Things Not Seen (5 page)

Mom's eyes follow the floating dollars as she keeps talking. “I hate you being home by yourself, but there's nothing we can do about it. And tomorrow I'll have your dad call you if he can. And you can call me if there's any problem…or if you just want to talk, okay?”

“Yup. I'll be fine.” I don't sound very sure about that, and I don't want her to worry, so right away I say, “But like Dad said, there has to be some reason this happened, something that caused it. I know we can figure it out…or…maybe we could just open a circus and get really rich.”

That makes her smile, and again I remember that smiling hurts her.

“Seriously, Mom, I'm all right. And I'll call you when I get home, okay?”

She nods and holds up her right hand for me, and I take hold of it again. “Now give me a kiss, if you can find a spot that's not bruised.”

And I do. And then I let go of her hand.

“See you, Mom.”

“I'll be home in just a few days, Bobby.”

I've got the door open now. The old woman in the other bed is wide awake. Her tubes flop around as she looks from the door to the curtain around Mom's bed and then back to the door. She's confused, and she has a right to be.

Mom is looking at the door too, leaning forward as I start to leave. “And Bobby?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for coming.”

“Sure thing, Mom. Bye.”

W
orking my way back to room 1007, getting into my clothes again, walking around to the front of the hospital, finding a nice big cab just like my mommy told me to, and then riding home—all that happens without a hitch. Except my toe starts throbbing again.

Coming home to an empty house. I mean, I've done it plenty of times, but tonight it's different. Alone is one thing; alone at night—all night—that's something else.

Dad has some timers rigged up, so a few lights are on. Still, the place looks like a big old funeral home.

This kid at school named Russell, his dad runs a funeral home on Kenwood. His family lives on the second and third floor of the place. At lunch one day Russell tells me they've got a big cooler down in the basement next to the room where his dad gets the bodies ready. He says sometimes they have three or four corpses in the cooler at the same time. And then Jim Weinraub says that when he slept over at Russell's once, they sneaked down to the basement in the middle of the night and looked at a dead woman.

After I heard that, I didn't eat lunch with Russell for a month. Stuff like that creeps me out.

I don't go in the front door of my house because the front porch has a light that goes on whenever anyone walks up the steps. If I go in that way, I'm almost sure Mrs. Trent would see me. She lives next door, and she sits in her big bay window all day and most of the night. She would see me, and then she would probably waddle over to tell me that the police were here earlier. Mrs. Trent is the nosiest woman on the planet, and it doesn't help that the buildings in my neighborhood are only about fifteen feet apart.

I let myself in at the driveway door on the east side of the house, the side away from Mrs. Trent. This side faces a big duplex apartment house. It's loaded with college kids. Their place is all lit up, and somebody's music system is blasting away. I wish I was going there for the night.

First, before I set the alarm system by the back door, before I turn on any other lights, before I even take off my coat and scarf, I go around and shut all the shades and curtains. If Mrs. Trent gets one good look at my empty clothes walking around the house, it‘ll mean the end of life as we know it.

With the alarm set and my coat and stuff dumped by the back door, it's time to eat. I'm starved again. I watch as I feel my hands throw a peanut butter and jelly sandwich together, and I think how I'd give anything for a double cheeseburger right now. Then this thought: Unless things change, my fast-food days are over. Unless someone else does the buying. Great—I can't even get a Happy Meal unless my daddy or mommy buys it for me.

Mom!

I grab the kitchen phone, and then I grab a paper towel to wipe the strawberry jelly off it.

I promised Mom I'd call when I got home.

One ring, two rings, three rings. Maybe she's already asleep. Or in the bathroom.

Four rings. It's a deep purse. Ringer's probably set on low.

Five rings. Six rings. Dead? Bad word. I mean the battery in her phone—dead battery.

Then it goes to voice mail. I try not to sound worried about her, but I am. “Mom? Mom, it's me. I got home fine, and now I'm fixing some food…it's about nine, I guess. So…say hi to Dad, and I'll call you tomorrow. Or you can call me. Bye.”

