Wonders of the Invisible World (16 page)

At first there was the boy. The dog came after. There was the boy and then there was a black Lab trotting behind him. Then the boy slapped his hip lightly in signal, and the dog hurried to catch up and walk alongside him. He was a squinty-eyed kid, fifteen or sixteen, wearing blue jeans and a brown barn jacket with a sheepskin collar warming the back of his neck. He was walking through the back field, a field I would have recognized in any season, because it had always been what I saw spread out beyond my bedroom window, though this particular season was not the winter I'd left behind me, but autumn, and the tree line at the back of the field blazed with color.

“Be careful, now,” a voice called from behind the boy, and he turned to look at the back of the yellow clapboard house, where his mother sat on the stoop snapping the last of the beans from her summer garden. Bennie. My grandma Bennie. Only much younger than I'd ever seen her. She had a face already worn out by the world, with lines around her dark eyes and early gray curling into her brown hair. “And make sure your father knows it'll be time for dinner soon, if you can drag him out of there when you find him,” she said.

The boy nodded. He was waving goodbye to her even as he turned back to the woods, to trudge through the rain-sopped field in his gum boots with the black dog trotting beside him.

There was a sun that day too, hovering over the trees on the horizon, orange and bleary, smearing the sky with its brassy oils. There was a slight wind at the boy's back, gently nudging him into the amber-lit forest. And there were the usual movements of squirrels and birds and rabbits, chatter and singsong, the shifting of brush and leaves as creatures turned themselves invisible at his approach. The dog, however, could sense them. It lifted its black nose, turned its ears in one direction, then another, every time it heard some tiny thing scuttle into a cold hole or into one of the ant-hollowed logs that littered the trails of the forest. The dog left the boy's side to circle around for a while, patrolling, until the boy slapped his hip again and the dog returned, tail flicking back and forth, and peered over its shoulder at whatever it had wanted to apprehend.

The boy went to these woods often; so often, in fact, that he had brought them into his mind over a long period of time and could now walk through them in his dreams. He pressed his face against his pillow each night, after feeding and watering the cows in the barn with his father, and walked through the world contained within him: the world his father and his grandfather had known before him. This land. These woods. He walked the footpaths they had worn into the earth during their years here, over the bridge and into the orchard, where the Living Death Tree scratched at the sky with its spindly black branches. Then down the lane he went, from the pasture to the woods, following paths only he and his father and grandfather could see spread out before them.

The farther into the woods he went, the bigger the world seemed to grow around him. The sunlight thinned as the trees twisted together, enclosing him in their shadows. And somewhere inside that private world, down in the ravine at the back of the woods, was his father.

There had been crying that day too, earlier. The boy was not able to stop thinking about it, and I watched the moments replay in his mind over and over as he walked. His mother's sobs, a burst of strangled pleas, the way she'd sounded as if her life were in danger. The boy had come down from his tiny attic bedroom to find his mother on her knees in the living room, her face buried in her old-too-early hands. The door in the mudroom slammed then, making the house shake, making the boy look up for a moment before his mother let out another sobbing sound and he turned back to her, saying, “Mom? Momma?” and she lifted her red face to finally look at him. “Was he saying it again?” the boy had asked her.

“Just give him some time,” she'd said, nodding. “He'll walk it off in the woods. Give him some quiet.”

An hour had passed, though, and the boy's father hadn't returned, which was why he'd decided to set off to find him, to bring him home to his bean-snapping, worn-down-too-early mother, who he loved more than anyone in the world, who sometimes made him wonder what had ever made her marry his father, a steelworker who drank half his paycheck on the nights he received them, then came home to smash the glass of the picture frames that held photos of their family members, like his father's own mother, Grandma Plumie, who the boy missed sorely. Grandma Plumie had been gone for three years now. And in those three years, it seemed the boy's father had only grown more distant from everyone, had grown into a stranger, as if he and the boy had never known one another, held conversations, as if the father had not made the boy from his own body with the boy's mother.

After Grandma Plumie's funeral, after Aunt Ethel took half of Grandma Plumie's jewelry, then left without a word, the boy's father had woken one morning to find that, somehow, he'd been cast as an actor in a life he could not remember making.

He began calling the boy John instead of Johnny, in a tone that dripped battery acid, as if John were the name of a constantly returning door-to-door salesman. He began to tell the boy's mother that he'd made a mistake by marrying her, that his own life was one great big mistake, that his own father, who had never come home from the war in France, who had died over there, should have never made him.

“This world,” the boy's father would say. “This world isn't worth spit, I tell you.” And when the boy's mother said, “John, don't talk like this,” the boy's father would cry and say he was sorry and that he was a coward. He'd never done anything right. He hadn't gone to fight in a war like his father had; the army had refused him, said he had a slight curvature of the spine and a murmur in his heart, and that he was too old, really. And though all of his wife's younger brothers had gone to Vietnam for a war that was unwinnable, they'd still done their duty. They'd done something honorable, even though all but one of them died over there, just like his father had died in the service of his country.

