Winter Oranges

  “We lived right next to an orchard, and in the fall, I swear I could smell them all the way to our house. Does it smell like apples? Please tell me it smells like apples!”

  It didn’t. Not even close. But Jason said, “Of course it smells like apples, silly. What else would it smell like in November?”

  Ben laughed with delight. “I don’t even care that you’re lying. It’s the best lie anybody’s told me in a century and a half!”

  It was enough to break Jason’s heart, knowing that there’d been so little cause for joy in Ben’s life. And yet, Ben didn’t seem to feel sorry for himself at all. He acted as if he’d been given the gift of a lifetime. He turned in a slow circle, trying to take everything in, looking more excited than the proverbial kid in a candy store.

  Jason tucked the globe under his arm and rubbed his hands together. Maybe Ben couldn’t feel the cold, but he certainly could. It wasn’t quite freezing out, but it was too cold to stand around. “Do you want to walk?” He pointed into the trees on the eastern edge of the clearing. “There’s supposed to be a stream that cuts through the property over that way somewhere. I haven’t really explored much yet.”

  “A stream!” Ben said, as if Jason had told him Santa Claus himself might be waiting for them around the bend. “That sounds wonderful!”

  They started off across the clearing toward the woods, Jason leading the way, although he didn’t know exactly where he was going. He’d feel silly if they ended up lost on his own land, but if nothing else, they’d find the fence and follow it west, back to the driveway. Ben walked next to him. Watching him, Jason was reminded again of their first meeting in the guest room, and the way Ben’s steps didn’t seem to sync with the distance traveled. It was as if he were walking on one of the moving walkways in the airport, and Jason found it disconcerting. He chose instead to focus on Ben’s face. The boy—and it was hard to think of him as anything but, especially now that he knew Ben was frozen at a mere twenty years of age—continued staring delightedly around the forest as they walked, yet he had an expression of concentration on his face. His lips were moving, and Jason realized he couldn’t hear him. He wound the globe again, listening.

  Ben wasn’t talking, per se. At least, not to Jason. He was mumbling to himself. “. . . Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine—”

  “Are you counting our steps?”

  Ben came to an abrupt stop, his head whipping up in surprise, as if he’d forgotten Jason was there. “Oh.” He glanced around them, at the trees, then up at the sky, as if searching for something. “Oh my God, I was, wasn’t I?”

  “Why?”

  Ben laughed nervously. “It’s kind of a habit.” He waved his hand as if to dismiss the entire incident. “I’m being stupid.”

  He started walking again, and Jason followed him into the evergreens that surrounded the house. Jason paid attention to the globe, making sure the music box was still running in case Ben spoke, but the only sound for several minutes was the crunch of Jason’s feet through the leaves, the chirping of birds, and the occasional angry chatter of an alarmed chipmunk. Although Jason frequently had to push branches aside, or duck his head to avoid ramming into one, Ben simply walked forward, allowing the trees to go right through his spectral form. He was hard to see in the sunlight, but clearer when he was in the shade, reminding Jason of Ben’s comments earlier about passing in and out of sanity. It was unnerving, and Jason found it easier to concentrate on his own slow steps through the forest than to watch Ben.

  “I told you about being stuck in the box?” Ben said at last.

  It sounded like a question, so Jason answered. “Yes.”

  “Well, I couldn’t manifest outside the globe, and there isn’t much to do in my cabin, and I knew I was starting to crack. So I started going for walks.”

  “Wait. Your cabin?” He’d known Ben’s existence was somehow tied to the globe, but he hadn’t quite thought of the fact that Ben lived there. That he fell asleep each night—presumably, at least—and woke each morning somewhere inside the world of the globe. That seconds and minutes and decades ticked by, and Ben experienced each and every one of them. He felt like a fool for not having considered it sooner. “You live in that cabin? The one in the globe?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can go outside? I mean, outside of the cabin, but inside the globe?”

  “Right. But it isn’t like this. It’s . . . Well, it’s hard to explain, but it isn’t real. I mean, there’s the ground, and the sky, and trees, but everything’s wrong. There’s snow, but it isn’t cold at all, and it never melts. And there are trees, but they never change. There aren’t any birds or deer or mice or anything. Just tree after tree after tree. But I started to think that maybe, if I looked hard enough, I’d find . . . I don’t know. Something. A door, or another house, or maybe a road. Anything.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “All I ever found was my cabin, again and again and again. No matter how hard I concentrated on walking straight ahead and never turning, I always ended up back at my cabin. Every day, I’d pick a new direction, and I’d walk. And at some point, I started counting, trying to figure it out.”

  “And?” Jason prodded.

  “Two thousand paces. If I start at the door, that’s how far I can go in any direction before I end up back home, whether I want to or not.”

  That was too depressing to think about. He imagined Ben walking out of his door, standing in front of that stupid little cabin in the snow globe—

  “Wait. If you walked out of your house inside the globe, would I be able to see you from the outside?”

