Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

  “What are you doing?” I ask the girl in the mirror. She doesn’t answer. She gazes at me with bright eyes like she knows something I don’t.

  * * *

  I’m not totally cut off from the world. Angela emails me every now and then, tells me about Rome and says, in her own version of code, that she’s finding out amazing stuff about angels. She’ll write things like, It’s dark outside right now. I’m turning on the light, which I take to mean she’s getting a lot of good info on Black Wings. When she writes, It’s so hot I have to change my clothes all the time, I think she’s telling me she’s practicing changing the form of her wings. She doesn’t say much more.

  Nothing about the mysterious Italian lover, but she sounds happy. Like she’s having a suspiciously good time.

  I also hear from Wendy occasionally, whenever she can make it to a pay phone. She sounds tired but content, spending her days with horses, learning from the best. She doesn’t mention Tucker, or the time I’ve been spending with him lately, but I suspect that she knows all about it.

  When I get a text from Christian I realize it’s been a while since I’ve thought about him. I’ve been so busy running around with Tucker. I haven’t even had the vision lately. This week I almost forgot I was an angel-blood and simply let myself be a regular girl having a perfectly normal summer. Which is nice. And makes me feel guilty, because I’m supposed to be focusing on my purpose.

  His text says:

  Have you ever been to a place you’re supposed to love, but all you can think about is home?

  Cryptic. And as usual when it comes to Christian, I don’t know how to respond.

  * * *

  I hear a car pulling into the driveway, and then the sound of the garage door. Mom’s home. I do a quick sweep around the house to make sure everything is in order, dishes washed, laundry folded, Jeffrey still in a food coma upstairs. All is right in the Gardner house. When she comes in, towing her huge suitcase, I’m sitting at the kitchen counter with two tall glasses of iced tea.

  “Welcome home,” I say brightly.

  She puts her suitcase down and holds out her arms. I jump off my stool and step sheepishly into her hug. She squeezes me tight, and it makes me feel like a kid again. Safe. Right. Like nothing was normal when she was gone.

  She pulls back and looks me up and down. “You look older,” she says. “Seventeen suits you.”

  “I feel older. And stronger lately, for whatever reason.”

  “I know. You should be feeling stronger every day now, the closer we get to your purpose. Your power is growing.”

  There’s an uncomfortable silence. What are my powers, exactly?

  “I can fly now,” I blurt out suddenly. It’s been two weeks since Inspiration Point, a hundred crashes and scrapes, but I’ve finally gotten the hang of it. It feels like something she should know. I lift my pant leg to show her a scratch on my shin from the top of a pine tree I passed over too closely.

  “Clara!” she exclaims, and she tries to act pleased but I can tell she’s disappointed that she hadn’t been there, like I’m a baby taking my first steps and she missed it.

  “It’s easier for me when you’re not watching,” I explain. “Less pressure or something.”

  “Well, I knew you’d get it.”

  “I totally love the dress you gave me,” I say in an attempt to change the subject.

  “Maybe we could go out to dinner tonight and I’ll wear it.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” She releases me, grabs her suitcase, and lugs it down the hall toward her bedroom. I follow.

  “How was work?” I ask as she lays her suitcase on her bed, opens her top dresser drawer, and begins to stack her underwear and socks neatly inside. I have to shake my head at what a neat freak she is, all her panties folded, arranged by color in perfect little rows. It seems impossible that we’re related, she and I. “Did you get it all straightened out?”

  “Yes. It’s better, anyway. I really needed to go out there.” She moves on to the next drawer. “But I’m sorry I missed your birthday.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What did you do?”

  For some reason I’ve been dreading telling her about Tucker, the Jumping Tree, and the time I’ve been spending with him all week, hiking, picking huckleberries, white-water rafting, speaking Korean to random people in front of him. Maybe I’m afraid that she’ll call Tucker what I know deep down that he is: a distraction. She’ll tell me to get back to work on the Saving Christian mission. Then I’ll have to tell her that, even though I’m feeling stronger lately, finally flying, I still can’t get that heavy duffel bag off the ground. And then she’ll give me that look, that speech about lightness and strength and how much I am capable of if only I put my mind to it. I just don’t want to go there. Not yet, anyway. But I have to give her something.

  “Wendy loaned me her brother and a pair of hiking boots, and he took me out to this place where all the kids go to jump into the Hoback River,” I say all in one breath.

  Mom looks at me suspiciously.

  “Wendy loaned you her brother?”

  “Tucker. You met him that time our car slid off the road, remember?”

  “The boy who brought you home from prom,” she says thoughtfully.

  “Yep, that’s him. And thanks so much for bringing that up.”

  For a minute neither of us says anything else.

  “I brought you something,” she says finally. “A present.”