I've been at home by myself plenty of times. Tons of times.

But not like this. Never with both my folks away all night. And no one else coming.

I don't like scary movies, especially the kind where people are alone in a big old house. And I've always been a little afraid of the dark. Which is not a bad way to be in this part of Chicago. Even with the cops and the university police all over, there's still plenty to worry about after sundown. The streetlights are on, but there are shadows. Lots of shadows.

So I turn on more lights. In the TV room I set up a tray table. Then I get some milk and my sandwich.

I should know better than to just turn on the tube. It's still set to WGN, and it's a movie preview, the one where Jack Nicholson is holding the ax and trying to push his face through a door. I punch the changer, and it flips to Cinemax. Some teenage vampires are having a meal.

I turn off the set, but then the house feels too quiet, and bad pictures are bouncing around in my head. All three lamps are on, but it still feels dark. So I grab the other remote and turn on the FM. The room fills up with jazz. I concentrate on the trumpet line because that's my instrument. The trumpet breaks into a high solo, and it's a bright sound, shiny and clean.

And then I remember my sandwich. I eat it, but it doesn't feel right in my mouth. It doesn't feel right when I swallow. And the milk tastes strange. Nothing feels right.

Because when fear begins to crawl, it just keeps coming.

Light is good, light is very good. But the windows behind all the curtains are dark, and behind every curtain there's a horror story, a real one. It's the real ones that come crawling at me through the night.

The alarm system is blinking. That's supposed to make me feel safe. It's blinking next to every door. The alarm system has eyes and fingers all over the house. It senses things. The system will shriek when something outside starts to come through a door or a window.

But fear doesn't need doors and windows. It works from the inside.

I hurry to the study, flipping on other lights as I go. I swivel the big computer monitor around so I can sit and not have my back toward the doorway or the big curtained window. The jazz keeps coming from the TV room, but it's a different tune now, and a saxophone starts wailing.

The computer boots up, and then I'm online and I've got a messenger window open, and I tap in Kenny Temple's screen name, Gandolf375. Kenny's a Tolkien freak, which is why we're sort of friends. So this'll be good. I can talk to Kenny online, just talk a little. Like about jazz band. Because jazz band practiced today after school. Without me.

No response. I key his name again. Nothing. I try a few other names, kids I ask about homework sometimes. Like Jeff. I can ask Jeff what I missed in biology today. Or maybe Ellen Beck. She lives over on Blackstone—practically a neighbor. She'll know. And I can ask her about English too.

Nobody's online.

Then I remember. Midterms are coming. Nobody's online.

A digit changes on the clock at the upper corner of the computer screen. It's now 9:11. I shut the box down. The hard drive whines to a stop, the screen gives a static crackle and goes dark, and it hits me that it's so early. Eight, maybe nine more hours before dawn. The lights are burning here, but darkness is all around me—in the alley, in the attic, in the basement, in every closet. The night is everywhere. Hours and hours and hours of night.

I'm sitting at the desk in the study, and I see my clothes reflected there in the dark computer screen.

If I could see my eyes there where my face should be, what would they look like right now? Would they look uneasy? More than that. Maybe haunted? Would my eyes look haunted? Were that lady's eyes open? The eyes of that dead lady down in the basement cooler at Russell's house? What did her eyes look like?

I'm running up the front stairs, flipping on lights as I go, and I get to my room and turn on the lights, and I shut the door, and I lock the door, and I sit on my bed, and I grab my pillow, and I hug it against my stomach. Because of the fear. It's cranked up. It's up past terror, past panic. I'm thinking this must be dread. Except I'm not thinking. There's no room for thinking, just feeling, feeling like the dread is oozing up through the cracks between the boards on my floor. Bubbling up through the heater grates. I can feel it rising. Like water. Like black blood. Like the fluids. Like the fluids. The fluids that Russell's dad pumps into the dead bodies down in the basement of the funeral home. The dread is filling my locked room and my mouth and my nose and my ears and my eyes and my lungs, and I'm drowning in it.

