I can't deal with this alone, Jake thought. I need perspective.
The kid glanced at him in alarm, as though he had read Jake's mind.
"You can't tell anyone I'm here," the boy said quickly, his french toast forgotten. He shifted his chair and it squeaked on the floor. Whatever else he was, the kid was tangible. Solid flesh and blood.
"Explain that to me," Jake said. "Why not?"
The kid glanced away. "If they know I'm here, they'll come for me. I just … I want to stay with you."
"You talked about them before. But you haven't said who they are."
The boy shuddered. His lower lip pushed out, not in a childish pout but on the verge of tears. It hit Jake in the gut. He thought of all the times he had cried in the months after Isaac's death, promising that if God would just give his little brother back, he would be so much kinder to him.
"No, hey," Jake said, moving away from the counter at last.
He slid into a chair across from the boy, but Isaac looked away.
Isaac. He had thought of the boy as Isaac. Emotion roiled inside him, a swirl of hope and fear and wonder and sorrow that made him feel sick and elated all at once.
"It's okay," Jake said. "You've been through something. I'm not sure what I really believe, but I believe that much. We don't have to talk about this now. It can keep a little while."
The boy lifted his gaze, his eyes full of hope. "You promise?"
"I do. For now, I do."
When the kid went right back to hungrily demolishing his french toast, Jake could only smile. Why, he wondered, was it so easy to pray to God for miracles but so hard to accept one when it had been granted?
Was that truly what had happened? Had he been granted a miracle? And what did it mean for life and death … and afterlife? The kid that sat across from him with a frothy hot-chocolate mustache had to be some kind of ghost, but he was tangible and solid and alive.
"Are you … reincarnated?" Jake said.
Isaac gave a shrug. "I don't know what that means."
"You know my brother … you know that you died?"
The boy's face fell. He slouched in his chair a little and nodded, pushing away his plate. He'd lost his appetite.
"You have Isaac's voice but not his face. Were you just … dead for a while … and then you were born again to a different family?"
Isaac's eyes lit up-and it seemed okay, somehow, to start thinking of them as Isaac's eyes.
"That's it," the boy said, tapping the table. "That's what happened. Is that re-in … "
"Reincarnated. Yeah."
Jake fell silent. He had more questions, like how old the boy had been when he realized that he had lived another life. Had he always had his old memories or had they come to him gradually? Jake let out a breath of amazement, trying to wrap his head around the whole thing.
Isaac started twisting up the paper napkin Jake had given him. It frayed a little and he began to tear it apart.
"You can't tell anyone, Jake. Especially not Mom."
"Why not?"
Isaac looked up at him, his eyes suddenly older, tired, and weighted down with difficult knowledge.
"Most people wouldn't believe you," Isaac said. "They'd think you were crazy, right? And even if they did believe you … it's just got to be our secret. It's not safe for either of us if you tell."
He said "tell" the way that little boys always did, as in "I'm going to tell."
"What about Mom?" Jake asked. "Why can't I-"
"I want her to know," Isaac interrupted. "More than anything. I want to see her. That would be … " He began to well up with tears again. "But not yet, okay? She thinks I'm dead, just like you did. We need to think about it, figure out the best way to talk to her about it. I'm afraid if we just, y'know, spring it on her, she might have a heart attack or something."
Jake hesitated, but one look at the emotion filling the boy's face made his decision easy.
"Okay. We wait."
Two hours later, Jake sat on the couch, struggling with the promises he'd made. Isaac's small body lay curled next to him, totally conked out. The kid slept the same way he'd eaten breakfast-as if he hadn't done it in years. They had talked and talked, both about their childhood together and about Jake's life now. The conversation had never for a moment lost the dreamlike sheen that had surrounded them from the moment of their first encounter that morning. Despite the persuasiveness of the kid's voice and memories and solidity, Jake kept waiting for someone to jump out and tell him he'd been punked. As a child he'd been fascinated by magicians, loved watching them and trying to figure out the trick. This felt much the same.
Isaac snored lightly. His mouth hung open and a tiny string of drool lay across his cheek. He looked as if he could sleep forever.
