The Mostly True Story of Jack (28 page)

He cleared his throat, but the sound didn’t come from the mirror. It came from the ground, from the breeze, from the blades of grass underfoot. It was everywhere.

“You!”
Jack’s voice thrummed through the air. It was as though each leaf, each flower, each blade of grass was yelling with one voice. “You left me alone!” The women stared at the boy in the mirror. Their mouths hung open. The edges of their bodies grew bright and blurry.

“
Get me the Avery boy!
” the Lady shouted, but Jack shook his head.

“No, Mom. You can’t give me away again. You already said
yours
, remember? What’s done is done. The Magic won’t give You a second chance. Only
I
can do that.” Two hands—both brown and woody, like the branches of a young tree, reached out of the mirror, grabbing both
Lady and Other by their arms. The Lady struggled and tried to pull away, but Jack held on tight.

“But it doesn’t matter
what
You did, because now
I
get to choose, and I’m taking back what belongs to me. I choose You, Mom. Both halves of You. You’re supposed to be whole, and You’re supposed to love me. And I’m supposed to be Your son. And You’re mine, do You hear me? Mine!” Jack shouted, his voice raw and ragged around the edges. “
You are mine!
”

The Lady screamed. The Other sighed. And, with a grunt and a terrific tug, Jack pulled the two of them inside.

The mirror rippled and flowed like water around their bodies, and both Lady and Other merged into one. It began with their torsos, then their waving arms, then their legs. Their heads remained separate until the last possible moment, as the Lady screamed and bit, and the Other began to sing, until finally they melded together in a bright flash. A column of light burst from the ground and shot up to the sky. Jack’s mother—his true mother, his
whole
mother—blinked. She stopped screaming, stopped singing, and stood perfectly still. Silence spread across the ruined yard and rested heavily on the debris-strewn street. She brought Her hands to Her mouth, then Her cheeks, then Her eyes.

“
At last!”
Her voice rumbled across the ground. It blew across the prairie and echoed against the sky. “
AT LAST!
” she shouted. Her voice was explosive and joyful. And then it was gone.

Wendy, Anders, and Frankie ran to the floating mirror. They glanced quickly at one another, and Wendy laid her hand on its surface.

The mirror brightened, shuddered, and shone. It flashed images of green hillsides and multicolored quilts and swelling corn. Standing in the mirror’s image was Jack—mostly. Wendy pressed her hand against the mirror’s surface.

It was Jack as she had never seen him, but Jack as he
was
.

She
knew
it.

Just as she knew that the face in the corn all those years ago meant no harm. Just as she knew that the face in the corn—the one that only she could see—was Jack. His face was the color of bark, and each strand of his hair had flattened and greened, like leaves. Around his head, he wore a crown of acorns. He grinned at them and waved.

“
Don’t go
,” Wendy whispered.

Jack shrugged and grinned again. There was no sound, but the words his mouth formed were unmistakable.

Thank you
, his mouth said.

Just as the picture faded—in the moment before the mirror vanished from sight—they saw a woman appear behind him. She wrapped her green arms around his brown and green shoulders and spun him around and around.

The image flickered, once, twice. And both Jack and mirror vanished from sight.

“A
H,” SAID
M
ABEL, LOOKING UP FROM A STACK OF BOXES
and a pile of wires, cables, and modems. “Reinforcements. Anders, dear, will you please run around to the loading dock and see whether there are any more boxes? Frankie, why don’t you help your mother assemble those units over there?”

Frankie smiled shyly and sat next to his mother, pouring over the manual and connecting towers and drives and shiny new monitors. Silently, he laid the instructions out over the table, and began connecting wires. Though
he had never done such a thing before, Frankie discovered that the quiet language of circuits and electricity was one that he could understand and manipulate. He liked the idea of a language made of light, whirring messages under his fingers, communicating poetry and mathematics and philosophical discourse in the blink of an eye.

