Boundless

by Cynthia Hand

  He turns to go.

  “Hey! We are not done talking about this!”

  “It’s my life,” he roars at me. “For the last time, stay the hell out of it!”

  He stomps up the street and disappears into the restaurant. I get in the car and slam my hands down on the steering wheel.

  I wish for Mom so badly that I can’t breathe. My eyes blur.

  Nothing in my life is going even remotely right.

  Shakily, I reach for my phone. I sigh, and press number two on speed dial.

  “It’s me,” I say when Christian picks up. “I need you.”

  He’s sitting on the floor, his back against my dorm door, when I arrive. We don’t speak until we get inside, but the second the door closes behind us, he puts his arms around me, about a millisecond before I seriously start to cry.

  “It’s okay,” he murmurs against my hair.

  Wan Chen makes a throat-clearing noise from where she’s sitting at her desk.

  “I think I’ll go get some dinner,” she says, slipping past us without meeting my eyes.

  I find a tissue, blow my nose hard. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m so emotional. Maybe I’m overreacting just a tad.”

  “Tell me,” he says.

  “It’s Jeffrey.” I start welling up again. But between the sniffles I manage to tell him everything.

  “I don’t know what to do!” I exclaim. “He won’t listen to me, and I have a bad feeling about his girlfriend. Maybe I’m being unfair, judgmental, like he said, but you should have seen the way she had him wrapped around her little finger. ‘You know what I like….’ Gag me. And she was all super smug like, ‘You’re in college? Yuck, I hate school.’ Where does she get off? And hello, she’s like twenty and he’s six-freaking-teen. And she’s filling his head with nonsense, I can just tell.” I finally run out of breath. “I sound like a crazy person, don’t I?”

  He doesn’t smile. “You sound scared.”

  I slump into my desk chair. “What should I do?”

  He goes to the window and looks out, thoughtful. “There’s not much you can do. Unless …”

  I wait, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. “Unless what?”

  “You could call the police.”

  “On her?”

  “On him. About the fire. You could tip them off to where he works.”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded.

  “He’ll get arrested, but it would get him away from her. He’d be safe,” he says.

  “Safe.”

  “Safer. He’d have to go back to Jackson. To juvie, maybe, for a while. But it might straighten him out.”

  “I don’t think I could do that to him,” I say after a minute. I can’t betray him that way. He’d hate me forever. “I can’t.”

  “I know,” Christian says. “I was just putting it out there.”

  Jeffrey doesn’t call me after that, but then what did I expect? I think about going back to the pizza place to apologize, but something tells me (namely, Christian tells me) that I would probably end up making things worse. Let him cool down, Christian says. Let you cool down.

  Christian and I are miraculously back to normal, back to deep conversations over coffee, racing each other on our morning jogs, laughing as we thrust and parry at each other in fencing class, everything like it was before our date. Well, almost. There’s always this moment at the end of our times hanging out together, as we’re saying good-bye, when I know he wants to ask me out again. To try again. To woo me. Because he thinks that’s part of his purpose.

  But he’s decided to let me make the first move, this time. The ball’s in my court. And I don’t know if I’m ready.

  Which brings us to late March, and the end of winter quarter, a few days before we’re out for spring break. I’m about to sit down for my lit class final exam, when I get the following text:

  Water broke. Do NOT come to the hospital. I’ll call you later.

  Angela’s in labor.

  I have a pretty hard time concentrating on my test. I keep thinking about her face when she said, I don’t know how to be a mother, her face after Phen disappeared and left her standing in the courtyard, the way the fire in her seemed to burn out right before my eyes. When I talk to her lately she always sounds sleepy, and she always says that she’s fine, gives me some little detail about how she’s preparing for the baby—took a Lamaze class, bought a bassinet, stocked up on diapers—but she’s not her fierce and fiery self. She thinks her life is ruined. Her purpose over with, irrelevant. Lost.

