Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

  I draw a paper. Cleric.

  “Very good, Sister Clara. Now you, Mr. Avery.”

  I turn to watch Tucker draw from the jar.

  “A knight,” he reads, looking pleased with himself.

  “Sir Tucker.”

  The role of king goes to a guy I don’t know, Brady, who is, judging by the muscles and the way he accepts his rule like he deserves it instead of drawing it by chance, a football player.

  Christian goes last.

  “Ah,” he says faux mournfully, reading his paper. “I’m a serf.”

  Mr. Erikson follows this up by going around the room with a pair of dice and making us roll to see if we survive the Black Plague. The odds of surviving are not good for serfs, or clerics, since they tended the sick, but miraculously I survive. Mr. Erikson rewards me with a laminated badge that reads, I SURVIVED THE BLACK PLAGUE.

  Mom will be so proud.

  Christian doesn’t make it. He receives a badge decorated with a skull and crossbones, which reads, I PERISHED IN THE BLACK PLAGUE. Mr. Erikson marks his death down in a notebook he has to keep track of our new lives. He assures us that the usual rules of life and death don’t apply as far as this exercise is concerned.

  Still, I can’t help but take Christian’s immediate demise as a bad sign.

  * * *

  Mom is waiting for us at the front door when we get home.

  “Tell me everything,” she commands as soon as I cross the threshold. “I want to know all the details. Does he go to your school? Did you see him?”

  “Oh, she saw him,” Jeffrey says before I can answer. “She saw him and she passed out in the middle of the hallway. The whole school was talking about it.”

  Her eyes widen. She turns to me. I shrug.

  “I told you she’d pass out,” says Jeffrey.

  “You’re a genius.” Mom moves to ruffle his hair but he dodges her and says, “Too fast for you,” before her hand lands. “I put some chips and salsa out for you in the kitchen,” she says.

  “What happened?” she asks after Jeffrey goes to stuff his face.

  “Pretty much what Jeffrey said. Just keeled over in front of everybody.”

  “Oh, honey.” She offers me a sympathetic pout.

  “When I woke up, there was this girl who helped me. I think she could be a friend.

  And then. ” I swallow. “He came back with the nurse and carried me to the nurse’s office.”

  Her mouth drops open. I’ve never seen her look so astonished. “He carried you?”

  “Yes, like some lame damsel in distress.”

  She laughs. I sigh.

  “Did you tell her his name yet?” comes Jeffrey’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Shut up,” I call.

  “His name is Christian,” he calls back. “Can you believe that? We came all this way so Clara could save a guy named Christian.”

  “I’m aware of the irony.”

  “But you know his name now,” Mom says softly.

  “Yes.” I’m unable to hold back a smile. “I know his name.”

  “And it’s all happening. The pieces are coming together.” She looks more serious now. “Are you ready for this, kiddo?”

  It’s all I’ve thought about for weeks, and I’ve known for the past two years that my time would come. But still, am I ready?

  “I think so?” I say.

  I hope.

  Chapter 4

  Wingspan

  I was fourteen when Mom told me about the angels. One morning at breakfast she announced that she was keeping me out of school for the day and we were going on a mother-daughter outing, just she and I. We dropped Jeffrey off at school and drove about thirty miles from our house in Mountain View to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, in the mountains near the ocean. My mom parked in the main lot, slung a backpack over her shoulder, said, “Last one up is a slowpoke,” and headed straight off along a paved trail. I had to practically jog to keep up with her.

  “Some mothers take their daughters to get their ears pierced,” I called after her.

  There was no one else on the trail. Fog shifted through the redwoods. The trees were as much as twenty feet in diameter, and so tall you couldn’t see where they stopped, only the small gaps between the branches, where beams of light slanted onto the forest floor.

  “Where are we going?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Buzzards Roost,” Mom said over her shoulder. Like that helped.

  We hiked past deserted campgrounds, splashed across creeks, ducked under gigantic mossy beams where trees had fallen across the path. Mom was quiet. This wasn’t one of those mother-daughter bonding times like when she took me to Fisherman’s Wharf or the Winchester Mystery House or IKEA. The stillness of the forest was punctuated only by our breathing and the scuff of our feet on the trail, a silence so heavy and suffocating that I wanted to yell something just to shatter it.

  She didn’t speak again until we reached a huge outcropping of rock jutting out of the mountainside like a stone finger pointing to the sky. To get to the top we had to climb about twenty feet of sheer rock face, which Mom did quickly, easily, without looking back.

