Wonders of the Invisible World (36 page)

Jarrod and I took a bus to Lily Dale a few days later to retrieve the Blue Bomb. Without it, we were both stuck taking the school bus, which was incredibly lame, especially for seniors who were graduating in a month. On the way up, Jarrod held my hand, and for a while I felt a little afraid, like someone might see us, and I was just then getting used to our being together that way in front of my family. But then, when some people on the bus obviously did see us and didn't do or say anything, didn't even make a face like I expected, I let myself sink down in my seat with his hand in my lap, and looked out the window at the passing scenery.

There were these brittle pine trees, greening under the sunlight.

And this almost crayon-yellow sun above.

And the sky was so blue—watercolor blue—with white, scarf-like clouds soaring through it.

Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world.

Maybe Jarrod's father wouldn't see things that way, and sure, there were probably a lot of other people who would see things the way his father might. But what other people saw wasn't necessarily the truth. And in the end it was the one truly and totally not-normal thing about me—the kind of sight I'd been born with—that helped me to understand and forgive the people who couldn't look at Jarrod and me and see us for who we were: just two people in love.

When I looked at other people now, I could see how so many of them were wearing blindfolds like the one my mom had put on me. I could see how so many of them had damaged vision. How they couldn't see things clearly. How they saw only the stories other people had told them. And understanding how all of that worked now, I started to even feel bad for them a little.

Carolyn was happy to see us again, and we stayed overnight in the angel-and-fairy-infested house once more, to tell her about what had happened after we left her. I promised her that I'd bring my mother up for a visit soon, now that my mom, too, was released from the constraints of her own story. “Please do that,” Carolyn said. She told me to remember to tell my mom something else: that time, however much of it exists in the universe, does eventually run out for everyone.

There was only one month of school left, and even though I thought it was way too late to become the kind of guy who suddenly makes friends with everyone at the end of the movie, I decided I also wasn't going to go back to being invisible. So when I saw Jarrod in the hallways at school, I'd meet him with an open smile, or I'd make fun of his hair being too long, because he was constantly having to brush it out of his eyes. He was the starting pitcher—the coach, as he'd expected, wasn't willing to let someone with Jarrod's talent go just because he'd missed a couple of practices—and he was earning his keep, with two no-hitters already on his scorecard for the season.

Sometimes, during breaks between classes, Jarrod would lean against the locker next to mine as I put books away or got out new ones, and he'd reach over to hold my door open, wanting to be near me. Before, I probably would have flinched, worried that he'd give us away. But now I'd just close my locker and lean back against it with him, our shoulders touching, watching everyone going by like a parade that didn't know it was a parade.

I was keeping hold of all of the details as I experienced them. I was committing them all to memory. I was going to store up everything I could. I was going to savor all of the moments as I saved them for the future.

Because here's the thing: Death does come for everything. But Death can also be bargained with, if you know how to strike a deal. Death likes to hear true stories, and I traded my own to save my mother's life. Old Black Suit had warned me that if I did so, I wouldn't be able to tell him my story when he eventually came to claim me. I'd nodded, acknowledging that I understood, and handed my story over to him anyway.

But there was something in our deal that the man in the black suit hadn't considered: the fact that all of us lead more than one life in our lifetimes. The fact that, in the years to come, I would become someone different from the seventeen-year-old who had struck a bargain with him at the bottom of a ravine to save the life of his mother.

I'd have other life stories to tell him later. And when he realized that, if that bothered him—if he was insulted by being manipulated—I'd sympathize with him, of course. Because no one likes being manipulated. But maybe he'd also enjoy the fact that I'd had enough foresight to think of it in the first place.

After school sometimes, Jarrod and I would go to Mosquito Lake, the first place I'd taken him when he came back to Temperance, when he came back to help me remember myself, and we'd look out at the small gray waves, rocking and rocking. Beneath those waves was an old coal-mining village, with a schoolhouse and a church, and the tiny houses of the workers who used to live there. You'd never imagine all of that was down there if you didn't already know about it. The past is like that, really. If you don't know it, it's hard to imagine what's come before you.

The future, I'd started to think, was kind of like that too. Hard to imagine, because we don't know it. And even though I could know the future if I wanted to, just by closing my eyes and willing it, I'd made a decision not to look into mine too often. I wanted to be just here, in this life of mine, to live it just like anyone.

We'd sit on the railing or on one of the flat rocks down near the water, looking out at the rocking waves, talking about our past, talking about our future, our hands linked together. Between us, we had the present, and we were not surprised at all to be happy with that, to be happy with now, to be happy with nothing more than now.

This book owes a lot to the people who have shaped my life from the beginning. It's for my grandparents—John and Sophia Leeper, Donald and Bernice Barzak—and it's for my parents, Donald and Joyce Barzak. It's for my brothers, Donald and Stephen, and my sister-in-law, Darlene. And it's for my nieces and nephew, Justin, Valerie, and Jenna. My family has always been an incredibly important part of my life, reaching backward and forward, providing me with a story to live within, and this is just one of the stories I've made out of the many stories I've been told by them, and out of the ones that we are still telling.

I would also like to thank Richard Bowes, who read far too many drafts of this book before I was finished with it, and my agent, Barry Goldblatt, whose encouragement kept me working on it through even more drafts. Carter Smith unknowingly revived my faith in this material while he was turning my first novel,
One for Sorrow,
into the film
Jamie Marks Is Dead,
which shares the same setting. I could not have brought the novel to its final form without the perspicacious vision of my editor, Melanie Cecka, and there might have been a great many mistakes within without the wonderful team of copy editors at Knopf, who spent so much time going through these pages with me. Thank you also to my instructors and classmates at Chatham University, where I worked on this book in one of its earliest incarnations, and to Mary Rickert, who never fails to give me the right perspective on things.

And finally, thank you to Tony Romandetti, who believes in me even when I've lost hope.