by Cynthia Hand
“The usual,” I say. “AP Calculus, College English, government, French, physics, you know.”
“Physics, huh?”
“Well, my dad is a physics professor.”
“No kidding? Where?”
“NYU.”
He whistles. “That’s a long way from here. When did your folks split up?”
“Why are you suddenly so chatty?” I ask a tad sharply. Something about the idea of telling him about my personal history makes me uncomfortable. Like I’ll start telling him and won’t be able to stop. I’ll blab the whole story: Mom’s half-angel, I’m a quarter, my vision, my powers, my purpose, Christian, and then what? He’ll tell me about the rodeo circuit?
He stops and turns around to look at me. His eyes are dancing with mischief.
“We’ve got to talk because of the bears,” he says in a low tone, hamming it up.
“The bears.”
“Got to make some noise. Don’t want to surprise a grizzly.”
“No, I guess we don’t want to do that.”
He starts up the trail again.
“So, tell me about this thing that happened with your grandpa, where your family lost the ranch,” I say quickly before he has a chance to get back to the subject of my family. He doesn’t break his stride but I can almost feel him tense up. The tables are turned. “Wendy says it’s why you hate Californians. What happened there?”
“I don’t hate Californians. Clearly.”
“Whew, that’s a relief.”
“It’s a long story,” he says, “and we don’t have that long to hike.”
“Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine, Carrots. I’ll tell you about it someday. But not now.”
Then he starts to whistle and we stop talking. Which seems to suit us both fine, bears or not.
* * *
After a few more minutes of hard climbing, we come out on a clearing at the top of a small rise. The sky’s bathed in a mix of gray and pale yellow, with a tangle of bright pink clouds hanging right above where the Tetons jut into the sky, pure purple mountain majesty, standing like kings on the edge of the horizon. Below them is Jackson Lake, so clear it looks like two sets of mountains and two skies, perfectly replicated.
Tucker checks his watch. “Sixty seconds. We’re right on time.”
I can’t look away from the mountains. I’ve never seen anything so formidably beautiful. I feel connected to them in a way I’ve never felt anywhere else. It’s like I can feel their presence. Just looking at the jagged peaks against the sky makes peace wash over me like the waves lapping on the shore of the lake below us.
Angela has a theory that angel-kind are attracted to mountains, that somehow the separation between heaven and earth is thinner here, just as the air is thinner. I don’t know. I only know that looking at them fills me with the yearning to fly, to see the earth from above.
“This way.” Tucker turns me to face the opposite direction, where across the valley the sun’s coming up over a distant, less familiar set of mountains. We’re completely alone. The sun is rising only for us. Once it clears the mountaintops, Tucker takes me gently by the shoulders and turns me again, back toward the Tetons, where now there are a million golden sparkles on the lake.
“Oh,” I gasp.
“Makes you believe in God, doesn’t it?”
I glance over at him, startled. I’ve never heard him talk about God before, even though I know from Wendy that the Averys attend church nearly every Sunday. I would have never pegged him as the religious type.
“Yes,” I agree.
“Their name means ‘breasts,’ you know.” The side of his mouth hitches up in his mischievous smile. “Grand Teton means ‘big breast.’”
“Nice, Tucker,” I scoff. “I know that. Third-year French, remember? I guess the French explorers hadn’t seen a woman in a really long time.”
“I think they just wanted a good laugh.”
For a long while we stand side by side and watch the light stretch and dance with the mountains in complete silence. A light breeze picks up, blows my hair to the side where it catches against Tucker’s shoulder. He looks over at me. He swallows. He seems like he’s about to say something important. My heart jumps to my throat.
“I think you’re—” he begins.
We both hear the noise in the brush behind us at the same moment. We turn.
A bear has just come onto the trail. I know immediately that it’s a grizzly. Its massive shoulders glow in the rays of the rising sun as it stops to look at us. Behind it two cubs tumble out of the bushes.
This is bad.
“Don’t run,” warns Tucker. Not a possibility. My feet are frozen to the ground. In my peripheral vision I see him slide his backpack from his shoulder. The bear lowers her head and makes a snuffling sound.
“Don’t run,” says Tucker again, loudly this time. I hear him fumbling with something.
Maybe he’s going to hit her with an object of some kind. The bear looks right at him.
Her shoulders tense as she prepares to charge.
“No,” I murmur in Angelic, holding up my hand as if I could hold her back by the force of my will alone. “No.”
The bear pauses. Her gaze swings to my face, her eyes a light brown, absolutely empty of any feeling or understanding. Sheer animal. She looks intently at my hand, then rises to stand on her hind legs, huffing.
“We won’t harm you,” I say in Angelic, trying to keep my voice low. I don’t know how it will sound to Tucker. I don’t know if the bear will understand. I don’t have time to think. But I have to try.
