Wonders of the Invisible World (30 page)

Later Lisbeth helped Dobry settle into his new room, where he sat on the corner of his new bed, looking at his hands in his lap, afraid to move. “You will be fine,” Lisbeth said. “You will learn who you are here. They will teach you since your mother is now unable. Do you understand my words?”

Dobry nodded, even though he didn't understand. I could see that in his eyes: two deep, frightened wells of insecurity. Lisbeth tried to smile fondly at him, and finally allowed her hand to rest on his head, to stroke his fine dark curls. She didn't say goodbye, but the next morning, when Dobry came down for breakfast, she was gone, and no one mentioned her except to say that Lisbeth would be back soon to visit.

A sunburst filled my eyes then, sending out shards of light, shattering the vision, leaving me momentarily in a great, empty white space. Then the vision began to reshape itself, to become a different time.

Dobry was now a few years older, sixteen or seventeen, with a dusting of hair on his chest and the face of a young man. He was staring into the mirror over his dresser, whispering at his own image. “Who are you? Who are you?” But the answer he received was always the same.

Silence.

In the silence, his worries and regrets were nourished. I watched as they grew in his mind like weeds overtaking a garden. He was always getting caught in them, entangled, as in dreams. Getting caught in his worries and regrets always began with this question he posed in the mirror, then the hated silence. And in the silence, all of the memories that composed him would begin to shimmer and coalesce.

The baskets of apples he used to hide at the edge of the orchard, where he'd retrieve them on his walk home from work.

Mrs. Lockwood holding her little boy's hand, asking after Dobry's mother.

Lockwood himself, that murderer. In Dobry's memory, the man holds a thick hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the sun as Dobry's mother reaches out her hand, stretching to grasp the last apple from the orchard. She twists the stem and it drops into her open palm.

There were other memories Dobry had made since then—with his new family, who were kind and good to him, as Lisbeth said they would be—but the memories that anchored him, the memories that became his idea of himself, were the ones that had occurred down in the orchard, on the spot of land people in Temperance had started to call Sorrow Acre since his mother's passing.

He had said words that day, had hurled a curse at Lockwood without realizing it. The words had burst through his throat and found their way into the world, changing reality even as they entered it. At the time, Dobry hadn't realized what he was doing. How could he have understood the power he'd drawn on when his mother hadn't taught him that lesson?

And would his mother have known how to teach him anyway? Was it something she was even able to do? His new parents, the Foresters, had roots in spiritualism—that was how they explained the source of Dobry's abilities, both to themselves and to Dobry—but even Mr. Forester once told Dobry, “You are capable of more than I can understand. To be honest, I am quite in awe of you.”

Lily Dale was full of people with minor talents. The occasional spirit would whisper into their ears or lift the veil from their eyes to let them gaze at the world beyond for an instant. Dobry, though, was known for manifesting miracles. When he held a finger out, birds came to perch there. When he closed his eyes to reach across to someone, he could see what ailed a person, in mind or in body, and if he drew his fingertips over a person's skin, his fingers would twitch as they passed over the illness. And if he held his fingers over the illness for long enough, the tips would begin to jump, as if he were playing a piano, until sour-smelling beads of black sweat rose to the surface of the person's body, collecting on Dobry's fingers, eventually sagging from his hands like strings of dark sap. He'd take the sickness outside and throw it into the air then, where it would turn to ash and float away on the wind.

He could go into another place, too. Another space, really. The back side of here and now, was how he thought of it. The place where everyone in this world was sleepwalking. Everyone, that is, but him. He could do things there, could suggest things, could change things. When people awoke from their dreams in the morning, they tended to see things his way.

“Who am I?” he asked himself in the mirror.

The boy who had watched his mother die for him, that boy was gone.

He was sixteen, then eighteen, then twenty, married to his adopted sister Margaret, slipping a ring on her finger, kissing her in the center of the woods near Inspiration Stump, its energies thrumming around them, her coils of red hair lifting in the wind like flames. “A piece of good luck,” Margaret's mother had told them. “Marry near the stump if you want your marriage to be a blessed one.”

