by Cynthia Hand
“Tuck.”
“Sorry,” he says, still not looking up from his notebook. “I am panicking over this test. I swear, my palms are sweating and my heart’s going and I’m this close to an anxiety attack. I think. Never had an anxiety attack before. But I have under three minutes to fill my brain with useful information.”
“Tuck, can you just stop for two seconds? There’s someone I want you to meet.” He glances up, sees my dad standing behind me. Freezes.
“Tucker, this is my dad, Michael. Dad, this is Tucker Avery.” Dad smiles, holds out his hand. Tucker swallows hard, staring, then shakes it.
“Sir,” he manages. He looks at me. “Your dad?”
“He showed up yesterday, to help us, since Mom . . .”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Dad says warmly. I think Dad says pretty much everything warmly. He’s a warm guy. “I’ve heard so much about you. Sorry to take you from your studies, but I wanted to meet this young man who stole my daughter’s heart away from her.” Stole being the operative word. I give Dad a sharp look.
“Pleased to meet you, too, sir,” Tucker says. “You’re a physics professor at NYU, right?” I swing around to look at Dad. I haven’t asked him about that particular falsehood yet.
“I’m on sabbatical,” Dad says.
Smooth. Very smooth.
“Well, um, geez, nice of you to show up to help,” Tucker says haltingly. He doesn’t know what to say. “I, uh, really admire your daughter.”
This is not going well. Tucker’s face is beyond pale now. It’s actually getting green.
There’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead. I worry that Dad’s barely suppressed glory is going to make him throw up. Time to bail.
“So, I wanted to introduce the two of you, and now I have, and Tucker’s got a big test in a minute, so we should go.” I loop my arm in Dad’s and pull him away, shoot Tucker a look that I hope he understands as an apology for springing all this on him. “Call me later, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t go back to his Spanish. He leans against his locker, long after the bell rings, catching his breath.
Chapter 16
Square Ice-Cream Cones
Angela is practicing her violin when we come in. She likes to do it on the stage at the Pink Garter, under the lights, letting the music fill the empty theater. It’s not a song I recognize, but a beautiful, haunting kind of tune that winnows its way up to my dad and me as we stand at the entrance. When the last note fades away, we clap. Angela lowers the violin and shades her eyes to peer out at us, unable to see beyond the stage lights.
“Awesome song, Ange,” I call to her.
“Oh, C, it’s you. God, you scared me. I thought you were under house arrest. Not that I’m not glad to see you. I’ve been studying some wild theories this week—this historian who analyzed The Book of Enoch back at the turn of the century. Fascinating stuff.”
“I have some news myself. Can you come down?”
She starts down the stairs. Nothing motivates Angela like news. As soon as her eyes adjust to the dimmer light in the audience section, she sees Dad.
“Holy crap!”
“Not exactly.” I have to admit, I enjoy surprising Angela.
“You’re an Intangere,” she blurts out.
“Hello,” Dad says. “I’m Michael. Clara’s father.”
Cat’s really out of the bag now. It seems odd, since he and Mom worked so hard to keep this all a secret, and now he’s going around introducing himself as my dad like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But that’s who he is, I realize. He is simply incapable of hiding what he is.
“Clara’s father . . .” Angela’s eyes are like saucers. “Clara’s . . .”
“Yes.”
“But that would mean . . .”
“We’re putting a great deal of trust in you, Angela,” he says. “You must guard this information from everyone.”
She nods solemnly. “Right. Of course I will.” Smiles. “Wow. Didn’t see that one coming.” She looks at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve known about this the whole time.”
“I found out yesterday. When he showed up.”
“Wow.”
“You’re telling me.”
She turns to Dad all businesslike. “So. What do you think of Enoch?” He thinks for a minute. “He was a good man. I liked him. Although he allowed himself to be used in terrible ways.”
She obviously meant the book.
He meant the man.
