Wonders of the Invisible World (31 page)

“Love you too,” Carolyn said, her eyes meeting mine for longer than a moment, it seemed, before she turned out the lights.

When I opened my eyes, the fire that had consumed me was gone, but the wind still streamed through the trees, shifting the leaves against one another, whispering.

“What did you see?” a voice called out, and I blinked, disoriented. The day had passed from late morning to early evening already, and somehow I'd stood there, dreaming, for hours.

Carolyn stood from her bench in the grove, and I started to remember myself again, to remember where we were, to remember what Carolyn had brought me here for.

“He was my grandfather,” I said. “My mother's father. Wasn't he? The boy who cursed us?”

Carolyn's long white hair had fallen out of its knot and now flowed over her shoulders like spilled milk. She nodded, frowning a little, sad to admit it. “He told me that eventually someone would see the truth and understand him,” she said. “He didn't mean for it all to happen as it has.”

“My mother?”

Carolyn shook her head. “How could your mother understand him? They did nothing but argue. She couldn't forgive her father for that. Not when she loved your father more than anything.”

“I don't know what you mean,” I said.

“Keep looking,” Carolyn said, nodding at the stump beneath my feet. “Keep seeing. She has told you things without telling you what they mean. She has hidden things from you in plain sight.”

So there, on that old stump in the woods, I closed my eyes once more, to see the pieces of my family's puzzle, the pieces my mother had hidden from me.

W
hen the vision took me this time, I found myself floating over a bed in a room that reminded me of the one I'd slept in the night before at Carolyn's house. Angels flew across the wallpaper. Fairy statues stood guard on bedside stands and windowsills. It was, in fact, Carolyn's house, but the person in the bed was my mother, who was stretched out on the comforter, staring up at the painting of the angel who pointed down. She was maybe twenty years old. Her hair spread across the pillow in long auburn curls like licks of flame rolling off her. She wore a summer dress, grass green, decorated with a bright print of sunflowers. One arm lay across her forehead, the other on her stomach, and her skin shone with sweat as she thought about the boy she'd left behind in Temperance. The boy she loved.

I could see everything inside her—her thoughts, her memories, her feelings—bubbling and stirring. The boy who took up all of her thoughts and feelings, that boy was my father, John Lockwood, a handsome young man who, in her memory, seemed carved out of stone: face chiseled, arms thick and ropy with muscle. The salt of the earth, she'd always called him. He was far away from her at the moment, back in Temperance, where she'd left him, and she wasn't sure what to do about him. She wasn't sure what to do about anything right then, really.

In the next room over, a salt-and-pepper-haired man sat at a desk writing in a leather-bound journal. His hand scrolled across the page, leaving wispy black ink in the wake of his pen. He wore a short beard, neatly trimmed, black with one stripe of gray down the center. Green eyes like his mother's. Green eyes like my mother's. Green eyes like mine.

Suddenly he set his pen down on the page and scraped his chair back to stand. Leaving the journal open on the desk, the pen collecting ink in a tiny bubble at its tip, he buttoned the top of his shirt as if he were going to a formal occasion, then left the room to cross the hallway, where he briefly hesitated before knocking on my mother's door.

Knock, knock, knock.

“Who is it?” she asked softly.

“It's me,” he said. “Will you please open the door, Sophia?”

My mom got up but only opened the door a sliver, enough to see a fraction of his face. “Daddy,” she said, “we've been through all this already. There's nothing left to say.” She didn't look up into his eyes. Instead she focused on a number of other items: the white button he had just slipped through its hole at the top of his shirt, the black hairs on the backs of his hands, the light-switch panel beside the doorframe. She flicked it on, then off, then on again, like a restless spirit.

“There must be more to say,” her father said. “I don't like it when there's bad blood between us. You know that. Your mother wouldn't have liked it either.”

So,
I thought after hearing that,
my mom learned how to guilt me from a professional.

“Momma's dead, Daddy,” my mother said.

“That doesn't matter. She wouldn't have liked it all the same.”

“I don't like it either,” my mother replied. But she still didn't look up at her father. She rubbed her forefinger and thumb together at her side, a gesture I'd seen her make all my life whenever she was anxious.

“Do you understand why I can't approve of this?” her father asked through the sliver of space she'd opened for him.

She nodded once, but she still wouldn't look at him.

“I don't think you do,” he said. “I've told you the story, but you don't understand it.”

