Seriously, it was cringe-worthy. It was like she was…performing or something.
It was not only unbelievable because she was usually reserved, but also because not three nights ago she’d seen my spirit outside of my body, returning home after riding a white stag during a war where I’d witnessed my great-grandfather die. Now, suddenly, she wanted to pretend everything was warm, homespun happiness.
Once we got the pleasantries over with and went inside, she had us sit at the kitchen table so we could continue talking as she cooked. It was the time of the day when I usually found her there with her tablet, absorbed in the news of the world filtered through her online portal. But today, she’d already started to prepare a meal. The house smelled of lemon chicken, my favorite, and she’d pulled out a bottle of white wine. It was already uncorked and breathing on the dining room table in an ice bucket.
“So tell me what’s up,” she said. Before we could answer, though, she opened the oven door to peek at the pecan pie and added, “It’s so good to have you back home again, Jarrod.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Lockwood,” Jarrod said. He dipped his head in her direction politely, even though her back was turned to him. “It’s good to be back.”
“I’m sure it is.” She closed the oven and came over to sit with us at the table then, where she put her hand on Jarrod’s forearm and said, “I’m so glad you’re home with your mom now. She’s missed you something awful.”
“We’re doing good again.” Jarrod nodded briefly, then moved the arm my mother had been patting to scratch his chin. When he lowered his hand again, he said, “I always thought I’d find myself back here someday anyhow.”
“Really?” My mom raised her eyebrows a little. “What made you think that? I would think that most young people who leave this place don’t ever look back.”
Jarrod didn’t say anything for a second. He just met my mom’s waiting stare. I could see him trying to figure out an answer. He knew she was more than an ordinary mother making dinner. He knew she’d done something to change the way his mom remembered things recently, same as she’d messed with the memories of her own family. And he knew what my mom had told me about harbingers of death and the world’s shadow. So there my mom sat, lifting a cup of coffee to her lips, sipping it while keeping her eyes locked with Jarrod’s.
“I guess,” he finally said, “that living in a city didn’t really take with me.”
“Interesting,” said my mom. Then she stood and went to pull plates down from a cupboard. Looking over her shoulder as she reached up to the shelves, she said, “I’ve always felt I wouldn’t want to live anywhere but Temperance. We must be kindred spirits that way, you and me.”
Jarrod gave her a friendly grin. But when she turned back to the cupboard, he looked at me and made a face that said Your mom is a total alien.
Twenty minutes later, my dad and Toby came through the back door, knocking their work boots off in the mudroom, hanging up their coats. When they stepped up into the kitchen and saw Jarrod at the table between my mom and me, my dad got a big smile on his face and said, “Why, Mr. Doyle! It’s been a while!” and held his hand out for Jarrod to shake.
My brother followed suit, and before long they were all sitting around the dining room table as my mom and I brought out the food. Toby had already caught Jarrod up on the local high school baseball scene, which Toby still followed. He said he’d heard Jarrod was pitching some mean games up in Cleveland, and Jarrod said, “Well, I’ve got a good fastball, but I need to work on my curve.”
“Everything straight down the center, no looking back, just like your father,” said my dad, grunting afterward. Jarrod was the kind of son he could have easily been proud of, like Toby. “Josh was always a straight shooter,” he said, “in life and in baseball. How’s he doing, by the way?”
Jarrod sort of flinched at the mention of his dad, or maybe he flinched at the mention of being straight down the center when in reality he wasn’t straight at all. But I guess you wouldn’t notice a flinch that slight if you didn’t know his dad had thrown him out because he’d been caught making out with a guy in his bedroom. I felt bad, sitting there, knowing his secret. It seemed to gather behind him now, like a dark cloud he hoped no one would notice. But I did. I noticed. Every day I saw his secret follow him around, like some mangy mutt he’d been too nice to.
Jarrod glanced my way, as if he was worried I’d tell everyone, but I looked down at my plate, where my mom’s chicken and rice waited, and let him recover. I knew the truth about why he’d come back, but I also knew something else: that he wanted me. That he wanted me to want him back in a way I wasn’t sure I could. It was almost as if I had to not look at him now, knowing all that, so he could go on being normal with my family.
He told my dad that his father was doing fine—still working at the car factory, still going to Indians games, despite record losses—and when he was finally back in a good rhythm of talking about all things baseball, I looked up again, slowly, to watch him when he wouldn’t notice me looking.
He was so animated, not hesitant, like he’d been initially. I found myself watching the curve of his jaw as he spoke, the line sharp as a sickle. And the way he kept brushing his hair from his eyes. How he waved his fork around to illustrate whatever he was talking about. He was…I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure how to express in words about what I felt right then. Especially about another guy. For as long as I could remember, I’d assumed that one day I’d run into some girl who jarred me out of my haze—maybe on one of those after-school drives down the back roads of Temperance, or maybe once I’d discovered my true destination during one of those drives, the home I was looking for—and everything for the rest of my life would just fall into place, like it does for most people.
