by Cynthia Hand
She gives me this piercing look. She knows about this morning.
Jason says he has to go check on something, and off he goes.
I’m in so much trouble. With everybody.
“Where’s Tucker?” I ask immediately. “He’s still, like, alive?”
“He had to go home and do some chores during lunch hour. He wrote you a note.” She holds out a single sheet of notebook paper. I snatch it out of her hand. “I didn’t read it,” she says quickly as I unfold it, but something in her voice makes me think she might have.
“Thanks,” I say, my eyes scanning down the words. In his awkward script he’s written, Keep your chin up, Carrots. We’ll get through this. We just have to follow the rules for a while, and drawn an X—a kiss.
“Were your parents furious?” I ask, putting the note in the inside pocket of my jacket. I flash back to how Mr. Avery’s eyes bulged when he saw us.
She shrugs. “Mostly they were shocked. I don’t think they ever expected . . .” She coughs.
“Okay. Heck yeah, they were mad. They kept saying the word disappointed, and Tucker looked like a dog getting kicked every time he heard it, and then when he seemed sufficiently whipped they sent him out to muck the barn so they could deliberate on a punishment.”
“And what’s the punishment?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s just say my parents are not your biggest fans right now, and things were tense at the Averys’ this morning.”
“I’m sorry, Wen,” I say, and I mean it. “I guess I made a mess of things.” She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes briefly. “It’s okay. It’s relationship drama. We all have relationship drama, right? You just happen to have a relationship with my brother. I guess I should have seen that coming.
“I have to mention one thing, though,” she adds good-naturedly, after a minute. “If you hurt my brother, you’re going to have to deal with me. I will bury you in horse manure.”
“Right,” I say quickly, “I’ll remember that.”
“So, what’s the big emergency?” Jeffrey says. He jogs down the aisle of the Pink Garter toward where Christian and I are sitting, waiting for Angela, who is uncharacteristically late. “I thought we weren’t going to meet this week because we like, you know, spent all weekend together. I’m kind of sick of you people.”
“Glad to see that you decided to grace us with your presence, anyway,” Christian says.
“Well, I couldn’t miss it,” he says. “You do know this whole club rotates around me, right?
I move that we change the name to the Jeffrey Club.” He grins as he reaches the table. On pure sisterly instinct I stick out my foot like I’m going to trip him, and he scoffs, steps over my leg and shoves my shoulder.
“How about the doody-head club?” I suggest.
He snorts. “Doody-head.” That was our highest form of insult when we were kids.
We tussle around for a second, trying to give each other noogies. “Ow,” I say, when he accidentally bends my wrist backward. “When did you get so freaking strong?” He steps back and grins. It feels weirdly good, roughhousing with Jeffrey. He’s been almost his normal old self since we came back from the congregation, like he has finally given himself permission to move on from whatever it was weighing him down before.
Christian is staring at us. He’s an only child and could never understand the delicate joys of sibling abuse. I give Jeffrey one last push for good measure and take my seat at the table.
Jeffrey plunks down on the chair opposite me.
Angela comes in from the back. Sits down without a word. Opens her notebook.
“So. Emergency,” I say.
She takes a deep breath. “I’ve been looking into the life span of angel-bloods,” she says.
“Does this have anything to do with you asking Mr. Phibbs how old he is?” I venture.
“Yes. After seeing the congregation last weekend, I was curious. Mr. Phibbs is a Quartarius, I’m pretty sure, but he looks a lot older than your mom, who’s a Dimidius. So you can see why I was confused.”
I don’t see.
“Either Mr. Phibbs must be a lot older than your mother,” she goes on to explain, “or your mom must age at a different rate than Mr. Phibbs does. Which made me think, what if Quartarius, who are only a quarter-angel—seventy-five percent human—age at like seventy-five percent the rate that humans do? Humans don’t live much past one hundred, typically, so a Quartarius angel-blood might live to be a hundred and twenty-five. Which would account for Mr. Phibbs looking old.”
