by Cynthia Hand
“You won’t lose yourself,” he whispers.
Now we’re clearly both cheating.
I won’t? I ask silently.
Not with me, he says. You know who you are. You won’t let anyone take that away.
He loves that about me. He loves—
He pulls me closer and looks into my eyes. My heart careens wildly in my chest. I close my eyes, and his lips touch my cheek near my ear.
“Clara,” he says, my name is all, but it sends a tremor through me.
He draws back, and I know he’s going to kiss me, any second now, and I want him to, but in that moment, his lips inches from mine, I suddenly see Tucker’s face. Tucker’s blue eyes. Tucker’s mouth a breath away from mine.
Christian stops, his body going rigid. He sees what I see. He pulls away.
I open my eyes. “I—”
“Don’t.” He rakes his hand through his hair, stares off at the water. “Just … don’t.”
He hates me. I would hate me about now, too.
“I don’t hate you,” he says sharply. Sighs. “But I wish you would get over him.”
“I’m trying.”
“Not hard enough.” His eyes are flinty when he looks at me this time. He’s not used to chasing girls; they’ve always chased him. He’s certainly not used to being someone’s second choice. The thought makes him clench his jaw.
“I’m sorry,” I say. He deserves so much better than this.
He shakes his head and starts back up the beach toward the road. I trail after him, struggling to put my shoes on as I go.
“Wait,” I say. “Let’s not go yet. It’s still early. Maybe we can—”
“What would be the point?” he interrupts. “You think we should brush it off and try to pretend it didn’t happen? I’m not built that way.” He sighs again. “Let’s just go.”
I hate the idea of the silent drive back to Stanford. “I can get home by myself,” I say, taking a step back. “You go. I’m sorry.”
He stares at me, hands shoved in his pockets. “No. I should—”
I shake my head. “Good night, Christian,” I say, and then I close my eyes and call the glory and send myself away.
I mean to go to Buzzards Roost, someplace quiet, where I can think, but when the glory fades and my eyes adjust, I find myself in an enclosed space in pretty much pitch black. I almost have a panic attack right there, but then I think this can’t be my vision, my doom, because I left Christian behind. I stumble forward, arms outstretched, feeling at the floor with my feet, breathe out a sigh when I find that it’s not slanted. I encounter the wall, rough and wooden, and attempt to walk along it in slow, shuffling steps. I run into something like a row of rakes leaning against the wall, which fall to the floor with a very loud crash. I hurry to set them upright again, then figure, Screw it, and call the glory to light my way.
I hold up my hand and concentrate on drawing the glory inside it, the way Dad says you do with the glory sword, but right now I’m thinking lantern, not blade. I’m impressed with myself when I’m able to shape a glowing ball in my hand, which feels so warm and alive it makes my fingers tingle. Ah, glory, I think, so useful—the power of the Almighty when you need a weapon, but also doubles as a handy flashlight.
I look around. I’m in a barn. A very familiar barn.
Crap.
I head for the door, passing the horse stalls on the way out. Midas nickers a greeting at me, his ears tilted forward, his eyes on me and the glowing ball in my hand, strangely unafraid of my light. Maybe he thinks he’s seen it all already.
“Hi, handsome,” I say to him, reaching with my free hand and stroking his velvety nose. “How are you, big boy? Do you miss me?”
He leans down and blows a wet, hay-scented breath onto my neck, then gently nips my shoulder.
“Hey, cut it out,” I laugh.
Suddenly the barn floods with light. Midas backs away from me and whinnies in alarm. I spin around to find myself at the business end of a shotgun. I yelp and lift my hands in immediate surrender, my glory ball instantly dissipating.
It’s Tucker.
He blows out an exasperated breath. “Good grief, Clara! You scared me!”
“I scared you?”
He lowers the gun. “That’s what you get for sneaking into people’s barns in the middle of the night. You’re lucky it was me that heard you and not my dad; otherwise you might be missing your head about now.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I didn’t mean to come here.”
He’s still wearing his flannel pajama bottoms under an oversize tan work coat. He sets the gun against the wall and goes to Midas, who’s throwing his head back and kicking at the door.
“Horses don’t like surprises,” he says.
“Obviously.”
“It’s okay, buddy,” he says, and reaches in the coat pocket and produces a handful of what look to be candies. Midas immediately steps forward, snuffling, and Tucker feeds them to him.
“Do you always carry candy around with you in case of emergencies?” I ask.
“He likes jelly beans,” he says with a shrug. “We’ve kind of been letting him have as many as he wants, too. He’s getting chubby.” He strokes Midas’s neck, then looks over at me. “You want to feed him?”
“Sure,” I say, and he hands me some.
“Keep your hand flat,” Tucker instructs. “Or you might lose a finger.”
Midas jerks his head up and moves around impatiently as I step forward. Then he drops his nose into my palm and slurps the jelly beans right up, munching them noisily.
“It tickles,” I laugh.
Tucker smiles, and I reach for another handful in his pocket, and for a minute things feel normal between us, like we haven’t had all that sniping and awkwardness and telling each other good-bye.
