Wonders of the Invisible World

  So I left the young man’s body by the creek and climbed onto the stag’s wide back, clutching its thick white neck to steady myself. When the stag heaved itself up onto all four legs again, I swayed for a moment, worried that I’d fall. Then it took off in a blink, jerking me backward as it carried me away, farther and farther, deeper and deeper, into the woods around us.

  Dawn had arrived without my noticing, and the morning light glowed red and bloody above me. Within the woods, though, every branch and leaf and mushroom ring dripped with dark shadows. The white stag’s hooves were as loud as a herd of cattle. On and on it ran, through brush and trees, until we burst out of the woods and arrived in the back pasture of my family’s farm, back in Temperance, back in the twenty-first century, where Sugar Creek trickled beside us with a few ribbons of moonlight still swaying on its surface. It was night here, on this side of the world, in this time, in my own story, and the stag knelt once again to let me off.

  Your body is in there, the stag said, turning its gleaming ivory rack toward the yellow farmhouse, which looked like a dollhouse from this distance. Go to it. And be careful not to wander so far again. The world is full of stories. You can get lost if you aren’t careful. You can lose yourself if you are unaware. And there are some spirits who would like nothing more than to lure you out of your world and into another.

  “I’ve already lost myself,” I said, and turned my eyes to the ground, ashamed for some reason I wasn’t able to name. Maybe it was because I didn’t know the first thing about myself. Maybe it was because I didn’t know my own story from someone else’s. And worse, I didn’t know if I could do anything about any of this.

  The stag only pawed at the ground, its silver rack swaying slowly as it shook its huge head back and forth.

  I will give you a piece of knowledge that may ease your worries, it told me. You will find yourself again.

  Then it turned, slowly, as if it were a large ship changing direction in the middle of an ocean, and took off in a flash of light so blindingly white I had to raise a hand to shield my eyes.

  Inside the yellow farmhouse, I drifted upstairs to the room where my body waited in bed with one arm flung above its head. And beside the bed, my mother sat in the chair she’d pulled away from my desk. She was watching over me with her eyes closed, elbows propped on her knees, hands clutching a silver pocket watch that had once belonged to her father: a thing that rarely made a public appearance, since my mom kept it on the nightstand in her bedroom.

  Her lips moved over and over, just barely, as if she were saying a prayer. Or maybe she was just repeating my name out of desperation, trying to call her son back to his lifeless body. Whatever it was, it sounded like a spell. It sounded like an incantation.

  And then, as I walked the rest of the way in, she turned from the body in the bed to look at this other me standing in the doorway as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  “Now that you’re back,” she said without blinking, “I suppose we should have that talk.”

  After I slipped myself back into my flesh like a hand fitting into a glove, flexing and stretching my muscles to reawaken, I opened my eyes, blinking over and over, trying to take in my room, which wavered around me like it too might be a vision. I was still reeling from what I’d just experienced, but I sat up in bed with my back against the cool headboard, my knees pulled up to my chest, arms gathered around them, hugging myself, glad to feel something real and substantial. Beside me, my mom cocked her head to the side, curious, and asked, “What’s the first memory you have when you think of us? When you think of me and you together?”

  I thought about her question for a minute, furrowing my brow as I concentrated, and for some reason, the usual white fuzziness that surrounded my memory whenever I tried to recall something wasn’t making an appearance this time.

  “The library,” I answered a moment later.

  “You loved the library,” my mom said without skipping a beat, nodding, smiling fondly, clearly happy that I remembered this particular piece of my childhood—that I’d pick this one out when she asked me to think of a first memory—even if my memory of it was still pretty vague. “I used to take you there all the time,” she said. “Tell me what you remember about going there. In fact, why don’t you just show me?”

  She held her hand out, palm up, while the other remained on her lap clutching the timepiece. I looked at her skin, pale in the moonlight falling through the window, unsure whether I wanted to do what she was asking. She knew. She knew about what Jarrod had shown me I could do. She knew and was now acting like it was somehow ordinary.

  After a few moments passed without me moving, though, she raised her chin in what seemed like a challenging gesture and said, “All right, then. If you won’t, why don’t I show you?”

  She leaned forward in her chair then, put her pale white fingers on my bare shoulder, and reached across.

  —

  It wasn’t the library my mother showed me, though, at least not at first. Instead, she showed me a day not long after I’d turned thirteen. The day after Mr. Marsdale died.

  All through school, the news was circulating. A heart attack while he was asleep the night before. Blam, his heart shuddered and he was gone like a snuffed-out candle. I sat through all the talk—in classrooms, in the cafeteria, on the bus ride home later that afternoon—listening to the ebb and flow of conversation around me, wondering if I’d somehow made it happen.

  Because I’d seen something just the day before. Something that worried me. And because of that, I wondered if I had some kind of strange connection to Mr. Marsdale’s death. I wondered if what I’d done was something more than a prediction of it.

