by Cynthia Hand
“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.
A snowflake strikes the glass. Then another. Then it really starts to come down, big, heavy flakes, floating toward the house. Christian unzips the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a black knit hat and puts it on. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. And he waits.
I have the urge to call for him. In my mind I can see how it would play out. I’d open the window and say his name into the chilled air. I’d go to him. He’d turn. He’d try to say something but I’d stop him. I’d take his hand and lead him back through the window, back to my room, and then he’d take me in his arms. It’d be like my dream. He’d make it better. I could lean on him. It would be as easy, I think, as calling his name.
His back stiffens. Does he hear all these thoughts rattling around in my brain?
I back away from the window.
I tell myself that I don’t want to feel better. There should be no happiness or comfort in all of this. I want to be devastated. So I turn away from Christian and slip into the bathroom to change into my pajamas. I ignore Christian’s presence when I come out and he’s still here. He must be freezing out there, but I push the thought out of my head. I lie down on my bed, my back to the window, and the tears finally arrive, running down my face, into my ears, onto my pillow. I lie there for a long time, for hours maybe, and right as I’m about to finally drift to sleep I think I hear the flutter of Christian’s wings as he flies away.
Chapter 10
The Absence of Certainty
I close my physics book, where I’ve tried unsuccessfully to solve the same problem about the Heisenberg principle three times this morning. So much for good grades, I think. Who cares about grades, anyway? At least I’ve already applied to my colleges, even caved to Angela and applied to Stanford, which I still think is a long shot, regardless of what Mom says.
Maybe I shouldn’t even go to college. I mean, Jeffrey will turn sixteen about the time Mom dies, and even though he’s agreed to this whole Billy-the-legal-guardian thing, he’s going to need me here, too, right? I’m his only family.
I lie back on my bed and close my eyes. The days have started to blur together. Weeks have passed since Mom confirmed her death sentence. I go to school like nothing has changed. I come home. I do my homework. I keep showering and I brush my teeth and I carry on. We’ve had a few Angel Club meetings, but it doesn’t seem so important now. Jeffrey has stopped going altogether. I’ve stopped trying so hard to bring the glory, now that I understand that there’s not a lot I can do. I can’t save my mother. I can’t do anything but trudge through my semblance of a life like a zombie. Tucker and I have gone on double dates with Wendy and Jason, and I try to pretend everything’s fine, everything’s normal. But it’s like somebody has hit the pause button on my life.
My mom is dying. It’s hard to think about anything else. Some part of me still doesn’t believe it’s true.
Something smacks my window. I open my eyes, startled. A clump of snow slides down the glass. It takes me a second to compute: somebody threw a snowball at my window.
I hurry over and open the window as a second snowball comes sailing through the air. I have to duck at the last second so I don’t get beaned in the head.
“Hey!” I yell.
“Sorry.” It’s Christian, standing down in the yard. “I wasn’t aiming for you.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Trying to get your attention.”
I look past him toward the front of the house, where I see his shiny black truck parked in the driveway. “What do you want?”
“I’ve come to get you out of the house.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been holed up here all week, brooding,” he says, squinting up at me. “You need to get out. You need to have some fun.”
“And you’ve appointed yourself as the bringer of fun.”
He smiles. “I have.”
“So where are you taking me? Assuming, that is, that I’m crazy enough to go.”
“The mountain, of course.” The mountain. Like there’s only one. But when he says that my heart automatically starts to beat faster.
Because I know exactly what he means.
“Dust off your gear,” he says. “We’re going skiing.”
Okay, so I can’t say no to skiing. It’s my drug of choice. So that’s how I find myself, about an hour later, perched on the chairlift next to Christian, sucking on a cherry Jolly Rancher, dangling over a snowy slope watching skiers weave lines down the hill. It’s a rush being so high up, the cold air on my face and hearing the scrape of skis on snow. It’s heavenly.
“There it is,” says Christian, looking at me with something like admiration.
“There what is?”
“The smile. You always smile when you ski.”
“How do you know?” I challenge, even though I know it’s true.
