Wonders of the Invisible World, Page 2

  “It’s the Blue Bomb,” said Jarrod. “Your dad’s old work car, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And then my brother’s first car. Man, you have a good memory.”

  “Not really,” said Jarrod, pushing hair away from his eyes. “But it looks like you’ve got a bad one.”

  I nodded toward the other side of the car and said, “Get in. The doors don’t lock anymore.” Jarrod laughed at that, then got in. And five minutes later, after the last bus left, we were on the road like we did this all the time, like we’d been doing this forever.

  This was usually the time of the day I’d spend driving around Temperance on my own, not thinking about school or the work I had to do when I got home. I didn’t know why I’d gotten into the habit of doing this after school, but an hour or two on the back roads would usually clear my head, which seemed full of fog most days. On these drives, I liked to pretend that some other life was waiting for me out there, that something mysterious and different from everything I knew was just around the bend. But I wasn’t used to having anyone with me on these expeditions, so with Jarrod beside me, it felt different, like for the first time there was some kind of meaning to my aimless driving.

  “Do you actually know where we’re going?” Jarrod asked after we’d been on the road for ten or fifteen minutes.

  “Wherever,” I said, shrugging. “Why? Someplace in particular you want to go?” Before Jarrod could answer, though, I said, “Now that I think about it, how long have you been back?” It was late October already. School had been in session for over two months, and the wide, toothy grins of jack-o’-lanterns had begun to appear on the porch rails of Temperance’s houses.

  “Just moved into my mom’s place last week,” Jarrod said. “It was kind of sudden.”

  I glanced over, but he kept staring out the windshield, blank-eyed, tight-lipped, not giving anything away.

  “Something happen?” I asked. And as soon as the question left my mouth, I felt like a jerk. Five years had passed without a word between us. Somehow I’d almost completely forgotten him, despite once having been his best friend. Yet there I was, prying into his private life, like I had a right to know everything about him.

  He answered me anyway.

  “Had a fight with my dad,” he said, shrugging one shoulder like it might be painful to shrug both. “I think I said this morning that he’s got a girlfriend.”

  “Yeah?” I said, hoping to keep him going.

  “Yeah, well, she and I don’t really get along,” he said, right as I slowed down to edge the car into the center circle of Temperance, which was surrounded by a small grocery store, a gas station, the Dairy Oasis, and Times Square Café, like points on a compass. Inside the circle was a dusty old bandshell, where the wind blew autumn leaves to life, making them shuffle across the steps of the shell like the severed hands of zombies.

  “So you don’t like your dad’s girlfriend or something?” I asked, trying to get more out of him.

  “Or something,” Jarrod said. “It’s more like she doesn’t like me. I think she wants my dad and his place for just them, no sullen teenager haunting the extra bedroom. She made me feel weird in my own house, like I didn’t belong there.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad you can come live with your mom, at least.”

  “Yeah,” said Jarrod, nodding slowly, a brief pout of doubt twisting his lips.

  As I turned out of the circle and onto the causeway, Jarrod peered out the window at the gray-blue waves of Mosquito Lake chopping up and down on either side of us.

  “You don’t sound as excited about being home as you did this morning,” I said.

  “Can you pull over here?” he asked suddenly. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were wide open in this way that made it seem like he was asking for a big favor. “You asked if there was someplace in particular. Here,” he said. “I want to see the lake, if that’s okay.”

  I slowed down and pulled into a strip of parking spaces on the side of the causeway, where fishermen would park during the summer months before they climbed down the embankment to perch on one of the flat gray rocks and cast their lines out, sipping beer with their buddies and talking about the win-loss records of various sports teams or telling worn-out hunting stories. When I killed the engine, Jarrod didn’t wait. He got out and took a pack of cigarettes from his jean jacket pocket. After shuffling a stick out, he lit it with one hand cupped around the flame of his lighter.

  “I thought you were going to play baseball,” I said, getting out and coming around to meet him. He offered me the pack, but I shook my head.

