Wonders of the Invisible World (7 page)

Forty-five minutes later, we strolled into the mall like two cowboys busting through the swinging doors of a saloon, looking up and around at the vaulted ceiling, at the illuminated fountains, gawking at the Niles city kids who hung out in clusters at various stations: in the sunken garden, in the arcade, on the marbled steps of the platform where the carousel turned round and round, the horses going up and down, riderless, behind them.

Stepping into the mall was always a bit like going to Disney World. I was used to Times Square Café, the Dairy Oasis, the county fair's two midways, fields of corn and soybeans, Sugar Creek winding through town on its way down to Yankee Lake. The denizens of the mall in Niles might as well have been costumed characters putting on a play. And there were lots of different types of characters, even ones I hadn't anticipated. Like Gilbert Humphrey.

We were in the food court, sitting in a vast archipelago of white and yellow tables, sipping supersized Cokes, when Jarrod asked, “Is that guy over there what I think he is?”

“Which guy?” I said, looking over my shoulder.

“Don't!” Jarrod whispered. “Damn it, he's spotted us. Here he comes.”

“Who?”
I said, still not understanding.

Out of the milling crowd of teenagers and mothers pulling children in tow, saying no to all the toy stores they passed, came a local army recruiter. He seemed to materialize a few feet from our table, as if beamed down by a starship, wearing a uniform and a smile, standing tall and proud. “Hey, guys,” he said, like we were old friends, and before I could blink, he stood at the edge of our table. “Gilbert Humphrey, army recruitment. You boys look like you're getting ready to graduate.”

I nodded. Jarrod shrugged.

“Well, that's great,” said Gilbert Humphrey. “That's good you boys are about to make it out into the world. Bet you're glad school's almost done?”

I nodded again. Jarrod shrugged again. “Sure,” we said in unison.

“What are you all going to do now?” Gilbert asked, and I could tell immediately where he was going with this.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “I figure I'll take the rest of the school year to think it over.”

“Good,” said Gilbert, nodding. “No hasty decisions.” And then, since I'd made myself unavailable, he looked Jarrod up and down, spotting potential in his athletic form. “What about you?”

“No idea,” said Jarrod. “I'll probably do the same as him.” He gestured at me with his tower of Coke. We were playing Hot Potato, I realized, throwing Gilbert Humphrey's attention back and forth between us.

“Well, in case you boys don't already have this, here's an information packet.” He handed us thick envelopes and we said thanks without looking at them. “We have all sorts of things you guys could do. Want to go to another country? Drive a tank? Amazing stuff out there in the world. Real different from here. And women? Let me tell you about the women.”

“Thanks, Gilbert,” Jarrod said as he scraped his chair back and stood. “We've got to go meet some friends, but it's been nice.” Jarrod looked down at me and I stood up like a soldier who's received an order.

“My number's in the envelope,” Gilbert said as we walked away.

And when we finally made it out of his range, I said, “That was awkward.”

“Sorry,” Jarrod said. “I should have pulled you out of your seat when I first saw him. Those guys can be persistent.”

“He'll never get anyone to sign up like that,” I said.

“Sure he will,” Jarrod said. “Even being that annoying, he'll get people. If this place wasn't full of cattle, though, I don't know how he'd convince anyone.”

“Cattle?”

Jarrod nodded. “This whole place—not enough jobs around to give people hope of making a life here, just enough to keep people breeding kids who have nowhere to go but into Gilbert Humphrey's waiting arms. They've got themselves a real army farm here.”

“You really think so?” I said. I'd never heard Jarrod sound like this. Like he held some kind of a grudge against the world.

Jarrod looked at me with raised brows, like he couldn't believe I was so stupid. “How does it work on your dad's farm?” he asked. When I didn't answer, he looked almost guilty about even asking the question. “Come on,” he said. “Let's just get out of this place.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever you want,” Jarrod said. “We could go to the moon, for all I care.”

We didn't go to the moon. Instead we drove out of Niles. Took Route 422 east to Youngstown, where the little roadside shopping plazas fell away, to be replaced by boarded-up factories and the collapsing remains of steel mills that had been built along the Mahoning River decades before we arrived in the world. This was our inheritance, these shambling buildings. They'd been left behind to rot in the brown fields of dead earth they once loomed over, their insides gutted like the deer carcasses my dad and Toby brought home from their hunts.

