Kitty

The Deep End

"Ding dong bell, Kitty's in the well. Who put it in there, I can't tell! Kitty plays a silly game and doesn't mean to harm; it just wants to have some fun with mice inside the barn!"

Juniper sat in a fat beam of sunshine, cross-legged on the cobblestones of the courtyard beyond the kitchen door of the Inn. Her father was driving into town to pick her up, since he'd no doubt received word of the day before, when his wife had walked from the fiery house raving mad. The two women who ran the place, as kind as they were, hadn't been able to offer much information about Junie's mother other than that she was alive but in the hospital.

"Did you like my rhyme?" she asked, though no visible person was nearby to hear her. "Oh, I know you have your own, but mine came off the top of my head . . . no, not really! You take everything so literally. That's what's happened, you know . . . Yes! You've done a lot of really awful things."

The girl picked at a bit of grass growing between the stones, stared at a few ants moving about there. She'd woken that morning in a comfortable bed but an uncomfortable position, and her neck ached a little because of it, now. One of the women—Anjulie, thought Junie, the one with the longer hair—had been sitting in a chair in the bedroom, watching her and Silas and the baby, asleep across the mattress. Once they'd all awakened, the lady had taken them down for breakfast in the kitchen, where the grown people talked and made plans somewhere beyond her while she'd been content to just eat and let her mind wander.

Junie had spent the rest of the morning in the lobby, reading and waiting, the other children having been taken home and her father contacted.

Frowning suddenly, serious, Junie kept her eyes on the ground and quietly asked, "What's going to happen to my mother? Will she be all right? . . . What do you mean, if she wants to be? Oh, your answers don't make sense, sometimes."

A breeze gently tousled the girl's fluffy hair as she listened; Juniper thought there might be something more than natural in it.

"Me? Oh, no. No, no. We're nothing alike, you and me . . . You're crazy. How? . . ." The girl pressed her fingertip against the warm cobblestone, squashing two ants. "You think I'm different. Yes, you've told me that, but I don't understand . . ." She furrowed her brow, gazed at the little corpses of the creatures she'd crushed and wondered at the meaninglessness of their existence. "I don't know about that. Most girls—well, I don't know about most girls. But it's not very nice to say they're shallow. My sisters— . . . What do you mean, not that sort of shallow?"

Juniper jolted to attention. Her lip hung open; her features dilated in suspense. Quite abruptly, something had become clear to her.

"The shallows," she barely whispered. "They live in the shallows. But I've always felt that—that I was in the deep end." She tilted her head ever so slightly to one side as she listened again. "Yes, like I'm always sinking!" she added. "What was—what did you call it? A hollow? A nothing? Like, like the ocean abyss? Is that where you're from? I mean, not the ocean, exactly, but—"

"Junie?"

Falling backward onto the cobblestones, Juniper whipped around and realized Anjulie had joined her.

"I'm so sorry, hon," the woman said, striding toward the girl and offering a hand. "I didn't mean to startle you."

Juniper stared at Anjulie for a moment, almost as if she were actually trying to surface from some watery depth, and then took hold of the proffered appendage and rose to her feet. "I was just talking to myself," she sheepishly explained.

Anjulie bit her tongue, crossed her arms. "Your father called. He'll be here in about twenty minutes."

"All right."