by N. E. Bode
Finally Fern stopped screaming. The scream had worn itself out, but it had felt very good to Fern, who hadn’t screamed for as long as she could remember. Silence filled the car. It was the kind of silence that follows something extraordinary, out of respect, like when you read the last page of great book, and you close it and just sit there for a moment, completely quiet and still. (Not that you’ll do that after finishing this book; I wouldn’t be so bold as to plant that thought in your mind. No, no, not me!) In any case, it was that kind of silent moment that lingered.
The ex–Mary Curtain was the first to speak. “We aren’t stealing you!” he said.
“No, no! We’d never steal anybody!” said the Bone.
“But you’re dressed like a woman!” Fern said to the ex–Mary Curtain. “And you, you were pretending! Where did you get that tie all of a sudden and what about your slicked-back hair?”
“We’re Anybodies,” the ex–Mary Curtain explained calmly.
“Anybodies?” Fern said.
“We’re a group,” the ex–Mary Curtain said, “of…of…professionals.”
“Professional Anybodies?” Fern asked.
“Exactly!” said the ex–Mary Curtain, as if that explained everything.
The Bone said sharply, “I told you no one knows what Anybodies are.” He glanced back at Fern. “You have no idea what he’s talking about, do you?”
Fern shook her head.
“Most people don’t, you know,” the ex–Mary Curtain said to the Bone. “I mean, if everyone knew about us, we wouldn’t be doing our job very well.”
The Bone said, “Your mother had these gifts as a child.” His voice cracked. Fern thought for a moment he might cry, but he cleared his throat and went on. “Some Anybodies are just born Anybodies. Naturals! And some have to learn it, like us. We’re practiced Anybodies. Your mother…” The Bone paused again. Was he about to cry? He sniffed, rubbed his eyes. “She was a natural, and when she was young, a book came into her possession, a one-of-a-kind book, and it was called The Art of Being Anybody. She was already good, and then she became really, really good. She taught it to me, and I’ve taught it to a few people, a very few.”
“Me, for example,” the ex–Mary Curtain said.
“Howard,” the Bone said. “I tried to teach Howard.”
“And what does an Anybody do?” Fern asked.
“Well, natural Anybodies, who knows? They can do lots of things that I could only imagine. But practiced Anybodies, we can do two things. First: we can be anybody,” the Bone said.
The ex–Mary Curtain interrupted. “For example, today I had to be somebody specific. Mary Curtain. And I was.”
“You mean you can dress up like anybody else and people will believe you? You mean you’re actors?” Fern knew immediately that she’d said something very wrong.
The ex–Mary Curtain erupted, “What? Actors! Please!”
“Actors! HA!” said the Bone. “Can an actor shrink fifteen inches to be a child? The greatest Anybodies of all time could take on the body of a table, of a flea! It’s mysterious. It’s elevated. It’s grand!”
“Oh,” Fern said. She was thinking of the bird that she’d seen get hit by the car and how it shivered into a dog. She wondered if a great Anybody could do that. Could a great Anybody turn into a nun and then a lamppost? Could a great Anybody go from being a bat to a marble or take the shape of a mean, gusty cloud? She decided not to bring up all of that. She decided to keep her questions simple. “What’s the second thing?”
“Well, the second thing was my specialty,” said the Bone. “I could help other people become better versions of themselves.”
“But how?”
“Hypnosis and a deep concentration and something else.”
“What else?”
“We’re not sure. It’s a third ingredient. I used to have it, but now I don’t. So things go a bit off. I’ve got some kinks in the system nowadays. And I’m nothing compared with the greatest, most famous Anybody alive today.” The Bone lowered his voice to a respectful hushed whisper. “The Great Realdo! I’ve met him, two times.”
“And there is the other master, too, don’t forget,” the ex–Mary Curtain said. “The Miser!”
There was a hot moment of silence. Fern remembered the warning Howard had given her: Watch out for the Miser. The Bone slumped down behind the wheel. He said, “There’s no need to talk about him.”
