Wonders of the Invisible World (23 page)

Do you understand now?
the voice asked as the vision began to disappear into wisps of smoke around me.

I was down in the dark hollow of the dead apple tree, blinking the last of the vision out of my eyes. I felt the earth beneath me again, smelled the dank odor of decaying wood, the mustiness of rotten apples, and quickly pushed myself out of that hole, sliding out onto a skin of ice, inadvertently making a blurry snow angel behind me.

This is your story, Aidan Lockwood,
the voice said.
Do you understand me?

I sat up to lean back against the trunk of the tree the woman had died in, caught in the web of gnarled branches strung above my very head, and nodded.

“If I understand you right,” I answered her a second later, “then your name is Eva Jablonski. And your son cursed my family.”

“W
hat did she say then?” Jarrod asked later, after I'd gotten up from the ground in a hurry, after I'd refused to stay and listen to the woman in the tree any longer—she had said she had one more thing to show me, but I'd shaken my head, said no, said I'm sorry, said it was all too much—and had run across the railroad-tie bridge, returned to the house, passed by my mom at the dining room table whispering my father's name like a mantra, gone past the open door to Toby's room, where he sat in a chair with his bad ankle in a brace, staring out his window as if he might somehow see my dad appear at the edge of the woods to reveal that everything that had recently happened to us simply wasn't true. After all that, I'd called Jarrod to ask if I could come over.

Half an hour later, I was stretched out across the cushions of his couch with my head cradled in his lap. Staring up at his face was way better than staring up at the ever-widening crack in my bedroom ceiling.

“She said that she didn't make the curse,” I told him, and described how the woman had shown me the dream my great-grandfather had had on the night she died in his orchard. How she'd shown me the moment her son, Dobry, had made the curse, how she'd reached out from the branches that held her dead body and plucked his words from the air, tucking each one into the folds of her ragged dress for safekeeping.

“So,” said Jarrod, “she just, what—enforces it? How long has it been?”

“From what I can guess,” I said, “about eighty or ninety years, give or take.”

“That's one hell of a grudge,” said Jarrod.

“I think it's what killed my dad,” I said. “And I think it's also probably what killed my brother Seth.”

I turned away from Jarrod to stare across the room at the television screen. In the blank gray eye of his mom's ancient TV, this hulking thing that sat on the floor surrounded by a huge cabinet, I saw myself reflected: my head in Jarrod's lap, his broad chest above me, his fingers playing with my hair, his other hand stroking my arm. In that antique TV, it all looked like a romantic scene from some old black-and-white movie, only with two guys on the couch instead of a man and a woman. Despite the warmth of the reflected image, though, and despite the warmth of Jarrod's body, I felt cold enough that goose bumps had risen on my skin as I told him what I'd learned.

“You mean your brother who died of a seizure?” Jarrod asked. He'd seen Seth's picture in the living room when he was at my house for the first time months before, had asked if Seth's picture was a photo of me as a little kid. When I told him the truth, when I told him Seth was a brother who had died before I was born, Jarrod had blinked and stuffed his hands into his back pockets as he looked at the picture once more, this time considering it more thoughtfully, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a sibling you'd never even met. When he turned back to me a second time, he said only that he thought my mom's features were dominant in my family.

And I'd thought,
Unfortunately.
If it weren't for her, after all, if I were more like my dad, I might not have ever seen a vision or been pulled into the world's shadow. I might never have spoken to a ghost who lived in a tree and kept a curse that would inevitably destroy my family.

“My mom used to always say Seth died from a seizure,” I told Jarrod now. “That was her story. After I started to see and hear things back in October, though, her story changed. She said Seth had seen something he shouldn't have.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know,” I said, shaking my head in Jarrod's lap. It was the woman in the tree, I thought. She'd spoken to Seth, I figured, just like she'd called out to me over the last few months. It had to be that. Or it had to be
something
like that. She'd shown Seth the vision she'd shown me. Or she'd shown him something else. A white stag or a man in a black suit wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a scraggly red beard, his face craggy and pitted. She showed him something that would kill him, or she'd killed him herself somehow. I was sure she had something to do with it.

“So why would the woman tell you that story?” Jarrod asked. “Why wouldn't she just let the curse take you, too?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I felt like she would have if she could have. But something was stopping her. There's something she can't do to me. I could feel that. I just don't know what's stopping her, or why.”

“Listen to us,” said Jarrod, “trying to figure out the logic of ghosts, when clearly they have to be pretty irrational to stick around here for so long holding grudges. Why try to make sense of them?”

I turned to face him again, relieved to see a corner of his mouth rise into a smile. He ran his fingers through my hair in one long stroke a second later, then leaned down to kiss me. His hair brushed my forehead, and his lips were strong. They tasted of cinnamon and were sweet like sugar. I could have kissed him like that forever, just to feel safe, just to close my eyes and see nothing else in this world, just to feel nothing else in this world but my skin against his, his breath on my collarbone, my fingers tracing the cage of his ribs as he enveloped me.

Nothing felt more right than that. Nothing felt more right than the two of us. I just didn't know how to make us work beyond the shelter of this trailer on the far edge of town. I didn't know how to make us work beyond the secrecy of my bedroom. And I worried that what we had together, this fire between us, could be put out by others if we were visible. If we let anyone see us.

When Jarrod pulled away, I said, “
You
have to be pretty irrational too, to stick around here for so long, you know.”

