The Mostly True Story of Jack (4 page)

New sneakers, she noticed. Pressed shirts still creased from their packages. Stiff jeans. Either he rarely went out or his mother had recently shopped. Maybe both. A thick, new book. Only the art supplies looked well used. And there were lots of them.

Wendy noticed there was nothing electronic that she could see. Still, that didn’t prove anything.

Outside the door, the Fitzpatricks’ cats scratched and murmured and whined.
I know, I know
, she whispered.
Just give me a second.

She peeked into the open backpack and pulled out a small photo album—the kind drugstores handed out for free. She moved to a square of moonlight on the floor and flipped the pages. The first five pictures showed a woman
who looked like a younger version of Mrs. Fitzpatrick. “So that’s your mom,” Wendy breathed. She looked closer. The woman was pretty—glossy hair, perfect makeup, nice clothes. She looked, Wendy thought, like she should be on the news. Or maybe in a shampoo commercial.

The next five pictures were of a man and the same woman with their arms draped around each other. And the last pictures were family portraits—the same man, the same woman, a little boy with reddish gold hair and freckles, and something else: A miniature drawing of a boy with dark hair and black glasses had been carefully taped onto each photograph, tucked in with the rest of the family. Wendy looked over at the bed. She still couldn’t see his face, but she could see the back of his dark-haired head—and his black glasses resting on the nightstand.

Why, she wondered, would someone paste a figure of himself into a family photograph? And why wasn’t he in any of the pictures in the first place? Having no answer that satisfied her, Wendy removed one of the pictures and slipped it into her back pocket. She replaced the album and tiptoed back to the windowsill, pausing to get one more look at the figure on the bed.

She still couldn’t see his face.

“Who are you?” she whispered into the darkness.

Having no answer, she swung her legs out the window and slipped into the night.

F
OR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS
, J
ACK DIDN’T LEAVE HIS ROOM
except to go to the bathroom, or that’s what he told his aunt and uncle anyway. Really, he just stayed in his room while they were home. Mabel brought his meals up and set them on the desk by the north window. “No sense letting the boy starve,” she said. With each meal, she left a little note:
We love you, Jack
, or
I know the divorce is hard, but their split brought you here to us, and I can’t help but be happy about that
, or
Be brave, honey
. And while Jack thought the notes babyish and embarrassing, he didn’t
throw them away. He flattened each one and slid it into his notebook, and he found himself doodling pictures of his aunt along the sides of the page—Mabel standing at the edge of a field, Mabel covering her face with her hands, Mabel holding a tiny baby in one palm.

Clive, on the other hand, didn’t like it much. Jack could tell. More than once, he found his uncle standing in the hallway just outside his room, raising his index finger as if about to say something, and then thinking better of it and shuffling back to his office.

Once, Clive came in without knocking, hauling in a stack of nonfiction books on horticulture and dropping them with a thud on the desk.

“You
do
have nonfiction,” Jack said, looking up from his drawings. “Finally, something
good
.”

Clive didn’t respond to this and sat on the chair, opening one book to a photograph showing a fruit tree with a cleft of bark cut away and a green bud held in place on the bare wood. “Have you ever seen an apple tree, Jack?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, shrugging. “Maybe.”

Clive nodded. “When I was a boy, my father kept fruit trees. To keep the orchard productive, he took shoots from different kinds of trees and grafted them onto a mother trunk. You see here?” He pointed to the photograph. “He took a very sharp knife and, right in the middle of the season, cut the skin of the tree, placed the tiny shoot
on the wound, and bound them tight. The shoot would grow into the mother. And though they’d look like one tree, they weren’t at all. They were two very different species, growing on the same trunk.”

“Oh.” Jack looked at his uncle for some clue as to where this conversation was going. “Okay.”

“Well, you see, he had this one tree. An heirloom pear. Very old and rare, with lovely yellow fruit. He wanted to make it grow on one of the apple trees, so he grafted a bud onto an apple mother and hoped for the best.” Uncle Clive pressed his hand to his mouth and paused for a moment, as though searching for the right words. “But there was a terrible thunderstorm, and the tree was hit by a bolt of lightning, splitting it in half, all the way down to the root. The pear shoot had only just attached, you see, so it was small and weak. But we had to remove it in order to save it. We had to graft it back onto its original tree. Indeed, by the time my father reached the injured apple tree, the pear shoot had already begun to detach. It couldn’t hang on to something that was broken, so it freed itself.”

Jack stared at the old man. His arms itched. His neck itched. He swallowed. “Did it die?”

“Everything dies, boy. But sometimes when things become… detached, we bring them back to the source. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Not really,” Jack said. “Can I call my mom?”

Clive sighed, stood, and shuffled toward the door, fidgeting all the while. “Of course you can, son. Though I daresay you might find it difficult to reach her.”

Jack tried to call five times that day. Each time, the message from her cell phone said that her mailbox was full and to try again later. Jack sat down to draw a picture of himself, and though he didn’t mean to, he drew himself with an angry wound on his side where his old life had been only just ripped away.

Jack snapped his notebook closed and decided to take a break from drawing for a while.

Fortunately for Jack, Mabel worked every day in her art gallery, and, though the college didn’t hold classes during the summer, Clive still had to show up for faculty meetings with the other professors from time to time, which meant that, for at least a few hours every day, Jack was left alone. Except for the cats. And the bird.

