The Girl With Borrowed Wings (3 page)

“If I leave the cat in this place,” I said, “that’ll be the same as killing it. I can’t do that.”

I tightened my grip on the animal. Unlike me and my mother, my father was a confirmed carnivore, so my plea didn’t have much effect on him. But I saw him glance at my mom again. She avoided his gaze, studying the ground, and I almost felt bad for pitting him against her. Then he turned back to me. “I told you before,” he said finally. “No pets.”

“I won’t keep it,” I offered, still in shock at myself. “I’ll find it a home as soon as it gets better.”

He grunted and turned away.

Now pay attention. That part was important. I won, but I didn’t win. It’s impossible to win against my father. He let me have my way for once, but his words—“No pets”—had been spoken, and their vibrations were already running down the spine of reality.

I carried the cat the whole time we were in the souk, even after my arms went numb; I kept it on my lap while we drove for three hours on a road through the desert to get back to our oasis; I pulled off all the ticks, waded through the books in my room, and laid it down on my bed; but those words of my father’s would spread right to the ends of the world and come crashing back in a tsunami. I think that it was because of my father that things turned out the way they did. I think the universe couldn’t help but obey him, even if I had refused to. In the end, his words came true, as always. The cat wasn’t a pet at all . . . I’ll explain, and then see for yourself whether my father is all-powerful or not.

It slept all day, curled up on the thin orange blankets of my bed. I settled it down so that its head was on the pillow, and it looked adorably luxurious stretched out like that, especially when I thought back to how I had first seen it in the Animal Souk—stuffed into its hot, tight cage. I began to enjoy my role as its savior. Inspired, I trickled water into its mouth. The water spilled all over my sheets and its fur, but it swallowed at least some. I saw its throat move.

That night we had dinner in silence. As usual, my mom cooked, but she didn’t sit with us. She stayed in the kitchen, washing up, and ate her food there. When I was little, she did sit with us, but then, over the years, less and less. At some point she vanished.

I set the table for three anyway, the way I did every night. My father and I sat opposite each other, chewing slowly. At first, the only thing he told me was to adjust how my fingers held the fork, and to sit straighter in my chair. Then, when we were done eating, he said very quietly, “I’m worried that your interest in animals is becoming ridiculous. I wonder if I should ask your mother to buy anchovies again.”

I shook my head without looking at him. When I was eleven and had first turned vegetarian, I’d answered back one time too many, and he hadn’t let me leave the table until I’d eaten anchovies—whole, so that I could see their faces.

“Maybe you’ll learn to be more moderate,” he said.

He was just trying to stir up the memory. And it worked.

In a rush, I felt again the little eyes crunching between my teeth, and the dry, twisted faces, and the brittle bodies breaking as I bit—becoming slime on the back of my tongue. Salt, and scales, and hot acid. My first days in the oasis were soaked in that taste. I could remember the enormity of heat outside, how the cool, empty dining room had looked—we’d just moved in; not much furniture yet—and my father waiting, and the tears plopping off my chin. Now I held on to the table and concentrated on not throwing up.

“I’ll have to see,” my father said, watching the impact. Calm, resigned.

For weeks I hadn’t been able to get the taste out of my mouth. Eating anchovies . . . it was such a small, specific thing. If I complained about it to anyone, they’d just say “So what?”

So you see, in one deft stroke, he had isolated me.

It was a very private torture.

I stared at the floor.

Finally, my father changed the subject. I guess he was satisfied with my reaction. “I think your mother needs help. Go tell her you will wash the dishes.”

And I thought, as I always did,
If you think she needs help, then you should help her, instead of sending me to do it
. But I cleared the table and washed the dishes without comment.

Straight afterward I withdrew to my room. This too was normal. I shut the door behind me, making as little noise as possible, and immediately went to check on the cat. It was still unconscious, but its breathing was less ragged than before. The air conditioner was blasting cold air right across it, and its fur was cool to the touch.

I could still taste anchovies. Ugh.

