by Cynthia Hand
“Clara, I don’t know,” he says doubtfully.
“It’s not all about me,” I say. “It’s about Angela. This entire time, it’s been about her. Come on.” I start tugging him into the welcoming coolness of the church. “Walk the labyrinth one more time, with me.”
Ten minutes later we’re both sitting in the front pew of the church, catching our breath. There’s no one else in the church, but when we talk, I get a sense that all the mosaic angels are listening.
“I saw it again,” I say to Christian, quietly, triumphantly. “Two minutes to midnight. The train even has the Caltrain logo on it. One comes in, headed north, and then a few minutes later another, headed south. That’s the one we’re going to take.”
“I didn’t see it,” he says, his face whiter than normal.
Some of my excitement fades. “You didn’t see the train?”
He shakes his head. “I saw Asael,” he murmurs.
My breath freezes in my lungs. “You saw him.”
“I saw his face. He was talking to me. I don’t know what he was saying, but he was less than ten feet away from me.”
That’s not good news. I mull this over for a minute. “But I see the train so clearly. And I’m waiting for you. I keep looking at my watch. I’m waiting for you to show up.”
“What if I don’t show up?” he says. “You can’t go, then. Samjeeza won’t take you without me, right?”
“But Christian, we have to go. It might be Angela’s only chance.”
“Angela’s gone,” he says. “She might not be dead, but she’s gone where the dead go.”
I stand up. “When did you turn into such a coward?”
He gets up, too. There’s a vein standing out on his neck that I’ve never seen before. “It’s not cowardly to not want to do something crazy.”
“Yes, this is crazy,” I admit. “I know that. Even in the vision pretty much all I’m thinking is, This is crazy. This is crazy. But I still do it.”
“We don’t have to do this, just because you see it,” he counters. “You and I both know that the visions never turn out quite how we expect them to.”
“I can’t leave Angela in hell,” I say, gazing up at him. “I won’t.”
“We’ll figure out another way.”
“What other way?”
“Maybe the congregation—”
“The congregation already said that they can’t help us.”
“We could ask your dad.”
I shake my head. “You remember what he said, don’t you? He said I had to be ready to face—whatever—without him. Helping me is not part of the plan.”
He stares up at the angels angrily. “Then what is he good for? What was all of that, the training, the talks, all of it, what good did it do us?” He sighs. “I thought we were partners,” he says softly. “I thought we’d decide things together. And here you go making deals with fallen angels without even telling me.”
I kneel down beside him. “You’re right. I should have talked to you first. We are partners. I’m counting on it, actually. I need you.”
“Because Samjeeza said you needed to bring a friend.”
“Because I can’t do this without you. I need our strength, Christian.”
He looks cornered. This is his worst nightmare come to life, I realize. “And what do you think will happen if we make it, if we get Angela out of there? You think they’ll stand idly by? They’ll come after us with a vengeance after that.”
I hadn’t given much thought to what would happen after we got out. I was too busy imagining Angela’s grateful tears, the joyous hugs, the “woo-hoo, we’re out of hell” feeling.
But he’s right. They will come after us. We won’t be able to go back to a normal life then, either. It won’t change our fate, not that way. It can only make things worse.
Christian sees the realization on my face. “We’re here, Clara. We’re safe, at least for the moment.”
I bite my lip. “But Angela’s in hell.”
His eyes are sad, resigned. “You can’t save everybody, Clara. Some things are beyond our ability to change.”
Like Jeffrey. Or my mom dying. Or being with Tucker.
“No,” I whisper. “What about the vision?”
He gives a bitter little laugh. “When did you become so faithful all of a sudden?”
It hurts, him saying that, but I’ll take it. And what I realize in this moment is that it’s his fate, too. It’s his choice. I can’t make it for him.
“I understand if you don’t want to do it,” I say then. On impulse I reach up and hook my hand behind his neck, draw myself into his arms for a hug. I let his warmth infuse me, and mine pour back into him.
