Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “Around your house,” Jarrod said, spreading his hands in front of him as if this were as obvious as the trays with the remains of our lunch sitting in front of us.

  “But there’s nothing there I don’t see every day of my life,” I said. “What could I possibly find?”

  “What if there’s something you see every day of your life and you just don’t realize it holds the answers?” One corner of Jarrod’s mouth rose into a grin; then he put his elbows on the table and leaned over our trays, coming closer and closer, until it seemed like he was going to kiss me right there in the cafeteria in front of everyone.

  I must have frozen up, though, thinking about everyone seeing us, because in the end he stopped short. A good four or five inches still stood between us, and now he looked more like he was just leaning in to whisper a secret. “You have to start treating everything in your life like it might be a whole lot more than it seems on the surface,” he told me.

  “What about you?” I said, dropping my stare, looking down at the pillow of his lips instead of his dark eyes. “Are you more than you seem?”

  “You’ve already found me out,” he whispered. “You found me out months ago.”

  Jarrod had practice after school almost every day, as the team was gearing up for spring scrimmages. So he wasn’t waiting at my car anymore like I’d gotten used to. Now we said goodbye after he changed in the locker room and came out wearing a baseball uniform, punching his fist into a glove. I drove home alone later that afternoon, hoping I’d be able to figure out some way to snoop, even though my mom was always around, haunting our hallways like a confused ghost.

  Toby, thankfully, had gone back to work and was bringing in money to keep things going. I didn’t know what we’d do without him, so I kept up with my before-and-after school chores in the barn, feeding and watering the cows, forking their manure out, distributing hay and clean straw, to help him as much as I could. But it was Toby who started to get the mail and to sort through it; it was Toby who started to pay our bills; it was Toby who was given my dad’s old job at the county, rising from road crew to crew supervisor. It all made me feel a little sad and a little guilty, thinking of all the burdens he was taking on for us to keep us going. He was reliving my dad’s story. Reliving the story of my dad helping my grandma Bennie after our grandfather shot himself in the same place my father had fallen.

  I couldn’t let the same thing happen to Toby. I couldn’t let it happen to me, either.

  When I got home, it would only be my mom I had to contend with. She rarely left the house anymore, and she’d lost weight in the two months since my dad died. Her cheeks had started to sink in a little, and the fine lines in her face had grown like the crack in my bedroom ceiling. My mom was already in her early fifties, but in just a few weeks she’d started to look even older, as if Age, like a harbinger of death, had come to her in the middle of the night and waved his wand over her sleeping body, withering her as she lay there dreaming.

  When I came into the kitchen through the mudroom, she wasn’t at the table drinking coffee and reading the news on her tablet like she used to. She’d given up most of her old daily rituals by then. I found her in the living room instead, kneeling in front of the fireplace, building a fire. Her new daily ritual. A bucket of ash sat next to her, so she must have spent the afternoon cleaning the hearth.

  “Hey,” I said as I came into the room and dropped my backpack on the couch. And for a second afterward, I looked at the backpack I’d thrown so casually and wished we could go back to the days when life seemed mostly normal. Back to the days when I came home, threw my backpack on the couch, and thought of nothing but schoolwork and helping out around the house. Back to the days when I’d been blinded, back when I’d been protected from the invisible world. Back when I didn’t know a damned thing other than the routines I went through like a trained dog.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice low and hoarse, as if she found it hard to speak after days of not uttering a syllable. She didn’t look away from the fireplace, just kept arranging sticks of wood and twists of newspaper in there, as if she were at a crucial stage in the making of a work of art or a bomb.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer. It was late March, and even though the temperature had started to rise, melting the snow a little more each day as we moved closer to spring, my mom kept making fires.

  “I’m looking,” she said. Just that. And I didn’t try to keep her talking. I just stood there and watched her light a match against a twist of newspaper, which she used to light the other twists she’d placed along the pile of kindling. I noticed she’d put a bunch of dried flowers on the pile too, which began to emit a strange sweet scent after the petals flared, their edges crisping before blackening in the next instant. My mom sat back on her haunches then, folded her hands on her lap and stared at the flames as they crawled across the wood, popping and sparking.

  Since she wasn’t talking, I went upstairs, ready to throw myself onto my bed and think about where to snoop. But before I even got to my room, I noticed my mom’s door slightly ajar across the hallway. I could see her unmade bed through the sliver of open space, and that was when I realized where I should start my search.

  I curled my fingers around the knob and pushed the door open, slowly, trying to avoid the alarm of a squealing hinge. Successfully silent, I stepped inside. But as soon as I crossed the threshold, I stopped, looked over my shoulder, and turned to hear if my mom had broken away from her place by the fire. All I heard was the distant crackle of flames, though, so I went the rest of the way in.

  Her blinds were pulled down and her quilts had been cast to the floor at the foot of the bed, as if she’d thrown them off in a nightmare. Otherwise, everything seemed like it always was in there: neat and tidy, as my mother liked things. I felt increasingly stupid as I looked around at her alarm clock, at the framed photo of her and my dad on their wedding day on the stand next to her bed, at her jewelry box on her dresser and the antique wardrobe that once belonged to my grandma. The door of the wardrobe was partially open, revealing the arm of a blazer my father had occassionally worn, dangling in the shadows. My mom kept a few other things in there too: her wedding dress, a few boxes of old photographs. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, I thought, shaking my head, pursing my lips like my mother did whenever she was perplexed. There were no clues for me to find here.

