Wonders of the Invisible World (15 page)

When I heard my dad buckling his belt and zipping up his coat, I left the window to go downstairs, arriving just in time to see him close the front door behind him. Snow still floated in the entryway where he'd been standing. The flakes hung in midair for one long moment, almost suspended in time, before they drifted to the floor and turned into drops of pearled water.

My mom, too, was awake already. I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a glass of water, her hair draped over her shoulders in uncombed strands. When I first came in and saw her under the fluorescent glare of the kitchen light, the fine lines that crowded the corners of her eyes seemed to cut deeper than usual. A bit of makeup usually hid the age that had crept up on my mom over the past few years, but without that polish she looked more worn down than I was used to seeing her.

“You should go back to bed,” she said, putting her glass down when she saw me in the doorway. “They're going to cancel school soon anyway.”

She was right. The house phone rang again not twenty minutes later. My mom took the call, listening to the recorded message from the principal, even though she already knew what was coming.

Before she'd even had a chance to shout the news to me from the kitchen, the weatherman on the news station I'd put on in the living room predicted that the snow would keep coming for the next few days. And after hearing that, in true Midwestern mother fashion, my mom decided we'd better stock up on necessities before things got worse, and she drove off ten minutes later, headed for the grocery store, where I was sure a mass of Temperance's parents were already gathering.

The first night of any string of winter days my dad was gone because of work was almost always a magical experience, at least initially, because his absence let the rest of us do whatever we wanted. Toby would watch TV without having to fight with my dad over the remote. My mom would open a bottle of wine and lie in bed reading a mystery novel, sipping from her glass until the bottle was empty. Me, I'd wander down into the basement, a space we usually avoided because my dad kept his woodworking machines and taxidermy tools down there and he didn't want us messing around with them. These were hobbies he indulged in whenever he had free time. I liked to go down there when he wasn't around to examine the things he made below the floors where we lived out our daily lives. Running my fingers along the leg of a stool still clamped on the lathe, stroking the back of my hand against the fur of a deer's preserved muzzle, both made me feel like I was somehow trespassing, but also like I was able to understand something about my dad, who was quiet and didn't share his thoughts with anyone too readily, unless he was angry, and then everything he thought, good or bad, came spilling out of him. The things he made in the basement were like hieroglyphs found in an Egyptian tomb, and I ran my fingers over them, hoping to somehow know him better.

After the first day of snow, he'd usually come home and the roads would be clear and everyone's lives would go back to normal. We'd eat dinner and he'd fight with Toby over the TV, and my mom would only have one glass of wine at dinner.

This snowstorm, though, was different. The first night passed in that magical absent-dad way, but in the morning, when he hadn't come home to pick up Toby, my mom called the roads department, worried. No one was there to answer her call, though. The answering service came on instead, telling her to leave her name and number, saying that someone would be in touch as soon as possible. They were working as fast as they could.

She called my dad's cell phone afterward, and luckily he answered. “The snow won't quit,” he said. “Me and the other guys have our work cut out. Stay home. Tell Toby not to answer his phone if a supervisor calls. Or else you answer and tell them he's sick. I don't want him on these roads.”

When another day passed without my dad coming home, my mom began to stop in the middle of doing things. She'd look out a window suddenly, as if she'd just heard my dad's truck pulling into the driveway, but who knows what she saw out there. Phantoms, maybe. It was never my dad. The driveway was always empty.

Toby got the tractor started on the third day and drove it fifteen miles to the roads department, ignoring my mom's pleas for him to do as his father said and stay home. A few hours later he returned, covered in a layer of frost that had formed on him as he drove out in the open air. Looking like a snowman as he stood before us in the kitchen, he said, “All the crews have been called in and are overnighting it. There are a bunch of trees down, and the roads are almost impassible in some places. Dad said he'd be back as soon as he's able.”

Which made my mom sigh, relieved to know that he was okay.

When he didn't come that night, though, when my mom had to later pack his dinner away in the refrigerator, her forehead started to crease with concern again. I began to worry too. Jarrod had texted several times over the course of that day to say, “Hey, your dad just drove past my place with his plow,” letting us know that he was out there in the world, safe, doing his job. But now those occasional notifications were cold comfort.

On the fourth day, my dad called near midnight to tell my mom that the storm seemed like it was never-ending, and that was when she and I stayed up together, avoiding the stare of my suicidal grandfather, watching the hands of my grandma Bennie's old cuckoo clock slowly sweep across the hours.

“This isn't natural,” my mother said to finally break our silence. She looked out the front window at the rolling hills of snow, at the buried bushes, at the trees sheathed in cases of glinting ice. Everything glinted under the cold glare of a full moon. We were like those small figures of people in snow globes, I thought, trapped in a tiny town under glass.

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“I mean, someone's done this,” she said. “Someone's wished this into being.”