  “Mom, wait!” I called, and scrambled after her. I’d never climbed so much as the rock wall in a gym. Her shoes flicked a spray of rubble down the slope. She disappeared over the top.

  “Mom!” I yelled.

  She peered down at me.

  “You can do this, Clara,” she said. “Trust me. It will be worth it.”

  I didn’t really have a choice. I reached up and grabbed at the cliff face and started to climb, telling myself not to look down where the mountain dropped off beneath me.

  Then I was at the top. I stood next to Mom, panting.

  “Wow,” I said, looking out.

  “Pretty amazing, right?”

  Below us stretched the valley of redwoods rimmed by the distant mountains. This was one of those top-of-the-world places, where you could see for miles in every direction. I closed my eyes and spread my arms, letting the wind move past me, smelling the air — a heady combination of trees and moss and growing things, a hint of dirt and creek water and pure, clean oxygen. An eagle turned in a slow circle over the forest. I could easily imagine what that would feel like, to glide through the air, nothing between you and endless blue heaven but little tufts of cloud.

  “Have a seat,” Mom said. I opened my eyes and turned to see her sitting on a boulder. She patted the space beside her. I sat down next to her. She rummaged in her pack for a bottle of water, opened it, and drank deeply, then offered the bottle to me. I took it and drank, watching her. She was distracted, her eyes distant, lost in thought.

  “Am I in trouble?” I asked.

  She started, then laughed nervously.

  “No, honey,” she said. “I just have something important to tell you.”

  My head spun with all of the things that she might be about to spring on me.

  “I’ve been coming to this spot for a really long time,” she said.

  “You’ve met a guy,” I guessed. It seemed like a distinct possibility.

  “What are you talking about?” Mom asked.

  Mom had never dated much, even though everyone who met her liked her immediately, and men followed her around the room with their eyes. She liked to say that she was too busy for a steady relationship, too wrapped up with her job at Apple as a computer programmer, too occupied with being a single mom the rest of the time. I thought she was still hung up on Dad. But maybe she had some secret passionate affair she was about to confess to me. Maybe within a couple of months I’d be standing in a pink dress with flowers in my hair, watching her marry some guy I was supposed to call Dad. It’d happened to a couple of my friends.

  “You brought me out here to tell me about this guy you met, and you love him, and you want to marry him or something,” I said quickly, not looking at her because I didn’t want her to see how much I hated the idea.

  “Clara Gardner.”

  “Re
ally, I’d be okay with it.”

  “That’s very sweet, Clara, but wrong,” she said. “I brought you out here because I think you’re old enough to know the truth.”

  “Okay,” I said anxiously. That sounded big. “What truth?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out, then leaned toward me.

  “When I was about your age I lived in San Francisco with my grandmother,” she began.

  I knew a little about this. Her father was out of the picture before she was born, and her mother died giving birth to her. I always thought it sounded like a fairy tale, like my mom was the orphaned, tragic heroine in one of my books.

  “We lived in a big white house on Mason Street,” she said.

  “Why haven’t you taken me there?” We’d been to San Francisco many times, at least two or three times a year, and she’d never said anything about a house on Mason Street.

  “It burned down years ago,” she said. “There’s a souvenir shop there now, I think.

  Anyway, early one morning I woke up to the house violently shaking. I had to grab on to the bedpost so I wouldn’t be tossed right out of bed.”

  “Earthquake,” I assumed. Growing up in California I’d been through a few earthquakes, none that lasted more than a few seconds or done any real damage, but still pretty scary.

  Mom nodded. “I could hear the dishes falling out of the china cabinet and windows breaking all over the house. Then there was a loud groaning sound. The wall of my bedroom gave way, and the bricks from the chimney crashed down on top of me in bed.”

  I stared at her in horror.

  “I don’t know how long I lay there,” Mom said after a minute. “When I opened my eyes again I saw the figure of a man standing over me. He leaned down and said,

  ‘Be still, child.’ Then he lifted me in his arms, and the bricks slid off my body like they weighed nothing. He carried me to the window. All the glass was broken out, and I could see people running out of their houses into the street. And then a strange thing happened, and we were someplace else. It still resembled my room, only different somehow, like someone else was living there, undamaged as if the quake had never happened. Outside the window there was so much light, so bright it hurt to look.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The man set me on my feet. I was amazed that I could stand. My nightgown was a mess, and I was a bit dizzy, but aside from that I was fine.

  “‘Thank you,’ I said to him. I didn’t know what else to say. He had golden hair that gleamed in the light like nothing I’d ever seen before. And he was tall, the tallest man I’d ever seen, and very handsome.”

