Mom comes out of her office the moment she hears me step through the front door.
“Hey,” she says. “How was school?”
“Everybody talked about my hair, but it was fine.”
“We could try to dye it again,” she suggests.
I shrug. “It must mean something, right? God wants me to be blond this year.”
“Right,” she says. “You want a cookie, blondie?”
“Do birds fly?” I scamper after her into the kitchen, where, sure enough, I smell something wonderful baking in the oven. “Chocolate chip?”
“Of course.” The buzzer goes off, and she puts on an oven mitt, takes the sheet of cookies out of the oven, and sets it on the counter. I pull up a stool on the other side of her and sit. It feels so normal it’s weird, after what’s happened, all the drama and fight-for-your-life stuff and serious soul-searching, and now . . . cookies.
The night of the fire I came home assuming we’d have this big tell-all, and everything would be out in the open now that the stuff from my vision had happened. But when I got home, Mom was asleep, asleep on the most important night of my life, and I didn’t wake her, didn’t blame her because we were both, at the time, so literally fried, and she’d been attacked, almost died and all. But still. It wasn’t exactly how I thought my purpose would go.
It’s not like we haven’t talked. We have, although mostly it was a debriefing of what’s already happened. No new information. No revelations. No explanations. At one point I asked, “So what happens now?” and she said, “I don’t know, honey,” and that was it. I would have pressed her about it, but she kept getting this look on her face, this bleak expression, her eyes so full of pain and sadness, like she’s so incredibly disappointed in me and how my purpose turned out. Of course she would never come right out and say that, never tell me that I’ve screwed up everything, that she thought I would be better than that, that she thought I’d make the right choices when my time came, that I’d prove myself worthy to be called an angel-blood. But the look says it all.
“So,” she says as we wait for the cookies to cool. “I thought you’d be home a while ago. Did you go to see Tucker?”
And already I need to make a big decision: to tell her about Angel Club, or not tell her.
Okay. So I think about how the first thing out of Angela’s mouth when it came to rules was not to tell anybody, especially the adults, and then I think about the way Christian refused, just like that, said that he tells his uncle everything.
Mom and I used to have that. Used to. Now I have no desire to share this stuff with her, not about Angel Club, not about the weird recurring dream I’ve been having, not about how I feel about what happened the day of the fire or what my true purpose might have been. I don’t want to get into it right now.
So I don’t.
“I was at the Pink Garter,” I say. “With Angela.”
Not technically a lie.
I brace myself for her to tell me that Angela, while full of good intentions, is going to get us all in deep trouble someday. She knows that any time spent with Angela is time spent talking about angel-bloods and Angela’s many theories.
Instead she says, “Oh, that’s nice,” and uses a spatula to slide the cookies onto a wire rack on the counter. I steal one.
“That’s nice?” I repeat incredulously.
“Get a plate, please,” she tells me, and I do. Then, as I’m sitting there with a mouthful of chocolatey goodness, she says, “It was never my intention to shelter you from other angel-bloods forever. I only wanted you to live normal lives for as long as possible, to know what it’s like to be human. But now you’re old enough, you’ve been through your visions, you’ve had a glimpse of the evil in this world, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to start learning what it truly means to be an angel-blood. Which means hanging out with others like you.”
I wonder if she still means Angela, or if now she’s talking about Christian. If she assumes being with him is my purpose. Not very women’s lib of her, I think, if she believes my entire purpose on this earth is to hook up with some guy.
“Milk?” she asks, then goes to the fridge and pours me a glass.
And this is the point where I finally get the guts to ask her. “Mom, am I going to be punished?”
“Why?” She reaches for a cookie. “Did you do something today I should know about?”
I shake my head. “No. My purpose. Am I going to be punished because I didn’t, you know, fulfill it? Am I going to hell or something?”
She halfway chokes on the cookie, then takes a quick sip of my milk.
“That’s not really how it works,” she says.
“How does it work, then? Will I get a second chance? Is there anything else that I’m going to be expected to do?”
She’s quiet for a minute. I can practically see the wheels turning in her head, deciding how much she’s going to tell me. This aggravates the crap out of me, of course, but there’s not a lot I can do about it. So I wait.
“Every angel-blood is given a purpose,” she says after what feels like an eternity. “For some that purpose manifests itself in a single event, a singular moment in time where we are led to be at a specific place at a specific time, to do a specific thing. For others . . .” She glances down at her hands, choosing her words carefully. “Their purpose can involve more.”
“More?” I ask.
“More than a single event.”
I stare at her. This has got to be the strangest conversation any mother and daughter has ever had over milk and cookies. “How much more?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. We’re all different. Our purposes are all different.”