  As I turned to leave, though, I noticed the bookshelf. It didn’t really hold a lot of books but was lined instead with knickknacks and some of the dolls my mom had collected when she was a little girl. Their eyes were black buttons and their dresses were made from pale blue linen, and in my particular circumstances at that moment they seemed to sit on the shelves and stare at me like eerie voodoo dolls. I worried that they were spies for her, that they were already telling her through some kind of telepathic communication that her private abode had been disturbed.

  The only book on the shelf was a photo album with the name Seth written on the spine’s label with a black felt-tip marker. As soon as my eyes settled on that, those letters flared as if they’d been set on fire, then cooled and blackened.

  I reached out to pluck the album off the shelf and stared at it for a while, examining it like it might be a holy book. I’d only seen it up close once before, when I was little—maybe five or six—and I’d come into this room investigating, like any curious little kid would do. I remember how the book seemed so big to me, how it felt so heavy I had to sit on the floor to open it. Back then, I’d only been able to look at the first couple of pages before my mom had come in and found me with it. “Aidan!” she’d said, as if I’d been playing with a loaded gun. “Don’t touch that!” She took it from me and put it up on a higher shelf, out of my reach, and said that I should never invade someone’s privacy. I didn’t understand what privacy was, so she explained it. “Privacy is someone else’s space. Privacy is where a person can be alone and where they can keep their speci
al things and no one should ever disturb it.”

  Funny, I thought now, how my mom had invaded the privacy of my own skull, how she’d ransacked my memories with such ease after being so adamant that I keep out of her things when I was just an innocent kid. She was such a hypocrite. The more I thought about everything she’d done and how she’d been since my dad died, the more I felt an incredible disgust for her. And simultaneously felt guilty for feeling that way. She’s your mother, I kept telling myself, the same way I told Jarrod that his mom just wanted good things for him, even if her actions didn’t always seem to show that.

  I took the book across the hall to my own room rather than staying in my mother’s space this time. I was no longer so innocent. I knew now not to linger.

  I opened the album on my bed and started to flip through the pages, hoping that whatever I needed to know would just declare itself to me so I could get this over with. Mostly it was just photographs of Seth as a baby, though. One, two, three years old. Then he was the five-year-old whose portrait still hung on the wall in our living room, looking out at me with the deep green eyes he and my mom and I shared. Those eyes that saw things they shouldn’t.

  Everything seemed normal—it was just a memory album for a dead child—and I started to feel stupid for thinking the book would somehow hold the answers I needed. But right as I was about to give up, I flipped back to the beginning. There was this one old picture of my mom holding Seth in a light blue blanket in front of a yellow house with crystal wind chimes hanging from the porch ceiling. At first glance, I thought it was our house, because it was almost the same color, and because my mom had had a set of those crystal wind chimes hanging from our porch for as long as I could remember. But something else was off about it, and I felt drawn to look at it harder.

  It wasn’t our house, I realized, despite the wind chimes, despite the similar color. The porch was completely wrong. The porch in the photo had a wraparound railing with decorative spindles lining it. Ours was an open stone porch with just support posts on either side and in the center, no decoration. But the really strange thing—other than the house in the photo not actually being ours—was the perspective of the camera.

  My mom and Seth were on the far right of the photo, at its edge, nearly cut off, even though there was a ridiculous amount of empty space ranging from the middle of the photograph over to the left border. It looked like my mom should be standing next to someone, but there was no one there. Why, I wondered, had the photographer taken the photo so off-center?

  I pulled the plastic cover away and slipped the photo out of the page, turned it over. On the back, scrawled in my mom’s handwriting, were the words Seth meets Aunt Carolyn, Lily Dale, NY, August 1980.

  “Lily Dale?” I murmured. “New York?” I said a little louder. Why were my mom and dad and Seth in New York when they’d never taken Toby and me beyond Cleveland? And who was Aunt Carolyn? I’d never heard that name before. Not ever.

  I turned the photo over again and looked at it even harder, as if I might burn right through it with hyperfocused heat vision, Superman-style. But I only saw the same image of my mom holding Seth off to the right of the photo, with the porch railing taking up the left half. Something was wrong with all this, but I didn’t know what.

  “The eye is a tricky thing,” my mom said suddenly, and I looked up, startled to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom. “Sometimes,” she said, “you have to close your eyes to see what they’re missing.”

  She didn’t move from the doorway to take the book away from me like she’d done when I was little. She just stood there, her face sagging with the weight of her collected grief. When she didn’t say any more after a while, I looked down at the photo and closed my eyes.

  In the dark of my mind’s eye, the image floated like a photo in developing chemicals. There was my mother, a young woman in her early twenties, holding her first child in her arms in front of a yellow house with wind chimes hanging from the porch ceiling. But in what had been the empty space beside her, a ghostly figure slowly began to develop, until a dark-haired woman wearing an old-fashioned floral print dress appeared, cupping Seth’s chubby hand in hers as she stood next to my mom.