“Where are we headed?” I asked Jarrod, who had fallen silent several miles back. Now he sat in his seat with pent-up emotion smoldering inside him. I could almost see the embers and smoke through his eyes.

“Just keep going until I tell you where to turn,” he said, nodding his chin straight ahead before turning to look out his window.

I wondered what was on his mind that had made him so sullen so quickly, but I didn't press him. One thing I'd figured out fast about Jarrod was that his moods could take a left turn at any time, without any apparent reason, and usually when that happened he gave off a vibe that said more than words. The vibe said,
Back off.

So I backed off.

I worried, though, that the reason he seemed able to fall into such a dark place was somehow connected to me. To something I wasn't saying or doing that he wanted me to say, or wanted me to do. Like there was a script out there for us, but I wasn't saying my lines. When I was around him, I felt like a man groping in the dark for a light switch.

We only drove a couple more miles before Jarrod perked up and said, “Here. Take a right here,” and followed that up with a few more directions.

I drove off the highway into a residential neighborhood where old narrow row houses stood side by side like faded soldiers, and a few turns later, after Jarrod told me to stop, I had pulled into one of the parking lots of Mill Creek Park.

When I killed the Blue Bomb's engine, I looked over at Jarrod and asked, “Why here?”

“Time travel,” said Jarrod. One corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk; then he opened his door and jumped out into the late-afternoon sun.

We walked from the lot into a large garden with a round stone fountain at its center. A gazebo was perched on a hill in the distance, and to our right a squared row of hedges held an old-fashioned rose garden inside it like a secret. At the far edge of the place was a wrought-iron railing that barred people from going any farther, and beyond the railing was a cliff that slid down to Lake Glacier, where even that late in autumn we could see a canoe skimming across the surface like a water insect. Otherwise, the place was empty.

“Time travel?” I said, once we were sitting on a bench near the fountain.

“You don't remember what happened in this place?” Jarrod asked. His eyes widened a little, but not like he was angry with me. More like he was trying to pull something out of me. Something I didn't know I had inside me.

I shook my head. I hadn't been in this park for years—it was a bit of a drive from Temperance—and what memories I had of Mill Creek were packed in the vague, cottony cloud of my childhood.

“Why don't you take a look at that fountain for a minute,” he suggested, and I turned to see where he was pointing.

It was an ordinary fountain, as far as I could tell: a circular stone basin with one main font in the center, smaller ones ringing it, their jets sending up a frothy spray over and over on a timer. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be seeing that was so extraordinary, but just as I was about to say that, Jarrod put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

“Just keep looking into the water,” he said. “Don't think about anything in particular. Just look. Just see.”

I did what he said, even though I thought he was setting me up for some kind of prank. But as I stared at the fountains going up and down, the light began to change, lowering from late-afternoon amber to a lavender dusk. It was the time of day I'd once heard my grandma call the gloaming. It was her favorite time, she used to say, when night and day met for a brief visit, before passing each other on their way to the other side of the world.

The fountain continued to spray, and the sound of its rising and falling began to lull me into a daze. My head was thick with the rhythms of sleep and dreaming, but right before I was about to give up on this experiment of Jarrod's, I saw something—or someone—through the curtain of water.

Two boys. Two boys emerged from around a corner of the rose garden hedgerows to enter the circle of benches around the fountain, and they sat down directly across from us, the fountain spraying between us. The fountain lowered a moment later, and I could see them again. Two kids, no more than twelve or thirteen. One with shaggy brown hair and dark eyes, the other with trimmed curls and green eyes like mine.

They
were
mine, actually, those eyes. Those boys were us—me and Jarrod—I realized as they leaned toward one another to talk conspiratorially, ignoring us, as if they couldn't see their older selves sitting across the fountain.

I opened my mouth to say something, but Jarrod's hand on my shoulder squeezed harder. “Do you see something?” he whispered, hopeful. I nodded and whispered yes. “Good,” he said. “Don't say anything. Just keep watching.”

The boys were talking about something that upset one of them—the younger Jarrod—and my younger self was telling him not to worry. “It'll be okay,” little Aidan Lockwood said, and I almost blushed to hear how I sounded as a kid, my voice still squeaky. “Here,” he said to the younger Jarrod, and placed his hand in Jarrod's. “Let me show you, so you'll know how it will be.” Then both boys closed their eyes and slumped back against the bench, as if all the life had gone out of them in an instant.