“So you’re not a Quartarius,” she says then. Something about the tone of her voice makes me look at her. Her face is blank, like she’s trying really hard to hide what she feels.
Jealousy. Wow, jealousy. I feel it without even trying. All this time she thought she was the powerful one of the two of us. She was Dimidius, I was Quartarius, and she liked it that way.
Now . . . she doesn’t even have a name for what I am. And my dad is here, handsome and powerful and good, and he cares about me, and he’s a link to more information than all the dusty old books in the world. Because my dad is older than all the dusty old books in the world.
Her jealousy is like something slimy in my mind.
“Okay, let’s not get all melodramatic or anything,” I say. “It’s not such a big deal.”
“It’s a huge deal!” she exclaims, then sucks in a quick breath. “You were reading me.
You were using your empathy.”
“Sorry. But you’re feeling some pretty stupid crap about me, right?”
“You can’t do that,” she says, then remembers that my dad is right there and shuts up. Her face is alabaster pale, then suddenly a flare of blue light sparks from her hair just once, like a lone firework against the black backdrop of the theater.
“I couldn’t help it,” I say.
Yeah, she’s pissed.
“It was really nice to meet you, Mr. Gardner,” she says, “but I should get back to practicing.” She looks at me. “You know the way out.”
“Fine.” I head for the door. “Come on. We’re done here.”
“Nice to meet you as well, Angela,” Dad says. “You’re just as Maggie described—very impressive for having been alone in this for so long.”
“Thanks,” she says with a bit of a squeak, unable to hang on to her sucky attitude with him around.
Yep, my dad’s a charmer.
He teaches me to become invisible. Well, maybe teach is a strong word. It’s a complicated thing, something that involves the bending of light. He tells me all about it like it’s a formula a genius is going to scribble in marker on a window someday. I only half understand, but then he does it. He makes us both invisible, which proves handy for flying around wherever you want, without someone pointing up into the sky and saying, Look, an angel! It’s even better than Jeffrey’s white bird theory.
I’m still in a bad mood, after Angela, but it’s hard to stay mad when my dad radiates joy, and then I’m flying with him, the wind carrying me like notes of a song. I haven’t flown in so long I was afraid I forgot how, but it turns out to be as easy as breathing, with Dad. We spiral down, swooping the edges of the trees. We shoot upward, breaking the cloud banks, up and up until the air grows thin around us. We soar.
We end up at a car dealership in Idaho Falls. We come down behind a building, Dad in the lead, and he makes us reappear.
Angela would have peed herself to see this, I think. Serves her right.
But I used to be jealous, too. All that time, thinking she was the strong one, the one who always had it all together. She knew everything before I did, even about my mom dying. She mastered flight first. She could change the form of her wings. She’d met a real angel, and spent her summers in Italy.
“Don’t dwell on it,” Dad says. “Her reaction was natural. As was yours, before.”
“You read minds?”
“I can. I’m better with feelings. Like you.”
Like me. I can’t help but shake my head at the craziness of that
idea, that he and I resemble each other, even in that small way.
“So, we’re in Idaho Falls,” I glance at my watch. Four p.m. It took us twenty minutes to get here, what would be more than a two-hour drive by car. We flew fast.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“I want to buy you a new car.”
What sane girl would say no to that?
Dad turns out to be quite the haggler. I’m pretty sure we get the base bottom price for the new white Subaru Forester we end up driving off with.
I drive us home, since driving is another thing he hasn’t had to do in a while. I wonder if this is going to become a regular thing, spending time with him. Or if, the moment Mom is gone, he will be too.
“I will be here as long as you want me,” he says. “Not every minute, by your way of seeing things, but in a sense I will always be with you.”
“It’s a time thing, right? Yeah, Mom tried to explain.”
“For you, time is like a line drawn across a piece of paper, a succession of events. A to B
to C, one moment following another. Where I come from, there are no lines. We are the paper.”
“Okay, totally confused now.” I pull over into the Rainy Creek Country Store, a gas station.