It was four weeks ago that Clive and Mabel’s house was nearly destroyed and Frankie started speaking again. During that time, his scars began to smooth, to lose their redness, and to heal. They would never disappear completely, and would remain, for the rest of his life, as a complicated seal on his cheek, a physical reminder of his brush with death—and worse than death.

They would remind him of Jack too. His friend. Brave and kind, and lost forever as far as Frankie could tell. He shook the thought away and returned to the instructions in the computer manual.

The library hummed with activity and conversation. On one end was the technology team, hastily assembling computers. On another end, people from the town crowded in the local interest section, paging through local history books that had altered of their own accord. Mysterious blank sections suddenly rewrote themselves. Photographs that had once been curiously empty now showed schoolchildren, or mothers holding infants, or an old man standing in front of a freshly built church. And the librarian in charge of records and documents finally
decided to require a numbering system to deal with the crush of people bringing in birth certificates and baptismal records and marriage licenses, all of which, until very recently, had been unaccountably blank.

Frankie smiled at the activity and commotion but said little as he completed the steps laid out in the computer manual. Though it was now common knowledge that he could and should speak, he still found himself shy in large groups. With familiar people, he spoke all the time—to Mabel in the shop, to his sister or Anders on their walks, and curled up with his mother and father, reciting story after story until they drifted asleep and Frankie kissed them both good night.

Anders wheeled in a cart full of boxes and went back for more. Mabel shook her head.

“I believe our dear Mr. Avery has rather overdone it, don’t you agree, Frankie?”

Frankie shrugged, though, in truth, he did agree. Mr. Avery, upon the reunion of his little family, decided to break up the Grain Exchange and Trust into separate entities and sell each one—along with the Avery house—to the highest bidder. That done, he used the proceeds to rebuild Clive and Mabel’s house, to broker a deal for his family’s relocation to the mountains of Colorado, and to purchase an army of computers for the library, the school, and the college, none of which had thought to purchase them before.

In those last days before he moved to the mountains,
Mr. Avery became wildly generous: books for every child, a scholarship fund, a playground, a new nursery school, and an updated clinic. He gave a substantial donation to the Schumachers’ bank account—anonymously, of course, but they knew. Who else had that kind of money? People joked that he just wanted the council not to take down his portrait from the town hall. There were rumors of a commemorative statue.

Clayton hadn’t wanted to leave Hazelwood, and he protested the move until the bitter end. Finally, his mother and Mrs. Fitzpatrick—who had become quite close—agreed that it would be a good idea if Clayton was to spend the following summer with Clive and Mabel, working at the gallery and receiving a tutorial from the old professor. “It’s always best to keep a child connected to his
roots
, don’t you think?” Mrs. Avery said on their final day in town. No one disagreed with her.

Mabel sat down next to Frankie to inspect his work. She laid her hand across Frankie’s knuckles. “And Wendy, dear,” she said. “How is she doing?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I suppose,” he said very quietly. This, of course, was a lie, and Frankie suspected that Mabel knew as much. Still, it felt good to say, and who knew? Perhaps all a person had to do was to say a thing enough times until it became true on its own. Perhaps, if he said that Wendy was okay every day, eventually she
actually would
be
okay. Perhaps wishing could make it so.

Despite the loud arguments at home, where Wendy was apt to shout and throw things and her mother was bound to crumple up and weep, things were close to normal at the Schumacher house. Wendy often bristled at the hovering attentions of her parents, but after three weeks of it, Clive and Mabel were able to convince them that Frankie’s reintegration as a normalized child was more important. Nothing could hurt Wendy anymore.

Nothing, of course, except the impending start of school.

Nothing except the niggling sense of loss for a friend she barely knew.

Nothing except the constant flashes of Jack’s face that appeared in rain-soaked window panes or the surface of puddles or in the face of the pond before it was rippled by a breeze.

He looked happy. Mostly. And it was the
mostly
that bothered Wendy and kept her up at night.

The day before school was set to start, Wendy woke just as the sun rose. The house was quiet and soft with the sounds of openmouthed breathing and the rustle of dreams. Wendy slipped on her sundress and sandals and peeked into Frankie’s room. He was asleep on his back,
his head cradled in his hands. Talking in his sleep. He did it all the time now.