  “Yeah, I am,” he said. He sucked in hard, then expelled a thick cloud, and I began to feel even more like I was hanging out with a stranger. “You can play baseball and smoke,” he said, rolling his eyes at me. “What? Don’t tell me that after I left you went on the straight and narrow?”

  “Was I ever off it?” I asked, laughing, trying to make it seem like I knew what he was talking about.

  Jarrod snorted and brushed the hair out of his eyes, smiling after he sucked in another drag. “I guess you were never bad, per se,” he said, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth in a slow stream. “Just weird. Not like other people. Not normal.”

  I laughed again, slow and completely faked, because I still didn’t understand what he was talking about, and I didn’t want him to know that. I wasn’t weird. I was just a benign loner. You know the type. There are a lot of us wandering the hallways of schools around the world, invisible, our shadows always turning the corner in front of you. I kept to myself, turned in homework like a good machine, watched other people doing things together from across the room. Looked down if someone caught my eye, tried not to invite trouble. Maybe being like that is weird for most people, but for me it was how I’d always been. Or at least, it was how I’d always remembered myself being.

  We stood in silence for a while, me leaning against the passenger side of the Blue Bomb with my hands in my jeans pockets, Jarrod a few steps in front of me, one hand in the pocket of his denim jacket, the other flicking away ash as he looked out at the waves and the gulls that screed overhead. Beneath those waves were a school and some houses, the remains of an old village where people used to mine for coal, my mom once told me, back when they needed it for the furnaces in the steel mills that used to line the rivers in nearby Warren and Youngstown. When I was little, I used to think of those buildings at the bottom of Mosquito Lake and imagine the inhabitants still going about their business, as if the lake had never been made, their village never flooded to make a reservoir after the coal had all been gotten. My mom used to tell me that there are places like that all over the world. Places we can’t see. People we can’t hear. She used to say that we’d never know any better by looking at the surface of things. The chop of waves, the flight of the gulls, the lines the fishermen cast over the water—you’d never see an old coal-mining village out there if you didn’t already know about it.

  When it seemed like Jarrod and I had nothing left to say and that maybe we weren’t cut out to be friends like we used to be, I asked the question I’d wanted to know the answer to all day.

  “What did you mean earlier?” I asked.

  And Jarrod looked over the curve of his shoulder, his hair fluttering in the wind. “About what?”

  “About me seeing weird shit,” I said. “About me being weird when we were little.”

  Jarrod flicked his cigarette into the water, where it sizzled before settling in to rock on the foamy waves. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you weren’t that weird. Maybe little kids are weird in general and I’m just remembering you being weird, is all.”

  “How?” I said. “What did I see that you’re remembering? Because seriously, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He suddenly came toward the Blue Bomb like he wanted to get in and get out of there in a hurry, so I moved out of the way to let him grab the door handle. Before he ducked down to fold himsel
f back into the car, though, he turned to me and took a deep breath.

  “You used to have all kinds of stories you’d tell me,” he said. “About a white deer you sometimes saw. And about a woman’s ghost who talked to you.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, not even a laugh. “You’re kidding,” I said eventually. “Right?”

  Jarrod shook his head. “No,” he said. “And there were other things you used to tell me about. Like the time Mr. Marsdale died. You remember that?”

  Mr. Marsdale had been one of our seventh-grade teachers. He died of a heart attack one night a month or so after school started, and for the rest of that year we had a pretty, just-out-of-college substitute named Miss Largent. “Yeah, I remember Mr. Marsdale,” I said, nodding. “What about him?”

  “Well,” said Jarrod, “the day before he died, you said you saw a man in a black suit come into our classroom and look him up and down like a piece of meat. But no one else could see him.”

  “A man in a black suit?” I said. “Like a piece of meat?” I repeated. I could feel my brows knitting together, and tried to laugh a little, hoping he’d admit that all this was a long, drawn-out joke.

