Boundless (Unearthly) (18 page)

“That’s easy. I sent him an email.”

I try to get my head around the idea of an angel with a Gmail account. “But Ange—”

“He’ll come, and I’ll tell him,” she says firmly. “Don’t you see what this means, Clara?”

I don’t.

“It means,” she says serenely, curving her arm around the crook of her swollen belly, “that everything is going to be okay.”

I highly doubt that. But for once, I hope she’s right.

I’m in the dark again. Hiding.

I’m crying. No doubt about it this time. My face is wet. Strands of my hair stick to my cheeks. Tears gather under my chin and drip down. Something’s happened that I can’t get out of my brain, but I only understand it in terms of sounds: a strangled moan, a sob, a few whispered words.

God help me.

I put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. The Clara that is me in the future feels helpless. Useless. Lost. The Clara that is me now doesn’t know where I am. I only know the darkness. The fear. The sound of voices coming. The smell of blood.

It’s no use hiding. They’ll find me. My fate has already been decided. I just have to wait for it all to play out. I have to be brave, I think, and face it.

God help me,
I think, but I feel so very little faith that God will.

I come to under a tree. There’s something hard poking me under my back, and I feel for it: the book I was reading before the vision got me. I glance around to see if anybody saw me go comatose in the grass, but nobody, as far as I can tell, is looking. I wipe at my eyes. Crying again. Panicky, my heart drumming, my palms sweating, with what feels like one big knot in my stomach.

I’ve got to figure this vision out before I drive myself crazy.

I take out my phone and stare at Christian’s name in my contact list for a long time before I sigh and put it back into my backpack. Christian hasn’t said two words to me for more than a month, not even in fencing class. His pride is wounded. I get that. I’d be mad too if I’d been about to kiss him, to lay my heart on the line like that, and he went and thought about another girl.

I pick up my book, flip to the page I was on before my brain took a quick trip to the future. It’s a novel, one of the epic dystopians that’s so popular these days. I’m liking it—it puts things into perspective. Sure, I might have occasional visions of doom, a mysterious, soul-crushing pain in my heart, a premonition of death, but at least I’m not scrounging the post-apocalyptic countryside looking for shelter, my only friend a three-eyed mutated dog that I’ll have to eat later in order to survive nuclear winter.

Of course, a mutated dog would be a step up from my friend situation at the moment. On top of Christian not speaking to me, Jeffrey hasn’t called, and Angela’s too busy trying to orchestrate her purpose and her everything’s-going-to-be-fine meeting with Phen to even notice I’m alive. Amy and Robin have been batty since they figured out that Angela has a bun in the oven, and all they want to do when we get together is talk about how tragic and surprising it is that Angela’s in this position, and what is she going to do, anyway? Even Wan Chen’s been acting aloof since she found out, like pregnancy is something that might be catching.

I sigh again, try to remember the kind of thing I would write in my gratitude journal, which, to be truthful, I haven’t picked up since fall quarter ended.

I have a good life, I remind myself. There are plenty of people who love me.

They’re just not around at the moment.

I hear the squawk of a crow directly over my head. I peer up into the branches of the tree, and, sure enough, there’s Samjeeza gazing down at me.

Every single time I see him, no matter how brave I try to be about it, how casual, it’s like getting splashed with ice water. Because every single time, I wonder if he’s decided to kill me. And he could, with the littlest flick of his wrist, I think. He could.

“Don’t you have better things to do than follow me around?” I ask, trying to keep my tone saucy.

The bird cocks his head, then flutters down from the branch to land in the grass beside me. The sad melody of his sorrow twines itself around my mind, making my chest tight with the regret he’s feeling.

Meg,
he thinks, my mother’s name and nothing more, but there’s a world of memory and pain in the word. Longing. Guilt.
Meg.

I shut him out. “Go away,” I whisper.

Suddenly he’s a man, unfolding from the body of the crow, expanding, in the blink of an eye.

“Geez!” I scramble backward, up against the trunk of the tree. “Don’t do that!”

“No one is looking,” he says, like what I’m really concerned about at this moment is whether anybody saw me talking to a bird and what that might do to my sterling reputation.

