Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “I know what it means,” my mom said, and finally she turned her face up to his. “I know what it means, and it’s nothing to do with me and him. What happened years ago between you and that man isn’t our problem.”

  “But it is,” her father said. “And it’s irrevocable.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t change it,” my mother said, almost spitting the words at him. “If you made the curse, why can’t you unmake it?”

  “She won’t let it go,” her father said. “I told you, darling. She won’t let go of it.”

  My mother’s face turned red in an instant. “I’ll make her let go,” she said. “I promise I’ll make her give up on it.”

  Her father shook his head, though. “There’s no way to do that, Sophia. The only way to destroy it would be to make her leave.”

  “And to make her leave, someone has to leave with her,” my mother mumbled. “I know. You’ve told me a thousand times.”

  “Don’t be like this,” her father pleaded, his voice falling to a whisper.

  “Don’t tell me how to talk,” my mother snapped at him. Her voice rose as his fell, and she cringed because she could hear how she sounded like a child and she couldn’t stop herself from going even further. “I’ll talk how I talk, just like I walk how I walk. You can change so many things, Daddy, but you can’t change that. You can’t change that I love him.”

  “You have important work to do,” her father said. “There are things I still need to teach you.”

  My mom looked over her shoulder into the shadows of her room, as if she knew I was in there with her, watching her, judging her. Then she turned back to her father, her face devoid of feeling. “I don’t think I want to learn any more,” she said, quietly now. “I think I’ve learned enough from you, Daddy.”

  “Sweetheart,” her father said, but my mother closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “I’m done with all this,” she said. “I just want to be left alone for a while. I just want to be normal.”

  “Some of us aren’t meant for that,” her father said. From his vest pocket, then, he fished out a silver watch. The silver pocket watch my mother kept in her bedroom. The pocket watch I’d seen her hold when she entered the world’s shadow and when she sat at the dining room table with a lit candle, looking for my father’s spirit or else making changes to the story she’d bound us all up in. That pocket watch, silver and gleaming, was taken from my granddad’s vest pocket and held out toward my mother. “You’re going to leave me,” he said. “I can tell it.”

  “You don’t know everything,” my mother said sullenly.

  “I know,” he said. “I know more than you might understand. Here.” He held out the pocket watch farther, the same watch his mother’s murderer had given him, and forced it into her grasp. “Be smarter than I’ve been,” he warned her. “Save some time up for yourself and the ones you love. I didn’t know I could do that myself. I learned too late. If I’d known, I might have been able to save your mother. I might have been able to undo all the mistakes I’ve made.”

  “Daddy,” my mom said, shaking her head, one tear slipping out of one eye.

  “There will be three to come, if you do this,” her father said, gesturing toward her stomach. “Three that you won’t be able to protect no matter how hard you try. They’ll be like any of the others from that family. It won’t matter that your blood is in them, because his will be there too. They’ll all die early.”

  My mother didn’t move: not to nod, not to shake her head, not to speak. She was completely still in that moment.

  “I can help,” her father said then, “if you’d only let me. I could help relieve you of your burden.”

  “Do you mean the burden I saw in my dream,” my mother said, “about what happened over in that orchard when you were a boy? Or do you mean the burden I carry?”

  She looked up to meet his eyes then. They flickered down toward her stomach, accusing. That was his answer: that look. Her bottom lip trembled. “That would not be a relief,” she replied firmly. “No, sir, that would not be a relief to me.” Then she shut the door on him and locked it.

  She went over to her bed again, taking up the same position she’d been in before her father disturbed her. One arm flung over her forehead, one hand on the slight curve of her stomach. “There will be three to come,” she whispered to the angel in the portrait hanging above her. She caressed her stomach, ran her fingers in circles over its growing roundness. “So be it.”

  Later she stood and went to the dormer window, slid it up so that the night air drifted in and lifted her hair. She looked up at a star that seemed larger and brighter than any other in the sky, and recited the rhyme that she would teach me when I was little.

  “This is my home and I know it. Even if I go away, it’ll still be here. If I lose my way, it’s your job to show it.”

  Then she reached out three times, as if to press the star with the tip of her finger, and it glimmered three times in return.

  A sliver of light no bigger than a blade of grass appeared before her. It was so small and narrow, she had to push the tips of her fingers inside to begin pulling at it, stretching it, making it bigger, until the outline of a doorway had taken shape in front of her, with bright white light pouring from it, filling up the room.

  She looked back at the door to her room once more, thinking about her father across the hall, what he’d said she should and shouldn’t do. She thought about what she’d be giving up if she followed his plans for her. She thought about how the boy she’d left behind two months earlier had said he didn’t care about what came before them, he didn’t care what their families thought about who they should be or who they should be with. He’d said he didn’t care about consequences. He loved her. That was all that mattered. Then he had leaned down and kissed her like it was the first time they’d ever kissed, two years earlier, right before they’d graduated from high school and were still trying to hold on to some part of themselves by holding on to each other.

