Wonders of the Invisible World (28 page)

I looked down to meet his eyes again. They were locked on me, hard, and I felt frozen beneath their gaze. “Who?” I said.

He nodded up at the angel. “You look like that,” he said. “You're beautiful like him.”

“You love me too much,” I said. I couldn't bear to think of someone seeing me in a way that I couldn't. “It scares me sometimes, how sure you are about me.”

“There's no such thing as too much love,” said Jarrod. He reached out to take my hand from my lap, but I pulled away.

“There
is
such a thing as too much love,” I said. “No one should give up everything for another person. I mean, it sounds nice. But what if missing practice to be here with me means you don't play first string this season, and because of that, college scouts don't get to see you play as often? What if all this loving sacrifice means you don't get a scholarship? And all because of my stupid family.”

“Who says I want to go to college?” Jarrod said, wrinkling his nose a little. He was trying to play it off like it was no big deal, but I knew different. He'd been trying hard in his classes the past few months, and he'd been working out rigorously to get ready for the season.

“You don't have to say anything for me to know you want to go to college,” I told him.

“What,” said Jarrod, “are you reading my mind or something?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No,” I said. “It's just a logical deduction. I know you're not in love with baseball. You do it because you're good at it, and it's a way to get things you want. Like a scholarship.”

“You're right,” Jarrod said. “I'm not in love with baseball. I'm in love with you. You're what I want. And baseball, I'm afraid, won't get you for me.” He reached out again, and this time I let him take my hand in his.

“But why risk what you need for what you want?”

“Who says you're not what I need?” he said, sounding a little offended. “There are plenty of ways to get by in life other than by playing baseball. I'd rather lose first string and a chance at a scholarship than lose you to whatever's happening here.”

“You're happening here,” I said. “You're who started all this.”

“I wouldn't have it any other way,” Jarrod said, pulling me closer, close enough for us to kiss.

Which was what we started doing a second later, softly at first, then harder, more hurried, as if someone might come in and try to stop us at any moment, and if we didn't get those kisses in right then, we never would.

Beneath the painting of the angel, we twisted together, losing ourselves as we explored one another, protected, hidden beneath the canopy of his large white wings.

W
e spent the rest of that first day talking with Carolyn, who continued to dote on us like you might expect any great-aunt figure to do. I couldn't get her to sit still, really, after Jarrod and I went back downstairs to join her. She made oatmeal cookies and talked to us over one shoulder the entire time, mostly talking about the daily life in Lily Dale, which was quiet as could be at that time of the year, which she preferred. “But the mediums, the young ones, they need the summer season to pay their bills,” she added. When I asked if she was a medium too, she scrunched her face up, as if she'd sucked on a lemon. “No, no, I don't use my gifts that way. I just rent this old house's rooms out and serve tourists their breakfasts.”

After the cookies, it was lemonade. And after the lemonade she took a quick nap before making dinner. By the time the day was over, she was exhausted from cooking and baking and talking, and said she would retire to her room, and suggested Jarrod and I go to sleep as well. Which we might have done if Jarrod hadn't appeared in my room moments after we went upstairs, asking if there was any room for him beneath the angel's wings.

The next morning, when we came down for breakfast, Carolyn's first question was “Well? How was last night for you?”

For a second, I thought she'd maybe heard Jarrod and me up in the room, and the red heat of embarrassment swept across my face like a grass fire. “I'm sorry?” I sputtered. I wasn't sure if I said it the way someone says excuse me when they bump into someone in passing, or the way someone says they're truly sorry for a great offense, but I hoped Carolyn would let my and Jarrod's possibly not-so-secret rendezvous go quietly.

“Last night,” she said again. “Did you feel it? The energy?”

Jarrod covered his mouth with his hand and pretended to rub a nonexistent goatee, but I kept as straight a face as possible. “I'm not sure,” I said. “What kind of energy?”

“The energies of Lily Dale,” said Carolyn. “Most people who spend a night in this town say they can feel the place reach out to them. Some say it brings them visions.”