When I pull away, his eyes are shining.
“If I don’t go, you can’t either,” he says. “He won’t take you.”
Oh, Christian, I think. Always trying to keep me out of trouble.
“I’ll see you at midnight at the train station,” I say. “Or I won’t. But I really hope I will.”
I kiss his cheek, and then leave him alone with the stained-glass angels.
Later I review my mental before-you-go-to-hell checklist: Make sure Web is somewhere safe—check. Tell Christian your plan, hope he doesn’t freak out too much—sort of check. And now I have to try to find my brother. The idea that Lucy knows about him, and has sworn to take revenge on me, has me near panic every time I think about it.
As usual, I start at the pizza place. Since the night at the Garter I’ve been calling like crazy, trying to reach him, but he’s never been there.
“He quit,” the manager informs me now, clearly ticked off. “He didn’t give notice or anything. He just stopped showing up about a week ago.”
“Do you know where he lives?” I ask.
The manager shrugs. “He always biked to work, even in bad weather. If you see him, tell him we need our uniform back.”
“I’ll tell him,” I say, but there’s a sick feeling in my stomach that I’m not going to get that chance anytime soon.
I wander around my old neighborhood, trying to think of where to look for him next. It feels like déjà vu, looking for my brother, the way we did last summer in the first weeks when he was gone. My inclination is to start at my old house, work my way out from there. I call Billy.
“How’s Web?” I ask, unable to help myself.
“He’s good. He smiled at me. I’ll text you the picture.”
My heart squeezes. Angela’s missing it.
“Hey, you asked the people who moved into our old house if they’d seen Jeffrey around, didn’t you? Last June?” I ask.
“First place I checked,” she answers. “A real pretty girl lived there, too. Long, black hair. She said she knew Jeffrey, from back when they were in school together, but she hadn’t seen him.”
“Did she give you her name?” I ask, my heart starting to beat fast. A pretty girl. Long black hair. Who’d gone to school with Jeffrey.
“L something,” Billy says. “Let me think.”
“Lucy?” I manage to get out.
“That’s it,” Billy says. “Oh dear,” she says, as she realizes what I’m getting at.
The answer that’s been staring me in the face all this time now basically head-butts me. Lucy’s been involved with Jeffrey for a long time, and we didn’t know it. Who knows all the ways she could have been messing with his head?
“He’s been staying at our house. Mom never sold it,” I murmur to myself.
Mom knew that I was going to run away, he told me. She even kind of prepared me for it.
The windows are dark when I get there, no cars in the drive, no bicycle leaning against the garage. We used to keep a spare key under a flagstone on the back patio. I vault completely over the fence and into our old backyard. The swings on my old swing set sway gently as I pass.
Oh, clever, sneaky Mom.
It’s not that she didn’t care about Jeffrey’s vision or that she wasn’t interested in his the way she was so involved in
mine. It’s that she already knew how it would play out. She knew what he would need. I can’t help but be annoyed by this. It’s like she was enabling him to run away.
The spare key is right where I thought it would be. My hands tremble as I unlock the door and slip into the house.
“Jeffrey?” I call.
Silence.
I send up a little prayer that I don’t run into Lucy instead. Because that would be awkward.
I poke around the kitchen. There’s a stack of dirty dishes in the sink. I open the fridge and find it mostly empty save for a gallon of chocolate milk that’s a week expired and what I think is a foil-wrapped slice of old pizza. It’s hard to tell what with the mold.
I call his name again, jog upstairs to his room. He’s not here, but his sheets are on the bed, rumpled at the bottom corner. The drawers of his old dresser, the one Mom said she was getting rid of before we moved to Wyoming—in fact, I complained because she bought Jeffrey a whole new set of bedroom furniture for the move, oh clever, sneaky Mom—are full of his clothes. It smells like him in here.
I search the drawers, looking for clues, but I get nothing.
