A Gift of Wings (31 page)

“Hey, Mo,” Lucky said quietly. When she didn’t receive a response, she continued, “I’m sorry I missed your calls yesterday. I was—out. And my phone, well, it got turned off—and I forgot about it.”

“You forgot?” Lucky could hear the hurt in Mo’s voice. “Yeah, well, I guess you forgot me too. When you didn’t return any of my calls, I called Josh, because I was worried about you. He said you were spending the day, and I quote, ‘with friends.’ I thought
I
was your
best
friend. We’ve celebrated every one of both our birthdays together ever since we’ve known each other. I can’t believe you didn’t even have the courtesy to let me know you’d made plans that didn’t include me.”

Lucky felt about the size of the catnip mouse Tef was batting and chasing around the room. Shu was a warm weight on her lap, and she sank her free hand into his fur, seeking some kind of comfort from one of the few creatures she didn’t have to lie to. “I’m sorry, Mo. I’m—really sorry. I—”

“I suppose you were with Aidan?” Mo interrupted.

Since Mo’s assumption was at least in part correct, and her having spent the day with Aidan would make more sense than what had really happened, Lucky took the explanation and ran with it. “Yes. We went downtown, did some sight-seeing. I met his friend Zeke.” She threw the name in just in case she slipped and mentioned him later.

“So, you were okay hanging out with
his
friends, then?”

“Mo, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t deliberately exclude you.…” Lucky stopped, realizing she had done exactly that, but for very good reasons. Unfortunately, she couldn’t share those reasons with her friend.

Mo didn’t give her a chance to continue. “I never thought you’d be
that
girl, Lucky. You know, the one who drops her girl friends as soon as she gets a boyfriend? I thought you’d still want to hang out with me and would still include me in things—like, oh, I don’t know, your eighteenth birthday celebration. I guess I got that wrong, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know what else to say, Mo,” Lucky said, feeling miserable. “I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t want to—be that girl. I do still want to hang out with you. I guess I just got a little—carried away with it all yesterday.” That last statement was vague enough it could mean anything. She would allow Mo to read into it whatever she would.

Her words were greeted with silence. After an uncomfortable pause, Lucky added, this time completely truthfully, “I was hoping maybe we could do something together today.”

It took Mo a few moments to answer. When she did, her words were like a knife in Lucky’s heart. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure I want to see you right now. Besides, I’m having lunch with Eric, and if he has time, maybe we’ll spend some of the afternoon together.”

“Okay,” Lucky responded in a small voice. “Um, are you going to see Icarus tonight?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. So, I guess I’ll see you there then.”

“I guess so.” With those words, Mo disconnected the call.

“Oh, Shu,” Lucky said, burying her face in the cat’s fur, “I seem to have made a mess of everything.”

She climbed back into bed and burrowed under the covers, hoping that surrounding herself with warmth would help alleviate the internal chill of loneliness. She was marginally comforted when both cats took up their standard positions on either side of her, bookending her between purring warm spots. She eventually fell into a fitful sleep, haunted by dreams of running through empty rooms in strange houses trying to find someone she’d lost.

***

When Lucky awoke, it was early afternoon. She had several hours to kill before Aidan picked her up, and she felt at loose ends. She guessed she could look for a job, but she wasn’t sure how a job was supposed to fit into her life anymore, and besides, she was in no mood to attempt any part of a job search. The idea of watching TV just made her feel more depressed. Even reading held no appeal.

As a last resort, she decided to start looking through the boxes of papers from G-Ma’s closet. She carried a couple of them from the computer room into the living room where she turned on some music and prepared herself to sort. Taking a deep breath, she opened a box and dived in.