  My mother turned back to the door of light in front of her, clutched the pocket watch her father had given her, and took a deep breath, then stepped through.

  And arrived on the other side, on a dusty back road lined with towering maples, where a yellow clapboard farmhouse stood behind the shade of those old silver branches, glowing beneath the moon.

  To the side of the house, across the creek, was an orchard with only a handful of apple trees still standing in it. The wind blew through them and their apples shook loose, landing and rolling down the slope toward the glistening water of Sugar Creek.

  A young man, my father, stood on the stone porch of the house in his blue jeans and a thin white T-shirt. He was smoking a cigarette, something I’d never seen him do in my entire life. Startled by my mother’s appearance in the middle of the road, he flicked the cigarette into a planter on the porch and raised his hand to wave at her.

  “Sophia?” he said. “Where’d you come from? I thought you’d be in New York until August.”

  “It’s not important,” my mom said, not mentioning the way she’d gotten there. He knew she could do it, touch a star and it would open a doorway. But it made him uncomfortable these days, the older they grew. And he disliked the way people in Temperance sometimes talked about her and her father knowing things other people didn’t or couldn’t possibly know. He was uncomfortable too, she knew, because all of it reminded him of the thread of magic that ran through his own family, the way that thread bound them all together. He’d told her once, soon after they started dating a few years earlier, that he’d found his father’s body back in Marrow’s Ravine, where the man had shot himself when my dad was just sixteen. He’d called out for my mother to come to him then. Made a wish and hoped she heard it all the way in Lily Dale, where she did hear it, and later came to him when he needed her comfort.

  “It’s not important,” my mother had said when he asked where she’d come from, though, not wanting to remind him. “I’m h
ere,” she said now. “Here is where I am.”

  My dad beamed. She’d gone away that summer with their fate clasped within her hands. Said she needed time to think about the two of them, what they were doing together, whether they should stay that way forever. He’d argued, he’d railed against her. But she’d left anyway, secretly carrying their child within her, not wanting him to know until she was sure of what she wanted.

  Here she was now, telling him. Telling him she wanted him.

  He stepped down from the porch to go to her then, and my mom moved toward him. When they came to stand on the front lawn beneath the shadows of the maples, they took each other’s hands. My dad leaned down to kiss her, but my mother stopped him, put a hand to his lips.

  “Wait,” she said. “There are things I need to tell you.” And because she’d told him bits and pieces of the future that had come true in the past, because my dad trusted her to know things he couldn’t ever know of, he stopped and waited for her to continue.

  “There will be three,” she said. She took her hands from his and put them on her stomach, then looked up into his eyes again, hoping he would understand. “There will be three children, and we won’t be able to protect any of them.”

  “No one can do that anyway,” my dad said, bold and foolish. “No one can protect their children from everything.”

  I stood apart from them, watching in the dark, trying to understand them, trying to understand myself through them somehow. If ever I’d had the chance to unravel my own life, to give it back like an unwanted gift, this was the moment to do it. I could change things, if I wanted. I could do what I’d seen my mother’s father do. I could say the words to bend reality, to make myself grow backward, to become younger and younger and younger, until I disappeared inside my mother and reduced myself to the atoms that I’d begun as, and then reduced myself to nothing, winking out of existence, as if I had never been.

  Or I could make myself visible to them, interrupt this moment. I could reveal their future to them, the whole thing, the big picture, our future as a family. I could warn them. I could say, Don’t do this. Her father is right. You will do and say terrible things to each other, you will involve your children in the messes your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents made. You will bury your first child when he’s five years old and you’ll die too young yourselves. It’s not worth it. I’m not worth it. Please. Don’t do this. If I slipped out of the shadows of time and space to reveal myself and tell them all the things that would happen when they trusted their hearts to lead them forward, I could take up this knot in our shared history and undo it. I could unmake the curse by unmaking our lives together.

  But I didn’t move. I waited for another moment, and then another. And then I closed my mouth, put my hand over it, shaking, frightened that I’d almost said something I could never take back, the way my mother’s father had done in the orchard. Even with the burden of our history, I wanted this life, I realized. This one. Not someone else’s. I wanted mine.

  My father leaned down to kiss my mother beneath the moonlight then, and that was when it happened. They began to bring us, my brothers and me, out of the ether of possibility and into the world.

  When I opened my eyes back in Lily Dale, I found a vault of stars spiraling overhead. Night had fallen around me. And when I looked for the star my mother had said would lead me home if I was ever lost, the one she’d used to take her back to my father in Temperance, it was still there. Up in the sky. Still blinking.

  The Probable Stone.

  From the surrounding leafy shadows, Carolyn stepped forward, and the blue light of the moon washed over her face, making her look like a ghost in the forest. “So?” she said. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”

  “I found something,” I said, nodding. “But I missed my chance to save everyone.”

  “Well,” Carolyn said, “you may not have to be the one to save everyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now that you’ve seen the truth,” she said, “the truth can see you. The story your mother told can no longer be believed. Now that you know the truth, now that you see everything, the curse…the curse can now see you. It can find you. And it can find your brother.”