  I check my phone after I turn in my final, but there’s no update.

  Is he here yet? I text. I try not to think too much about all that might entail.

  She doesn’t answer.

  About an hour later I’m pacing around my dorm, chewing my fingernails, when Christian knocks on my door.

  “Hey, I finished my last final. Do you want to grab some sort of celebratory dinner?” he asks.

  “Angela’s in labor!” I burst out.

  I almost laugh at the aghast look on his face.

  “She texted me a few hours ago, and I don’t know if it’s happened already or not. She told me not to come to the hospital until she called me, but …”

  “You’re going to go anyway, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll stay in the waiting room or something but … yeah. I want to go.” I put on a coat, because it’s March in Wyoming and probably still freezing. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “You mean, you’d take us both to Wyoming? You can do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried to bring anybody along with me before.” I hold my hand out to him. “Dad does it, though. Want to try?”

  He hesitates.

  “The waiting room. Not the delivery room,” I emphasize.

  “All right.” He takes my hand, and my blood positively boils with our shared power and the anticipation I’m feeling. Zapping us should be no trouble at all.

  “Okay, give me your other hand.” I face him, both of our hands joined. He gasps when I summon the glory around us.

  “It’s that easy for you, isn’t it?”

  “Glory? I’m getting better at it. How about you?”

  He looks at his feet, gives me a half-embarrassed smile. “It’s not that easy. I can do it, but it usually takes me a little while. But I can’t cross. That is way beyond me still.”

  “Well, glory’s easier when I’m with you,” I say, and am rewarded by his eyes lighting up. “Let’s go.” I close my eyes, think of my backyard in Jackson, the aspen trees, the sound of our babbling brook. The light around us intensifies, red behind my eyelids. Then fades.

  I’m not holding Christian’s hand anymore.

  I open my eyes.

  Tucker’s barn.

  Gack, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t succeed in bringing Christian. I whip out my phone.

  Sorry, I text him. Want to try again? I can come back.

  It’s okay. I’ll get home the traditional way. See you in a couple days. Say hello to Angela for me.

  I look up to see Tucker staring at me from the hayloft.

  I’m gone before he has time to form a greeting.

  I find Angela in the recovery part of the maternity wing, dressed in a faded blue-and-white hospital gown, staring out the window. The baby’s a few feet away in a plastic bassinet on wheels, wrapped up tightly in a blanket so he looks like a little burrito, sleeping, a tiny blue cap on his head that doesn’t quite cover his thatch of thick, black hair. WEBSTER says a printed card at the end of the tub. His face is all purple and splotchy, swollen around the eyes. He kind of looks like he was just in a boxing match. And lost.

  “He’s adorable,” I whisper to Angela. “Why didn’t you text me?”

  “I was busy,” she says, and there’s a hollow quality to her voice that makes my heart sink, a terrible dullness in her eyes.

  I sit down in a chair near the bed. “So it was pretty bad, huh?”

  She shrugs, u
sing only one shoulder like she’s too tired to use both. “It was humiliating, and terrifying, and it hurt. But I survived. They say I can go home tomorrow. We, I mean. We can go home.”

  She stares out the window again. It’s a nice day, blue sky, fluffy clouds moving past the glass.

  “Good,” I say, for lack of something better. “Do you need me to—”

  “My mom can handle it. She’s out getting more supplies right now. She’ll help me.”

  “I’ll help you too,” I say. “Seriously. I’m all done with finals. I have almost two weeks off.” I lean forward and put my hand on hers.

  She’s feeling such despair that it makes my chest hurt.

  “I don’t know anything about babies, but I’m here for you, okay?” I gasp against the pain.

  She pulls her hand from under mine, but her eyes soften slightly. “Thanks, C.”

  “I don’t think I ever told you how much I admire you for how you’re handling all this,” I say.