The bear makes a noise that’s half roar, half bark. I stand my ground. I look into her eyes.
“Leave this place,” I say firmly. I feel a strange power moving through me, making me light-headed. When I look at my outstretched hand I see a faint glow rising under my skin.
The bear drops to all fours. She lowers her head again, woofs at her cubs.
“Go,” I whisper.
She does. She turns and crashes back into the brush, her cubs falling in behind her.
She’s gone as suddenly as she appeared.
My knees give out. Tucker’s arms come around me. For a minute he crushes me to him, one hand on the small of my back, supporting me, the other on the back of my neck. He pulls my head to his chest. His heart is pounding, his breath coming in panicked shudders.
“Oh my God,” he breathes.
He has something in one of his hands. I pull away to investigate. It’s a long, silver canister that looks vaguely like a fire extinguisher, only smaller and lighter.
“Bear repellent,” says Tucker. His face is pale, his blue eyes wild with alarm.
“Oh. So you could have handled it.”
“I was trying to read the directions on how to spray the thing,” he says with a grim laugh. “I don’t know if I would have figured it out in time.”
“Our fault.” I sink down so I sit on the rocky ground near his feet. “We stopped talking.”
“Right.”
I don’t know what he heard, what he thought.
“I’m thirsty,” I say, trying to buy myself some time to come up with an explanation.
He slips the canister back into his backpack and retrieves a bottle of water, opens it and kneels beside me. He holds the bottle to my lips, his expression still tight with fear, his movements so jerky that water spills down my chin.
“You did warn me about the bears,” I stammer after I try to drink a few swallows. “We were lucky.”
“Yeah.” He turns and gazes down the trail in the direction that the bear went, then back at me. There’s a question in his eyes that I can’t answer.
“We were pretty lucky, all right.”
* * *
We don’t talk about it. We hike back down and drive into Jackson for breakfast. We go back to Tucker’s house later in the morning for Tucker’s boat and spend the afternoon on the Snake fishing. Tucker hooks a few and t
hrows them back. He catches a big rainbow trout, and that one we decide to eat for dinner along with fish he caught the day before. It’s not until we’re standing in the kitchen of the Avery farmhouse, Tucker teaching me how to gut the fish, that he brings the bear up again.
“What did you do today, with the bear?” he asks as I stand with the fish at the kitchen sink, trying to make a clean incision up the belly the way he showed me.
“This is so gross,” I complain.
He turns to look at me, his expression hard the way it always gets whenever I try to get something past him. I don’t know what to say. What are my options? Tell the truth, which is against the only absolute rule Mom has really given me about being an angel-blood: Don’t tell humans — they won’t believe you and if even they did, they couldn’t handle it. And then there’s option two: Come up with some sort of ridiculous-sounding lie.
“I sang to the bear,” I try.
“You talked to it.”
“I sort of hummed at it,” I say slowly. “That’s all.”
“I’m not stupid, you know,” he says.
“I know. Tuck—”
The knife slips. I feel it slide into the fleshy part of my hand below my thumb, slicing through skin and muscle. There’s a sudden rush of blood. Instinctively I close my fingers around the gash.
“Okay, whose brilliant idea was it to give me a knife?”
“That’s a bad cut. Here.” Tucker curls back my fingers to press a dish towel over the wound. “Put pressure on it,” he directs, letting go. He dashes out of the room. I press for a moment, like he said, but the bleeding’s already stopped. I feel suddenly strange, light-headed again. I lean against the counter dizzily. My hand starts to throb and then a flare of heat like a tiny lick of flame shoots from my elbow to the tip of my pinkie finger. I gasp. I can actually feel the gash closing itself, the tissue knitting together deep inside my hand.
Mom was right. My powers are growing.
After a moment, the sensation fades. I peel back the dish towel and examine my hand. By now it’s only a shallow cut, little more than a scratch. It seems to have stopped healing itself. I flex my fingers back and forth gingerly.
Tucker appears with a tube of antibiotic ointment and enough bandages to fix up a small army. He dumps it all on the counter and crosses quickly over to me. I pull the dish towel tight across my palm and tuck my hand into my chest protectively.
“I’m okay,” I say quickly.
“Let me see,” he orders. He holds out his hand.
“No, it’s fine. It’s only a scratch.”
“It’s a deep cut. We need to close it.”
I slowly lower my hand to his. He takes it and gently turns it so my injured palm faces up. He tugs back the dish towel.
“See?” I say. “Only a minor flesh wound.”
He stares at it intently. I’m holding my breath, I realize. I tell myself to relax. Just act normally, like Mom says. I can explain this. I have to explain this.
“Are you going to read my future?” I say with a weak laugh.
His mouth twists. “I thought you were going to need stitches for sure.”
