Wonders of the Invisible World (29 page)

At first nothing happened. But after a minute the soles of my feet began to feel warm, as if I were standing on a heated floor. And the longer I stood there, the hotter they grew. Then the heat began to travel up the length of my body, inch by inch, moment by moment, until it reached my ankles, my shins, my knees. Then both of my legs seemed to catch fire. There was no real fire, though, just that faint heat and then sparks flashing, until it looked like my legs were made of fire instead of flesh—two pillars of volcanic light—and I looked down, helpless, frightened.

The fire continued to travel up my torso, my chest and my arms, my neck. Then I was drowning in flames, choking on fire. Light flared behind my eyes, opening up like a series of fireworks, the way it sometimes felt before one of my migraines. I wanted to jump off the stump, to avoid whatever was coming next, but I couldn't move no matter how hard I tried. I tried to scream, but when I finally forced my mouth open, another voice—the voice of the boy whose mother had died in the Living Death Tree back in Temperance—that boy's scream was the one to come out.

Dobry Jablonski screamed. The old woman—his mother's friend Lisbeth—had already managed to pack his meager belongings: a wooden whistle his father had whittled for him, a shirt his mother had made for him. Now Lisbeth was sealing up the shack in which his family had existed together for several years after moving to Temperance, Ohio, where Dobry's father had said they would make a better life. They'd only been there a year before his father had begun to cough up blood, though, and within months Dobry and his mother had buried him. Dobry's mother, too, was now dead. Whether his eyes were open or closed, though, Dobry couldn't help but still see her hanging in the tree where she had died for him. Even now, days after she'd been buried, when he went near the Lockwood orchard, he could see his mother's ghost in the tree.

“You must stop this, right now,” Lisbeth said as she shook him by his narrow shoulders. The boy had begun to scream when she removed a portrait of his parents from the wall. “You have already said something terrible, done something terrible. Something that you cannot take back. If you cannot control yourself, you will do so again without thinking. How many people do you want to hurt?”

Dobry didn't know what she was talking about, though. “To name a thing,” Lisbeth told him, “brings the thing into your possession, under your control. But a great responsibility is undertaken when you do this. To be a master of something, or someone,” she added in a dark tone, “means you are bound to them as much as they are bound to you. You did not think of this when you made your curse, did you?”

Lisbeth shook her head, disgusted, and left him standing there as she moved to bar the windows with planks of wood. “No,” she muttered as she put a sense of order to the shack Dobry's father had built, wiping the last crumbs from the table so that vermin did not invade. “No, how could you think of this? You do not know better. Your mother did not teach you this part. Your mother, she is shaking her head in heaven right now, regretting what she did not tell you. Now, though, you will learn from Lisbeth. And from others like us.” Lisbeth stopped to look around the room one last time, and to tuck a few strands of sweaty gray hair back under her babushka.

“My mother is not in heaven!” Dobry shouted. She was still here on earth, still caught in the tangled branches of the apple tree where she had died for him.

Lisbeth folded her hands in front of her stomach and said, “This too is because of you, now, isn't it?”

And Dobry began to scream louder and louder, as if his voice could shatter every word she'd said.

Lisbeth is a red-faced hag,
Dobry thought as the old woman loaded him into a car she had borrowed to complete her final duties to Dobry's mother. I followed them, claiming the backseat quietly, hoping the boy and the woman wouldn't notice my presence inserted into their lives from the future, a watcher brought there by way of an ancient tree stump in Lily Dale, New York. They were seers too, after all.

When Lisbeth climbed into the driver's seat, she turned the ignition over and over, but the engine whinnied as if it would never start. And then, finally, it roared to life, making the vehicle shudder.

Dobry watched the woman from the corner of his eye as she looked ahead at the rutted roads, driving them toward Warren, the city where Lockwood had promised to put Dobry in jail for stealing apples. Her face looked like melted wax. It dripped with age, the skin pooling in various places: under her eyes, beneath her jawline. Lisbeth had been his mother's best and first friend in Temperance. She had appeared on their doorstep only days after their arrival in that little scratch-in-the-earth place, bearing gifts of thread and yarn for his mother and a basket of food that would last them several days. Dobry could remember how his mother hadn't acted surprised by Lisbeth's sudden appearance, could remember how Lisbeth had told his mother, “Welcome, fellow traveler,” and how his mother had smiled and said she'd worried there wouldn't be others like her where they were going. Dobry thought his mother had meant she'd feared there would be no Poles in Temperance, but while Lisbeth did share the kinship of their homeland, it was something else his mother had referred to. He could see that now. Too late, as always.

At ten years old, Dobry learned what his mother had been talking about. This was when his father, after dying, began to come to him in his dreams, and sometimes even in Dobry's waking hours, when his eyes were wide open. His mother had told him the truth then, when it was clear that he was like her. “You are a lucky one,” she'd said.

And Dobry had said, “What's a lucky one?”

“Someone who sees,” she told him.

“Everyone but the blind can see,” Dobry countered.