“Which was it for you?”
“For me . . .” She clears her throat delicately. “It was more than one event,” she admits.
Not good enough.
“Mom, come on,” I demand. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”
Inexplicably, she smiles this tiny smile, like she finds me funny. “It’s going to be okay, Clara,” she says. “You’ll figure it out when you’re supposed to figure it out. I know that’s frustrating to hear. Believe me, I know.”
I swallow the rising craziness that’s churning in my stomach. “How? How do you know?”
She sighs. “Because my purpose lasted more than one hundred years.”
My mouth drops open.
One hundred years.
“So . . . so you’re saying that it might not be over?”
“I’m saying that your purpose is more complicated than simply completing a task.”
I jump to my feet. I can’t keep sitting down for this. “You couldn’t have told me this, oh, I don’t know—before the fire?”
“I can’t give you the answers, Clara, even if I know them,” she says. “If I did it might change the outcome. You just have to trust me when I say that you’ll get the answers when you need them.”
And there’s the look again, the sadness. Like I’m disappointing her right this minute. But I also see something else in her luminous blue eyes: faith. She still has faith. That there’s some kind of plan for our lives, some kind of meaning, or direction, behind all of this. I sigh. I’ve never had her kind of faith, and I’m afraid I never will. But I find that even though I obviously have some issues with her, I do trust her. With my life. Not only because she’s my mother, but because when it really counted, she saved it.
“Okay,” I say. “Fine. But I don’t have to like it.”
She nods, smiles again, but the sadness doesn’t quite leave her face. “I don’t expect you to like it. You wouldn’t be my daughter if you did.”
I should tell her, I think, about the dream. See if she thinks it’s important, if it’s more than a dream. If it’s a vision. Of my possibly continuing purpose.
But right then Jeffrey comes through the door, and of course he hollers, “What’s for dinner?” since food is always the first thing on his mind. Mom calls back to him, starts bustling around preparing a meal for us, and I’m amazed at her ability to switch off like that, to make it feel like we’re any other kids coming home from our first day of school, no heavenly purposes set for us, no fallen angels hunting us, no bad dreams, and Mom is just like any other mother.
After dinner I fly over to the Lazy Dog to see Tucker.
He’s surprised when I tap on his window.
“Hi there, handsome,” I tell him. “Can I come in?”
“Absolutely,” he says, and kisses me, then quickly rolls across the bed to close the door. I crawl through the window and stand, looking around. I love his room. It’s warm and cozy, neat but not too neat, a plaid bedspread pulled haphazardly up over his sheets, piles of schoolbooks, comics, and rodeo magazines strewn about his desk, a pair of gym socks and a balled-up hoodie in the corner of the slightly dusty oak floor, his collection of cowboy hats set in a line across the top of his dresser along with some old green army men and a couple fishing lures. There’s a rusty horseshoe nailed over his closet door. It’s so boy.
He turns to look at me, scratches at the back of his neck.
“This isn’t going to become one of those creepy situations where you show up at all hours of the night to watch me sleep, is it?” he asks playfully.
“Every moment I’m away from you, I die a little,” I say in return.
“So that’s a yes, then.”
“Are you complaining?” I ask, quirking an eyebrow at him.
He grins. “Nope. Definitely not complaining. I just wanted to know so I can start wearing more than my boxers to bed.”
That gets a blush out of me. “Well, don’t—uh, change anything on my account,” I stammer, and he laughs and crosses the room to kiss me again.
We spend a very nice few minutes hanging out on his bed. Nothing heavy, since Tucker still has this notion that since I have angel blood in my veins he should try to keep my honor intact. For a long time we simply lie there, catching our breath. I lay my head on his chest, feeling his heart thumping beneath my ear, and I think for the thousandth time that he is without question the best guy on the planet.
Tucker takes one of my hands and curls and uncurls my fingers around his. I love the texture of his hands, the calluses along his palms, evidence of all the hard work he’s done in his life, the type of person he is. Such rough hands, but he’s always so gentle with them.
“So,” he says out of the blue, “are you ever going to tell me what happened the night of the fire?”
Moment over.
I guess I knew this question was coming. I was maybe hoping he wouldn’t ask it. It puts me in this terrible position, knowing other people’s secrets, especially when those secrets are all tangled up with mine.
“I—” I sit up, pull away from him. I seriously don’t know what to say. The words catch in my throat. This must be what it’s like for Mom, I think, keeping things hidden from the people she loves.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, sitting up next to me. “I get it. It’s top-secret angel stuff. You can’t tell.”
I shake my head. I decide that I am not my mother.
“Angela’s forming a club, for angel-bloods,” I say as a start, even though I know this isn’t what he asked me.