“But he has gotten better and better. And we certainly haven’t, that’s for sure.” The ex–Mary Curtain turned to Fern, confessing, “I was never very talented. Not bad, but never great. Your father was very, very good.”
“The Miser is no Realdo and he never will be!” The Bone seemed winded, almost breathless now. It was clear he didn’t like to talk about the Miser. He said to Fern, “Look, I mean, the truth is: I am your father. That’s the bad news, the sad truth, Fern. I’m a has-been, a washed-up hypnotist, a washed-up Anybody.”
“Oh,” Fern said. She didn’t really understand what an Anybody was, but she knew that being a has-been must be terrible. The Bone seemed to sag under the weight of these failures now. Fern felt sorry for him. It was true that she couldn’t really trust a word the Bone said, but still she wanted to comfort him. That was how she felt. She wanted to tell him that everything was going to be just fine and to maybe pat his head or even hug him. But she hadn’t ever been in this position before. The Drudgers had never needed comforting. They were so self-sufficient, like wind-up toys that could wind themselves and goose-foot on forever. So Fern, not knowing what to do, didn’t do anything about wanting to comfort the Bone.
“You’re not so bad nowadays,” the ex–Mary Curtain said, but it sounded weak.
The Bone looked at him sharply, then said to Fern, “I’m not a very good father. I won’t go around being mushy with you. I don’t believe in all that. I get along in the world just fine without it.”
“That’s okay,” Fern said. The Drudgers weren’t mushy types. Although Fern was relieved that she hadn’t patted the Bone on the head, she was a little disappointed that there would be no mushiness allowed here either—even though it seemed the Bone was often on the edge of tears, which she decided was best to ignore.
“I’m Marty,” said the ex–Mary Curtain, reaching over the seat to offer his hand to Fern, who shook it. “I’ve been friends with the Bone for a long time. My wife and I took care of little Howard until the Bone got out of jail.”
“Oh.” Fern thought she should say thank you, because Marty and his wife would have taken care of her if the babies hadn’t gotten swapped. But it didn’t really make sense to thank him for taking care of her, since he hadn’t. So she asked a question: “Where is Mary Curtain?”
“She lives next door to her mother right here in town. She gave up nursing. That part was definitely true! It helps to sprinkle in the truth,” Marty told her. “It helps give a more convincing performance. Mary Curtain got married. We talked to her and her husband. We had dinner together. She’s a great cook. But she’s an anxious woman. She would’ve never been able to go through with something like this.”
The Bone was quiet, letting Marty chatter. He kept his eyes on the road.
There was a lull in the conversation. Fern was thinking, trying to process everything she’d learned. The Bone piped up. “I just knew you were my daughter. I knew when I saw you.” His voice was soft for a moment, but he didn’t let it stay that way. “Well, it was clear as a bell.”
“But how long have you been planning this? You didn’t lay eyes on me until tonight!”
“Not true. Not true,” said the Bone. “Marty delivered a pizza to your house two weeks ago. And I’m the Good Humor Man you’ve seen. I hate that tinkling music. ‘Home, Home on the Range’—a million times a day.”
So that’s why they had seemed a bit off. Fern didn’t tell them that she’d been suspicious. They both seemed to have fragile egos about their Anybody abilities. But it seemed like those oddities in her life, th
ose inexplicable happenings, might just have been real. “And Howard? What has Howard been?”
“I’m teaching Howard how to hypnotize other people, but he isn’t old enough to do the transformations himself. Howard kept it running. He kept us on track. He had graphs and charts,” the Bone explained.
Fern was putting things together. “Which one of you was the man from the census bureau?”
“What?” the Bone asked. “What bureau?”
“Who?” asked Marty.
