“How can it do that?”
“Why, you just push it three times and tell it a secret rhyme.”
“What secret rhyme?” I asked, eyes wide with wonder.
“This is my home,” she said, turning me around to look her straight in the face, “and I know it. Even if I go away, it’ll still be here. If I lose my way, it’s your job to show it.”
“Will it really work?” I asked, starting to grow skeptical.
“The Probable Stone has never failed me,” said my mother. “Whenever I’ve needed it, it’s always been there.”
“When did you need it?” I asked. “When were you lost?”
“That’s classified information, Mr. Lockwood,” she said. “Just trust me on this one. Look up there and memorize that map of the stars. If you ever need to find me, look at that star right there, touch it three times, tell it the secret rhyme, and it’ll show you the way home.”
The vision ended, and as it disappeared into wisps of smoke inside me, my mother’s hand left my shoulder. “There was a time,” she said, “when I didn’t keep things from you. But I can’t keep you from being who you are any longer. I can see that now.”
“Who am I?” I asked, hesitating, as if those words were a foreign language, as if I wasn’t sure I was even asking the right question. I was still trying to understand the memories she’d shown me. That conversation where she’d talked about seeing the future and carrying people around inside her: it was like no other conversation I’d ever had with her. I could now see these new pieces of myself inside me, though, could recall the memories she’d just shown me, and I kept touching them, moving them around, trying to push them into the right places in my puzzle. Some snapped into place immediately, but others remained elusive, floating free in the empty space within my frame of patchwork memories.
“You’re him all over again,” my mom said, shaking her head like even she didn’t want to believe what she was saying.
“Who?”
“Your brother,” she said. “Your older brother Seth.”
I stared at her for a while, unsure whether I should feel uncomfortable about my mom’s thinking I was my dead brother reincarnated, or if I should seriously reconsider the idea of reincarnation. Especially now, seeing how everything else I thought I knew wasn’t true. Could I be that boy in the framed photo that hung on the wall, that brother I’d never met, staring across the living room at my suicidal grandfather? Sure, we had the same green eyes, the same curly brown hair with flickers of my mom’s auburn in it, but otherwise, that boy was a stranger to me.
“I don’t mean that you’re him, literally,” my mom said when my concern must have shown on my face. “I mean that you’re like him. He could see things too. But at a much younger age than you started.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s wrong with me?”
My mom shook her head and said, “Nothing. Absolutely nothing is wrong with you, sweetheart. You’re fine. But there are things in this world that aren’t fine at all. Like that man in the black suit you saw when you were little. There are things in this world that you can see that are dangerous, especially if they notice you watching them.”
“The young soldier in my dream tonight?” I said.
“No, not him,” my mother corrected me. “He’s your great-grandfather on your father’s side. And that wasn’t a dream. That was D-day, the day itself. You went there, or were brought there somehow, maybe because you’ve been drinking alcohol tonight and it opened you up to the journey. Not a good idea, by the way, drinking, unless you know how to drink just enough to loosen up. Drink too much and things like what occurred tonight can happen.”
“You knew I was drinking?”
My mom rolled her eyes. “You reeked of it when you came home. I could smell you a room away.”
“And what was it that happened to me tonight, exactly?”
My mom held me in a steady, serious gaze. “You went back to another time and place, to someone you’re connected to in the past. Your great-grandfather. You went there through the world’s shadow.”
“The white stag told me I fell out of my own story,” I offered, and my mom nodded, as if, yes, of course the white stag had told me that. Only natural, really. Of course that was what happened.
“You’re going to have to tell me more,” I finally said, looking at her with a deliberately hard stare, trying to make her understand how much I needed her to talk to me about these things. “Otherwise, I’m going to go crazier than I am already.”
“You’re not crazy, sweetie,” she said, drawing a firm line in the sand.
“I feel like it,” I admitted. “I’m some psychologist’s future famous case study in the making.”
My mom laughed but waved away that idea. “I can tell you more,” she said, taking a deep breath, sighing it out in the next moment. “But it’s a long story.”
