Wonders of the Invisible World (4 page)

L
ike 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 finally 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.

“If my humor isn't from Grandma,” I said, “then it must be from someone even further back.” My mom nodded after I said this, as if to say
Of course,
but quickly and without another word she looked down at her tablet, as if something of great importance had sprung up on its screen.

I didn't stick around to encourage any more weirdness. I'd had my fill for the day. Instead, I let that hairline-fracture-in-a-perfectly-normal-seeming-window feeling lead me away.

I fed the cows a while later, taking time to pat a few muzzles and to rub behind a few fuzzy ears. There were only twenty in my dad's herd, all Herefords—red body, white face—my dad's favorite breed, and they all had names, as if they were part of our family. I could hear my dad's truck pull into the drive as I filled the trough with fresh water, announcing his and my brother's return. My dad and Toby both worked for the county roads department—Toby on a road crew, my dad as a crew leader—hauling coal patch to fill potholes in summer, scraping the roads clean of snow in winter. In spring, they'd get calls in the middle of the night to go out to remote corners of the county to cut up trees that had fallen across roads during storms, and occasionally I'd go with them to help out, to hold a light on them as their chain saws buzzed through limbs like knives through butter and rain spattered against their concentration-lined faces.

When I came back in from the barn, they were already sitting at the dining room table. “Come on, Aidan,” my dad said, dinging his fork against the side of his plate and nodding at my empty seat. “I'm famished. Wash your hands and get over here.” The Lockwoods were like that: we ate dinner together like a family in a Norman Rockwell painting, only without the overly happy faces populating the table. It wasn't that we were unhappy. We just weren't the best examples of glee.

The conversation during dinner that evening revolved around the roads department, as usual, since my dad and Toby were still stewing in their daily work stresses. That night their complaints centered on their boss, who my dad, in private, always called a corrupt politician. My mom didn't join in. She never took part in these types of discussions. She'd just sit there and listen as she cut her steak or as she lifted a forkful of baked potato. She wasn't much for talk of work, and she was even less interested in politics, which she always called “a petty game played by petty people,” in a tone that made it sound like she blamed politics for all the world's problems. She preferred the domestic world: the house, the garden, the farm, her family.

I never had much to say in these dinner conversations either. Like my mom's, my life was limited to just a few social spheres. I'd go to school and then come home to do work around the farm for my dad. And because of that, I wasn't in any after-school clubs, so I didn't have much to add. Probably my dad thought this was normal because it was how he'd grown up. Once a month I'd attend a 4-H meeting he insisted I go to, and I'd sit in a circle of kids from local farms, listening to speakers talk about cuts of beef. This wasn't interesting to anyone except my dad, who hoped 4-H would keep me on the farm as an adult, which I didn't really want, to be honest, so I usually kept quiet at dinner. I didn't want him to know how I felt. I didn't want to invite any arguments. Arguments with my dad were unwinnable.