Wonders of the Invisible World (18 page)

My mother didn't panic when Toby burst into the room with those words spilling out of him; she didn't lose one ounce of control. She simply put the candy cane she was holding back on the branch and said, “Calm down, Toby. What's happened?” And when Toby was able to explain that our dad had fallen out of his tree stand and wasn't moving, my mom went straight to the kitchen to call Sheriff Barrens to tell him about what might have occurred down in Marrow's Ravine. There were a few tears in her eyes as she spoke, but her voice held steady. “Yes, well,” she kept saying, over and over. “Yes, well.” She finished the call by saying she was going down to the ravine to see about the truth of the matter, and that she'd meet him there. Sheriff Barrens must have told her not to go, though, because she said, “I'm sorry, but you know I have to do this.”

While they spoke, Toby sobbed on the couch, hunched over, fists tucked into his armpits. He was wearing his orange camouflage snowsuit and hunting hat with furry ear flaps. The suit was covered in mud, as if he'd stumbled and fallen into water, making me think of our great-grandfather drowning in that creek in France. “Toby,” I said, “what happened?” But he only shook his head. Snot dripped from his nose, and no matter how many times I asked, he wouldn't answer.

I'd never seen my brother like this before. I'd never seen him so reduced, so afraid.

When my mom came back from talking to the sheriff, she sat beside Toby on the couch and put her hand on his shoulder, gently, as if he might break, as if her touch would call him back to us. “You need to calm yourself,” she said, taking off his orange cap and pushing away the sweaty hair from his dirt-speckled forehead. “You need to calm yourself so you can take us back to your father. We need to find him. We need to help him right now.”

“I can't,” Toby spat through gritted teeth. “I fell halfway down the ravine when I went to check on Dad. I lost my phone in the fall or I would have just called you. I think I either twisted or broke my ankle.”

“Show me,” my mom said, and Toby reached down, gritting his teeth harder, and his face turned an angry red color as he pulled the boot off.

The flesh of his ankle was purple and swollen. My mom felt around it for a while, squeezing gently in different places, asking what he could feel and what he couldn't, asking if he could move the ankle in certain ways. It reminded me of the jellyfish squish of bone I'd heard in my great-grandfather's foot after he'd landed from his plane jump. When my mom was done, she looked up at Toby and said, “It's not broken, I think, just badly sprained.” Then, turning to look up at me, she said, “Aidan, you'll have to come with me.”

“Me?” I said.

“I can't do it alone,” she said. “I need you to help me find your father.”

Her tone was remarkably calm, but I'd never heard her say she needed me before, not like this, not with this carefully hidden dread in her voice.

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Let's go, then.”

“He's not dead,” my mother said as soon as she closed the mudroom door behind us and the cold air began to fog around our warm bodies. I looked at her—bundled in a thick barn jacket and a black men's stocking cap, a blue scarf twisted around the bottom half of her face—and could see the severe expression in her eyes that meant she wouldn't allow any other idea to exist as we began to silently trudge through the snow a moment later.

I listened to our boots crunch through the icy crust with each step that we took and tried to imagine a world in which my dad was no longer alive. It wasn't possible. Toby had to be wrong. He had to be.

After my mom and I had been trudging on like that for a while, lost in our own heads, I decided to finally break our silence.

“How do you know for sure?” I asked, giving her a sidelong glance. “How do you know he's not dead?”

“Because,” my mother said, not missing a beat in her step. “I would have felt him leave this world. And besides, he's been hidden, protected.”

“Protected from what?” I asked, but my mom just stared for a second like I'd said the stupidest thing in the world.

I didn't say any more. I kept my head down and pulled one leg in front of the other, over and over, punching through the snow. My breath came out in plumes as we pushed back through the frozen pasture, back through the ice-crusted lane that would take us into the woods.

“Do you know where we're going?” I asked when we did finally reach the edge of the woods a while later, in the same place where, several months earlier, on a cold autumn night, the white stag had knelt down to let me slide off its back.

“I have a general idea,” my mom said, “but I haven't been down to Marrow's Ravine in years. When's the last time your father took you?”

I thought about it for a second. The last time Dad had taken me down to Marrow's Ravine had been a year ago, when I was a junior and he and Toby had been excitedly talking about going back to screw steps into their trees and climb into the branches to set up their stands. My mom had stood in the living room watching them gear up for the journey, and unexpectedly she'd suggested that my dad take me with them. “What for?” my dad had asked, looking from her to me like there was something wrong with both of us. “Aidan doesn't hunt.”

“Maybe he'd just enjoy the walk,” my mom had offered. “Maybe he'd enjoy seeing what you two see back there.”

My dad had grudgingly agreed, nodding and chewing his bottom lip like he'd been forced to pick a not-so-likely classmate for a gym team. But I'd suited up quickly, not wanting to annoy him further, because he and Toby were already almost ready. Then we went back through the pasture and back through the woods, with the trees stretching up tall and dark around us, until we reached the edge of the ravine, a mile or so from our back doorstep. Then we climbed down the side of the ravine, using the spots where my dad's and his dad's and his granddad's feet had worn a trail of steps into the earth over their decades of hunting, to find the tree my father would use for his stand. Toby's place was on top of the ridge, where he could look down and see my dad at the bottom. The plan was, if a deer got past my dad, it would run up to the ridge, where it would think it was safe, and then Toby would have a chance to take it.

