On the front porch I hesitated, holding the door open behind me, worried that I might be going crazy. Above, the sky was indigo and full of clouds backlit by the moon, so that they looked like shadowy creatures floating by. It was either way too late for me to be doing this, or else it was way too early. I couldn’t tell which, because I had yet to look at a clock.
Go back, I told myself. Go back to bed, you idiot.
But even as I convinced myself, the voice called out again—Aidan. Aidan Lockwood, she said—and I turned toward the sound, like metal to a magnet, felt myself being pulled in its direction, as if I no longer controlled my own legs.
The orchard. The old orchard on the other side of Sugar Creek, the creek that cut across the middle of our property. That was where it was coming from. The voice drifted out of the hole in the Living Death Tree like a fog, spread over the entire farm, covering every blade of grass, covering every leaf that dangled on the verge of falling, covering it all with my name.
Aidan Lockwood, the farm itself seemed to call out to me.
I moved through the cold, dewy grass until I reached the railroad-tie bridge that spanned Sugar Creek. It was an ancient crossing my great-grandfather Lockwood had made, according to my dad, back during the Great Depression, when the farm came into his possession. And when I crossed over those old logs a moment later and stood in front of the Living Death Tree, looking up into its canopy of leafless, gnarled branches, the voice finally, thankfully, fell to a whisper.
Aidan, the voice said. Aidan Lockwood. You are a good boy, aren’t you?
“I don’t know,” I said. Then I asked, “What—what are you?”
The voice didn’t say anything right away.
Then it began to croon what sounded like a lullaby in a foreign language. A mournful song from some other time and some other country drifted out of the hole in the Living Death Tree. I stood there, listening, and felt tears spring to my eyes, as if I could understand those words, as if I could comprehend the sadness in their mysterious meanings.
After a while, the singing stopped, and the next thing the voice said was Close your eyes, young one. I have something to show you.
But even as I closed my eyes like the good boy she’d called me, another voice sounded suddenly, out of thin air. This new voice, though, came from behind me.
“Aidan Lockwood,” the new voice said, and I turned away from the Living Death Tree to find my mom standing on the railroad-tie bridge, Sugar Creek trickling beneath her, the red morning sunlight edging the frame of our house behind her. She had folded her arms across her chest to hold her robe together, and she wore a pair of old rubber boots that belonged to my dad, which she must have put on in a hurry when she noticed I was missing. They engulfed her legs, and I almost laughed at the sight of her. She seemed like a figure out of a dream or a nightmare.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked. Her lips formed a firm line after they closed on her question, and her eyes scanned me from top to bottom, then back again, making me look down and realize that I was wearing only the boxer shorts I’d gone to bed in. My feet and ankles were streaked with mud. And I was shivering, even though I hadn’t felt the cold until my mom called my name and turned me in her direction.
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, the voice from the Living Death Tree was inside me again, saying, Don’t. Don’t tell her.
“I don’t know,” I said, stumbling over my own words, pulling my arms around my chest to match hers. “I think…I think I may have been sleepwalking.”
Jarrod Doyle didn’t show up at school the next day, and for most of that morning I felt like maybe I’d dreamed everything that had happened to me in the past twenty-four hours. The voice from the Living Death Tree. Jarrod’s memories, which didn’t match up with mine. My mother’s silence after she’d found me under a dead apple tree in the orchard at half past five in the morning, still in my boxers with mud spattering my legs. I hoped it was all a dream, really, because if it was, then my life could go back to normal. Whatever normal was—even if it was completely boring—I’d take it and be glad to be thoroughly bored.
I was beginning to doubt everything. Myself included.
And then the next day the same thing happened. Or didn’t happen. Jarrod wasn’t there. Not in the hallways. Not waiting out in the parking lot after school. And the day after that, he wasn’t there again. So when Friday came around and I still hadn’t seen him, I decided I should probably drive over to the trailer on Cordial Run to make sure he actually existed. To prove to myself that he wasn’t some bizarre delusion.
When I pulled down the ruts of his dirt drive and killed the Blue Bomb’s engine, the silence of the back roads rushed at me, surrounding my car like a swarm of bees. Living in this part of Temperance was like living in a vast desert. You wouldn’t see another person for miles. You wouldn’t hear anything but the wind passing through the trees. At certain hours of the day a train would go by, clickety-clacking on a set of tracks hidden in the woods behind the trailer, or you’d hear a tractor grinding its engine from some farm half a mile away. Other than that, just birds and crickets chirping. My family lived only a fifteen-minute drive from this corner of the township, but even in that short distance there was a difference in the quality of the remoteness. Cars would pass by our place on their way out to Niles, for instance, with hourly regularity, reminding us that we weren’t so far away from somewhere else. Jarrod and his mom, though, inhabited this great big emptiness of fields and woods and covered bridges. There was something forlorn about it all, living so apart from other people.
