Radiant

by Cynthia Hand

  Which she wanted more than anything.

  Someone looked at me that way once.

  Tucker.

  I close my eyes. It’s so easy to call up the way his hands felt cupping my face. He kissed me so many times, more than I could count, but each time it was like this wonderful surprise. He always got this I-want-to-kiss-you expression in his eyes, right before he’d draw me in. My throat aches as I remember the agonizing joy of those few seconds before his lips touched mine. The rioting drum of my heart. His smell, a mixture of grass and sweat, a hint of fish and river water from our afternoons on the lake, maybe lemon that he’d sliced to put on some trout for dinner, and that smell all his own, man-and-sun-and-cologne. The sheer warmth of him, his skin, his hazy blue eyes, the dimple in his cheek.

  I open my eyes.

  This is not healthy, I think. This is not good. It’s over. I need to get over it.

  Over him.

  Why is that so freaking hard?

  I miss Mom. All of a sudden missing her hits me like a never-ending wave. I try not to dwell on it, but her absence is always here, like I’m walking around with a big open hole in my chest where my mother used to be. I wish I could call her. She’d know what to do, what to say to make everything all right again. She always did. She’d say something witty and true, make me a cup of tea, hug me, smooth my hair down, and tell me something to get me laughing.

  She’s never going to do that, ever again.

  Cue the big old lonely lump in my throat.

  When I open my eyes again it’s morning, and Angela’s still not here. I get dressed and spend a few minutes pacing around the room trying to come up with some kind of plan. Maybe I can slip out and look for her—not that I have any clue where to look—before anybody else knows she’s gone.

  But I have no such luck with the sneaking. Rosa’s already at the stove, and to make matters infinitely worse, Angela’s snotty cousin Bella is sitting at the kitchen table. They both turn to stare at me when I come down the stairs.

  “Too much wine last night?” Bella looks me up and down. “These American girls never know how to drink wine,” she says in Italian.

  Rosa eyes me with a mournful expression that totally reminds me of Angela’s mom. I don’t know if she’s sad about the way I look or the idea that I can’t hold my wine.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say as an explanation. “I thought I might take a walk this morning, clear my head.”

  Smooth, Clara. Yeah, get some of that superfresh Roman air.

  “Where is Angela?” Rosa asks as I reach the door.

  I’m a terrible liar. I’m going to come up with something brilliant like She’s sleeping in, and what this sharp old lady is going to see all over my face is She didn’t come home last night, and then all hell is going to break loose.

  My mouth is suddenly dry. I let go of the doorknob, start to turn around. “Um,” I say, about to blow it, but I’m saved, because right then Angela comes in the door.

  “Good morning, Nonna,” she chirps, going straight to her grandmother and kissing her on the cheek. “I was out for a walk and thought I might bring you back some apricots from the fruit stand on the corner.” She hands over a small brown paper sack. Rosa takes it and empties the fruit into a bowl on the table, beaming that Angela is so thoughtful.

  “Grazie, sweet girl,” she says.

  “I never knew that Americans liked walking so much,” sniffs Bella, but she reaches and snags an apricot. Bites into it noisily.

  Angela dares to meet my eyes for the briefest of moments. I wonder if anyone else notices that she’s still wearing the same clothes as last night.

  “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” she says, and her smile is full of secrets.

  ANGELA

  I wake up in his arms, a ray of morning sun cutting across us in his tangled-up bed. Wow, I think. That was . . . wow. Totally worth the wait.

  For a minute I keep perfectly still, savoring the feel of his body against mine, the hair on his legs a delicious counterpoint to my smooth skin, his breath in my hair, the steady thump of his heart under my cheek. I lift my head to look at him. He’s awake—he’s a morning person, one of his many flaws. His eyes are warm as he gazes down at me.

  “Morning,” I say, my voice rough with sleep.

  “Yes,” he says, an affirmation, Yes, it is morning. He reaches to brush away a strand of damp hair that’s stuck to the side of my face. I wonder if I was drooling on him.

  His fingers trace the outline of my ear.

  “You were whimpering,” he says. “What were you dreaming about?”

  I dreamed about my vision. The guy in the gray suit. The steps. In the dream I climbed the steps and stood behind him, waiting, afraid to do what I was meant to do. I was supposed to touch him on the shoulder, I think, and then he would turn (and I would finally get to see his face!) and I would deliver my message. But I didn’t. In the dream, my hand lifted, hovered near his shoulder for several seconds, then dropped.

  I don’t know the words, I thought. I’m not ready. I’m not prepared.

  Panic seized me. I took a step back, then another, and another, then turned and fled down the steps, leaving the guy in the gray suit behind. The bright sunshine darkened into a storm. I ran, and the skies opened and poured rain down on me, chilling me, soaking me to the skin.

  I’d chickened out. I’d failed my purpose. I had the sense that I’d lost everything, everything that was important to me, every hope, every dream.

  I shiver. “Nothing,” I say.

  A lie.

  He raises his eyebrows the tiniest bit.

