by Cynthia Hand
“Shh.” I cast a glance at Charlie over my shoulder. He’s faced away from us, his fingers punching the buttons on the Xbox controller passionately. I turn back to Christian.
“You should sleep,” I tell him. I stroke his hair away from his face, my fingers lingering near his temple. He closes his eyes. I move my hand to his forehead, and peek again at Charlie, who’s as oblivious as ever.
Then I call the glory to my fingers and send the tiniest bit of it into Christian.
His eyes open. “What did you just do?”
“Does your head feel better?”
He blinks a few times. “The pain’s gone,” he whispers. “Completely gone.”
“Good. Now go to sleep,” I tell him.
“You know, Clara,” he sighs sleepily as I get up to leave. “You should be a doctor.”
I close the door behind me, then take a minute to lean against the wall and catch my breath.
It’s funny. Here I’ve been seeing this dark room for months, and I know something bad has happened right before Christian and I end up there, hiding, and I know it’s not going to do any good for us to hide, and I know that this whole vision could be life or death. Those people, whoever they are, want to kill us. I’ve sensed that from the beginning.
But I don’t think I ever truly considered that I might die.
Okay, God, I cast upward at breakfast Sunday morning, nibbling at a dry piece of toast while the bells of Memorial Church chime in the background. Give me a break. I’m eighteen years old. Why put me through all of this, the forest fire and the visions and the training, if I’m going to kick the bucket, anyway?
Or maybe this is a punishment. For not fulfilling my purpose the first time.
Or maybe it’s some kind of ultimate test.
Dear God, I write in my notebook as I’m sitting in chemistry class on Monday morning listening to a lecture on the laws of thermodynamics. I don’t want to die. Not now. Sincerely, Clara Gardner.
Please, God, I plead when I’m up at three a.m. on Tuesday morning trying to dash off my Waste Land paper. Please. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. I’m scared.
“Oh yeah?” says T. S. Eliot. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Angela doesn’t show up for the Poet Re-making the World. Doesn’t turn in the paper. Which means, according to the rules in the syllabus, that she can’t pass the class.
The idea sends a chill through me. Angela Zerbino: straight-A student, high school valedictorian, school-geek extraordinaire, lover of all things poetical, is going to fail her first college poetry course.
I’ve got to find her. Talk to her. Right freaking now. I’ll do whatever it takes.
The minute class is over, I call Amy. “Do you know where Angela is?” I ask.
“She was in the room, last time I saw her,” she tells me. “Why? Is something going on?”
Oh, something’s going on.
I sprint all the way back to Roble, but stop short when I reach the building. Because a crow is perched on the bike rack again.
“Don’t you have somewhere better to be?” I ask it.
No reply, except it hops from the rack to one of the bikes. My bike, as a matter of fact.
I don’t want bird poo on my bike, broken or not. I take a few steps forward, waving my arms at it. “Go away. Get out of here.”
It cocks its head at me, but doesn’t otherwise move.
“Go on.”
I’m directly in front of it now. I could touch it if I wanted to, and it doesn’t budge. It stares at me calmly and holds its ground. Which is when I know—or maybe I’ve always known, and haven’t wanted to admit to myself—that this is not a regular old crow.
It’s not a bird at all.
I open my mind then, like cracking open a door, ready to push it closed again at any moment. I can feel him, that particular flavor of sorrow I know so well. I can hear that sad music, the way I used to hear it calling me last year from the field behind the school grounds, a melody of this is all that I am, when I was so much more; I’m alone, alone now for good, and I can never go back, never go back, never go back.
I wasn’t being paranoid. It’s Samjeeza.
I take a step back, slam the door in my mind so hard it gives me an instant headache, but a headache’s better than the sorrow by a long shot.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper. “What do you want?”
I know I felt sorry for him last year, I did; I knew how much he’d cared about my mom, even in his twisted-up way, and I’d taken pity on him that day in the cemetery. Even now I don’t fully understand what came over me. I just walked over there and gave him my mother’s bracelet, and he took it, and he didn’t try to hurt us and we all got home safe and sound. But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. He’s a fallen angel, aligned with the powers of dark. He’s almost done me in on two separate occasions.
I force myself to stand up straight, look him in his wide yellow eyes.
“If you’re here to kill me, then do it already,” I say. “Otherwise I’ve got stuff I’ve got to do.”
The bird shifts and then, without warning, takes off, straight at me. I yelp and duck and prepare to, I don’t know, have my head separated from my shoulders or something, but he breezes past me over my shoulder, so close he brushes my cheek with his feathers, up and away, into the cloud-darkened sky.
Standing outside her dorm room in A wing, I try to call Angela again, and I can hear her phone ringing from inside. She’s home. It’s a miracle.
I pound on the door.
“Come on, Ange. I know you’re there.”
She opens the door. I push my way inside before she can protest. A quick glance around reveals that the roommates aren’t here. Which is good, because it’s about to get ugly.