I made sure the curtains were properly closed—that there wasn’t the smallest crack between them through which some man in the house opposite or down on the street could catch a glimpse of me as I changed. I threw on a baggy white shirt that was so oversized it almost reached my knees. That was all I wore at night. I didn’t like to wear anything heavier because it might bring on a bout of claustrophobia.

Then I crawled over the sheets toward the cat, wanting to warm it, and smothered us both in blankets so that my parents wouldn’t be able to see if they walked in without warning. I knew they wouldn’t like it to be on my bed. But if it had a contagious disease, I’d probably caught it by now anyway, so why be cautious? That’s what I told myself, cheerfully. I liked having the cat around. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in years.

I plucked a book off a towering stack beside me. At least six hundred books surrounded my bed, piled up like the walls of a fortress. I was only allowed so many because I got most of them for free. People often moved away and needed to get rid of their books, and my reputation as a reader meant it wasn’t unusual for me to open the door in the morning on my way to school and find a big black garbage bag full of abandoned novels left lying across the doorstep. I just had to get to them before my father did.

I read one of my favorites for the tenth time, and then around midnight I turned the lights off to sleep. By that point I remember the cat was very warm.

I don’t know what I dreamt that night. Something petty and annoying, probably. I don’t have a lot of nightmares anymore, but I do have irritating dreams quite often. Of trying to walk while people keep tripping me. Of asking people not to do something, and then having to watch while they go right ahead and do it. Things like that.

At around four in the morning I woke up abruptly. Something had jerked me awake.

The song of the mosques? I had heard the mosques sing at their proper times for so many years that I should have been desensitized, but I was such a light sleeper that they still woke me sometimes. Although they weren’t calling
me,
I liked to hear them anyway; they were the heartbeat of the day, providing a rhythm to the flow of time. I closed my eyes and listened. But no . . . I must have been mistaken . . . I couldn’t hear the mosques. Something else must have awoken me. Oh, I knew what. It was the soft sound of my window being opened.

Ye gods.

That must be what it feels like to have a heart attack.

My eyes snapped open.

The predawn light was filtering in through the window. Right, it couldn’t have been sunrise yet, because otherwise the mosques would have been calling. Only a faint, fresh whiteness came in through the curtains, making it light enough for me to see the details of my room.

Ever since that old nightmare of the man with the flashlight, I’d made a habit of keeping the curtains shut, for safety. But now they had been pulled apart, and the window was half open . . . that was all I could see at first, because I wasn’t wearing contact lenses, and because my eyes were adjusting to the brightness of that glowing square.

Then I spotted the figure standing beside the window. He was half invisible behind the screen of white light that slanted between us. I could make out the curve of his body as he twisted around to look at me, and the very faint impression of a face. His irises were yellow gold.

I sat up slowly. My chest was solid with dread.

We were both frozen for a long, drawn-out sliver of time.

Finally, I said, “. . . I think I should scream now.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I’m just leaving.”

“Don’t,” I said. Then I was surprised at myself. What an odd thing to say.

He clearly thought so too. “Why not?”

“Because . . . you have to explain what you’re doing here. It’s not fair to just leave.” I sat straighter. The movement broke some sort of stalemate between us. We both unfroze.

“I’m not explaining anything,” he said, shoving the rest of the window open.

“But you’re in my room!”

He hissed. I don’t mean that poetically. He actually bared his teeth and hissed at me, like a cat. “You brought me here!”

“What?”

One movement, and suddenly he was crouched in the window. The light framed him so that I couldn’t see details, but his outline was very clear. He couldn’t have been human. I thought he looked a bit like a gargoyle. But maybe I only thought that because of the wings: two arched wings at his back, with the skin drawn tight, almost transparent, over the thin framework of bones. They fit perfectly with the curve of his shoulders. He would make a really good statue, I thought, irrelevently.

He turned away from me; the wings shifted, like shadows sliding over his back; and with a quick, light movement, he tossed himself out the window. It really was a toss—the careless sort of gesture with which you would flick something not very important into the garbage.

I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to react to that.

