Wonders of the Invisible World (24 page)

The floorboards creaked as she came toward the door, and I turned to go back downstairs. I only made it to the midway landing before the door opened, though, and I turned around fast, put my hand on the newel post, and pretended I was just then coming up.

“Hey,” I said as my mom closed Toby's door behind her.

She didn't say anything at first, just stared down at me as I came the rest of the way up. When I reached the top, she said, “You have something in your eyes,” and reached out as if she were going to pluck a speck of dust away from my eyelashes. I flinched and backed up to the edge of the staircase, as if she were about to hit me, and she dropped her hand. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “I wasn't going to hurt you.”

“My eyes are fine,” I said. “I'm just tired.”

“You shouldn't be going out all the time,” she said. “Your father would be upset if he knew how often you're not at home now. He'd be upset if he knew how much time you spend with Jarrod.”

I flinched again, this time at what she was implying. She knew Jarrod and I were doing more than playing video games and studying for tests. She knew everything, unfortunately. And she knew that my dad would have been ashamed of me if he'd known. Guilt was her weapon of choice tonight, but I refused to let her work that kind of magic on me.

“I still get my homework and chores done,” I said in my defense. I wasn't going to let her use my dead father to guilt me from beyond the veil. No way should she get to say what he'd think or feel about anything, I figured. Especially since she hadn't been able to find his spirit over the past few weeks of her constant scrying.

She shook her head and said, “That's not the point.”

“What
is
the point?” I demanded.

“The point,” my mother said, then stopped midsentence to stare at me, her eyes frozen somewhere between anger and confusion. “The point,” she repeated, still unable to complete her answer.

She turned quickly then and retreated to her room, clicking the door shut behind her, as if she'd realized she would have only shamed herself if she'd finished that sentence.

“Yeah,” I whispered, alone in the hallway again. “I kind of figured.”

At school, since my dad died, people had started to treat me a little differently. They'd started to see me. To nod in the hallways, to say hello, to ask how I was doing. After all the years I'd spent being invisible, I didn't know what to make of the attention. Why had they all changed so suddenly? Was it because my dad had died in a hunting accident? In a town like Temperance, where more than half of the junior and senior classes were absent on the first day of deer season, there would be sympathy for something like that. People would think,
That could have been me or my dad.
They would see me now because when they looked at me, they'd see themselves.

Or was it because I was always hanging out with Jarrod Doyle? Jarrod had joined the baseball team and was off-the-charts better than the other players. And because of that, he'd started to scale the ladder of popularity without much effort. Had I been lifted up into the range of everyone else's vision because he'd taken an interest in me?

Maybe it was both of those things. Sympathy for a guy whose father died while hunting, respect for a guy who a popular, seemingly normal person like Jarrod had taken under his wing.

Whatever the reason, it didn't matter. I nodded back, returned their hellos, smiled at their smiles, said I was fine, thank you. I did and said Normal Things. But it was too late to truly become friends with people I'd hardly spent any time with in the last few years. I mean real time. Not just forced to occupy the same space for several hours at school five days a week.
You were liked,
Jarrod had said when I'd asked if I used to have friends, back before my mom did something to mess up my head. Any one of these people might have once been a friend, and I just couldn't remember. And neither, it seemed, could they, thanks to my mother. On top of that, each time I tried to search inside myself for the memories she'd hidden from me, a flash of white pain would burn through my brain like a bolt of lightning.

Like the bolt of lightning that burned through the trunk of the Living Death Tree, hollowing it out from top to bottom.

I didn't let this depress me. There were only a few months of classes left, and I didn't want to play the role of the nobody who suddenly becomes everyone's friend right before graduation. Those kinds of endings to books and movies always seemed dishonest. As if the point of life was to be liked and accepted. I didn't need to be liked or accepted. I needed to know and to accept myself. And when I dug down through the muck of my mixed-up memories and feelings, the only person I could say I wanted to be around right then was Jarrod. Everyone else? They were paper people. They were the background to my life. Jarrod was the foreground.

