So he washed his face and behind his ears, as his mother had taught him to do. He changed the shirt he’d been wearing while they traveled for the only other one he had: the one his mother had made for him. He dusted his pants off, combed his hair with his fingers. It was curly and dark, and with a little water he could get it to look like a sea of black waves.
When he looked in the mirror over the washbasin, he blinked. Beneath those dark waves, his eyes were green flecked with gold. They were his mother’s eyes. She had always said so. Other than the shirt she’d made for him, the one he’d changed into, those eyes were all he had left of her.
Later, after Lisbeth returned and praised him for making himself ready, she led him from the hotel to a yellow house a few streets away. And as they walked down the dirt road to the house, Lisbeth said, “This is where you will live now. The people here are good. If you are good to them, they will take care of you. Can you be good?”
Dobry looked up into Lisbeth’s face, which was shadowed by her babushka. He nodded like a duty-bound soldier.
There were introductions all around as Dobry met his new family. The father, Elias; the mother, May; the oldest daughter, Margaret, a girl with fiery red hair who was around Dobry’s age. And then Carolyn, a small child who waved her hand and smiled when Lisbeth introduced Dobry. The first thing this spritely creature said to Dobry, before anyone else had a chance to greet him, was “You’re going to marry my sister, did you know that?”
Everyone laughed at her announcement; everyone except Margaret, the little girl’s older sister, who blushed and turned her cheek into her lace-covered shoulder. Little Carolyn continued to chatter. “And one day,” she said, “we will be best friends, and I will help care for your children and your grandchildren.”
Dobry narrowed his eyes at the little girl, her blond coils and blue eyes, so like a doll he would find on the shelves of a store. She managed to make the entire room shift from cheerful to uncomfortable as she went on and on, divulging a future neither Dobry nor Margaret, apparently, had ever thought of, until the adults began to shush her.
“Carolyn,” her mother said, “it’s rude to give messages when they haven’t been asked for. Please contain yourself or go to your room.”
Carolyn bounced up and down on her heels. “I can’t contain myself,” she said. “I don’t want to.” She ran, then, up the staircase. A moment later, footsteps thudded in a straight line overhead as she ran down a hallway on the floor above. Dobry looked up, then back down at his new family, who were still smiling at him, still trying to make him feel welcome.
Later Lisbeth helped Dobry settle into his new room, where he sat on the corner of his new bed, looking at his hands in his lap, afraid to move. “You will be fine,” Lisbeth said. “You will learn who you are here. They will teach you since your mother is now unable. Do you understand my words?”
Dobry nodded, even though he didn’t understand. I could see that in his eyes: two deep, frightened wells of insecurity. Lisbeth tried to smile fondly at him, and finally allowed her hand to rest on his head, to stroke his fine dark curls. She didn’t say goodbye, but the next morning, when Dobry came down for breakfast, she was gone, and no one mentioned her except to say that Lisbeth would be back soon to visit.
A sunburst filled my eyes then, sending out shards of light, shattering the vision, leaving me momentarily in a great, empty white space. Then the vision began to reshape itself, to become a different time.
—
Dobry was now a few years older, sixteen or seventeen, with a dusting of hair on his chest and the face of a young man. He was staring into the mirror over his dresser, whispering at his own image. “Who are you? Who are you?” But the answer he received was always the same.
Silence.
In the silence, his worries and regrets were nourished. I watched as they grew in his mind like weeds overtaking a garden. He was always getting caught in them, entangled, as in dreams. Getting caught in his worries and regrets always began with this question he posed in the mirror, then the hated silence. And in the silence, all of the memories that composed him would begin to shimmer and coalesce.
The baskets of apples he used to hide at the edge of the orchard, where he’d retrieve them on his walk home from work.
Mrs. Lockwood holding her little boy’s hand, asking after Dobry’s mother.
Lockwood himself, that murderer. In Dobry’s memory, the man holds a thick hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the sun as Dobry’s mother reaches out her hand, stretching to grasp the last apple from the orchard. She twists the stem and it drops into her open palm.
There were other memories Dobry had made since then—with his new family, who were kind and good to him, as Lisbeth said they would be—but the memories that anchored him, the memories that became his idea of himself, were the ones that had occurred down in the orchard, on the spot of land people in Temperance had started to call Sorrow Acre since his mother’s passing.
He had said words that day, had hurled a curse at Lockwood without realizing it. The words had burst through his throat and found their way into the world, changing reality even as they entered it. At the time, Dobry hadn’t realized what he was doing. How could he have understood the power he’d drawn on when his mother hadn’t taught him that lesson?
And would his mother have known how to teach him anyway? Was it something she was even able to do? His new parents, the Foresters, had roots in spiritualism—that was how they explained the source of Dobry’s abilities, both to themselves and to Dobry—but even Mr. Forester once told Dobry, “You are capable of more than I can understand. To be honest, I am quite in awe of you.”