“You’ll understand, someday.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“Where are we?” he asks.
“Swan Valley. You’ve got to taste their square ice-cream cones.”
“Square ice-cream cones?” he repeats, blank-faced again, like this must be another newfangled thing he hasn’t learned about yet.
“See, you don’t know everything. I get to teach you something, too.” We get our ice-cream cones, made with special scoopers that shape the ice cream into perfect squares. Dad chooses chocolate mint. I go for strawberry.
“When you were small, you were my strawberry girl,” he says as we’re leaving the store.
“Your mom planted a patch in the backyard in Mountain View and if we couldn’t find you, that’s often where you’d be, eating strawberries, smeared with juice. Your mother had quite the time getting the stains out of all your tiny outfits.”
“I don’t remember.” I walk around to behind the building where there’s a bench to sit on.
I sit. He stands behind me for a minute, then sits next to me. We look out in the fading light at the mountains, listening to the voice of a small stream gurgling not too far away, the sounds of cars passing on the highway, which sets a kind of rhythm. “I don’t remember much,” I admit.
“I know. You were very small.”
“I remember you shaving.”
He smiles. “Yes. You were fascinated with that. You wanted to do it yourself. Your mother came up with the ingenious idea of cutting up old credit cards into the shape of razors, so then you sat up on the bathroom counter and shaved along with me.”
“Weird that an angel would have to shave.”
He rubs a hand over his smooth chin. “I don’t. Although sometimes, in my profession, I’m required to wear a beard.”
His profession. I turn the word over in my mind.
“In those days, with your mother, things were different for me, physically speaking. I had to shave, wash my body, eat, and drink.”
“And you don’t now?”
“I can. But I don’t have to.” He takes a big bite of his ice cream, crunching the cone. It dribbles down his chin, and he tries to wipe at it. I hand him a napkin.
“Because you have a different body.”
“There are two parts, to all of us,” he says. “Body and spirit.”
“So the body is real. And the spirit is . . . ghostly,” I say.
“In humans. The body is solid, and the spirit, translucent. Until the two separate, and the body returns to dust, and the spirit passes to another plane. Then the spirit becomes solid.”
“What about me?” I ask. “What’s my spirit like? Can you see it?”
“Beautiful.” He smiles. “You have a gorgeous spirit. Like your mother’s.” It’s fully dark now. A few feet away a lone cricket starts to chirp. We should go, I think.
It’s still more than an hour’s drive to home. But I don’t get up.
“Will Mom . . . go to heaven?”
He nods, and something in his face brightens. He’s happy, I realize, about her dying.
Because in heaven he’ll probably get to see her all the time. He’s happy, but for my sake he tries to dampen it down, understand it from my point of view.
“Her body is fading now,” he says. “Soon she will give it up entirely.”
“Can I go and visit her?” Hope blooms in my chest. We can cross, I know we can, back and forth from heaven and earth. Mom’s already been to heaven at least once. I could go there. It wouldn’t feel so terrible if I could see Mom every now and then, talk to her. Fill up on her advice and her jokes and her witty remarks. I could still have my mom.
“You can travel to heaven,” Dad says. “As a Triplare, you have the ability to cross between worlds. Dimidius must have help, but historically the Triplare can learn to travel there alone.”
I almost laugh, this is such good news.
“But you are unlikely to see your mother,” he says then. “She has her own journey to undertake when she arrives, and you cannot accompany her.”
“But why?” I know I must sound like a three-year-old, crying for my mama, but I can’t help it. I wipe at sudden, infuriating tears. I jump to my feet, hurl the rest of my ice-cream cone into the trash can behind us.
He doesn’t respond, which only makes me feel more embarrassed.
