Hallowed u-2

by Cynthia Hand

  “Okay.”

  “You believe me, right?”

  “Right,” I answer, nodding.

  Even though the truth is, not all of us are going to make it, and I don’t know what to believe.

  Chapter 12

  Don’t Drink and Fly

  It all starts happening pretty fast, then. Mom quits her job. She spends a lot of time in front of the television wrapped up in quilts, or out on the back porch with Billy, talking for hours and hours. She takes long naps. She stops cooking. This may not seem like a big thing, but Mom loves to cook. Nothing fills her with more domestic joy than putting something wonderful on the table, even if it’s something simple like her signature coffeecake or five-cheese macaroni. Now it’s too much for her, and we fall into a predictable pattern: cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, frozen dinners. Jeffrey and I don’t complain. We don’t say anything, but I think that’s when it really hits us, when Mom stops cooking. That’s the beginning of the end.

  Then one day she says to Billy and me, out of the blue, “I think it’s time we talk about what we’re going to tell people.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “About what?”

  “About me. I think we should say that it’s cancer.”

  I suck in a shocked breath. Before that moment I hadn’t given any thought to what we would tell people, how we would explain Mom’s “illness,” as she likes to call it. Cancer would definitely explain it. People are starting to notice, I think. How she stays seated now at Jeffrey’s wrestling matches. How quiet and pale she’s become, how this one strand in the front of her hair has turned silver and she always wears hats now to cover it. How she’s gone from slender to just plain thin.

  It seems so sudden, but then I think, I wasn’t paying attention before. I was so consumed with my own life, my dream, with the idea that it was Tucker who was going to die. She’s been getting weaker all this time, and I didn’t really notice until now.

  Some stellar daughter I am.

  “What kind of cancer?” Billy asks thoughtfully, like this is not at all a morbid topic.

  “Something terminal, of course,” Mom says.

  “Okay, so can we not talk about this?” I can’t take this anymore. “You don’t have cancer.

  Why do we have to tell them anything at all? I don’t want to have another lie I’m going to be forced to tell.”

  Billy and Mom share this amused look I don’t understand.

  “She’s honest,” remarks Billy.

  “To a fault,” Mom replies. “Gets it from her father.”

  Billy snorts. “Oh come on, Mags, she’s like a carbon copy of you at that age.” Mom rolls her eyes. Then she turns her attention back to me. “A rational explanation will help everybody. It will keep them from asking too many questions. The last thing we want is for my death to appear mysterious in any way.”

  I still find it crazy that she can say the words my death so calmly, like she’s saying my car or my plans for dinner.

  “Okay, fine,” I concede. “Tell them whatever you want. But I’m not going to be involved.

  I’m not going to call it cancer or lie about it or anything. This is your thing.” Billy opens her mouth to say something smart-alecky or maybe chew me out for how insensitive I’m being, but Mom holds up her hand.

  “You don’t have to say anything at all,” she says. “I’ll take care of it.” So, cancer it is. But Mom was wrong about me not having to deal. Maybe it would have worked before I got slammed by the power of empathy, but now it’s impossible not to know how everyone is feeling about me. The news that my mother has terminal cancer is like an atom bomb going off at Jackson Hole High School. It doesn’t even take a whole day before everybody, and I mean everybody, knows. First it’s people looking away, some of the nicer girls shooting me sympathetic looks. Then whispers. I quickly know the script by heart. It starts with, “Did you hear about Clara Gardner’s mom?” and it ends with something like, “That is so sad.” I keep my head down and do my work and try to act normal, but by the second day I’m suffering through overwhelming waves of sympathy, and this from people who didn’t even bother to learn my name last year. Even my teachers are solemn, with the exception of Mr.

  Phibbs, who just looks at me like he was quite disappointed in the half-assed paper I wrote on Paradise Lost, for which he gives me a D minus and demands that I rewrite. It’s like I’m a tiny boat adrift in an ocean of pity.

  For instance: I’m in a stall in the ladies’ room, minding my own business, when a bunch of freshman girls come in. They chatter like squirrels, even while they pee, and then one of them says, “Have you heard about Jeffrey Gardner’s mom? She has lung cancer.”

  “I heard it was brain cancer. Stage four, or something. She’s only got something like three months to live.”

  “That is so sad. I don’t even know what I’d do if my mom died.”

  “What’s Jeffrey going to do?” asks one. “I mean, when she dies. Their dad doesn’t live with them, does he?”

  Amazing, I think, what they know about us, this group of total strangers.

  “Well, I think it’s tragical.”

  They murmur their agreement. The most tragical thing ever.

  “And Jeffrey’s so broken up about it, too. You can totally tell.” Then they move on to discussing their favorite flavor of lip gloss. Either watermelon or blackberry cream. From my dying mom to lip gloss.

  Tragical.