On his fourth day in Iowa, Jack wrote a letter to his parents:

Dear Mom and Dad
, he wrote.
Iowa is worse than I thought. Dad was right. Aunt Mabel and Uncle Clive are kooks. Please let me come home.
Please.
I promise I’ll try to be more like Baxter. I won’t be too much trouble. Love, Jack.
Baxter, Jack’s brother, had a summer job to keep him occupied and what seemed like thousands of friends to stay with if he needed to. So Baxter was allowed to stay home in San Francisco. And Jack wasn’t.

Jack folded the letter neatly and slipped it into an
envelope. The cats watched him do it. They bobbed and wobbled their heads in time with his writing as he printed the address. They hissed at the stamp.

“What’s the matter with you?” Jack asked. “You’re the weirdest cats I ever met.”

They hissed again, this time at Jack.

He brought the letter downstairs, the cats worrying at him as he went, every once in a while leaping up and taking a swat at his rear. “Knock it off,” he said.

Lancelot was outside, standing on the mailbox.

“What are you doing—guarding the mail?” Lancelot fixed a bright bead of an eye right on Jack. Jack watched the hooked beak nervously. “Go on now.” His voice was shaky. “Shoo.” Lancelot waited for a long moment. Finally, with a squawk that clearly said “I’m only leaving because I
feel
like it,” the bird flew away.

Jack sighed in relief. He opened the metal door and stopped dead. There was a letter sitting faceup with his name on it. No address, no stamp. Just
Jack
, written in a spidery, thin script. He left the note to his parents in the box and sat on the porch to open his own letter.

Inside the envelope was a very old piece of paper—a letter to someone who wasn’t named. Just
Dear Professor
, and signed by a man named Reverend Marcus Weihr.

“Eighteen forty-nine?” Jack looked at the date on the letter. “It has to be fake. It should be falling apart if it’s that old.” While the paper
looked
old and
felt
old, the ink was clear, and the folds were still strong. The letter read:

“Huh?” Jack said out loud. People in the olden days took a long time to get to the point, he thought. Plus, they used way too many capital letters.

The next part of the letter was… ridiculous. The letter told the story of a couple who knocked on his door in the
middle of the night carrying a tiny baby—about the size of a man’s fist. It had leaves for hair, and its skin was like the bark of a tree, and it fussed and cried in its acorn cradle. They wanted the Reverend to baptize the child and to tell everyone that the child was
theirs
. The Reverend wrote:

“What a load of garbage,” Jack snorted.

“No, it’s not,” said a nearby voice. Jack yelped and jumped up, his heart racing. On the far side of the porch, a head popped up—a tall boy with a head full of hair so blond it looked as though it might glow in the dark. The boy grinned.

Jack, recovering himself, tried to take a casual stance.
It’s easier to be casual
, he thought,
when no one’s looking at you.
“How do you know?”

The boy shoved his hands into his back pockets and leaned back on his heels. “Me? I don’t know nothin’,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like garbage. It looks like a letter. I’m Anders, by the way.”

Jack’s head reeled. He had spent his whole life imagining the kinds of conversations that he’d like to have with kids his own age. No one ever talked to him at school.
No
one. Even at home, Jack sometimes went days without exchanging a single word with his parents. And his brother was always so busy, he hardly even noticed that Jack was in the family at all—let alone in the room next door. Jack had gotten very good at inventing long and fascinating conversations in his imagination, and he had been eager to have a discussion one day with someone his own age about… well, anything, really. Still, this conversation was nothing like the conversations in his head. Jack changed the subject. “Hi,” he said, trying to sound normal. “I’m—”

“Jack. I know. Your aunt called my mom. Plus, I saw your house wobble when you arrived.”

“No, it—Wait a minute. Did you—” Jack stammered, not knowing which sentence to start with first, only to have all three tumble out at once.

“Long story. It happens when a house sits on an eruption point. Anyway, I gotta get back.” He shrugged. “Chores. I’ll see you around, Jack.”

And before Jack could reply, the boy called Anders turned and disappeared into the thicket of branches at the back of the yard.

“Yeah, well,” Jack began. But it seemed silly to start a sentence when the person he was talking to had already left. Still, he couldn’t help himself. “
Eruption point?
” he
called out. “There aren’t any volcanoes in Iowa!” But the boy called Anders was already gone, and probably couldn’t hear him.

Jack looked down at the ancient paper in his hand.
Why
, he thought,
did someone give this to me? And why not just hand it to me? Why the envelope?
He wondered whether it was part of a game, or a section from a book (
fairy tales
, Jack thought derisively), or maybe even a joke. It surely couldn’t be
real
.

Later that day, Jack watched the mailman arrive with a stack of letters. He opened the metal door and slid the letters in. He took nothing out. Jack hurried downstairs to catch the man before he left. Obviously, Jack thought, he just didn’t see the letter to his parents. No big deal.

“Wait!” Jack called, sprinting out the front door, opening the mailbox and reaching inside. The mailman paused but did not turn around. “I need to send this—” Jack stopped. There was no address on the envelope, no return address, and no stamp. “Oh. I guess I… um… never mind.” The mailman didn’t turn and didn’t acknowledge Jack. He just shook his head and kept on walking.

I could have sworn I wrote the address on here
, Jack told himself. He sat down on the porch steps and looked closely at the envelope, checking for the imprint of his pen. He found nothing. Gog and Magog snaked out of the house and sat on either side of Jack. They eyed the envelope suspiciously.

“You saw me write the address. Right?” The cats just gave him an icy stare.
Great
, Jack thought.
Now I’m talking to cats.
He opened the envelope and pulled out the stationery paper. The letter had been wiped clean. He stared at the blank piece of paper, shaking it a few times, as though the writing might jostle its way to the surface. It didn’t. The paper didn’t look touched. Even the folds had vanished.