by Cynthia Hand
“Biology,” I say, nervous to see what she’ll think of that. “Premed.”
“I have a degree in nursing,” she says. “It’s a hard path, sometimes, making people better, fixing them up, but rewarding, too.”
I had almost forgotten that about her. A nurse.
We talk for a while, about the Stanford-Berkeley rivalry, about California and which beaches are best for surfing, about the premed program. Before five minutes are up she’s acting a whole lot friendlier, still kind of wanting me to leave so she can buckle down and make whatever decision it is that she came up here to make, but also amused by my jokes, curious about me, charmed. She likes me, I can tell. My mom likes me, even if she doesn’t know that she’s supposed to love me. I’m relieved.
“Have you ever been inside Memorial Church?” I ask her when there’s a lull in the conversation.
She shakes her head. “I don’t go to church, as a rule.”
Interesting. Not that Mom was ever fanatical about church or anything, but I always got the impression growing up that she liked church. We only stopped going when I got to be a teenager, maybe because she thought that I’d do something in church that would give away that there was more to our family than met the eye. “Why not?” I ask. “What’s wrong with church?”
“They’re always telling you what to do,” she says. “And I don’t like to take orders.”
“Even from God?”
She glances at me, one corner of her mouth hooking up into a quiet smile. “Especially from God.”
Very interesting. Maybe I’m having a little too much fun with this conversation. Maybe I should tell her who I am, point-blank, stop messing around, but how do you break it to someone that you’re actually their as-yet-not-even-conceived child, come to visit them from the future? I don’t want to freak her out.
“So,” she says after a minute. “What did you come up here to think about?”
How to put this? “I’m supposed to go on a … trip, to help a friend who’s in a bad place.”
She nods. “And you don’t want to go.”
“I want to. She needs me. But I have a feeling that if I go, I won’t ever be able to really come back. Everything will change. You know?”
“Ah.” She’s looking at my face intensely, seeing something there. “And there’s a guy you’re leaving behind.”
Trust her to miss nothing, even now. “Something like that.”
“Love is a many-splendored thing,” she says. “But it is also a pain in the ass.”
I give a surprised laugh. She swore. I’ve never heard her truly swear before. Young ladies, she used to tell me all the time, do not swear. It’s undignified.
“Sounds like the voice of experience,” I say teasingly. “Is that what you came up here to think about? A man?”
I watch her carefully frame the words before she says them. “A marriage proposal.”
“Whoa!” I exclaim, and she chuckles. “That’s serious.”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “It is.”
“So he asked you?” Holy crap. This must be Dad she’s talking about. She’s up here trying to decide whether or not to marry Dad.
She nods, her eyes distant like she’s remembering something bittersweet. “Last night.”
“And you said …”
“I said I needed to think about it. And he said that if I wanted to marry him, to meet him today. At sunset.”
I give a low whistle, and she smiles in a pained way. I can’t help myself. “So are you leaning toward yes, or toward no?”
“Toward no, I think.”
“You don’t … love the guy?” I ask, suddenly out of breath. This is my future we’re talking about here, my entire existence on the line, and she’s leaning toward no?
She gazes down at her hands, at her ring finger, where there is very conspicuously no gorgeous engagement ring. “It’s not that I don’t love him. But I don’t think he’s asking me for the right reasons.”
“Let me guess. You’re loaded, and he wants to marry you for the money.”
She gives a little snort. “No. He wants to marry me because he wants me to have his child.”
Child, singular. Because she doesn’t know that there’s a Jeffrey in the plan.
“You don’t want kids?” I ask, my voice a tad higher than usual.
She shakes her head. “I like children, but I don’t think I want to have my own. I’d worry too much. I don’t want to love something that much and then have it taken away.” She looks off across the valley, embarrassed by how much she’s given away about herself. “I don’t know if I can be happy in that life. Housewife. Mother. It’s not for me.”
It’s quiet for a minute while I try to think of something smart to say, and miraculously, I hit on it. “Maybe you shouldn’t look at it in terms of whether or not you’ll be happy as this guy’s wife, but if being his wife is true to the kind of person you want to be. We think of happiness as something we can take. But usually it comes from being content with what we have, and accepting ourselves.”
Happiness class is coming in handy, at last.
She looks over at me sharply. “How old are you, again?”
“Eighteen. Sort of. How old are you?” I ask with a grin, because I already know the answer. I’ve done the math. When Dad asked her to marry him, she was ninety-nine.
She reddens. “Older than that.” She sighs. “I don’t want to become someone else simply because it’s what’s expected of me.”
“So don’t. Be more,” I say.
“What did you say?” she asks.
“Be more than what’s expected of you. Look beyond that. Choose your own purpose.”
At the word purpose, her eyes narrow on my face. “Who are you?”
“Clara,” I answer. “I told you.”
“No.” She gets up, walks to the edge of the rock. “Who are you, really?”
I stand and stare at her, meeting her eyes. Time to show my hand, I think. I swallow.
“I’m your daughter,” I say. “Yeah, it’s kind of weird to see you, too,” I continue, as her face goes sheet white. “What’s today’s date, anyway? I’ve been dying to know ever since I saw your outfit.”
