Wonders of the Invisible World (27 page)

“You're Carolyn,” I said, turning back to her. “Right?”

“
Aunt
Carolyn,” she corrected me. “But to be completely honest, for you it would be Great-Aunt Carolyn. You can call me whatever feels most comfortable, though. Please. Come inside. We've done enough standing around out here on the porch as if you're the postman. I should have known it was you who was coming here today. I would have prepared better—but these days I don't understand my own inklings like I used to.”

I hesitated to follow her inside after I heard her say that. “What do you mean?” I asked. “How would you know I was coming here today? We've never even met.”

“Oh, come now,” she said. “You know what I'm talking about. You have to understand
some
things, if you found your way here. I dreamed I received mail on a Sunday. Obviously.”

“But it's not a Sunday,” I said.

“No,” she said, “and you're quite unexpected, just like mail on a Sunday. I mean, really. Has your mother taught you nothing at all?”

She turned around after that and went inside, leaving Jarrod and me on the porch to look at each other for a while, before we both shrugged and followed her into the house. Which was this seriously old Victorian place with ornate rugs covering wood floors, and chintz-covered furniture. In each room we passed through, gaudily framed portraits of angels hung on the walls; on every bookcase or lamp stand, statues of winged fairies stood guard. I wanted to laugh, because this was the kind of stuff I'd imagined I'd find in this town, the kind of stuff that would make me think the trip was a waste altogether, but I didn't even let myself share a secret smile with Jarrod. We might crack up laughing if we let ourselves smile, and if I was going to go so far as to surround myself with angel and fairy statues in a crazy old hippie woman's house just to find out what she had to tell me about my family, I was determined I'd at least leave with the answers I'd come for. Even if they weren't the answers I wanted.

Carolyn brought us into her dining room, where Jarrod and I sat at a long cherry table, which, in a moment of trained politeness, I declared one of the finest tables I'd ever seen. And as Great-Aunt Carolyn poured us glasses of iced tea from a crystal pitcher, she said, “It should be. Your father made it for me.”

Which was followed by my jaw dropping a little, and the flash of a memory of going down into our basement on those snow-filled nights when my dad would be out in his truck, plowing roads, those nights when I'd wander among the things he made with his woodworking tools, as if they were relics in a museum.

“So,” said Carolyn as she sat down at the table. “I suppose the time has come for answers.”

I looked back and forth between her and Jarrod, wondering if it was really going to be this easy—in and out, just how I'd hoped, as if maybe a god of haste was on my side after all—and then I dipped my head just once to confirm her suspicion. “Yes,” I said. “Answers would be fantastic.”

“Well,” Carolyn said, “as much as I'd like to help, I'm not sure there's much I can tell you.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because of the story your mother told. I'm afraid that I'm bound to it as much as anyone she included in it. Though I must say, something has clearly damaged it enough for me to know who you were when I saw you on my porch. Ordinarily, I would never have recognized you. I would have treated you like a stranger.”

“The story,” I said, sighing, hating that word and wanting to know what she and my mother meant by it all at once. “What is this story? My mom keeps talking about it too. I'm sorry, but I just don't get it.”

“The story?” Carolyn repeated. She tilted her head to the side and smiled in this way that announced that she clearly found my lack of knowledge amusing. “Really? Your mother hasn't taught you what you need to know at all, then. Well, I can't tell you
the
story, not the one your mother told to keep you safe, but I can tell you about stories in general.”

Jarrod caught my eye from across the table and raised one eyebrow doubtfully.

“A story,” Carolyn continued, “is what your mother has woven around you. When you tell a story, you're either changing something or you're changing how people
see
something. In either case, you're bending the world and the minds of others to the will of your story, and you'd best tell it well.”

“Sounds like a spell,” Jarrod interjected.

Carolyn turned to him now, her own eyebrows rising to match his. “Some of us, young man,” she said, “do not approve of such language. Words like that have gotten people killed in the past. But that is a matter of politics, of course, and I have never been one for parties and factions. A spell? Sure. If that makes more sense to you, I suppose it's similar.”

A spell,
I thought. My mother would have scoffed at that word. But I couldn't help thinking Jarrod was right. Carolyn's description of a story sounded like a spell. And spells do what Eva Jablonski said her story had done to my family. Spells bind people.

“What did you mean by telling it well?” I asked Carolyn.

“You can make mistakes in the telling,” she said. “Like the person who finds a genie in a bottle and is granted a wish. How you phrase the wish will shape the final outcome. It works the same way for stories. Telling a story, the sort of story your mother has told, is tricky.”

“And my mother's story?” I said.

“Your mother's story,” said Carolyn. “Well, I'm afraid that it was told with earnest intentions, and holds up under most people's scrutiny, but not all. That's any storyteller's fear, really.”

“What is?”

“That they'll come across people who will see right through their stories.”

“There aren't many people like that around Temperance,” I said.

“No,” said Carolyn. “Which is probably why the story has worked so well for her. There are a few there who could see through her, though. And you're one of them.”