“I understand,” my mother said, her voice flat and heavy. “I saw what you did to his family.”

He nodded and said, “Yes, but I'm not sure you understand why.”

“I know what it means,” my mom said, and finally she turned her face up to his. “I know what it means, and it's nothing to do with me and him. What happened years ago between you and that man isn't our problem.”

“But it is,” her father said. “And it's irrevocable.”

“I don't see why you can't change it,” my mother said, almost spitting the words at him. “If you made the curse, why can't you unmake it?”

“She won't let it go,” her father said. “I told you, darling. She won't let go of it.”

My mother's face turned red in an instant. “I'll make her let go,” she said. “I promise I'll make her give up on it.”

Her father shook his head, though. “There's no way to do that, Sophia. The only way to destroy it would be to make her leave.”

“And to make her leave, someone has to leave with her,” my mother mumbled. “I know. You've told me a thousand times.”

“Don't be like this,” her father pleaded, his voice falling to a whisper.

“Don't tell me how to talk,” my mother snapped at him. Her voice rose as his fell, and she cringed because she could hear how she sounded like a child and she couldn't stop herself from going even further. “I'll talk how I talk, just like I walk how I walk. You can change so many things, Daddy, but you can't change that. You can't change that I love him.”

“You have important work to do,” her father said. “There are things I still need to teach you.”

My mom looked over her shoulder into the shadows of her room, as if she knew I was in there with her, watching her, judging her. Then she turned back to her father, her face devoid of feeling. “I don't think I want to learn any more,” she said, quietly now. “I think I've learned enough from you, Daddy.”

“Sweetheart,” her father said, but my mother closed her eyes and shook her head.

“I'm done with all this,” she said. “I just want to be left alone for a while. I just want to be normal.”

“Some of us aren't meant for that,” her father said. From his vest pocket, then, he fished out a silver watch. The silver pocket watch my mother kept in her bedroom. The pocket watch I'd seen her hold when she entered the world's shadow and when she sat at the dining room table with a lit candle, looking for my father's spirit or else making changes to the story she'd bound us all up in. That pocket watch, silver and gleaming, was taken from my granddad's vest pocket and held out toward my mother. “You're going to leave me,” he said. “I can tell it.”

“You don't know everything,” my mother said sullenly.

“I know,” he said. “I know more than you might understand. Here.” He held out the pocket watch farther, the same watch his mother's murderer had given him, and forced it into her grasp. “Be smarter than I've been,” he warned her. “Save some time up for yourself and the ones you love. I didn't know I could do that myself. I learned too late. If I'd known, I might have been able to save your mother. I might have been able to undo all the mistakes I've made.”

“Daddy,” my mom said, shaking her head, one tear slipping out of one eye.

“There will be three to come, if you do this,” her father said, gesturing toward her stomach. “Three that you won't be able to protect no matter how hard you try. They'll be like any of the others from that family. It won't matter that your blood is in them, because his will be there too. They'll all die early.”

My mother didn't move: not to nod, not to shake her head, not to speak. She was completely still in that moment.

“I can help,” her father said then, “if you'd only let me. I could help relieve you of your burden.”

“Do you mean the burden I saw in my dream,” my mother said, “about what happened over in that orchard when you were a boy? Or do you mean the burden I carry?”

She looked up to meet his eyes then. They flickered down toward her stomach, accusing. That was his answer: that look. Her bottom lip trembled. “That would not be a relief,” she replied firmly. “No, sir, that would not be a relief to me.” Then she shut the door on him and locked it.

She went over to her bed again, taking up the same position she'd been in before her father disturbed her. One arm flung over her forehead, one hand on the slight curve of her stomach. “There will be three to come,” she whispered to the angel in the portrait hanging above her. She caressed her stomach, ran her fingers in circles over its growing roundness. “So be it.”

Later she stood and went to the dormer window, slid it up so that the night air drifted in and lifted her hair. She looked up at a star that seemed larger and brighter than any other in the sky, and recited the rhyme that she would teach me when I was little.

“This is my home and I know it. Even if I go away, it'll still be here. If I lose my way, it's your job to show it.”

Then she reached out three times, as if to press the star with the tip of her finger, and it glimmered three times in return.

A sliver of light no bigger than a blade of grass appeared before her. It was so small and narrow, she had to push the tips of her fingers inside to begin pulling at it, stretching it, making it bigger, until the outline of a doorway had taken shape in front of her, with bright white light pouring from it, filling up the room.