“Okay, what is going on with you?” I demand to know.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” I cry. “You’ve been dodgy. The whole dorm is talking about how you’re involved, in a horizontal-type way, with Pierce. He’s the PHE, you know, the dorm doctor. He lives on the first floor. Blondish, shortish, scruffyish—”
She gives me an amused look and closes the door behind me, locks it. “I know who he is,” she says with her back to me. “And yes, we’re together. Involved, if that works better for you, in a horizontal-type way.”
My mouth drops open.
I owe Christian ten bucks.
Angela puts a hand on her hip. I notice that she’s got a wet washcloth slung over one shoulder. She’s wearing sweats, an oversize Yellowstone National Park T-shirt with a trout on the front, her hair braided in a long, single plait down her back, no shoes or socks, and no polish on her fingers or toes. Under the fluorescent lights of our room, her skin has a blue cast to it, lavender shadows under her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I’m fine. Tired, is all. I was up all night working on my Eliot paper.”
“But you weren’t in class—”
“I got an extension,” she explains. “Things have been crazy lately, and I’ve been so swamped that I’ve fallen way behind. I spent all weekend trying to catch up with everything.”
I squint at her. She’s lying, I sense vaguely. But why?
“Are you okay?” she asks. “You look a little wild-eyed.”
“Oh, well, let’s see: My dad showed up saying that he wants to train me to use a glory sword. Because I’m apparently going to have to fight for my life at some point. And oh yes, I’m having a vision where someone is trying to kill me, which works well with Dad’s theory that I should sharpen up my glory sword. And if that’s not enough, Christian’s having the same vision, except in his vision he doesn’t see me holding a glory sword. He sees me all weak and covered with blood. So maybe I’m going to die.”
She stares at me in horror.
“This is what happens when you don’t return my phone calls,” I say, flopping down on her bed. “All the proverbial cra
p hits the proverbial fan. Oh, and I just saw the bird again, and I felt his sorrow this time, and it’s definitely Samjeeza. So yay, right?”
She leans against the door frame like all that bad news has knocked the air out of her. “Samjeeza? Are you sure?”
“Yep. Pretty sure.”
There’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead, a greenish tinge to her skin.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say, sitting up. “I mean, it’s not good, but—”
“Clara—” She stops and presses the washcloth to her mouth, inhales deeply, closes her eyes for a minute. And she goes even greener.
All thoughts of Samjeeza fly out of my head.
“Are you … sick?”
I’ve never been sick, truly sick, a day in my life. Never had a cold, the flu, never got food poisoning, never had a fever or an ear infection or a sore throat. And neither has Angela.
Angel-bloods don’t get sick.
She shakes her head, closes her eyes.
“Ange, what is going on? Stop saying everything’s fine and spill.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but suddenly she groans and rushes out into the hall and two doors down to the bathroom, where I hear the unmistakable sounds of her throwing up.
I creep to the bathroom door. She’s in a stall crouched in front of the toilet, clutching the sides with white-knuckled hands, shivering.
“Are you okay?” I ask softly.
She laughs, then spits into the bowl, gets a wad of toilet paper, and blows her nose. “No. I am definitely not okay. Oh, Clara, isn’t it obvious?” She pushes her hair out of her face and glares at me with fierce, shining eyes. “I’m pregnant.”
“You’re—”
“Pregnant,” she says again, the word echoing off the tile. She stands up and brushes herself off, pushes past me and back to her room.
“You’re—” I try again, following her.
“Knocked up. Yes. A bun in the oven. Preggers. With child. Expecting. In the family way.” She sits down on the bed, stretches her back, and lifts her shirt.
I stare at her belly. It’s not huge, not so much that I would have noticed it if she weren’t pointing it out, but it’s gently rounded. There’s a faint black line that stretches from her belly button down. She stares up at me with tired eyes, and I feel in that moment that she’s about an eyelash away from crying. Angela Zerbino, on the edge of tears.
“So,” she says softly. “Now you know.”
“Oh, Ange …” I keep shaking my head, because there’s no way that this could be true.
“I’ve already talked to Dr. Day, and three or four people in administration. I’m going to see if I can make it through winter quarter, since I’m not due for a while, and then take a leave of absence. They tell me that it won’t be any problem. Stanford will be here when I decide to come back; that’s the policy when it comes to these types of situations.” She gives me a look that’s trying hard to be brave. “I’m going to go back to Jackson and live with my mom. It’s all worked out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I breathe.
She lowers her head, rests her hand lightly on her belly. “I guess I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now. Telling people makes it real.”
“Who’s the father?” I ask.
Her expression smoothes itself in perfect composure again. “Pierce. We had this night a couple months ago, just something that happened, and we’ve been kind of on again/off again since then.”
She’s lying. I can feel it like she has a neon sign that says LYING flashing over her head.
“You think people are going to believe that?” I ask.
“Why wouldn’t they?” she asks sharply. “It’s the truth.”
I sigh.
“For one thing, Ange, you can’t really get away with lying to me. I’m an empath. And secondly, even if I wasn’t an empath, Pierce is the PHE.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” She’s not looking at me now.
“He’s the guy who gave out the safe-sex pamphlets during orientation. He’s got a dorm’s worth supply of condoms stashed in his room. And—”
She pulls her shirt back down. “Get out,” she says, almost a whisper.