“You look nice,” he says, looking at me appraisingly, at my curled hair and makeup, his gaze flickering over the hemline of my little black dress, my pretty sandals and painted nails, up to the black fleece jacket, which I’m still wearing around my shoulders. “Not a funeral, this time.”
“No.” I don’t know what else to say.
“A date.”
I’m tempted to lie, to say that I was out with a bunch of people, no biggie, nothing special, but I’m bad at lying, and Tucker’s really good at spotting a fib. “Yeah. A date.”
“With Prescott,” he concludes.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.” He pats Midas on the nose, then turns and scuffles away a few steps. The look on his face is killing me, like he’s trying so hard to act like he doesn’t care, but I know him.
“Tucker—”
“Nah, it’s all right,” he says. “I guess I should have expected him to make his move, now that we’re over and done. So how’d it go?”
I stare at him wordlessly.
“Well, it can’t have gone too well, or you wouldn’t have ended up here at the end of the night.”
“That,” I say carefully, “is none of your beeswax, Tucker Avery.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” he says. “We’ve got to move on, don’t we? But the way I see it, there’s one big thing getting in the way of us doing that.”
My breath catches. “Oh yeah? What?”
He looks at me coolly. “You keep showing up.”
He has a point.
“Look—” we say at the same time. He sighs.
“You go,” I say.
He scratches at the back of his neck. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry I’ve been so testy with you. You were right. I’ve been a jerk.”
“You were surprised. And you’re right. I’m invading your space.”
He nods. “Still, it’s no excuse. You’re not the worst thing that could pop up unexpectedly into my life.”
“Oh great. I’m not the worst thing.”
“Nope.”
We laugh, and it feels good, laughing. It feels like old times. But then I think, Maybe I a
m the worst thing that could pop up in his life. He’s looking at me with a flicker of longing in his eyes that I recognize all too well, and it sends a dart of fear for him all though me. I can’t let myself get close to him. I’m not good for him. Plus, I might not even make it through this year.
“Your turn,” he says.
“Oh.” I find I can’t tell him what I was thinking. I point my thumb behind me at the open barn door. “I was going to say that I should go.”
“Okay.”
He looks confused when I don’t move. Then amused. “Oh, right. You want me to leave.”
“You can stay. Only, the glory …”
“That’s all right.” He smiles with his dimples, then moseys past me toward the door. “Maybe I’ll see you around, Carrots.”
No, you won’t, I think grimly. I have to stop this. I can’t keep coming here. I have to stay away.
He called me Carrots.
Angela’s still in the same position she was in when I left her, scribbling away on Wan Chen’s bed. She stares at me for a minute after I materialize in the room.
“Wow,” she says. “You were right when you said it was like beaming yourself in Star Trek. That is pretty cool.”
“I’m getting better at it,” I admit.
“How did your date—” she starts to ask, then gets a look at my face. “Oh. It didn’t go well.”
“No, it didn’t go well,” I say, kicking off my shoes and lying on my back on my bed.
She shrugs. “Men.”
“Men.”
“If we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all there?” she says.
I’m tired and can’t help but laugh at her joke.
“That’s why I don’t bother with men,” she says. “I don’t have the patience.”
Right. She doesn’t deal with mere mortals, she means.
“It’s Phen,” she says then.
“The father, you mean?”
She starts like my question surprises her, then hesitates for a split second before she says, quietly, “Yes. But you already knew that.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“But it’s also Phen in my vision,” she goes on to say. “The man in the gray suit. It’s Phen.”
Shock ripples through me. “Are you sure?”
She nods enthusiastically. “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him before. All those times I had the vision, but I didn’t think it was about me.”
“Yeah, visions can be tricky that way.”
“I wasted so much time feeling sorry for myself,” she says. “I thought, since this happened”—she nods at her baby bump—“that I’d wrecked everything. But I didn’t. It was supposed to happen this way. It was meant to be.”
I turn over onto my stomach. “So what are you supposed to do?”
“I’m supposed to tell him about our baby,” she says. “The seventh is ours.”
This strikes me as a very bad idea, given all I know about Phen. He’s just not trustworthy, for all his charm. But Angela’s not going to want to hear that right now. She doesn’t listen to reason when it comes to Phen.
“Okay, let’s say that you’re right—” I start slowly.
“Of course I’m right,” she says.
“Of course you’re right,” I agree. “But how does Phen know to come? How will he know to meet you there?”
“That’s easy. I sent him an email.”
I try to get my head around the idea of an angel with a Gmail account. “But Ange—”
“He’ll come, and I’ll tell him,” she says firmly. “Don’t you see what this means, Clara?”
I don’t.
“It means,” she says serenely, curving her arm around the crook of her swollen belly, “that everything is going to be okay.”
I highly doubt that. But for once, I hope she’s right.
11
ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK
I’m in the dark again. Hiding.
I’m crying. No doubt about it this time. My face is wet. Strands of my hair stick to my cheeks. Tears gather under my chin and drip down. Something’s happened that I can’t get out of my brain, but I only understand it in terms of sounds: a strangled moan, a sob, a few whispered words.