“I watched you last year.”
“Yeah, well, when you race you do this funny grimace thing with your mouth.” He makes a shocked face. “Do not.”
“Do so. I watched you, too.”
The wheels rattle when our chair crosses a tower, and a few skiers call to each other below. I turn away from his seeking green eyes. I remember last year, when it seemed like a magical turn of fate when I ended up on the chairlift with him, able to talk to him, really talk to him, for the very first time.
Now I don’t want to talk.
He senses my withdrawal, or maybe he reads it.
“You can talk to me, Clara.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier for you to read my mind?”
His expression clouds. “I don’t just scan your mind whenever I want, Clara.”
“But you could.”
He
shrugs. “My power’s unpredictable when it comes to you.”
“It’s amazing that anything in your life could be unpredictable,” I say.
He looks away and knocks snow off his skis. We watch it tumble down to the ground.
“Reading minds isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. I mean, how would you like it, walking down the hall at school, knowing exactly what everyone thinks about you?”
“That would suck.”
“But with you, it’s different,” he says. “It’s like, sometimes you just talk to me, even if you don’t know you’re doing it. I don’t know how to block that out. I don’t really want to.”
“Well, it’s not fair. I don’t ever get to know what you’re thinking. You’re Mr. Mysterious who knows more about everything than I do, but you don’t tell me.” He watches my expression for a moment, then says, “Most of the time what you’re thinking about, when it comes to me, is that you want me to go away.” I let out a breath. “Christian.”
“If you want to know what’s going on in my head, ask me,” he says. “But I get the distinct impression that you don’t want to know.”
“Hey, I want to know everything,” I protest, even though that’s not completely true.
Because I don’t want to understand what our future would have been if I hadn’t chosen Tucker. I don’t want to feel what he always makes me feel: confused, scared, excited, guilty, yearning, aware of myself and everything I feel and he feels, like he has the power to magically switch on my empathy, even when it’s true — I don’t want to know. I don’t want to need him.
“I want to know what my purpose was supposed to be, for crying out loud,” I go on.
“Why can’t somebody just tell me: here’s your purpose, so go do it? Would that be too much to ask? Or where my brother was that night in the woods? Or about Angela’s secret boyfriend? I also want to know why a Black Wing is in love with my mother, and what her purpose was, and why she still, even when she’s dying, won’t tell me anything about it, and if you tell me it must be for my protection or my own good or something, I think I will push you off this chairlift. And is all this some kind of punishment for not fulfilling my purpose? Which brings me back to what, exactly, is my freaking purpose? Because I would really, really like to know.” Christian shakes his head. “Wow.”
“I told you.”
“So Angela has a secret boyfriend. .,” he says.
“Oh crap, I shouldn’t have told you that.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. Way to go,” he adds with a laugh. “I won’t tell. Although now I’m pretty curious.”
I groan. “I’m so not good with secrets.”
He glances over at me. “I don’t think you’re being punished.”
“You don’t?”
“Hey, I don’t even know what my purpose is,” he says, and then his voice softens. “But I do know that if you hadn’t had your vision about the fire, you never would have come to Wyoming. We wouldn’t be sitting on this chairlift right now. If your mom had told you about the congregation earlier, you would have been at the last meeting, the one I went to, and we would have found out about each other before the fire. Everything would have been different. Right?” Yes, it would have been different. We would have known that we weren’t supposed to save each other. We would have known that our meeting in the forest was supposed to be something else. And where did that leave us? Would I have still flown off to save Tucker, knowing that?
“It feels like a test.” I lean back in the chair and look up at the clouds. “Like it’s all one long final examination, and now this vision with the cemetery, it’s the next question. Although it doesn’t seem like I’m supposed to do anything. At least, with my fire, I knew I was supposed to do something.”
“What were you supposed to do?” he asks in an amused voice.
“Save you. Only I wasn’t actually supposed to do that, was I?”
“That’s the hardest part,” he says. “The absence of certainty.” The phrase has a nice ring to it. It could be the motto of my life.