He lives here, clearly. Or he did. It doesn’t seem like he’s been back here for a while. Add that to what the pizza place manager said about him not showing up to work for a week, and color me officially worried.
Lucy could have him, right now. Asael could have him. Or he could be—
I won’t let myself think the word dead, won’t allow myself to picture Jeffrey with a sorrow blade through his heart. I have to believe that he’s out there, somewhere.
I sit down on his bed and dig for a scrap of paper in my purse, a pen. On the back of a Nebraska grocery store receipt I write the following note:
Jeffrey,
I know you’re mad at me. But I really need to talk to you. Call me. Please remember that I’m always in your corner.
Clara
I hope he gets the message.
Outside again, I hide the key back under the flagstone and take a long, last look at the house where I grew up, and I wonder if I’ll ever lay eyes on it again after tonight, or if I’ll ever get to talk to my baby brother.
Very soon now, I’ll have to catch a train.
18
YOU’LL SEE ME AGAIN
At some point in the afternoon it seems like I have nothing to do but wait for night to fall. I glance at my watch. I’ve got hours to go before I have to make the journey to the train station.
Before I go to hell.
I should do something frivolous, I think. Fun. Ride a roller coaster. Eat a ton of rocky road ice cream. Buy something ludicrous on credit. These very well could be my last hours on this earth.
What should I do? What is the thing that, if everything changed, I’d miss the most?
The answer comes to me like a song on the wind.
I’ve got to fly.
It’s stormy at Big Basin. I climb quickly, easily, my nerves giving me even more speed than usual, and take my place on the rock at the top of Buzzards Roost, legs dangling over the edge, staring out across the blue-black tangle of clouds that lies heavy over the valley.
Not good flying conditions. I briefly consider going somewhere else—the Tetons, maybe, crossing there—but I don’t. This is our thinking spot, Mom’s and mine, and so I’ll sit here and think. I’ll try to be at peace with whatever’s going to happen.
I cast back to the day Mom first brought me here, when she broke the news to me that I was an angel-blood. You’re special, she kept saying, and when I laughed at her and called her crazy, denied that I was faster or stronger or smarter than any other perfectly normal teenage girl I knew, she said, So often we only do what we think is expected of us, when we are capable of so much more.
Would she approve of what I’m about to do, the leap I’m about to make? Would she tell me I’m insane to think that I can do this impossible thing? Or, if she were here, would she tell me to be brave? Be brave, my darling. You’re stronger than you think.
I’m going to need to come up with a story to tell Samjeeza, I remind myself. That’s my payment. A story, about Mom.
But what story?
Something that shows my mother at her very best, I think: lively and beautiful and fun, the things Samjeeza most loves about her. It has to be good.
I close my eyes. I think about the home movies we watched in the days before she died, all those moments strung together like a patchwork of memories: Mom wearing a Santa hat on Christmas morning, Mom whooping in the stands at Jeffrey’s first football game, Mom bending to find a round, perfect sand dollar on the beach at Santa Cruz, or that time we went to the Winchester Mystery House on Halloween night and she ended up more creeped out than we were, and we teased her—oh, man, did we tease her—and she laughed and clutched at our arms, Jeffrey on one side and me on the other, and she said, Let’s go home. I want to get in bed and pull the covers up over my head and pretend like there’s nothing scary in the world.
A million memories. Countless smiles and laughs and kisses, the way she told me she loved me all the time, every night before she tucked me into bed. The way she always believed in me, be it for a math test or a ballet recital or figuring out my purpose on this earth.
But that’s not the kind of story Samjeeza will want, is it? Maybe what I give him won’t be good enough. Maybe I’ll tell him, and he’ll laugh the way he does, all mocking, and then he won’t take me to hell after all.
I could fail at this before I even start.
I feel dizzy and open my eyes, wobble unsteadily at the edge of the rock. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m too high up. I could fall.
I scramble back away from the edge, my heart hammering in my chest.