She stops. Drums her pen against her notebook. Looks worried.
“Go on,” I say.
Another deep breath. She doesn’t look at me, which is really starting to freak me out. “I thought Dimidius, who are only half human, might live at least twice as long, somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years. So your mom would be a middle-aged angel-blood. She’d look like she was forty. Which she does.”
“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” says Christian.
She swallows. “I thought I did,” she says in an oddly flat voice. “But then I read this.” She flips a few pages in her notebook, then begins to read. “When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God— that’s angels; at least it’s largely interpreted as angels —saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.”
I know this passage. It’s the Bible. Genesis 6. Enter the Nephilim: angel-bloods.
But Angela keeps reading: “The Lord said, ‘My Spirit will not remain in man forever, for he is mortal, his days will be a hundred and twenty years. Then it goes back to talking about the Nephilim, when ‘the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them’ and all the ‘heroes of old’ stuff, and it occurred to me that something’s weird here. First we’re talking about the Nephilim, then God sets a limit on the life span of man, then we go back to talking about the Nephilim. But then I realized. It’s not a limit on the life span of man. That part in the middle isn’t about man. It’s about us. God wants us to be mortal.”
“God wants us to be mortal,” I repeat cluelessly.
“It doesn’t matter whether or not we’re capable of living for hundreds of years. We don’t live more than a hundred and twenty years,” concludes Angela. “I researched it all last night, and I can’t find a record of a single angel-blood, Dimidius or Quartarius, who’s lived longer. Every single one I’ve been able to find a paper trail on dies either before or during their hundred and twentieth year, but nobody ever makes it to one hundred and twenty-one.” Suddenly Jeffrey makes a choking sound in the back of his throat. He jumps up. “You’re full of crap, Angela.” His face contorts into an expression I’ve never seen on him before, wild and desperate, full of rage. It scares me.
“Jeffrey—” Angela begins.
“It’s not true,” he says, almost like he’s threatening her. “How can it be? She’s completely healthy.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “Let’s all calm down. So we get a hundred and twenty years. No biggie, right?”
“Clara,” whispers Christian, and I feel something like pity from him, and then it all hits home.
I’m so stupid. How could I be so stupid? Here I am thinking it’s fine, a hundred and twenty years is fine, because at least we get to stay young and strong. Like Mom. Mom, who doesn’t look a day over forty. Mom, who was born in 1890. Margaret and Meg and Marge and Margot and Megan and all those strangers, those past lives she got to live. And Maggie, my mother, who turned a hundred and twenty a few weeks ago.
I feel dizzy.
Jeffrey punches the wall. His fist goes right through like it’s made of cardboard, spilling plaster everywhere, his blow strong enough that the whole building seems to shudder.
Mom.
“I have to go,” I say, standing up so fast that I knock over my chair. I don’t even stop to pick up my backpack. I just run for the
exit.
“Clara!” Angela calls from behind me. “Jeffrey . . . wait!”
“Let them go,” I hear Christian say as I reach the door. “They need to go home.” I don’t remember the drive back to my house. I’m just here, suddenly parked in the driveway, hands clenched on the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles are white. In the rearview mirror I see Jeffrey’s truck parked behind me. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve probably broken a dozen traffic laws to get here as fast as I possibly could, some part of me wants to drive away. I don’t want to go inside. But I have to. I have to know the truth.
Angela’s been wrong before, I think, although right now I can’t remember when. She’s been wrong. She’s full of crap.
But she’s not wrong.
It’s not Tucker’s funeral, in my dream of Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s Mom’s.
I feel like I’ve been on the teacups at Disneyland, all vertigo, my head spinning even when the rest of me is holding still. My emotions are a jumbled cocktail of relief about Tucker, mixed with shock and crazy hurt, guilt and a whole different level of grief and confusion. I could throw up. I could fall down. I could cry.
