Sangris frowned around at the oil-painted trees and the dry sunflowers and the well of cold water. “I don’t see how jumping off a cliff is noble.”
“Because it requires willpower,” I said, “and discipline. My father gets uncomfortable with affection, and putting yourself forward, and all of that. So his ideal daughter has to be quiet, submissive, restrained. Kind of the perfect woman.”
“Who, you?” Sangris said. He gave me a sideways smile.
“Don’t,” I said worriedly. “Don’t make fun of it.”
“Why not? You don’t love your father anyway. You should make fun of it with me.”
“But I think I agree with him. Sort of. See, he’s—powerful,” I said. “He scares me.”
“But obviously he taught you to think that. It’s the only way he could hope to make you the sort of person who would jump off a cliff on command,” Sangris said. “Why else would you do it?”
I’d thought of this before, and I had the answer. “Because there would be no other choice,” I said. “My father has all the power, and I have none. Simple as that.” I looked at my fingers and saw with vague surprise that they were shaking.
Sangris saw them too. He put his own hands, long and brown, over them. I’d never noticed a boy’s hands before, and it was strange how different they were from mine. “You wouldn’t actually jump, would you?”
I shrugged. “I believe that my father’s words have a kind of inevitability about them. Everybody obeys him. I think that if he told the sky to rain, it would. And as for me—I live in the oasis with him, don’t I, even though I hate it there, even though I get attacks of claustrophobia, even though I have to stay inside all the time? And I still put up with it, because I have no choice. It’s my father’s way or nothing.” I stared at our hands. “Living somewhere suffocating . . . how different is that, really, from stepping off a cliff? It’s slower, that’s all. I have enough time to live my life before I hit the ground.”
“And then it’s over, and you’ve spent your life hating every minute,” Sangris said, frowning at the sunflowers.
“Maybe not every minute,” I said. “My books help. And you. You’re helping.” His hands tightened over mine. Before he could get a big head, I added hastily, “A bit.”
Silence. I peeked up at him. He didn’t look back; he was watching our hands. “I’m being overly dramatic, aren’t I?”
“Shut up. You meant every word.”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t melodramatic.”
“Shut up,” he said again. “I was just thinking . . . It’s funny, but this isn’t at all the sort of place where I’d expect your father to invent his idea of you.”
“No?”
“No. The sunflowers, for instance.” He nodded over at them. “They’re strong, bold. The least delicate flowers you could imagine. And there are thousands of them. Your father would probably call it an immodest display.”
True. I had to bite back a smile.
“Could he sit here, listen to the leaves roaring, smile for a photo, and then say, ‘Huh, I think I need to ruin my daughter’s life’?”
“He wasn’t trying to ruin my life, he was trying to bring me to life,” I said, “and he wasn’t smiling in the photo, though he looked sort of optimistic—”
“We’re in the Spanish countryside,” Sangris said, “by a centuries-old pilgrim route. Fresh air. Those enormous flowers, so many of them that they cover the entire hill. Trees that look as if they’ve been painted. They make a sound like a flooding river, don’t they? A stone well, in the shade. Dark green, gold, black.” He paused. His hands were still over mine. “I can imagine someone sitting here, thinking of you, but a different you. Different from what your father wants, I mean, and more like you are now. Your father’s Frenenqer seems like she’d be thought up in a dull drawing room somewhere. But here . . . everything is ancient and lovely and bold and dusty and romantic. It’s the sort of place where a poet would be born. Either a poet or a revolutionary.”
I tried to brush it off. “Are you calling me ancient and dusty?”
“And lovely and bold and romantic. You conveniently left those out, didn’t you?”
“I’m not any of those things.”
“Well, actually I was trying to describe the place, not you. As it happens, you’re only bold on occasion, when you feel comfortable enough; you’re the opposite of ancient and you’re definitely not romantic; as a matter of fact, you’re so determinedly unromantic that I think you do it on purpose; and I haven’t noticed any dust on you. But you are lovely. One out of five—at least it’s something.”
“I’m not lovely,” I said seriously. “Anything with the L word in it doesn’t suit me.”
“Liar. Why do you think I haven’t been able to look you in the eyes since you called me your dear?” He ducked his head and added, “Even if that was only a joke.”
Ye gods, he was serious too.
“You didn’t notice, did you,” he said.
I looked over at the straight line of Sangris’s nose, and the black hair that hid most of his face right now.
Well—
Of course I had noticed. No one with eyes could have missed it. But it was better to fake blindness. “No,” I said slowly. “I didn’t.”
I’m not sure whose benefit I was acting for. Not my own. (I knew that I was lying through my teeth.) Maybe not even Sangris’s. I think I was talking to the presence of my father, which hovered behind my shoulders. See that? I told it. I didn’t notice a thing. So I don’t have to shove Sangris away, and I don’t have to run back to my room, and I don’t have to go to Pfft, because . . . because I didn’t notice a thing.