“Nope. False alarm.”
He sets right to fixing me up. He cleans the cut with water, smears on a bit of ointment, then smoothes a bandage over it carefully. I’m relieved when the cut’s covered by the bandage and he finally has to stop staring at it.
“Thanks,” I tell him.
“What’s going on with you, Clara?” His eyes when he looks up at me are fierce, full of so much hurt and accusation that it takes my breath away.
“What — what do you mean?” I stammer.
“I mean,” he starts. “I don’t know what I mean. I just. You’re just. ”
And then he doesn’t say anything else.
Insert the biggest, most awkward silence in the history of big awkward silences. I stare at him. I’m suddenly exhausted by all the lies I’ve told him. He’s my friend, and I lie to him every day. He deserves better. I wish I could tell him then, more than anything I’ve ever wanted. I wish I could stand in front of him and truly be myself and tell him everything. But it’s against the rules. And these aren’t rules you break lightly.
I don’t know what the consequences would be if I told.
“I’m just me,” I say softly.
He scoffs. He picks up the dish towel and holds it up, a bit of white terry with my incredibly bright red blood soaked into the middle of it. “At least now I know you can bleed,” he says. “That’s something, I guess. You’re not completely invincible, are you?”
“Oh right,” I retort as sarcastically as I can manage. “What, did you think I was Supergirl? Vulnerable only to Kryptonite?”
“I don’t know what I think.” He’s managed to tear his gaze away from the dish towel and is now looking at me again. “You’re not. normal, Clara. You try to pretend you are. But you’re not. You talked to a grizzly bear, and it obeyed you. Birds follow you like a Disney cartoon, or haven’t you noticed? And for a while after you came back from Idaho Falls, Wendy thought you were on the run from someone or something.
You’re good at everything you try. You ride a horse like you were born in the saddle, you ski perfect parallel turns your first time on the hill, you apparently speak fluent French and Korean and who knows what else. Yesterday I noticed that your eyebrows kind of glitter in the sun. And there’s something about the way you move, something that’s beyond graceful, something that’s beyond human, even. It’s like you’re. something else.”
A violent shiver passes through me from head to foot. He really has put it all together. He just doesn’t know what it adds up to.
“And there couldn’t possibly be any rational explanation for all of that,” I say.
“Considering your brother, the best I’ve been able to come up with is that maybe your family’s part of some kind of secret government experiment, some kind of genetically altered animal-friendly superhumans,” he says. “And you’re in hiding.”
I snort. It would be funny if the truth wasn’t so much weirder. “You sound crazy, you know that?”
Another silence for the record books. Then he sighs.
“I know. It’s crazy. I feel like—” He stops himself. He suddenly looks so miserable that my heart aches for him.
I hate my life.
“It’s okay, Tuck,” I say gently. “We’ve had kind of a crazy day.”
I reach to touch his shoulder but he shakes his head. He’s about to say something else when the screen door opens and Mr. and Mrs. Avery enter the house, talking loudly because they know they’re interrupting us. Mrs. Avery spots the pile of bandages and ointment on the counter.
“Uh-oh. Someone have an accident?”
“I cut myself,” I say quickly, avoiding Tucker’s eyes. “Tucker was teaching me how to clean out the fish, and I got careless. I’m okay, though.”
“Good,” says Mrs. Avery.
“That’s a nice fish,” Mr. Avery says, peering down in the sink where I dropped the big rainbow trout. “You catch that today?”
“Tucker did, yesterday. Today he caught the one over there.” I gesture to the open cooler. Mr. Avery looks at it and gives a low whistle of appreciation.
“Good eating tonight.”
“You sure that’s what you want for your birthday dinner?” asks Mrs. Avery. “I can make anything you like.”
“It’s your birthday!” I gasp.
“Didn’t he tell you?” laughs Mr. Avery. “Seventeen years old today. He’s almost a man.”
“Thanks, Pop,” mutters Tucker.
“Don’t mention it, son.”
“I would have gotten you something,” I say softly.
“You did. You gave me my life today. Guess what?” he says to his parents, louder than his usual gruff speech. “Today we ran into a mama grizzly with two cubs up at the ridge off Colter Bay, and Clara sang to it to make it go away.”
Mr. and Mrs. Avery stare at me, aghast.
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br /> “You sang to it?” Mrs. Avery repeats.
“Her singing is that bad,” said Tucker, and they all laugh. They think he’s joking. I smile weakly.
“Yep,” I agree. “My singing is that bad.”
* * *
After Mrs. Avery fries up the fish for dinner, there’s cake and ice cream and a few presents. Most of the gifts are for Tucker’s prize rodeo horse, Midas, which I think is a funny name for a horse. Mr. Avery brags about the way Tucker and Midas can pick a single cow out of a herd.