A Song for Issy Bradley (36 page)

“It’s a secret,” he says.

A
FTER LUNCH
, J
ACOB
takes the Box of the Dead out of his desk. He flicks it open and touches the dry, curled-up dead things. None of them came back to life. Nothing happened, despite all his prayers, all his practice. But Fred came back to life, the prayers worked for him. Jacob isn’t sure why, maybe there’s something special about fish; fish are in the Bible, Jesus feeds them to people, the disciples catch them, and Jonah is swallowed by a big, whaley sort of fish. There must be special rules for fish.

George Hindle pokes him in the back as he closes the glasses case. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.” He shoves it back in his desk.

“Mrs. Slade, Mrs. Slade! Jacob’s got a load of dead stuff in his desk!”

Mrs. Slade is fiddling with the SMART Board. “Sit down, George,” she says.

“But, Mrs. Slade, Jacob’s got—”

“No I haven’t.” Jacob’s words are loud and he feels the lie spread straight to his face, where it burns his cheeks.

“George, that’s enough. Stop making up stories and sit down, both of you.”

George glares at Jacob. “Pants on fire,” he whispers as they sit.

Jacob looks away. Lying is wrong. He has to tell the truth to Mrs. Slade or he will be in trouble with Heavenly Father. What’s the best way for him to tell her that there
really are
dead things in his desk? He can’t decide. She will be so disappointed in him. She’ll think members of the Church are liars and one day, when the missionaries knock on her door, she won’t want to learn about Jesus. She’ll say, “Jacob Bradley is a member of your Church and he tells lies.” And then she won’t be able to go to the Celestial Kingdom and it will be completely his fault.

A
FTER
D
AD HAS
collected him from After-School Club, Jacob goes up to his room and says hello to Mum. She’s awake, but she doesn’t say anything back. He looks in the wardrobe. There’s a furry Dalmatian costume, a fairy dress, a Victorian child’s outfit that’s just an old school uniform with some holes cut into it, and a Harry Potter cloak with a red-and-yellow scarf Nana knitted. He decides on Harry Potter. He ties the cloak over his school uniform and wraps the scarf around his neck. There isn’t a wand so he goes downstairs, takes a piece of paper out of the printer, rolls it over and over, and finishes it off with some sticky tape.

It’s dinnertime when the bell rings. Dad opens the door and Sister Stevens is there, wearing a Cookie Monster onesie. She says,
“Coo-kie,”
in just the right voice and then she says, “Happy Halloween.” She’s holding a big pot and there’s a lovely, meaty smell wafting out of it. She says it’s a special cowboy casserole for pioneers and she hands it to Dad. Then she dashes back to her car and returns with a pie and a shopping bag.

“Pumpkin pie,” she says. “Especially for Halloween. And
coo-kies
.” She does the voice again and everyone laughs.

“How’s Sister Bradley?”

“She’s a little better,” Dad says. “Thank you for the food, it looks wonderful. I’m sorry you had to come out to deliver it on a Monday.”

Sister Stevens tells Dad not to be silly. She says something about man not being made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man, which, she thinks, also applies to Mondays and Family Home Evening. Dad nods, thanks her again, and closes the door.

As they turn to head down the hall Jacob glances up at the stairs and thinks of Mum, who is not
“a little better.”
Then he hurries to the table with the others and they all stuff themselves with cowboy casserole, pumpkin pie, and
coo-kies
until there’s hardly any space left for sadness.

A
T THE END
of the Family Home Evening lesson, which is about patience, Dad asks, “Any questions?”

Jacob likes to think of really difficult questions because it makes Dad happy to answer them: questions like, if you got baptized on the same day as other people, and you were the last one in the font, would you get dirty standing in the water that had washed away their sins?

Today he asks another hard question. “Is it ever OK to tell lies, Dad?”

“No, Jacob, it’s not. Always tell the truth.”

“Even if you’re going to get into trouble?”

“Yes.”

Maybe he will have to tell the truth to Mrs. Slade … but then he thinks about Dad and the way he keeps pretending Mum is just a little bit tired. “Is it OK for you to tell lies about Mum?”

“Jacob!” Zippy’s eyes go all googly and she shakes her head at him.

“No, it’s a fair question,” Dad says and he thinks for a moment. “I was wrong. I think maybe it is OK to tell lies in certain, special circumstances. Abraham had to lie to the Egyptians. He had to tell them that his wife, Sarah, was his sister. He was worried the Egyptians might kill him if they knew the truth.”

“Talk about moving the goalposts,” Alma huffs.

“No one’s going to kill you for telling the truth about Mum, though, are they, Dad?”

“No, but sometimes you can’t tell the whole truth, even if you want to; sometimes there are valid reasons not to be one hundred percent honest, but it doesn’t happen often.”

Maybe it was OK to lie to Mrs. Slade about the Box of the Dead, then. It might be one of those times when it was best not to tell the whole truth, even though he wanted to. He tries another question.

“Can I go trick-or-treating?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But I’ve got my costume on and everything. Someone could
come with me,” he suggests, remembering what Mrs. Slade said about safety.

“Mum could go with you,” Alma mutters. “She could be a zombie; she wouldn’t even have to dress up.”

“I beg your pardon? Would you like to say that again, out loud?” Al shakes his head and Dad glares at him. “I don’t like Halloween. I don’t think it’s conducive to the Spirit.”