But here I was, feeling something else, a vague and possibly dangerous emotion. I wasn’t on one of my back road drives, though, and there was no girl waking me up from the spell of confusion I’d been under. There was this guy instead, this guy who had called my name in the hallway, this guy who had made me look up and realize that nothing around me was what I thought it was. Not even myself.
It was while I was staring at Jarrod, trying to sort through those unexpected and confusing feelings, that I noticed something other than me was out of place in that room: a shadow, a real shadow, that didn’t belong to anyone in our house.
At first it seemed like the light in the room dimmed, as if the flow of electricity through the house was about to wink out. And then the shadow suddenly slipped out of a corner of the room to come and stand behind Jarrod’s chair. At first it was just this dark, vaguely human shape, but as I continued to watch, the shadow took on full definition, a hazy layer of color, developing like an old-fashioned photograph, antique and blurry, until I could make out the figure of a woman.
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t manage to say anything as the shadow put her hands on Jarrod’s shoulders and leaned down to whisper in his ear. He just sat there, talking with my father and brother as if he didn’t feel her behind him, as if he couldn’t hear her spinning her voice inside him, the voice she sometimes spun inside me.
Who was she? And what was she telling him? If she had her way, would Jarrod eventually wake to find himself standing under the Living Death Tree in the orchard?
“What are you doing to him?” I finally managed to say.
And everyone at the table turned to look at me.
“Aidan?” my dad said, his face a mess of confusion. “What are you talking about?”
The woman’s shadow disappeared in an instant, like smoke clearing after a magic trick, and my mom, looking more startled than anyone else in the room, said, “Yes, just what are you talking about, Aidan?”
Toby held a forkful of chicken in midair and looked at me like I was a crazy person. But when I turned to Jarrod, he only looked at me with his dark steady eyes, undisturbed by my outburst, waiting to hear what I’d say next. And I knew right then that whatever I said, he’d be on my
side.
“It’s just,” I said, trying to think of an alternate explanation for my outburst, since the truth would not have gone over well with anyone but my mom, and not even her, really, since it would have brought up the sort of things she’d asked me not to mention to my dad and brother. “It’s just that you guys are talking Jarrod’s ears off. Give him some breathing room, or he probably won’t come back to visit.”
Jarrod laughed at this answer, and the tension in the room evaporated. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back, as long as your mom promises to make dinner again. This is delicious, by the way, Mrs. Lockwood.”
My dad laughed too, now that he’d been prompted to find my outburst humorous. And with that, I knew I’d escaped what could have been an explosive moment.
My mom turned her attention to Jarrod now, saying that he was quite the charmer and that she’d make him a meal whenever he wanted. “As long as you can guarantee that my son won’t bite everyone’s heads off in the middle of dinner,” she added, turning to raise her eyebrows at me, as if she couldn’t believe my behavior. Then she speared a piece of broccoli with her fork, fast and sharp, like a hunter going in for the kill.
I let the comment go. And I waited. Waited to get through the rest of dinner. Waited to get through dessert. Waited to be excused from chores that night, since I had a guest over, so Jarrod and I could go up to my room to hang out like we were completely normal seventeen-year-olds, away from everyone else for the evening.
“What was that all about?” Jarrod asked after I’d closed my bedroom door behind us a little later. “Something raised your hackles back there, didn’t it?”
I slipped my hands into my pockets and looked out my bedroom window at the dark line of trees behind the pasture, where I’d exited the woods on the back of a white stag a few nights before. “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “I saw something down there. In the room with us.”
“What was it?” Jarrod asked. I could feel him step closer as I stood with my back to him, heard the creak of floorboards beneath his feet, as if he were sneaking up on me like the shadow had snuck up on him.
“There was a woman down in the room with us,” I said. “I saw her doing something to you. I don’t know how to explain it. She came out of the corner to stand behind you. She leaned down and whispered something in your ear. That’s when I freaked out at the table.”
“You’re kidding me,” Jarrod said. I could almost feel his breath on the back of my neck as he formed his words behind me.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “She went away after that, but I know what I saw. She was doing something to you. She was…telling you something. But in whispers. I couldn’t hear her.”
Moonlight glinted on the dewy November grass, so that it sparkled like a field of stars below my window. I thought of the Probable Stone, the star my mom had pointed out in the memory she’d given back to me. I wanted to find it right then, to touch it, to ask the star to take me home again, wherever home was. Because where I was didn’t feel like home any longer. It couldn’t be home, so full of mismatched memories and shadows that hovered in corners. My house was haunted. But by who, or what, I didn’t know.
Sometimes it felt like it was maybe me—my old self, the one I’d forgotten—doing the haunting. Waiting for me to turn around and see who I used to be.
“There’s no one else for me to trust,” I said. “Not even my family. I’ve never been able to talk to my dad. And even though I love my brother, we’ve never been really close, you know? And my mom. Well—” I stopped there for a moment, shaking my head and wincing a little, not wanting to feel the hurt and anger that welled up whenever I thought about her these days. “I don’t know who she is anymore,” I continued. “There’s just you. You’re the only person who doesn’t feel like a stranger right now. Even though I haven’t seen you in years, even though I can’t remember everything about us, I can feel you inside me, in all the memories I can’t recall anymore. There’s just you.”