Jake glanced at the television, marveling at the cartoon images on Nickelodeon. Talking to Isaac had been surreal enough, but after they'd spoken for a while, the kid had asked if they could watch something. Sitting there on the couch watching cartoons with his dead brother as if there was nothing extraordinary about it … that had been the most surreal moment of all.
He didn't want to get up. Didn't know what he'd do with himself. How could he have a normal conversation with anyone right now?
Isaac's dirty sneakers were pushed up against his thigh. Jake felt the pressure, the confirmation of reality. But as he sat there with the soft snoring of the reincarnated boy for company, he could not help but begin to wonder about the nature of reality. Back in high school, one of his friends had suffered a serious psychotic break, thought that aliens were monitoring his every conversation and that the entire government was a vast, conspiratorial network of collaborators serving alien overlords. The jokes had been nonstop, but Jake had never thought it was funny. He knew the little psycho-Jeff Tanner-pretty well. He'd seen the fear and confusion and paranoia in Tanner's eyes. With therapy and serious drugs, Tanner had recovered.
The question, as Jake now saw it, was whether or not his brain had gone "full Tanner," as the kids at Coventry High had often said when someone started acting crazy or belligerent.
Jake looked at the sleeping boy beside him and smiled. Isaac's nose remained swollen from whatever had bloodied him that morning, but he still looked pretty adorable, snoozing away and drooling. If this was a psychotic break, it was an incredibly detailed bit of imagination.
A thought struck him and he rose from the couch. Isaac slept on undisturbed as Jake strode into the little dining room. Like so many rooms in the house, this one was unfinished. Capped wires jutted from the ceiling where a chandelier belonged. The walls had been painted an antique-rose hue but he'd left the plates off the outlets. The floors needed to be done, and the table and chairs were much too obviously a set he'd picked up from a yard sale.
His camera sat with some of his equipment on the scratched and uneven table. Jake grabbed the camera and left the still-unfinished room. Perhaps, he had begun to think, it was not meant to be a dining room. Time would tell.
Returning to the couch, he raised the camera and studied the boy who might be Isaac through the viewfinder. He snapped a picture and then three more in quick succession, afraid that the tiny noises would wake the boy, but Isaac did not stir. Tapping the button on the back of the camera, he scanned back through the photos he'd taken. Isaac showed up in all of them, looking no different from the way he looked to the naked eye. He wasn't a vampire, at least, but as for a figment of the imagination, Jake could not be certain. If all this was some psychotic episode, what did the camera prove?
Nothing.
He set his camera on the coffee table and picked up the remote control, settling back onto the couch, careful not to rouse Isaac. After a storm he usually liked to be outside taking pictures. Today would have been the perfect day for it, warm sun melting ice and snow all over town, but instead the gauzy drapes were drawn to keep out prying eyes. Isaac had pleaded with him and Jake had thought it a small concession. The kid had obviously suffered some kind of trauma. He would speak about it when he felt comfortable enough. Until then, Jake just had to keep from going nuts.
Aiming the remote, he started surfing channels in search of a movie or one of the home-improvement shows he always thought would inspire him to complete some of his projects around the house. He bounced through a couple of news stations as well and landed on a flick with a young Denzel Washington before he froze and started back through the channels.
Hurrying through the news stations he had seen a photograph of a boy, a familiar face, for it belonged to the kid sleeping on the couch beside him. A terrible car accident in the middle of the storm, a Mercedes upside down, half submerged on the edge of the Merrimack River. Husband and wife dead. Police searching for their son, Zachary Stroud.
Isaac had been reborn as Zachary Stroud.
Local police and volunteers were searching for him. The state police were putting divers into the river, though the current might have carried the boy miles beneath the frozen surface, at least according to the news anchor.
Only the current hadn't carried the boy anywhere. He was asleep on Jake's couch.
A terrible paralysis gripped him. Jake stared at the television, not wanting to look at Isaac-at Zachary Stroud-not wanting to think about all the people searching for this boy. Divers in the river. Relatives who'd already lost the boy's parents and didn't know the kid was alive. Alive and safe. Snoring on Jake Schapiro's couch.