs to the bedroom. The sound of a faraway phone rang in his ear, followed by the sound of his brother’s sleepy voice.

  Luke began to speak, without so much as a stray thought about the startling revelation he had less than an hour before while he sat in his Lab with a cat on his lap.

  Three

  Luke sat with his mother in a room off the nurse’s station as dawn peeked through nearly closed mini-blinds behind them. She was asleep, leaning into him on a borrowed pillow. He had dozed off, too, sometime in the middle of the night. They had been encouraged by the night nurse to get a decent nights rest at a nearby hotel. She had even recommended one, but neither Luke nor his mother wanted to leave the hospital. They had both felt compelled to stay close by, as if they expected Jack Foxbourne to suddenly awaken from his strange stupor and ask where his family was.

  Luke yawned and stretched, and then felt his mothers small frame stir beside him. She lifted her head.

  “What time is it?” she asked groggily.

  Luke raised an arm and looked at his watch. “A little after six.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “I can’t believe this has happened,” she said softly. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up. But I am awake. And this is real.”

  Luke involuntarily flinched when she said the word “real,” remembering for the first time since he’d learned of his father’s stroke that he had his own set of hurdles looming ahead.

  “I’ve always known life can change in an instant,” she continued.

  “I’ve seen it happen to other people. I see it happen to people in Halcyon all the time. I saw it happen to the little Janvik boy in front of my very eyes. But I just never considered it might happen to us.”

  Luke put an arm around his mothers shoulder and she let her head fall into the place on his chest his movement created.

  ‘Tm afraid he’s gone, Luke,” she whispered.

  “Don’t…” he replied. But he could say nothing else.

  When Luke had finally arrived at the hospital the evening before, it was nearly six-thirty. Jack Foxbourne’s face had been expressionless when Luke first saw him lying on layers of white, but his father’s eyes seemed to glisten with fear as Luke made eye contact with him, as if his dad knew exactly what was happening and it scared him to death. A thick, bright-white bandage was taped above his right eye, evidence he had hit something hard and unforgiving when the stroke had felled him.

  The emergency-room doctor had told them the stroke had occurred on the left side of Jack Foxbourne’s brain, disabling the speech center and paralyzing his right side.

  “But he will recover, right?” his mother had asked.

  The doctor had paused before telling Luke’s mother she really needed to talk with the stroke-rehabilitation doctor, whom Jack would see for the first time later today, about her husband’s recovery.

  “Why can’t you tell me?” she had said, sounding very young and afraid.

  “Recovering from a stroke is sometimes very slow and difficult, Mrs. Foxbourne. And it can be different for everybody. The most significant recovery will happen in these next thirty days. And most stroke victims
continue to recover for several months. Usually by six months, though, whatever recovery is going to take place will have taken place. Some of the skills he has lost he will recover, some he probably won’t. He will need to learn to adapt to his new limitations. And you need to know it takes time to learn to compensate for skill deficits.”

  “What deficits? What do you mean?”

  “Well, your husband may need to learn how to hold a fork differently, or walk with a cane or a walker, or button a shirt with one hand. He may need to relearn how to read and write. When the brain is damaged, we enter into a whole new realm of unknowns, I’m afraid.”

  I’m afraid, too, Luke had wanted to say.

  The doctor had said nothing else, and Luke and his mother had spent the rest of the evening and night wondering what awaited them. For Luke’s mother, it was a fresh set of troubles. For Luke, it seemed like his dilemma had just been magnified three times over. And another long day was just beginning.

  By nine o’clock that evening, Luke had convinced his mother to leave the hospital for a night of rest at a nearby hotel. He had offered to drive her home to Halcyon for the night but she refused to make the forty-five-minute trip. He got her situated in a hotel three blocks from the hospital, taking care of the arrangements and escorting her to her room. As he got ready to leave the hotel, his mother looked at him, a question poised on her lips.

  “Luke, I need to ask something of you… something I would never ask if there was any other way…” She stopped.

  Luke knew what it was she wanted to ask him but was struggling to say. He had known all day, ever since his mother had called Lucie at the newspaper to tell her his father had had a stroke. His father’s paper was currently without an editor. He was the most likely and qualified person to step in for a while.

  “I know what you’re going to ask me, Mom,” he said quietly. “It’s all right. I’ll do it. At least until we can make other arrangements.”

  “I hate to have to ask you,” she said. “I know you never wanted to go back to the paper. But Lucie can’t do it all. And Gretchen and Todd don’t even know how to write. Cubby can only write sports stories. You should have seen the last story he did on the city council. It sounded like a play-by-play of a wrestling match.”

  She was crying again but her sudden humor was welcome—the first he had seen of it since he arrived.

  “It’s not that I hate it, Mom, it just wasn’t the career for me,” he said, trying to reassure her. “It’s not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I don’t hate it, okay? But I honestly can’t stay indefinitely. We may need to think about selling the paper, Mom.”

  She looked up at him, her brief display of humor gone. “You’re already giving up on him?” she said, with a slight edge in her voice.

  “I’m not giving up,” he said, surprised by her response. “I just think we need to be prepared for some unpleasant choices. Mom, he may not be able to—”

  “We don’t know anything yet! We don’t have a crystal ball!” she said, standing at the little table. “Luke, don’t give up on him. You can’t! If you do, he’ll see it. He needs to know he can get well!”

  “Mom, maybe we should talk about this another time. You’re tired, I’m tired.”

  “You must promise me you won’t say a word to him about selling the paper!” his mother insisted. “And you can’t mention it to me when I am with him. He hears everything just fine. He mustn’t think his life won’t wait for him!”

