Queens of Wings & Storms

by Angela Sanders et al.

  I decided against pulling Kasi into my drama. She’d want me to hang with her and I was late for meeting Jared as it was.

  I knew she’d understand my priorities. Ever since we were in seventh grade, Kasi had been the kind of girl who disappeared when she was dating a new guy. She’d be gone for weeks or months or sometimes just a day or two and then reappear like nothing had happened when she broke up with whoever.

  Getting to Jared’s place was going to be kind of a pain. Elle had revoked my Uber privileges by putting a hold on the card linked to my account. I could have charged it to the account Elle didn’t know about, but I hated spending money on transportation when there were three perfectly good cars sitting in the garage.

  It was easy getting into the garage. All I had to do was stay close to the walls after I climbed down the tree so I could avoid the motion detectors. There was a side door off the garage from where the old owners had started to install a mother-in-law apartment, and no one ever bothered to lock it.

  I had copied the valet key from Elle’s key ring months ago, so all I had to do was open the door of Elle’s pearl-gray Mercedes—the model with the seat warmers and the Pandora subscription, make myself comfortable and start the engine up. Sure I could have taken my own car—of course I had a copy of my key—but the Mercedes was a lot nicer, even though it smelled like cigarettes.

  I knew Elle would hear the sound of the garage door opening, but by the time she got downstairs and out the kitchen door, I’d be gone, baby, gone.

  And I was.

  It took me twenty-five minutes to get to Jared’s place in Encino. The joke in L.A. is that it takes you half an hour to go anywhere, whether it’s to the airport or down the street to the grocery store.

  I don’t mind driving, but it used to make my mother crazy that traffic was heavy any time of the day or night. She’d tried to get my father to move to a smaller town using the argument that he spent more time on the road than he did at home anyway, but he’d never been interested.

  The house was dark when I pulled up to the back gate. Good, that meant his parents weren’t at home. Not that they ever bothered him much. Jared lived in his parents’ basement in what amounted to a one-bedroom apartment with his own bathroom and his own separate entrance. They leave him alone if he leaves them alone and it works out fine all around.

  I envy him that. We have a big house, but even so, my bedroom is right across the hall from dad and Elle and I can’t even poke my head out the door to let the dog in without a light snapping on in their bedroom.

  I assumed Jared would be playing Fallout or something while he waited for me, so I tiptoed in so as not to startle him. Once I’d caught him watching porn and jerking off. He downloaded a ton of German bondage porn and liked to act it out when I was over. His parents had no idea. But then, neither did mine.

  Jared’s “rom” was dark when I arrived without so much as a computer screen to illuminate it. How romantic, I thought and wondered if he had some wonderful surprise for me, like piles of rose petals leading the way to his bed. That thought made me happy. And then I pushed open the door that led into his bedroom and called his name.

  “Jared?” There was a sound like a scuffle and then Jared turned on the light. He was naked, which would have been fine except that he was in bed. Without someone I couldn’t see. Who wasn’t me.

  “Rose,” he said when he saw me at the door. He calls me Rose because he can’t pronounce Roisin.

  “Fuck are you doing here?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said. “We had a date.”

  “That’s today? You should have reminded me.” There was movement on the bed as someone squirmed out from under the covers and sat up. She was biracial with a cascade of copper curls that went down to her breasts. She was gorgeous and I’d never seen her before.

  “Who’s this bitch Jared?” she said.

  “Rose,” he said again, ignoring her, and then he said a lot more things after that, but I wasn’t listening anymore.

  I wasn’t there anymore.

  Somehow I stumbled back to the car and got it started. By the time I turned onto Mulholland for the drive back to Century City, my vision was blurry with tears.

  How could he?

  How could he?

  How could he?

  I wondered if Kasi knew if he was cheating on me. I reached for my phone and hit speed-dial. The call went to voice mail. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t picking up.

  Bitch.

  I was driving fast and though Mulholland Drive is usually deserted this time of night, I could see one lone headlight behind me, gaining on me. For a moment I wondered if it was Jared, whose parents had given him a motorcycle for his last birthday. But as it got closer I could see it was a cop.