I’m torn between the desire to run—hightail it straight to Memorial Church, the nearest hallowed ground I can think of—or to suck it up and hear what he’s going to say this time.

I glance over at the church, which is all the way across the quad. It’s too far.

“How can I help you, Sam?” I ask instead.

“I took your mother dancing once,” he says, starting up again on his stories. “She wore a red dress, and the band played ‘Till We Meet Again,’ and she put her head down on my chest to hear my heart beating.”

“Do you even have a heart?” I ask, which is foolish of me to say, and maybe even a little mean, but I can’t help it. I don’t like the idea of him and my mother that way. Or any way, really.

He’s offended. “Of course I have a heart. I can be wounded, the same as any man. She sang to me that night, as we danced. ‘Smile the while you kiss me sad adieu. When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you,’” he sings, and his voice isn’t half bad.

I know the song immediately. Mom used to sing it when she was doing some mundane task, like folding laundry or washing dishes. It’s the first time I’ve ever recognized my mother in this mysterious Meg of his.

“She smelled like roses,” he says.

She did.

He takes the silver charm bracelet out of his pocket and holds it in his palm. “I gave this to her on her doorstep, right before we said good night. All that summer I would leave charms for her to find. This one”—he fingers a charm shaped like a fish—“for that first time I saw her at the pond.” He touches the horse. “This one for when we rode through the French countryside after the hospital where she worked was bombed.”

He caresses the tiny silver heart with a single ruby at its center, but doesn’t tell me about that one. But I know what it means.

That’s the point of all this, I guess. He loved her.

He still loves her.

His hand closes around the bracelet, and he returns it to his pocket.

“What year was that?” I ask him. “When you danced?”

“1918,” he says.

“You could go back there, right? Can’t angels travel through time?”

His eyes meet mine, resentful. “Some angels,” he says.

He means the good ones. The ones who can access glory. Who are still on God’s good side.

“Will you tell me a story now?” he asks me softly. “About your mother?”

I hesitate. Why do I feel sorry for him?

Maybe, supplies my pesky inner voice, because he loves someone he can’t have. And you can relate.

I tell my inner voice to shut it. “I don’t have any stories for you.” I get up, brush grass off my jeans, and gather my stuff. He stands up, too, and I’m horrified to realize that the grass underneath where he was sitting is brown and crisp. Dead.

He really is a monster.

“I have to go.”

“Next time, then,” he says as I turn to walk away.

I stop. “I don’t want there to be a next time, Sam. I don’t know why you’re doing this, what you want from me, but I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I want you to know,” he says.

“Why? So you can rub it in my face that you had a supposedly passionate love affair with my mother?”

He shakes his head, the two layers of him, body and soul, form and formless, blurring with the motion. And then I realize: He wants me to know because there’s no one else to share it with. No one else cares.

“Good-bye, Sam.”

“Until next time,” he calls after me.

I walk away without looking back, the image of my mom wearing a red dress, a silver charm bracelet tinkling against her wrist, singing and smelling of roses, bright in my head.

“So tomorrow’s it,” Angela informs me. We’re doing her laundry in the Roble laundry room, me helping since it’s getting harder and harder these days for Angela to bend down, the noise of the churning washer and dryers the perfect mask for a secret conversation about destiny. Which is apparently happening tomorrow.

“How do you know?” I ask her.

“Because that’s when I told him to meet me,” she says, “in the email.”

“How do you know he got the email?”

“He replied and said he’d come. And because that’s what happens. He comes because I see him there.”

This is circular logic, but I go with it. “So you’re going to just march up to him and say, ‘The seventh is ours.’” This idea worries me. A lot. I’ve been going over and over the scenario in my head, and I can never imagine it turning out well. It’s not just Phen’s wings that are gray, but his soul—his very being. And Angela always gets kind of crazy when it comes to him. He’s bad news, in my opinion.

Angela catches her bottom lip in her teeth for a few seconds, the first sign of real nervousness that I’ve seen since she put the whole seventh thing together. “Something like that,” she says.

