Then I called the same number and asked for Michael instead.
Michael picked me up in his father’s old car, and we headed west. For half an hour or so we drove aimlessly, talking. Michael’s hair looked even longer than on Halloween, and he wore old jeans and a black t-shirt under a moth-eaten sweater. I thought he looked wonderful.
Michael said he hated school. He hated America, too, but he also loved it. He talked on and on about politics, and I nodded from time to time, secretly a little bored. He handed me a paperback copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac and said I must read it.
Finally he pulled the car into an old cemetery, the Gideon Putnam. “This place is supposed to be haunted,” he said.
I looked out the car window. It was a bleak November day, the sky an opaque mass of gray clouds. The cemetery grounds were covered in dead leaves, interrupted by mausoleums, crosses, and statues. An obelisk served as monument for one grave, and I wondered idly who might be buried under such an imposing object. Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I’d never considered before, and I was about to ask Michael’s opinion when he leaned over and kissed me.
We’d had kisses before, of course. But today his lips felt unusually warm, and he held me harder and closer. It’s not easy describing kisses without sounding soppy or stupid. What I want to convey is that this kiss was important. It left me feeling out of breath and dizzy (another stupid word, one that I use too often). When he initiated a second kiss, I had to pull away. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
He looked at me as if he understood. I didn’t know why I’d said it, actually. But he held me not so tightly for a minute or so until we’d both calmed down.
He said, “I love you, Ari. I love you and I want you. I don’t want anyone else to have you.”
From reading, I knew that the first time someone declares love is meant to be special, almost magical. But in my head, a voice (not my own) was saying, “Ari, the whole world is going to have you.”
“Someone is watching me,” I told my father the next day.
He was wearing a particularly beautiful shirt, the color of smoke, with black enamel buttons and onyx cuff-links. It made his eyes seem gray.
He looked up from the physics book he’d opened, and his gray eyes looked shy, almost embarrassed, as if he’d heard my thought. “Someone is watching you,” he said. “Do you know who it is?”
I shook my head. “Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Are you able to define chromism and isomerization?” In this way he changed the subject, or so I thought at the time.
The next morning I awoke from another crossword-puzzle dream with two clues — “sea cow” (seven letters) and “snakebird” (seven letters). I shook my head, trying to recover the grid, but I couldn’t visualize it. So I dressed and went down for breakfast with a familiar sense of frustration at the limits of my intelligence.
For weeks I’d noticed that Mrs. McG seemed distracted. The morning oatmeal was more burnt than usual, and the evening casseroles some nights were inedible.
That morning, as she was taking a saucepan of oatmeal from the stove, she dropped it. The pan hit and bounced, and the glutinous cereal splatted against the linoleum and spattered her shoes. Aside from a quick inward breath, she barely reacted. She simply went to the sink and came back with towels.
“I’ll help,” I said, feeling guilty at my glee that I wouldn’t have to eat the stuff.
She sat back on her heels and looked up at me. “Ari,” she said, “I do need your help. But not with this.”
She cleaned up the mess and came to sit with me at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you spend time with Kathleen these days?” she said.
“She’s too busy,” I said. “With school stuff — you know, the play, and the band, and all.”
Mrs. McG shook her head. “She dropped out of the play,” she said. “And she quit her flute lessons. She’s even stopped nagging me to buy her a cell phone. She’s changed, and she makes me worry.”
I hadn’t seen Kathleen since Halloween. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“I wish you would call her.” Her hands scratched her forearms, on which I noticed a reddish rash. “I wish you’d come and spend the night. Maybe this weekend?”
I agreed to give Kathleen a call.
“Mrs. McG, have you ever seen a photo of my mother?” I hadn’t planned to ask that question, but it was something I’d been thinking about.
“No, I never have,” she said slowly. “But there might be something in the attic. That’s where they put all her things. When I first started working here, Miss Root and Dennis were gathering them up for storage.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Clothing and books, mostly. Your mother apparently was quite a reader.”
“What sorts of books?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back away from the table. “You might want to ask your father about that.”
I excused myself and headed upstairs. The staircase to the third story was uncarpeted, and my footsteps sounded loud as I went up. But the attic door was locked.
So I went on up the final set of stairs, the air growing colder with each step. The top of the house was uninviting, always too hot or too cold, but today the cold didn’t bother me.