  That was all I needed. I hadn’t been drinking and I hadn’t smoked since the night before, but I didn’t need the hassle of being pulled over and breath-a-lyzed. Not on my fucking birthday.

  And then out of nowhere I heard a voice saying, “It’s not going to get better Roisin. Why not end it now?”

  What. The. Fuck? If it had been daylight. If I hadn’t been alone. If any one of a dozen different variables hadn’t been present, I’d have shrugged off the voice as some sort of weird thing. But the voice was persistent, seductive. “It can all be over, Roisin. And then there won’t be any more pain.”

  “No,” I said weakly because I could tell the car was starting to drift toward the edge of the road. The car had some kind of safety feature that would nudge the car back into a lane if a driver was straying, but I knew I could override that by signaling like I was going to make a turn.

  A flicker of movement caught my eye. I glanced over at the passenger seat and saw I was no longer alone in the car. A tall, thin guy was riding shotgun. He was tall and thin, about my age. His dark hair looked like he hadn’t washed it in a month, and I could smell it from three feet away. I’d never seen him before in my life.

  “Who are you?” The guy grinned, but he didn’t answer. The voice in my head returned.

  “It’s time Roisin. Turn the wheel. Turn the wheel.”

  I looked at the guy on the seat next to me. His shirt had been white when I first noticed him but now it was a dark red, the color of arterial blood.

  I turned on the signal. Behind me, I could hear the roar of the motorcycle as it pulled up parallel to me. I looked over. And I could see the cop’s face as clearly as if his helmet was an illuminated fish tank. This is L.A. Every other guy you pass on the street is handsome. This cop? He was beautiful. Michelangelo could have sculpted him.

  He was trying to get me to slow down, to pull over, to get away from the edge of the road. But that voice in my head kept talking. “Look at the lights, Roisin. Aren’t they pretty? You could be swimming in a sea of stars.”

  “No,” I said again but I wanted to turn the wheel. I had to fight against myself to keep the wheel straight. And I was losing the fight.

  The lights of the valley below were so beautiful. Nothing but clean, sparkling light hiding all the dirt and the ugliness, and the meanness.

  “turn the wheel Roisin,” the voice said again. And it was weird, but for a moment, the voice sounded like my father. “Turn the wheel.”

  The guy in the red shirt reached and wrenched the wheel out of my grasp. The tires slipped a bit and the car slewed sideways and then raced toward the edge of the road as if leaping into the void.

  The guy in the red shirt disappeared.

  The car flew for what seemed like miles before gravity took hold and we crashed into the canyon below. The sturdy chassis of the Mercedes shattered like an eggshell as the car rolled and rolled and rolled.

  Pain!

  Oh God, the pain. My head cracked against the windshield as every bone in my body broke. I couldn’t draw a breath as my lungs were crushed. Panic overtook the pain. I felt my heart strained through the bones of my ribcage and like meat forced through a grinder. Blood filled my mouth and I choked. Then…
<
br />   …everything went black and the pain blessedly stopped. Though my eyes were closed—or were they? I could no longer feel my face—I saw a rapid montage of images. Is my life flashing before my eyes? I wondered. And then … nothing.

  I looked up to see the beautiful cop bending over me, his mouth bloody from where he’d been giving me mouth-to-mouth. The feathers of his wings enfolded me like a cradle.

  Feathers?

  Wings?

  I blinked blood out of my eyes, and he turned back into a cop. I could feel heat flowing into my body. Not the gentle warmth of a summer day, but a searing fire that charred my bones and boiled my blood. I screamed.

  “Stay with me Roisin,” he said, and his voice was beautiful too, a rich baritone that flowed like dark honey.

  I’m not going anywhere, I thought, but moments later, I fell into the dark again.

  Why am I still here?