And on top of that, he was losing his inheritance. The farm. He had taken to selling it off in pieces. One parcel when he needed to buy a new tractor. Another when he needed a new car. Part of the woods, even, had been sold off to loggers after he'd gambled away the last of the savings his father left him.

More and more often, the boy would find his father in dark corners of the house, his head buried in the palms of his hands, shaking. And once, when the boy went out to feed the cows, he'd stopped pouring the grain into their buckets when he heard an odd noise come from above and realized quickly that it was someone crying, someone up in the hay mound. Whimpering, really.

That day he left the barn and went to his bedroom in the second floor of the yellow farmhouse and watched from his window, waiting to see who, if anyone, would eventually emerge. And when the gate did finally swing open, it was his father, wiping his eyes one last time before he turned to lock the gate behind him.

At the edge of the ravine—their destination—the boy and the black dog came to a stop to look down the footpath that led to his father's tree blind at the bottom, where the boy could find his father anytime he disappeared from the house now. He was down there again. The boy told the black Lab to sit, to stay, and the dog went down on its haunches like a statue while the boy carefully picked his way down the slope to the bottom of the ravine.

It was when he reached the bottom that the boy spotted his father sitting against the base of his tree, his legs crossed, a revolver held against his temple. The boy froze, afraid to move another inch, not wanting to disturb him, not wanting the gun to go off. Just a while ago he had asked his mother, “Did he say it again?” after he'd found her in the living room, sobbing. “Yes,” she'd said. His father had said it again. The thing he'd been saying for weeks now, it seemed. That he was going to correct the mistake God had made of him. Now, here in Marrow's Ravine, was the first time the boy had actually seen his father appear as if he might actually do what he'd been threatening.

The boy looked up to the side of the ravine, to the black Lab waiting for him on the ridge above, its pink tongue lolling. And then, suddenly, beside the dog, he saw the curve of wide white antlers appear before the broad white head bearing those antlers followed. There was a creature up there, a creature the dog didn't seem to notice, and it stared down at the boy with eyes so dark and so cold, it seemed like it could see right into the center of the boy's soul.

It was when the boy turned to look up at the top of the ravine that his father noticed him. The boy's father lowered the gun from his temple then. And at that very moment, when it seemed the man might return to his senses, he shook his head wildly, the hatchet of his nose shifting back and forth, and said, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” Then he flashed the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The sound of the gun exploded in the boy's ears, pushing every other noise— every bird's call, every squirrel's chatter, even the trickling of Sugar Creek itself—out of Marrow's Ravine.

And after the echo of the blast and the ringing of the gunshot began to sift back down from the treetops, a deep stillness remained, quietly filling the place like a fog, as if the woods themselves had been shocked into a resolute silence.

The boy stood there, staring, his eyes wide, his lips parted for the sharp breath he'd taken right before he watched his father's unstrung puppet of a body slouch against the base of the tree, head slumping against the shoulder. Gone now. Gone from him.

I stood there with him, my own eyes wide, my own mouth hanging open, shocked into silence, until I heard my father crying, and turned to see him fall to his knees, covering his face with his hands. I watched my father, younger than I was now, place the back of his hand against his eyes to wipe away tears that wouldn't stop coming. Watched as he heaved and sobbed at the foot of his own father's body.

I couldn't stop myself any longer. I reached out from the shadows I hid within, reached out to try to touch him. To put my hand on his shoulder. Tried to take his hand from his eyes, to hold him, to bear some of his grief for him. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get through to him. It was just like our life together back in my time, back in my world: he couldn't see me.

I knew he sensed me, though, because a second later he said, “Sophia? Is that you? Are you still up in New York with your father? If you can, would you do that thing? That trick with the star? Would you come home right now? I need you so bad.”

I furrowed my brow, confused. What trick was he talking about? It sounded like the story my mom had told me about the Probable Stone, the star she said could lead me home if I ever needed it. So she had told my father, too, back when they were high school sweethearts. Because how else would my sixteen-year-old dad seem to know my mom could do some trick that would let her come home to Temperance from some other place with a snap of her fingers? Seeing that he knew that all those years ago, though—it didn't make sense. Why had my mom taken all of that knowledge she'd obviously once shared with him and made him forget it?

I couldn't probe to ask that question. I couldn't get that answer from my dad's younger self. Because even as I knelt beside him and clutched his shoulder, trying to reach him, a curtain of rain began to fall around me, harder and harder, colder and colder, and then the vision of my dad faded altogether.

I woke back into my body, back into my bedroom, completely drenched, to find my mom standing over me with the watering can she used on her houseplants, pouring water on me as I lay there.

She was shaking her head, her lips curled in anger. And when I was done blinking the vision out of my eyes, she said, “I cannot believe you, Aidan Lockwood. You promised you'd watch over me. I could have been hurt. I could have been trapped if something bad had happened. And you could have been trapped in there too, seeing something you shouldn't be seeing.”