Wonders of the Invisible World (33 page)

I looked back at Carolyn, who was already raising her hand to wave goodbye. I nodded at her, and when I looked back at Jarrod, I said, “Are you ready?”

“Always,” he said, “if it's with you.”

So we stepped on through.

A
nd came out on the other side, at the end of the long gravel drive of my house back in Temperance, where Jarrod had met me two days before, blocking me from going to Lily Dale without him.

All of the windows were still dark as the last smudge of night began to disappear from the horizon, and a red glow from the rising sun hung over the back tree line. After Jarrod and I came closer to the house, we found light escaping around the edges of the blinds in the kitchen windows. Ordinarily no light would be turned on until my mom woke up and started fixing breakfast, but when I let us in the front door and we searched the first floor, she was nowhere in sight. And when I raced upstairs to her room, taking two steps at a time, I discovered that her bed had already been made. Or else it had never been slept in.

Across the hall, Toby was still asleep. His chest rose and fell peacefully. If nothing had disturbed him the night before, I thought maybe my mom had figured out some other way to walk Eva out of the world. Or else Carolyn had been wrong and maybe Jarrod and I could have driven back home after all. Maybe I didn't need to talk my mom out of doing anything.

“Toby,” I said, trying to wake him. He'd know where she went, I figured. And if he didn't know, he could help us look for her.

But Toby didn't wake when I called his name. Not the first time, not the second. And when I went farther into his room and stood directly over him, when I shook him by his shoulders and called his name over and over, he still didn't wake up.

That was when I knew that she'd done it after all.

“What's wrong with him?” Jarrod asked from the doorway.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “He's been put to sleep, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mom did something to him.”

It was clear to me then too that she didn't want anyone to get in the way of her plans.

I went to Toby's window to look out at our property, sweeping from orchard to stream to pasture to cornfield to the woods at the back of the place, hoping to see her moving through the landscape somewhere. But the view offered me no answers. Our farm remained silent, asleep and dreaming.

There would be no answers forthcoming, I knew then. Clearly she'd foreseen my coming back here, foreseen that I'd try to stop her.
I've always known what you were going to do before you did it,
she'd told me before I left home. And it was true. She'd always seen our futures laid out like a map in front of her. There were gaps in her vision, of course, but she'd seen enough. More than I ever realized.

None of that mattered now, though. I had to find her. Her trail would most likely be invisible, but I knew how to see invisible things, thanks to the eyes I'd been born with, the eyes my mother had given me. Now that her blindfold had been lifted, I could recall what it had felt like to interact with the invisible world when I was little, when it wasn't unnatural for me to see a spirit cross the railroad tracks on its way to wherever it was going, or to see a white stag slip between the trees down in Marrow's Ravine. And if my mother had tried to cover her trail so that I couldn't find her, I'd just have to go back to the moment she left here. I'd have to look for her in the world's shadow.

I'd seen her do this—return to the past by counting backward to the hour she wished to revisit—and by now I knew how to do that trick without even thinking my way through the steps. So I sat down on my bed, preparing to dream, like my brother was doing in the next room, but with a purpose. Jarrod pulled the chair from my desk and put it beside my bed, straddling it, his arms folded on top of the back, his head resting on his folded arms. “If you see me struggling with something,” I told him, “don't wake me.”

“But what if you're in danger?”

“If I need you to wake me, I'll squeeze your hand. Here,” I said, and slipped my palm into his. It was warm and only slightly rough-skinned from all of the training he'd been doing, but it felt solid because of that, and someone solid was what I needed.

Then I lay down and began to count back through the minutes and back through the hours. Back and back and back I traveled. And as I counted, the events of the hours that had passed before my return whirred by like ghostly visitors: my mother putting the fire out in the downstairs fireplace, advising Toby to go to bed, reminding him that he had work in the morning; Toby going into his room to sleep later; my mother going in a while afterward, putting two fingertips on top of his eyelids to conjure some kind of deep sleep within him. And as the right moment arrived—when my mother walked down the staircase from her own room, pulling her arms into an old denim jacket she wore each springtime—I passed out of this world to join her in that last hour of that morning, right as she left the house and, under the remains of the moonlight, crossed over the railroad-tie bridge into the orchard.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in the orchard with her. The wind blew through the trees, making the few scraggly leaves that had opened up for spring whisper against one another. In the distance, the chimes on our front porch were ringing. And in front of me, my mother stood beneath the Living Death Tree.