I do believe her when she says it’s her vision. So it must be destined to happen, right?

I don’t know. I never did figure out why Jeffrey had a vision of starting a forest fire and then saving someone from the same fire. Or why I was supposed to meet Christian in the forest that day. Or what I was doing at my mom’s funeral.

Ours is not to reason why, I suppose. Ours is but to do or—well, crap.

“And then what?” I ask. “You tell him, and then—”

“He and I will deal with this thing”—she rests her hand lightly on her belly—“together.”

I mull this over. Does she think that she’ll tell him and then they all—nineteen-year-old college student, thousands-of-years-old gray-souled ambivalent angel, and bouncing bundle of Triplare joy—will be a happy family? I guess stranger things have happened, but still …

She reads the doubt on my face.

“Look, C, I’m not expecting a fairy-tale ending here. But this is my purpose, don’t you see? This is what I was put on this earth to do. I have to tell him. He’s …” She takes a quick breath, like this next thing she’s about to say takes all her courage. “He’s the father of my child. He deserves to know.”

I’m familiar with that gleam of certainty in her eyes. Her faith in the vision, and how she feels in the vision, her faith in the way things work. I felt that way myself once, not long ago.

“If this is a test of some kind, my moment of spiritual decision,” she says, “then I choose to tell him the truth.”

“So tomorrow. Big day,” I say, like, I get it. I understand.

She smiles. “Big freaking day. Will you come with me, C?”

“To see Phen? I don’t know, Ange. Maybe this is between you and him.” Last time I had one-on-one interaction with Phen, I sort of told him to leave Angela alone, that she deserved better than he could offer her. And he called me a hypocrite and a child. We’re not exactly best buds, Phen and me.

Angela leans against the dryer. “You’re going to come with me,” she says matter-of-factly. “You’re always there, in my vision.”

I had forgotten all about that. Or maybe I thought she made that bit up so that she could coerce me into coming to Stanford with her. “Right. And where am I, exactly, in this vision?”

“Like two steps behind me, most of the way. For moral support, I think.” She bats her eyes and pouts at me.

All of a sudden this feels like a test for me, too. As an angel-blood who’s supposed to believe in the visions. As her friend.

“All right, all right. I’ll be there, two steps behind,” I promise.

“I had a feeling you were going to say yes,” she says gleefully.

“Yeah, don’t push your luck.”

She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a sheet of wrinkled paper, unfolds it for me. It’s an ultrasound.

“You went to a doctor?” I ask. “I would have gone with you, if I’d known.”

She shrugs. “I’ve been a bunch of times. I wanted to make sure it was okay.” She corrects herself: “He. It’s a boy.”

I stare at the picture, part of me stunned that this is really a tiny person growing inside my friend. It’s grainy, but I can clearly make out a profile, a tiny nose and chin, the bones that make up the baby’s arm. “Are they sure? That it’s a boy?”

“Pretty sure,” she says with a smirk. “I think I’m going to name him Webster.”

“Webster, like after the dictionary? Hmm, I like it.” I hand the picture back to her.

She looks at it for a long moment. “He was sucking his thumb.” She refolds the paper and puts it back in her pocket. The dryer beeps that it’s done, and she starts pulling clothes out and into the basket.

“I’ll take that,” I offer, and she slides the basket over to me.

When we’re back in her room, folding, she suddenly says, “I don’t know how to be a mother. I’m not very … maternal.”

I fold a shirt and lay it across her bed. “My guess is that nobody knows how to be a mother until they become one.”

“He’s going to be so special,” she says softly.

“I know.”

“Phen will know what to do,” she says, like a mantra she’s repeating to herself. “He’ll know how to protect him.”

“I’m sure he will,” I say to reassure her, but I have my doubts about Phen. I’ve seen inside him, and
paternal
is not a word that springs to mind.

I knock on Christian’s door. He’s sweating when he opens it, wearing a white tank top and sweat pants, a towel slung around his neck. He’s surprised to see me. He wishes I’d called first.

“But you’re not returning my calls,” I say.

His jaw tightens.

“You’re still mad at me, and I think that’s reasonable, considering. But we need to talk.”