I shrugged, I looked away from Sangris with a show of disinterest, and I did everything I was supposed to do; almost everything that my father would have wanted me to do. But I couldn’t quite make myself slide my hands out from under Sangris’s. That was too much to ask of me. Instead I turned away and gave the sunflowers a last look.
He was right. The place didn’t make sense. It was so pretty, so peaceful, it seemed to deny all the cold little facts of my life. The beauty here was the exact opposite of what must have been boiling in my father’s head when he’d visited. But I’d told Sangris the truth. Everything I knew. My father had sat here, and, somehow, he’d come up with me.
When the time came, I didn’t stop Sangris from picking me up and flying me home, over the lightening landscape on the other side of the night. And if I ought to have said no when he asked if he could hold me while in human form—well, that was also too much to ask of me.
CHAPTER NINE
In Which a Bird Is Wadded Up
The desert looked pale and perfect at dawn. The dunes lying in vast interlocked patterns. Almost pink—but that didn’t fool me. Nothing was alive down there, nothing soft. Even the trees were armored. The acacias buckled under the weight of their spikes, and they grabbed their leaves close and stingy around themselves, refusing to spread out green, keeping gray instead, as if the color were a hoard of treasure they were afraid to share.
And beyond that, on the horizon, a flat yellow sun sliding up into a dull white sky, a cardboard sunrise.
Sangris lowered us into the oasis. I spotted my house from far off, a cube of crumbly stone, flat-roofed. My window had been left open. It seemed miserably small.
Sangris brought us level, and I slid out of his arms, through the window, into my room before I had time to regret it. When my feet were safely on the hard marble floor, I turned and looked back.
“Could I visit you at the school today?”
“It’s the weekend,” I said.
“Oh.” He hovered in the window frame. “At night, then?”
“Not on the weekend.”
“Why not?”
“Too dangerous. My father doesn’t keep a regular sleep schedule unless he has work the next day. And he’s home the entire time.”
He thought I was exaggerating. “I’m sure your dad won’t figu
re it out—”
“As a matter of fact, you’d better go now.”
Sangris frowned a bit. He leaned on the windowsill, black hair waving all around his face in the breeze from his wings, and burning eyes fixed on me. “What are you worried about?”
“He might hear something.”
“What, do you think he’d guess if he did? Is your father the type of person who’d say, ‘Oh, it must be a shape-shifting non-cat’?”
“Just go.”
“I’ll try to visit anyway,” he warned, and then before I could change his mind, he slipped away and the faint colorless light closed in where he’d been.
For a moment I just stood there. The stupid Free person didn’t understand what it was like to have a father . . .
I shut the window, then the curtains. I got into my nightshirt and crawled into bed. I thought I might as well try to sleep. After a few minutes the tension dropped away. Sangris wouldn’t do anything rash. He knew I’d kill him if he did. I could handle this. I shut my eyes, and for a few hours the world went black and secret.
. . .
Later in the morning I went through my routines. I consciously tried to be a machine. When I came out of my room, I thought my father would be able to look at me and see something different at once, as though the Spanish sunlight and the smell of the sky had left their marks on my skin. But he didn’t look up.
My mother poked her head into the dining room once, but when she saw the two of us sitting together she slowly withdrew it.
As I ate cereal, my father concentrated at the other end of the table, working on his laptop. Long spidery fingers pecked back and forth. He had never learned to type properly. The pallid sunlight came in through the window and lit the marble floor, the white walls, his crinkled black hair.
I said, “Good morning.”
He glanced at the clock on the wall to check that I was accurate. Luckily it was still eleven.
“You should make your voice go up on the last syllable,” he said, “not down. It’s more polite.”
I wondered again about Spain. He must have thought he was doing the world a duty, creating me. I remembered the sunflowers. The invention of one girl, someone who’d always be right, and always be blameless. It was a grand thing. My father had spent years of his life struggling in this tiny effort to improve the human race. Except that I’d turned out so shoddy, still a work in progress.
“All right,” I said, my voice going up on the second syllable.
“Better.”
Peck, peck, peck. His index fingers moved in nervous little jolts over the keyboard, meticulous and precision-perfect.
When I began to leave he stopped me. “Show me how you close the door.”
Like a toddler trained to go potty, I demonstrated.
The thing about being an expat is that you can pick up fragments of the cultures you pass through, like a crab covering its shell with pieces of its surroundings, choosing whatever appeals to your personality. My father has adopted guidelines for me from all around the world. Whatever strikes him as refined. Apologize to anyone you brush against, that’s from Canada. Act shy, that’s from Thailand. Don’t smile at men, that’s from the oasis. I do admire these graces, it’s not that I’d rather be coarse and cultureless . . .
Ten times I shut the door quietly, cheeks flushed, until he said, “Bend a little too. In doorways, keep your head low in case someone’s passing through.” (You see, that’s why it’s such a pity I’m tall: My head’s not meant to be higher than my superiors’.) “You don’t want to lay yourself open to reproach,” my father said to me.
. . .
