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.”
The floorboards creaked as she came toward the door, and I turned to go back downstairs. I only made it to the midway landing before the door opened, though, and I turned around fast, put my hand on the newel post, and pretended I was just then coming up.
“Hey,” I said as my mom closed Toby’s door behind her.
She didn’t say anything at first, just stared down at me as I came the rest of the way up. When I reached the top, she said, “You have something in your eyes,” and reached out as if she were going to pluck a speck of dust away from my eyelashes. I flinched and backed up to the edge of the staircase, as if she were about to hit me, and she dropped her hand. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”
“My eyes are fine,” I said. “I’m just tired.”
“You shouldn’t be going out all the time,” she said. “Your father would be upset if he knew how often you’re not at home now. He’d be upset if he knew how much time you spend with Jarrod.”
I flinched again, this time at what she was implying. She knew Jarrod and I were doing more than playing video games and studying for tests. She knew everything, unfortunately. And she knew that my dad would have been ashamed of me if he’d known. Guilt was her weapon of choice tonight, but I refused to let her work that kind of magic on me.
“I still get my homework and chores done,” I said in my defense. I wasn’t going to let her use my dead father to guilt me from beyond the veil. No way should she get to say what he’d think or feel about anything, I figured. Especially since she hadn’t been able to find his spirit over the past few weeks of her constant scrying.
She shook her head and said, “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” I demanded.
“The point,” my mother said, then stopped midsentence to stare at me, her eyes frozen somewhere between anger and confusion. “The point,” she repeated, still unable to complete her answer.
She turned quickly then and retreated to her room, clicking the door shut behind her, as if she’d realized she would have only shamed herself if she’d finished that sentence.
“Yeah,” I whispered, alone in the hallway again. “I kind of figured.”
At school, since my dad died, people had started to treat me a little differently. They’d started to see me. To nod in the hallways, to say hello, to ask how I was doing. After all the years I’d spent being invisible, I didn’t know what to make of the attention. Why had they all changed so suddenly? Was it because my dad had died in a hunting accident? In a town like Temperance, where more than half of the junior and senior classes were absent on the first day of deer season, there would be sympathy for something like that. People would think, That could have been me or my dad. They would see me now because when they looked at me, they’d see themselves.
Or was it because I was always hanging out with Jarrod Doyle? Jarrod had joined the baseball team and was off-the-charts better than the other players. And because of that, he’d started to scale the ladder of popularity without much effort. Had I been lifted up into the range of everyone else’s vision because he’d taken an interest in me?
Maybe it was both of those things. Sympathy for a guy whose father died while hunting, respect for a guy who a popular, seemingly normal person like Jarrod had taken under his wing.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. I nodded back, returned their hellos, smiled at their smiles, said I was fine, thank you. I did and said Normal Things. But it was too late to truly become friends with people I’d hardly spent any time with in the last few years. I mean real time. Not just forced to occupy the same space for several hours at school five days a week. You were liked, Jarrod had said when I’d asked if I used to have friends, back before my mom did something to mess up my head. Any one of these people might have once been a friend, and I just couldn’t remember. And neither, it seemed, could they, thanks to my mother. On top of that, each time I tried to search inside myself for the memories she’d hidden from me, a flash of white pain would burn through my brain like a bolt of lightning.
Like the bolt of lightning that burned through the trunk of the Living Death Tree, hollowing it out from top to bottom.
I didn’t let this depress me. There were only a few months of classes left, and I didn’t want to play the role of the nobody who suddenly becomes everyone’s friend right before graduation. Those kinds of endings to books and movies always seemed dishonest. As if the point of life was to be liked and accepted. I didn’t need to be liked or accepted. I needed to know and to accept myself. And when I dug down through the muck of my mixed-up memories and feelings, the only person I could say I wanted to be around right then was Jarrod. Everyone else? They were paper people. They were the background to my life. Jarrod was the fo
reground.
At lunch, I told Jarrod what I’d overheard in my brother’s room when I got home the night before. I told him how my mom had been acting and about the strange things she’d been saying to me and now to Toby.
“I’m sorry, Aidan,” he said, shaking his head across the table. “But it sounds like she’s completely lost it. You might have to get together with your brother and see if you can get her to a doctor. Like, you know, a psychiatrist or something.”
“I don’t know.” I looked around the cafeteria as if I might find an answer on the faces of the other students. “I think she’s making some kind of sense,” I said, turning back to Jarrod, “but I don’t have enough information to understand. It’s like she’s having a conversation with people who should already know what she’s talking about. But Toby and I don’t have a clue. She told Toby how she should have never told that story, just like she told you that you weren’t a part of the story. Remember?”
Jarrod nodded. “When she said that, I just figured she thought I was intruding on you all when she needed some privacy. I thought it was understandable, considering what had just happened with your dad.”
“What story is she talking about, though?” I asked, more of myself than of Jarrod.
He leaned back in his molded plastic chair, folded his thick arms across his chest, and raised one eyebrow at me skeptically. “You know, Aidan,” he said, “if you want to find out, you’re going to have to do something you ordinarily wouldn’t.”
“Like what?”
“You’re going to have to go snooping,” said Jarrod.
“Snooping?” I said. “But where?”