Lily Dale was full of people with minor talents. The occasional spirit would whisper into their ears or lift the veil from their eyes to let them gaze at the world beyond for an instant. Dobry, though, was known for manifesting miracles. When he held a finger out, birds came to perch there. When he closed his eyes to reach across to someone, he could see what ailed a person, in mind or in body, and if he drew his fingertips over a person’s skin, his fingers would twitch as they passed over the illness. And if he held his fingers over the illness for long enough, the tips would begin to jump, as if he were playing a piano, until sour-smelling beads of black sweat rose to the surface of the person’s body, collecting on Dobry’s fingers, eventually sagging from his hands like strings of dark sap. He’d take the sickness outside and throw it into the air then, where it would turn to ash and float away on the wind.
He could go into another place, too. Another space, really. The back side of here and now, was how he thought of it. The place where everyone in this world was sleepwalking. Everyone, that is, but him. He could do things there, could suggest things, could change things. When people awoke from their dreams in the morning, they tended to see things his way.
“Who am I?” he asked himself in the mirror.
The boy who had watched his mother die for him, that boy was gone.
He was sixteen, then eighteen, then twenty, married to his adopted sister Margaret, slipping a ring on her finger, kissing her in the center of the woods near Inspiration Stump, its energies thrumming around them, her coils of red hair lifting in the wind like flames. “A piece of good luck,” Margaret’s mother had told them. “Marry near the stump if you want your marriage to be a blessed one.”
He and Margaret had lived in close proximity for years already, and had slipped into loving one another with a certainty that eluded most young people, because they had been friends for so long. Only one thing seemed to escape them: Margaret couldn’t carry a child. Each attempt ended in disappointment. So they lived alone, their hands intertwined before they fell asleep each night, thinking they would die this way, just the two of them, with no one to go on after them, with no one to carry their stories into the future.
One night, though, Dobry remembered the way the words felt in his mouth when he was twelve years old and so angry that reality began to waver as his wor
ds reshaped it. By now the curse he’d made that long-ago day had killed his enemy, he was sure. Although Dobry didn’t know where or how it had happened, he knew that Lockwood was dead. He’d felt the string that attached them, that braided coil of sorrow and rage made on the day he’d cursed the man, snap when Lockwood drowned in his own reflection during the war in Europe. Lockwood’s son would be next, according to the law Dobry had brought into being that day. And so on, and so on, and so on, the next and the next and the next, until they were all gone. The Lockwood family erased from existence. He could do that again, he thought now; he could bend the world to his will if he wanted the thing badly enough. But this time his wish would be made from the materials of disappointment instead of vengeance.
He whispered words that night: “A child will come to us. A child will come through.” And he doled the wish out little by little, encouraging it, nurturing it, giving it more and more power as he repeated it like a ritual every night thereafter, until eight and a half months had passed and Margaret was holding her hands over her ever-growing stomach, shouting with glee because her water had broken. The child was coming. The child Dobry had wished for every night for months and months was finally coming through to them.
“Right now, Dobry!” she called from their bedroom, and Dobry rushed up the stairs to help her. At the top of the landing, though, he stopped, shocked, when he saw the blood staining her nightdress, the blood streaming down her legs. The way it kept coming.
When the baby finally made its way into this world, Dobry set it aside and began to run his fingers across his wife’s body, looking for the place inside her that bled so badly. But even as his fingers twitched upon locating the problem, Margaret’s chest heaved violently, and then her body stopped moving altogether.
Her heart had seized up. The beat had gone out of her. It flew from the room faster than Dobry could move to catch it. And even as the heartbeat disappeared like smoke on the wind, the child Dobry had wished into the world opened her mouth to send up a fierce howl.
Too fast to catch, Carolyn had told me. One thing a healer can’t mend: a heartbeat that’s flown away from a person.
The child, though, lived and grew. Her red infant face widened into the shape of a heart, like her mother’s, and her hair grew in auburn. She was toddling, falling over, crying, picking up toys after she’d been scolded—a doll her aunt Carolyn gave her for her birthday, a book of stories about fairies who live under the floorboards of children’s rooms—then she was striding across a field of clover, arms pumping as she found her pace, a smile blooming on her face. Now she sat at a school desk practicing her cursive, which was the best, the most finely modeled hand in class, her teacher told her. “Very good, Sophia,” her teacher said, and the girl looked up, beaming with pride. “My aunt Carolyn practices with me at home,” she said. “That’s why.”
Aunt Carolyn. There she was, bringing the girl, Sophia, my mother, a cup of warm milk in bed. “It’ll help you sleep,” she told my mother. “Don’t worry. Your father will be back before you know it.”
“Where did he go?” Sophia asked. She was ten, her face still round with childhood, her hair just a little darker.
“He’s gone back to the place where his own parents once lived.”
“Where is that?” Sophia asked. She sipped the warm milk, scissoring her legs back and forth under the covers.
“Temperance,” Carolyn said, running her hand across the coverlet, smoothing it down again.
“Where’s Temperance?”
“In Ohio,” Carolyn answered.
“What’s he doing there?” Sophia asked. Her words had started to come slowly with the onset of drowsiness.
“He’s reclaiming your past,” Carolyn told her. “He’s making you a home there.”