The first box was filled with Lucky’s old drawings and papers from elementary school. She found herself smiling as she remembered how proudly she had presented them to G-Ma as gifts. G-Ma, it seemed, had kept them all. She made slow progress through the contents of the box, lingering over drawings, letting herself dwell in the happy memories they evoked. When she had finally looked at everything in the box, she had amassed a small stack of drawings and finger paintings that she wanted to turn into a collage to hang in her room, something that would remind her of simpler times, when she felt certain of her grandmother’s love and was secure in her place in the world—and when the notion that she would ever have to lie to her loved ones for their own protection would never have even crossed her mind.

At first, she thought the contents of the second box were more of the same. But after recognizing nothing familiar in the first few drawings she examined, she knew they were not hers. Then she found one with a name printed in the lower right corner—Marie. Lucky gasped, realizing that these drawings had been made by her mother when she was a child.

Lucky took her time looking through the box. She had never had a chance to know her mother and was grateful for the opportunity to learn something about her through these childhood creations. She wondered why G-Ma had never shown them to her. Surely, her grandmother would have realized that she would have jumped at the chance to find out anything she could about her mother. Then again, maybe it had just been too painful for G-Ma herself to look through things that had been made by her lost daughter.

At the bottom of the box, Lucky found a large envelope. Handwritten in ink across the front were her mother’s name, Marie Monroe, and a date a few weeks later than the day Lucky was born eighteen years ago. The return address printed in the envelope’s upper left corner was that of a hospital in Ohio. Frowning, Lucky opened the envelope. Inside she found more drawings and paintings, as well as several pages covered with handwriting. She put the latter aside, as the powerful images in the former beckoned.

Although the strokes with which they had been created were somewhat frenetic, the pieces were well-executed. Clearly, her mother had inherited more of G-Ma’s talent in art than Lucky had. But it wasn’t the skill of the drawings that captured her attention; it was their subject matter. The drawings depicted figures like those that had become familiar to Lucky in the last few days: figures with wings—some feathered, some bat-like and leathery—and small, gargoyle-ish creatures like the ones she had encountered yesterday at the assisted living facility. The paintings were more abstract, confusions of color, light, and shadow. But Lucky recognized those as well. That was how the world had looked to her as her powers had come flooding in the day before.

Her heart rate increased as she studied the drawings and paintings, and when she turned at last to the handwritten pages, she picked them up with trembling hands. It took her a while to read through them, because the writing was hurried, and she sometimes found it difficult to decipher the scrawl. By the time she reached the final pages, she could hardly see through the tears that filled her eyes, and her hands were shaking so violently she had to lay the papers on the coffee table to finish reading them.

My Dear Little Lucy—

I am so sorry that I will not get the chance to see you grow up. I have only held you in my arms a few times, but you are already so dear to me. It breaks my heart to know I must leave you, but I recognize that I have no choice. I can’t be the mother you deserve—or even the mother you need. I can’t take care of myself, let alone you.

I want to take care of you. I want to hold you and rock you to sleep, to sing you lullabies. I want to play with you and read you stories and watch you grow up. But they won’t let me see you for very long at a time—and never alone. I understand—believe me, I do—but it still hurts. It hurts so much. You’re my baby, and I can’t be trusted to be alone with you.

I know I’m losing my mind. My thoughts spin around, and my senses are sometimes overwhelming. There’s so much noise and color, and my body aches from the feel of things I’m not even touching. I see such things—things that can’t be real—and yet they seem to me as real as anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve been drawing and painting what I see, and that’s given me some peace. But most of the time, I just want to put my arms around my head and scream. And a lot of the time, I do. No wonder they won’t leave you alone with me. It’s a miracle they let me see you at all.

I’ve tried to be strong—for you. But I just can’t. No matter what I do, the visions come, and the noises come, and it’s all too much. I struggle just to write this letter to you. And when I read back over what I’ve written, I wonder if I should tear it up. It’s probably better if you never read it. You really don’t need to know what a mess your mother was. I just want so much to have some sense of connection with you. And this is the only way I know to do that. Besides, like the drawings, writing gives me some peace—if only for a few minutes at a time.