  But before Jarrod put himself back into the car and closed the door on me, he said, “Your exact words, if I remember correctly, were: ‘Like a piece of meat he was going to purchase.’ ”

  Like a piece of meat he was going to purchase. Those words kept circling the drain in my mind for the rest of the drive back to Jarrod’s trailer on Cordial Run, which looked the same as it had five years ago, the last time I’d seen it: a beaten-up, half-rusted white rectangle with a pale yellow stripe of paint wrapped around it like a sad bow. I didn’t go in. I just braked halfway down the rutted dirt drive and told Jarrod that I’d see him at school the next morning.

  “It was good to catch up,” he said, sliding out of the car. I nodded, didn’t mention how catching up had mostly made me feel awkward, decided instead to say there was a lot more to catch up on, and that brought out a last-minute good feeling between us. Jarrod wore a half smile as he turned to leave. And really, that was a decent end to a day that had become way too strange.

  Fifteen minutes later, after driving away from Jarrod’s place in a paranoid panic, I found myself pulling into the long gravel drive to my own house, and then suddenly pressing down on the brakes before I’d even reached the garage. The Blue Bomb’s tires spun in the gravel before the car came to an abrupt stop, rocking a little afterward. I shook my head, as if someone had punched me hard enough to rattle me, and realized that I wasn’t breathing. Maybe I hadn’t been for a minute, because I was starting to gasp like a fish out of water, feeling like I might drown out there in the open air.

  I calmed myself down, though, and after I caught my breath, I turned to stare at my house through the grimy driver’s-side window. This was the only place I’d ever lived in all my seventeen years, but right then for some reason it felt like I’d just crash-landed on another planet.

  The curtains had been pulled tight in all the windows, blocking out the late-autumn light, and the weather vane up on the roof squealed a little as a breeze pushed it a few inches to the west. And in the next moment, as I sat there in my car halfway down the drive, an awful idea came to me: Something is wrong with me, I told myself. I could feel it. I could feel something inside me indicate that, the same way the weather vane rooster blew westward with the wind.

  We had a two-story farmhouse, goldenrod-colored, with a rusted tin roof that looked like someone had sprinkled it with cinnamon. A gingerbread house, my mom sometimes called it, usually over holiday breaks, when she’d be baking a pie or making a turkey dinner and she’d get nostalgic and start telling stories about how she and my dad met, or what life was like back when she was a little girl. She always said she could remember seeing the Lockwood farm on the bus ride home when she was in grade school. “I think I fell in love with this house before I ever fell in love with your father,” she once told me, and my dad had interrupted to say it was her plan all along to marry him and steal the family fortune. “Family fortune,” my mother had snorted. “Is that what you call your mother’s debts we’re still paying off ?”

  To the right of the house was the barn, where the cattle gathered, waiting for the afternoon grain I’d eventually bring. It was an old barn, built from some kind of wood that hadn’t been painted in so many years it had gone gray as driftwood, worn down by the waves of time and neglect. Behind the barn was the pasture, and behind the pasture were the woods that led down into Marrow’s Ravine, where my dad and brother hunted during deer season. The golden stubble of a cornfield, already harvested this late in the fall, lay off to the right of the farm, and to the left, Sugar Creek flowed, a trickle dark as tea, separating the house from the old orchard, where the Living Death Tree loomed in the distance like a scarecrow.

  “This is my home,” I whispered within the quiet of my car, as if I needed to remind myself of something so ordinary. My voice shook as I repeated those words. “This is my home, and I know it,” I said.

  It felt like there were more words to say, words that were meaningful, words that would somehow set everything back in place. But what those words were, I couldn’t recall. And I didn’t even know why I was saying any of this out loud in the first place.

  “Snap out of it, Lockwood,” I told myself. “You’re losing it.”

  Or had I already lost it, whatever it was? Because something was off. It was the kind of feeling you get when something is wrong, but the wrongness is so subtle you can’t pick out the flaw. A picture-frame-hanging-askew kind of feeling. A hairline-fracture-in-a-window-that-looks-perfectly-fine kind of feeling. I’d lost something, but I didn’t know what. And I could only sense that because Jarrod Doyle had appeared out of nowhere and told me things about myself I couldn’t remember. Pieces of me, it seemed, were missing.