“It’s the weekend,” I said, shrugging. “You have plenty of time to tell it.”
“So what did she say?” Jarrod asked on Monday, after school was out and I’d caught him in the parking lot. He was afraid to speak to me after he’d revealed his secret. I could tell by the way he’d frozen when I called his name as he made his way to the bus instead of to my car like usual. I hadn’t gone to his house over the weekend to talk about his confession. Not after riding the white stag. Not after having a dream that turned out to be a visitation, as my mother had later called it.
If I were to break it all down for Jarrod into the neatest of packages, instead of the ramble I went into after we drove to the lake, it would go something like this:
She said that I’d gone into something called the world’s shadow, the back side of here and now, and witnessed something that happened to my great-grandfather. She told me that I come from a line of seers. She told me that my brother Seth had been able to see things too. She said he died because he saw something he shouldn’t have. And she said that after I saw the man in the black suit back in the seventh grade, she put a blindfold of some kind over me. “A dust cover over certain memories and abilities,” she’d called it, which I guess sounded nice, at least in theory. She did it, she said, to protect me from seeing anything that might hurt me.
“What could hurt you?” Jarrod asked after I’d caught him up on the state of my thoroughly screwed-up life.
“Oh, you know,” I said, real casual. “Harbingers of death could mistake me for someone who’s died and take me to the other side too early. That’s what she called the white stag and the man in the black suit. Harbingers of death. I mean, what do you do with that? So anyway, you were right all along. Back when I was a kid, I saw some weird shit. I saw the man in the black suit getting ready to take Mr. Marsdale to Death.”
“Whoa,” Jarrod said as he leaned back on the causeway guardrail. Behind him, Mosquito Lake was calm. No waves chopped up and down today. The surface was a smooth skin of pewter water. “That’s a lot to take in. Makes me want a cigarette just thinking about it.”
I took a big breath and released it, then spread my hands in front of me, looking at the back of my fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “Yeah,” I said. “I could use a cigarette too.” I dropped my hands to my sides again and said, “There’s nothing I can do about any of it. We’re all just who we are in the end, aren’t we?”
Jarrod turned to look at the lake. A single gull skimmed the surface, searching for easy prey. I hadn’t meant to say something that would remind him of what he’d admitted a few days earlier, but there it was, his confession, out in the open again, if he wanted to talk more about it. And bringing that up sort of made us even, considering how he kept reminding me of how much weird shit I used to see but couldn’t remember.
“I don’t know,” Jarrod said. He still hadn’t turned back to me, so I watched his profile, his eyes downcast, his dark hair curling out from the sides of the baseball cap he wore backward. “I mean, something isn’t right.” He shook his head as he turned things over in his
mind. “You saw things even after Mr. Marsdale died. I remember that. I was only around for another month or two after that happened, but that day in the park, when you showed me a vision of us still together in the future, that was a few weeks after Mr. Marsdale and the man in the black suit incident. So whatever she did to you, she didn’t do it right away.”
I shrugged. “It’s been a while,” I said. “Maybe my mom’s got some of her own memories mixed up over time. In any case, she said she’s been letting up on her influence—that’s what she called it—lately. That it’s okay for me to remember again, now that I’m older and able to take better care of myself. But she also said not to bother my dad or Toby about it. She said it’d be best not to disturb them.”
“You got your big boy pants on now,” Jarrod said, finally turning back to me, laughing. “But I’d still keep looking into things if I were you. I mean, she asked you not to talk to your own dad about it? That seems wrong. I don’t want to sound mean or anything, but something about your mom bothers me.”
“How can she possibly bother you?” I said, rolling my eyes a little. “You haven’t even seen her since you’ve been back. Which reminds me. She wants you to come over. She invited you to dinner on Halloween, actually, but—”
“But you had other plans,” said Jarrod, raising one corner of his mouth and pretending to adjust the fit of his cap by grabbing the bill and twisting it sideways a little.