This is so not what Tucker thought I was going to say. “Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood.”
“Yes.”
He snorts. “Well, I guess that makes sense. There’s always been something off about that girl.”
“Hey. I’m an angel-blood. Are you saying there’s something off about me, too?”
“Yep,” he answers. “But I like it.”
“Oh, okay, then.” I lean in to kiss him. Then I pull away.
“Christian is an angel-blood too,” I say, trying to be brave and look him in the face and say it. “I didn’t know until the night of the fire, but he is. A Quartarius. Like me.”
Tucker’s eyes widen. “Oh,” he says in this emotionless voice, and looks away. “Like you.”
For a long time neither of us speaks. Then he says, “Big coincidence, huh, all these angel-bloods popping up in Jackson?”
“It was a pretty big surprise, that’s for sure,” I admit. “I don’t know about coincidence.”
He swallows, and there’s this little click in his throat. I can see how hard he’s trying to play it cool, pretend that the angel stuff doesn’t scare him or make him feel like he’s standing in the way of something more important than him. He’d still step aside, I realize, if he thought he was distracting me from my purpose. He’s already putting on the breakup face. Like he did before.
“I don’t know what was supposed to happen that night,” I say quickly. “But the fire’s over. I’m moving on with my life.” I hope he doesn’t detect the touch of desperation in my voice, how much I want to make the words true just by saying them. I don’t want to think about the possibility that my purpose could last another hundred years. “So I’m all yours now,” I say, and the words ring false, so terribly false, in my ears. And here I started out determined to tell him the truth.
Only I don’t know the truth. Or maybe I don’t want to know.
“All right,” he says then, although I can tell he’s not sure if he believes me. “Good. Because I want you all to myself.”
“You’ve got me,” I whisper.
He kisses me again. And I kiss him back.
But the image of Christian Prescott, standing with his back to me at Fox Creek Road, waiting for me, always waiting, suddenly flashes through my mind.
When I get home Jeffrey’s out in the yard, chopping wood in the rain. He sees me and nods his head, lifts his arm and wipes sweat from above his top lip with his sleeve. Then he grabs a log, lifts the ax again, and splits it easily. He splits another. And another. The pile of chopped wood at his feet is already pretty big, and he doesn’t look like he’s stopping anytime soon.
“You deciding to stock up for the whole winter? Can’t wait for the snow?” I ask. “You do know it’s only September.”
“Mom’s cold,” he says. “She’s in there in her flannel pj’s, wrapped up in blankets drinking tea, and she’s shivering. I thought I’d build her a fire.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s nice of you.”
“Something happened to her that day. With the Black Wing,” he says, trying out the words. He looks up, meets my eyes. Sometimes he looks so young, like a vulnerable little boy. Other times, like now, he looks like a man. A man who’s seen so much sadness in this life. How is that possible? I wonder. He’s fifteen.
“Yeah,” I say, because I’ve concluded the same thing. “I mean, he tried to kill her. It was a pretty rough fight.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“I think so.” The glory healed her. I watched it wash over her like warm water, taking away the burns, the bruises from Samjeeza’s hands. But thinking about it brings back the image of her dangling from his arm, flailing, gasping for breath as his hand tightened around her throat, her kicks growing weaker and weaker until she went still. Until I thought she was dead. My eyes burn at the memory and I quickly turn away to look at the house so Jeffrey won’t see my tears.
Jeffrey chops some more wood, and I pull myself together. It’s been a long day. I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers up over my head, and sleep it all away.
“Hey, where were you that day?” I ask suddenly.
He goes with playing dumb. “When?”
“The day of the fire.”
He grabs another block of wood and places it on the stand. “I told you. I was in the woods, looking for you. I thought maybe I could help.”
“Why don’t I believe that?”
He falters and the ax strikes the log unevenly and sticks. He makes a noise like a growl and jerks it out.
“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” he asks.
“Um, maybe because I know you, and you’re acting all weird. So where were you? Cut the crap.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.” He throws the ax in the dirt, then gathers an armload of the chopped wood and pushes past me toward the house.
“Jeffrey . . .”
“It was nothing,” he says. “I got lost.” Suddenly he looks like he’s the one about to cry. He goes into the house, and I can hear him offering to make a fire for Mom. I stand in the yard until the first curls of smoke drift out of the top of our chimney. I remember his face when he flew out of the trees that night, tight with fear and something like pain. I remember the hollow way he laughed at me when I told him that I saved Tucker, and suddenly I’m all twisted up with worry for him, because whatever he was doing out there that day, my gut tells me that it wasn’t good.
My brother has his secrets, too.