by Cynthia Hand
“I’m happy for you.” At least I’m trying to be. I grew up near Stanford. It still feels like home.
“And there’s something else,” she says.
I brace myself for even more jolting news, like she already has a full-ride scholarship, or that a real-live angel, an Intangere, dropped off with a note for her, carefully detailing her purpose and everything she’s supposed to do at Stanford, a memo from heaven.
“Okay. What?” I ask when she doesn’t come out and tell me.
“I want you to go too.”
“Huh? When?”
“For college, silly. I’m going to Stanford, and I want you to be there with me.” Three a.m. No possibility of sleep. I’ve been thrashing in my blankets all night, unable to quiet all the crazy thoughts bouncing around my head. My mother being friends with a fallen angel. College plans. Christian. Purposes that last a hundred years. A flood that kills all the angel-bloods on earth. Angela wanting me to go to Stanford with her. Tucker staying here, always and forever. Ms. Baxter all hopeful and sweet and completely annoying. And somebody dying, let’s not forget. Somebody. And I still have no clue who.
Finally I get up and go downstairs. I’m surprised to find Mom sitting at the kitchen counter with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her hands circling a cup of tea like she’s using it for warmth. She glances up and smiles.
“Insomniacs of the world unite,” she says. “Want some tea?”
“Sure.”
I find the pot on the counter and pour myself a cup, locate cream and sugar, then stand there absently stirring it for way too long, until Mom asks, “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I answer. “The usual. Oh — and Angela’s going to Stanford.” Her eyebrows lift. “Stanford. Impressive.”
“Well, she hasn’t even applied yet, but she thinks her purpose is going to happen there.”
“I see.”
“She wants me to go with her.” I laugh. “Like I could ever get into Stanford, right?”
“I don’t see why not,” she says with a frown. “You’re an excellent student.”
“Come on. It takes more than that, Mom. I know I have good grades, but for a school like that it takes. . being president of the debate team or building houses for the homeless in Guatemala or acing my SATs. I hardly paid attention to my SATs. I haven’t done anything since I came to Wyoming.” I meet her eyes. “I was so obsessed with my purpose I hardly noticed anything else.”
She drinks her tea. Then she says, “Pity party over?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Good. Not good to wallow for too long. It’s bad for the complexion.” I make a face at her.
“You do have one big advantage when it comes to Stanford,” she says.
“Oh yeah? What?”
“Your grandmother went there, and she happens to donate a large sum of money to the university every year.”
I stare at her. My grandmother. I don’t have a grandmother. Mom’s mother died in childbirth back in like 1890.
“You mean Dad’s mom?” I’ve never heard anything about Dad’s mom. Neither of my parents have ever said much about their families.
“No,” Mom says with a small, knowing smile. “I mean me. In 1967 I graduated from Stanford with a degree in history. My name back then was Margot Whitfield. That, according to the official records, anyway, is your grandmother.”
“Margot Whitfield,” I repeat.
“That’s me.”
I shake my head incredulously. “You know, sometimes I feel like I don’t know you at all.”
“You don’t,” she admits easily, which catches me off guard. “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you’ve lived several different lives, and each one of them is, in some ways, like a different person. A different version of yourself. Margot Whitfield is a stranger to you.” My thoughts shoot straight to Samjeeza and the way he calls my mom Meg, the image of her he carries around in his head, this smirking girl with cropped brown hair. Definitely a stranger.
“So what was she like, this Margot Whitfield?” I ask. “Nice name, by the way. Margot.”
“She was a free spirit,” Mom says. “A bit of a hippie, I’m afraid.” My brain instantly conjures an image of my mom in one of those flowy polyester dresses with the tiny sunglasses and daisies in her hair, swaying to the music at Woodstock, protesting the war.
“So did you do a lot of drugs?”
“No,” she says a bit defensively. “I had my rebellious stage, Clara. But it definitely wasn’t the sixties. More like the twenties.”
“Then why were you a hippie, if you weren’t rebelling?”
She hesitates. “I had a hard time with the conformity of the fifties.”
“What was your name in the fifties?”
“Marge,” she says with a laugh. “But I was never the fifties-housewife type.”
“Because you weren’t married.”
“Right.” She’d told me this. Early on I’d been nervous that maybe, given her age, she’d already been married a few times and had lots of kids out there, but she assured me this wasn’t the case.
“Did you ever almost get married?” Now this, I’ve never asked her. But she’s been pretty forthcoming recently, so I try my luck.
She closes her eyes for a minute, takes a deep breath. “Yes.”
“When?”
She looks at me. “In the fifties. Now back to Margot Whitfield, please.” I nod. “So you’re a Stanford alum. How many times have you been to college, anyway?”