“What?” I asked again. It was the first time she'd talked openly—without any coded references—since she'd made me promise not to tell anyone about the things I'd been hearing and seeing since October. I was hoping I could find out more now, while an emergency distracted her from keeping her secrets.

“There's a wish behind all of this,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were my physics teacher talking about gravity. “A wish that comes from sorrow and anger. Can you see the tears behind the flakes as they fall?” She pulled back the curtain a little more, to show me, and I pressed my face closer to the window.

I couldn't see anything like tears falling behind snowflakes, but I knew they were there if my mother said she saw them. “Wishes made in sorrow or in pain are powerful creations,” she said, dropping the curtain again. “Sometimes they come from people who are too caught up in their feelings to realize what they've even done.”

“A wish,” I said, “can actually be made?”

My mother nodded, her lips pursed in thought, as if she didn't like the idea of wishes but had to acknowledge their existence. “Curses, too,” she said. “If a person knows how to bring them into being.”

“How?” I asked.

She shook her head, eyes heavily lidded. “It's too much to explain right now. I've got to deal with this blizzard.”

“How?”

She turned back to the window then, and I noticed her fingertips rubbing against the palm of her hand nervously. “I have to go into the world's shadow to change this,” she said. “And I'll need you to look after me. Here, at home. I might be gone for a while. And if I'm not back in a few hours, I'll need you to wake me.”

“You can do that?” I asked, thinking of how, not long ago, I'd been unexpectedly swept away to a battlefield in France during World War II. “You can go there when you want to? Like, on purpose?”

She nodded, eyes closed, like she was ashamed of all the things she still hadn't taught me. “You can,” she said, opening her eyes again. “But you shouldn't do it unless you absolutely have to.”

“Why won't you tell me about these things?” I asked, throwing my hands in the air, shaking them with each word that I said, the same way my dad did whenever he got angry. “Why don't you trust me?”

“Aidan,” she said, “it's not you I distrust. And I don't have time for this right now. I have to change things. This blizzard has been caused by someone, and I think your father may be in danger because of it. Will you or won't you wake me if I don't get up on my own in a few hours?”

“I will,” I said. “That's easy enough.”

Her face was grim, but she nodded, grateful for my agreement. “If I don't wake at first,” she said, “you'll have to keep trying. Shake me. Throw water on me if you have to.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I have to,” she said. “This has nothing to do with wanting.”

We climbed the staircase together then, and before she stretched out on her bed, she took the old silver pocket watch, the one her father had given her, and clutched it in her hands.

I took a seat on a chair beside her nightstand, watching as she stared up at the ceiling, breathing deeply, as if she were about to plunge underwater, stroking the round case of the watch like a favored pet. Then she began to count backward from one hundred, stating the numbers slowly, solemnly, as if she were recalling the words of a spell. And when her lips parted to finally say “Zero,” her eyes closed abruptly, and the word flew out of her mouth like a snowflake, melting in midair.

After that, she was gone. She was there on her bed, but I could tell she was gone. And her body remained behind, an empty vessel. Like I must have been gone, like I must have been still as stone, looking like a person who'd died in his sleep, when I'd parachuted into a forest in France with my great-grandfather Lockwood. I sat beside her like a guard now, wondering how I'd make it through the next couple of hours, wondering who could have sent a blizzard to endanger my father, like my mom suspected, frustrated that I couldn't do anything. Frustrated that my mom wouldn't teach me about the things I needed to know in order to actually help.

My mother had done this on purpose, I reminded myself then. She'd gone into the world's shadow by willing it. What else could she do—could
I
do—that I didn't know about?

She kept too many secrets, my mother, and I kept bumping up against them like furniture in a dark room.

I went up and down the staircase several times for a while after that, before I realized I was pacing.
One hundred to zero,
I was thinking as I reached the upstairs landing for probably the fourth or fifth round of anxiety-driven stair climbing.
Just lie back and close your eyes. Slip inside like a shadow. Like slipping a hand into a glove.

I stopped pacing then. I was tired of feeling useless. Tired of having this ability and not being told how to use it. I'd gotten back from the world's shadow once before. I could do it again, I figured.

I headed straight to my room then, where I stretched out on my bed and looked up at the crack etching its way across the ceiling, and stared at that dark crevasse for a long time, breathing deeply, like my mom had done before she went under.

The longer I stared, the wider the crack seemed to grow—to widen, to deepen—until suddenly it was a chasm above me, a dark canyon with wind howling through it, pulling me up toward it, lifting me higher and higher, closer and closer, like a person possessed by a spirit.

Everything that made up the ordinary world I moved through, all the laws we're forced to live by, natural and man-made, felt like they'd been undone. The crack in the ceiling was a space I could fall into if I wanted, if I'd only let myself fall upward into the sky above.

I began the count backward from one hundred then, and closed my eyes to the world as I reached zero—

—only to open them again in the world's shadow.