  A man in a black suit had come into our classroom the day before, had looked Mr. Marsdale up and down like a cattle buyer contemplating a possible purchase. But no one else had seen this. Just me. I realized that after I’d interrupted Mr. Marsdale during his lesson to say, “Mr. Marsdale, who’s that man in the black suit standing beside you?” and everyone in the room had laughed at me behind their hands. I got a stern warning not to be disruptive. Then, later that night, Mr. Marsdale’s heart stopped beating.

  Somehow I felt like I’d done it, had made it happen. Would he have died if I hadn’t seen the man in the black suit come to stand beside him? That awful man with stringy red hair and a beard that animals might have built nests in. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat with the smell of charcoal wafting off it, smoky and dark. Would Mr. Marsdale have died if I hadn’t said anything about it? If I hadn’t said out loud in class that I saw the man in the black suit standing right beside him?

  My guts twisted throughout the school day, and when I got off the bus that afternoon, I ran into the house to complain to my mother. I told her that I couldn’t go back there; I told her I felt sick and didn’t belong there with everyone.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, her hands gripping my shoulders to steady me, her eyes pinched, shaking her head in confusion. “Aidan, where is all this coming from?”

  So I told her what I’d seen during history, how the man in the black suit had come into our classroom like anyone who worked at the school might have. Like he belonged there. I told her how he’d looked Mr. Marsdale up and down as if looking at a cow going to auction, as if he were evaluating the distribution of fat and muscle in Mr. Marsdale’s body. Would he be a good buy? I told her how I’d tried to call Mr. Marsdale’s attention to the man in the black suit, and how no one else but me could see him, and how the man in the black suit had looked straight at me and tipped his hat in my direction before exiting the room, leaving me shaking at my desk, nearly breathless.

  When I finished, I looked up, choking on my tears a little, to find my mother staring out the window over the kitchen sink, entranced by something in the distance, across the creek, over in the orchard. She didn’t say anything right away, but finally she turned back to me and said, “He must not have told his story true, then.”

  “What do you me
an?” I asked, blinking away my last tears.

  “Mr. Marsdale had a chance,” she said, “like any of us do.” She stopped then, and her eyes started to look inward to a place where I wouldn’t be able to reach her if she retreated any further. I had to prompt her to continue, asked her to go on, to keep her there in the room. “Are you telling your own story,” my mother finally asked me, “or are you being told?”

  I didn’t know what she meant, though, so I didn’t answer.

  “One day Death will pay you a visit,” she continued, “but if you can tell the story of your life before Death tells its version—if you can tell it true—you can maybe keep on living.”

  “Mr. Marsdale didn’t tell Death his story?” I asked.

  “He might not have known that he could,” said my mother. “He might not have known how to. Most people don’t know that trick anymore.” She looked over at me standing in the corner, and it seemed as if a breath she’d been holding was suddenly released, filling the room with the scent of peppermint and coffee. “Now you know,” she said, “and you can use that trick one day if you want to. But the thing is, you have to tell your story true, and not everyone can do that.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because telling the truth is the hardest thing a person can do.”

  The next day, she let me stay home from school, as if I were truly sick. It was a day spent watching her clean the house from top to bottom, dusting, washing clothes and dishes, vacuuming carpets, feeding cows, filling their trough—an old claw-footed bathtub—with water from a red rubber hose.

  In the afternoon we went to the small grocery store off the town circle, where I watched her pick out things we needed. Cereal, oranges, flour and spices, cleaning products. She spoke to everyone we came across: the checkout woman, Margie Wallace; the bank manager, Mr. Keating; several women in the Temperance library, a one-room building with high, dusty shelves that surrounded an open area that held round tables where old ladies gossiped in whispers. They wore white gloves, as if they lived in a different era, as if it were still the forties and fifties of their youth and they were at a wedding party. They stroked my head, complimented my curls and green eyes as if I were a celebrity. But I shrank from their touch. They made me shiver.

  “This one’s yours, Sophia,” one old lady said, holding my chin with the tips of her fingers so that I’d look straight up at her line-mapped face. “The eyes will tell it.”

  Another clucked her agreement, nodding her cloud of cottony hair. “Those eyes are yours,” she said, “if I ever did see them.” The women wore pearls and pastel dresses. They smelled of lavender and citrus, of medicine and dusty Bibles. When I pulled away from the old woman holding my chin, she looked at my mom and said, “Why, Sophia, he’s sensitive, too. Isn’t he?”

  My mother nodded. She smiled proudly, brushing hair away from my forehead, and in the next moment she looked down at the floor, as if she was also somehow embarrassed.

  My mom selected two books: one for herself, a mystery novel—her favorite vice—and one about dinosaurs for me. I’d gone through a dinosaur phase several months before, but I was now on to ancient Egypt.

  “Ancient Egypt?” she said when she found me paging through a book of myths at the end of our visit. I nodded curtly. I was very serious about Egypt right then. Several nights before, I’d dreamed of a mummy climbing out of its tomb to chase me, and I’d concluded that I’d better get myself heavily informed about mummies in case the dream ever happened in real life.

  Which it seemed my dreams could sometimes do. Sometimes, it seemed, my dreams could come to life right in front of me.