  “Mom, let’s just forget it for now, okay? I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “But you’re already thinking about it,” she said, nearly pouting.

  Luke wanted to collapse into a bed. He wanted sleep. “Mom, please,” he said.

  She was silent for a few seconds. “Promise me you won’t give up on him.”

  Luke looked intently at his mother, trying to match her determination.

  “Mom, I will not give up on him,” he said.

  But the newspaper was another matter. He could stay a month, maybe two. But that was it. He had a book to finish. He had a wife and kids back in Connecticut. He had a life. And it wasn’t here in Iowa.

  Although his mother wouldn’t go back to Halcyon for the night, Luke would. He would need to stop by the newspaper in the morning anyway. Lucie would be eager to know how Jack was… and what the future held. The latter question was as hard for Luke to consider as his writer’s block. Halcyon in the late spring moonlight looked as peaceful and serene as its name suggested. The tree-lined residential streets were dotted here and there with the warm hues of creamy yellow and fairy blue; colors cast by porch lights and glowing TV screens in living-room windows as Luke made his way through town. His hometown was home to three thousand with another eight hundred or so on nearby acreages. The true heart and soul of the community—the family farms—were visible on any road leading out of town; they were marked by grain silos, solitary clusters of trees, and two-storied, shuttered houses that all faced south.

  Luke wove through the quiet streets, traveling past the lamp lit town square, the silent band shell in Memorial Park, and the darkened storefronts without a great deal of interest. He purposely eased up on his speed as he drove past the offices of the Halcyon Herald, though. He supposed it had been crazy in there earlier today as the staff pulled the paper together for the printers tomorrow morning. He was glad the office was dark and that Lucie and Cubby were not still inside trying to put the paper to bed. He would have felt compelled to stop and help them.

  Luke turned past the bank and the post office and cast a glance down the street that led to his old high school. It seemed odd to be driving these familiar streets in a strange vehicle without Téa and the girls. It seemed even more out of place to be headed toward his childhood home, knowing he’d be sleeping there tonight and would be alone.

  He turned down a side street and followed it for several blocks, slowing down by the house where his best friend, Matt, had lived. He had no idea who lived there now. He had long since lost track of Matt. He turned left onto Seventh Avenue.

  Luke’s parents’ house came into view, standing in a pearly-splash of moonlight but wrapped in its own darkness, with not even a light in a bedroom window showing. As he pulled into the driveway, he noticed that the Janvik place next door looked the same—dark and unwelcoming. It was obvious no one was inside either house. He wondered if Norah’s grandmother’s old house—still painted the same nauseating shade of green—was empty again. He wouldn’t be surprised if it was. That house was cursed. No one had ever truly been happy in it. Not before Nell Janvik had owned it and not after. And certainly not while she owned it.

  Luke stopped the car in the driveway and got out. He took his suitcase out of the trunk and walked up the dark pathway to the front door, noticing that a For Sale sign was indeed poking out of the front lawn next door. Dandelions had sprouted all around the sign’s legs, and even in the darkness, Luke could tell the sign had been there for a while. He pulled his mother’s key ring out of his pocket, slipped the key into the lock, and stepped inside.

  When he switched on a light in the living room he saw at once where his father had fallen. He saw the lamp on the floor, the small spot of blood on the carpet, the end table that was out of alignment with its twin on the other side of the sofa. His dad had no doubt fallen against the table, hitting his head on the corner. The lamp had crashed to the carpet with him. Three indentations in the carpet showed where the legs of the little table usually rested.

  Luke closed the door behind him, stepped farther inside, and put his suitcase down by the sofa. His mother’s overnight bag was there, too. He moved the end table back to its rightful spot and replaced the lamp. He’d tackle the little bloodstain tomorrow. What could one more day matter?

  He sank down onto the sofa and rested his head in his hands for a moment. It was after ten but he needed to talk to Téa. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “Hey.” Téa’s voice at once began
to soothe him.

  “Hey, yourself,” he said wearily.

  “How’s it going?”

  “There wasn’t a whole lot of change today. He’s trying to talk but can hardly get one word out right. And it’s driving him crazy. They’re moving him to a regular room tomorrow. And he starts occupational and physical therapy tomorrow, too. The doctor said the first days of therapy are like hell. For everybody.”

  “I’m sorry, babe. I wish the girls and I could come.”

  “Actually, I think maybe it’s best if you don’t for a while. He wouldn’t want you or the girls to see him like this.”

  A few seconds of silence passed between them.

  “So, do you know how long you’ll be staying, Luke? The girls are already asking.”

  Luke took a deep breath before continuing.

  “He’s going to be in recovery for several months. He may get some of his movement and speech back, but the doctors aren’t even suggesting he’ll fully recover.”

  “So… what does that mean?”

  “Well, between you and me, I think it means my parents are going to have to sell the paper. Dad’s going to have to retire a little early.”

  Téa was quiet for a moment. “That’ll kill him,” she said. “Sorry, I know it’s a bad choice of words. But Luke, I can’t imagine your dad not having that newspaper.”

  “Well, my mom can’t either. She won’t even discuss it with me. I’m thinking she’s going to have to realize it on her own, and I’m betting these next thirty days will convince her of it. That’s when the most recovery will be made.”

  “So you don’t think he’ll be able to go back?”

  Luke sighed. “I suppose it’s possible. But I really think it would take a miracle, Téa.” He suddenly couldn’t continue.

  “Luke, I’m sorry,” Téa said, her voice also filled with sadness. “Is there anything I can do?”