She had fallen silent too long. Wyatt said, “Joanna? What was it, what he said that you found curious?”
“It was the night before my eighth birthday,” she recalled, “and I was very excited. I talked about how, when I was sixteen and had a license to drive, I’d take Jimmy far away, where no one ever said anything stupid about him or was mean. It hurt me when people called him Jimmy Two Eyes. Only halfway to sixteen, I complained about how long we’d have to wait. Jimmy said eight years wasn’t so long. I said, well, he was eleven, three years closer to sixteen than I was, so it wasn’t as long for him. That’s when he said he was a lot older, said he was more than four thousand years old.”
“You thought it was Jimmy saying that.”
“That’s all I knew then—–that he was Jimmy. I told him he was being silly, and he said, ‘Maybe.’ Today, he told me he’d been here when American Indian tribes warred with each other, saw the Sioux torturing and killing the Crow, the Crow torturing and killing the Sioux, the Blackfoot slaughtering the Salish, European settlers killing the tribes in turn. He thinks humanity has earned a reckoning.”
“That was . . . two hundred years ago, a hundred fifty? No one lives four thousand years. Who does he claim to be—Methuselah?”
“He hasn’t claimed to be anyone. Maybe because . . . in a way, he isn’t anyone, not any one of us.”
“What do you mean?”
Joanna felt watched, heard, hated.
A fragment of memory surfaced, a moment in the apple orchard from long ago, Jimmy saying, If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. She strained to recall the context of that, but it eluded her.
“A reckoning,” she repeated.
The darkness and the wind, the land and the water, the past and the future gathered here in the still point of the present, the past unredeemable, the future nothing but the past waiting to happen.
“Don’t you feel it, Wyatt? It feels inarguable, inevitable.”
“Tell me.”
“Whatever the hell we’re up against,” she said, “this puppeteer of animals, this master of Jimmy—it isn’t one of us. The damn thing isn’t human.”
“Not human? Then you mean . . . something from another planet?”
“Maybe. But I suspect it’s not as simple as that.”
62
After Jojo and the detective departed, Hector Alvarez stood in the yard, watching the Range Rover until it was out of sight. Then he turned his attention to the sky, which gathered its elements for violence, as the light retreated into the west and the night seemed to rise out of the meadows and forests rather than descend on them.
For over fifty years, he’d worked with animals and been as one with this land that he loved. Living close to nature, he developed a perhaps sharper intuition than that of men who lived in cities and worked in offices. Now he sensed that Jojo’s return to Rustling Willows had nothing to do with the billionaire, Liam O’Hara, that she had come for some purpose of her own, and that her visit with Jimmy had been central to that purpose.
Neither he nor his late wife, Annalisa, had understood Jojo’s connection with the boy when they were children. The girl had been swept away by fantasy stories—Cinderella, A City in Winter—and perhaps she saw Jimmy as a character who might have been at home in one of those fanciful tales, even imagined that he was magical in some way. However, the enthusiasms of young children never lasted long, and to this day, Hector remained puzzled as to why Jojo had been Jimmy’s steadfast companion, why she behaved like a doting sister when the boy couldn’t reciprocate.
He looked once more toward that place where the Range Rover had vanished. “Why did you come here, Jojo? What was that really about?”
With the dying of the light, the wind grew cooler. Shivering, though not because the twilight was truly cold, which it was not, Hector returned to the house. He went to his son’s room.
Jimmy stood at the window, gazing out at the rising tide of night. He often spent hours staring intently at the same thing—a flower, a picture in a book, a bulto of a saint, a scene beyond a window—as if he saw deeper into all things than other people did, as if in the fine details of a rose or a colorful stone he perceived meaning of the most profound and complex kind. In truth, Jimmy’s tragically low intelligence suggested that he saw nothing in the rose and the stone except shape and color, or that what he appeared to be fixated on was in fact of no interest to him because he was lost in an interior world, in some impoverished dreamland beyond the comprehension of anyone not cursed with his limitations.