“No. I don’t think it was a dream. I don’t usually remember scary dreams.”
“Some you remember and some you don’t.” She looked tired, and Jacob wondered about those nights when he woke in fright and saw his parents standing over him. She looked tired but also sad, and sometimes he would catch her just staring out the window into the trees for long periods of time – the same trees the strange man disappeared into each night. He wondered what she was thinking. He wondered if maybe she had seen the man, too. Or maybe she knew him and that was why he seemed familiar.
“I’ll keep an eye out for anything, okay?” she said. “But if you see him again, you come and tell me and show me, okay? It might just be one of the neighbors.”
The police had been here yesterday because some animal put scratches in the door. The police were big, strong in their stiff uniforms, and Jacob, like most boys, focused almost exclusively on their guns, the shape of them in those holsters, wanting to one day be able to proudly walk around with that kind of power at his fingertips. He didn’t know why; he just did. Daddy had guns, but they were locked up in the basement and he hardly ever took them out, except for this week when he went on a trip.
Jacob had watched his father clean those guns one time. He took them out of the safe and methodically, silently went over them bit by bit, taking them apart and wiping the metal with a rag and spraying its precise parts with a can of special oil that gave off a smell and left Jacob with a headache. He wanted to hold them, to feel the metal and pretend to shoot bad guys.
“Some other time,” Daddy said. “When you’re older.” Jacob wondered if that would ever happen. Daddy would always say ‘later’ when Jacob wanted to do something with him, and later never seemed to come. His father would just sit on the couch, drinking from one of his ‘Daddy drinks’ until after Jacob went to bed. It was like lying, but not quite. That was the strange thing about his father – he always seemed to be lying, to be hiding something. It was nothing that Jacob could actually point to and say ‘liar’ but just a feeling that there was some great big secret and everyone knew it but him.
But his father was gone now on his hunting trip, and for some reason Jacob felt a sense of relief, as if he could breathe easier without this large, lumbering man who seemed to be angry all the time, stalking around inside the house. At least the man from the woods was outside, beyond locked doors and windows.
It was Friday morning, and Jacob ate a bowl of cereal grown soggy with milk. His mother was drinking coffee and tapping on her phone with her thumb. It was almost seven thirty in the morning, and she finally told him to get ready for school. Jacob tried in vain every morning to pretend school wasn’t coming, but his mother always remembered, always told him it was time to get ready and go, and then he would wander out into the cold, walk to the corner with the stop sign and wait with the other kids for the big, yellow bus. His mother would watch him some mornings from the driveway. Other mornings when it was too cold, she would sit with him in the car at the corner. Jacob didn’t like school. It was a lot of sitting, being forced to do work, being made to pay attention to things that didn’t interest him. He liked his imagination. He liked to spend all day in his room, imagining adventures, playing with Legos, creating worlds in which he was a powerful hero bent on overcoming an enemy and saving the day.
School was strange. The teachers, the other kids, all seemed to be in on some big secret, too. They all seemed to know so much more than him, even the kids in his same grade. They gathered in circles and talked and laughed, and Jacob generally had no idea what they were talking about and why it was funny. He tried to laugh along, to pretend that he was part of it, that he knew about a particular television show or video game, but he didn’t, and it usually showed fairly quickly; the other kids would look at him as if he were an alien and move on. He was invariably left out. Jacob asked his parents for a phone like his mother and father had, but they refused. He asked for a video game system, but they said they didn’t have the money. He asked to watch particular movies, but was only shown movies for little kids. He was left out of the know; everyone else had a head start and Jacob couldn’t catch up.
The teachers were nice enough, but they insisted he do work and learn things that all seemed foreign. Perhaps he was an alien, accidentally left here for some reason, or transported from some other time and place, the same way he would close his eyes and wake in fright in some other part of the house.
Jacob wasn’t sure where he was from, what he was doing in this world. He didn’t feel a part of it. He didn’t really feel a part of his family. His father seemed angry about something, his mother tired and sad and he, above all else, felt alone with the feeling that something wasn’t right.
Jacob dropped his shoulders, cleared his bowl and spoon, and shuffled off to his room to put on the clothes his mother had laid out for him the night before. His room was bright with sunlight now. He