But I sit there and I don't. I don't drown. I'm breathing so fast, I feel faint. I have to yawn. But I'm getting a thought. It's a real thought, a memory. About fear. And I'm thinking it. And the thought is simple. It's simple:
nothing to fear but fear itself
. From a history class. Just words. Until now.

And then it's like I'm five feet away. And I'm looking at me, at this guy sitting on a bed. And I can see he's not under attack. There is no danger. And I can see that the fear is the thing. It's just fear.

Another memory, another thought. I'm walking out of the library about a year ago behind two college girls. And one of them says, “I am so upset, I am just
so
upset! And the thing that upsets me the most is that I'm so up
set
!” That's what she says, and I listen to this and I think,
How stupid is that? If you don't want to be so upset, just stop being upset!

And now it's the fear. It's the same. Like being upset because you're upset. It keeps feeding itself. And then it gets you to feed it. And you just have to stop it.

I have to stop it
.

I stand up and toss my pillow back onto the bed. I take deep breaths. I go over to my dresser and look in the mirror. I wonder what my hair looks like. So I grab a comb and pull it across my head, patting my hair with the other hand. Feels right. It's Bobby, the well-groomed spook. What a clear complexion he has.

Then I walk over and unlock my bedroom door, and I go downstairs. I shut off the radio, and I take my dishes from the TV room back to the kitchen, and I scoop myself a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream. I go back to the couch, and I pull the blue fleece blanket around me, and I turn on Nick at Nite. It's
I Love Lucy
, and it's funny. I start laughing, and I am eating ice cream, and I am not afraid.

Still, when I finally go upstairs, I lock my bedroom door again.

And I sleep with my lights on.

I mean, I know I can get past the fear. I just did it. But I don't kid myself.

The bogeyman isn't really dead, not forever. He's just not here. Not tonight.

W
ake up. Shower. Eat. Read. Talk to Mom. Watch TV. Talk to Mom. Eat. Nap. Listen to jazz. Read. Talk to Dad. Watch TV. Go online. Talk to Mom. Eat. Practice my trumpet. Worry. Watch TV. Read. Talk to Mom. Nap.

So that's Wednesday, my second thrilling day as Bobby the Missing Person. It's weird not having anybody around. It makes it so easy to think. Too easy. Because unless the tube is on or there's music playing, it's just me, thinking. Until Mom calls again. And again.

When she calls in the morning, she wants me to tell her everything I'm doing, like every second. Starting with the cab ride home from the hospital last night. And she hopes that I remembered to turn on the alarm system. And why didn't I call her, which I did, but she was too messed up to remember to turn the phone on. And have I remembered to water the plants? Because the ivy in the front hall needs a half cup of water every other day or it droops. And did I do my homework? What do I mean, I couldn't get the assignments? So if no one is online, then you just call them on the telephone. Have kids today forgotten how to use the telephone? What do I mean that I didn't want to talk to anyone last night? Am I feeling all right? Am I eating nutritious foods? I'm not just eating junk, am I? Because that's the worst thing for my complexion.

Fifteen minutes of that, and I'm ready to scream and yank the phone out of the wall. The only good thing is that she doesn't have a charger there in the hospital. I'm guessing the batteries on her cell phone give out pretty soon. But then she'll just get a regular phone put in her room. So there's no escape. I'm missing the old Mom, who would show up once or twice a day, give an order, and then get on with her busy life. Suddenly, it seems like
I'm
her life.

Dad sounds all right when he calls me about noon. And I'm glad, because I need Dad's help. I mean, like, what if the accident had messed up his head? But that clearly has not happened. Because first he explains
exactly
how he's hurt. Exactly, like he'd been the surgeon himself, or like he was awake the whole time, taking notes. Then he tells me how he's been thinking about my “situation.” I can tell there's another person in the room with him because he's not being specific.