“I don’t want to live in Ohio,” Sophia murmured. “I want to stay here with you.” She blinked, trying to stay asleep, but eventually her eyes closed and her protests ended.
“It’s not so different there,” Carolyn replied. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll still spend your summers here with me, my love.”
“I love you, Aunt Carolyn,” Sophia murmured. The words barely escaped her lips before she drifted off to sleep.
Carolyn tucked the comforter under my mother’s chin, then went to the doorway, where she rested her hand on the light switch for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the sleeping child once more. Then, for just a moment, she turned toward the corner of the room where I stood in the shadows, invisible to them, I believed, like Scrooge being taken into his past, present, and future, watching in silence as everything transpired.
“Love you too,” Carolyn said, her eyes meeting mine for longer than a moment, it seemed, before she turned out the lights.
When I opened my eyes, the fire that had consumed me was gone, but the wind still streamed through the trees, shifting the leaves against one another, whispering.
“What did you see?” a voice called out, and I blinked, disoriented. The day had passed from late morning to early evening already, and somehow I’d stood there, dreaming, for hours.
Carolyn stood from her bench in the grove, and I started to remember myself again, to remember where we were, to remember what Carolyn had brought me here for.
“He was my grandfather,” I said. “My mother’s father. Wasn’t he? The boy who cursed us?”
Carolyn’s long white hair had fallen out of its knot and now flowed over her shoulders like spilled milk. She nodded, frowning a little, sad to admit it. “He told me that eventually someone would see the truth and understand him,” she said. “He didn’t mean for it all to happen as it has.”
“My mother?”
Carolyn shook her head. “How could your mother understand him? They did nothing but argue. She couldn’t forgive her father for that. Not when she loved your father more than anything.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Keep looking,” Carolyn said, nodding at the stump beneath my feet. “Keep seeing. She has told you things without telling you what they mean. She has hidden things from you in plain sight.”
So there, on that old stump in the woods, I closed my eyes once more, to see the pieces of my family’s puzzle, the pieces my mother had hidden from me.
When the vision took me this time, I found myself floating over a bed in a room that reminded me of the one I’d slept in the night before at Carolyn’s house. Angels flew across the wallpaper. Fairy statues stood guard on bedside stands and windowsills. It was, in fact, Carolyn’s house, but the person in the bed was my mother, who was stretched out on the comforter, staring up at the painting of the angel who pointed down. She was maybe twenty years old. Her hair spread across the pillow in long auburn curls like licks of flame rolling off her. She wore a summer dress, grass green, decorated with a bright print of sunflowers. One arm lay across her forehead, the other on her stomach, and her skin shone with sweat as she thought about the boy she’d left behind in Temperance. The boy she loved.
I could see everything inside her—her thoughts, her memories, her feelings—bubbling and stirring. The boy who took up all of her thoughts and feelings, that boy was my father, John Lockwood, a handsome young man who, in her memory, seemed carved out of stone: face chiseled, arms thick and ropy with muscle. The salt of the earth, she’d always called him. He was far away from her at the moment, back in Temperance, where she’d left him, and she wasn’t sure what to do about him. She wasn’t sure what to do about anything right then, really.
In the next room over, a salt-and-pepper-haired man sat at a desk writing in a leather-bound journal. His hand scrolled across the page, leaving wispy black ink in the wake of his pen. He wore a short beard, neatly trimmed, black with one stripe of gray down the center. Green eyes like his mother’s. Green eyes like my mother’s. Green eyes like mine.
Suddenly he set his pen down on the page and scraped his chair back to stand. Leaving the journal open on the desk, the pen collecting ink in a tiny b
ubble at its tip, he buttoned the top of his shirt as if he were going to a formal occasion, then left the room to cross the hallway, where he briefly hesitated before knocking on my mother’s door.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Who is it?” she asked softly.
“It’s me,” he said. “Will you please open the door, Sophia?”
My mom got up but only opened the door a sliver, enough to see a fraction of his face. “Daddy,” she said, “we’ve been through all this already. There’s nothing left to say.” She didn’t look up into his eyes. Instead she focused on a number of other items: the white button he had just slipped through its hole at the top of his shirt, the black hairs on the backs of his hands, the light-switch panel beside the doorframe. She flicked it on, then off, then on again, like a restless spirit.
“There must be more to say,” her father said. “I don’t like it when there’s bad blood between us. You know that. Your mother wouldn’t have liked it either.”
So, I thought after hearing that, my mom learned how to guilt me from a professional.
“Momma’s dead, Daddy,” my mother said.
“That doesn’t matter. She wouldn’t have liked it all the same.”
“I don’t like it either,” my mother replied. But she still didn’t look up at her father. She rubbed her forefinger and thumb together at her side, a gesture I’d seen her make all my life whenever she was anxious.
“Do you understand why I can’t approve of this?” her father asked through the sliver of space she’d opened for him.
She nodded once, but she still wouldn’t look at him.
“I don’t think you do,” he said. “I’ve told you the story, but you don’t understand it.”
“I understand,” my mother said, her voice flat and heavy. “I saw what you did to his family.”
He nodded and said, “Yes, but I’m not sure you understand why.”