God help me.
I put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. The Clara that is me in the future feels helpless. Useless. Lost. The Clara that is me now doesn’t know where I am. I only know the darkness. The fear. The sound of voices coming. The smell of blood.
It’s no use hiding. They’ll find me. My fate has already been decided. I just have to wait for it all to play out. I have to be brave, I think, and face it.
God help me, I think, but I feel so very little faith that God will.
I come to under a tree. There’s something hard poking me under my back, and I feel for it: the book I was reading before the vision got me. I glance around to see if anybody saw me go comatose in the grass, but nobody, as far as I can tell, is looking. I wipe at my eyes. Crying again. Panicky, my heart drumming, my palms sweating, with what feels like one big knot in my stomach.
I’ve got to figure this vision out before I drive myself crazy.
I take out my phone and stare at Christian’s name in my contact list for a long time before I sigh and put it back into my backpack. Christian hasn’t said two words to me for more than a month, not even in fencing class. His pride is wounded. I get that. I’d be mad too if I’d been about to kiss him, to lay my heart on the line like that, and he went and thought about another girl.
I pick up my book, flip to the page I was on before my brain took a quick trip to the future. It’s a novel, one of the epic dystopians that’s so popular these days. I’m liking it—it puts things into perspective. Sure, I might have occasional visions of doom, a mysterious, soul-crushing pain in my heart, a premonition of death, but at least I’m not scrounging the post-apocalyptic countryside looking for shelter, my only friend a three-eyed mutated dog that I’ll have to eat later in order to survive nuclear winter.
Of course, a mutated dog would be a step up from my friend situation at the moment. On top of Christian not speaking to me, Jeffrey hasn’t called, and Angela’s too busy trying to orchestrate her purpose and her everything’s-going-to-be-fine meeting with Phen to even notice I’m alive. Amy and Robin have been batty since they figured out that Angela has a bun in the oven, and all they want to do when we get together is talk about how tragic and surprising it is that Angela’s in this position, and what is she going to do, anyway? Even Wan Chen’s been acting aloof since she found out, like pregnancy is something that might be catching.
I sigh again, try to remember the kind of thing I would write in my gratitude journal, which, to be truthful, I haven’t picked up since fall quarter ended.
I have a good life, I remind myself. There are plenty of people who love me.
They’re just not around at the moment.
I hear the squawk of a crow directly over my head. I peer up into the branches of the tree, and, sure enough, there’s Samjeeza gazing down at me.
Every single time I see him, no matter how brave I try to be about it, how casual, it’s like getting splashed with ice water. Because every single time, I wonder if he’s decided to kill me. And he could, with the littlest flick of his wrist, I think. He could.
“Don’t you have better things to do than follow me around?” I ask, trying to keep my tone saucy.
The bird cocks his head, then flutters down from the branch to land in the grass beside me. The sad melody of his sorrow twines itself around my mind, making my chest tight with the regret he’s feeling.
Meg, he thinks, my mother’s name and nothing more, but there’s a world of memory and pain in the word. Longing. Guilt. Meg.
I shut him out. “Go away,” I whisper.
Suddenly he’s a man, unfolding from the body of the crow, expanding, in the blink of an eye.
“Geez!” I scramble backward, up against the trunk of the tree. �
�Don’t do that!”
“No one is looking,” he says, like what I’m really concerned about at this moment is whether anybody saw me talking to a bird and what that might do to my sterling reputation.
I’m torn between the desire to run—hightail it straight to Memorial Church, the nearest hallowed ground I can think of—or to suck it up and hear what he’s going to say this time.
I glance over at the church, which is all the way across the quad. It’s too far.
“How can I help you, Sam?” I ask instead.
“I took your mother dancing once,” he says, starting up again on his stories. “She wore a red dress, and the band played ‘Till We Meet Again,’ and she put her head down on my chest to hear my heart beating.”
“Do you even have a heart?” I ask, which is foolish of me to say, and maybe even a little mean, but I can’t help it. I don’t like the idea of him and my mother that way. Or any way, really.
He’s offended. “Of course I have a heart. I can be wounded, the same as any man. She sang to me that night, as we danced. ‘Smile the while you kiss me sad adieu. When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you,’” he sings, and his voice isn’t half bad.
I know the song immediately. Mom used to sing it when she was doing some mundane task, like folding laundry or washing dishes. It’s the first time I’ve ever recognized my mother in this mysterious Meg of his.
“She smelled like roses,” he says.
She did.
He takes the silver charm bracelet out of his pocket and holds it in his palm. “I gave this to her on her doorstep, right before we said good night. All that summer I would leave charms for her to find. This one”—he fingers a charm shaped like a fish—“for that first time I saw her at the pond.” He touches the horse. “This one for when we rode through the French countryside after the hospital where she worked was bombed.”
He caresses the tiny silver heart with a single ruby at its center, but doesn’t tell me about that one. But I know what it means.
That’s the point of all this, I guess. He loved her.