Writers of the Future Volume 31

  As I lugged myself over to the kitchen, Megan fell into step beside me, smiling secretly. “They’re doing this for you, you know. We had a house meeting, and this is what they decided. Say yes.”

  My lips curved into something resembling a smile. “I think I missed my sister’s funeral,” I said. Megan stopped walking, and I turned to face her. “Yes, I’d love to visit the Lady of Wisteria.”

  After eating, I tried calling Aunt Patricia, but all I got was her voice mail. The recorded message beeped, and for a long moment I just stared at the receiver. Is my sister in the ground? I wondered. Did you honor Kevin at the same funeral?

  I slowly brought the receiver to my mouth. “It’s me,” I said softly. “Uh, Jason. Call me when you get a chance. How was …” I grimaced. “Just call me.” I gave the number to Kessington House and hung up.

  Come the following morning, Aunt Patricia still hadn’t returned my call and the townhouse was all ready to visit the Lady of Wisteria.

  We had a tough time even getting out the door, though. The twins took turns quacking, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah,” until she finally looked up from the couch and realized that we were leaving. Then on our way out, Nate disappeared. He sat down—cargo pants and a green windbreaker—and cried: He hadn’t gone invisible in a while, he didn’t know why it happened, he didn’t mean for it to happen, and he was sorry for Eric if they had to cancel their trip because of him. But Megan pulled the cleverest trick I’d seen yet. She said, “Oh look, see, you’re already back,” and Nate sniffed and said, “Oh, really?” He got up, and by the time he reached the door, he really was visible.

  I sat next to Sarah on the train. She stared out the window and sighed tragically every once in a while. I asked, “So what’s the deal with Eric?” and was mildly surprised when her blue eyes actually turned toward me.

  “He gets scared,” she answered.

  I glanced up the aisle at him. “Quite the reaction,” I commented.

  “He was a war baby. Things exploded all around him, so now he explodes when startled.” That image seemed to give her some morbid satisfaction.

  “And Megan?” I asked. You never knew. I don’t know why I suddenly had this fascination with all of our disorders. “Anything there? Maybe overcame something?”

  “She gets a few pounds heavier when she’s sad, lighter when she’s happy. That’s all she’s mentioned.”

  Like I used to be, I mused. Common enough, not really considered a disorder. “And what about you?” I asked. “Are you just depressed? Do you have the ‘wisteria melancholy’?”

  She shrugged. “I’m content.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’re content, so you wear black? And shut people off?”

  “I’m content because I shut people off. And I like black.” She sounded a trifle annoyed. “It’s for me. I don’t care what other people think.”

  “So what, you’re in live-in counseling so you don’t have to do anything, or deal with other people?”

  I was about to say more when I realized that she was looking through me rather than at me, and then she turned her head and gazed out the window again. I apologized, knowing that she couldn’t hear me. This time when she sighed, I didn’t think of it as tragic. More like the wistful poet contemplating the world’s pathos.

  The station where we all filed out was dingy and faded. The ticket booth’s peeling green paint revealed dirty red paint underneath: an echo of an echo of better days. The bright sun rudely exposed weathered planks and a rust-stained railing. Only the tracks looked polished and new, from the trains that passed through.

  “Are we sure about this place?” asked Sarah.

  Megan grimaced. “Map Man, this was the station, right?”

  Dave pulled the map out of his pocket and crinkled it open. “Yeah, look,” he said. “Churchbrook. See? We circled it in red.”

  “Okay, come on,” said Megan. “Stay close. Put away that map, we don’t want to look like tourists.”

  “But—”

  “I know, but we don’t want to look like them. I remember the turns we marked, don’t worry.”

  The streets were wide yet suffocating. The buildings’ second levels jutted out, blocking the sun and muffling our footsteps as we shuffled down the center in our tight cluster. Eric followed with doe eyes. Dave developed a twitch in his neck that had him looking over his shoulder every six seconds. But at least the streets were well labeled. We made the first turn and had already reached the next one when we realized that we had lost Sarah. We had to jog back and then I directed her by the shoulders. I’m not sure if she felt my hands, or if her mental block encompassed even human contact, but she turned then as if she had always intended to go that direction.

