Wonders of the Invisible World (32 page)

But I didn't move. I waited for another moment, and then another. And then I closed my mouth, put my hand over it, shaking, frightened that I'd almost said something I could never take back, the way my mother's father had done in the orchard. Even with the burden of our history, I wanted this life, I realized. This one. Not someone else's. I wanted mine.

My father leaned down to kiss my mother beneath the moonlight then, and that was when it happened. They began to bring us, my brothers and me, out of the ether of possibility and into the world.

When I opened my eyes back in Lily Dale, I found a vault of stars spiraling overhead. Night had fallen around me. And when I looked for the star my mother had said would lead me home if I was ever lost, the one she'd used to take her back to my father in Temperance, it was still there. Up in the sky. Still blinking.

The Probable Stone.

From the surrounding leafy shadows, Carolyn stepped forward, and the blue light of the moon washed over her face, making her look like a ghost in the forest. “So?” she said. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”

“I found something,” I said, nodding. “But I missed my chance to save everyone.”

“Well,” Carolyn said, “
you
may not have to be the one to save everyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now that you've seen the truth,” she said, “the truth can see you. The story your mother told can no longer be believed. Now that you know the truth, now that you see everything, the curse…the curse can now see you. It can find you. And it can find your brother.”

“Why did you let me see it, then?” I said, raising my voice a little. I hadn't understood everything, exactly, that unraveling my mother's story would mean. “I thought you were trying to help me!”

“I
am
helping you,” Carolyn said. “You've undone your mother's story, and now you—and everyone she bound to it—can see things clearly. Remember. Your grandfather could see the future clearer than anyone. Clearer than your mother. Clearer, even, than you. He saw all of this coming to pass beyond a time he'd be able to do anything to fix it. He saw your mother's story unraveling because her son would fall in love with a young man who didn't fit into her story, a young man who knew it wasn't the truth because she'd forgotten to write him into it, the way she wrote the entire town into it. And he saw how that would be her story's undoing. He knew something would have to be done to save you, and he prepared me to help you see the truth, even though it would endanger you.”

“But why?”

“So that your mother would do what must be done now,” Carolyn said. “What she promised she would do a long time ago, if she couldn't figure out another way. The only thing that can undo the curse he made.”

I didn't like what I was hearing, and wasn't sure I wanted to know anything more than what I'd already discovered, but I asked the question anyway: “What? What does she have to do now?”

Carolyn had stopped smiling as she explained things, and before she answered my question, she frowned. “Your mother must walk Eva out of this world and into the next one,” she said. “She must take the curse with her. Your mother can't keep telling this story forever, trying to make you invisible to the eye of the curse. If she dies without walking Eva and the curse out of the world, her story will die with her, and the curse
will
eventually find you.”

“If that's the solution,” I said, “then why hasn't she already done it?”

“Because,” Carolyn said, raising her silvery-white brows in shock that I didn't yet fully understand. “In order to walk Eva out of this world and into the next one, your mother must give up her own life.”

Blackness then. Blackness and a painful howl of rage and desperation filled me. I'm not sure how long it consumed me, but when I returned to myself, I was running through the front door of Carolyn's house, running through the rooms, out of breath, shaking, until I found Jarrod. He was in my room, waiting for me under the angel painting, asleep, one arm thrown over his forehead. “What's wrong?” he asked when I burst in, startling him awake.

“It's my mom,” I said, breathless. “She's going to do something terrible.”

“What?” Jarrod asked.

I melted into his arms as he stood to hold me and kept me standing. When I could, I pulled away and told him what I'd seen in the woods. “She's going to give herself up for my brother and me,” I said.

Jarrod's face twisted with confusion. “How?” he asked. “When?”

Before I could say anything, though, Carolyn answered.

Behind me, she said, “If everything your grandfather told me years ago is still true, then she has already done it.”

She looked at the clock on the desk in my room. It was five in the morning and I hadn't even realized it. I'd been out in the woods for half a day and an entire night, traveling through the world's shadow to find the truth of my family, and here it was: my family would soon be just me and Toby.

Unless I did something. Unless I found another way to change things.

“Are you telling your own story,” Carolyn asked when she saw the idea in my eyes, “or are you being told?”

They were my mother's words, the trick she'd taught me years ago to outwit Death, after I'd witnessed a red-bearded man come into my seventh-grade classroom in his black suit and wide-brimmed black hat to look my teacher up and down like he was a cow going to slaughter.

One day Death will pay you a visit,
my mother had said,
but if you can tell the story of your life before Death tells its version—if you can tell it true—you can maybe keep on living.

Mr. Marsdale didn't tell Death his story?
I'd asked.

He might not have known that he could,
my mother answered.
He might not have known how to. Most people don't know that trick anymore.
She had looked at me then, and it seemed as if a breath she'd been holding was suddenly released, filling the room with the scent of peppermint and coffee.
Now you know,
she said,
and you can use that trick one day if you want to. But the thing is, you have to tell your story true, and not everyone can do that.

Why not?
I'd asked.

Because,
my mother said,
telling the truth is the hardest thing a person can do.

“The teller shapes the story,” Carolyn said from the doorway. “If you don't tell it, the story shapes you.”

I turned to Jarrod. “We have to go right now,” I said. “I have to help her.”

“But it'll take at least two hours to get back to Temperance.”

“No,” I said. “There's another way. Do you trust me?”

And Jarrod said, “You know it.”

Outside the sky was beginning to pale, but the stars still winked weakly. There were only a few minutes left, I figured, before I'd see a red line grow on the horizon, and then the stars and the moon would disappear. So I stepped off the porch, pulling Jarrod behind me, and ran out into the middle of the road, where all of the tiny cottages of Lily Dale blinked their eyes in the sleepy hours of early morning, and there I reached a hand up to touch the place where my mother had pinned a spell to the sky. As I raised a finger to the star, I found that I could feel it, warm and soft, thrumming with life and energy. Energy my mother had made, shaped into this form. Energy she had placed in the sky for safekeeping.

“This is my home and I know it,” I said, reciting the rhyme my mother taught me when I was little. “Even if I go away, it'll still be here. If I lose my way, it's your job to show it.”

I pressed my finger against the star a second time, a third, and then the air around us began to shimmer. The Probable Stone glowed brighter, then grew larger, and finally it began to lower itself from the sky until it stood in front of me, changing its shape so that it looked like an open door filled with white light.