“Oh,” I said, and almost sighed with relief. “No. I didn't have any visions. I slept like a baby. No dreams, or at least none I can remember. And believe me, after the past six months or so, not dreaming was awesome.”

Carolyn nodded, then blinked, seeming a little disappointed by my answer. She tightened her silver topknot and said, “Well, we'll have to try harder, then. Let's go for a walk.”

I got up, surprised she was actually hoping for me to have some kind of out-of-body experience, and as I stood, Jarrod said he'd stay behind.

“I need to call my mom,” he said, “so she doesn't call the police on us for going missing.” I could tell that he really did plan to call his mom, but I also knew he was trying to give me time to be around Carolyn without him. Who knew what she might be holding back just because Jarrod, an unknown factor, was with us? So I agreed to leave him behind in the angel-and-fairy-infested house and went for a stroll with Carolyn down a gravel road that seemed to constantly curve around bends, over and over, encircling the entire place, holding the village inside it.

For ten or fifteen minutes, we ambled along quietly, looking anywhere but at each other, until we came to a break in the tree line beside us, and there Carolyn turned to enter the woods. It wasn't a beaten path she led us down, like I expected, but a cement walkway that went straight up to a white one-story building with cornflower-blue trim around its windows and four pillars holding up an overhanging roof. On either side of the walkway stood rows of pots for flowers, which were just starting to push their way out of the soil. When Carolyn stopped in front of the building, she bowed her head and whispered something, then raised her head again and opened the front door.

From the outside, the place looked a bit like the VFW Hall back in Temperance, and I half expected to find a slew of old-timer veterans inside, sitting on folding chairs around cafeteria tables, arguing about politics and sharing their faded war stories. But what I found instead were rows and rows of blue-cushioned chairs and, at the back of the darkened room, an altar flanked by tall blue-glass lanterns.

“Is this a church?” I whispered, immediately adopting the hushed tone sacred places inspire, and Carolyn turned her wrinkled face toward the ceiling, as if some kind of spiritual force roosted in the rafters. Slowly, she turned in a circle, then looked down at me again and shrugged.

“We call it a temple,” she said. “A place for healing. It's where your grandfather did much of his work. Right here within these walls.”

“My grandfather?”

Carolyn nodded.

“I don't know much about him,” I said. “My mom never talks about him, other than to say she had a falling-out with her family years ago. She doesn't even have any pictures of him around the house. Who was he? What was he like?”

Carolyn frowned at that, and shook her head. Then she pinched her thumb and forefinger together and ran them across her lips like a zipper. I nodded. I understood that whatever story my mother had told—whatever spell she'd cast over so many of us—prevented Carolyn from giving me the answers I wanted. At least direct answers.

Carolyn was taking in the place with a nostalgic gaze now, as if she'd been frozen in a cryogenic chamber for years and had only woken from her deep sleep upon my arrival the day before. I didn't get any of her good feelings about the place, though. The room was strange. Spooky. Even if the grandfather I'd never met had done some kind of work in this place, I wanted to leave instead of lingering in the temple's weird blue shadows.

“I
can
tell you a few things,” Carolyn said when she eventually reached the altar. Her back was to me, so her voice was slightly muted. “The cracks in your mother's story continue to widen, allowing me to slip some things through. Things that won't disturb the story's essence.”

I bit the corner of my lip, then said, “What kind of things?”

“Some say this is a holy place,” Carolyn said, raising her hands, palms up, as if she were about to invoke a god. “Some say that the ties between this world and the one beyond it are stronger here. Your grandfather always said he could feel the energy he needed to heal people more when he came to this place.”

“He was a healer?” I asked.

“He was,” said Carolyn. She sounded proud of this fact, as if he'd been a judge or a police officer, some authority figure out in normal society.

“Could he really heal people?” I asked.

“I saw him do it every summer,” said Carolyn, nodding with the firmness of a true believer. “Right here in this room. I hear he sometimes did it in Temperance, too, for people he trusted to keep his secrets. But always here, every summer, people would come to him in the temple and he would heal them.”

“How could he do that?” I asked.

“Do you, as I suspect, know what it is to reach across to someone?”