  Then we emerged. Broken pavement gave way to cobblestone. Wooden buildings became stone foundations with cement tops. A metal gate stood before us, delicately arched on top with stylized lettering: “Wisteria Garden.”

  “Wow,” said the twins. Eric was grinning, his dark eyes reflecting the purple of the garden.

  The gate glided smoothly on its hinges. No guards stopped us or asked for tickets. We entered with our heads tilted up—and coughed simultaneously. The heady, overwhelming scent of wisteria lodged in my throat. Enough sweetness to suck the saliva out of my mouth and leave my tongue caked with sugar.

  “Strangled by wisteria,” recited Sarah reverently. Wisteria was a vine, I realized then, not a tree: the vine strangled the tree. Sometimes to death, it seemed. I noticed one tree, a delicate maple, had collapsed, but still the wisteria constricted around it. Here and there a spray of green leaves escaped the wisteria’s embrace, grasping for the sun.

  “My heart, too, blossoms,” continued Sarah. “Heavy purple flowers.” The delicate flowers hung like bunches of ripe grapes. Along one sturdy bough they dangled over our heads like a living chandelier.

  “Melting to mist.” Gushing fountains of purple, bleeding pink into the air. We stood in a suspended cloud of perfume.

  “I am gripped by a wisteria melancholy.”

  It felt like walking through a dream. Someone two steps away became a silhouette, veiled in mist.

  “Nate!” called Dave, an edge of panic to his voice. “Where did Nate go?”

  We all looked around.

  “Dave!” came the answering call a moment later. I watched the two of them reunite after mere moments away. What happened to make them this way? Was it a tragedy? We were all subtly or profoundly broken.

  Everyone else peeled off one by one. I was alone, and it felt incredibly peaceful. I wandered, brushing my fingers against the trunk-like vines, tapping the occasional bunch of flowers and watching them sigh pink clouds. Jessica would have hated this, I thought fondly. She hated anything girly: dresses, the color pink, and especially flowers. They had probably surrounded her in flowers at her funeral. I wondered if Aunt Patricia might have called since this morning.

  “Welcome,” breathed a voice in my ear. “Are you enjoying my garden?”

  I looked left and right, but saw nothing except the mist that I’d disturbed. Airy laughter floated down to me like popping bubbles.

  “Oh, I’ve seen better reactions than that,” sighed the voice. It was decidedly female, but breathy, making her age difficult to place. I heard it in one ear and then the other, as though its source were flitting around my head. “You must have been expecting me. Were you?”

  “The Lady of Wisteria,” I said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Neither of us said anything for several moments. I just inhaled the fragrant mist, then exhaled it through my nose, conscious that a portion of that mist was probably the Lady herself.

  “Wait, don’t go,” I said, suddenly afraid that the Lady might drift off to the next visitor of her garden.

  “I was thinking of it,” she admitted, sounding a bit farther away. “Okay. Amuse me.”


  “I expected something …”

  “Different?” she finished.

  “Sadder,” I qualified.

  That made her laugh again. “Who could be sad in a garden like this? Especially when it’s in full bloom, my goodness.”

  “I thought … I heard that the wisteria melts because it’s sad.”

  “Wisteria isn’t sad. It’s happy, light. Free. Like me.”

  I tilted my head up, the direction I’d last heard the Lady. “But how can you be a caligino if you’re happy? You’re psychomorphic, very much so. Happy people don’t develop psychological disorders.”

  That indescribable laughter again, like air blown over the rim of a glass: unexpected resonance. “Don’t they? I don’t like that word, disorder. To me it’s more like …” I felt the mist sigh around me. “A different sort of order.”

  She sounded like Sarah.

  “If you fight it, though,” whispered the lady, “then you’ll certainly be unhappy.”