Whoa. This is too much pressure, I think. I rub my eyes. It’s too much.
A gust of wind hits me, warm and insistent against my face, and my hair picks this moment to slide out of my ponytail and swirl around me, into my eyes. I cough and swipe at it. For all of two seconds I wish I had a pair of scissors. I would hack it all off. Maybe I will, if and when I get back from hell. The new me will need a radical makeover.
I gaze wistfully out at the sky, then catch my breath as I truly look at it. The clouds are all but gone, only a few wisps of white hanging in the distance. The sky is clear. The sun is dropping slowly toward the ocean, glancing off the treetops in a golden blaze.
What happened? I think dazedly. Did I do that? Did I dissipate the storm, somehow? I know that Billy can control the weather, and sometimes things get wonky when she’s feeling emotional, but I never thought that I might be able to do it myself.
I stand up. Whatever the reason, it’s good. I can fly now, even if it’s only for a few minutes. It feels like a gift. I take off my hoodie, stretch my arms up over my head, and prepare to summon my wings.
Just then I hear a rustling below me, then the unmistakable sound of sneakers on rock, the small grunts of exertion as somebody climbs the rock wall. Somebody is coming up.
Bummer. I’ve never seen anyone else here before. It’s a public trail, and anyone can hike it, I suppose, but it’s typically deserted. It’s a difficult climb. I’ve always counted on it being a place I could go to be alone.
Well, I guess flying is out.
Stupid somebody, I think. Find your own thinking spot.
But then the stupid somebody’s hands appear at the edge of the rock, followed by her arms, her face, and it’s not a stupid somebody after all.
It’s my mother.
“Oh, hi,” she says. “I didn’t know there was anybody here.”
She doesn’t know me. Her blue eyes widen when she sees me, but it’s not in recognition. It’s in surprise. She’s never come across anybody else up here, either.
She is beautiful, is my first thought, and younger than I’ve ever seen her. Her hair is curled in a fluffy way that I would have teased her about if I’d seen it in a photograph. She’s wearing light-colored jeans and a blue sweatsh
irt that slouches off the shoulder in a way that reminds me of this one time when she made me watch Flashdance on cable. She’s a poster girl for the eighties, and she looks so healthy, so flushed with life. It makes an achy lump rise in my throat. I want to throw my arms around her and never let her go.
She glances away uncomfortably. I’m staring.
I close my mouth. “Hi,” I choke out. “How are you? It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
She’s looking at my clothes now, my skinny jeans and black tank top, my loose, blowing hair. Her eyes are wary but curious, and she turns and gazes out at the valley with me. “Yes. Beautiful weather.”
I hold out my hand.
“I’m Clara,” I say, the picture of friendliness.
“Maggie,” she replies, taking my hand, shaking without squeezing, and I get a glimpse of what’s going on inside her. She’s irritated. This is her spot. She wanted to be alone.
I smile. “Do you come up here often?”
“This is my thinking spot,” she says, in a tone that subtly informs me that it’s her turn now, and I should be on my way.
I’m not going anywhere.
“Mine, too.” I sit back down on my boulder, which is so not what she wants to happen that I almost laugh aloud.
She decides to wait me out. She takes a seat on the other side of the outcropping and stretches her legs in front of her, reaches into her bag for a pair of police-officer-style mirrored sunglasses and puts them on, leans her head back like she’s taking in the sun. She stays that way for several moments, her eyes closed, until I can’t stand it anymore. I have to talk to her.
“So do you live around here?” I ask.
She frowns. Her eyes open, and I can feel her irritation giving way to a more general wariness. She doesn’t like people who ask too many questions, who show up out of the blue in unexpected places, who are too friendly. She’s had experiences with that kind of thing before, and none of them ended well.
“I’m just finishing my freshman year at Stanford,” I ramble on. “I’m still kind of new to the area, so I’m always hounding the locals with questions about the best places to eat and go out and that kind of stuff.”