  Ben laughed. “I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think anybody’s seen me yet.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  “To get the attention of somebody outside? Of course. Especially right after the soldier took me away. I tried breaking branches off the trees, but they don’t break. Not even the little ones. And I don’t have an ax or anything. So eventually, I went through the cabin, and I took every single thing I could carry outside—my blankets and pillows, and the chair, and even my clothes—and I tried to spell out ‘HELP’ in the snow. But every morning when I woke up, everything was back inside, in its proper place, and the girl who owned the globe never noticed anything at all.”

  “But . . .” Jason’s mind reeled. There was so much about it that was impossible. He wasn’t sure where to begin. “How do you eat? Or—”

  “I don’t. I don’t do anything.” Ben hung his head, his smile fading. He glanced sideways at Jason. “I don’t want to talk about the globe. I know you’re curious, but I’ve spent a hundred and fifty years there and trust me: it’s boring.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m being an ass.”

  “No.” Ben smiled again, shaking his head. “Not at all.” He looked around them, as if searching for a new topic. “This reminds me of that last movie we watched. I halfway expect a crazy ax-wielding killer to jump out and start chasing us.”

  “I’m more worried about tabloid photographers, to be honest.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.” Jason didn’t want to talk about the press any more than Ben wanted to talk about the globe.

  “What I can’t figure out,” Ben went on, as if Jason hadn’t interrupted, “is why, when that killer was after you, you ran upstairs and hid in a closet with no way out. Couldn’t you have run to the neighbor’s house? Or taken the car and left? And why did you and your friends decide to split up in the first place? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to stay together?”

  “Those are the rules of the genre: never work as a group. Never run without tripping. And, if you’re female, never wear a bra.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Sure doesn’t. And now that you’ve figured it out, there’s no reason to watch any of the other slashers I’ve been in. They all use the exact same tropes.”

  Ben laughed as he walked straight through a clump of leafless
baby aspens. “Nice try, but I still want to see them all.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Ben held out a hand as if to stop Jason, although Jason ended up walking right through it before he could stop himself. He shivered, not because he’d felt anything at all, but because he hadn’t.

  Ben seemed oblivious to the Jason's discomfort over the incident. “I think I hear water.”

  Jason tilted his head, listening. It took a second, but then he detected the faint gurgling of a stream. Odd that Ben couldn’t feel the cold air or smell the breeze, but he could hear better than Jason. “It sounds like it’s close.”

  They crested a small hill. Below them, a tiny stream tumbled over a sunken, rocky bed. A few evergreens lay on the far side, but otherwise, everything around them was brown.

  “Oh,” Ben sighed. “This is my new best day.”

  “Your ‘new best day’?”

  “Yes! Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Jason searched Ben’s face for some sign of sarcasm, but found none. “It’ll be a lot better in the spring.”

  “Will you bring me back then?” Ben asked hopefully. “If you still own the globe?”

  “Of course,” Jason said, surprised more at the latter question than the former. “You don’t think I’d throw it away now, do you? Not knowing you’re inside.”

  “I don’t know. I hope not. Then again, you didn’t ask for this. Maybe you’d just as soon not be stuck with some weirdo nobody else can see.”

  Jason shook his head, watching the stream, trying to pinpoint why Ben’s words bothered him so much. No, he hadn’t asked for this. He certainly hadn’t expected it. But it wasn’t unwelcome. On the contrary, the idea of discarding the globe now, given what he knew, felt like the most heartless kind of betrayal. Besides, he liked talking to Ben. He liked hearing Ben’s bright laughter and seeing his astonished joy at everything from walking outside to the ability to pause live TV.

  He liked . . .

  He liked having a friend.

  The simple realization surprised him. After spending most of his life in Hollywood, he couldn’t name a single person other than Dylan who he counted as a kindred spirit. He’d always been comfortable with his solitude, and yet suddenly it struck him as rather pathetic that nobody but Dylan and Natalie knew or cared where he was. And with that startling assessment of his life came a new realization: he wouldn’t have traded the hours he’d had with Ben for anything.

  He glanced over at his new companion. Ben stood watching him, a bare branch sticking absurdly through his translucent head. Jason couldn’t help but smile.

  “Believe it or not,” Jason said at last, “this is the best day I’ve had in a really long time too.”

  The next day dawned windy and bitterly cold, the heavy skies threatening snow, but never making good. In the warmth of his rose-festooned living room, Jason pulled out his laptop, determined to trace his family tree back to its Tennessee roots so he could find the place where his ancestors overlapped with Ben’s family.

  “I guess the logical first step would be to call my parents.” But it was the last thing he wanted to do.

  Ben must have heard the reluctance in Jason’s voice. “I’ve noticed you never talk about your family. You don’t get along with them?”

  They were sitting on the couch, Jason’s open laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Ben had seen it before, but he always watched it warily, as if expecting it to misbehave. The wind buffeted the house, rattling the windows in their panes, and Jason sighed, not wanting to get into it. “It’s not that we don’t get along so much as we have no use for each other. My dad’s a stockbroker, and he’s always busy. And my mom . . .” He glanced over at Ben, remembering what he’d said about how children were viewed in the nineteenth century. “I was a commodity. And at this point, I have no value.”

  “You mean you made money for them when you were a kid, but now your money is all your own?”