“Let’s see,” she says, obviously relieved to be off the fifties and back to a time she’s comfortable with. “Four. I studied nursing, history, international relations, and computer programming.”
I let that sink in for a minute. “International relations?”
“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Don’t tell me you were a spy?”
She smiles blandly.
“So that’s why you keep telling me to relax about the college thing. I don’t have to pick a single career. When you’re going to live hundreds of years, you have time to be everything that interests you.”
“When you live a long life,” she says, “you can do a lot of things. You have time. But if you want to go to Stanford with Angela, I think that might be great fun.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say. But if I go with Angela, Tucker and I are going to be separated.
We’re going to have to do the long-distance thing, and that does not sound like great fun to me.
I crawl back to bed around four, completely exhausted by this point, hoping to grab a couple hours of sleep before tomorrow begins. But I’m instantly sucked into the cemetery dream, which is not at all restful. For a few seconds I fight it, completely disoriented, stumbling as I make my way up the hill. I try to slow my breathing, remind myself that I actually want to be here, try to calm the immediate desperation and panic I feel to figure out who is going to die.
Look around, I tell myself. See who’s not here. Who should be here, and isn’t.
I spot Jeffrey, same as usual. I say his name. He doesn’t look at me, says, Let’s get this over with, like he does every time. I want to ask him, Who is it? But my lips won’t form the words. I am locked into what future-Clara is doing at this moment, which is walking, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, and wishing she could cry. If I could just flipping cry, she thinks — I think —then maybe the ache wouldn’t be so bad.
All I can do is stay along for the ride and observe. Now that I know this is a cemetery, that this is a funeral procession, it seems so obvious. Everybody’s wearing dark clothes. I notice gravestones scattered around under the trees. I try to pay attention to more than the grief raging in my head.
It’s spring, I quickly figure out. The leaves on the trees, the grass, are new green. The air has that fresh-washed smell that comes after a spring rain, where you can still detect a hint of snow. There are the beginnings of wildflowers on the h
illside.
It’s going to happen in the spring.
I can clearly make out Angela walking way off to the side, wearing a long violet dress.
There’s Mr. Phibbs, my English teacher. Come to think of it, I recognize several people from school, maybe because school is the only place in Jackson where I know anybody. I see Mrs.
Lowell, the school secretary, and her redheaded daughter, Allison. Kimber Lane, Jeffrey’s girlfriend. Ava Peters. Wendy, walking next to her parents, clutching a white rose to her chest. I see a flash of her face, which is paler than usual, her blue eyes all red and puffy. She doesn’t have a problem crying.
Who’s missing?
Warm fingers enclose mine. I look up at Christian. He squeezes my hand. I shouldn’t be letting him hold my hand, I think. I belong to Tucker.
You can do this, Christian says in my head. There’s no doubt in him. No hesitation. He’s not worried that Tucker’s going to show up and have a problem with him holding my hand.
The bottom of my stomach drops out.
Tucker.
Chapter 6
Sooner or Later
“Five more minutes, people.”
Government class. I’m watching Tucker take a test on the U.S. Constitution. I finished it fifteen minutes ago, so I’m sitting watching him as he leans over his paper, frowning, pausing to tap his pencil in a crazy rhythm on his desk like that might jog his memory. Things are clearly not going well.
At any other time I’d find him adorable like this, all frustrated and pursed in concentration.
But all I can think is, Who cares about a stupid government test? You’re going to die. And it’s my fault, somehow.
Stop it. Stop thinking that. You don’t know for sure.
But it feels like I do know. The conclusion I’ve come to is that Tucker was supposed to die in the fire. If I hadn’t abandoned my purpose, if I hadn’t flown off to save him, he would have died up there in the woods above Palisades. That was his destiny. I was supposed to choose Christian. Tucker was supposed to die. Now, with this new dream, it feels like the same thing playing out again. Christian and me, walking in the woods again. Tucker dead.
Only this time, it’s not some split decision that I have to make. This time I’ll have months to agonize over it.
And here’s the other realization I’ve come to: it doesn’t matter how much time I’m given to think it over. I’ll still choose Tucker. I don’t care if it screws up my purpose.
I’m not going to let him die.
The problem is, I don’t know how it’s going to happen, so I don’t know how to stop it.
It’s like that movie Final Destination, where these people were supposed to die in a plane crash, but they got off the plane and so Death comes hunting them down, one by one, because they were supposed to die. I’ve been over the craziest scenarios, like: a) Tucker gets in a car wreck, b) he chokes on a piece of meat at dinner, c) he gets struck by lightning because it never ever stops raining, d) he slips and falls in the shower and drowns, or e) his house gets hit by a meteor. But what can I do about that? It’s not like I can be with him all the time. I did get so wigged out that I sneaked out to his house a couple times in the middle of the night to watch over him while he slept, just in case, I don’t know, his comic book collection decided to spontaneously combust.