  I woke up in so much pain it felt like I’d been flayed and then stomped on by an elephant with spikes in its feet. My face hurt a lot, and when I reached up to touch it, I felt bandages. That can’t be good. But then I realized, I could reach up to touch my head. I looked down at my body. I didn’t see any casts. I wriggled my toes experimentally. They worked. I cranked my neck around. I could still move.

  How? For a moment I was confused, but then it all came back to me. The voice in my head urging me—no compelling me—to drive off the edge of the road. I remembered the guy in the red shirt grabbing the wheel and guiding the car over the edge. I remembered mashing the accelerator all the way to the floor. I remembered the pain. So much pain.

  I’d felt every single bone breaking.

  I’d felt muscles and ligaments tearing.

  I’d felt hot metal slicing into my flesh. I looked down at my legs beneath the thin sheet. Both of them were there. I distinctly remembered my right leg being sheared off.

  I remembered the blood and the choking and the pain. So much pain.

  I’d felt everything right up until I died.

  I’d died.

  And yet, here I was. I’d been in a crash that had destroyed $150,000 of steel but somehow I was still breathing. Somehow I was still whole, if a little banged up.

  I remembered he motorcycle cop. I remembered…the angel! And then the pain swallowed me.

  The next time I woke up, I was floating on a lovely cloud of painkillers. I was still hooked up to monitors but nothing hurt, not even my head. I was profoundly relieved—no, grateful—to still be alive. The overhead lights in the corridor were dimmed, but I could make out the shadow of a woman moving around my bed.

  “Mom?” I said, and as soon as the word left my mouth I remembered that my mother was dead.

  “Your mother left to get something to eat,” a woman’s voice told me. Although I could somehow sense that she was a warm and caring person, her voice sounded cold and clinical.

  That was my first taste of what I’d soon label “suicide backlash.” For all the awareness campaigns around the act, there’s still a lot of anger and judgment directed toward the people who survive the act.

  The voice belonged to the nurse who’d cared for me since I’d been moved from I.C.U. into another “room,” if you could call a curtained-off cubicle a “room.” Though I hadn’t seen her face before now, I recognized her presence. How?

  I understood her anger. She spent her days trying to save people and she thought I’d intentionally tried to end my life. But I hadn’t. when I went over the edge, I wasn’t the one in control. But I knew if I told anyone about the voice in my head or the guy I’d seen in the passenger seat, my next stop would be a mental hospital. For Elle’s purposes, a mental hospital would work just fine for getting me out of her hair. The thought skittered away from me. The drugs were making me foggy, but I did feel one source of discomfort.

  “Thirsty,” I said, and my voice came out in a rusty croak. The nurse brought a straw to my lips and I sucked down a mouthful of lukewarm water. For a moment it felt like I was drinking blood and I nearly gagged.

  I could still feel disapproval radiating from her. I wanted her to know I hadn’t tried to kill myself but when I tried to tell her, the words wouldn’t come. Somehow I knew she didn’t want to have a conversation. All she wanted to do was go home and eat the leftover Chinese takeout in her fridge.. She was exhausted. She’d been working night shifts while her friend was on vacation and she was tired and foot-sore. It was taking a lot of effort just to stay awake, never mind deal with me. I felt sorry for her and my sentiment surprised me. Before the crash, I would have been annoyed by her attitude. After all, my father’s insurance was paying her salary. She owed me service with a smile.

  Would I really have thought that? I wondered and knew that I would have. Elle had once accused me of having “affluenza,” which I thought was pretty hypocritical for someone who drove a Mercedes and had a whole closet full of designer shoes.

  I mean that literally. The closet in the master bedroom was the size of a studio apartment and arranged like a fancy boutique. Her purses and shoes had their own little home down the hall in what had once been a tiny maid’s room. Because heaven forbid the live-in maid should have a bedroom big enough to walk around in.

  Affluenza. I had never seen any reason to apologize for being a rich girl. I’d never even stopped to consider my privilege, much less acknowledge it or check it. I’d lived in a comfortable, cozy bubble. Somehow in the crash, the bubble had burst. I had only ever cared about myself, the girl whose mother had died. Now it seemed, I could sense all the sadness around me. It was overwhelming and I couldn’t seem to shut it off.