  So we went to the nonfiction section and found a book about the gods of Egypt, Ra and Osiris and Isis and Nut. They had the best names of any gods I’d ever heard of. I liked the story of Osiris, how he was dismembered, how his body was cast to the corners of the earth, how his wife, Isis, journeyed through the world’s darkness to retrieve his various parts to put him back together. I imagined her on that journey, alone, finding an ear, an eye, a leg or a finger, placing it in her pocket for safekeeping. One day she would have all of the pieces and she’d put him back together. He’d no longer be lost to her. It was all, in my mind, a ridiculously awesome thing to do.

  I loved it.

  We drove home that afternoon in silence, me already reading the book, my mother’s attention on the road. From the spacey gaze in her eyes, though, I could tell that she was really elsewhere, in some other place and time beyond the car she drove.

  When Toby came home from school later, he complained that I hadn’t been forced to go back after my meltdown. My mother told him to hush. “You’re both treated fairly,” she said, “but sometimes people require different things for true fairness.”

  Toby didn’t agree. “Aidan’s spoiled,” he said, before running upstairs, stomping all the way. And in a way, he was right. My mom favored me. Anyone could see that if they paid attention. When my mom looked at me, she saw a part of herself. I was hers, I somehow understood, just like the old lady at the library had told her. We saw things through the same eyes.

  After my dad came home from work that evening, we sat at the table to eat dinner as usual. Toby talked about the 4-H meeting he’d be attending later that week. He was going to choose a calf from my grandmother’s stock after dinner, would raise it over the course of the next year as a project. I was still too young for 4-H, but the following year I’d get to raise a calf along with him. My dad wanted to see his boys raising cattle. He had hopes that one day we’d work the farm together, just like all of the Lockwood men before him. When he talked like that, though, my mom would shake her head and cast him a glance across the table.

  “They aren’t all meant for that” was all she’d say. Then she’d look down at her glass of wine like she could see the future forming in its bloodred liquid.

  Sometimes my dad would argue. Sometimes he’d tell her she was just like her father, who Toby and I couldn’t remember because we’d never met him. Our grandparents on our mom’s side had died long before we were born, and even before that, my mom had once told Toby and me—after we asked why the house was full of our dad’s family photos but none of hers—that she and her father had, as she put it, “had a falling-out.” She said she had refused to speak to anyone in her family for nearly thirty years, and from that I learned early in life that my mom was not someone to cross. She could carry a grudge for eternity.

  That night, my dad told my mom she was crazy to think she could see our futures spread out before us as if they were maps. “It’s foolish,” he said, “the way you think you can control everything.” I remember thinking how odd it was that he’d accuse her of the very thing she’d just told him he was doing. Trying to decide our futures for us.

  My mom didn’t argue. She stopped talking and looked out the nearest window. This was how she’d get whenever she and my dad couldn’t agree on something. And as she peered out the window at what seemed to be something far away, I felt like she might be doing exactly what my dad had said she couldn’t: she was looking at our future selves as they rushed toward us. Here they were, the people we were becoming, about to knock on our front door, hoping they could undo the mistakes we were making at that very moment.

  My mom trailed her fork through her mashed potatoes after she turned herself back to the table. She looked up every once in a while to answer a question my dad put to her, or to tell Toby it was his night to do dishes. I could tell she was in one of her moods now, as my dad called those times when she’d turn inward, out of rejection of whatever was going on in front of her, or because something had called her attention away from this world. But later, when I asked her if it was true, if she was in a mood, my mother said my dad didn’t understand everything he was seeing.

  “They aren’t ordinary moods,” she said. “They’re moods that come on me when I have a presentiment. A message about something that’s going to happen.” She said that whenever she received one of
these, good or bad, she’d always feel a little tired and confused for a while after. When I asked why she’d get tired from that, she said it was from carrying all of those people around with her.

  “What people?” I asked.

  “The people in the future. You, your daddy, Toby. Everyone in town. And others,” she added mysteriously. “There will always be others coming,” she said in the tone I knew meant she was trying to teach me something.

  “Mom,” I said, frightened by these other, mysterious people, frightened by the things she and I sometimes saw. “What are we?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, me and you. What are we?”

  She pursed her lips, already disappointed with her answer. “Us?” she said, shrugging. “We’re just like anyone.”

  When the sky darkened and stars began to appear, she took me outside to look up at them, tracing their alignments with one delicate fingernail. Hers were not patterns we’d learned in school, though; they weren’t constellations I’d ever heard of. “That’s the Rose Bearer,” she said, pointing to what I’d thought was Cassiopeia. “And there’s the Little Man, and that’s the Oak Lord bringing him an acorn. And there—the one with its corner star blinking—that star is the Probable Stone.”

  “The Probable Stone?” I said. Somewhere in the nearby woods, an owl hooted. “I’ve never heard of that one.”

  She looked down and said, “You’ve never heard of the Probable Stone? What on earth are they teaching you at school, then?”

  “Nothing useful,” I said, and she laughed, knelt down, put one arm around my shoulders.

  With her lips beside my ear, she said, “If you’re ever lost and don’t know how to get home, no matter how dark and lonely it gets, just look up at the Probable Stone and it will show you the way back.”