Black House

all. Some of them are very intelligent. I’ve had conversations in here that were a lot more interesting than the ones in my church group or the PTA. Maybe I should have come to Ward D sooner! Being here has helped me learn some things.”

“Like what?”

“Like there are many different ways to get lost, for one, and getting lost is easier to do than anyone ever admits. The people in here can’t hide how they feel, and most of them never found out how to deal with their fear.”

“How are you supposed to deal with that?”

“Why, you deal with it by taking it on, that’s how! You don’t just say, I’m lost and I don’t know how to get back—you keep on going in the same direction. You put one foot in front of the other until you get more lost. Everybody should know that. Especially you, Jack Sawyer.”

“Especial—” Before he can finish the question, an elderly woman with a lined, sweet face appears beside him and touches his shoulder.

“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