I went up the three wooden planks on cinder blocks to the trailer’s front door and rapped my knuckles against it, making a trio of hollow thuds. The sound of feet hitting the living room floor like a pair of barbells came a moment later; then the front door squealed open, and Jarrod was standing a foot above me, wearing black sweatpants and a gray sleeveless T-shirt, like he was ready for the gym. His hair was all messed up, like he’d just gotten out of bed, and right before I said hello, he stretched his arms above his head and yawned like a bored lion.
“What’s up, Lockwood?” he asked after lowering his arms. Before I could answer, though, he turned around, curling the back of his hand to wave me in behind him. “Come inside. I’m not really into daylight at the moment.”
The trailer was a mess. Clothes littered the living room couch and chairs, a multitude of unwashed plastic drinking glasses sat on end stands, and an ashtray threatened to spill cigarette butts onto the water-stained coffee table. Amid all the mess, a completely chemical floral scent from some kind of recently sprayed aerosol canister clung to the air. Earlier that week both Jarrod and my mom had sworn that his mother had put herself back together, but seeing the state of things inside the trailer, I started to wonder. On the other hand, if his mom was working ten-hour split shifts over at Times Square Café, like my mom said she was, then it was Jarrod who should have been cleaning up the place, helping out, especially if he wasn’t going to come to school any longer.
“I thought I should stop over to see if you were still alive,” I said as I pushed some clothes aside to sit on the couch, its springs squeaking.
“Still alive,” Jarrod said, shrugging. He sat back in an old brown recliner, kicked up its footrest, rolled his head around to work kinks out of his neck like a fighter, then gave me a pearly-toothed grin. “What?” he said. “You miss me or something?”
I made a face and rolled my eyes at him. “Or something,” I said. Then: “I was just worried that I’d made you up the other day. Had some kind of hallucination. Did you decide to quit school or something?”
“Or something,” Jarrod said. “Did my mom get you to come over here to grill me?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen your mom in forever. But she did call mine the other day after I drove you home.”
“Figures,” said Jarrod. He rolled his eyes, not at me, but at the idea of his mother. “She worries like she??
?s trying to make up for the past five years all at once.”
“Can you blame her?”
“No,” said Jarrod. “It’s just a lot to make up for in the span of two weeks. That’s all.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. It was like those five years of absence he’d mentioned took up all the air in the room. We breathed in those missing years and exhaled them in awkward silence. Eventually I took out the picture I’d found in my photo album, the one of Jarrod and me sitting on swings as kids, and passed it over to him without comment.
Jarrod grinned as he looked at it. “You always did love Superman,” he said, shaking his head. “Where’d you find this?”
“My mom had it in a photo album.” I paused, not sure how to say what was on my mind. “I don’t…I don’t know if I can remember everything from back then very well,” I admitted.
“No kidding,” said Jarrod. He looked up from the photo with raised eyebrows. “What happened? You fall down and crack your head a few years back or what?”
“If I did,” I said, “I don’t remember doing it.”
Jarrod squinted hard, like he was trying to see through to the real me. The me I didn’t know anything about. “Really?” he said. “I mean, you don’t remember anything? Nothing at all?”
“Well, that’s not it,” I said. “I can remember things, sure. But I can barely remember you. And there are other things I can’t remember, I think, even when I try really hard. Like, most of junior high is gone.”
“Good riddance,” Jarrod said, and snorted, and I laughed with him, grateful to break the tension, hoping that whatever was wrong with me could continue to be a source of humor.
A minute later, though, I asked the question that had been on my mind since looking through that photo album the night before. “Hey,” I said. “Can you tell me something?”
“What?” Jarrod said, lifting his chin a little, looking at me from beneath his furrowed brow.
“Was I—”
I hesitated, and a flare of heat rushed across my chest, up my neck, over my face, like a wave of lava. I felt completely freakish as I tried to figure out the words I needed to ask the question that burned inside me like a live coal.
“Go ahead,” Jarrod said, nodding to encourage me, his eyes lit up with what might have been hope that I was remembering something he wanted or needed me to remember.
“Was I, you know, liked by people when we were kids? I don’t mean popular or anything like that. But, you know, liked. Because I found this other photo last night along with that one, and it was a picture of you and me and a bunch of other kids we went to school with—still go to school with, actually—at my birthday party. I don’t really remember that party, though, or having other kids around that often, and I haven’t been close to most of them for years now. You know, I keep to myself. But that picture. When I saw it, it made me think that at some point things had been different, but I can’t remember for the life of me.”
Jarrod frowned like he felt bad for me, and I thought I saw maybe even a hint of tears in his eyes, like he was attending the funeral of a good friend who had died in an accident, and was looking down at his dead body, thinking, That’s not him, the way I’d thought when I saw my grandmother in her casket, all made up with colors she’d have never chosen for herself had she been alive.
“You were liked, Aidan,” Jarrod said finally, quietly, firmly. “Everyone liked you, actually. I mean, you and I were best friends, but you weren’t what I’d call a loner back then.”
I sat there for a while, absorbing what he’d said, wondering why I wasn’t a part of things any longer. Then I looked down at my hands, which I’d folded together on my lap like I’d been praying for something, and saw they were shaking a little.
“You tell your folks about any of this memory loss?” Jarrod asked when he saw how troubled I was.