  “It was a performance-anxiety dream,” I explain, “like my equivalent of one of those showing-up-for-class-naked dreams.” I glance at the clock on the nightstand. It’s almost seven o’clock. I sit up, drawing the sheet around me. “I have to go. My grandmother’s an early riser.”

  “All right, just love me and leave me,” he says with a playacted sadness, folding his arms behind his head and watching me as I go around gathering up my clothes.

  No, that’s what you’re going to do, I want to say, but I don’t. This is supposed to be casual between us.

  I’m not supposed to love him.

  “Sorry, babe,” I say as I slip on my shoes. “I gotta run.”

  He smiles at the word babe, so American, then slides out of bed and starts to get dressed quickly. “I wish you could stay for breakfast,” he says. “I’m getting good at making eggs.”

  “Rain check,” I say. “I’m going to have to think fast to explain things to Nonna as it is.”

  “Will Clara tattle on you?” he asks.

  This stops me. We haven’t talked about Clara, not this time. I guess I told him enough about her last year that he was able to recognize her on the train. She’d freak if she knew how much I told him, all about her and Jeffrey and her perfect Dimidius mother, although I knew pretty much squat about the real situation last summer. I didn’t know about Christian. Or Mr. Phibbs and Billy and the congregation. Or about Michael.

  “No,” I say to answer the question. “She’ll cover for me. She’s the loyal type.”

  “I’d like to meet her,” he says softly, like he knows this may upset me. “Why don’t the two of you come to dinner this evening? I’ll make something nice for us.”

  My stomach clenches at the thought of Clara here, in his apartment, her wide blue eyes taking it all in, taking him in.

  She’s prettier than I am.

  An utterly stupid thought to have, I realize. I’m no plain Jane. I know that. I don’t have trouble getting a guy’s attention if I want to. But my mind jumps instantly back to British History, junior year, Clara and me standing in front of the class, Clara in her Queen Elizabeth getup for our class project. Christian Prescott in the front row. The way he looked at her like she was the most gorgeous creature he’d ever beheld in his life.

  Or Tucker at prom that same year, gazing longingly across the room at Clara as she stood next to C
hristian daintily sipping her punch. I might as well have been invisible next to her.

  They talked about me, that night. Christian said, “You’re friends with Angela? She’s kind of intense.”

  Intense. That’s the word for me. Not beautiful. Intense.

  There’s something about Clara that pulls boys in like a magnet—something to do with her vulnerability, I think. The heart-on-the-sleeve stuff. It makes them want to protect her. Guys always want to be the white knight.

  It’s kind of pathetic.

  “Sure,” I say now, lightly, as if I couldn’t care less about it. “I’ll invite her.” I button up my shirt, then pull my hair out of my collar and give it a little shake so it tumbles all down my shoulders, turn, and meet his eyes. He starts to pull a T-shirt over his head, those plain white tees he wears, sexy as hell, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him. I lean to whisper in his ear, “But I’d rather be alone with you.”

  The truth.

  CLARA

  “He wants to meet you,” Angela says later, when we’re alone. No explanation—nothing—just “he wants to meet you,” with the dramatic voice.

  “Who?” I say sarcastically, and when she doesn’t answer, “Aren’t you even going to tell me his name?”

  “No.” She’s determined to be mysterious about the whole thing, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m that curious.

  “All right,” I say. “Introduce me to Mystery Guy.”

  We leave around sundown, ride the metro to the Spanish Steps. Angela keeps running her fingers through her hair, reapplying her lipstick. At the door of his flat, she turns to me and puts on her this-is-serious face. “Try to have an open mind,” she says.

  She knocks. Somebody inside turns down the music, a slow and mournful kind of blues. Footsteps. Then the door opens and there he is again, the guy from the train, smiling broadly.

  “Buongiorno,” he says. He leans over like he’s going to give Angela a brief kiss on the mouth, the kind a man might give his wife before heading off to the office, but she turns at the last second so his kiss glances off her cheek. She murmurs something I don’t quite catch. He looks at me. “Hi. Come in.”

  We follow him into the apartment. It’s a small place, but cozy and well decorated. Right off it’s obvious that he’s some kind of artist or art collector. There are paintings everywhere, mostly in a type of impressionism, I think, although I don’t know much about art.

  An artist, I think. How perfect that Angela would fall for an artist.

  He leads us to the living room and a green velvet sofa.

  “Have a seat,” he says, and we sit.

  He reminds me of Orlando Bloom, I decide, slender and soulful-eyed, a relatively tidy mop of dark, curly hair, fine-boned face with distinctive crinkles around his eyes when he smiles. He’s older than I first thought, maybe even thirty. I wonder if that’s what Angela meant by me keeping an open mind.

  An awkward minute passes where we all basically look each other over. Then Angela forces her gaze away from him, looks at me, clears her throat. “So. Um. This is Clara Gardner.”

  “Good to finally meet you,” he says warmly. “Angela’s told me so much about you.”

  That makes one of us, I think. He doesn’t have an Italian accent, which surprises me. There’s something foreign about it, soft r’s like he’s British, maybe faintly Middle Eastern, but definitely not Italian.

  “Clara,” Angela says then, a nervous tremor in her voice. “Meet Phen.”

  Wait.

