The Mostly True Story of Jack (3 page)

“I’ll just put these in the guest room, then,” Clive said, his voice muffled by the duffel bag. He turned, walked up the polished staircase, and disappeared.

Mabel’s voice poured out of the kitchen, a constant stream of words, broken only by the occasional
hmm
or
oh
or
really
from his mother. They were talking, Jack knew, about the divorce, and he did his best to shut his ears to the whole business. Even the word bothered him. It sounded like breaking glass, or a piece of cloth pulled tight and ripping in two.

Jack stood in the middle of the room, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. The house surrounding him was a jumble of books. Pretty polished bookshelves with curved trim and carved flowers twisting up the sides had been built into every possible wall. They wrapped around windows, ran along the back edge of the living room, and stretched nearly to the ceiling. And still the books hardly fit: They teetered in stacks all over the room.

Three animals crouched on top of the bookshelves—
one brightly colored parrot and two identical and astonishingly large cats. The cats flexed their shoulders, extended their hind legs, and lashed their tails, as though strongly considering leaping across the room and pouncing on Jack. Jack took a step backward. The cats winked their eyes in unison, first the left eye and then the right, before settling down into two matching lumps of shining silver fur, their faces turned attentively toward Jack. The bird, on the other hand, streaked across the room and hit Jack’s chest like a bright, sharp missile. Jack screamed.

“
No, Lancelot!
” both Clive and Mabel shouted from different parts of the house. The bird seemed to deflate a little and swooped down, fluttering toward the stairs. He shot a backward
watch-it-bub
glance at Jack before vanishing around the corner.

Jack rubbed his arms and stood in the center of the room, not wanting to touch anything. The cats kept their gaze fixed on him, the unsettling glow of their golden eyes flickering with each blink. He shuddered.
Stop staring at me
, he would have said if he was the sort of person to talk to cats. Since he wasn’t, he willed himself to look away.

Clive came down the stairs, nearly bounded into the room, and perched himself on the blue velveteen couch. He looked expectantly at Jack.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Nothing, dear boy, nothing. We’re just so glad that you’re here.” He clasped his left hand on his chin the
way Jack had seen other professors do on public television. Jack nodded vaguely and turned away to study the books, not because he was
interested
but because he did not want to talk to Clive. Clive, on the other hand, didn’t seem to notice the snub and continued to stare at Jack pleasantly.

It was the staring, Jack decided, that unnerved him. It was
new
. No one stared at him at home. No one noticed him—even when they were supposed to. Even the hall monitors at school never saw him—and they caught
everybody
. It was as though their eyes just slicked past Jack. He hardly noticed it anymore.

Finally, Clive stood up, stood next to Jack, and examined the books alongside him. Jack took a step away, but his uncle didn’t seem to notice. Instead he raised his fingers to the spines of the books.

“It’s an occupational hazard. When one studies books for a living, the result is a house with more books than should be allowed. We don’t have many for children, I’m afraid,” Clive said, “except for the fairy tales. And I daresay you aren’t a fan of fairy tales.”

How does he know?
Jack wondered. But it was true. Something about fairy tales set Jack’s teeth on edge. He’d never liked them.

“I prefer nonfiction,” Jack said without looking at his uncle. “I like it when things are
true
.”

“Or mostly true anyway,” Clive said, and though Jack
didn’t really understand what his uncle meant, he decided not to push the issue.

Clive reached into one of the upper shelves and pulled out a book. “Here,” he said. “You might enjoy reading this.”

The title,
The Secret History of Hazelwood
, curved across the top edge of the book, and was written in a thin, spidery script that looked familiar to Jack somehow, though familiar
how
, he wasn’t sure. It had a picture of a small, gnarled tree. Except if you looked at the tree a certain way, it did not look like a tree at all. It looked like a woman. And if you looked at it another way, it didn’t look like one woman but two, their faces superimposed on each other like a double-exposed photograph.

“Thanks for the book,” Jack said, noticing too late that his voice had a hard, sarcastic edge to it. He decided not to care. Jack set the book down on the end table and didn’t think about it again for the rest of the afternoon.

When his mother and Mabel bustled in with cookies and lemonade, Clive lobbed questions about politics and the mayor’s aspirations and social theory. Jack watched his mother light up with the questions, giving long, complicated answers. Jack wished he were holding a camera. His mother always looked better under the glare of flashing lights and the crush of insistent news reporters.

He sipped his lemonade.

He slurped it.

She didn’t notice and didn’t admonish him. His
mother’s eyes slid from one side of Jack to the other, never quite resting on him. He tried to raise his eyebrows and grin at her, just to get a little eye contact. She did not grin back. Her eyes slicked past again and again without focusing once.

Two hours later, Jack’s mother was back in the car and driving away. She hadn’t hugged him or told him that she’d call him every day. She hadn’t embarrassed him with tears or sobs or even the sniffles. Instead, in the moment before she got into the car, she took Jack’s hand, held it upward by the knuckles, and uncurled each finger. She ran her hand against his palm.

“You can’t turn something into what it isn’t,” she said, looking at the hand, then at the ground, then at the cornfield down the road. “Everyone’s on a path that leads them to where they belong.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Can’t I just—” Jack began, but his mother interrupted him.

“Sometimes all you can do is your best, and sometimes your best isn’t good enough.” She looked up, though not
at
him. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot and slicked with tears, and the muscles of her face twisted slightly, as though she was trying to remember something but it slipped just out of reach.