I get out of the car and walk slowly up the steps to the house. Jeffrey falls in behind me as I open the front door and move through the entryway, past the living room and the kitchen and straight down the hall to Mom’s office. The door’s open a crack, and I see her reading something on her computer, her face the picture of concentration as she stares at the screen.
An odd calm comes over me. I knock, a gentle rap of knuckles on the wood. She turns and glances up.
“Hi, sweetie,” she says. “I’m glad you’re home. We really do need to talk about—”
“Angel-bloods only live a hundred and twenty years?” I blurt out.
Her smile fades. She looks from me to Jeffrey standing behind me. Then she turns back to her computer and shuts it down.
“Angela?” she asks.
“Who cares how we know?” I say, and my voice sounds sharp in my ears, shrill. “Is it true?”
“Come in here,” she says. “Sit down.”
I sit on one of her comfy leather chairs. She turns to Jeffrey, who folds his arms over his broad chest and holds his ground in the doorway.
“So you’re dying,” he says in a total monotone.
“Yes.”
His face goes slack with dismay, his arms dropping to his sides. I think he expected her to deny it. “What, you’re going to die just because God decided that we shouldn’t live too long?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” she says. “But essentially, that’s the gist.”
“But it’s not fair. You’re still young.”
“Jeffrey,” Mom says. “Please sit down.”
He sits in the chair next to mine and now she can turn and address us both. I watch her face as she tries to collect her thoughts.
“How does it happen?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. It varies for all of us. But I’ve been getting progressively weaker since last winter. Markedly so these past few weeks.”
The headaches she keeps having. The fatigue she blamed on work problems. The coldness in her hands and feet, the way her normal warmth seemed to leave her. The new wrinkles. The shadows under her eyes. The way she’s always sitting down these days, always resting. I can’t believe I didn’t put it all together before.
“So you’re getting weaker,” I say. “And then what, you’ll just fade away?”
“My spirit will leave this body.”
“When?” Jeffrey asks.
She gives us that sad, thoughtful look I’m so familiar with by now. “I don’t know.”
“Spring,” I say, because that’s one thing I do know. My dream has shown me.
Something hot and heavy starts to rise up in my chest, so powerful it roars in my ears, squeezes the air out of my lungs. I gasp for breath. “When were you planning to tell us?” Her midnight eyes flash with sympathy, which I find ironic, since she’s the one who’s dying. “You needed to focus on your purpose, not on me.” She shakes her head. “And I suppose I was also being selfish. I didn’t want to be dying yet. I was going to tell you today,” she says with another weary sigh. “I tried to tell you this morning—”
“But there’s something we can do,” interrupts Jeffrey. “Some higher power we can appeal to, right?”
“No, honey,” she answers gently.
“We can pray or something,” he insists.
“We all die, even angel-bloods.” She gets up and goes to kneel in front of Jeffrey’s chair, putting her hands over his. “It’s my turn now.”
“But we need you,” he chokes out. “What will happen to us?”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says. “I think what’s best for you might be to stay here, complete the school year. So I will transfer guardianship to Billy, who’s agreed to take you.
If that’s all right with you.”
“Not Dad?” Jeffrey asks with a quiver in his voice. “Does Dad even know?”
“Your father, he’s not . . . He doesn’t really have the resources to take care of you.”
“He doesn’t have the time, you mean,” I add woodenly.
“You can’t die, Mom,” Jeffrey says. “You can’t.”
She hugs him. For a split second he resists, tries to pull away, but then he gives in, his shoulders shaking as she holds him, a terrible rough sob rumbling out of his chest. I hear that hurt-animal noise come out of my brother and part of me starts to split in half. But I don’t cry. I want to be mad at her, accuse her of being a big fat liar my whole life, shout that she’s abandoning us, maybe punch a hole in the wall myself, but I don’t do that either. I remember what she told me this morning, about death. I thought she was talking about me and Tucker, but now I know she was talking about me and her.