Wendy closed her eyes and smiled. Despite everything—the sadness, the loss, the guilt—she thought she could listen to her brother all day long. And though she had half a mind to wake him up and bring him with her, there were some things that are better done alone. She grabbed the skateboard that had once belonged to Jack—the one that Clive and Mabel gave to her after they retrieved it from the wreckage of their house. They said he would have wanted her to have it. She couldn’t look them in the face, couldn’t even say
thank you
, but she knew they felt her thanks all the same. She rode it every day now, and kept it in her room. It was one of the few things she had to hang on to.

She tiptoed down the stairs, across the kitchen, closed the door behind her with a quiet click, set Jack’s skateboard on the pavement, and skimmed down the road. It never came close to nearly flying for her the way it did for Jack, but still. There was something special about that board.

Across the field, crows gathered in great, black clouds. They rose and swelled against the sky. The gatherings were large already, but by autumn they would enlarge to thousands upon thousands calling to one another, their voices shrill and echoing across the wide, flat land. Wendy passed the elementary school and the college, saw that the vans full of fiber optic technicians had already arrived
and started to work. Her school would now have a computer lab and work stations in each classroom, thanks to Mr. Avery’s parting gift. People called it generosity, but Wendy knew better. If guilt was the reason behind a good deed, was it
still
a good deed? She doubted it.

The gully was chilly and damp, and Wendy wished she had brought a sweatshirt. She considered taking her shoes off, as Anders would have, to see whether she could feel, as he did, the energy and life of the world under the bluff. To see whether—just maybe—she could catch a snippet of Jack’s new life, and perhaps ask him whether it was really—really and truly—the life he would have chosen. But she didn’t have that particular talent, and there was no way for her to know.

At the bottom of the gully, a stream widened into a small, deep pool. She crouched down and peered at the smooth water. Again Jack’s face looked back. She had seen his image, again and again, always in water, always looking up at the sky. His eyes were wide and calm, and while they didn’t seem to see her at all, she could see in his dark pupils a reflection of the clouds slipping away in a limitless sky.

“Jack?” she said tentatively. “Can you hear me?”

“I’m afraid he cannot,” Clive Fitzpatrick said, coming up from behind and, his knees creaking and snapping prodigiously, crouching next to her at the edge of the water.

“But he’s looking at—”

“The sky, yes. I daresay it’s the thing he misses most.”

Wendy felt a sharp stab at her heart. She wiped her leaking eyes with the back of her hand and sniffed deeply. “It’s my fault,” she said. “It’s all my fault.”

“Not at all, my dear,” Clive said, giving her a stiff pat on the shoulder before folding his hands at his knees. “He did what he had to do to undo a terrible wrong. That he was particularly motivated to do so for
your
welfare, well, all the better. Jack has his early memory restored to him, and, more important, his true mother restored to him. Not
just
Her good half or
just
Her bad half either. Instead, She is whole, complicated, and real. She has the same struggles of right and wrong, just like you and me, and what’s more, when She chooses good, for the first time in over a century, it
matters
.

“It’s a great gift to Her, and you helped make that happen. You should be proud.”

Wendy did not feel proud at all. She only felt sick.

“What about Jack,” she said. “What about his choice?” Clive stood, offered his hand to Wendy, who took it. He hooked his arm in hers and they began walking up the slope. “It’s true, he’s dependent on his mother’s wishes and choices, as are all children until they grow. But don’t forget, he chose to take your place. And what’s more, he chose to finally experience the love of his mother. That’s no small thing, after all. But don’t worry. You haven’t seen the last of him. The only question is,
How long?
It is my
greatest hope that I may see that boy again before I die.” His voice caught in his throat and he nearly choked. He tightened his hold on Wendy’s arm and began walking again.

Wendy felt his hand tremble and shake. She wanted to say
something
. Anything, really. But her thoughts jumbled together and her heart felt cold and heavy, and really, there was nothing more to say. She made a friend; she lost a friend; and that was that.