“Everyone does it in Utah,” Zippy says. “Sister Stevens thinks it’s great.”

“That’s not saying much—Sister Stevens thinks everything’s great.”

“Alma Bradley, if you can’t say anything nice, you know what to do. I’m not prepared to accompany any of you while you knock on the neighbors’ doors, bothering them.”

“Save that for the missionaries.”

“
Enough
, Alma.”

“Did you get anything for the trick-or-treaters, Dad?” Jacob asks.

“No.”

“We have to give them something—”

“Look, I’ve got more important things to worry about than buying sweets for other people’s children. You’ll have to give them a cookie.”

Alma snorts. “It’s not like we’ve got any nice cookies since Mum stopped doing the shopping. And they’re not getting any of Sister Stevens’s cookies, no way. ‘Trick or treat’—here, have a Rich Tea biscuit! Ha ha! That’s so bad it’s hilarious.”

“There’s an easy solution,” Dad says. He gets up, tugs the curtains closed, and turns off the lights in the living room and the hall. Then he goes outside and returns holding the doorbell battery.

“But, Dad, I
really
wanted to go trick-or-treating.” Jacob stands up and waves his paper wand at Dad, as if it might charm him into saying yes.

“Come here,” Zippy says. “Come on.” She takes his hand and
leads him out into the hall. She opens the front door and gently pushes him outside onto the step. “Knock,” she says and then she shuts him out.

Jacob stands on the step in the deep dark. He turns round to face the road and the park. The dark is cool and velvety; it collects between the street lights, right at the tips of the trees where Issy might be floating about, waiting until it’s precisely the right time and the right day to come back.

He knocks.

Zippy answers. “Yes?” she says.

Alma is standing behind her, holding the bag of cookies.

“Trick or treat?”

Alma gets a cookie out of the bag and extends his hand but at the last minute he pulls it back and stuffs the whole cookie in his mouth.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” Zippy takes the bag off Alma while he laughs, shooting crumbs over the hall carpet.

“Here you are, Harry Potter.”

Jacob takes the cookie and waves his wand
—“Wingardium Leviosa!”
He pretends the cookie is flying up to his mouth and copies Alma by stuffing it all in at once. Then he comes inside and Zippy locks the door.

When it’s time to go to bed he takes his costume and school uniform off. He leaves them on Mum’s dressing table and he steps into his pajamas. Dad comes up and Jacob manages to talk him into reading a story from the big fairy-tale book. After Dad has finished “Hansel and Gretel” he asks, “What’s the moral of the story?”

Jacob isn’t sure. “Is it to do with not stealing food?”

“I think it’s a lost-and-found story,” Dad says. “When good people get lost, someone always finds them.”

Dad says this so emphatically that Jacob wonders if it’s a rule.

Dad says, “I hope so,” and then he says goodnight.

After Dad goes downstairs Jacob gets up and puts the Harry Potter cloak back on. If he was a real wizard he would use magic.
He’d talk to Issy in photographs, he’d fight battles and make her soul shoot out of the end of his wand so he could talk to her again. He sits on the big windowsill, where he can look out over the park. He tucks the curtain behind him and shivers because the air next to the window is cooler than the air in the bedroom. The front door is locked and the whole front of the house is dark; he hopes Issy isn’t trying to get in. He rests a cheek against the icy glass. If she looks carefully, she will see him sitting there, watching out for her. The autumn leaves on the trees across the road seem blacker than the sky behind them. Every so often there’s a breeze and the leaves part to show a slice of path or a line of light from one of the lamps that surround the lake. He is sleepy but he keeps watching, murmuring the words of a Primary song to keep himself awake.

He wakes up in Dad’s bed. It’s dark, but it’s morning. He can hear cars on the road outside and he lies still for a moment and watches as their lights stroke the walls.

He feels around his neck; he isn’t wearing the cloak anymore, Dad must have taken it off. Dad is still asleep, breathing heavily. Jacob slides out of his side of the bed. He tiptoes to the door. The cloak is on the dressing table with his school uniform. As he passes he picks it up and sneaks out onto the landing. He fastens the cloak around his neck, sits down on the top stair, and waits.

Zippy is up first. “What are you doing?” she says.

“I’m waiting.”

“Oh. Shall I wait with you?” She sits on the step next to him and puts her arm around him. “You’re nice and warm,” she says.

Jacob wriggles out from under her arm.

Dad gets up next. He wanders down the corridor scratching his tummy. “What are you two doing?”

“We’re waiting,” Zippy says.

“It might be a good idea to do it somewhere else so people can get up and down the stairs.”

Alma stumbles out of his room, eyes half shut. “You woke me up! I could’ve had another ten minutes. What’s up?”

“We’re waiting,” Jacob says.

“What for?”

“It’s a secret. But I
can
tell you something, something completely ace that you’ll never guess.” They look at him and he can see they’re listening. He rearranges his cloak.

“So, guess what.”

“What?” Alma says.

“No, guess.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Come on.”

Zippy has a go. “You got a certificate at school?”

“No.”

“You got picked for the School Council?”

“No. Way better than that. Way, way better. Issy’s fish got resurrected.” He nods at them. They don’t look impressed, so he nods harder, until the stairs go all swimmy.

“Oh yeah,” Alma says. “I heard about that.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Dad rubs his cheeks with the palms of his hands and it makes a scratchy sound.