I nodded and said, “I do.”

“Well, it's like that,” said Carolyn. “The same way you can see the thoughts inside someone if you reach across to them. Just like that, he could see inside people, could see what made them ill. And sometimes he could take their illness out of them.”

“But how?”

“I don't know how, really,” Carolyn said, turning to face me again. “I was never able to do that, you see. It's far beyond my abilities. But the way it looked, he'd touch them wherever they hurt and would somehow pull the sickness toward his fingertips, like a magnet pulls metal. And when he had all of the illness in his hands, he'd jump back and walk it to the front door over there and he'd scatter the sick on the wind. You could see it all go away. You could see it all fly off like ashes.”

“Are you serious?”

Carolyn said, “Serious as a heart attack.”

“Could he stop one of those, too?” I asked, thinking of my poor dad clutching his chest in his tree stand a few months earlier.

She shook her head. “Your grandfather always said that those are too quick. One of the things that happen too fast for a healer to catch hold of.”

“Too quick,” I repeated, grimacing at the bad luck I'd had to be born into a family like this one.

“Too quick,” Carolyn repeated. “Too quick for him to save even his own wife when one took her.”

“I wish you could tell me more,” I said.

“I wish I could too,” said Carolyn. “But despite the cracks in your mother's story, it's still a strong one. Come on. There's another place I want to show you.”

We left the temple and took up another path nearby. This one led us away from the cottage-lined streets into the thick forest surrounding them, where the trees towered high into the sky. They must have been a hundred years old, at least. You didn't see much old-growth forest like this outside of protected areas any longer, and being inside here, beneath such grand old trees, made me feel small and more like any other human being, which was a comfort.

The path led us deep into the woods, until suddenly we entered a shaded grove where rows of park benches surrounded an old stump. A stump that was so wide and flat on top, it looked like it served as a platform for people to stand on. To speak from.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Inspiration Stump,” said Carolyn, smiling. “When people come to Lily Dale for the summer, these benches will all be full, and the mediums will take turns standing in front of the stump to give messages to the visitors. We used to stand on the stump itself, but over the years it was being damaged by the constant wear, so we put that little ornamental fence around it, see, and now we stand in front of the stump to draw on its energy. It's a sacred place. You can see more clearly from it, you can hear better because of it, you can feel more than usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Why don't you see for yourself?”

I looked back and forth between Carolyn and the stump, cautiously considering whether I wanted any of those things to happen. I was already too open to the things of the invisible world. They already wandered into my line of sight at random moments, flickering to life like optical illusions, whispering in my ears at night. Why would I want to open myself up even further to their communications?

In the end, though, I knew Carolyn was trying to give me something she couldn't explain in words. So I moved toward the stump slowly and stood in front of the little wrought-iron fence surrounding it. When I looked back, Carolyn had already taken a seat in one of the empty rows of benches. Sitting with her hands clasped together on her lap, she nodded at me like a teacher might, encouraging me with a smile. “Actually,” she said, “I think you should do something we don't do in Lily Dale any longer. I think you should get up on the stump.”

“On the stump?” I echoed, raising my eyebrows as I looked at it.

Carolyn nodded vigorously. “Yes,” she said. “The stump. No one has to know about it. It'll be between you, me, and the spirits.”

“Um,” I said, trying to be polite. “Okay. Maybe it'll…inspire me.” The thing had an aura of magic about it, sure, especially when Carolyn talked about it. But really it was just an old stump in the middle of an old-growth forest.

All the same, I lifted one leg over the fence, then the other, and went up a set of stairs, one, two, three, stopping just before I stepped onto the surface of the stump itself. I stared at it for a moment. A slab of stone had been placed on top of it, smooth and gray. And as I stared down at that slab, a strong wind picked up and blew through the grove, moving the trees back and forth, rattling the new leaves as if spirits rustled through them, urging me to take the last step, urging me to let them help me.

Wincing, worried that I might be electrocuted when my foot finally touched it, I took the last step onto the stump's surface. And when I stood on top of the stone slab, I braced myself for whatever might come next.