  I closed my eyes and let the drugs pull me under, away from other people’s problems.

  I knew I was dreaming. I’d never had lucid dreams before, but I knew this was one. I was standing on a mid-rise rooftop looking down at Sunset Boulevard. I could see billboards advertising a movie I’d never heard of. It was one of those distracting animated billboards and as I focused, I realized the “trailer” it was showing was actually a video of my car crash filmed from a God’s eye view. Horrified, I watched as the Mercedes veered right and then drove straight over the edge, catching air before crashing down.

  The video ended and then began again. I turned away and saw someone was standing on he roof with me. The cop.

  “You,” I said.

  “Roisin,” he said, his voice still as sexy as I remembered it. he was wearing civilian clothes—tight jeans and a white t- shirt that was untucked. He had an elephant-hair bracelet wrapped around one wrist and his feet were bare.

  “Your feet are going to get filthy,” I said stupidly.

  “I’m not really here,” he said. I thought about that for a minute.

  “Where are we?”

  “Between,”’ he said. “We call it ‘the Between.’”

  “We?”

  He didn’t answer my question, just gazed out over the street. There wasn’t any traffic and it was very quiet. It’s never truly quiet in Los Angeles, just like the sky is never fully dark. There’s so much noise and light pollution that you don’t even notice it. Except that even though I could see all the lights of the city, I could also see the stars. There were so many of them and I realized I could see a great white ribbon of them undulating across the whole sky.

  “Is that the Milky Way?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  He didn’t say anything so I just studied him as if memorizing his features so I could draw him later. Eventually he turned to face me, his expression serious and sad.

  “I imagine you have questions.”

  “That’s an understatement. Are you an angel?”

  For a moment, he didn’t answer, then he said, “Yes. My name is Dai.”

  “Die?” I asked, confused.

  “D.A.I.,” he clarified. “It’s a Welsh form of Dai.”

  “You’re Welsh?”

  “It’s not the first name I’ve had.”

/>   “That was cryptic.”

  “My name is not important,” he said. “Ask your other questions.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you you’re bossy?” Dai looked taken aback by that question and then for a moment I thought he was going to laugh before the serious look settled over his face again.

  “We really don’t have much time. Don’t waste it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

  “I know.” His answer threw me.

  “How do you know?”

  “Keep an open mind,” he said.

  “I’m already standing on a rooftop talking to an angel, I think I can handle the truth.”

  “You were being manipulated by a demon.”

  A demon. Of course. “I don’t mean to be skeptical, but why would a demon target me? What did I ever do to attract a demon’s attention?”

  Dai looked somewhat amused by that. “It’s more what you didn’t do,” he said, “but in this case it wasn’t personal.”

  I probably should have asked why it wasn’t personal first, but I wanted to know what he meant by “What you didn’t do.”

  “I don’t understand. What didn’t I do?”

  “You didn’t do anything,” he said. “That was the point.”

  I must have still looked confused because he added mildly, “To whom much is given, much is asked.”

  I actually felt those words as if they were blows. As I averted my eyes in shame, my gaze was caught by new images on the moving billboard. Now it was playing what looked like a montage of “greatest moments” from my life, only they weren’t great moments. They were scenes of me being thoughtless, careless, and downright mean. I saw every hateful thing I’d ever done to anyone—things I’d done because I wanted to. Things I’d done because I could. I saw myself laughing at Shanda Jenkins when she got her first period at school and bled through her uniform skirt. I saw myself eating cupcakes in front of Ashley Martorelli who was desperately trying to lose weight. I saw myself deliberately tripping Naomi Addisu in the middle of a soccer game so I could score. I saw her limping away, a huge, bloody gash in her knee. Further back I saw myself stealing toys and breaking things, and generally being a brat. I saw myself making my friend Noelle’s little sister cry because she was annoying me. The images went on and on. “Stop,” I said. The images kept rolling. I couldn’t look away. “Stop,” I said again. “Those are things I did. What didn’t I do?”