I couldn’t face him as I said those things. It was too hard to say something that made me feel that vulnerable. So I kept looking out the window, where in the glass I could see a reflection of Jarrod’s face hovering over my shoulder.
“I’m glad you can trust me, Aidan,” he said. “But if we’re going to be completely honest with each other, I have something else to tell you.”
“What?” I asked, hoping it wouldn’t be some other huge problem for me to figure out. I had enough of those to handle.
“I told you that my dad kicked me out because he caught me with another guy.”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Well, that’s true. But it wasn’t really completely innocent on my part.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Jarrod, “that I set myself up to be caught that night.”
“Why?” I asked. I could see my own brow furrowing in my reflection in the window.
“Because,” said Jarrod, “my dad wouldn’t let me move back in with my mom, even though she’s been clean and on track for a while now. And I needed to get back here somehow. To help you, if I could. So I brought that guy home after picking him up outside a club one night, and I made sure it was when my dad would be coming home from his night shift. I made sure we were…well, you know, not quiet. So my dad would come in and see us like that.”
“How did you know I’d need your help?” I asked, shaking my head, unable to comprehend why he’d go so far out on a limb for me. Unable to comprehend how he even knew I’d need him.
“Because one of the things you showed me when we were thirteen was this time in your life, when you wouldn’t know yourself any longer. You didn’t understand how it would happen, but you knew it would. You showed it all to me. And you asked me to come help you remember things if I could.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“I’m not,” said Jarrod. “For a while after my dad moved us to Cleveland, I’d think about you and all that stuff. With each year that passed, I started to tell myself maybe I’d imagined all the weird things you were able to do and see, all the things you’d shown me. But at the end of this summer, I dreamed about you, and I hadn’t done that in a long time. When I woke up, I couldn’t get the dream out of my head. I felt like you’d sent it to me, like a message. A few weeks passed, and I kept having dreams about you. And I saw you like you are now, not like the thirteen-year-old I’d left behind. So I knew they were more than ordinary dreams. That’s when I brought that guy home so my dad would discover the truth about his perfect son and send me to live with my mom since he couldn’t stand to look at me any longer.”
“And here you are,” I said.
“And here I am,” said Jarrod.
I turned around quickly to tell him what an idiot he was for taking that kind of a risk, and he was right there, his face inches from mine, waiting for me, waiting for this moment, like maybe all those years ago I’d shown him this moment happening too, and he’d positioned himself to be ready for it. His warm breath fluttered against my lips, and it smelled of peppermint.
“I saw this moment in a vision you showed me once, a long time ago,” he said now, confirming my suspicions. His voice was low in his throat, almost like he was frightened of what he was saying. His eyes were dark, and something in them glittered.
I struggled with how close we were, with how I was almost pressed up against the window with only an inch or two between us. But I managed to overcome my fears and tell him what I had to.
“If I showed you this exact moment years ago,” I said, “then you know what to do next, don’t you?”
I could feel my body trembling and tried to calm it.
Jarrod nodded, but he didn’t do what I thought he would, not right away. Instead, he said, “Are you sure about this?”
And I nodded, closed my eyes like that might help me go through with it blindfolded. I’d been blindfolded for years by then anyway. I was used to not seeing.
“I don’
t know,” Jarrod said a second later. “You seem afraid.”
“I am afraid,” I admitted, but I opened my eyes again, looked at him for one long moment.
“There,” he whispered now. “That’s better.”
Then he put his hands on my cheeks and leaned in to kiss me.
There was a moment in that kiss where I felt like I’d been thrown over the side of a ship into the depths of the ocean, and I split into two people: the me who’d been thrown overboard and the me watching myself falling down and down through the dark blue water, unconscious, floating, my arms flung out like a jellyfish, formless, my eyes closed, drifting down and farther down to the bottom of an endless nothing.
I’m going to drown, I thought. I’m going to lose myself entirely.
And then my drowning body opened its eyes, looked from side to side, saw the glimmering of sunlight filtering from above, and began to swim toward it, pulling upward and farther upward in long strokes.
I opened my eyes an instant later, inhaling deeply as Jarrod and I pulled away from each other.
“What do you think?” he said, blinking his dark eyes, stroking my cheek with one fingertip. “Is this okay?”
I could have answered him with words. I could have said “Yes, it’s okay,” and “It’s more than okay.”
But instead, I just nodded, put my hands on his cheeks like he’d put his on mine, and threw myself overboard a second time.
November would be good. I kept telling myself that it had to be good after the insanity of October. So life wasn’t what I thought, I told myself. So what if I could sometimes see into the future or the past? So what if I could unintentionally slip into something my mother called the world’s shadow if I wasn’t careful? So what if I’d gotten up on the back of a harbinger of death, as my mother called the white stag, and rode it home through time and space? So what if I’d seen another harbinger of death walk into my seventh-grade classroom on the day he planned to claim the life of my teacher, and couldn’t remember because my mom had hidden some of my own memories from me? So what if I’d made out with a guy in my bedroom while my family watched television in the room below?
Wonders of the Invisible World Page 10