Look at me!
Jack wanted to yell.
Say my name
. But instead, he said, “Good-bye, Mom,” his voice thick and heavy.

Clair turned toward the car, her steps unsteady. She
shut herself inside and turned the key. It roared to a start and slid out onto the road. She didn’t honk or grin. She never even turned to wave good-bye.

Jack told himself that was normal.

After a silent dinner, or at least he was silent, Jack headed toward his new room.
No
, he told himself. Not his new room. His room for
now
. He didn’t belong here, he decided. He belonged in his mom’s new house. Or his dad’s new apartment. Either one. He had to belong
somewhere
.

Clive and Mabel let Jack find his own way up.
Up the stairs and the first door on the left
, Clive had said. Jack appreciated the privacy. He ran his fingers along the wall as he went up and felt that odd, warm, shivery sensation of the plaster under his fingertips. It didn’t hurt like before. It just… trembled. He wondered whether the house was on a fault line.
Are there fault lines in Iowa?

The cats—named Gog and Magog, which were, in Jack’s opinion, the most ridiculous names for cats he had ever heard—followed at his heels. “Shoo!” Jack said. The cats just flexed their shoulders and blinked, their eyes glowing strangely in the half-light on the stairs.

Even on the upper floor, he could hear his aunt and uncle talking about him. Typical of adults, they talked around the subject instead of saying the things they
were actually talking about. Instead of
divorce
, they said,
catastrophe
. They called it
a premature unraveling
and said that
sometimes a sapling graft won’t take if the new tree isn’t sound
and that
in the end, it wasn’t as strong as we’d hoped
.

“In any case,” he heard Clive say, “it doesn’t do us any good to complain. I should have anticipated what would happen if that family unraveled, but it’s too late to fix that now. The boy is here. And now everything starts. I just pray that we’ll be ready.”

There was silence for a moment, as though both Clive and Mabel were holding their breath.

“I just pray that Jack won’t hate us for what we’ll need him to do,” Mabel said.

Too late
, Jack thought. He hated them already.

A
S SHE CROUCHED IN THE SHADOWS AT THE SIDE OF
the Fitzpatricks’ yard, Wendy Schumacher ignored the swarms of mosquitoes landing on her neck and arms and the backs of her legs. She had work to do. Once the last of the lights went out, she crept across the damp grass to the trellis on the eastern side of the house. She gripped the wood and vines, testing the trellis for stability, and with a grunt, she started climbing toward the open window.

It wasn’t the first time. Wendy had climbed up that
trellis so many times she could have done it with her eyes shut. Four summers earlier, when Frankie disappeared, Wendy’s house was overrun with pacing police officers and weeping relatives, and she found herself needing to be somewhere
else
. Someplace small and tight and
quiet
. One night, she slipped out of her house, and after wandering for a bit, she climbed into the first open window she could find—the second-floor guest bedroom in the brightly painted house at the edge of town. After that, she returned, night after night, whenever she got the chance.

Wendy liked the Fitzpatrick house—its shelves crammed tightly with books, its strange pictures on the wall. Most of all, though, she liked learning things that the other kids in town didn’t know. She learned, for example, that her brother wasn’t the first kid in town to go missing. She learned that people once relied on rawhide—wrapped around wrists or tied around necks or slipped into the sole of a shoe—as protection from…
someone
. A Lady, the book said. She learned that both souls and memories are slippery, fragile things, and easily snatched if a person isn’t careful. Though she knew it couldn’t be true—not
really—
she wore a thin rawhide bracelet on her left wrist every day, and encouraged her brother to do the same. Just a superstition, but still. It’s not like a person can grow a new soul.

There was one book that was particularly useful:
The Secret History of Hazelwood
. On her second visit, she
found it sitting on the bed in the corner. The bed was newly made and had been lined with pillows and teddy bears. The book lay in the middle with a plate of cookies right next to it. A glass of milk waited for her on the side table. She never mentioned this hospitality to the Fitzpatricks, and they never pried. Sometimes, Wendy thought, a silent thank-you is enough.

Later, when her parents and the police and neighbors had started to forget about Frankie, when he had slowly faded out of photographs and disappeared from conversations, the book told Wendy what to do.
Keep the memory alive
, it said on page seventy-nine.
A person’s soul is bigger than his body. It takes root and lives in all who love him
, page forty-seven cautioned.
Hang on for dear life.

Wendy hung on. And when Frankie was miraculously found, Wendy had a hard time forgiving those who had forgotten what happened. Even now, four years later, forgiveness was elusive and difficult. She still didn’t know
why
her brother was taken, or
why
he was hurt, or
who
was responsible. Still, there
had
to be someone to blame. Someone needed to make amends.

Wendy tiptoed across the quiet room. She had seen the new kid arrive, but she didn’t want to get too close. She wasn’t looking for a friend. She wanted information.

The boy on the bed snored and sighed in his sleep. He hiccuped and gulped as though he was crying. She tried leaning in to peek at his face, but he had gathered the blanket in the crook of his elbow and draped it over
his head like a shroud. She couldn’t risk waking him to get a better look. His right hand was gathered into a tight fist, and his forearm was covered with red welts, as though he had been recently scratching at mosquito or chigger bites, but there were none that she could see. Maybe he was just nervous.

She’d have preferred to see his face, but there would be time enough for that, she decided. In a small town, it’s no trick to find the new kid. What’s more, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to hide. If his face was familiar, she’d know it when she saw it.

His bags littered the floor, opened but unpacked. She crouched down, pulled the piles apart gently so as not to disturb the order and arrangement.