  “That’s your aunt Carolyn,” my mother said as the image of the woman developed. And when I opened my eyes again, there she was in the photo.

  “Why haven’t I ever met her before?” I asked.

  “Because,” my mom said, “if I was going to protect you all, she couldn’t be a part of the story.”

  “What’s the story you keep mentioning?” I asked.

  “It’s the story I told,” my mother whispered, sounding like she might burst into tears at any moment. “It’s the story I hoped would save your father and you boys.”

  “Are you talking about the curse?” I asked.

  My mom’s eyebrows rose a little at hearing that. “So,” she said, “she finally got to you again?”

  “The woman in the tree,” I said. “Eva. What do you mean by again, though?”

  “She first got to you when you were thirteen,” my mother said. “Tried stirring things up with you back then. Back when you started seeing things like Old Black Suit. That’s when I told the story. I told it to hide you all from her.”

  “How can we stop her?” I asked. “There has to be a way.”

  My mom shook her head firmly. She didn’t have to say anything for me to know that the subject was off-limits. “You were always a curious child, Aidan,” she said. “You were always getting into things you shouldn’t. I should have known you’d be everyone’s undoing, even after all the trouble I went through to protect you.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I said, feeling like she’d just plunged a knife into my chest.

  “It’s not your fault, baby,” she said. “It’s just in your nature to want the truth. That’s because of me, though. That’s my fault. You got your eyes from me, after all.”

  “What’s the truth?” I asked her.

  My mother shrugged, defeated. “I’ve been telling stories for so long, trying to correct things,” she said, “I’m not sure if I know any longer.”

  “Where is this place?” I asked. “This Lily Dale?”

  “Lily Dale,” my mom said, cupping one cheek in her hand, smiling a far-off smile, as if I’d jogged a memory of a place she’d forgotten or would have liked to forget. “Lily Dale,” she said again, shaking her head and grinning like a madwoman, before she turned and left.

  Thanks to the Internet, I didn’t need my mom to answer my questions. Within a few hours of searching on my laptop, I discovered a few things about Lily Dale, New York, without any trouble at all.

  I discovered, for instance, that Lily Dale was a community of spiritualists. Mediums. Psychics. All of those words my mom once said didn’t describe her—here they were, glowing on the screen of my laptop. And beside my laptop lay the photo of my mom holding my brother Seth with the words Lily Dale, 1980 written on the back.

  Liar, I thought. How could I believe anything she’d ever told me?

  Beyond that, I discovered that the house of the Fox sisters—these two girls who cracked their ankles beneath a dinner table in the mid-1800s to convince everyone they were communicating with spirits—had been moved to Lily Dale at the turn of the twentieth century so the house could be appreciated by a community that revered it as the place where spiritualism had first started. Ankles, I thought. Is that all it took to fool people? When I clicked on a link to the history of the Fox house, I discovered it had burned down in the 1950s, and now the ghosts of the sisters were said to roam the forest surrounding Lily Dale, looking for their front door. I guess that’s a suitable punishment for two girls who tricked so many people.

  And I discovered that Lily Dale, New York, was only a two-hour drive from Temperance, Ohio. And not a minute after that discovery, I’d downloaded a map telling me how to get from here to there.

  I looked again at the photo of my mom holding my brother Seth in fron
t of the yellow house in Lily Dale and could see in the shadows of the porch a house number posted above the front door: a single, solitary four. It was all I had to go on—the name of a small town even weirder than Temperance, and a house number—but it was more than I’d ever had to go on until now. It would lead me somewhere, I was sure. I just hoped it wasn’t a dead end.

  I called Jarrod to fill him in on everything I’d discovered, and after I finished, the first thing he said was “When do we leave?”

  “We aren’t going anywhere,” I said. “You have baseball practice. You can’t miss or the coach will throw you off the team.”

  “I don’t care about his stupid rules,” said Jarrod. “I care about you. And besides, he’d never do that. The team is total crap. Without me pitching they’ve got no one, and Coach knows it.”

  “I care,” I said, “even if you don’t. You can’t come. It might mean a scholarship if scouts don’t see you play, and then your mother’s dreams will be crushed and it’ll be all because of me. So, no, you can’t come. End of argument.”

  Jarrod sighed, but he didn’t say anything.

  “All right?” I said a few seconds later, hoping he’d relent. “I can do this on my own,” I added, trying to make him feel better about it. “I don’t always need a protector, though I do appreciate you worrying. I do.”

  “All right,” he said, finally giving up. “But don’t do anything dangerous.” He insisted that my going there alone be only on this one condition.

  “I won’t do anything dangerous,” I said. “Promise.”

  “Good,” he said. “I didn’t get myself kicked out of my dad’s house just to come back here and lose you right after finding you again.”

  “I promise,” I said again, trying to etch those words into the ethereal stone of the cell phone wavelengths between us. “I promise I won’t do anything dangerous.”

  But my silent response, the thing I would have never said out loud to him, was: Jarrod, I don’t think there’s anything I can do right now that won’t be dangerous.