  “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! / That all this good of evil shall produce, / and evil turn to good; more wonderful / than that which by creation first brought forth / light out of darkness! Wait,” I say, laying my book on the floor next to my feet. “I don’t even know who’s talking here. Michael, or Adam?”

  “Adam,” supplies Wendy, homework buddy extraordinaire, looking down at me from her perch on my bed. “See where it says, So spake the Arch-Angel Michael, then paused, / as at the world’s great period; and our sire, / replete with joy and wonder, thus replied. So now it’s Adam speaking. He’s our sire, get it? I love that line, ‘as at the world’s great period.’”

  “Ugh! What does that even mean?”

  “Well, Michael was telling him about redemption, about how good is going to triumph over evil in the end, all that stuff.”

  “So now he’s okay with it? He’s going to get thrown out of Eden but everything’s great because someday, thousands of years after he dies, the side of good is going to win out?”

  “Clara, I think you’re taking this a tad too seriously. It’s only a poem. It’s art. It’s supposed to make you think, is all.”

  “Well, right now it’s making me think that my physics homework looks really super fun and I should get to it.” I close the offending book and slide it away from me.

  “But Mr. Phibbs said you had to turn in that rewrite tomorrow. No more dragging your feet, he said.”

  “Yep, and I’m probably going to get a D on that paper too, whether I study or not. I swear, he’s trying to torture me.”

  Wendy looks concerned. “It will probably be on the AP test.” I sigh. “I don’t want to think about the AP test. Or college. Or my stupendously bright future. I want to live in the now, I’ve decided.”

  She closes her book and looks at me with this ultra let’s-be-serious expression.

  “You should be excited, Clara. You applied to all these awesome schools. You have a great chance at getting in to at least one of them. Not everybody has that.” She’s nervous. Our acceptance letters should be coming this week. She’s already gone to the post office like three times since Monday.

  “Okay, okay, color me excited,” I say to placate her. “Woo-hoo! So. Excited.” She gets out her chemistry book, apparently done talking. I open up my physics book. We study. Suddenly she sighs.

  “It’s just. . Tucker’s the same way,” she says. “My parents kept trying to talk him into college, but he wasn’t even a little bit interested. He didn’t apply to a single school. Not even Unive
rsity of Wyoming, as a backup.”

  “He wants to stay here,” I say.

  “Do you?” Wendy asks.

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you want to stay here? Because Tucker does? Because I think that’s romantic and everything, Clara, but don’t—” She stops, tugs at the end of her braid in an agitated way, trying to decide if she’s going to go ahead and say this to me. “Don’t give up your life for a guy,” she says then firmly. “Not even a great guy. Not even Tucker.” I don’t know what to say. “Wendy—”

  “I’m going to break up with Jason,” she adds. “And I like him. A lot. But when it’s time to leave for school, I’ll have to cut him loose.”

  “He’s not a fish, Wen,” I point out. “What if Jason doesn’t want to be cut loose? What if he wants to try the long-distance thing?”

  She shakes her head. “He’ll be in Boston, or New York, or one of those fancy schools he applied to. I’ll be in Washington, hopefully. It wouldn’t work. But that’s being a grown-up. You have to think about the future.”

  I want to remind her that we’re not grown-ups yet, we’re only seventeen. We shouldn’t have to think about the future. Besides, my future, the one I see almost every night when I close my eyes, is a cemetery. An incredible, staggering loss. What happens after that, my life after that day, is like a videotape that’s been deleted: gray and static. Yes, I will probably go to college. I might make new friends, go to parties, and end up thinking that life is okay. But right now I’m trapped inside a single sunny day on a hillside.

  “Are you okay?” Wendy asks. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the right to lecture you. I know you’re having a hard time, what with your mom and everything.”

  “It’s okay,” I try to reassure her, shake the bad feelings off, ignore the pity I’m starting to feel from her.

  “Hey, I have an idea,” I say to change the subject. “Let’s go check the post office.”

  “It’s different than what I thought it would be,” Wendy says as we walk along the boardwalk in downtown Jackson.

  I hold the door open for her as we duck into the post office. “What is?”

  “You and Tucker. I thought you were so perfect for each other, you’d balance each other out, your yin to his yang, something like that, and I thought he’d be so happy all the time, but—” She chews on her bottom lip for a minute. “Sometimes you’re so intense, so focused on each other that you don’t even seem to notice anything else. Like, um, me.”

  “Sorry, Wendy,” I say. “You’re still my bestie, you know that, right?”

  “Darn straight,” she says. “But boyfriend trumps best friend, is all I’m saying. Although I guess I’m guilty of that too.”

  She’s right. I haven’t seen nearly as much of Wendy this year, partially because, when I have free time, I tend to spend it with Tucker or at Angel Club and partially because Wendy is with Jason a lot. That’s to be expected, like she said; when a girl gets a boyfriend she doesn’t spend as much time with her girlfriends. I always thought that was dumb, but that didn’t stop us from doing it when it happened. I also hang out less with Wendy because there’s a lot that she doesn’t know now, that she can’t know, and I’d rather stay away than constantly lie to her. Last year I could pretend, at least most of the time, that I was normal. This year I can’t.