“We should go,” I tell him. “Everyone will be wondering where we went.” He finishes off the last of his cone and follows me back to the car. We drive in silence for the next half hour, past the glowing farmhouses tucked back from the roads, the silhouettes of horses in the fields, then up into the forest of lodgepole pines, past the YONDER IS JACKSON
HOLE sign at Teton Pass. Dad doesn’t seem angry, but like he’s respecting my need for space. I appreciate that, and resent it, at the same time. I resent that he can make me appreciate that, even though he thinks it’s perfectly okay to waltz back into my life and start dropping bombs on me.
And then I feel guilty that I resent him, because he’s an angel, and he’s the epitome of good.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally as we start to descend the hairpin turns into Jackson.
“I love you, Clara,” he says after a long moment. “I want you to feel that. Can you?”
“Yes.”
“And I promise, you will see your mother again.”
I remind myself that he’s the kind of guy who never breaks a promise.
It’s quiet at dinner, me and Dad and Jeffrey at the table. Jeffrey practically inhales his food to get away from us, which makes Dad sad, or as close to feeling sad as Dad is capable of.
“Nice talk, today,” he tells me as we’re loading dishes into the dishwasher. “I’ve wanted that with you.”
“You used to call me,” I remind him. “How come you never seemed to want to talk to me then?”
“I was uncomfortable with the pretense,” he says, looking down.
“You mean lying to me?”
“Yes. It does not come naturally. It causes me pain.”
I nod. It makes sense. Finally, it’s starting to make sense. Not that it makes up for it. But it helps.
I smile at Dad and excuse myself and go up to my room to knock out my homework. I’m not in there ten minutes before Christian alights on the roof. He comes right up to the window and stands there, staring at me, then raps on the glass.
I open the window. “You’re not supposed to show up here. It’s not safe. There’s a Black Wing hanging around, remember?”
His green eyes are sharp, assessing me. “That’s funny, because I thought I saw an angel banish Samjeeza from the field today. I figured it was safe now.”
“You saw that?”
“I went to the wi
ndow at the end of the second-floor hallway. Pretty impressive, I thought.
Those wings, wow.”
I don’t know what to say. So I say something dumb. “You want to come in?” He hesitates. He’s never been inside my room before. “Okay.” I’m embarrassed by the girliness of my bedroom, the sheer amount of pink stuff I have lying around. I kick a pink teddy bear under my bed, snatch a bra from where it’s draped over my bedpost and try to discreetly dump it into my hamper. Then I tuck a strand of runaway hair behind my ear and try to look anywhere but straight at Christian.
He seems embarrassed, too, unsure of what to do in this situation. Imagine our mortification when at exactly that moment there’s a gentle knock on my door and Dad comes in.
“Oh, hello,” he says, looking at Christian.
“Dad! Don’t you . . . this is . . .”
“Christian Prescott,” Dad supplies. “I’d recognize those eyes anywhere.” Christian and I look at each other, him all confused about Dad knowing anything about him, me freaking out because I don’t want Christian to think I’ve been waxing poetically about his eyes to my dad.
“I’m Michael. Clara’s father,” Dad says, extending his hand.
Funny how he says that exactly the same way, every time.
Christian doesn’t hesitate. He takes Dad’s hand and shakes it firmly.
Dad smiles. “It’s remarkable, really, how much you resemble your mother.”
“You knew my mother?” Christian’s voice is almost painfully neutral.
“Quite well. She was a charming woman. A good woman.”
Christian glances down for a minute, then up to meet my father’s gaze. “Thank you.” His eyes flicker over to me, linger on my face like he’s seeing it in an entirely new way. Then he says,
“Well, I should go. I just wanted to make sure Clara was okay after she left in the middle of class today.”
Dad couldn’t look more approving of the idea of Christian looking out for me. “Don’t go on my account. I’ll leave you to talk.”
And he does. And he closes the door on the way out. What kind of Dad leaves his teenage daughter alone in her room at night with a boy and the door closed? He’s got a lot of catching up to do, parent-wise, I think. Or maybe he doesn’t really see parenting as his role. Or maybe he’s just that confident that Christian would have to be crazy to do anything inappropriate with an angel on the other side of the door.