“Ange, wait.”
She stands up and crosses to the door, holds it open for me. “I don’t need this from you right now.”
“Ange, I only want to hel—”
“Sounds like you’ve got your own stuff going on,” she says, still not looking at me. “You should worry about that.”
“But what about your purpose?” I say. “What about ‘the seventh is ours’ and the guy in the gray suit?”
“Don’t talk about my purpose,” she says fiercely between clenched teeth.
Then she shuts the door in my face.
I wander to the Old Union in a daze, sink to a bench next to the Claw fountain in White Plaza. I sit there, staring at the falling water, until the sun is much lower in the sky. People are all around me, coming and going from the CoHo on their search for coffee. I don’t hear them. I only hear the fear in Angela’s voice.
I’m pregnant.
This is how Christian finds me, dazed and silent on the bench. He takes one look at me and drops to his knees in front of me, peers up into my face.
“Clara?” Clara? What’s wrong?
I blink, look into his worried green eyes. Should I tell him?
I don’t have a choice. He can read the shocked thought like I’m shouting it. His mouth drops open.
“She’s …” He can’t even finish the sentence.
My eyes burn. What is she going to do? I keep thinking. What is she going to do?
Christian puts his hand over mine.
“Clara,” he says quietly. “I think it’s time you told me about what happened in Italy.”
So I tell him. I tell him about how, this one night in Rome, on the metro, of all places, we ran into this guy, and Angela totally freaked just looking at him. How she sneaked away that night to see him, and didn’t come home until morning. How he turned out to be Phen, the mentor angel she’d told me about before, but he was clearly more than her mentor. I tell Christian about how Angela desperately wanted me to like Phen, but I just couldn’t. I saw Phen for what he was—a gray soul, weary with the world. How I didn’t think he could truly love her, but Angela loved him, and acted like she didn’t love him, so she could keep seeing him and call it casual.
“So what do you think?” I ask Christian when I’m done with the story.
He shakes his head. “I think this changes everything.”
8
WHEN I MET YOUR MOTHER
It’s a few weeks later, winter break, and I’m standing next to Christian, holding his hand as we watch Walter’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Snow is coming down, thick and heavy, blanketing Aspen Hill Cemetery. The circle of faces around us is familiar, all members of the congregation: Stephen, the pastor; Carolyn, who was my mother’s nurse; Julia, who’s an all-around pain in the butt, if you want my opinion, but at least she’s here; and finally I settle on Corbett Phibbs, the old Quartarius who was my high school English teacher, who looks especially somber, his hands folded as he gazes into the grave. He must not be that far away from this fate himself, I think. But then he glances up at me and winks.
“Amen,” Stephen says. The crowd of mourners starts to clear out, everybody headed home in case the storm (because it’s December in Wyoming) becomes a blizzard, but Christian stays, so I stay.
The snow, I’m pretty sure, is Billy’s doing. She’s standing on the other side of me, wearing a long white parka that makes the shining black of her hair look like spilled ink down her shoulders, and the snow is swirling around her, drifting down as she stares at the hole before us with an anguish in her eyes that makes me want to hug her. The snow’s her way of crying. It’s hard to see her this way when normally she’s so strong and steady, so quick t
o make a joke to break the tension. At my mother’s funeral she smiled every time she met my eyes, I remember, and I was oddly comforted by that, as if Billy smiling was proof that nothing truly bad had happened to my mom. Just a little death, is all. A change of location.
But this is her husband.
They start to fill in the grave, and she turns away. I reach out and touch her shoulder. The sharp, aching chasm of her grief opens up in my mind. So little time, she thinks. For all of us.
She sighs. “I need to get out of here.”
“Okay. See you at the house?” I ask. “I can make us some dinner.”
She nods and hugs me, a stiff hug.
“Billy—”
“I’ll be all right. See you later, kid.” She strides off through the snow, leaving a trail of dark tracks behind her, and after she’s gone, the snow lets up.
Christian doesn’t say anything as the men work to fill in the hole. A muscle moves in his cheek. I step closer, until our shoulders touch, and I will my strength to flow into him the way his came into me the day we buried my mother.
I wish I’d known Walter better. Or at all. I don’t know if more than three sentences ever passed between us. He was a hard man, always guarded, and he never quite warmed up to me or to the idea that I was involved in Christian’s vision. But Christian loved him. I can feel that, Christian’s love, his hurt now that Walter’s gone, his sense of being alone in the world.
You’re not alone, I whisper in his mind.
His hand tightens in mine. “I know,” he says out loud, his voice hoarse with the tears he’s holding back. He smiles and looks at me, his eyes dark and red-rimmed. He reaches to brush snow out of my hair.
“Thank you for coming here with me,” he says.
A bunch of trite responses spring to mind—you’re welcome, don’t mention it, no problem, it’s the least I can do—but none of them feel right, so I simply say, “I wanted to come.”
He nods, glances briefly at the white stone bench beside his uncle’s grave that serves as his mother’s headstone. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out. “I should get out of here, too.”
“You want me to go with you?” I ask.