“Nothing,” Fern said. No, the man from the census bureau had been a bad force. She thought of the Miser and felt that old dread again. But just then something else crossed her mind. They were at a red light in the middle of town. Fern quickly took off her seat belt (the only thing that seemed to work in the car) and looked at the Bone’s face. His eyes looked familiar. His chin seemed to jut out just so. Fern stared at him, and he stared back like he was going to ask her a question…a question about…her scissor kick? Yes, her scissor kick! Fern gasped sharply, a yelp really, and flopped back in her seat. “Mrs. Lilliopole! My swim teacher!”
“In the flesh!” said the Bone proudly. “I would have preferred being a softball coach, but you were bent on swimming and there was an opening for a girls’ swim coach at the YWCA. And the woman hiring was a real feminist, wanted to hire a woman. That was clear.”
“If you cut a Nerf football in half,” Marty explained, “and stuff each end into a swimsuit, it gives a pretty realistic look.” As a visual aid, he pulled two halves of a Nerf football out of his blouse the way Fern’s science teacher used the plastic model human being with removable innards. “Back in our prime, of course, neither of us would have had to rely on such things.”
Fern couldn’t shake the image of the census bureau man and the dark cloud. She had to ask: “Could you ever turn yourself into, say, just for example, a bird, and then if a cat came along could you turn yourself into a dog or into—I don’t know—a cloud?”
“Us?” the Bone asked. “Are you kidding? Maybe, just maybe, if our lives depended on it, we could have some great sparkling moment. But, knowing us, I doubt it even then.”
“You and me? Ha!” Marty said, shaking his head, almost laughing. “Nope. Once the Bone almost became a dog. He shrank to four short legs, grew fur even, but he couldn’t get the tail or the muzzle. And it took three days to get even that far. Oh, well. Important thing is that we got him back. It took all of our concentration, mine and your mother’s. He could have stayed that way, you know. Odder things have happened.”
“They have?” Fern had trouble believing that there were odder things than turning yourself into a dog and getting stuck that way.
“The Great Realdo could turn into a dog in three seconds,” the Bone said. “But you know what I mean, Fern. You’ve seen it happen, right? Remember the swimming pool?”
Fern didn’t respond. She wasn’t ready to admit to anything, not yet. You see, she was very well trained by now not to mention such things. She sat there, clamped down, eyes narrowed, as Drudger-like as possible. Something loose in the car rattled, a few things actually. Fern held onto the door handle to see if the rattle would stop. One rattle did, but others jangled on.
“I have to say, Fern,” the Bone continued, “it was at the pool that things became clear. The bat? Remember?”
Fern stayed perfectly still.
“It wasn’t planned. I don’t know why it was there. But it was remarkable.”
It was remarkable! Fern was thinking. She squirmed in her seat. She thought of the whistling kettle. Finally she blurted, “I saw it too. How it changed into a marble and rolled away!”
“I know you saw it,” the Bone said calmly.
“You do?”
“Yep. You denied it. That’s what made it clear to me that you’re mine. Any other kid would have been shocked, would have had a million questions about how a bat could become a marble. Any other kid wouldn’t have been able to shrug and go on with their lesson as if nothing had happened, as if that kind of thing—”
“Happens all the time,” Fern finished. “Well, not all the time, but often enough. And why is that?”
“You’re being watched over,” the Bone said. “I don’t know why.” He didn’t dwell on it. But Fern wondered if it was the good kind of being watched over or the bad. “We had to figure a way to get you out. At least for a summer! I’m hoping you’ve got your mother’s head on your shoulders, just like you have her eyes.” The Bone said it, but then he blushed. “I don’t mean anything by that! The eyes are nice enough. I didn’t say they were beautiful or anything.”
But for the first time, Fern thought that someone actually meant that her eyes were beautiful. She felt shy all of a sudden. She sat back and buckled her seat belt again. She fiddled with the key that hung from the string around her neck. Fern wondered if the circus was in her blood, if she could be an Anybody, if she could turn other people into better versions of themselves. Could she turn the Drudgers into being something other than dull? She wanted to ask questions about the Miser, but didn’t. There was one thing that needed to be very clear. Fern didn’t want to ask, but she had to. “My mother is really dead?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” the Bone said.