  I finally got myself together and drove the rest of the way up the drive. Then I made myself leave the car and went inside through the back door. Kicking off my shoes in the mudroom a second later, I suddenly understood the feeling Jarrod had mentioned earlier. How sometimes you could be made to feel like a stranger in your own house. For me, though, I was starting to feel more like a stranger in my own life.

  I found my mom sitting at my grandmother’s old Formica table in the kitchen, a relic from who knows how long ago, reading the news on her tablet—one of the few trinkets of current technology my mom embraced wholeheartedly—as she drank her afternoon cup of coffee. She didn’t look up as I came in, just continued tapping and swiping her finger across the glass, even as she said, “Hello, stranger. How was school today?”

  And I thought, Act normal. Act normal and things will be normal.

  “It was okay,” I said. “It was, you know, school.” She nodded while she scanned the screen in front of her. But as I went to the fridge to pull out a can of soda, she turned away from whatever online article she’d been reading to look at me more carefully.

  “Did something happen?” she asked. Her green eyes, the same color as mine, the eyes she always said she gave me, narrowed a little, as if she were trying to see something far away. But I was right there in front of her, of course. She tucked a piece of her auburn hair behind one ear then, as if she needed to move it to hear me better.

  I was going to tell her about Jarrod Doyle coming back to Temperance—I was, I really meant to—but something stopped me before I could. A voice, actually. A voice, deep down inside me, suddenly spoke, as if it were traveling up from the bottom of a well, and stopped me cold.

  Don’t tell her, the voice inside me said, and I shivered as I stood in front of my mom, who sat there blinking, waiting for me to answer. The voice wasn’t my own—I knew that immediately—but somehow it was inside me all the same. And it was a woman’s voice, which made me feel even stranger.

  Don’t tell her, the voice whispered for a second time, like it knew I might defy its order.

  “No,” I finall
y said, shaking my head. “I mean, no, nothing out of the ordinary. Why?”

  My mom cocked her head and continued to narrow her eyes, as if she didn’t believe me. “You just seem off a little,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “That’s because I killed a man on the way home,” I said. “Hit and run. Don’t check the grille of the Blue Bomb. It’s a mess right now. I need to wash it.”

  She laughed at that, holding one hand to her chest like her heart might jump out of her throat if she didn’t, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes grew deeper. She and my dad were already fifty-two when I was seventeen. They looked a bit older than most of my classmates’ parents, but I usually forgot about that until I made one of them laugh and their wrinkles showed up.

  “You are so bad,” my mom said, finally waving me and her suspicions away. That was what my mother always said about anyone who could make her laugh at something she felt she shouldn’t, which was one of the few minor talents I possessed. “I don’t know who you get your sense of humor from. Certainly not from me or your dad.”

  “Grandma Bennie,” I said after cracking open my can of pop and swallowing a fizzy gulp.

  “Not possible,” my mom said, shaking her head. “Bennie was serious as the grave, rest her sweet soul.”

  That was what my mother always said about anyone she liked who had passed on. Their souls were always sweet, and she always hoped they were resting peacefully. My grandma had died two years ago, when I was fifteen, and my mom was right: Grandma Bennie hadn’t been much of a stand-up comedian. She’d grown up on a farm out in Cherry Valley, a half hour north of Temperance, and had been forced by her family to quit school at sixteen and go to work in the factory where she met my grandfather, John Lockwood Jr., a man who died long before Toby and I ever came into the world. His photo, grayish-green in color, was preserved in an oval frame on a wall in our living room: a serious-looking guy with a mustache like a handlebar, wearing a button-down shirt, suspenders, and saggy pants. He’d killed himself when my dad was sixteen, the story went, leaving my dad and Grandma Bennie on their own. I’d always hated that picture, because it was the kind where the eyes follow you wherever you stand, judging you, finding you to be small and possibly stupid. Grandma Bennie, I’d always thought, would have needed a sense of humor to live with a guy like that.