She looked back at the door to her room once more, thinking about her father across the hall, what he'd said she should and shouldn't do. She thought about what she'd be giving up if she followed his plans for her. She thought about how the boy she'd left behind two months earlier had said he didn't care about what came before them, he didn't care what their families thought about who they should be or who they should be with. He'd said he didn't care about consequences. He loved her. That was all that mattered. Then he had leaned down and kissed her like it was the first time they'd ever kissed, two years earlier, right before they'd graduated from high school and were still trying to hold on to some part of themselves by holding on to each other.

My mother turned back to the door of light in front of her, clutched the pocket watch her father had given her, and took a deep breath, then stepped through.

And arrived on the other side, on a dusty back road lined with towering maples, where a yellow clapboard farmhouse stood behind the shade of those old silver branches, glowing beneath the moon.

To the side of the house, across the creek, was an orchard with only a handful of apple trees still standing in it. The wind blew through them and their apples shook loose, landing and rolling down the slope toward the glistening water of Sugar Creek.

A young man, my father, stood on the stone porch of the house in his blue jeans and a thin white T-shirt. He was smoking a cigarette, something I'd never seen him do in my entire life. Startled by my mother's appearance in the middle of the road, he flicked the cigarette into a planter on the porch and raised his hand to wave at her.

“Sophia?” he said. “Where'd you come from? I thought you'd be in New York until August.”

“It's not important,” my mom said, not mentioning the way she'd gotten there. He knew she could do it, touch a star and it would open a doorway. But it made him uncomfortable these days, the older they grew. And he disliked the way people in Temperance sometimes talked about her and her father knowing things other people didn't or couldn't possibly know. He was uncomfortable too, she knew, because all of it reminded him of the thread of magic that ran through his own family, the way that thread bound them all together. He'd told her once, soon after they started dating a few years earlier, that he'd found his father's body back in Marrow's Ravine, where the man had shot himself when my dad was just sixteen. He'd called out for my mother to come to him then. Made a wish and hoped she heard it all the way in Lily Dale, where she did hear it, and later came to him when he needed her comfort.

“It's not important,” my mother had said when he asked where she'd come from, though, not wanting to remind him. “I'm here,” she said now. “Here is where I am.”

My dad beamed. She'd gone away that summer with their fate clasped within her hands. Said she needed time to think about the two of them, what they were doing together, whether they should stay that way forever. He'd argued, he'd railed against her. But she'd left anyway, secretly carrying their child within her, not wanting him to know until she was sure of what she wanted.

Here she was now, telling him. Telling him she wanted him.

He stepped down from the porch to go to her then, and my mom moved toward him. When they came to stand on the front lawn beneath the shadows of the maples, they took each other's hands. My dad leaned down to kiss her, but my mother stopped him, put a hand to his lips.

“Wait,” she said. “There are things I need to tell you.” And because she'd told him bits and pieces of the future that had come true in the past, because my dad trusted her to know things he couldn't ever know of, he stopped and waited for her to continue.

“There will be three,” she said. She took her hands from his and put them on her stomach, then looked up into his eyes again, hoping he would understand. “There will be three children, and we won't be able to protect any of them.”

“No one can do that anyway,” my dad said, bold and foolish. “No one can protect their children from everything.”

I stood apart from them, watching in the dark, trying to understand them, trying to understand myself through them somehow. If ever I'd had the chance to unravel my own life, to give it back like an unwanted gift, this was the moment to do it. I could change things, if I wanted. I could do what I'd seen my mother's father do. I could say the words to bend reality, to make myself grow backward, to become younger and younger and younger, until I disappeared inside my mother and reduced myself to the atoms that I'd begun as, and then reduced myself to nothing, winking out of existence, as if I had never been.

Or I could make myself visible to them, interrupt this moment. I could reveal their future to them, the whole thing, the big picture, our future as a family. I could warn them. I could say,
Don't do this. Her father is right. You will do and say terrible things to each other, you will involve your children in the messes your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents made. You will bury your first child when he's five years old and you'll die too young yourselves. It's not worth it. I'm not worth it. Please. Don't do this.
If I slipped out of the shadows of time and space to reveal myself and tell them all the things that would happen when they trusted their hearts to lead them forward, I could take up this knot in our shared history and undo it. I could unmake the curse by unmaking our lives together.