Wonders of the Invisible World (19 page)

We stayed for a while like that, my mom kneeling in the snow next to his body, my head bowed as if I'd found myself in a vision, silent, unable to participate in the events going on around me. Eventually my mom looked up with her mouth open, her lips trembling, as if for the first time in her life she didn't know what to say.

“We have to go,” she managed to say. “We have to go back so we can get him home before nightfall. I won't leave him out here like this.”

The walk home felt longer, and slower, especially having to climb the side of Marrow's Ravine instead of picking our way down. I held my mother's hand most of the way up, leading her to the safe places to plant her next step, and eventually we reached the top, exhausted both by the climb and by the constant awareness we had to maintain on our way up. I could see how easy it would have been for Toby to stumble and fall, especially thinking that our father was dead or dying. He was lucky, really, that he'd done nothing more than sprain his ankle badly.

We followed our own tracks back through the woods in silence. Every now and then, I'd try to catch a look at my mom with a sidelong glance, and her face was always hard, red, and angry. She looked like she might tear a bear limb from limb if one happened to cross our path. I almost hoped we'd run across the sheriff on our way back, just so I wouldn't be alone with her in her barely contained rage. But he was nowhere in sight, so I stayed quiet as we trudged back through our own footprints.

Until we came to the place where I'd noticed the deer tracks—tracks my mother hadn't been able to see when we'd gone back to find my father. Tracks she still couldn't see as we returned. Tracks with the trail of my father's blood winding between them.

Then she stopped suddenly and turned to me with that angry red face and said, “You saw something here, didn't you?”

I shook my head, not wanting to make her angrier than she was already.

“Yes, you did,” she said, nodding, trying to encourage me now with a softer tone to tell the truth. “Tell me, Aidan. What did you see when we were on our way down there?”

“A deer,” I admitted. “A deer like a ghost. It just came right through here, then disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

“The stag?” she asked.

“It was fast,” I said. “It didn't seem as real to me as when I've seen it in the world's shadow. But it could have been. It happened so quickly.”

My mother looked around, trying to pierce the veil of the present into the past, to see what I'd seen. “I don't understand,” she said. “I don't understand why you would see that and I wouldn't.”

“It might have been nothing,” I said. “It could have been entirely random.”

I put my hands in my armpits to signal that I was cold standing there, to see if I could get her moving again, but she didn't budge. Instead, she stared at me hard for a long moment. And then she said, “Don't keep things like that from me, you hear?”

And in a moment of complete exasperation, I said, “Why not? You keep things to yourself. You hide things from all of us.”

She breathed out of her nose heavily then, squinting at me like I was a stranger who had offended her. Clearly I'd become one of those children whose parents look at them one day and suddenly realize they've become their worst enemies.

“If you see things that I can't,” she said a second later, “I need to know what they are, or we may never get to the bottom of this. Whatever happened to your father doesn't feel like a simple accident to me. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and stood there, not knowing what else to say, afraid to say anything. Afraid that I might choose the wrong word. A word that might attract whatever had killed my father. At least, I thought, she was giving me a rationale with her orders. Much better than how she usually responded when questioned.
That's for me to know and for you to find out.
Maybe, I thought, we could work together, if she could just see me, if she could recognize me as an adult.

“Okay,” I said again, nodding. And then we continued our trek home.

When we finally reached the house, we found Sheriff Barrens waiting with Toby, and after we made arrangements for the sheriff to go back and bring my father home, I called Jarrod.

“Did you know this was coming?” he asked on the phone.

“No,” I said. “Neither did my mom. She swore she'd know if my dad had died, but she didn't.”

“If one person in the world would know something like that,” Jarrod said, “it'd be your mom. I'm sorry, Aidan. I don't know what to say. Can I do anything?”

“You can come over,” I said, thinking of the wish I'd made earlier, the wish that would have erased this day and left me sitting on my bed with Jarrod, him holding me, telling me everything would be okay.

“I'll borrow my mom's car” was all he said before disconnecting.

When Jarrod showed up twenty minutes later and rang the bell, my mom reached the door before I could. And when she opened it and found him standing on her front porch with his hands in his pockets, his mouth hanging open a little because he'd expected me to answer, she said, “Why are you here?” as if he might have done all of this, as if he had caused my dad's fall. And all Jarrod could say was how sorry he was for her. How sorry he was for all of us.

“I asked him to come over,” I said from the landing between the first and second floors.

My mom turned to look up at me. Her face was white, as if all the blood had drained out of her in the last few hours, and her mouth was open in surprise, like Jarrod's. When she looked away from me and back at Jarrod, she mumbled, “You were the only one. The only one who wasn't a part of the story.”

“Excuse me?” Jarrod said.

My mom walked away, though, shaking her head, leaving the door open and Jarrod standing on the front porch with his black stocking cap pulled down over his ears and the snow falling gently around him.

I shook my head as she walked out of the foyer into the living room, where she'd built a fire. She'd been staring into the flames since Sheriff Barrens left, as if the orange and red licks charring the logs might hold the answers she wanted. “Come on up,” I said to Jarrod after she was out of sight, and I waved him toward me.

When Jarrod came into my room with me, he closed the door gently and said, “What did your mom mean back there? About me being the only one who's not part of the story?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, shaking my head, unable to believe how rude she'd been, and for no apparent reason. “She's been like this since we found him. She's not making much sense right now.”

“That's understandable.” Jarrod pulled his arms out of his coat and hung it on the back of my door, then came over to sit with me on my bed, just like I'd wanted, and we leaned back against the headboard together. He put one arm around my shoulders and squeezed me close, put his chin on top of my head, kissed my hair softly. “How about you?” he said. “How have you been?”

“It wasn't just an ordinary accident,” I said immediately.

“What do you mean?”

I still saw the trail of blood leading away from my father's body, that thin red ribbon. It had wound up the side of Marrow's Ravine and through the woods, a crimson thread on the snow. The thread my father had left for me to follow, I'd already decided, the thread that would lead me to discover who, or what, had killed him.

“I want to go with you,” Jarrod said after I told him what I was going to do.

“I don't think you can, actually.”

“Why not?” he said, pulling back to look me in the eye, to challenge me a little.

“Because,” I said, “I think the trail is going to lead me somewhere you can't follow. Somewhere
not here.
Somewhere not in this world.”

“Then I don't want you to go there,” Jarrod said, squeezing me tight again, as if he might weigh me down and keep me on this earth if he just held on to me.

I buried my face between his neck and shoulder, felt the heat of his skin against my face, kissed him gently on his collarbone. And when I looked up, I said, “I don't think either one of us has a choice. I have to do this. And you have to let me.”