His mother had shaken her head slowly, her gaze steady. She put a finger to the side of his face, near his left eye, tapped it gently on the thin bone of his temple. “No,” she said. “I am not speaking of sight. I am speaking of visions. Not everyone sees what you see. Not everyone sees what you will come to see in your lifetime, child.”

In Warren, Lisbeth took Dobry to the train station, and they boarded the line to Erie, Pennsylvania, where an hour later they transferred to go on to Jamestown, New York. Dobry felt anxiety flutter within his stomach like a caged bird after they stepped down to the platform there, in a much bigger city than he'd ever been to. He looked around at the bustling station and asked, “Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

Lisbeth held one hand over his head, as if she might lower it to affectionately stroke his hair. After a moment, though, she thought better and took the hand away. “You will see,” she said. “Be patient.”

Later that afternoon, she hired a driver to take them out of Jamestown, a city full of smoke and the noise of factories and the clamor of cars and trains. It was more than Dobry could take in all at once. The fields of Temperance were what he'd become accustomed to. But the streets of Jamestown soon fell away from the car windows, and after a while Dobry looked back to find the city buildings jutting up like the peaks of lean black mountains in the distance.

He didn't see me there, behind him, looking over his shoulder. He pinched his lower lip between his teeth for just an instant, then looked back at the road in front of him.

Ahead, the road wound and dipped as the car traced the outline of a lake. Surrounded by trees, Dobry couldn't see anything but a flurry of leaves float past, and the clouds of dust that formed in the road behind the car, sparkling like molten gold whenever a beam of sunlight passed through them.

Later, after falling asleep against Lisbeth's side, Dobry blinked awake as the car pulled into a gravel drive that curved around the front of a three-story hotel: an inn with its shutters still open, the eyes of the house staring as they approached.

The hotel had a wide front porch held up by white pillars, and in all of the windows the shades were half drawn. The land around the building looked like it belonged in a park, manicured to perfection. And the tall trees cast the perfect shade against the inn's white walls. People sat along the wide wraparound porch at small tables, drinking glasses of iced tea, wearing formal clothes, boaters and bow ties, the newest fashions. A man standing on the front porch took a watch from his jacket pocket to examine the hour. He twisted his mustache, clicked the lid shut, and slipped the watch back into his pocket. It reminded Dobry of the silver pocket watch Lockwood had given him. Out of guilt, Dobry assumed, for destroying his family. It sat in his pocket like an anchor now, mooring him to the day his mother had been killed.

“Where are we?” Dobry asked.

“You are in Lily Dale,” Lisbeth told him. “You will be at home here. And now your mother—maybe she will come out of that tree and rest peacefully.”

Lisbeth took Dobry into the hotel, where a room had been prepared for him. She instructed him to clean up while she attended to making a situation for him. He didn't understand what she meant by
making a situation,
but he did as he was told. The only alternative was to run away, and since his mother had trusted Lisbeth, Dobry decided he should trust her too, no matter what he thought of her melted face and oily gray hair.

So he washed his face and behind his ears, as his mother had taught him to do. He changed the shirt he'd been wearing while they traveled for the only other one he had: the one his mother had made for him. He dusted his pants off, combed his hair with his fingers. It was curly and dark, and with a little water he could get it to look like a sea of black waves.

When he looked in the mirror over the washbasin, he blinked. Beneath those dark waves, his eyes were green flecked with gold. They were his mother's eyes. She had always said so. Other than the shirt she'd made for him, the one he'd changed into, those eyes were all he had left of her.

Later, after Lisbeth returned and praised him for making himself ready, she led him from the hotel to a yellow house a few streets away. And as they walked down the dirt road to the house, Lisbeth said, “This is where you will live now. The people here are good. If you are good to them, they will take care of you. Can you be good?”

Dobry looked up into Lisbeth's face, which was shadowed by her babushka. He nodded like a duty-bound soldier.

There were introductions all around as Dobry met his new family. The father, Elias; the mother, May; the oldest daughter, Margaret, a girl with fiery red hair who was around Dobry's age. And then Carolyn, a small child who waved her hand and smiled when Lisbeth introduced Dobry. The first thing this spritely creature said to Dobry, before anyone else had a chance to greet him, was “You're going to marry my sister, did you know that?”

Everyone laughed at her announcement; everyone except Margaret, the little girl's older sister, who blushed and turned her cheek into her lace-covered shoulder. Little Carolyn continued to chatter. “And one day,” she said, “we will be best friends, and I will help care for your children and your grandchildren.”

Dobry narrowed his eyes at the little girl, her blond coils and blue eyes, so like a doll he would find on the shelves of a store. She managed to make the entire room shift from cheerful to uncomfortable as she went on and on, divulging a future neither Dobry nor Margaret, apparently, had ever thought of, until the adults began to shush her.

“Carolyn,” her mother said, “it's rude to give messages when they haven't been asked for. Please contain yourself or go to your room.”

Carolyn bounced up and down on her heels. “I
can't
contain myself,” she said. “I don't want to.” She ran, then, up the staircase. A moment later, footsteps thudded in a straight line overhead as she ran down a hallway on the floor above. Dobry looked up, then back down at his new family, who were still smiling at him, still trying to make him feel welcome.