He says, “Regarding your, um, situation, Bobby, I've been running through some possible cause scenarios.” Possible cause scenarios. That's vintage Dad. He says, “The second I get out of here, I'd like to run some tests at the lab. Maybe put a sliver of your fingernail under the electron microscope, maybe try to get a reading from a spectrometer, things like that. Plus, there are dozens of very fine papers in the journals of the past ten years—things about light and energy, subatomic refraction, ideas that could give us some good science as a starting point, you know, so we can generate a theory about what's going on here. Sound good?”

I say, “Yeah, I guess.” But then I say, “How come we don't just do detective work? Because it could have been anything that caused this, right? Like maybe I ate a chunk of irradiated beef at the school cafeteria. Or maybe we lived too close to some big power lines down in Texas. Or maybe I inherited something from you, because you're the one who's been smashing atoms for twenty years. Shouldn't we just start looking for clues?”

Because I've been thinking too. Dad's not the only guy in the world with a brain.

Dad says, “Yeees,” drawing out the word while his gears are turning, “you've got some good points there—but we have to start somewhere, and for me, that means finding a theory.”

Who's surprised? With Dad, it all gets back to theory. That's what he does all day long: He theorizes. Has he ever actually even seen one of these atoms he studies year after year? No. He looks at made-up pictures of things that are invisible and comes up with theories. I don't want theories. I need some action.

I'm not saying anything, and it's too long a pause, so Dad starts talking again. “Maybe you could go online this afternoon, Bobby. You could go to the website of the journal
Science
and do some poking around, search their database for articles on light, do some reading—okay?”

I don't want to argue with an invalid, so I say, “Yeah, I'll check it out.” But when we hang up, I turn on the tube and tune in to a John Wayne festival on AMC. Because a John Wayne movie is an almost perfect cure for Dad's kind of thinking. With John Wayne, it's all about action.

My big event for Wednesday is when Mrs. Trent comes to the front door about two o'clock—just as the Duke is revving up his War Wagon. The doorbell rings, and I trot to the front hall. I can tell it's her. She makes a very wide shadow on the frosted glass.

She rings a second time, and I make my voice sound kind of weak, and I call out, “Hello? Who's there?”

“Bobby? It's Mrs. Trent…from next door. I heard about your parents. You poor dear, are you all alone in that big old place? I saw the lights come on last night, so I thought you must be there, but I didn't see you leave for school this morning, so I've been worried about you, and I thought I would bring over some cookies.”

It's the old “get your foot in the door with some cookies” trick. She really does bake amazing cookies. With Mrs. Trent, sometimes it's cookies, sometimes it's a question about how to make her VCR work, or maybe it's a piece of our junk mail that got delivered to her house. Anything'll do. And once Mrs. Trent gets into the front hall, it takes at least twenty minutes to get her out again.

I'm not sure what to say, but I guess I have to go with what Mom told the hospital, so I say, “My great-aunt Ethel is staying with me till my folks come home. She came late last night. And I'm at home because I've got the flu. And Aunt Ethel told me to come to the door because she's in the bathtub, but I shouldn't open the door…because of the flu…and because it's cold.” Sounds lame to me, probably to Mrs. Trent too.

But all she says through the door is, “Well, that's fine. I just wanted to be sure you were all right, Bobby, so I'll leave the cookies here on the porch, and your aunt can fetch them inside a little later. Now, you run along and get back into bed.”

“Okay. Thanks a lot, Mrs. Trent. And I talked with my mom and my dad today, and they're both doing fine.”

But she's already down the steps and waddling across the brown grass on her tiny front lawn. I peek through the glass, and I can see that she put the cookies down about five feet from the door. That's because Mrs. Trent is smarter than she looks, plus she has a big nose. With the cookies that far out on the porch, Mrs. Trent can sit in her front window and get a sideways look at whoever comes out to retrieve them. She wants to have a gander at Aunt Ethel.