At lunch, I told Jarrod what I'd overheard in my brother's room when I got home the night before. I told him how my mom had been acting and about the strange things she'd been saying to me and now to Toby.

“I'm sorry, Aidan,” he said, shaking his head across the table. “But it sounds like she's completely lost it. You might have to get together with your brother and see if you can get her to a doctor. Like, you know, a psychiatrist or something.”

“I don't know.” I looked around the cafeteria as if I might find an answer on the faces of the other students. “I think she's making some kind of sense,” I said, turning back to Jarrod, “but I don't have enough information to understand. It's like she's having a conversation with people who should already know what she's talking about. But Toby and I don't have a clue. She told Toby how she should have never told
that story,
just like she told you that you weren't a part of the story. Remember?”

Jarrod nodded. “When she said that, I just figured she thought I was intruding on you all when she needed some privacy. I thought it was understandable, considering what had just happened with your dad.”

“What story is she talking about, though?” I asked, more of myself than of Jarrod.

He leaned back in his molded plastic chair, folded his thick arms across his chest, and raised one eyebrow at me skeptically. “You know, Aidan,” he said, “if you want to find out, you're going to have to do something you ordinarily wouldn't.”

“Like what?”

“You're going to have to go snooping,” said Jarrod.

“Snooping?” I said. “But where?”

“Around your house,” Jarrod said, spreading his hands in front of him as if this were as obvious as the trays with the remains of our lunch sitting in front of us.

“But there's nothing there I don't see every day of my life,” I said. “What could I possibly find?”

“What if there's something you see every day of your life and you just don't realize it holds the answers?” One corner of Jarrod's mouth rose into a grin; then he put his elbows on the table and leaned over our trays, coming closer and closer, until it seemed like he was going to kiss me right there in the cafeteria in front of everyone.

I must have frozen up, though, thinking about everyone seeing us, because in the end he stopped short. A good four or five inches still stood between us, and now he looked more like he was just leaning in to whisper a secret. “You have to start treating everything in your life like it might be a whole lot more than it seems on the surface,” he told me.

“What about you?” I said, dropping my stare, looking down at the pillow of his lips instead of his dark eyes. “Are you more than you seem?”

“You've already found me out,” he whispered. “You found me out months ago.”

Jarrod had practice after school almost every day, as the team was gearing up for spring scrimmages. So he wasn't waiting at my car anymore like I'd gotten used to. Now we said goodbye after he changed in the locker room and came out wearing a baseball uniform, punching his fist into a glove. I drove home alone later that afternoon, hoping I'd be able to figure out some way to snoop, even though my mom was always around, haunting our hallways like a confused ghost.

Toby, thankfully, had gone back to work and was bringing in money to keep things going. I didn't know what we'd do without him, so I kept up with my before-and-after school chores in the barn, feeding and watering the cows, forking their manure out, distributing hay and clean straw, to help him as much as I could. But it was Toby who started to get the mail and to sort through it; it was Toby who started to pay our bills; it was Toby who was given my dad's old job at the county, rising from road crew to crew supervisor. It all made me feel a little sad and a little guilty, thinking of all the burdens he was taking on for us to keep us going. He was reliving my dad's story. Reliving the story of my dad helping my grandma Bennie after our grandfather shot himself in the same place my father had fallen.

I couldn't let the same thing happen to Toby. I couldn't let it happen to me, either.

When I got home, it would only be my mom I had to contend with. She rarely left the house anymore, and she'd lost weight in the two months since my dad died. Her cheeks had started to sink in a little, and the fine lines in her face had grown like the crack in my bedroom ceiling. My mom was already in her early fifties, but in just a few weeks she'd started to look even older, as if Age, like a harbinger of death, had come to her in the middle of the night and waved his wand over her sleeping body, withering her as she lay there dreaming.

When I came into the kitchen through the mudroom, she wasn't at the table drinking coffee and reading the news on her tablet like she used to. She'd given up most of her old daily rituals by then. I found her in the living room instead, kneeling in front of the fireplace, building a fire. Her new daily ritual. A bucket of ash sat next to her, so she must have spent the afternoon cleaning the hearth.