  We separate to check our mailboxes. In ours is the usual junk, bills, grocery store ads, but then, at the bottom, a fat envelope. I swallow hard. Stanford University.

  Wendy appears by my side, her face white under her tan, blue eyes wide. She holds up an envelope. WSU. This is it. Her dream school. Her future. Her life. She tries to smile but it comes out as more of a wince. Her eyes drop to the envelope in my hand, and she gasps.

  “Should we. . wait until we get home?” she asks, her voice almost a squeak.

  “No. Definitely not. Let’s open them. Get it over with.” She doesn’t have to be told twice. She tears right into her envelope, takes one look at the top page, then presses her hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she says.

  “What? What? You got in, right?”

  There’s a shimmer of tears in her eyes. “There is a God,” she says. “I got in!” We hug and jump around and squeal like little girls for a few minutes, then settle down.

  “Now you,” she says.

  I open it carefully. Pull the papers out. A brochure for the on-campus housing drops out, floats down to the floor. Wendy and I stare at it.

  “Clara,” she breathes. “You got in too.”

  I read the first line of the first page— Dear Clara, we are pleased to inform you—then try to work up a smile that matches Wendy’s, although what’s moving through my head in this moment is something different than excitement, something different from elation or happiness, like a combination of incredulity and dread. But this is a good thing, I tell myself. I could go home to California. I could actually attend Stanford University, and study anything I want, and build a new life for myself.

  “I got in,” I whisper in disbelief.

  Wendy’s arm comes around my shoulders. “This is amazing,” she says. “And trust me.

  Tucker’s going to be so happy for you.”

  “So that’s it,” Angela says matter-of-factly later when I show up for Angel Club. “You’re going.”

  “Not necessarily.” I’m back to my usual position on the stage at the Pink Garter, back to glory practice, because that’s all I can think to do in the dreamy sort of daze I’ve been in since this afternoon.

  Angela puts down her pen and gives me her best you-absolute-moron stare. “Clara Gardner. You got accepted to Stanford. You got a scholarship, even. Don’t tell me you’re not going.”

  The money thing is the new bone of contention with her. Here I am, Miss Moneybags, Mom’s been loaded since the Second World War, investing in things like, say computers back when one computer took up an entire room, and I get a scholarship. Not a huge one, granted, and one that’s alumni-related, because of my “grandmother,” but more than I need, all the same. And Angela (of course she was accepted) is going to have to scrimp and save and stretch and take loans to make tuition. She got scholarships too, because she’s like, Super Student, but not a full ride.

  I should feel guilty about my indecision, but I don’t. I don’t have room for fresh guilt in the massive clutter of conflicting emotions in my head. What I’m turning over, what’s been on my mind ever since earlier in the post office when I saw the Stanford logo on the envelope, is that I don’t have to go. I’m formulating a different plan. A new and improved plan. A great one.

  “Maybe I won’t go to college this year,” I say as casually as I can manage. “I might take a year or two off.”

  “To do what?” she sputters.

  “I’d stay here. Then I’d get to stick around while Jeffrey finishes high school. I’d get a job.”

  “What, like working in a gift shop? Selling fudge on the boardwalk? Waitressing?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You’re an angel-blood, that’s why not. You’re supposed to be doing something special with your life.”

  I shrug. There are other angel-bloods in Jackson, and they work regular jobs. Besides, I like this plan. It feels right. I can stay here in Jackson. I can make sure Jeffrey’s okay. It’s a good plan, one where I don’t have to leave my house or my family (or at least, what will be left of it, after Mom goes), and I can build myself a nice, normal life.

  Angela shakes her head, gold eyes narrowing. “This is about Tucker.”

  “No.” I glare at her. But I confess that part did cross my mind.

  “Oh my God, you’re going to throw Stanford away so you can stay with Tucker,” Angela says in disgust.

  “Lay off, Angela,” Christian says suddenly. He’s been in his usual spot at one of the far tables, doing his homework while this whole conversation was going on. “It’s Clara’s life. She can do what she wants.”

  “Yeah, what he said.” I shoot Christian a grate
ful smile. “Anyway,” I say to Angela, “you only want me to go to Stanford so you won’t have to be out there by yourself and face your purpose alone.”

  She looks down, smoothes the tablecloth like she’s taking a momentary rest before she’s going to jump up and punch me in the nose. I brace myself.

  “Okay, so maybe that’s true,” she admits then, which surprises me. “You’re my best friend, Clara, and you’re right. I don’t want to go alone.”

  “Ange, I’m sure you’ll be fine. You’re the most advanced, most knowledgeable, most capable angel-blood the world has seen in a thousand years. If anyone is going to totally kick butt at fulfilling her purpose, it’s you.”