Whatever else you may believe about me, please know that I love you. Oh, my little girl, I love you so very much. More than my own life.

Your grandparents are coming tomorrow. You’re going to live with them, and they will take very good care of you—as they did of me, for as long as I let them. It’s better this way. You’ll have a good life—and you’ll grow up to be a good girl and not make a mess of things the way I did.

I love you, my Lucy, my baby. You must believe that. Forgive me.

Your Mama, Marie

Scrawled beneath the name was a date the day before the one on the envelope. Lucky wiped the tears from her eyes with trembling hands and scanned back through the pages again. She had been told that her mother had died giving birth to her, but it wasn’t true. According to the date on the letter, her mother had been alive for at least a few weeks after her birth. As she wondered why G-Ma hadn’t told her the truth, she felt a sickening sense of betrayal. All her life, she had believed a lie. She wondered what else she hadn’t been told.

Her mother had obviously been a Sensitive too, and like Lucky, she hadn’t known it. But, unlike Lucky, she hadn’t had anyone like Aidan or Zeke looking out for her. She had had to face the onset of her powers all on her own, and they had driven her mad. Why hadn’t anyone been able to help her mother? And why had she herself been fortunate enough to wander into the Icarus show and encounter Aidan at just the right time? Maybe her nickname was more appropriate than she had thought.

The final item in the box was a manila folder, inside which Lucky found a death certificate, indicating that her mother had died on the same day the letter had been written, and naming the cause of death as blood loss from cuts to the wrists and the manner of death as suicide. Also tucked in the folder were a yellowed newspaper obituary announcement and a program from the memorial service that had been held a few days later.

Once she had read through all three documents, Lucky simply stared at the papers scattered across her lap. When awareness returned some time later, she had no idea how much time had elapsed. She had no memory of thinking or seeing anything she stared at. It was as if she had disappeared, checked out, for an indeterminate period of time. Taking a shaky breath, she placed the papers back in the folder and everything back in the box, this time putting the envelope of drawings and the manila folder on top, instead of burying them beneath the childhood artwork.

Then she curled up in the corner of the couch, her arms wrapped around her knees, her mind struggling to integrate these revelations. Gradually, she realized that Uncle Matthew and Aunt Beth had been as much a part of the conspiracy of silence as had G-Ma. She even wondered if Josh was aware of more than he’d ever let on. He had only been five when her mother had died, but that was old enough to have maybe heard something. He may have even been present at the memorial service. Tears filled her eyes again. She had never felt so alone.

***

“I can’t believe we’re still discussing this!” Aidan managed to keep himself from shouting, but he spoke loudly enough to drown out Sambethe, who was again holding forth on the primary importance of convincing “the human girl” to be Made Nephilim. “What part of ‘No, it’s way too dangerous’ do you not understand?”

“Aidan,” Zeke said in warning.

Aidan’s anger flared higher. He hated it when Zeke used his name like a reprimand, just like he was still a child under his tutelage. Considering the angel’s age, though, he supposed everyone was like a child in comparison.

He took a deep breath and managed to reply in a moderate tone. “You know you aren’t any fonder of the idea than I am, Zeke.”

“No, I am not. But Sambethe is convinced it merits serious consideration.”

“More than ‘serious consideration,’” the oracle asserted. “It
must
be done! It is the only way. I have seen several outcomes for the coming battle—and the
only
one that shows our victory includes the girl—as Naphil.”

This time Aidan couldn’t temper his reply. “But you’ve seen her die in the Making too! If she’s already dead, she won’t be any help to our cause!”

Sambethe caught and held his eyes with her pale ones. When she spoke, her voice was slow and deliberate. “If she does not undergo the Making, she will die anyway—
as will we all
. But if she survives the Making, then we will all have a chance. I fear there is no other possibility for victory.”

“There has to be.” Kev joined the conversation. “Isn’t it possible that there are other potential outcomes that you haven’t seen, Sambethe?”