In the end, like a good girl, I got up and shut the window. My hands reached up and took hold of the heavy cloth of the curtains. Slowly I drew them closed, and the last of the light disappeared. My hands wouldn’t relinquish their hold on the curtains, though, so I just stood there for a while, facing the thick folds of cloth and not looking at anything in particular. It was as if I were confounded by a weighty problem, only I couldn’t have explained what it was. At last I let go of the curtains, turned around, and walked back to bed. I stood at the side of the bed for a while too, staring at it, my brow still furrowed. Then I got in and went back to sleep. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

I woke up a couple of hours later. I stared at the ceiling for another half an hour. I thought to myself,
The cat is gone
.

This was true.

Then I thought—well, that’s it for pets. My father doesn’t want a cat in his house; the cat turns into a human thing and flees in the middle of the night. So much for my rebellion.

I thought for a while longer. Then I padded out of bed, changed, and went off to make myself breakfast.

CHAPTER THREE

In Which I Transform Into an Eighty-Year-Old Saint

The day passed. I was unnaturally calm. I told my parents that the cat had somehow run away, and that was the end of it.

At noon, my friend Anju phoned and asked my parents for permission to visit me next week after school. I could imagine her flat, businesslike tone on the other end of the line. My father said he would have to think about it. From two to six in the afternoon I read another favorite book of mine for the fifth time. At six I set the table and we had dinner. Halfway through, my mother came into the dining room to check that I’d laid out the dishes properly, and knocked one of the placemats slightly askew. My father looked at it, frowned, and moved it back into the right place. Wordlessly, she retreated to the kitchen. This was their dance.

When I was done washing the dishes, I retired to my bedroom, closed the door, and sat for a while. Without looking, my fingers crept compulsively to one of my shelves and closed over the spine of a book. I drew it out, gave the cover a glance—I’d only read it twice before—and opened to the first page.

I was near the end and my parents had long since gone to sleep when the attack came. The itch on my back grew and grew, spreading fiery fingers right up to my neck. I dropped the book to the floor. My breaths came short and shallow. I felt that my bedroom was very small, hardly any bigger than a coffin, and it seemed to be shrinking even as I felt the walls to reassure myself that they couldn’t be moving. I had to walk—had to run—but there was nowhere to go. I flew to the window and shoved the curtains apart.

The cat was sitting on the other side of the glass.

Two wide eyes stopped me dead in my tracks. I jerked back as if I’d been slapped. He was startled too, on his paws before I had recovered.

“Wait, wait,” I said, regaining control of myself. I slid the window up. He withdrew, but at least he didn’t flee.

What do you say to a cat? We studied each other in silence for a bit. At last I took a deep breath and said, “Do you mind if I sit here with you?” It made me sound a bit as if I thought we were in a public cafeteria, but at least it was polite.

“If you think you can fit,” he said. Now
that
wasn’t polite.

My mouth twisted, but I didn’t say anything. I slipped myself up onto the window ledge effortlessly—I must have done it hundreds of times before. There was plenty of room for both of us. There would have been enough room for
three
of me. So there. I realized I was grumbling to myself—typical Frenenqer, getting distracted by irrelevancies while sitting beside a talking cat. I tried to focus.

It was dark, but in the light streaming out from my bedroom, I could see that he looked a lot better. His black fur made him almost invisible, except that it gleamed at some angles. The eyes reminded me of magic lights in a swamp. Yellow, and savage, and seeming to come from very far away, even though they were right in front of me.

“Why did you come back?” I said to him.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, looking away. “I was just thinking about it. You weren’t supposed to see me.”

“Is it necessary to sit outside my window in order to think?” Oh. That sounded more accusing than I had intended it to. “Sorry,” I said quickly. “I mean—I’m glad you’re back.”

He didn’t look convinced. I changed the subject. “Where’ve you been all day?”

“I went to kill someone,” he said.

“. . . Oh.”

Silence.

He threw me a vaguely amused look. “I had a reason.”

“. . . Good . . .” I said.

Okay, so nonviolence had just backfired. That’s the problem with doing good deeds. You work hard to save someone, and then they just go off and kill things.