“So if it’s a test, what do you think the answer is?” he asks.
You, I think, the answer is supposed to be you, but I don’t say that. I guess I’m still fighting my purpose, even now that I know it’s my mom dying and not Tucker. It still feels like I am being asked to choose between Christian and Tucker.
“No clue,” I answer finally.
“Right. So,” he says. “Is there something you want to ask me, specifically? I can’t promise that I can give you a good answer, but I’ll try.” I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Did you. . love Kay?” He looks away, toward the valley and the town below, knocks his skis together again, gently. Resents me for asking.
Sorry, I think at him.
“No, it’s a fair question,” he says. Sighs. “Yes. I loved her.”
“Then why did you break up with her?”
“Because she was going to find out about me.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
He leans back in the chair too and exhales out his nose. “I’ve had it hammered into my head since Day One that we shouldn’t tell humans. It’s bad for both parties, my uncle says. And he’s right — it’s impossible to have a relationship with a human, a real relationship, anyway, without them noticing there’s something off about you. Once they do, then what?” Suddenly I think about my dad, how he moved to the other side of the country after he and Mom split, which in retrospect seems extreme, although it now occurs to me, maybe he found out she wasn’t normal. Maybe that’s why he abandoned us. Maybe Christian’s uncle is right. Maybe any relationship with a human is doomed.
A corner of Christian’s mouth turns up. “I guess we could pick really dumb people to be with.”
“Kay’s not dumb,” I say. She might be a royal queen bee you-know-what, she might play dumb in class sometimes, but she’s no dummy.
“No, Kay’s not dumb,” he agrees. “And eventually she would have made it impossible not to tell her. She was going to get hurt.”
I think of the night Tucker found out, his hounding questions, the crazy assumptions he made. He wouldn’t relent until I revealed myself.
“I get it,” I say quietly, looking down at my gloves.
“So how much does Tucker know?” he asks. “Because he’s not dumb, either.” It embarrasses me that Christian was such a good little angel-blood and did the right thing and kept the right secrets while I so obviously did not. Like a lovesick puppy, compulsively, selfishly, I told a human everything. I put everyone at risk, especially Tucker.
“That much, huh?” Christian says.
“I’ve told him. . a lot.”
“About me?”
“Yes.”
His eyes when he looks at me now are about ten degrees colder than they were a minute ago.
“I told you. I’m not good with secrets,” I say again.
“Well, you did keep one thing from him, and aren’t you happy you did?” He’s talking about my dream, of course. How it turned out to be Mom’s grave, and not Tucker’s, that I was seeing.
“Yeah,” I admit, “although I don’t know if happy is the right word for it.”
“I know.” He puts his gloves back on, claps his hands together, which startles me into looking up. The chair is quickly approaching the top of the mountain.
“So serious talk is officially over. I brought you here to have fun.” He adjusts his ski poles. I do the same. The chair comes up to the top of the hill. I put my ski tips up the way Christian taught me last year. The chair levels out, and I stand up and push off, brush shoulders playfully with Christian as I slip easily by him. I’m a blue square girl now, not a newbie to the skiing thing anymore.
“My little prodigy,” he says with mock pride. He pulls his goggles down over his eyes.
Smiles wickedly. “Let’s do it!”
I hardly think about my mom the entire morning. Christian and I braid patterns down the face of the slope, weaving back
and forth, occasionally invading each other’s space, cutting each other off, playing around like kids. Sometimes we race, and Christian lets me get ahead a bit before he uses his super-racer powers to leave me in the snow, but he never goes very far without me. He skis at my pace, to my skill level. I appreciate that.
Then he takes me to this powder run he says he loves. We stand at the top, looking down.
The sign posted at the side says this is a black diamond: not just difficult, but extra-super, you-might-die-if-you-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing difficult. I stare down at it with wide eyes.
“Oh come on, don’t chicken out now,” Christian practically dares me. “You’re an angel-blood. You’re virtually indestructible, remember? This will be a snap, trust me.” I never did react well to being called a chicken.