I looked up and shook my head. “No. It’s weird, but I didn’t realize any of this until I saw you on Monday. I mean, sometimes over the last few years I’d start thinking about something, but I could never hold a thought for very long. It’s like this wall will spring up inside me sometimes, and after that I can’t see clearly. Sometimes I’ll get migraines if I try to think about something too hard. And, well, I get this feeling like I shouldn’t tell my mom and dad what I’m telling you right now. Especially my mom.”
Jarrod wrinkled his nose and said, “Your mom has always been a little odd.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” he said. “Telling fortunes and stuff like that. My mom used to go to her after she got out of rehab a few years back, trying to figure out what she should do with herself after she got cleaned up.”
“Are you serious?” I said. Jarrod pulled back and looked like I’d accused him of lying, which I guess was true in that I doubted what he was saying. But I couldn’t grasp what he was telling me and recognize it as reality. “My mom doesn’t do that,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, I’ve never seen her do anything remotely like that except on occasion, like by accident. At home. With just us around. My dad and Toby and me. We used to joke that she was psychic, but she’d be the first person to tell you psychics are fakes performing for money.”
“Well,” Jarrod said, “according to my mom, she does. Maybe your mom just likes to keep it on the down low.”
“On the down low?” I repeated the words like they were a phrase from a foreign language, squinting as I shaped the syllables.
“I’ve been in Cleveland too long,” Jarrod said, snorting, “or else you don’t watch enough TV. Just keeping it under wraps, is what I’m talking about.”
“Oh,” I said, still stunned, trying to take everything in. “I don’t know why she’d do that, though,” I said. “I mean, yeah, sometimes she knows things before other people do, but it’s always random, and it’s usually something not that important. Like she gets itchy fingers and thinks it’s a sign that money is coming to her, so she goes to play bingo or something. Stupid stuff like that. Half the time she’s joking. She’s never been someone who just sits down and tells someone’s future.”
“Maybe it’s pocket money for her,” said Jarrod. “Maybe she’s ashamed of it and doesn’t want you and your dad or your brother to know about it. Anyway, you should tell your dad about not remembering things if you don’t want to tell your mom.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think telling you has been enough.”
Jarrod smiled then. A genuine smile, no teasing grin. Softly, he said, “It used to be.”
“What?” I asked, smiling back now, ready for him to deliver a line that would most likely make fun of me somehow.
“When we were kids,” he said. “It used to be enough for you to tell just me your secrets.”
I suddenly felt awkward again, like we were talking about someone else, this someone else in the past who happened to be me. I couldn’t remember the memories he referenced, though, and my face must have shown as much, because the next thing Jarrod said was “You’re freezing up on me again, Lockwood. Fine. Let’s talk about something else. What’s there to do around this godforsaken place, anyway?”
“Not much,” I said. “Most people drive out to Niles to hang at the mall.”
“Is that where all the good boys go?” Jarrod asked. He lifted his chin as he posed the question, like he was challenging me to not be one of the good boys.
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I told him. “My parents keep me busy at home. I don’t have a lot of time to run around, really.”
He laughed, repeating my words. “Run around. Sounds like something your mom and dad would call what everyone else calls having fun.” He lifted his hands off the recliner arms and dropped them down hard, like he’d just made a big decision. “Well then,” he said. “Let’s take a drive out there and find out what’s happening. God knows I could use a little running around right now.”
Forty-five minutes later, we strolled into the mall like two cowboys busting through t
he swinging doors of a saloon, looking up and around at the vaulted ceiling, at the illuminated fountains, gawking at the Niles city kids who hung out in clusters at various stations: in the sunken garden, in the arcade, on the marbled steps of the platform where the carousel turned round and round, the horses going up and down, riderless, behind them.
Stepping into the mall was always a bit like going to Disney World. I was used to Times Square Café, the Dairy Oasis, the county fair’s two midways, fields of corn and soybeans, Sugar Creek winding through town on its way down to Yankee Lake. The denizens of the mall in Niles might as well have been costumed characters putting on a play. And there were lots of different types of characters, even ones I hadn’t anticipated. Like Gilbert Humphrey.
We were in the food court, sitting in a vast archipelago of white and yellow tables, sipping supersized Cokes, when Jarrod asked, “Is that guy over there what I think he is?”
“Which guy?” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“Don’t!” Jarrod whispered. “Damn it, he’s spotted us. Here he comes.”
“Who?” I said, still not understanding.
Out of the milling crowd of teenagers and mothers pulling children in tow, saying no to all the toy stores they passed, came a local army recruiter. He seemed to materialize a few feet from our table, as if beamed down by a starship, wearing a uniform and a smile, standing tall and proud. “Hey, guys,” he said, like we were old friends, and before I could blink, he stood at the edge of our table. “Gilbert Humphrey, army recruitment. You boys look like you’re getting ready to graduate.”
I nodded. Jarrod shrugged.
“Well, that’s great,” said Gilbert Humphrey. “That’s good you boys are about to make it out into the world. Bet you’re glad school’s almost done?”
I nodded again. Jarrod shrugged again. “Sure,” we said in unison.