This was dumb and admittedly creepy in an Edward Cullen kind of way, but it was the only thing I could think to do. Thank God he’s not in rodeo anymore, since I don’t think I could bear to watch him try to ride a bull right now.
So I’ve appointed myself his guardian. I’ve also picked him up for school every day this week and driven us there so slowly that he’s started teasing me about driving like a granny. He’s noticed, of course, that something’s wrong. Nothing ever slips by Tucker. Plus I am not being very subtle in my spazzing out about this boyfriend-destined-to-die thing.
This morning, for example. We were sitting in the commons during breakfast break and there was this loud, sudden pop from the other side of the lunchroom, and I couldn’t help it. I moved fast, too fast, so fast that Mom would have freaked if she’d seen, putting myself between that noise and Tucker. Then I stood there, waiting, hands clenched at my sides, until I heard a few boys laughing at the doofus who had crushed a soda can under his foot — a soda can! — and now everybody in his group was congratulating him on his spectacular noise-making ability.
And Tucker was looking at me. Wendy too, her bagel lifted halfway to her mouth.
Everybody at my table, staring.
“Wow,” I said breathlessly, trying to cover. “That scared me. People shouldn’t do that.”
“Shouldn’t crush pop cans?” asked Wendy. “You’re pretty jumpy, don’t you think?”
“Hey, I’m from California,” I tried to explain. “We had to go through metal detectors to get into the school.”
Tucker was still looking at me, his eyebrows drawn together.
Now as I watch him struggle through his test, I think about telling him. I could tell him and then there would be no secrets between us, no lies. It would be the honest thing. But it would also be a terrible thing. A selfish thing.
Because what if I’m wrong? After all, I thought my last vision was telling me I was supposed to save Christian and wrong-o. It’s not the kind of news you want to deliver unless you are pretty freaking sure.
But what if I’m right? Would I want to know if I was going to die?
My eyes wander past Tucker, two rows over, to Christian. He too is already done with his test. He looks up, like he can feel my gaze on him. He gives me a faint smile that only lasts a few seconds. Then he glances at Tucker, who’s still frowning obliviously at his paper.
Nice move in the cafeteria this morning, Christian says suddenly in my mind.
He’s talking in my head! For a minute I’m too shocked to form a response. Can he tell what I’m thinking right now? Has he been reading my mind this entire time? I’m torn between the desire to answer him or to attempt to block him completely.
Oh, you saw that? I answer finally, trying to push my words out to meet him the way I did when I talked with Mom that day in the forest, when we had an entire conversation in our heads.
I can’t tell if he hears me. His eyes lock on mine.
Are you okay?
I look away. I’m fine.
“Okay, pencils down,” says Mr. Anderson. “Bring your test to the front. Then you’re free to go.”
Tucker scowls, sighs, then makes his way up to Mr. Anderson’s desk with his test. When he turns back, I give him my most sympathetic smile.
“Didn’t go well, huh?”
“I didn’t study,” he says as we gather up our stuff and head for the hallway, me carefully avoiding Christian. “It’s my own fault. Burning the candle at both ends, as my dad says. I have a Spanish test tomorrow that I’m probably not going to do much better on.”
“I could help you,” I offer. “Yo hablo español muy bien. ”
“Cheater,” he says, but smiles.
“After school? I’ll tutor you?”
“I have work this afternoon.”
“I could come after.” I know I’m being persistent, but I want to spend every possible minute by his side. I want to help him, even if it’s only with his Spanish. That I can do.
“You could come over for dinner, and then we could hit the books. But we might have to stay up pretty late. I’m seriously that bad at Spanish,” he says.
“Good thing for you, I’m kind of a night owl.”
He grins. “Right. So tonight then?”
“I’ll be there.”
“Hasta la vista, baby,” he tells me, and I shake my head and smile at how adorably dorky he can be. His Spanish only comes from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That night I find myself sitting in the warm, lighted kitchen at the Lazy Dog Ranch. It’s like a scene from Little House on the Prairie. Wendy sets the table while Mrs. Avery finishes up with the mashed potatoes. Tu
cker and Mr. Avery come in from the barn and both give Mrs.
Avery a quick kiss on the cheek, then roll up the sleeves of their flannel shirts and scrub their hands in the kitchen sink like surgeons prepping for the OR. Tucker slips into the chair next to mine. He squeezes my knee under the table.
Mrs. Avery beams over at me from the stove.
“Well, Clara,” she says. “I must say it’s nice to see you again.”
“Yes, Mrs. Avery. Thanks for having me.”