Fern closed her eyes. Howard had been right. He hadn’t fooled her. She missed her mother now, deeply, and it was strange because she’d never known her, had never known that she existed until just that evening. The missing was more painful than anything Fern had felt before. The image of her mother in the photograph holding her belly appeared in Fern’s mind. It was all she had of her. “And the book?” Fern asked. “Her book, The Art of Being Anybody? Where is it now?”
Marty humphed and shook his head. “Funny thing,” he said. “No one knows. It was in their house before the Bone went to jail. But things were packed up after, well, after, you know…The bank came in and took everything out to sell. It could be anywhere, really, anywhere. Not that it would be of much use. It was written in a certain code only your mother could decipher.” The car got really quiet then. Even the windshield wiper froze as if holding its breath.
“Or you,” the Bone said.
“What?” Fern said.
Marty went on, “Now that we know about you, well, the idea is that maybe you’ll be able to decode it. Your mother figured it out when she was your age, and then she could write that way. She even wrote coded grocery lists, sometimes out of habit.” He sighed. “The book has more secrets. Many, many more.”
“And we don’t want the Miser to get his hands on it,” the Bone said.
“You needed me so you came and got me! That’s the only reason! Because you think I’ll be able to decode some book, some lost book!” Fern was angry now, more confused than ever.
“No, Fern,” the Bone said. “I came and got you because you’re my daughter and, for better or for worse, you should know me.”
The rain was letting up. Fern could have told them that she did have some powers. Hadn’t she once gotten a book to cough up bunches and bunches of crickets? That wasn’t exactly being an Anybody, but it was something, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she once turned snow into scraps of paper that asked her: Things aren’t always what they seem, are they? Yes, she had, and it was true. Anyway, maybe it was nice to be needed, Fern thought, although she wasn’t sure she could help at all. She gazed out the front windshield and noticed there was no rearview mirror. “Isn’t it dangerous to drive without a rearview mirror?” she asked.
“I prefer to look into the future! I prefer to see what’s coming. Why look back, Fern? In life, I mean. It’s a waste of time. I never look back. Do I, Marty?”
Marty stared at the Bone but didn’t answer.
The Bone squinted out onto the dark road. He seemed distant suddenly. He said, “I can still smell her lilac perfume. Your mother always smelled of the sweetest lilacs.”
2
THE BAD HYPNOTIST
THE BONE STOPPED IN FRONT OF A TRAILER IN Twin Oaks Park to drop
Marty off. Marty’s wife was hunkered in the small metal doorway. She was a tall woman, so tall she had to stick her neck out, ducking her head down to fit in the small frame of the door. She was wearing a yellow bathrobe, tied too tightly at her middle, and pink spongy hair curlers. Her chin was set in a menacing scowl.
“By the way,” Marty said to the Bone. “You owe me money.”
“We weren’t talking about money, were we?”
“No.”
“Then how can it be ‘by the way’? It can’t be, can it?” the Bone asked.
“I think it’s an expression to say ‘by the way,’” Marty explained, a little defensive. “People say it all the time, even when something isn’t ‘by the way.’”
“Yes, but it should be reserved for when something is ‘by the way.’ Don’t you think?” the Bone said, heatedly. “I mean, what would happen if there was no clear communication? We may as well all speak gibberish. Do you want us all to speak gibberish?”
Marty had to admit that no, he didn’t want everyone speaking gibberish. And so, Fern noticed with a bit of pride, the whole issue of the Bone owing Marty money disappeared.
Marty looked at his wife. He mumbled, “Wish me luck,” and then he hopped out of the car. The Nerf football halves under one arm, he spread the other wide open and called to his wife. “What are you doing awake? You need your beauty sleep.” She didn’t move; her glare only tightened on him. “Not that you need your beauty sleep. I mean, you’re always beautiful…”