“It’s July tenth,” she says dazedly. “1989. What are you playing at? Who sent you?”
“Nobody. I guess I was missing you, and then I crossed through time by accident. Dad said I would see you again, when I needed it most. I guess this is what he meant.” I take a step forward. “I really am your daughter.”
She shakes her head. “Stop saying that. It’s not possible.”
I hold up my arms, shrug. “And yet here I am.”
“No,” she says, but I can see her scrutinizing my face in an entirely different way, seeing my nose as her nose, the shape of my face, my eyebrows, my ears. Uncertainty flickers in her eyes. Then panic. I start to get worried that she might jump off this rock and fly to get away from me.
“This is a trick,” she says.
“Oh yeah? And what I am trying to trick you into?”
“You want me to …”
“Marry Dad?” I fill in. “You think he—Michael, my father, an angel of the Lord and all that—wants to trap you into a marriage that you don’t want to be in?” I sigh. “Look, I know this is surreal. It feels strange to me too, like any minute I might disappear like I was never born, which would be a total bummer, if you know what I mean. But I don’t care, really. I’m so glad to see you. I’ve missed you. So much. Can’t we just … talk about it? I’m going to be born on June 20, 1994.” I take a slow step toward her.
“Don’t,” she says sharply.
“I don’t know how to convince you.” I stop and think about it. Then I hold up my hands. “We have the same hands,” I say. “Look. The exact same. See how your ring finger is slightly longer than your index finger? Mine too. You always joked that it was a sign of great intelligence. And I have this big vein that goes horizontally across the right one, which I think looks kind of
weird, but you have that too. So I guess we’re weird together.”
She stares at her hands.
“I think I should sit down,” she says, and drops heavily to sit on the rock.
I crouch next to her.
“Clara,” she whispers. “What’s your last name?”
“Gardner. I think it’s what Dad chooses as his mortal surname, but I’m not sure, actually. Clara, by the way, was like the most popular girl’s name in something like 1910, but not so much since then. Thanks for that.”
She stifles a smile. “I like the name Clara.”
“Do you want me to tell you my middle name, or can you come up with it on your own?”
She puts her fingers to her lips and shakes her head incredulously.
“So,” I say, because the sun is definitely on its way toward the horizon now, and she’s going to have to go soon, “I don’t want to pressure you or anything, but I think you should marry him.”
She laughs weakly.
“He loves you. Not because of me. Or because God told him to. Because of you.”
“But I don’t know how to be a mother,” she murmurs. “I was raised in an orphanage, you know. I never had a mother. Am I any good at it?”
“You’re the best. Seriously, and I’m not just trying to make my case here, but you are the best mother. All my friends are superjealous of how amazing you are. You put all the other moms to shame.”
Her expression’s still cloudy. “But I’ll die before you grow up.”
“Yes. And that sucks. But I wouldn’t trade you for somebody who’d live to be a thousand.”
“I won’t be there for you.”
I put my hand over hers. “You’re here now.”
She nods her head slightly, swallows. She turns my hand over in hers and examines it.
“Amazing,” she breathes.
“I know, right?”
We sit for a little while. Then she says, “So tell me about your life. Tell me about this journey you’re going on.”
I bite my lip. I worry that if I tell her too much about the future, it will disrupt the space-time continuum or something and destroy the universe. When I tell her this, she laughs.
“I’ve seen the future all my life,” she says. “It tends to work as a paradox, in my experience. You find out something is going to happen, and then you do it because you know that’s what happens. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario.”
Good enough for me. I tell her everything I think I have time for. I tell her about my visions, about Christian and the fire, the cemetery, and the kiss. I tell her about Jeffrey, which shocks her, because she never considered that she might have more than one child.
“A son,” she breathes. “What’s he like?”
“A lot like Dad. Tall and strong and obsessed with sports. And a lot like you. Stubborn. And stubborn.”
She smiles, and I feel a glimmer of happiness in her at the idea of Jeffrey, a son who looks like Dad. I blab on about how Jeffrey’s vision got him all messed up and how he ran away and has been living at our old house, how he’s dating a bad Triplare, how I can’t find him now, and she sobers right up.
And finally, I tell her about Angela and Phen and Web, and what happened in the Garter, and how I’m starting to believe that Angela’s what my purpose is really about.
“So what do you have to do,” she asks, “to save her?”
“I made a deal with the devil, so to speak.”
“What devil?”
“Samjeeza.”
She flinches like I’ve slapped her. “You know Samjeeza?”
“He considers himself a friend of the family.”
“What does he want?” she asks grimly.
“A story. About you. I don’t know why, really. He’s obsessed with you.”
She bites the end of her thumb gently, contemplating. “What kind of story?”
“A memory. Something where he can imagine you alive, like a new charm on your bracelet.” She looks surprised. “Which you gave me, and I gave back to him, the day of your funeral. It’s complicated. I need a story. But I can’t think of anything good enough.”
Her eyes are thoughtful. “I’ll give you a story,” she says. “Something that he’ll want to hear.”