“Around Temperance?” he said, grinning, waiting for me to turn what I was saying into a joke of some kind.

“No,” I said. “Around me.” And I wasn't joking. I couldn't muster an ironic tone, because I believed what I was saying. That I wasn't worth it. That I had too many problems. Even if he was gay and his dating pool limited by being in Temperance, he could have found someone else. Someone whose family wasn't so messed up.

Jarrod's smile disappeared then, but his hand found mine and squeezed, hard, tight, like he would never let me go.

“Being in love isn't irrational,” he said. “It only looks that way to people who have never felt it.”

“Is that what we are?” I asked. “In love?”

For a moment after I put the question out there, it filled the room like a fog. I tried to see the two of us the way anyone else might if they were to open the door of the trailer right then. I tried to see myself lying beneath Jarrod, my hands drifting under his shirt to slide across the warm skin of his back. Then I wasn't trying to see, wasn't imagining anything at all, as my hands did find their way under his shirt and began to travel up the warm skin of his back. Then he was leaning down, kissing me harder than before, and I put my arms around him, kissing him harder too, like we were in this ridiculous kissing contest or something. Who could obliterate the other one with his lips? Who could show the other one he wanted him more? Then he was fumbling with the button of my jeans, until suddenly he released it, and then both of our mouths parted, as if we were somehow both surprised at this conclusion. Then we closed our mouths again, put them back against one another.

In love. It felt like a real possibility. It felt like it was more than a possibility, actually. Like it was maybe our destiny, if you believed in destiny. The way Jarrod sometimes talked, and the way I was turning down paths I never knew existed, I was starting to believe. I thought back to the vision I'd shared with him when we were in middle school, the one I'd shown him in Mill Creek. The one he would eventually show me. What had I really shown him that day?
A future where we were still friends,
he'd said when I'd asked him that question a few months earlier. Then he'd looked out the window of the Blue Bomb as we drove home, as if he was embarrassed by something he couldn't admit.

That wasn't the truth, of course, and I could see it now. He'd played down that vision. I'd shown him something more than our friendship lasting into the future. I'd shown him something more like this, something more like now, where the two of us were alone in this ramshackle trailer on the outskirts of town, him squeezing my hand as he pulled away from a kiss to finally answer my question: “Is that what we are? In love?”

“Yes,” he said, low down in his throat, like he didn't want any argument about it. And then the fog of my question began to evaporate, the air to clear between us. “That's what we are.”

Jarrod began to slip his hand around my waist, to pull at my jeans, to peel me open. I didn't know what to do—other than what we were already doing—and stopped him to say as much.

“Don't worry,” he said, brushing his thumb against my cheek. “I can show you.”

If ghosts weren't entirely logical, neither were human beings.
Some
human beings, anyway. My mother, for one, had stopped making sense months before, even though I suspected there had to be some kind of method to her madness. But madness might have been the problem in the end. After my father's death, it seemed like my mom stopped making sense even to herself. It was always candles and a fire roaring in the fireplace now, as if she couldn't see anything outside of the flames she constantly stared into. It was as if the material world had dropped away from her abruptly, and she kept falling now, falling away from a reality she couldn't face.

When I came home from Jarrod's later, my mom wasn't in the living room staring into the fireplace, though. And she wasn't in the dining room staring into the flickering light of a candle. The house was silent except for the creak of the floorboards as I stepped across them. But as I started up the stairs to the second floor, I heard muffled voices, and when I reached the top step, the voices became clearer. Words slipped beneath my brother's closed door and skittered across the hallway like mice.

I stepped closer, quiet as I could, until I was at the door with my ear pressed against it. “Try harder,” my mom was telling Toby. “You had to have seen something more. Something else. You're able to do that, you know? If you try hard enough, you can see things other people can't. You're a lucky one, Toby, like your brother and me. You just have to give yourself permission.”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Mom,” Toby said, and I heard a note of totally-freaked-out ringing through his voice. “I've told you everything,” he continued. “I was up on the ridge in my stand. Dad was down in his. I could see him from above. Right before he fell, he raised his muzzle-loader up to his shoulder like he was going to shoot at something. But there were no deer around, as far as I could see. There wasn't anything. It was just snow and the wind blowing more snow. We hadn't seen anything all day but some squirrels digging around in the drifts. Then Dad shot, and then the next thing I knew, he was clutching his chest like all the air had gone out of him. Then he started to lean forward, like something was pulling him over, like he was struggling to stand. Then he fell from the tree and I started to climb down mine to go to him. I'm telling you. That's all I saw. That's everything.”

“Well,” my mother said, “I suppose this is partially my fault.”

“How?” Toby asked. “What are you talking about?”

She was silent at first. Then, quietly, she said, “I should never have blinded all of you. I should never have told that story.”

“Please, Mom,” Toby said in the weak voice that only came out of him in his most anxious moments. Which were rare, almost nonexistent, or at least had been up until the past few weeks. “I don't know what you're talking about. You're scaring me.”

I thought about opening the door and interrupting; I thought about bursting in and demanding she tell us what she was going on about with this story she kept mentioning, like she'd done the night Jarrod came over. But right as I grabbed the knob, I heard her stand and scrape Toby's desk chair back into place before saying, “You don't have to be afraid, Toby. I'm going to protect you. I'm going to keep us all safe.”