Inside the cupola, I sat on a tall stool set before the oculus window — my round eye on the world — and looked out, over the rooftops of our neighbors and across the gray sky into the blue beyond. Beyond the houses, beyond the city of Saratoga Springs, lay a vast world, waiting to be explored.
I thought of the great-grandmother in The Princess and the Goblin, who lived in a rose-scented, transparent-walled room lit by its own moon, set high above the world. She gave her great-granddaughter, the Princess, a ball of invisible thread that led her out of peril, away from the goblins, back to the rose-scented room.
Like me, the Princess had lost her mother. But she had the thread.
“Do you ever dream crossword puzzles?” I asked my father when we met later that day.
For a second his face froze — the numb expression it normally wore when I tried to talk about my mother.
I answered my own question. “She did, didn’t she? My mother. She dreamed crosswords.”
“She did.” He said such dreams were signs of an “overactive mind.” He advised that I massage my feet lightly before retiring.
And then he launched into another physics lesson.
We were deep in a discussion of electromagnetic radiation phenomena when someone knocked on the door, then opened it slightly. Root’s ugly face appeared in the crack.
“The delivery man needs to talk to you,” she said. She kept her eyes on my father, not even glancing at me.
“Excuse me, Ari.” My father rose and left the room.
When he didn’t return, I went to the window and pushed aside its heavy drapes. A black car was parked in the yard near the house’s rear entrance. On its side were the words “Sullivan Family Funeral Home.”
About ten minutes passed before I heard the door open again. I was standing before a brass-framed oval Victorian shadowbox that hung on the wall. Inside it, encapsulated for eternity, were three brown wrens, a monarch butterfly, and two sheaves of wheat. But I wasn’t looking at them — I was studying my wavy reflection in the convex glass that held them in.
Root’s voice came from behind me. “He says to tell you he won’t be back today,” she said. “He says he’s sorry.”
As I turned around I thought that I should apologize to her, but her tone of voice was so contemptuous that I knew I never would. “Why can’t he come back?” I asked.
“He’s needed downstairs.” Her breathing made a raspy sound.
“Why? For what?”
Her small black eyes flashed at me. “That’s Seradrone’s business. Why do you ask so many questions? Don’t you realize the trouble you cause?” She moved toward the door, but as she opened it, she turned her head. “And why waste your time looking at your reflection? You know who you are.”
She slammed the door as she left. For a moment I fantasized about going after her, yanking her chin hairs, slapping her — or doing something worse.
Instead, I went upstairs and called Kathleen.
“My school has been cancelled today,” I told her.
As I pushed my bicycle along the gravel driveway that led from the garage to the street, I noticed that the car from the funeral home was gone. Perhaps my father was on his way upstairs again. I hesitated, but decided to press on. Kathleen was waiting for me.
It was a dull day in mid-November, the smell of dead leaves in the air. As I rode through the streets, the wind stung my face. Soon we would have snow, and the bicycle would stay in the garage until April, or even May.
As soon as I entered the soda shop I saw her, sitting in a booth. She wore a black sweater and black pants, and she was drinking coffee. I sat down and ordered a cola.
“That’s an interesting necklace,” I said. A round silver pendant hung from a silk cord, next to the flannel bag of herbs.
“It’s a pentacle,” she said. “Ari, I have to tell you. I’ve become a pagan.”
The server brought my soda. I unwrapped the straw slowly, not sure what to say. “That could mean several things,” I said finally.
Kathleen ran her hands through her hair. Her fingernails were painted black, and her hair looked freshly dyed. Next to her, in my fleece jacket and jeans, I felt dull and ordinary.
“We practice spells,” she said. “And we’re into role-playing.”
I had no idea what role-playing meant. “Is that why your mother is worried about you?”
“My mother!” Kathleen shook her head. “She’s impossible lately. She really doesn’t have a clue.” She took a long sip of coffee, which also was black.
I couldn’t drink that stuff, and I watched her with awe.
“She found one of my notebooks and got all alarmed about it.”
Kathleen reached into a battered backpack on the seat next to her, and pulled out a spiral notebook with a black cover. She opened it, and slid it across the table to me.
Under the heading Magick Chants was written what looked like poetry.