“And the story my mother told,” I said, “keeps me from seeing the truth.”

“And keeps the truth from seeing you,” Carolyn added, nodding. “That's the most important part.”

“Wait,” I said. “I don't understand. You're saying she's still telling this story?”

“She's trying to,” said Carolyn. “She's trying her hardest to make you the most normal family in the world, to hide you all.”

I thought of my mother sitting at the dining room table for the past two months with her silver pocket watch and her white candle, murmuring words under her breath. I thought she was trying to find my father's spirit in the next world, but maybe she'd been doing something else all along. Maybe she'd been trying to shore up her story.

“But like any complicated story you fabricate, it's gotten away from her,” said Carolyn. “There are too many things she didn't account for.” She stopped to look at Jarrod for a moment, head tilted to the side like she was studying him. Then she smiled like she understood something. “I wish I could explain it all in more detail, I really do, but it's a struggle to have even this conversation. I hope you'll be patient with me. I'm sure I must sound like a silly old woman. But if you could stay awhile—even just overnight—there may be other ways for you to find what you're looking for here, if you're open to letting others reach across to you.”

A shiver ran down my spine then, like fingers running over the keys of a piano. That phrase, the same one Jarrod had used when he'd shown me the memory back in Mill Creek. The same words my mother used to explain how she and I could sync up with the mind and heart of another person. Here it was again,
reaching across,
this phrase I'd thought only a few people knew. Hearing it come from Carolyn, a stranger despite our being related, unnerved me. I looked at Jarrod, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. So he didn't know what we should do either.

In the end I said to him, “We've come this far. I'm game if you are.” And when Jarrod nodded, I turned back to Carolyn. “All right, then. We can stay. But just for tonight. My mom probably has the police coming after me already.”

After that, Carolyn showed us to our rooms on the second floor, both decorated like the rest of the house with the flashy fineries of angelic communion. Mine had a narrow twin bed and a small bathroom decorated with celestial wallpaper. Jarrod got an identical room across the hall. Carolyn must not have been able to see that we would rather have shared a room, but I figured it wasn't worth bothering her, since one of us could always sneak across the hall after she'd gone to bed downstairs.

“Thanks,” I said after she showed me where I could find everything I might need to clean up, and then she came to stand in the frame of the bedroom doorway, hands clutched together at her waist. When she hesitated, I said, “You have a pretty house, by the way,” even though I thought the decor of angels and fairies was incredibly tacky.

“Why, thank you,” she said. “I try my best to make the place work as a bed-and-breakfast during the summer.” She finally went to leave then, but turned back once more to say, “Really, though, you needn't be so polite. I understand if all of this is a bit much.” She waved one hand around to encompass the room with its celestial figures. “Just don't let it distract you from your purpose.”

“My purpose?” I said, blinking.

“Yes, your purpose,” said Carolyn, not giving an inch. “You're being followed by many who wish you goodwill. Do not waste this opportunity.”

Then she turned and crossed the hallway. A second later, I could hear her greeting Jarrod, beginning the grand tour of his room.

Above my bed hung yet another angel painting, the frame almost as wide as the headboard. This angel was a young man with blue eyes and blond hair. He floated in midair, surrounded by wisps of pink cloud and golden light as he pointed down at something outside of the picture, so that it looked like he was pointing at whoever was sleeping in the bed below. I had to put my hand to my mouth to stifle a laugh. And a while later, after I'd heard Carolyn's footsteps going down the staircase, I texted Jarrod to come over in stealth mode.

“Look at that,” I said when he peeked around my doorframe a second later. I pointed up at the angel who pointed down at what would eventually be my pillows, all embroidered with small pink and yellow flowers, and we allowed ourselves to laugh quietly for a minute. In the end, though, I stopped laughing before Jarrod did, and slumped down on the bed.

“What's the matter?” Jarrod asked, sitting down next to me, nudging my leg with his knee.

“Before she left, Carolyn told me I was being followed by many who wish me goodwill,” I said. I tried to laugh at that, too, to make it into a joke to distract me from everything we were doing—running off on a whim to a village full of psychics in search of whatever my mother was trying to keep from me—but I was having a harder and harder time laughing as I got closer to the truth.

“What's so bad about having support over in the spirit world?” Jarrod asked, snickering a little. “Isn't it a good thing to have someone rooting for you?”

“Well, first of all,” I said, “it sounds kind of stalker-y, being followed by spirits or whatever. I'd rather not be so popular with the invisible population, to be honest. But really, I just feel like this is all going to be for nothing. That I'll find out my mother's just crazy, that she comes from a crazy family, and that I'm going to turn out to be crazy too.”

“Well, at least you won't be alone in your craziness,” Jarrod said. “I'll be crazy with you.”

I had a hard time looking at him, knowing what he'd sacrificed to come here with me, even though I'd told him not to. So I turned to look at the angel in the painting above the bed instead.

“He looks like you,” Jarrod said a second later.