She takes a deep breath and gazes down at the trees below us. “As I said before, I was a nurse once, during the Great War, working at a hospital in France, and one day I met a journalist.”
“At a pond,” I supply. “In your underwear.”
She looks up, startled.
“He’s told me some stories, too.”
She’s mortified at the idea, but pushes on. “We became friends, of a fashion. We became more than friends. At first I think it was only a game for him, to see if he could win me, but as time went on it became … more. For both of us.”
She pauses, her eyes scanning the horizon like she’s searching for something, but she doesn’t find it.
“Then one night the hospital was bombed by the Huns.” Her lips tighten. “Everything was on fire. Everyone was …” She closes her eyes briefly, then opens them again. “Dead. I clawed my way out of there, and it was just fire, fire everywhere, and then Sam rode in on a horse and said my name, and reached out his hand for me, and I took it, and he pulled me up behind him. He took me away from there. We spent the night in an old stone barn near Saint-Céré. He pumped some water and made me sit down, and he washed the soot and blood off my face. And he kissed me.”
Kissed in a barn. Must be a genetic thing.
But this story isn’t going to cut it, I realize. Samjeeza already knows it. It’s the horse charm.
“He’d kissed me before,” Mom continues. “But after that night it was different, somehow. Things had changed. We talked until the sun came up. He finally admitted to me what he was. I had already guessed that he was an angel. I felt it when we first met. At the time I wanted nothing to do with angels, so I tried to ignore him.”
“Right.” I smile. “Angels can be a pain in the ass.”
Her mouth twists, her eyes twinkling for a moment before she gets serious again. “But he wasn’t merely an angel. He told me how he had fallen, and why. He showed me his black wings. And he confessed that he’d been trying to seduce me because the Watchers wanted angel-blood offspring.”
“Whoa. He just admitted it?”
“I was furious,” she says. “It was all that I’d been running away from my entire life. I slapped him. He caught my wrist and asked me to forgive him. He said he loved me. He asked me if I could ever love him back.”
She stops again. I am transfixed by her story. I can see it, the images pouring out with her feelings into my brain. His eyes, earnest, full of sorrow and love, pleading. His voice, soft as he told her, I know that I’m a wretch. But is it possible that you would ever love me?
I gasp. “You lied.”
“I lied. I said I could never care for him. I told him I never wanted to see him again. And he looked at me for a long moment, and then he was gone. Just like that. I never told anyone about that night. Michael knows, I think, in the way he seems to know everything. But I haven’t ever talked about it until now.” She exhales through her lips like she’s just set down something heavy. “So there’s your story. I lied.”
“You did care for him,” I say carefully.
“I loved him,” she whispers. “He was my sun and moon for a time. I was crazy about him.”
And now he’s crazy about you, I think. Emphasis on crazy.
She clears her throat. “It was a long time ago.”
And yet we both know that time can be a tricky thing.
“That must be uncomfortable for you to hear,” she says, seeing my frown. “Me saying I loved a man who’s not your father.”
“But I know you love Dad.” I remember Mom and Dad together in her last days, how obvious the love was between them, how pure. I smile at her, bump my shoulder into hers. “You loooove him. You do.”
She laughs, pushes back agains
t me. “All right, all right, I’ll marry him. I couldn’t very well refuse him now, could I?” She suddenly gasps. “I have to go,” she says, jumping up like Cinderella late to the ball. “I’m supposed to meet him.”
“On the beach at Santa Cruz,” I say.
“I told you about it?” she asks. “What do I say to him?”
“You just kiss him,” I tell her. “Now go on before you’re late and I cease to exist.”
She moves to the edge of the rock and summons her wings. I’m startled by how gray they are, when normally, when I knew her best, they were so piercingly white. They’re still beautiful now, but gray. Undecided. Uncertain.
She hesitates.
“Go,” I say.
There are tears in her eyes. I don’t want to leave you, she says in my mind.
Don’t worry, Mom, I answer, calling her Mom for the first time since I came here. You’ll see me again.
She smiles and caresses my cheek, then turns and takes off, the wind from her wings blowing back my hair, and glides toward the ocean. Toward the beach, where my father is waiting.
I wipe my eyes. And when I look up again, I’m back in the present, like this entire afternoon has been some kind of beautiful dream.
19
SOUTHBOUND TRAIN
Two minutes to midnight.
For real, this time.
The vision hasn’t prepared me for the sheer enormity of this moment. I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin. I feel each tick of my watch’s second hand like an electric charge pulsing through me again and again.
I can do this, I tell myself, fiddling with the zipper of my black hoodie.
Tick, tick.
Tick, tick.
The northbound train comes and goes. Samjeeza arrives, claims the lamppost, squawks at me.
But Christian’s not here.
I turn a slow circle, looking for him, my eyes lingering on every empty space, every shadow, hoping to find him, but he’s not here.
He’s not coming.
For a minute I think my fear is going to eat me up.
“Caw,” says the crow impatiently.
It’s midnight.
I have to go. With or without him.
I face the stretch of pavement that will take me across the tracks. One step at a time, my heart going like a rabbit’s, my breath coming in shallow gasps, I cross the tracks.