In All Deep Places

by Susan Meissner

  “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 responsible, 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 continued. “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!”

  A little after three o’clock, at my direction, the four of us headed back to town. As we came back into city limits, I suddenly remembered it was the day before the Wooden Shoes Festival. On impulse I led the others down Main Street instead of Seventh Avenue. The city square would be bustling with preparations for tomorrow. Maybe we could stop by the newspaper office and get money from my dad for some funnel cakes. The funnel-cake guy always opened a day early. Maybe we could watch the Ferris wheel get put together, or maybe the petting-zoo people had arrived and maybe they would need help getting the goats and miniature horses and baby deer out of their trailers. Maybe the wood-carvers who made the wooden shoes would let them help them unload their truck for a few dollars.

  I just didn’t want to go home yet. I wanted to be somewhere where things were happening. Good things. I didn’t want to go home and see the snot-colored house I lived next door to. I didn’t want to hear Nell’s voice or Darrel’s voice or smell their cigarettes. I didn’t want to think about scary men in jail or high rocks or deep places where you can’t see the bottom.

  And for some reason I couldn’t quite make sense of, I didn’t want Norah or Kieran to have to go back to that snot-colored house right then, and to whatever awaited them inside it.

  Later that evening, after my parents and Ethan had returned from the Miss Halcyon Pageant—I flat-out refused to go with them—and after Ethan had gone to bed and my parents had begun to watch the ten o’clock news, I slipped out my window and climbed into the tree house. I brought the little battery-powered camping lantern my dad had bought for me at the hardware store and my notebook. I wanted to write a story about a man who got sent to jail for something he didn’t do but no one would believe him.

  I scooted across the floor of the tree house to my favorite corner and set the lantern down. I opened the notebook and turned to a fresh page and started to write:

  In his dreams the man always walked out of the courthouse in a suit while he laughed and shook hands with people, but when he awoke the man was always lying in a jail cell, wearing an orange jumpsuit—

  A commotion outside interrupted me. A door had opened. Nell’s back door. Darrel was yelling. It sounded like he was on the phone. He said Belinda’s name. Then he yelled Belinda’s name. The door closed and the yelling became muted. Somewhat. I could still make out some of the words. Most of them were words I was forbidden to say. I peered out an opening and saw that Norah was sitting on Nell’s back step.

  My movement startled her, and she looked up at me. In the dusky moonlight and the yellow glow of Nell’s back-porch light, I could see she was crying. I thought perhaps she would look away or walk away when she saw me looking at her. But she just stared at me with those ancient eyes of hers. I didn’t know why—I certainly never would have been able to explain it to anybody—but I held up my hand to her, fingers curled down except for my pointer finger, with which I pointed to the plywood ceiling above me. It was an invitation to join me in the tree house. My place of escape.

  For a second, Norah did nothing. Then she nodded once and got to her feet. She walked barefoot across the little adjoining lawn and began to climb up the wooden planks nailed to the trunk.

  She emerged from the opening in the floor and hoisted herself inside, looking around, taking in the view. Two camping stools were in one corner along with a box of comic books and Ethan’s Hush Puppies shoebox of Creepy Crawlers. I was in another corner, sitting on the floor with an old sofa cushion behind my back. An old cigar box was on the floor by my feet, and the lantern sat between us. Norah took a seat on one of the stools and dried her cheeks with her hand.

  Neither one of us said anything.

  “I like to come in here to write,” I finally said.

  “To write? What do you write?” she asked softly.

  “Stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  I paused for a moment. “Stories about places I’d like to go, or things I’d like to do. Or things I hope I never have to do.”

  “Is that what you’re doing right now?” she said, looking at my notebook open on my lap. “Writing a story?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence.

  “You want to write something? I can give you some paper,” I said.

  “What would I write about?”

  Luke shrugged his shoulders. “Anything you want.”

  “I like to write poems,” Norah said.

  “Then write a poem.” I tore out a piece of paper and handed it her. I pulled a pencil out of the old cigar box and handed that to her, too. “You can use Ethan’s shoebox to write on.”

  Norah picked up the Hush Puppies shoebox and put it on her lap, laying the piece of paper on the lid. She cocked her head and squinted: the look of someone searching for an idea.

  I went back to my own paragraph about the man in the jail cell. A few seconds later I heard the sound of Norah s pencil on paper.

  “What rhymes with water?” she said a few seconds later.

  I tapped my cheek with my pencil. “Daughter?” I said.

  She considered it. “Yeah. That works.”

  The next day, Norah and Kieran sat with my family and I during the parade that marched past the Janvik and Foxbourne houses an hour before sunset. Nell and Darrel had left—without saying much of anything—to head to the bar in Carrow, the next town over, where nothing special at all was happening that night. If my parents and I had been able to read Nell Janvik’s mind we would have understood she could no longer watch the Wooden Shoes Festival Parade because army veterans bearing the American flag always led the way and she could no longer bear to look at a man in an army uniform. Not after what had happened to Kenny. But we weren’t mind readers, of course, so Nell and Darrel’s casual way of leaving Norah and Kieran with us, without really asking, was looked upon with astonishment.

  Two days later, while the carnival workers packed away the Tilt-a-Whirl and the carousel five blocks away, Darrel loaded up his car. I heard the sound of car doors opening and closing as I ate my breakfast, and I went and looked out the screen door, watching as Darrel prepared to go back to California. Norah came out of Nell’s house then with a grocery bag and a pillow, and she put these in the car. She looked over at my house right then and saw me standing there. She held up her hand an
d kept it still. She was saying goodbye. I held up my hand, too.

  Nine

  The summer I turned fourteen, my father declared I was old enough to earn money at the Halcyon Herald. Real money—not a dollar here and there for running this ad copy over to the co-op, or that missing issue to the nursing home. I finally got to write my name on a yellow time card, and Lucie, the office manager, showed me how to punch it so the time landed on the line it was supposed to.

  That summer, I learned how to use the Nikon 35mm camera and how to develop film in the darkroom. I also began to write the simplest of news stories, like announcements of concerts in the park and diabetes support-group meetings and benefit auctions for good causes. I proved to be dependable and thorough, as many firstborns typically are, but there was an unspoken agreement between father and son, and though it was never mentioned audibly, both understood it. The agreement was this: Working at the paper did not mean I wanted a career in journalism. I was sure I did not, and I suppose my Dad hoped in time maybe I would change my mind.

  When school began that fall, I had to cut back on my hours, but I spent two or three afternoons a week at the paper, doing what I could in between basketball practice and spending time with Matt. My friendship with Matt was changing as the years progressed: Matt was becoming more and more the superstar athlete, and I was becoming more and more the studious academic. Matt was a starter for the junior-varsity basketball squad, and sometimes suited up for varsity games. I sat on the bench most games and played only when a twenty-point spread at the two-minute mark assured a win. Our ideas of good entertainment were changing, too. Matt was a frequent guest at upperclassmen’s parties and had already admitted to experimenting with alcohol. I was not extended those same invitations, nor did I want them. I felt torn between my loyalty to Matt as a friend and my own desire not to mess things up for myself.

  When the basketball season was over, I saw less and less of Matt; we no longer had sleepovers, of course, and playing tricks on Nell had also lost its appeal. And Matt had a bigger circle of friends than I did. We were still good friends, but we were growing apart, and we knew it.