  She unzips a compartment of her suitcase and pulls out something made of dark purple fabric. It’s a jacket, a gorgeous corduroy jacket the exact color of Mom’s African violet on the kitchen windowsill. It will play down the orange of my hair and play up the blue in my eyes. It’s perfect.

  “I know you have your parka,” Mom says, “but I thought you could use something lighter. And besides, you can never have too many jackets in Wyoming.”

  “Thanks. I love it.”

  I reach to take it from her. And the moment my fingers touch the soft, velvety fabric, I’m in the vision, walking through the trees.

  I trip and fall, scraping the palm of my right hand. I haven’t had the vision in weeks, since prom when I saw myself fly away from the fire with Christian in my arms. It doesn’t feel as familiar to me now, as I make my way up the hillside toward him. But he’s still there waiting for me, and when I see him I call his name, and he turns, and I run to him. I missed him, I realize, although I don’t know if it’s what I’m feeling now or in the future. He makes me feel complete. The way he always looks at me, like he needs me. Me, and no one else.

  I take his hand. The sorrow’s there, too, mixed with everything else: elation and fear and determination and even a serving of good old-fashioned lust. I feel it all, but overshadowing every other emotion is the grief, the sense that I’ve lost the most important thing in the world, even as I seem to be gaining it. I bend my head and look at where our hands join, Christian’s hand so finely constructed, like a surgeon’s hand. The nails are neatly clipped, his skin smooth and almost hot to the touch. His thumb strokes over my knuckles, sending a shiver through me. Then I realize.

  I’m wearing the purple jacket.

  I come back to myself to find Mom sitting next to me on her bed, her arm around my shoulders. She smiles sympathetically, her eyes worried.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Don’t be, silly,” she says. “I know what it’s like.”

  Sometimes I forget that Mom had a purpose once upon a time. It was probably a hundred years ago if she was my age at the time. Which (I do the math quickly in my head) would put her at sometime between 1907 and 1914, approximately. Which means ladies in long, white dresses and men with top hats and big, bristly mustaches, horse-drawn carriages, corsets, Leo DiCaprio about to win his ticket on the Titanic. I try to picture my mother in that time, reeling with the force of her visions and lying awake in the dark trying to put the pieces together, trying to understand what it was she was meant to do.
r />   “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “I’m going to wear that jacket,” I say shakily. It’s lying on the floor near the bed. It must have slipped out of my hands when the vision struck me.

  “Good,” says Mom. “I thought it would look good on you.”

  “No. In the vision. I’m wearing that jacket.”

  Her eyes widen slightly.

  “It’s happening.” She calmly smoothes a strand of my hair behind my ear.

  “Everything’s aligning for you. It’s going to happen this year, this fire season, I’m sure of it.”

  That’s weeks away. Just weeks.

  “What if I’m not ready?”

  She smiles knowingly. Her eyes are twinkling again with that strange inner light. She lifts her arms and stretches them over her head, yawning. She looks a lot better. Not so tired. Not so worn down and frustrated about everything. She looks like her old self, like she’s ready to jump up and get started on my training again, like she’s excited about my purpose and determined to help me succeed at it.

  “You’ll be ready,” she says.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know,” she says firmly.

  * * *

  The next morning I sneak quietly down the stairs and get myself a quick bowl of granola cereal, standing in the middle of the kitchen eating it, waiting for the familiar rattle of Tucker’s truck in the driveway. Mom startles me by appearing as I’m pouring a glass of orange juice.

  “You’re up early.” She examines the new woodsy version of me in the hiking boots, water resistant shorts, sports polo, the backpack hanging off one shoulder. I’m sure I look like I walked out of an Eddie Bauer ad. “Where are you off to?”

  “Fishing,” I say, swallowing my juice quickly.

  Her eyebrows lift. I’ve never been fishing in my life. The closest I’ve come is marinating salmon steaks for dinner.

  “With who?”

  “Some kids from school,” I say, inwardly wincing. Not quite a lie, I tell myself. Tucker is a kid from school.

  She cocks her head to one side.

  “What’s that smell?” she asks, wrinkling up her nose.

  “Bug spray.” Mosquitoes never bother me, but apparently they eat Tucker alive if he forgets bug spray. So I wear it for solidarity. “All the kids wear it,” I explain to Mom.

  “They say the mosquito is the Wyoming state bird.”

  “You’re really fitting in now.”

  “Well, I wasn’t exactly friendless before,” I say a little too sharply.

  “Of course not. But something’s new, I think. Something’s different.”

  “Nah.”

  She laughs.

  “Nah?”

  I blush.

  “Okay, so I talk more like the kids at school,” I say. “You hear it so much, you pick it up. Jeffrey does it too. They tell me I still talk too fast to be from Wyoming.”

  “That’s good,” she says. “Fitting in.”