He and Margaret had lived in close proximity for years already, and had slipped into loving one another with a certainty that eluded most young people, because they had been friends for so long. Only one thing seemed to escape them: Margaret couldn't carry a child. Each attempt ended in disappointment. So they lived alone, their hands intertwined before they fell asleep each night, thinking they would die this way, just the two of them, with no one to go on after them, with no one to carry their stories into the future.

One night, though, Dobry remembered the way the words felt in his mouth when he was twelve years old and so angry that reality began to waver as his words reshaped it. By now the curse he'd made that long-ago day had killed his enemy, he was sure. Although Dobry didn't know where or how it had happened, he knew that Lockwood was dead. He'd felt the string that attached them, that braided coil of sorrow and rage made on the day he'd cursed the man, snap when Lockwood drowned in his own reflection during the war in Europe. Lockwood's son would be next, according to the law Dobry had brought into being that day. And so on, and so on, and so on, the next and the next and the next, until they were all gone. The Lockwood family erased from existence. He could do that again, he thought now; he could bend the world to his will if he wanted the thing badly enough. But this time his wish would be made from the materials of disappointment instead of vengeance.

He whispered words that night: “A child will come to us. A child will come through.” And he doled the wish out little by little, encouraging it, nurturing it, giving it more and more power as he repeated it like a ritual every night thereafter, until eight and a half months had passed and Margaret was holding her hands over her ever-growing stomach, shouting with glee because her water had broken. The child was coming. The child Dobry had wished for every night for months and months was finally coming through to them.

“Right now, Dobry!” she called from their bedroom, and Dobry rushed up the stairs to help her. At the top of the landing, though, he stopped, shocked, when he saw the blood staining her nightdress, the blood streaming down her legs. The way it kept coming.

When the baby finally made its way into this world, Dobry set it aside and began to run his fingers across his wife's body, looking for the place inside her that bled so badly. But even as his fingers twitched upon locating the problem, Margaret's chest heaved violently, and then her body stopped moving altogether.

Her heart had seized up. The beat had gone out of her. It flew from the room faster than Dobry could move to catch it. And even as the heartbeat disappeared like smoke on the wind, the child Dobry had wished into the world opened her mouth to send up a fierce howl.

Too fast to catch,
Carolyn had told me. One thing a healer can't mend: a heartbeat that's flown away from a person.

The child, though, lived and grew. Her red infant face widened into the shape of a heart, like her mother's, and her hair grew in auburn. She was toddling, falling over, crying, picking up toys after she'd been scolded—a doll her aunt Carolyn gave her for her birthday, a book of stories about fairies who live under the floorboards of children's rooms—then she was striding across a field of clover, arms pumping as she found her pace, a smile blooming on her face. Now she sat at a school desk practicing her cursive, which was the best, the most finely modeled hand in class, her teacher told her. “Very good, Sophia,” her teacher said, and the girl looked up, beaming with pride. “My aunt Carolyn practices with me at home,” she said. “That's why.”

Aunt Carolyn. There she was, bringing the girl, Sophia, my mother, a cup of warm milk in bed. “It'll help you sleep,” she told my mother. “Don't worry. Your father will be back before you know it.”

“Where did he go?” Sophia asked. She was ten, her face still round with childhood, her hair just a little darker.

“He's gone back to the place where his own parents once lived.”

“Where is that?” Sophia asked. She sipped the warm milk, scissoring her legs back and forth under the covers.

“Temperance,” Carolyn said, running her hand across the coverlet, smoothing it down again.

“Where's Temperance?”

“In Ohio,” Carolyn answered.

“What's he doing there?” Sophia asked. Her words had started to come slowly with the onset of drowsiness.

“He's reclaiming your past,” Carolyn told her. “He's making you a home there.”

“I don't want to live in Ohio,” Sophia murmured. “I want to stay here with you.” She blinked, trying to stay asleep, but eventually her eyes closed and her protests ended.

“It's not so different there,” Carolyn replied. “Don't worry about it. You'll still spend your summers here with me, my love.”

“I love you, Aunt Carolyn,” Sophia murmured. The words barely escaped her lips before she drifted off to sleep.

Carolyn tucked the comforter under my mother's chin, then went to the doorway, where she rested her hand on the light switch for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the sleeping child once more. Then, for just a moment, she turned toward the corner of the room where I stood in the shadows, invisible to them, I believed, like Scrooge being taken into his past, present, and future, watching in silence as everything transpired.