“I had other plans,” I said, grinning back, hoping that whatever tension he felt would start to fade now.
“Well,” Jarrod said. One of his eyebrows arched, like the offer of dinner at my house was something he had to think about. “I guess I can do that. Just make sure not to leave me alone with your mom. I don’t want you to come back into the room after five minutes and find that she’s lobotomized me for my own good or anything.”
“Shut up,” I said, pushing him on the shoulder, and he got one last laugh in before he looked down at where my hand had touched his arm. When his eyes flicked back up to me, the other side of his mouth had curled too, just a little.
“So go ahead and give her a call,” he said. “Tell her she’s got a fine-looking young man with a sinful interest in her youngest son coming over, and to wear her pearls so she can clutch them at key moments in the evening.”
I let Jarrod’s flirtation go without comment, just laughed, shook my head, and told him he was an idiot. Then I pulled my phone out of my pocket to call home and make plans.
After I talked with my mom about dinner, we decided to go visit Jarrod’s mom so he could let her know where he’d be when she got home from work later.
Times Square Café sat on the old town circle, just off the causeway, across from a small grocery store and a bait shop. It used to be an old Victorian inn called Diggers, back in the days when the lake wasn’t a lake but a coal-mining village. There was said to be a ghost inhabiting the second-floor rooms, the ghost of a woman who was jilted by a miner, who had up and moved to West Virginia the day before their wedding without telling her. “The wedding dress,” Jarrod’s mom told us that day as she poured us coffee at the bar, “can’t be removed. Anyone who’s tried to throw it out finds it’s returned the next day, hanging over the back of an old chair in the room directly above us.”
We both looked up at the high ceiling, where a brass chandelier with crystals hanging off it swayed a little, shaking off dust to sift down toward us like snowflakes. This was the sort of place we had available as a hangout in Temperance: a diner named after one of the most famous intersections of one of the most famous cities in the world, but really it was just this ancient inn filled with kitschy furniture and claw-footed tables. My mom loved the place—she said it had character—but it gave me the creeps.
“Libby, do you care if I eat dinner over at Aidan’s tonight?” Jarrod asked after we’d heard the Times Square Café ghost story to its tragic conclusion.
“That’s fine by me,” his mom said, not blinking. I, however, did a lot of blinking when I heard Jarrod call her by her first name. “Make sure to thank Mrs. Lockwood,” she added. “And make sure not to overstay your welcome.”
Mrs. Doyle started to sort silverware then, and Jarrod said, “Yes, ma’am,” which surprised me even more after he’d just got done calling her by her first name. Then Mrs. Doyle swung around to put the silverware tray behind the bar, and her hair, long and dark like Jarrod’s, swayed like a curtain.
She looked younger than I remembered. Less worn out and ruined than the woman I recalled coming to school for a fourth-grade open house with “a hangover the size of a tractor”—she had told our mousy teacher, Mrs. Burroway—and a small flask of whiskey she kept taking out of her purse, then putting back when she realized where she was and what exactly she was doing.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get Jarrod back in time to do his homework.”
Libby laughed, one short, sharp ha, and said, “This one? Homework? All I can do is hope you’ll be a good influence on him, Aidan. If he hadn’t been the star pitcher for his school up in Cleveland, I’m not sure he’d have been given as many second chances as he’s gotten used to having.”
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” Jarrod said, twirling a spoonful of cream into his coffee. His mom looked at him, her eyebrows raised, halfway between offended and guilty-as-charged.
“Yes, everyone deserves a second chance,” she said with her voice lowered a little to challenge him. “But it’s also good if everyone does their part to change their bad habits.”
Before their jabs became a full-blown battle, the café’s front door swung open, and the bell above jingled its old-fashioned greeting. A couple of white-haired guys came in, saying, “Hey, Libby,” like they were good friends, and waved from the other end of the room in all its dark-wood-and-ornamental-plaster glory. When I turned back, Jarrod’s mom was already moving in their direction with a notepad, slipping a pen out of her apron pocket.