But I’m not as much of a machine as I should be. Hidden in my room later, it didn’t take very long for me to regret sending Sangris away.
By noon I was sick of my books and their fantasy worlds. I wanted something new. Again I thought of Sangris. Then I heard my father pace past my door, and I jumped, as though he might have sensed my thoughts.
But that didn’t stop me from tossing my book aside and going to the window.
I winced when I peeled back the curtains. The glass was too hot to touch, and outside, everything shone hard and white. I could see the air rippling over the cars on the distant road, and I could almost feel the ground curling up and stiffening in the dryness. I scanned for any signs of life, any movement—particularly in the shape of a black cat. But there was nothing.
I tried to summon the memory of Ae, and the openness of the sky there, but it was like a dream that becomes more faded and disjointed the harder you try to remember it. I thought maybe Sangris was a lie that I had told myself to keep from going crazy. Free people?—an impossible idea; impossible exactly because I wanted it to be true.
Come on, Sangris . . .
I caught a scrap of movement. My eyes focused. Down there, somewhere. I scalded my fingertips when I tried to lean closer to the windowpane.
Yes, there. On the sun-sucked gray pavement along the road, in the direct and dangerous sunlight, there was a tiny thing struggling. I squinted. Just looking outside gave me a headache. The atmosphere was toxic. But I saw it, near a shriveled-up tree, out of the shade. A bare patch of skin burning on the pavement.
I should have looked away. It was only a baby bird. You find them all the time, normally as no more than papery skeletons littering the balconies and the roads. The desert is a place well-suited to turning small creatures into dust.
But this bird hadn’t died yet.
I swallowed and it hurt my throat. My eyes were fixed on the rare living thing down there, on the other side of the glass. It was so small I couldn’t see any details. But I could tell that it had no feathers, because it was pink gray, the color of bones showing through bare skin. I knew that the stone of the pavement would be flaming. God help anything that fell out of the nest; it would be cooking on the ground.
Nothing on earth matters more than a life. Right?
I think everything would be easier if I didn’t have a conscience.
I pulled away from the window, headed to the door, stopped at the last second and looked down at myself to check that I was wearing enough. The pants were long, but the sleeves were a bit short. I got nervous at the sight of my arms. But there was no time for that. I hurried out, walking on the balls of my feet, I slipped on the first pair of shoes I could find, and let myself out the door.
I would pay for it later. I spent a precious moment trying to close the door as quietly as possible. Then I ran.
The heat squeezed at me. Nobody else was outside, not at noon. No one was stupid enough for that. A few cars slowed on the street so that the people inside could watch me run past, and they honked in appreciation. I ducked my head, trying to hide behind my hair. But I didn’t slow down.
For a second I was afraid I might forget where I had seen the bird. But my feet carried me there. With relief I spotted the pink-gray dot wriggling around on the stone up ahead. For that dot, I had left the house. Maybe I could get back before my father noticed what I had done.
I knelt down on the pavement, and even through the fabric of my pants, the stone blistered me. I couldn’t stay kneeling for more than a moment before it became painful. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for the bird.
It was a nestling. Its wings were crooked bare bumps like those on a baked chicken, and part of its skin was raw, mottled red in a way that made it look more like a monster than a baby. I felt queasy at the idea of touching it. I did anyway. Its head was too heavy for its neck, and flopped back as I slid my fingers underneath. The brittle bones were bulging beneath the skin.
“Shh,” I said. The bird was gross and I would have died for it willingly. It couldn’t have been more than a few days old. It stank of something musty. The beautiful thing. It waggled its head back and I whispered to it again. I got up, turned, and almost walked right into my father.
He’d followed me out of the house.
I staggered back, opened my mouth, then shut it again. On the pa
lm of my hand the broken bird wriggled.
“It was going to die,” I explained.
My father watched me. His face was screwed up in the heat and the bright light. Sand was already beginning to stick to the streaks of sweat gathering in the creases on his forehead. I saw him like a stranger, leveling his gaze at me, straight and unemotional as a bullet.
It would be easier if he seemed angry sometimes. But there’s never any uncontrolled feeling behind the flat glaze of eyes. Or if there is, it’s something alien—something so far removed from me that it’s unrecognizable. His feelings are made of metal, and I’m only meat.
“I came out to help it,” I said, starting to babble when he still didn’t speak. “I saw it through the window—”
“Get inside.”
“Going now.”
He stopped me. “Put that thing down first,” he said.
I hesitated. “This?” I said, holding up the lopsided bird.
His face screwed up even more when he saw it.
“That’s disgusting,” he said. “Don’t you see how wrong your conduct is? I wouldn’t have believed it. Do you think it’s smart to run outside without supervision and pick up dirty animals off the street?”
I glanced up at him and then down again, quickly, before he could think I was staring. Staring is rude.
I was taken off guard when he reached out and pulled the nestling away from me. He stepped back with the baby bird somewhere inside the fist of his right hand. He wasn’t holding it very carefully. There was one bony leg sticking out from between his fingers and waggling in the air, blindly.
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