“An old pest. Don’t worry, it wasn’t a human. He’s the one who trapped me in a cage and sold me to the Animal Souk. He thought he was getting rid of me.” He laughed to himself. It wasn’t the wicked cackle I would have expected from a murderer. His laughter was only evil in a careless way (as if that made it any better). He had an extraordinarily casual air about him. I’d noticed that before, when he had tossed himself out the window.

I said, “How come you were trapped?”

“Huh? Oh, he was trying to get revenge for some silly little thing he imagined that I’d done to him . . .”

“No, I mean—you’re not a normal cat, so why couldn’t you just escape from the souk?”

“I can’t go
poof
and make the bars disappear. The only difference between you and me is that I was born free.” He saw from my face that I didn’t understand. “I’m a Free person. Probably the only one you’ll ever meet. All the rules and boundaries and whatever”—he listed them as nonchalantly as if they were made of smoke; things that could be waved off in a bored fashion—“aren’t applicable to me.”

I stared at him for a moment, considering it. I had many thoughts. I thought of my stiff little life and I understood that there
must
be some people who were born differently, because otherwise reality wouldn’t make sense. What would be the point of a world where everyone was caged? If I could be so trapped, then, in the interests of symmetry, there had to be at least a few people who were equally free. But the first thing that I thought, above all, was that I should shove this cat off the windowsill for taking his good fortune so much for granted.

“Lucky,” I said, in a low tone. If I sounded bitter, he didn’t notice.

He shrugged. “It’s like that for all Free people. Some animals are born without tails, some are born without aggressive instincts, and some are born without speech—and, well,
we’re
born without rules. Simple as that. I’ll still die, sure. But in the meantime, I can go anywhere and be anything I want. Extreme sizes are a bit tricky . . . That’s why I couldn’t slip between the bars of the cage in the souk. But anywhere between a whale and a mouse is fair game. I could go human,” he added brightly, like a child saying “Look what I can do!”

So, without another word—that’s exactly what he did.

And I almost fell off the window ledge. There was a sickly lurching moment—but before I could scrabble for a grip, before my heart had time to either stop or begin a row of frantic death-drumbeats, he’d caught me, and by the time I felt my first jolt of panic, he had already pulled me back to the window. With bare arms. Against his chest. And then I had more important things to worry about than falling to my death. “Let me go,” I growled, before he had the chance to hoist me inside.

“What? Do you want to fall?” he said.

Better to fall than to be held by a naked— I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to finish that thought. “I said to let me go!”

Blankly, he said, “Why?”

“Put some clothes on, will you?”

“Oh . . . right,” he said as light dawned. He kept his hands on my elbows. “But I wasn’t wearing any this morning, and you didn’t mind.”

“You weren’t human this morning!” It was harder to struggle with my eyes shut. I couldn’t tell which side was my room, and which side had only the emptiness of air. I held rigid in the arms of the Free person.

He considered this, then sighed, as if hard-put-upon. “All right, all right. Keep your eyes shut, then.” I was lifted briefly into the air, but before I could react, I was standing on the solid floor again and by the change in temperature I could tell I was back in my room. I heard my wardrobe door open and some things being shuffled around.

“There isn’t much here that I can wear.” He kept up a running commentary as he rifled through my clothes. “Oh, what’s
this
? I’m not even sure how you’re supposed to wear this . . .” I screwed my eyes tighter shut, wondering which drawer he was in. “I like this one. Nice color. You ought to put it on. It wouldn’t suit me, though—far too girly. All right, let’s see . . . Ah. I think I opened the wrong drawer. I definitely couldn’t wear anything in
there
—”

“Okay,” I snapped. “That’s enough.” To my horror, I thought I heard a noise in the next room. Ye gods, if my father found out I had a boy in my room . . . “I’ll find you something to wear, but you have to either change shape or go stand in a corner while I do it,” I whispered. I gave him a moment and then, without looking to see which he had chosen to do, opened my eyes and went over to the wardrobe. In the last minute he had managed to turn my mother’s neatly stacked piles of clothing into a site of terrible devastation. Steeling myself, I picked a pair of pants out of the mess. They were loose and shapeless, neither particularly female nor male. They’d do fine. And in the next drawer was one of my plain, oversized nightshirts.