With her back to me, she placed one hand on the trunk of the old tree and curled the other around the knotty rim of the hole at the top, where the tree began to branch outward. She was talking to the woman who lived in there. Eva. Eva Jablonski. Her grandmother. My great-grandmother. The woman who held her son's curse in the folds of her dress and wouldn't let go of it. I couldn't make out what my mother was saying, though, so quietly I moved forward.

“There's no reason for it,” my mother was saying. “My sons have nothing to do with it. It's time to end this, Eva. Let it go. Please. Release it.”

When no answer came from the tree, my mother changed her tone. “I've tried talking sense and I've tried being patient. I've tried for years now. But these are my children. I've already lost one, and you've taken my husband from me too. I won't let the others come to harm. If you force me to, I'll burn this tree down to its hateful roots.”

With the threat in the air, Eva stepped from around back of the tree, as if she'd only been hiding on the other side of it. She wore the same clothes I'd seen her wearing in the vision she'd shown me: a ragged dress with a babushka wrapped around her ruddy face. I knew she had probably been no more than in her early thirties when she died, but she looked more like an old woman. Her bare feet were covered with mud and bloody scratches from climbing through the Living Death Tree's branches. But even in that wretched condition, she smiled briefly before she said, “You cannot make me leave here, child.” And then she turned to pat the trunk of the tree like a sturdy horse. “If you burn this tree, I will simply move into your house with you.”

“You can't,” my mother said, and there was no tone of family feeling in her voice. “You can't go beyond the creek without my permission. That land is mine by marriage, as this tree belongs to you by blood.”

Eva narrowed her eyes and wrung her hands in the folds of her dress a little, fingering what must have been the curse she clasped within it. “Do you really think you can drive me away with fire?” she asked my mother. “I cannot burn, girl. And if this tree burns, it does not matter. I will find another. Will you burn them all down?”

My mother nodded, just once, firmly. “Yes,” she answered. “You've twisted these trees beyond their lives anyway. Their fruits spoil even as they grow. Eva, we must end this. Now.”

“I can stay without them,” Eva said, frowning, pouting as though she thought my mother hadn't made her plans very carefully. She seemed to almost feel bad for her. “I do not need the things of this world to stay within it, my sweet one. One thing and one thing only keeps me here, and it will not let me go until it is finished.” She clutched the folds of her dress tighter then, clutched the place where she'd put her son's words and shook it like a purse full of coins. “These trees?” she continued, looking around at them, shaking her head, closing her eyes sadly. “They do not matter.”

“Old Black Suit is coming,” my mother said fiercely, and Eva's eyes snapped open. “I saw him the other day, in fact. It's time again, you know, for you to deal with him. Or have you forgotten?”

“Why are you doing this?” Eva said, wincing. A note of fear had crept into her voice. My mother was threatening her with something, and she seemed to actually feel threatened by it, but I didn't understand what my mom was using against her.

“I'm doing this to free you,” my mother said. “I'm doing this to free all of us.”

They looked at each other for a while after that, silent and serious. Finally Eva said, “It is not so easy, leaving after having stayed for so long. Do you know how it is?” She shook the folds of her dress again, rattling the words inside, and this time she looked down at her skirt as though it were a chain locked around her body. When she looked up again, she said, “I'm not sure I know the way to leave any longer.”

My mom held her hand out to Eva then. “I will take you where you need to go,” she told her. “I know the way. It's not as far as you might think.”

Eva stared at my mother's outstretched hand, hesitating, but in the end she said, “If you are willing to take me, then I must go with you. I know that rule, even though I forget so many others.” Then she reached across the space between them and took hold of my mother's hand.

For a while they stared into each other's eyes, searching each other's face for the shared spirit between them—an old woman wearing a babushka who had saved her son's life only for him to unwittingly curse the lives of her great-grandchildren, and a middle-aged woman in a pair of jeans and a jean jacket that had belonged to her dead husband—and when they found what they were looking for, a glint of recognition behind both of their green eyes, they turned together and began to walk into the field behind the orchard, taking the lane beside Sugar Creek back to the woods.