I find myself sliding out of my chair, moving on my knees over to Jeffrey’s chair. Mom pulls back and looks at me, her eyes shining with tears. She opens up the hug to let me in, and I snuggle against her, enveloped in a mix of her rose and vanilla perfume and Jeffrey’s cologne. I can’t feel anything—it’s like I’m floating out of my body, somehow, disconnected. I still can’t breathe.
“I love you both so much,” she says against my hair. “You have made my life into something so extraordinary, you can’t even know.”
Jeffrey sobs. Big, macho Jeffrey, crying like his heart will break.
“We’re going to make it through this together,” Mom says fiercely, pulling back again to look into our faces. “We’re going to be all right.”
She’s different at dinner. It’s just her and me at the table, since Jeffrey has a wrestling match, and she insisted he go. She doesn’t say much, but there’s something lighter about her, something in the way she sits up so straight that makes me realize that lately she’s been slumping, something in the way that she eats every last bite of her meal that makes me see that lately she’s been picking at her food. She’s acting so much stronger all of a sudden, like it hasn’t been the sickness that’s been weighing her down, but the secret. Now we know, and it’s like that secret’s been lifted off her, and momentarily she feels like herself again. It will not last. She knows it will not last. But she’s determined to enjoy the moment of normalcy.
She puts her fork down with a sigh, then looks at me across the table and raises her eyebrows. It takes me a second to realize that I’m reading her emotions.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“Didn’t feel like spaghetti?”
I glance down at my plate. I’ve hardly touched my food. “It’s good. I’m just—” You’re dying, I think. How can I eat when I know you’re dying and there’s nothing we can do to stop it?
“Can I be excused?” I’m out of my chair before she has a chance to answer the question.
“Sure,” she says with a bemused smile. “I’m going to go to Jeffrey’s match in a bit. Do you want to come?”
I shake my head.
“Can I say no? I mean, maybe sometime, but right now, I don’t really want to talk. Is that okay?”
“Of course. This is going to take some time to get used to, for all of us.” I retreat to the quiet of my bedroom and lock the door. Will I ever get used to the idea that I’m going to lose my mother? It seems so ridiculous, such an impossible thing to happen, my mother, who’s like Supermom, cheering at all Jeffrey’s games, videotaping my dance recitals, whipping up cupcakes for the wrestling team bake sale, not to mention fending off Black Wings, able to literally leap (okay fly, but what’s the diff?) over buildings in a single bound. And she’s going to die. I know exactly what it will be like. We’re going to put her body in a coffin. In the ground.
It’s like a bad dream, and I can’t wake up.
I reach for my phone. Dial Tucker’s number automatically. Wendy answers.
“I need to talk to Tucker.”
“Um, he’s kind of lost his phone privileges.”
“Wen, please,” I say, and my voice breaks. “I need to talk to Tucker. Right now.”
“Okay.” She runs to get him. I hear her telling him that she thinks something’s wrong with me.
“Hey, Carrots,” he says when he picks up, “what’s the matter?”
“It’s my mom,” I whisper. “It’s my mom.”
There’s movement outside my window. Christian. I can feel his worry radiating like a heat lamp. He wants to tell me that he understands. He lost his mother too. I’m not alone. But he’s making up his mind not to say those things to me, because he knows that ultimately words are meaningless at times like these. He just wants to sit with me, for hours, if that’s what I need.
He would listen if I wanted to vent. He’d hug me.
It’s something I didn’t entirely expect from him. When I told Tucker he kept saying he was so sorry, over and over again, and I could tell he didn’t know what else to say, how to react to news like this, so I told him I had to go and let him off the hook.
I get up and go to the window and stand for a minute looking at Christian, at his back, since he’s turned away from me, perched in his usual spot on the eaves. He’s wearing the black fleece jacket. I know this angle of him so well. He’s here for me. It’s like he’s always been here, in some way or another.