Black House

"Excuse me." She tucks her chin toward her throat with the shyness of a child. "I want to ask you a question. Are you my father?"

Jack smiles at her. "Let me ask you a question first. Is your name Estelle Packard?"

Eyes shining, the old woman nods.

"Then yes, I am your father."

Estelle Packard clasps her hands in front of her mouth, dips her head in a bow, and shuffles backward, glowing with pleasure. When she is nine or ten feet away, she gives Jack a little bye-bye wave of one hand and twirls away.

When Jack looks again at Judy Marshall, it is as if she has parted her veil of ordinariness just wide enough to reveal a small portion of her enormous soul. "You’re a very nice man, aren’t you, Jack Sawyer? I wouldn’t have known that right away. You’re a good man, too. Of course, you’re also charming, but charm and decency don’t always go together. Should I tell you a few other things about yourself ?"

Jack looks up at Fred, who is holding his wife’s hand and beaming. "I want you to say whatever you feel like saying."

"There are things I can’t say, no matter how I feel, but you might hear them anyhow. I can say this, however: your good looks haven’t made you vain. You’re not shallow, and that might have something to do with it. Mainly, though, you had the gift of a good upbringing. I’d say you had a wonderful mother. I’m right, aren’t I?"

Jack laughs, touched by this unexpected insight. "I didn’t know it showed."

"You know one way it shows? In the way you treat other people. I’m pretty sure you come from a background people around here only know from the movies, but it hasn’t gone to your head. You see us as people, not hicks, and that’s why I know I can trust you. It’s obvious that your mother did a great job. I was a good mother, too, or at least I tried to be, and I know what I’m talking about. I can see."

"You say you were a good mother? Why use — "

"The past tense? Because I was talking about before."

Fred’s smile fades into an expression of ill-concealed concern. "What do you mean, ‘before’?"

"Mr. Sawyer might know," she says, giving Jack what he thinks is a look of encouragement.

"Sorry, I don’t think I do," he says.

"I mean, before I wound up here and finally started to think a little bit. Before the things that were happening to me stopped scaring me out of my mind — before I realized I could look inside myself and examine these feelings I’ve had over and over all my life. Before I had time to travel. I think I’m still a good mother, but I’m not exactly the same mother."

"Honey, please," says Fred. "You are the same, you just had a kind of breakdown. We ought to talk about Tyler."

"We are talking about Tyler. Mr. Sawyer, do you know that lookout point on Highway 93, right where it reaches the top of the big hill about a mile south of Arden?"

"I saw it today," Jack says. "Fred showed it to me."

"You saw all those farms that keep going and going? And the hills off in the distance?"

"Yes. Fred told me you loved the view from up there."

"I always want to stop and get out of the car. I love everything about that view. You can see for miles and miles, and then — whoops! — it stops, and you can’t see any farther. But the sky keeps going, doesn’t it? The sky proves that there’s a world on the other side of those hills. If you travel, you can get there."

"Yes, you can." Suddenly, there are goose bumps on Jack’s forearms, and the back of his neck is tingling.

"Me? I can only travel in my mind, Mr. Sawyer, and I only remembered how to do that because I landed in the loony bin. But it came to me that you can get there — to the other side of the hills."

His mouth is dry. He registers Fred Marshall’s growing distress without being able to reduce it. Wanting to ask her a thousand questions, he begins with the simplest one:

"How did it come to you? What do you mean by that?"

Judy Marshall takes her hand from her husband and holds it out to Jack, and he holds it in both of his. If she ever looked like an ordinary woman, now is not the time. She is blazing away like a lighthouse, like a bonfire on a distant cliff.

"Let’s say . . . late at night, or if I was alone for a long time, someone used to whisper to me. It wasn’t that concrete, but let’s say it was as if a person were whispering on the other side of a thick wall. A girl like me, a girl my age. And if I fell asleep then, I would almost always dream about the place where that girl lived. I called it Faraway, and it was like this world, the Coulee Country, only brighter and cleaner and more magical. In Faraway, people rode in carriages and lived in great white tents. In Faraway, there were men who could fly."

"You’re right," he says. Fred looks from his wife to Jack in painful uncertainty, and Jack says, "It sounds crazy, but she’s right."

"By the time these bad things started to happen in French Landing, I had pretty much forgotten about Faraway. I hadn’t thought about it since I was about twelve or thirteen. But the closer the bad things came, to Fred and Ty and me, I mean, the worse my dreams got, and the less and less real my life seemed to be. I wrote words without knowing I was doing it, I said crazy things, I was falling apart. I didn’t understand that Faraway was trying to tell me something. The girl was whispering to me from the other side of the wall again, only now she was grown up and scared half to death."

"What made you think I could help?"

"It was just a feeling I had, back when you arrested that Kinderling man and your picture was in the paper. The first thing I thought when I looked at your picture was, He knows about Faraway. I didn’t wonder how, or how I could tell from looking at a picture; I simply understood that you knew. And then, when Ty disappeared and I lost my mind and woke up in this place, I thought if you could see into some of these people’s heads, Ward D wouldn’t be all that different from Faraway, and I remembered seeing your picture. And that’s when I started to understand about traveling. All this morning, I have been walking through Faraway in my head. Seeing it, touching it. Smelling that unbelievable air. Did you know, Mr. Sawyer, that over there they have jackrabbits the size of kangaroos? It makes you laugh just to look at them."