That reminded me. I’d cuddled the cat last night, hadn’t I, while I was wearing no more than a nightshirt? Had he been awake? I fiddled with the cloth, taking longer than necessary.

“Here,” I said finally, throwing the clothes over my shoulder without turning around. “Put them on.”

A second later he said, “Okay, you can turn around now. But I still think you’re overreacting.”

I turned.

I’m not going to gush. That would be demeaning. Even in the shock of the moment, I would rather stick to facts. I saw black hair and burning yellow eyes. The pupils were slightly slanted, and that, added to the sharp cast of his face and also the deceptively languid way he held himself, left a distinctly feline impression. I think a good way to describe it is—interestingly wicked. I would have been prepared to bet that his ears and incisors were just a tiny bit more pointed than usual.

“So the clothes fit,” was all I said.

“Yeah, no problem,” he replied. A breeze brushed the curtains apart, and moonlight flashed in his face as he grinned. “So, are we taking turns? Do I get to dress you now?”

“No!”

Great. I clammed up like some prim old woman. I folded my arms and looked off to one side of the room, as if to suggest that the peeling paint in the corner was a more interesting sight than he was. It was the only safe way to behave around his lounging, absentminded maleness.

I was really good at being humorless. Too good. I almost scared myself. And yet he didn’t seem to notice my abrupt transformation into an eighty-year-old saint. “Just a joke,” he said, casting his eyes around at all my books.

“Keep your voice down, will you?” I said.

“Why?”

“My parents are asleep next door.” I used my best old-maidenly voice, still unable to look away from the stupid paint. I even tapped my foot. My mother would have been impressed.

“So?”

“My father wouldn’t like you to be here.”

“Sounds strict.”

“Not compared to some of my friends’ fathers,” I said shortly. “But he does have a lot of control. He decides everything—he decided who I would be before I was born.”

“Really?” he said. “Who did he decide you should be?”

“Not the kind of girl who lets Free people into her room! Especially male ones.”

His eyebrows disappeared into the crush of black hair, which still looked rumpled from when he’d pulled his—my—shirt over it. “Free people? Unless you have some others hidden away, it’s just me.”

“Even worse,” I muttered.

“I’ll go if you want me to,” he said, looking at me sideways. I couldn’t tell whether he was testing me or not. He slipped past me, closer to the window, and . . . grew wings. As casually as I would put on a hat.

The back of his shirt tore as the bat-like wings curled out.
So much for that nightshirt,
I thought. But my eyes immediately went to what was important. The wings. Two smooth dark arcs sweeping out of his shoulder blades. They seemed to fill the room with curves, graceful tapering points, an expanse of blackness, and I thought of the seas I had seen long ago, far away, during a time when I lived beyond the clinging dust of the desert. Those wings resembled the nights I could explore, if I only had a pair of my own. A faint flush came to my cheeks.

He noticed, of course. He paused at the window and a thoughtful look reached his yellow eyes. The corner of his mouth twisted. “You like the wings, huh?”

I jumped and jerked my gaze away.

“We could go somewhere, if you want,” he said.

My mouth was dry. “Where?”

“Anywhere. I’m very fast.”

Again I wondered what exactly he had done to deserve so much good luck. He was leaning against the wall, grinning at me slantwise, and steeped in his own freedom. The loose black hair was finally beginning to fall back into place. Messy. And he couldn’t have been much older than me. No, he didn’t look particularly superior; and yet there it was, the gift of wings curving behind him.

I wanted to answer yes. I wanted, badly, to just dive out the window. My skin tingled as I imagined it. The imaginary wings at my back beat as hard as a second heart, but there, exactly between them, digging tight into my back, was the itch of my father’s finger, and from its tip came the command. It traveled through me, right up to my throat, where my father’s voice spoke and said: “No.”

“You sure?” he said, slipping up onto the windowsill. The line of his cheek was thin and eager from this angle, like the sharp edge of a knife. Then he turned to look back and ruined the silhouette. “I want to thank you for saving me, that’s all. You should come. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”