About ten minutes later Mrs. Trent sees the storm door swing open on our front porch. Then this short plump person with stooped shoulders wearing a long pink terry cloth robe and fuzzy blue slippers shuffles out to the cookies, bends down slowly, picks up the plate, turns around, and shuffles back to the door. Mrs. Trent doesn't get a good look at Aunt Ethel for three reasons. First, the collar on the pink robe is turned up; second, there's a bath towel wrapped around her head; and third, the real Aunt Ethel is about twelve hundred miles southeast of here.

And as a reward for my first major acting role, I have a whole plate of chocolate-chip macadamia nut cookies to myself. They're gone by the end of the third John Wayne movie.

But apart from my big performance on the front porch, Wednesday is mostly boring. But I don't get scared at all Wednesday night.

And then it's Thursday.

Wake up. Shower. Eat. Worry. Watch TV. Talk to Mom. Worry. Watch TV. Worry. Talk to Dad. Read. Worry. Eat. Worry. Read. Worry. Talk to Dad. Worry. Talk to Mom. Worry. Listen to jazz. Talk to Mom. Worry. Worry. Worry. Nap.

I even worry during my nap.

So Thursday is pretty much like Wednesday, only worse.

Besides the worry, it's worse because it's a beautiful day outside, one of those trick days near the end of February in Chicago when it feels like spring, except you know there's going to be six or eight more weeks of cold and snow and sleet. But a day like this actually makes you want to go outside and throw a Frisbee or something.

And it's worse because Mom and Dad are doing a lot better and they feel like they have to call me all the time now—which is something new for them.

And it's worse because I'm starting to see what's happening to my life.

Because it's not like I wanted this. It's not like I'm some mad scientist who planned and studied and dreamed about becoming invisible all his life, and now it's happened, so now I can use my powers to take over the world. It's not like that, not when it's really happening.

And I can just hear some guys at my school talking about this. They'd go, “Whoa! You're invisible? And you're bummed about it? Like, what's your problem? Go with the flow, dude. Check out the girls' locker room. Check out the jewelry store. Go to the bank and learn some codes, man. Go work for the CIA, you know, like James Bond, only better. Invisible. That's so
cool
!”

Because if that's what some kid is thinking, that's because it's not happening to him. He's not facing it all day and all night, what it really means. This isn't a movie where you watch it for two hours and then it ends, and then you climb into a car and you talk about how the movie was while you go to get pizza with some friends.

This isn't like that.
This is my life
.

And what's happening means that suddenly my life is completely off track. It's like a train wreck, and I'm pinned down, trapped. And it's starting to feel like this is permanent. What if I never change back to the way I was? What then? Do I have to keep it a secret forever, like a spy who can never tell his wife and kids who he really is? Hah! What wife and kids?

Right now it feels like I'm never going to get to be on my own. Like, never even get my driver's license, or go away to college. Never buy a car or get a job or have my own apartment. Never!

And how would I live?

And where? Am I going to have to stay in this house with my parents? Forever?

I'm pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the TV room, back and forth, and my whole life is on hold. I'm waiting for something to happen. I'm waiting for Mom to come home and Dad to think and Mrs. Trent to bake more cookies and the school to call and the sun to go down and the sun to come up again tomorrow. It's like my life is supposed to be playing, but the VCR is on pause and the screen is blank and maybe the whole rest of the tape is erased.

So I go down the steps from the kitchen and out the side door. That's the door away from Mrs. Trent's house. I turn off the alarm. I peel off my clothes, all of them. I take the key out of my jeans pocket, and I go outside and tuck it inside the drainpipe beside the steps.

And I go around the front corner of the house and walk west, right past Mrs. Trent's window. The weatherman said it was going to be unseasonably warm, and for once it was the truth.

It's about 65 degrees, so it feels like when the air conditioner is up on high. I can bear it, so I'm going for a walk. Today. Right now. In the sunshine. Because I can. Because I want to. Because I'm not going to just sit around and wait for stuff to happen anymore. I'm still me, and I have a life. It's a weird life, but it's still mine.

It's still mine.