“Why does she stay here?” I asked, once she was out of earshot. “She could make more money waiting tables out in Niles.”
“It’s close to home,” said Jarrod, lifting his cup. “So she saves on gas. And more important, they don’t serve liquor here. Libby doesn’t even want to carry it out to someone else on a tray.”
“I’ll give her one thing,” I said. “She’s disciplined.”
“Has to be.” Jarrod watched his mom smile with the old men at the other end of the room, laughing at their crusty jokes like they were actually funny. Who knows? Maybe they were. “It’s why she wants me to be more disciplined too,” he added.
“About drinking?” I asked.
“About everything,” Jarrod said. He spun around on his stool to face me. He had the same eyes as his mom, like I had my mother’s. But where my eyes sparked green, his were dark and murky. “She wants my grades up, my pitching impeccable, and for me to get a college scholarship at the end of the year.”
“She’s your mom,” I said, as if that explained everything. “She wants good things for you.”
Jarrod accepted that without comment, and a minute later his mom slipped behind the counter to fill cups for her table. As she poured the coffee in a careful stream, Jarrod said, “Hey, remember when you went to Aidan’s mom a while back to ask about your future?”
I stiffened in my seat, and it looked like Libby did the same. She stopped pouring, straightened her back, and glared as if some man had made an unwanted advance on her. “I do remember that,” she said, nodding curtly. “Why do you ask?”
“We were just talking about it,” Jarrod said, nodding toward me, making me an accomplice in whatever game he’d decided to play here. “What was it his mom told you again?”
“Jarrod.” Libby shook her head, wincing. “It wasn’t anything. Not what you’re thinking, at least.” Then she turned to me, as if I had asked the question. “When I got out of the center in Liberty a few years ago,” she said, “I was feeling pretty down, as you can imagine. Your mom was
real understanding, that’s all. She came over a few times to check in on me. Always exactly at times I needed someone to talk to. And she told me not to worry. My stars were looking good, she said. She was being a friend, that’s all. Jarrod makes it seem like we were two witches brewing up some kind of magic in the kitchen.”
She laughed, and I laughed with her, but Jarrod only grinned, like his mom and I were the foolish ones. Then he brought his cup of coffee up to his lips to sip at it.
“Anyway,” said Libby, “I can’t talk, boys. We’re starting to get the early dinner crowd. The old folks like to get it out of the way before the place gets busy. Jarrod, I’ll see you at home later. Aidan, it was good to see you, honey. I just saw your mom the other day, but tell her hi for me anyway.”
“I will,” I said, and Libby winked at me as she walked away to take care of people.
“I will,” Jarrod mimicked after his mom was far enough away. I rolled my eyes at him. “Seriously,” he said. “What my mom just told you? That’s nothing like how she described it a month ago when I moved home.”
“How did she describe it then?”
“She said your mom saved her life right when she was about to give up hope. She said your mom took her hand in hers and showed her a future my mom could continue to hope for. It sounded like what you do when you…”
“Reach across?” I said.
Jarrod looked down at my hand, which lay on the counter near his.
“Yeah,” he said, looking up again, blinking out a small spark of his own nearly extinguished hope. “When you reach across.”
“When did she change her story, then?” I asked.
“That’s the thing,” said Jarrod. “Just a week or so ago. After your mom stopped in here to pay her a visit.”
When we pulled down my driveway twenty minutes later, my mom was already on the front porch, waving as if she’d been there since I called, waiting to welcome home a war-ravaged soldier. I hadn’t seen her so enthusiastic in a long time. Usually she kept to herself, stayed at home as much as possible, only went out for groceries and to run important errands, made rare expeditions to visit old friends like Jarrod’s mom every now and then. When Toby and I were younger, she’d been more outgoing. Never missed a parent-teacher conference, never missed a chance to help out at a bake sale, and took us once a week to the library. Now here she was, a virtual hermit, coming out to greet Jarrod with a big hug and an “Oh my goodness, you have grown so tall, young man! I can’t believe it!”