  She smiled at the memory. I rubbed at the goose bumps that had jumped up along my arms. I tried to picture this tall, fine-looking guy with shiny blond hair, like some kind of Brad Pitt sweeping in to rescue my mom. I frowned. The image made me uneasy, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “He said, ‘You’re welcome, Margaret,’” Mom said.

  “How did he know your name?”

  “I wondered that myself. I asked him. He told me that he was a friend of my father’s.

  They served together, he said. And he said that he’d been watching me from the day that I was born.”

  “Whoa. Like your own personal guardian angel.”

  “Exactly. Like my guardian angel,” Mom said, nodding. “Although he wouldn’t call himself that, of course.”

  I waited for her to go on.

  “That’s what he was, Clara. I want you to understand. He was an angel.”

  “Right,” I said. “An angel. Like with wings and everything, I’m sure.”

  “I didn’t see his wings until later, but yes.”

  She looked dead serious.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I pictured the big old angel in the stained-glass window at church, wearing a halo and purple robes, huge golden wings fanned out behind him. “Then what happened?”

  This really can’t get any weirder, I thought.

  And then it did.

  “He told me that I was special,” she said.

  “Special how?”

  “He said that my father was an angel and my mother human, and I was Dimidius, which means half.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Come on. You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.” She looked at me steadily. “It’s not a joke, Clara. It’s the truth.”

  I stared at her. The thing was, I trusted her. More than anybody. As far as I knew, she’d never lied to me before, not even those little white lies that so many parents tell their kids to get them to behave or believe in the tooth fairy or whatever. She was my mom, sure, but she was also my best friend. Cheesy but true. And now she was telling me something crazy, something impossible, and she was looking at me like everything depended on my reaction.

  “So you’re saying. you’re saying that you’re half angel,” I said slowly.

  “Yes.”

  “Mom, really, come on.” I wanted her to laugh and tell me that the angel stuff was some kind of dream she had, like in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up and finds out the whole Oz thing was a big, colorful hallucination from getting conked on the head. “So then what happened?”

  “He brought me back to Earth. He helped me find my grandmother, who was by that point convinced I’d been crushed. And when the fires burned through our neighborhood, he helped us evacuate to Golden Gate Park. He stayed with us for three days, and then I didn’t see him again for years.”

  I was quiet, bothered by the details of her story. About a year before, my class had gone on a field trip to the San Francisco museum because they opened up a big exhibit about the great San Francisco earthquake. We’d looked at all the pictures of the broken buildings, the cable cars thrown off their tracks, the blackened skeletons of the burned up houses. We’d listened to old recordings of people who’d been there, their voices sharp and quivery as they described the terrible disaster.

  Everybody had been making such a huge deal out of it that year because it was the hundred- year anniversary of when the quake had happened.

  “You said there were fires?” I asked.

  “Terrible fires. My grandmother’s house burned to the ground.”

  “And when was this?”

  “It was April,” she said. “1906.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. “That would make you what, a hundred and ten?”

  “A hundred and sixteen, this year.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I stammered.

  “I know it’s hard.”

  I stood up. Mom reached for my hand, but I jerked it away. Hurt flashed in her eyes.

  She stood up too, and took a step back, giving me some space, nodding slightly as if she completely understood what I was going through. Like she knew that she was unraveling everything.

  I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs.

  She was crazy. That was the only explanation that made sense. My mom, who up to that point seemed like the best mother ever, my own personal version of the Gilmore Girls, the envy of all my friends with her beautiful auburn hair and fabulous dewy skin and quirky sense of humor, was actually a raving lunatic.

  “What are you doing? Why are you telling me this?” I asked, blinking back furious tears.

  “Because you need to know that you’re special, too.”

  I stared at her incredulously.

  “I’m special,” I repeated. “Because if you’re a half angel then that would make me what, a quarter angel?”

  “Quarter angels are called Quartarius.”

  “I want to go home now,” I said dully. I needed to call Dad. He might know what to do. I needed to find my mom some help.

  “I wouldn’t have believed it either,” she said. “Not without proof.”

  At first I thought that the sun must have come out from behind the clouds, suddenly brightening the ledge where we stood looking out, but then I understood, slowly, that this light was stronger than that. I turned and
shielded my eyes from the sight of my mom with light beaming off her. It was like looking at the sun, so intense my eyes watered. Then she dimmed slightly and I saw that she had wings — enormous snowy wings unfurling behind her.

  “This is glory,” she said, and I understood the words she said even though she wasn’t speaking English, but a strange language like two notes of music played on every syllable, so eerie and alien it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.