  “Why did you let me see it, then?” I said, raising my voice a little. I hadn’t understood everything, exactly, that unraveling my mother’s story would mean. “I thought you were trying to help me!”

  “I am helping you,” Carolyn said. “You’ve undone your mother’s story, and now you—and everyone she bound to it—can see things clearly. Remember. Your grandfather could see the future clearer than anyone. Clearer than your mother. Clearer, even, than you. He saw all of this coming to pass beyond a time he’d be able to do anything to fix it. He saw your mother’s story unraveling because her son would fall in love with a young man who didn’t fit into her story, a young man who knew it wasn’t the truth because she’d forgotten to write him into it, the way she wrote the entire town into it. And he saw how that would be her story’s undoing. He knew something would have to be done to save you, and he prepared me to help you see the truth, even though it would endanger you.”

  “But why?”

  “So that your mother would do what must be done now,” Carolyn said. “What she promised she would do a long time ago, if she couldn’t figure out another way. The only thing that can undo the curse he made.”

  I didn’t like what I was hearing, and wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything more than what I’d already discovered, but I asked the question anyway: “What? What does she have to do now?”

  Carolyn had stopped smiling as she explained things, and before she answered my question, she frowned. “Your mother must walk Eva out of this world and into the next one,” she said. “She must take the curse with her. Your mother can’t keep telling this story forever, trying to make you invisible to the eye of the curse. If she dies without walking Eva and the curse out of the world, her story will die with her, and the curse will eventually find you.”

  “If that’s the solution,” I said, “then why hasn’t she already done it?”

  “Because,” Carolyn said, raising her silvery-white brows in shock that I didn’t yet fully understand. “In order to walk Eva out of this world and into the next one, your mother must give up her own life.”

  Blackness then. Blackness and a painful howl of rage and desperation filled me. I’m not sure how long it consumed me, but when I returned to myself, I was running through the front door of Carolyn’s house, running through the rooms, out of breath, shaking, until I found Jarrod. He was in my room, waiting for me under the angel painting, asleep, one arm thrown over his forehead. “What’s wrong?” he asked when I burst in, startling him awake.

  “It’s my mom,” I said, breathless. “She’s going to do something terrible.”

  “What?” Jarrod asked.

  I melted into his arms as he stood to hold me and kept me standing. When I could, I pulled away and told him what I’d seen in the woods. “She’s going to give herself up for my brother and me,” I said.

  Jarrod’s face twisted with confusion. “How?” he asked. “When?”

  Before I could say anything, though, Carolyn answered.

  Behind me, she said, “If everything your grandfather told me years ago is still true, then she has already done it.”

  She looked at the clock on the desk in my room. It was five in the morning and I hadn’t even realized it. I’d been out in the woods for half a day and an entire night, traveling through the world’s shadow to find the truth of my family, and here it was: my family would soon be just me and Toby.

  Unless I did something. Unless I found another way to change things.

  “Are you telling your own story,” Carolyn asked when she saw the idea in my eyes, “or are you being told?”

  They were my mother’s words, the trick she’d taught me years ago to outwit Death, after I’d witnessed a red-bearded man come into my seventh-
grade classroom in his black suit and wide-brimmed black hat to look my teacher up and down like he was a cow going to slaughter.

  One day Death will pay you a visit, my mother had said, but if you can tell the story of your life before Death tells its version—if you can tell it true—you can maybe keep on living.

  Mr. Marsdale didn’t tell Death his story? I’d asked.

  He might not have known that he could, my mother answered. He might not have known how to. Most people don’t know that trick anymore. She had looked at me then, and it seemed as if a breath she’d been holding was suddenly released, filling the room with the scent of peppermint and coffee. Now you know, she said, and you can use that trick one day if you want to. But the thing is, you have to tell your story true, and not everyone can do that.

  Why not? I’d asked.

  Because, my mother said, telling the truth is the hardest thing a person can do.

  “The teller shapes the story,” Carolyn said from the doorway. “If you don’t tell it, the story shapes you.”

  I turned to Jarrod. “We have to go right now,” I said. “I have to help her.”

  “But it’ll take at least two hours to get back to Temperance.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s another way. Do you trust me?”

  And Jarrod said, “You know it.”

  Outside the sky was beginning to pale, but the stars still winked weakly. There were only a few minutes left, I figured, before I’d see a red line grow on the horizon, and then the stars and the moon would disappear. So I stepped off the porch, pulling Jarrod behind me, and ran out into the middle of the road, where all of the tiny cottages of Lily Dale blinked their eyes in the sleepy hours of early morning, and there I reached a hand up to touch the place where my mother had pinned a spell to the sky. As I raised a finger to the star, I found that I could feel it, warm and soft, thrumming with life and energy. Energy my mother had made, shaped into this form. Energy she had placed in the sky for safekeeping.

  “This is my home and I know it,” I said, reciting the rhyme my mother taught me when I was little. “Even if I go away, it’ll still be here. If I lose my way, it’s your job to show it.”