  She scoffs. “Which part? For the way I lied to everybody about who the father is? For the way I put all my hopes in a silly vision? For how stupid I was to let it happen in the first place?”

  “Um, none of the above. For going through with this, even though you’re scared.”

  Her lips tighten. “I couldn’t give him away to some stranger, not ever knowing what would happen to him.”

  “That’s brave, Ange.”

  She shakes her head. Maybe not, she says in my head. Maybe he would have been safer away from me. With a human family. Maybe he would have been better off. Maybe I’m being selfish.

  The baby starts making a grunting noise, twisting in the blanket he’s wrapped in. He opens his eyes, golden like hers, and starts to cry, a thin, reedy-sounding wail. The sound sends a prickle down my spine. I jump to my feet.

  “Do you want me to hand him to you?” I ask.

  She hesitates. “I’ll page the nurse.” She presses a button on the frame of her bed.

  I go to the side of the bassinet and look in. He’s so tiny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so small and new. I’ve never even held a baby before, other than Jeffrey, I guess, and I don’t remember that.

  “I don’t want to break him,” I confess to Angela.

  “Me either,” she says.

  But we’re saved by Anna, who comes into the room a few steps ahead of the nurse. She sweeps right in and lifts the baby, cooing, holds him to her shoulder, but he doesn’t stop crying. She checks his diaper, which is apparently fine. This is clearly a relief to Angela.

  “He’s hungry,” Anna reports.

  Angela looks tense. “Again? He just fed like an hour ago.”

  “Do you want to try to nurse him again?” the nurse asks.

  “I guess.” She holds out her arms, and Anna gives her the baby; then Angela looks at me like, Sorry to be rude, but I’m about to flash my breasts here.

  “I’ll be … out,” I say, and duck into the hall. I head down to the gift shop and buy her some yellow flowers in a vase that’s in the shape of a baby boot. I’m hoping she’ll think it’s funny.

  When I get back, Anna’s holding the baby again, and he’s quieted down. Angela is lying with her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. I set the flowers on the windowsill and gesture to Anna that I’m going.

  She nods, but walks with me to the door.

  “Do you want to hold him?” she whispers.

  “No, I’m good to look and not touch. He’s beautiful, though,” I say, even though that might be a stretch.

  She gazes down at him with adoration in her eyes.

  “He’s a miracle,” she says. Her eyes flicker over to Angela. “She is frightened now. It was the same for me. But she’ll understand, soon enough. That he’s a gift. She’ll realize that she’s been blessed.”

  The baby yawns, and she smiles, readjusts the blue cap on his head. I inch toward the door.

  “Thank you for being here,” she says then. “You’re a good friend. Angela is lucky to have someone like you.”

  “Tell her to call me,” I say, unnerved as usual by the steady intensity of Anna’s dark, humorless eyes on me. “I’ll be around.”

  When I get in the elevator, I hold the door for a couple with a baby dressed in what looks like a pink jumpsuit with ladybugs embroidered on the feet. They’re both—the mother in a wheelchair with the baby in her arms, the father standing behind her—focused entirely on the baby, their bodies turned toward her, their eyes not leaving her tiny face.

  “We’re taking her home,” the father tells me, proudly.

  “Congratulations. That’s epic.”

  The orderly who’s pushing the wheelchair looks at me all suspicious. The mother doesn’t even seem to hear me. The baby, for her part, thinks that the elevator is the most fascinating thing, like, ever. She decides the appropriate reaction to this wonderful magic box that takes you somewhere different from the place that you started in is a sneeze.

  A sneeze.

  You’d think she’d recited the alphabet, for all the excitement this action stirs up in her parents.

  “Oh my goodness,” says the mother in a high, soft voice, bending her face close to her baby’s. “What was that?”

  The baby blinks confusedly. Then sneezes again.

  Everybody laughs: the mother, the father, the orderly, and me, for good measure. But I’m watching the way the father puts his hand gently on the back of his wife’s shoulder, and how she reaches up briefly to touch his hand, love passing between them as simply as that, and I think, Angela won’t get this. She won’t leave the hospital this way.

