Wonders of the Invisible World (14 page)

“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.

N
ovember 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?

So what?

November would be good, I told myself. It had to be. Otherwise, I was going to self-combust.

Over the last few weeks, the leaves of Temperance had changed from yellow and red to the deep brown of late autumn. Throughout the day, the wind would strip them from the trees, one by one, and float them through the air until they gathered at the foot of our porch steps, spread them across the expanse of the high school parking lot, or line them up along the windowsills of houses. Leaves got caught beneath windshield wipers, and whenever rain came and I turned the wipers on, the leaves would fly up and away after being released, to drift through the air like paratroopers.

Wherever I looked, it was a golden-brown landscape I moved through.

Winter was coming down the line, though. I knew it when my dad and Toby took a day off work to go hunting and came back with a young buck, which they hung from the basketball hoop on the front of our garage to drain its blood, staining the gravel beneath the hoop a sticky black for weeks to come. And I knew it when my mom started to decorate the house for the coming holidays.

Jarrod and I spent the first half of November trying to figure each other out. Since he understood what we were doing together better than I did, I let him take the lead. And because of what my mom had done—cut me off from parts of myself—I felt like I was speaking a foreign language.
You, me, this thing between us.
I didn't always know what to do or how to do it, but I moved toward this feeling Jarrod created in me just by being near him. I touched his chest. Looked into his eyes. He stared back, and his lips were rough against mine.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be, though, was it?

Nothing,
nothing
I'd been told—by my family and teachers, by books and TV—none of it meant much to me any longer.

And I had to figure out a way to live with my mom without hating her for messing with my head and lying to me, even though she said it was for my own protection. What a
parent
thing to say. That excuse, like everything else, didn't mean much to me.

“Let's take it slow,” I told Jarrod, even though I wanted to pack a bag and hit the road, ride to some other place where I could kiss him on a street corner. Go someplace where we could figure each other out without worrying that anyone was looking at us, staring. Places like that existed. Temperance just wasn't one of them. It was hard to ignore how different life here was from what we saw on TV and the Internet. Guys and girls were the norm here. If there was anything other than that, I'd never seen it. It was hard not to think that the right life for us was probably elsewhere.

“Don't worry,” Jarrod said, stroking my arm, raising goose bumps. He took my hand, looked at me through the locks of hair falling across his eyes, and said, “I'm not going anywhere.”

But how could I know that for sure? Hadn't he gone away before? And hadn't my mom made me forget important things? It seemed to me that nothing could be certain, that people couldn't be trusted, not even your own family. Life could change your circumstances and whisk you away, or else someone could do something horrible to you, maybe without you even realizing it. And when you did realize it, they'd say,
It was for your own good.

“It's just that I don't know how to be myself,” I said. I was holding on to his hand like if I didn't, I might float up through the air, into the clouds and into outer space, and then I'd keep on floating until I reached a planet with a gravity strong enough to hold me. This world, this town, my family, it all felt like I could put my hands right through it. Like there was nothing here but smoke and mirrors.

“You don't have to know how to be yourself,” Jarrod said, running his thumb across my knuckles. “You just
are
yourself. You don't think it. You just feel it.”

“But everything I feel,” I said, “none of those feelings can be real if I've been lied to. That's what she's done to me. She's made my whole life into a lie.”

“She messed up,” Jarrod said, shrugging. “All of our parents do. They think they're doing good things for us, and sometimes they are. But other times, they're doing things that are just convenient. I'm sure my mom used to think one more sip of whiskey would calm her nerves so she could take better care of me. I'm sure my dad thought by kicking me out, he'd kick the queer right out of me. People fuck up, Aidan. Your mom's no different just because she's—I don't know. What the hell is she? Did she explain that to you, at least?”

“You mean, what the hell are
we,
” I said. “Her and me both.” I wanted him to remember that I was as strange as she was so he didn't blind himself to that and then later change his mind about me. “And no.” I shook my head. “She didn't explain any of it. Said she doesn't know what we are, just that we're like anyone. Said she thinks most people can do what we do, if they would only let themselves.”

Jarrod made a face like what I was saying was pure garbage.

“Yeah,” I said. “She's still lying. I know she knows more, she just won't tell me.”

“Maybe it really is for the best, then,” Jarrod said, sitting up against his headboard and stretching out his arms. He'd been lying beside me for the past hour, working me through tangled feelings, probably hoping we could do something far more interesting. But he listened to me; he asked questions.

“How can it be for the best?” I asked. “You're starting to sound like her now.”

“I don't know, Aidan.” He got out of bed, running his fingers through his hair. “It's just that whatever's happening here, it's big. Maybe it's best not to know everything. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but you're already freaking out about what you do know. Finding out more might be enough to crack you.” He came to stand near where I sat on the edge of his bed, bent down on one knee, then put his hand in my hair to ruffle it a little. “And I don't want to see you break,” he said. “Not after just getting you back again.”

It was weird to find myself in this position. Especially with my family. Not because I was secretly having a relationship with Jarrod while everyone assumed we were just friends, but because of the secret I kept for my mom. “Don't bring up any of the things I've shared with you to your dad or brother” was what she'd said after I'd ridden home on the back of a white stag, when she'd finally talked openly about the things I was starting to see and hear that autumn.

“But don't they already know?” I'd asked.

“Toby doesn't,” she'd said, shaking her head vigorously. “He never had the sight you have, not to that degree, so it's best to just leave him be. Your father once knew about all of this, yes.” She'd looked down at her hands, where her fingers slowly twisted together in her lap, fidgeting.

“What do you mean,
once knew
?”

And she had looked up with her lips pursed, unable to meet my eyes, and said, “I helped him forget some things. The same way I did with you.”

“Mom,” I'd said.

But she'd hushed me. “It's better this way,” she said. “Our lives are much better separated from the things I hid from you and your father. Please, Aidan. Help me keep it this way. I just want us all to be happy.”

Grudgingly, I'd agreed. What else could I have done, really? Run and told my brother I'd seen our great-grandfather in the war that killed him? Run and told my dad that my mom had somehow made him forget things, that she'd done something to make him remember his life differently from the way it had actually occurred? They would have looked at me like I was crazy.

So the days passed as if they were normal, and then Thanksgiving came around just in time for my family to really get some good practice at being ordinary. We spent that day in the usual way—watching the parade on television, eating turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing—like any average American family, even though my mom and I sat across the table from each other withholding a secret from my dad and brother while we ate slices of pumpkin pie. Our eyes met every so often, but my mom was always the first to look away, which made me realize just how much she required my silence.

It was only a couple of weeks later, when everyone had just gotten used to the idea of December, that the house phone rang in the middle of the night. Across the hall, I heard my dad's voice, thick with sleep, say, “Snow? Really? That much? This early?” And his voice kept going up and up as he spoke, drifting across the space between us, slipping beneath my doorway, like the voice of the Living Death Tree seemed to manifest right there in my room sometimes, a disembodied presence.

Snow usually didn't fall this early in December, and never that much when it did. But when I got up and went to the window, sure enough, it was falling fast and thick over the fields and the back pasture. It must have been falling like that for hours, too, because the ground was covered and my car had become this amorphous whiteness sitting in front of the garage. I looked down at my phone: it was five in the morning and the town was already buried in nearly a foot, according to my local weather app.