  “It’s better than sticking out,” I say nervously. I just caught sight of the rusty blue truck snaking its way through the trees in front of the house.

  “Gotta run, Mom.” I give her a quick hug. Then I’m out the door, down the driveway, jumping into Tucker’s truck while it’s still moving. He yelps in surprise and slams on the brake.

  “Let’s go.” I flash him an innocent smile. His eyes narrow.

  “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  He frowns. He can always tell when I lie. It’s annoying when there’s so much I have to hide from him. I sigh.

  “My mom’s back,” I confess.

  “And you don’t want her to see you with me?” he asks, offended. I glance over my shoulder, out the window of the truck where I clearly see Mom’s face in the front window. I wave at her, then look back at Tucker.

  “No, silly,” I say. “I’m stoked to learn fly-fishing, that’s all.”

  He still doesn’t believe me, but he lets it slide. He tips his Stetson at Mom through the windshield. Her head vanishes from the window. I relax. It’s not that I don’t want Mom to see me with Tucker. I just don’t want to give her the chance to question him.

  Or question me about what I think I’m doing with him. Because I have no idea what I’m doing with Tucker Avery.

  * * *

  “Fly-fishing is easy,” Tucker says about two hours later, after he’s shown me all the elements of fishing from the relative safety of the grass along the Snake River. “You just have to think like a fish.”

  “Right. Think like a fish.”

  “Don’t mock,” he warns. “Look at the river. What do you see?”

  “Water. Stones and sticks and mud.”

  “Look closer. The river’s its own world of fast and slow, deep and shallow, bright and shadowed. If you look at it like that, like a landscape where the fish live, it’ll be easier to catch one.”

  “Nicely said. Are you some kind of cowboy poet?”

  He blushes, which I find completely charming.

  “Just look,” he mumbles.

  I gaze upriver. It does seem like its own little corner of paradise. There are golden motes of sunlight cutting through the air, deep pockets of shade along the bank, aspen and cottonwoods rustling in the breeze. And above everything else is the sparkling river. It’s alive, rushing and bubbling, its green depths full of mysteries. And supposedly full of wonderful, tasty fish.

  “Let’s do it.” I lift the fly rod. “I promise, I’m thinking like a fish.”

  He snorts and rolls his eyes.

  “All right, fish.” He gestures to the river. “Right there’s a sandbar you can stand on.”

  “Let me be sure I’ve got this right. You want me to stand in the middle of the river?”

  “Yep,” he says. “It’ll be a bit chilly, but I think you can handle it. I don’t have any waders your size.”

  “This isn’t another one of your ploys to have to rescue me, is it?” I tilt my head and squint at him in the sun. “Because don’t think I’ve forgotten the Jumping Tree.”

  “Nah,” he says with a grin.

  “Okay.” I take a step into the river, gasping at the cold, then another and another until I’m standing up to just above my knee. I stop on the edge of the narrow sandbar that Tucker pointed out, trying to get a firm footing on the smooth river rocks under my feet. The water is cool and strong against my bare legs. I straighten my shoulders and adjust my hands on the rod the way he showed me earlier, pull the line through the guides and wait as he wades out next to me and starts to tie on the fly.

  “This is one of my favorites,” he says. His hands move quickly, gracefully, to fasten on the bit of fluff and hook meant to look like an insect on the water. “Pale Morning Dun.”

  “Nice,” I say, although I have no clue what he’s talking about. It looks kind of like a moth to me. To a fish it’s supposed to look like prime rib, apparently.

  “All set.” He releases the line. “Now try it like we practiced on the grass. Two beats back to two o’clock, one beat forward to ten. Pull out a little line, and back again.

  Once you cast the line forward, relax it to about nine o’clock.”

  “Ten and two,” I repeat. I raise the rod and cast the line backward, to what I hope is about two o’clock, then whip it forward.

  “Gently,” coaches Tucker. “Try to hit along that log over there, so the fish thinks it’s a nice juicy bug.”

  “Right, think like a fish,” I say with an embarrassing giggle. I try it. Ten and two, ten and two, over and over, the line looping around and around. I think I’m getting it, but after about ten minutes no fish has even looked at my Pale Morning Dun.

  “I don’t think I’m fooling them.”

  “Your line is too tight — your fly is dragging. Try not to cast like windshield wipers,”

  says Tucker. “You have to pause on the back cast. You’re forgetting to pause.”

  “Sorry.”

  I can feel him watc
hing me, and frankly it’s wrecking my concentration.

  I suck at fly-fishing, I realize. I don’t suck because I’m holding back; I just plain suck.

  “This is fun,” I say. “Thanks for bringing me.”

  “Yeah, it’s kind of my favorite thing. You wouldn’t believe some of the fish I’ve caught in this river: brook trout, rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, some brown trout. The native cutthroat are getting rarer, though; the introduced rainbows breed them out.”