The Wonders of the Invisible World Read Online Free PDF Page A

Krupa next door as “my sister’s boy” rather than “my nephew” because it sounded more folksy, and because
nephew
seemed like a euphemism for
catamite.
    But a playdate crisis was bound to come sooner or later. You can’t lock a kid up and never let him make any friends—which in fact would look more suspicious than anything. So maybe they could go to Caleb’s house.
Or
come here, with Mrs. Bishop as duenna.
    Billy thought at first that Deke might need psychiatric care and feeding. (Maybe Cassie’s sticking him in his room in front of the TV hadn’t been such a bad idea, considering what hemight otherwise have seen.) But he seems fine—if Billy’s any judge of what’s fine—simply having a routine and getting some attention. He doesn’t even appear to suffer from TV withdrawal, and asked only once if he could watch
The X-Files.
Billy said it wasn’t on until after his bedtime, so why didn’t they play Candyland instead. And Deke was fine with it. Billy’s rule is, if Deke brings something up, they talk. If and only if.
    A couple of days after he got here, Deke asked when he was going to see Mommy, and even Billy recognized this as a cue. “You must miss her,” he said. Hey, no shit.
    “I don’t know,” Deke said. “Sometimes.”
    “Well, it’s going to be a while longer,” Billy said. “But I called her at the hospital this morning, and she said be sure and tell you she misses you, too.”
    Deke frowned. Billy could guess what he was thinking: if he missed her and she missed him, then what the hell was going on? But he didn’t ask any more questions.
    Billy
had
talked to Cassie that morning; that much was true. She’d warned him not to trust Deke because he was a “star baby.” She meant a changeling left by aliens; the real Deke was on some star being dissected alive.
    “A star?” Billy had stupidly said. “Or a planet?”
    “Oh,” she’d said. “The stickler. You stick it in your boyfriends’ asses, and then they stick it in you. And you call it the life of Riley.”
    When Billy left New York, his teaching job, his lover and the cats, the forsythias were starting. Now the trees are bare again; out in the country, orange pumpkins litter the brown fields. This morning, while shaving, he noticed there’s only a speck on his earlobe where his earring used to be.
    He sleeps in his parents’ bedroom: bizarre, but less so than it would’ve been to move back into his own little room acrossthe hall and leave the big bedroom empty. They probably conceived him in this bed, but it’s like the time his father took the family to Gettysburg: long ago something happened on this spot, but now so what? He’s put Deke in
his
old room, which his father cleaned out and repainted as soon as he went off to Brown. Cassie’s room still has her single bed with the dust ruffle, her big old teddy bear Weezer, her books from
Pippi Longstocking
through
Lady Sings the Blues.
Deke will stay in there for hours, going through drawers, exploring the closetful of toys. Once, while outside raking leaves, Billy watched him through the window. He’d hauled out this old game of Cassie’s called Operation, where you touch different body parts with this penlike thing and tiny bulbs light up. He’d knelt on the floor, touching this spot and that—Billy couldn’t see what—and moving his lips: a healing ceremony for his mother? When Billy moved closer to the window, he could hear that Deke was singing “The Ants Go Marching One by One.”
    Last Christmas they were all in this house, in their former configurations. Mom was still alive, still well enough to get the stepladder out of the garage and string the colored lights on the twin spruces flanking the front walk. (She never took them down, and Billy’s of two minds about whether to plug them in come December.) Cassie and Deke had driven out from Boston, and Billy and Mark had taken the train up from the city after throwing their own Christmas party, at which