  It makes me remember a quote from today’s exam. From Dante. Midway upon the journey of life, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.

  I know what he means.

  13

  A SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON

  “A glory sword is more than a simple weapon,” Dad’s saying. “I have talked about a sword being an extension of your arm, imagining that it’s part of you, but a glory sword is more than a metaphor. The glory is part of you; it grows from the light inside you, that energy, that connectedness to the power that governs all life.”

  We’re on the deserted beach again, because he decided that place is less distracting for us to train than my backyard in Jackson. It’s dusk. Christian and I are sitting near the waterline, our toes buried in the sand, while Dad gives us a mini lecture on the composition of glory and its many uses.

  And here I thought I was on spring break. We’ve been training every day since we got back to Jackson. At least today we’re hitting the beach.

  Dad continues. “There is nothing, not on earth, or in heaven, or even in hell, that can overcome that light. If you believe this, then the glory will shape itself into anything that you need.”

  “Like a lantern,” I say.

  “Yes. Or an arrow, as you’ve also seen. But the most effective form is a sword. It’s quick, and powerful, sharper than any two-edged blade, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

  Now he’s gone all poetic on us.

  I remember how Jeffrey reacted to the idea of a glory sword. “What about a glory gun?” I ask. “I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Maybe what we should really be trying to shape is a glory semiautomatic.”

  “Which would require you to create what, a glory stock and barrel, a firing mechanism, glory gunpowder, glory shells and bullets?” Dad questions, his eyes amused.

  “Well, it sounds dumb when you put it that way. I guess a sword is good.”

  Dad makes a face. “I think you’ll find the sword more useful than anything else. And tasteful.”

  “An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age,” I joke.

  He doesn’t get it, but my geekiness makes Christian smile, which counts for something.

  “Why?” Christian asks suddenly. “Why would a sword be more useful, I mean?”

  “
Because the enemy uses a blade as well,” Dad says, his eyes serious. “Fashioned from their sorrow.”

  I sit up straighter. “A sword made of sorrow?” I try not to think about Christian’s vision, about the blood on my shirt, about how scared I am, like every minute, that what he’s seeing is my death. But I haven’t worked up the courage yet to ask Dad for his interpretation of the future.

  “Typically it’s shorter, more like a dagger. But sharp. Penetrating. And painful. It injures the soul as well as the body. It’s difficult to heal,” Dad says.

  “Well that’s … great,” I manage. “We have a glory sword. They have a sorrow dagger. Yay.”

  “So you see why it’s so important that you learn,” he says.

  I get up, brush sand off my shorts. “Enough talk,” I say. “Let’s try it.”

  About an hour later I drop back down to the sand, panting. Christian is standing next to me with the most beautiful blade of glory in his hand, perfect and shining. I, on the other hand, have made a glory lantern a few times, a glory arrow of sorts (more like a glory javelin, but it’d do the trick in a pinch, I think, which is not nothing, I point out), but not a glory sword.

  Dad is frowning, big time. “You’re not concentrating on the right things,” he says. “You must think of the sword as more than something physical that you can hold in your hand. You must think of it as truth.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t a metaphor.”

  “I said it was more than a metaphor. Let’s try something else,” he suggests. The sun is fully down now, shadows stretching across the ground. “Think of something you know, absolutely, to be true.”

  I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I know I’m your daughter.”

  He looks pleased. “Good. Let’s start there. Think about the part of you that knows that fact. That feels it, in your gut. Do you feel it?”

  I nod. “Yes. I gut-feel it.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  I do. He steps up beside me and takes my wrist in his hand, stretches my arm out in front of me. I feel him draw glory around us. Without being asked, I bring my own to meet it, and his glory and my glory combine, his light and mine making something greater, something brighter. Something powerful and good.