“It's been over a year,” I told my mom. “I've never come back here in winter, not since I was a kid and Toby and I used to play down there sometimes.”

My mom brushed a strand of windblown hair out of her face as we pushed farther into the woods. “We'll have to keep our eyes open, then,” she said. “These eyes”—she pointed back and forth between our eyes with two fingers—“and this eye too,” she added, pointing from her forehead to mine.

We drifted for what seemed like forever, lost in a vast white desert where none of our eyes seemed to do us any good. After a while, my mom seemed to be on the verge of giving up hope. I could tell she was worried that my dad's condition was getting worse, that every second that passed made it more likely he would slip out of his body and leave this world behind him. I could see her thoughts as she formed them, as if they were no more than strands of yarn, a cat's cradle inside her mind instead of strung between her fingers. Usually my mom had all kinds of shields up to guard her thoughts and feelings. Now, though, with her attention focused on my dad, seeing into her mind was like looking through a pane of glass.

We stumbled through snow-laced underbrush, licking our chapped lips, blinking ice out of our eyes, until finally I found a set of deer tracks, a pair of holes punched through the snowy crust. And there were flecks of blood in the snow too, as if maybe the deer had been hit, and the tracks remained, as if no amount of snowfall could erase them. I looked up from the tracks, turned in the direction they came from, and for a moment I thought I saw a deer running toward me, as if it were charging right at me. I startled as it came at me, jerked to the side a little, but before it could reach us, it broke apart like smoke and I could only hear the ghost of its hoofbeats as it passed, drumming and drumming as it ran in the direction of the farm.

“Did you see that?” I asked, turning to my mom.

She shook her head, squinted at me for a second. “What did you see?” she asked.

I didn't want to tell her I'd seen a ghost deer, that I'd heard its hooves as it ran past. If it was the white stag, it might be a sign that things were bad for my dad. So I told her I'd seen a glow coming from up ahead, that it might be where sunlight broke through the woods because the ravine widened and separated the tree canopy. She nodded and said that sounded like a smart idea, and from there I took us in the direction the deer tracks came from. Clutching her coat tight near her neckline, my mom let me take the lead. And after another twenty minutes, we'd done it. We'd reached the ridge that looked over Marrow's Ravine.

I could see my dad from that high up, even through the snow flying in my face, even through the branches of the trees that sprouted up on this side of the ravine. He was facedown in the snow, one arm flung out at an odd angle, and the falling snow had already begun to cover him.

My mother gasped, then covered her mouth with her hand while tears formed and streaked down her wind-chapped face. She put her other hand on my shoulder to steady herself. “You did good,” she said without looking at me, without removing either hand from where it had settled. Then, after she caught her breath, we began the climb down.

On the way, I kept wishing that I had stopped my mom from bringing me with her. I kept wishing that I'd called Jarrod and asked him to come over. Right now, he could be holding me as he told me none of this was really happening, that what I was about to face when I reached the bottom of the ravine was all in my head. I wanted him to tell me that I was crazy. Crazy, at that point, would have been preferable to the reality in front of me.

But my wishing was futile. I didn't know how to wish something into or out of existence. My mother had refused to teach me. So instead, I found myself holding my mom's hand, helping her pick her way down the side of the ravine. It felt like I was watching it all happen from outside my own body, like it had felt when I'd fallen into the world's shadow and watched my great-granddad fall through the air over a French battlefield. My breath came faster, then harder, and steam poured out of my mouth like smoke from a stack. I could hear my own heartbeat as we reached the bottom, and I could hear it stop for just a moment, skipping a beat when we came to stand next to my father.

We found him almost directly below his tree stand, his rifle emerging from a crust of snow a few feet away, his shape still visible, like the curves of a body beneath a white sheet. A trickle of blood had leaked from his mouth and was frozen against his bristly jawline. And when I saw the blood, I let out a gasp like my mother had when she'd seen him from above. My breath curled away in wispy tendrils as reality settled inside me like a dark seed, one that would take root and grow a black and thorny vine around my heart in the days to come.

It was then that I noticed that the tracks I'd followed to the ridge were down here too, around my father's body. It looked as if the deer that had made them had found him before we did, had circled him, sniffing, trying to make sense of the human at the bottom of the ravine, the steam lifting from his body. There was a trail of blood in the snow between the hoofprints, a thread of red leading away from the spot where my father lay motionless. My mother didn't seem to notice it, but I saw it clearly. It led up the side of the ravine in the direction we'd come from and was surely the blood I'd seen half a mile back.

My mom bent down to place one hand on my father's shoulder, but her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to her knees in one fast motion. She let out a short, sharp moan then, and touched the back of my dad's head. “Oh,” she whispered, shaking her head, trying to deny what lay in front of her. “Oh, my love, we had time left. I was saving it up. I had heaps and heaps of time saved for us.”