  I know that name.

  I glance from him back to Angela. “I’m sorry. Did you say . . . ?”

  “Phen,” he says, louder, like I’m hard of hearing. “It’s actually Penamue, but I go by Phen. With my friends, anyway.”

  Right. Phen. As in, the guy who Angela met two years ago, who told her about the angel-bloods.

  That Phen.

  Angela’s in love with an angel.

  ANGELA

  I first met him in a church. I had a thing for churches back then; I suppose I still do. They’re so quiet most of the time, a quiet that’s different from anyplace else, cool and peaceful and contemplative in their very nature. I’m not religious, not the way my mother is, but I like churches. I go there to relax, to calm the inner voices of my everyday life, to think.

  This church was located in a tiny, out-of-the-way corner of Milan, San Bernadino alle Ossa. I went there because I heard that there was a room decorated with human bones, and I found this horrible and fascinating. I was sixteen that summer, and I’d been going around Italy on my own private creeptastic tour, making a point to visit all the churches that housed the corpses of the saints, whose bodies were said to remain mostly fresh and pliable for hundreds of years after they’d died—incorruptible, is the term—that’s how good they were. It was morbid but fun, visiting these nuns in glass cases who all looked the same, dressed in white, their hands folded in prayer, sleeping eternally, like Snow White waiting for the prince’s kiss.

  A room of bones was too good to pass up.

  The room was in a side pocket of the church. There was a cross on the wall inside made from human skulls—in fact, the walls were almost entirely covered with bones, hundreds and hundreds of skulls and ribs and tiny bits I couldn’t identify. My mother would have had a heart attack if she’d been there. It gave me a wicked thrill, looking at all that macabre art, but it also kind of grossed me out. It was different from the bodies of the saints, so carefully laid out in order that people could come and be near someone holy, even in death. This seemed like a reminder—we all die, and it’s not so pretty—and I looked from one skull to another and thought about how each had once had a face. A life. It was a person who ate and drank and complained about the weather and tried to get by the best he could. Now on the wall of a church, gaped at by a morbid American tourist.

  Right then I decided that it’s not polite to leer at the dead. I turned to go.

  That’s when I saw him.

  He was standing at the front of the church, directly under the dome, staring up at the fresco on the ceiling, angels and sky and people being borne up to heaven, I assumed. He seemed focused on one particular corner of the fresco, an angel in a pinkish robe, what a few hundred years ago might have been red, with gray, outstretched wings. He didn’t look like he was getting anything spiritual from the church, not praying or receiving any kind of divine inspiration. In fact he—the guy, not the angel—was almost scowling. Muttering to himself.

  Then I noticed that he was also kind of glowing, a weak, almost unperceivable light flickering out of him.

  I knew, in that instant, that he was one of them.

  An angel.

  Of course I had to introduce myself. I’d never met an angel before, not a real-life angel who existed outside the words in my books, the stories my mother told me. I smoothed my hair back—because, also, this guy was unbelievably attractive, perhaps the most ridiculously good-looking guy I’d ever seen—and applied a layer of lip gloss. I glanced around and saw that we were the only two in the sanctuary, and then I straightened my shoulders, walked up to him, and said, “Hello.”

  Not in English, as it turned out.

  In Angelic.

  I’d never spoken Angelic aloud before that moment, and it surprised me as much as it did him—the way the word sounded, like two notes of music played simultaneously, like a feeling instead of a word.

  Hello.

  His gaze jerked down from the fresco on the ceiling and landed, red-hot, on me. Astonished. Then accusatory. Then curious.

  I was all of those things, too. Because he and the fresco angel had the same face.

  We stared at each other for like two minutes.

  “What did you say?” he asked slowly in Italian, carefully, like he might have misheard—although there was no possible way that what I said sounded like anything else but what it was.

  “I said hello,” I replied, in English.

  “What are you doing here?” he deman
ded.

  “I came to see the bones,” I answered. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to talk to God.”

  I arched an eyebrow and folded my arms across my chest. “I see. So what does He say?”

  Before he could reply, the door of the church groaned open on its rusty hinges and an old and bent-over Italian lady in a black dress hobbled in. She eyed us suspiciously, like two young people had no business making small talk in a church.

  I smiled at the angel. The corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, too, but instead he looked stern. He crossed the sanctuary in three rapid steps and grabbed my arm, his touch slightly cool against my flushed skin.

  “Come with me,” he said, and drew me off to the side, back toward the room of bones, where the old lady couldn’t see us.

  I opened my mouth to tell him that he may be an angel but I was American and bossing me around was not going to fly, but he put a finger to my lips, which startled me.

  “Come with me,” he said again softly.

  I instantly got a weird, dizzy sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs wobbled, as if I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Something had changed, darkened and brightened at the same time. He pulled me back out of the bone room and into the main part of the basilica, and the old lady was gone. I took a good look at him and gasped again.

  He was all in black and white, his hair jet-black, his skin ice-white, and still glowing slightly, still hard to look at, he was so gorgeous. Everything around us was black and white, too, the colors of the world converted to an old movie, made up of shadows and stark contrasts.

  He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.