  “Well, that too. But it wasn’t about money so much as bragging rights, and there’s no glamour being the mother of a has-been.”

  Ben shook his head and scooted a bit farther away from the computer. “You’re not a ‘has-been.’ And anyway, I’m sure your mother doesn’t see it that way.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s an agent now. She has other clients. Other projects.” Jason shrugged. “It’s not like there’s bad blood between us. We just don’t have much to say.” He chewed his thumbnail, eyeing the online genealogy site. He could start with his grandparents, but he knew it was silly to create more work for himself when all he had to do was make a simple phone call.

  He swallowed his pride and dialed.

  Neither of his parents recalled having any connection to Tennessee. They were able to give him the names of their grandparents, and a couple of their great-grandparents, but nothing more than that.

  It felt like a good start, but Jason quickly found that doing genealogy online was far more difficult than the commercials would have him believe. Ben grew bored with the process after only a few minutes and went back to watching reruns of Seinfeld on TV, leaving Jason to fight his way through the lineage lists himself. It might have been easier if he’d had one specific line to trace back, but there was no way of knowing which of his eight great-grandparents shared Ben’s blood, and with each new generation, the number of names he had to trace doubled. His list soon included more than fifty ancestors. The problem was, he couldn’t find the maiden names of most of the women, and many of the men had frustratingly common names. Without knowing their birthdates, or where they’d been born or died, he had no way of knowing which Mary Smith or John Walker was actually connected to his family.

  Jason stopped, chewing a cuticle in frustration. He wasn’t following the trunk of the tree to its roots as he’d envisioned. He was running up and down its branches like a mad squirrel, trying to find the one slender twig that took him where he longed to go. Even after feeding his credit card number into the genealogy sites, he got nowhere near Tennessee or anybody with the last name of Ward.

  Maybe he was going about it wrong. Tracing his own lineage meant following the branches of an ever-widening tree. But he knew his final destination: Ben.

  “What was your sister’s full name?”

  “Sarah Elizabeth Ward.”

  “And do you know her birthday?”

  “September 9, 1837.”

  But even with that information, Jason came up empty. Most of the records from the nineteenth century weren’t available online. He tried searching for Ben and Sarah’s father, and for Theodore Jameson, the man Sarah was supposed to marry, but couldn’t find him either.

  “The only way to figure it out,” he told Ben at last, “would be to drive to all of these cities and dig through the archives in their libraries or courthouses or . . . or wherever the hell old records like this are kept. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  Ben watched him for a moment, chewing his lip as he debated. “Why does it matter?” he asked at last.

  Jason didn’t have a good answer. He’d had some half-brained idea that finding their shared ancestry would lead to an explanation of Ben’s predicament, but when he sat back and looked at it logically, he realized it was ridiculous. How would knowing a name change anything? Even if he knew which parent shared Ben’s blood, it got him no nearer to understanding Ben’s situation. It certainly didn’t offer any kind of solution. After all, if any of his cousins or aunts or uncles had any kind of mystical powers, he was sure he would have heard of it. His mother would undoubtedly have found a way to make a dime off it by now.

  Still . . .

  “Aren’t you curious?” Jason asked.

  Ben graced him with one of his sweetest smiles. “Not really. You can see me, and you can hear me. That’s good enough for me.”

  “But what if this is the answer?”

  “The answer to what?”

  “To getting you out of the globe?”

  Ben scowled and
turned away. The more time they spent together, the more Jason found himself wondering about the globe that held Ben prisoner, but it was a topic Ben adamantly refused to discuss.

  “I’ve spent a hundred and fifty years in there,” he said at last. “I don’t want to spend the time I have with you talking about it.”

  “But there must be a way to get you out.”

  “If there was, I would have found it by now.”

  “Maybe there’s something we’ve missed,” Jason insisted. “Maybe she left a clue somewhere.”

  Ben’s expression bordered on disdain. “A clue? Like what, some kind of cryptic treasure map?”

  “Yeah,” Jason said, feeling defensive. “Why not?”

  Ben shook his head. “She wasn’t a pirate, and I’m not a chest full of gold. She put me in here to keep me safe, not to torture me. If she’d thought to leave directions, they would have been crystal clear. Something like, ‘Bathe in the blood of a rooster and dance naked under the full moon.’”

  “Do you think that would work?” Jason asked.

  Ben winked out of existence rather than gracing him with an answer.

  Jason dropped the subject for the rest of the afternoon, but he didn’t give up his search. Any time that wasn’t spent sleeping or with Ben was spent online, tracking down people who claimed to be experts in the supernatural. He sent emails and made phone calls asking for advice, but got nowhere. Most of them never responded. The ones who did generally thought he was pulling their leg. The vast majority of the people who claimed to believe him quickly proved to be complete frauds who asked for massive down payments in advance, clearly hoping only to take him for as much money as possible while running him in circles. Only a handful showed genuine interest, but they all suggested the same thing: a religious intervention, similar to an exorcism. But they assumed he wanted Ben’s spirit banished or “laid to rest.” They were at a loss when he tried to explain that he wanted Ben returned to his living state.

  “Why would you want to do that?” one man asked him. “Most folks don’t like being haunted.”