  “That …” I clamped my mouth shut, afraid to finish the sentence. It makes sense, I wanted to say. It wasn’t the world as I knew it, but it made a perverse sort of sense. I was unhappy because I struggled. I struggled because I tried to force the world to fit my personal view of it. My parents should have been more understanding. My sister should have remained innocent. But something about the wisteria, the lady, the day, made me want to let it all go. I felt disconnected again, but more so—I felt light.

  “Oh, my,” trilled the lady. “You’re floating.”

  I looked down at my feet. The ground was indeed drifting away, like falling, but in reverse. I felt like a mote of dust caught on an updraft.

  “Now I’m glad I didn’t leave,” commented the lady. “You’ve become interesting after all.”

  “I’m euphoric,” I explained. I realized that I had never truly been happy since Jessica had pushed me off the cliff. I had become miserable enough to curl up on the ground like a fetus made of lead, but all that time the potential had been there to let the world be the ugly place it wanted to be and just float.

  “My garden always makes people happy.”

  I spread my arms out, drifting like a dandelion seed, gently pushing myself off the vine-covered trees. That was when I heard from below, “Uncle Jason!”

  I looked sharply down. Uncle Jason? I instantly thought of my nephew Kevin.

  Which of course made me think of Jessica. Jessica’s empty hazel eyes, looking down on me from my dreams; Jessica’s corpse, floating in the river on her back, staring up with the same glazed expression. And poor Kevin, who’d never even had a chance. It all hit me anew. Reality. I could turn my back for a moment, but then it came crashing back.

  I plummeted out of the sky. It wasn’t far. One moment I was floating, the next lying face up on the ground, staring at eddies of pink mist churned up from my descent.

  “Uncle Jason.”

  I felt small, invisible arms wrap around my leg. A boy cried into my knee. I was so surprised I forgot to be lead. “Ghost?” I asked. And then, more cautiously, “Kevin?”

  The boy sniffed an affirmation. Impossible. My nephew, Kevin. I hadn’t truly believed he was alive. But that habit of invisibility … he was Jessica’s kid, after all.

  And then another thought: Where had Jessica been all this time? Close enough to watch me? To point me out to Kevin? Did they even follow me to Kessington House? What did she tell him about me, that he came to me once he realized that his mother was never coming home? He knew I was “Uncle Jason.”

  “Kevin,” I said, sitting up. I realized that I could see him—I could see a little boy-shape where he displaced mist. I leaned forward and pulled him into a proper hug. “Why did it take me floating like an idiot for you to speak up?”

  Kevin didn’t stop crying, so I didn’t stop hugging. Not until faces emerged from the mist. Megan and Eric, followed by Sarah and the twins. Everyone talked at once.

  “It was you,” said Megan.

  “I heard a crash!” said Nate.

  “Look at that dent he made in the ground!” said Dave.

  “Guys,” I said, quieting them. One by one they seemed to notice the form in my arms. “Meet Ghost,” I said. “A.k.a. my nephew, Kevin.”

  The Nave boys gibbered. “He came all the way on the train and stuff?”

  “Apparently,” I said. Now that Kevin had latched onto me, he didn’t want to let go. I lifted both him and myself off the ground.

  “Are you okay?” asked Sarah, the last person I would have expected to show concern.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve fallen much farther than that. Think we could head on home?”

  Megan nodded eagerly, then looked around. “Um … if we can find home.”

  Good point. I had an idea, though. “Are you still here?” I called.

  Everyone looked at me quizzically until an ephemeral voice answered, “Mm-hmm.”

  “Would you mind humming or something? Lead the way for us?”

  There was a brief pause before she answered, “For you, I suppose.”

  Apparently the lady hadn’t visited the rest of them, because the expression on Eric’s face was priceless.

  Even on the walk back to the train, I felt shrouded in mist. The jutting buildings cast shadows over our group, adding to the cloistered feeling. I wanted to celebrate the discovery of my nephew, but felt oddly subdued.

  Dave thrilled: “I still can’t believe he was in the house that whole time and we couldn’t find him. It was—” he started to count on his fingers.

