Deepwater
Sometimes, life decides to go in a direction you never dreamed it could go. For some people, this is probably a beautiful thing. For others, it means the destruction of everything that they took for granted.
I was the latter.
I stared out the window, lost in thought. The road had long since grown empty, surrounded only by an almost impressively thick, unending wall of trees that only seemed to get taller, deeper… and darker.
“You all right, Brooke?”
I glanced over at my mother. There were deep lines under her eyes that had never been there before; the laughter was gone out of the hazel, leaving only sadness. Deep shadows had sunken her face in with concern, stress, and something I didn’t really understand.
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice too loud in the car. I cleared my throat. “Are we… almost there?”
My mother- Helen Grace- sniffed in amusement. “Isn’t that a little cliché, honey?”
“We’ve been driving for, like, three days,” I said, trying not to laugh. “You don’t think I’ve earned the right to ask?”
Mom smiled for just a moment, before it slid off of her face tiredly. “I can tell we’re almost there,” she said, and I saw her glance at the trees on either side. “The woods are getting meaner.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is that a… Deepwater thing?”
“What?”
“Talking about trees like they’re… sentient.”
She glanced at me. “Sort of.”
I frowned. I’d been joking, obviously. “Mom, you okay? You need me to drive?”
She snorted, a shockingly loud, derisive sound. “If I wanted us to get there before your graduation, the last thing I’d do is stick you behind the wheel.”
I placed a hand to my chest in mock offense. “Excuse you, Mom, I’ve gotten loads better at driving, thank you very much!”
“Your last lesson took marks off for driving too slow.”
“People need to slow down!”
“You were going twenty-five in a fifty zone!”
I smiled as she laughed, relieved to see a small resemblance to how she’d been before… well. Before Dad died.
“If Deepwater is as small as you were saying,” I said, “then I shouldn’t have any trouble learning how to drive, right?”
Darn. There went the smile.
“Honey, I know this is going to sound weird,” she said, hesitating, “but… I don’t want you to get too comfortable here, all right?” Her hands tightened on the wheel. “I left Deepwater for a reason.”
“A reason you won’t tell me.”
“Because it’ll sound crazy,” she admitted. “But you’ll understand once we’re there.” Her expression darkened. “You’ll see why I left.”
“But… you always talk about how much you miss Aunt Clary,” I insisted. “You talk about going to visit all the time.”
She snorted again. “Honey, both Clary and I know that I never meant it. She knew I wasn’t going back if I could help it. That we’re going back at all shows how bad things are.”
Her voice cracked, but we both pretended it didn’t.
“I’m not planning on getting attached,” I said. “I’m supposed to start University next year, right? In and out. We’ll just… do Senior year here, and then get moving.”
My Mom smiled wanly. “Thank you for making this move so easy, Brooklyn. I know it can’t have been easy, leaving… leaving everything behind.”
“People have moved states all the time,” I said, pretending to be feeling better than I really was. I hated the fact that all of my best friends were going to move on without me… because I knew they would. Deep down, I knew that without me there, they’d slowly move on with their lives, and the messages would come more slowly. I’d seen it happen before.
Whatever my mother might have responded with, it died in her throat as we rounded a corner. I looked up in time to see a very large, white sign that read, “Welcome to Deepwater”. There was a strange symbol underneath it, but we were driving too quickly for me to be able to pick up what it was. I did see, however, that the population was somewhere around 80,000.
“Eighty thousand people, huh?” I said, glancing at my mom. Her hands had tightened as hard as they could on the wheel, till her knuckles had turned white; her expression was pinched. “That seems like a lot more than I expected.”
“Only because you’re not used to the way things are. Everyone is going to know who you are, Brooke.” Her expression soured further. “Everyone.”
We drove in silence after that, because I could tell that wherever Mom had receded to in her head, it was a place I couldn’t get her out of. She’d always been like that whenever Deepwater spent too much time in any given conversation, but since Dad had died… it had gotten way worse.
The outskirts of Deepwater began appearing around us slowly, and I felt a keen desire to try to get out of my head- and the boundaries of my mother’s. I slipped out my phone, lowered the window, and recorded our surroundings for a moment before sending the video off to Ava, my best friend in the entire world.
Brooke: Does all of this seem weird to you?
Ava: jeeze, not even a hello! I haven’t heard from you in hours. It’s so quiet on your end
Brooke: Mom’s not stoked about how close we’re getting.
Brooke: Seriously, though, does this seem off to you?
Ava: I mean… it’s dark, but it just seems like a forest? I guess it is really, really dark. Why are the houses so far back, and so far apart?
I looked out the window and frowned. We were passing more and more houses now that we were entering the city- town?- proper. The houses were really far back in the woods, but that wasn’t necessarily strange; we’d seen that as we’d driven North out of California, particularly as we’d passed other smaller towns. Houses having tons of land between them and even around them wasn’t weird outside of Los Angeles.
But this felt… different. Everything under the trees was in shadow; if the sun ever touched the forest floor, then it wasn’t happening today. Why anyone would choose to live in constant shadow was beyond me, but the forest floor was thick with overgrowth. I would’ve thought that maybe the houses were abandoned, but on some lots, there were brand, spanking new cars sparkling like they’d just come off the lot.
I shook my head, pinching the bridge of my nose before finally shooting off one more text to Ava.
Brooke: I think my mom’s getting to me, lol
Brooke: She keeps saying the most crytpic stuff.
Ava: Well, you both have been through the ringer
Ava: You feeling okay?
I shook my head. For a second, I thought about telling her the truth. Of course I wasn’t okay. My dad had been killed in a stupid car accident, and I was leaving everything behind for a place my mom had been warning me about my entire life, acting like living there was a literal, actual death sentence.
But that would be counter intuitive to my mission. We had to keep moving forward. If I stopped to think about everything that was happening, I’d fall apart, and if I did that, then so would mom. Neither of us could afford to fall apart. I had to get my crap together, because if I left Deepwater, then mom could, too, and we could pretend this one little year in our lives was just some terrible nightmare.
So:
Brooke: I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I have too much to worry about anyway
Ava: If you say so
We both knew better, but the charade had to be kept up.
By now, more and more houses were beginning to appear, and things were sort of normalizing. This was your average suburban neighborhood that we were in now; houses beside houses, some with children’s play things out front, some with actual children running around. We saw people chatting with neighbors, the occasional lawn littered with random belongings, and cars that ran the gambit between “too old to be on the road” and “so new, it was barely used”.
I can’t let myself get attached to anything here, I thought grimly. I need to be able to say goodbye to this place when the time comes. I’m not supposed to be here.
But there was a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I was supposed to be in Deepwater. It was probably just my mother’s own mood messing things up in my head, but there was this dark thought nagging somewhere deep down, somewhere that was still afraid of the dark.
What if something was always going to be trying to bring us back?
Stupid, I thought, trying to shake myself. I’m not in the right head space for all of this. This is just some stupid town out in the Pacific Northwest; there’s nothing here.
Right then, however, we pulled to a stop at a red light, and I looked up in time to see a pretty girl with long, raven-black hair putting a sign up on a post just a few feet away from the car door. Her eyes were blotchy red, and there were two other girls standing behind her, all of them very pretty. I could see why the three of them were upset a beat later when I read the sign, and my stomach turned:
MISSING: ANNIE NORRIS
AGE: 17
SEX: FEMALE
LAST SEEN: JULY 28th
IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION REGARDING THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ANNABELLE “ANNIE” NORRIS, PLEASE CONTACT PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR AIDAN ARKWRIGHT OR DETECTIVE DEREK LEACH.
Welp.
So much for normal.