  “Nine days,” filled in Nate.

  “And on the train! I bet he locked himself in the bathroom. That’s what I would have done. Does he even talk?”

  “He’ll talk when he’s ready.” I said, glancing down toward the invisible boy holding my hand. “He’s only said my name twice so far.” And that was when I was floating away. After trailing me so tenaciously, I’d finally gone somewhere he couldn’t follow. He had no choice but to talk.

  “How old is he?” asked Megan.

  I did some quick mental arithmetic. “Five,” I answered.

  “That’s incredible that—”

  “Good afternoon, folks,” said a man behind us. “Come from visiting the garden? Nothing to be afraid of, this is going to be quick and painless.”

  I began to turn, but several things happened at once.

  Suddenly the mist was back, but deep blue this time, and I realized that Eric had exploded, as he had the very first time he saw me. The twins turned invisible and their empty clothes clung to each other. Sarah yelled over the commotion, “Hey, guys! What happened? Guys!”

  By then I had turned full around, and I saw a man holding a pistol. He wore a bright yellow raincoat, which would have been disarming if it didn’t strain over an intimidating bulk. His bald head was smeared with mud. He whipped his gun around, fanning the blue smoke out of his face.

  “Freaks,” he cursed.

  Megan was trying to pull Sarah away from the danger, but for some reason Sarah struggled against her, blind to everything that was happening. “Why’d Kevin explode? Guys?”

  The first thing I did was push my nephew away. I probably used more force than was necessary, but I didn’t have time to think. Submerged in mist again, it felt oddly like a dream. I stepped forward, trancelike, in front of the man.

  He panicked. Two shots echoed against the buildings.

  Then all was quiet. The man’s eyes grew slowly wide. He jammed his pistol into his pocket, keeping his eyes on me. He backed away a few steps, shook himself, and turned and ran.

  I looked down; stuck my finger through a hole in my jacket. He’d shot me. He’d shot me, but … I felt fine.

  Still looking down, I noticed the ground drift away between my feet. Floating again—

  Invisible hands gripped my ankle
.

  I smiled. “I’m sorry, Kevin. I’ll try to keep my feet on the ground from now on, okay?” And for the first time, I wanted my body to do something and it did it. One heel and then the other touched the pavement.

  “Jason,” called Megan. “Are you okay? You’re okay, right? Oh good.” I wasn’t sure myself. I pulled up my shirt to get a better look. There were marks, but …

  “Pinpricks,” I answered. Slowly, slowly, my appropriate weight settled back into me. “I guess,” I reasoned, “if I’m light enough to float, then there’s not much substance for a bullet to pierce.”

  My head was still in the clouds. Thinking would come later, I decided. I was vaguely aware that my brief step away from reality had likely just saved my life.

  But then there was my future, invisible and clinging to my pant leg.

  I had returned to Kessington House that afternoon to find a message from Aunt Patricia. They hadn’t held the funeral yet. They’d been trying to find Kevin first. I called her right back to share the good news.

  “Have you met Kevin?” I asked Aunt Patricia at the funeral home. I nodded toward my hand, which looked like it was gripping air.

  “Oh.” Her voice raised an octave, but then she knelt with impressive composure. “Nice to meet you, Kevin,” she said to the air beneath my hand. “I’m your Great Aunt Patricia. I’m so glad you found your Uncle Jason to take care of you.”

  I still couldn’t believe that. When Kevin was ready to talk, I’d ask him about what he went through, and how exactly he found me.

  “You are going to look into … treatment?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” I assured her. “I know a very good place.”

  The ceremony was open casket, so after I had mingled and made introductions, I hoisted Kevin onto my shoulder so that he could say goodbye to his mom. It was a tough call to make, letting him see her like this, but there was only this one chance. And besides, I needed it as well.

  They had dressed Jessica up in a nice, respectful dress, combed her cherry-brown hair, washed her up; it was hard to imagine that body floating down a river. What caught my breath, though, was her expression. She’d looked dead in my dreams, but in actual death, she seemed quite peaceful.