Transcendent (6 page)

“Iris.” My name cracked on my mom's lips as she tilted her tear-filled eyes up to face me. “It's time for me to tell you. It's time for you to know . . . to know
everything
.”

“T
HIS IS GOING
to sound completely absurd,” my mom started. “Completely, utterly ridiculous. It's not going to be easy for you to believe any of it, but I . . .”

“Mom.”
I leaned forward, grabbing her hand. “Stop. Just tell me.”

She nodded, swiping at her dripping cheeks with the dark leafy-green scarf that was more often than not draped around her neck.

“When I was seventeen, just your age, fresh out of my junior year, I waitressed at the big local pizza place in Green Hill. Frankie and Friends'. I was alone in the front one night, cleaning up after my shift, getting ready to leave, when a woman walked in. An old woman, very old—the oldest I'd ever seen—in a crazy getup, this old patchwork jacket, a big black cane. And these green eyes, the greenest . . .” Her voice broke again, and she clapped her hand over her mouth, muffling a sob.

My dad leaned in closer, whispering something in her ear that I couldn't quite make out. But whatever it was, it made her smile—a tiny smile, but still, a smile. And she was able to keep talking.

“I sat down with her, this woman, and we chatted for a little. I'd never seen her there before, which was a little remarkable for Green Hill. It's nothing like Brooklyn, of course—in Green Hill, everyone knows everything about each other. There aren't secrets there, not many anyway. This woman, she seemed lonely and harmless, at least at first. But then the conversation . . . the conversation became strange. She said that she
knew
me somehow, knew all about me. And that I was the reason she was there at all, in Green Hill.”

She shifted in her chair, pulling her knees in toward her chest and hugging them close with her free hand. Her other was still tightly clasped in mine, dangling in the space between us.

“I started freaking out then, of course. The idea of this stranger coming for me,
stalking
me even . . . She told me that they were ready for me,
everyone
was ready for me. ‘The longer we wait, the more trouble we'll see, and I think that the world has seen enough trouble, don't you?' That's what she said to me. I'll never forget it. And then she . . . she said that keeping me and the child safe was all that mattered, that we were so valuable. I thought she meant
my little sister, your aunt Gracie, but when I asked, she said no, it was
my
child.
My
child who had to be kept safe.”

She laughed—a sad, broken sound. It was garbled in my ears. None of this made any sense. Who was this woman? What did she have to do with me? With anything?

But then Kyle Bennett's words came back to me, all of them crashing down at once. He'd mentioned a baby, too. My
mom's
baby.

Before I could ask, confess to her that I'd heard their entire conversation, she started talking again. Her voice was low and heavy, determined to push through to the end, whatever the end could possibly be.

“Your dad walked in then,” she said, that same little smile creeping back onto her lips. “He worked in the back of Frankie's, in the kitchen, but we hadn't met yet. He swept in just when I needed him, like my own personal superhero.” She glanced up at my dad, and he bent down, pecking her gently on the forehead. Their gazes lingered on each other for a moment before she broke away, turning back to me. “I ran off and left him to deal with her, but not before she asked me to accept, to approve of, whatever crazy nonsense she was trying to sell me. And I said
yes
. I said yes because it was easiest, because it was the first thing that came out. And that was it. I put the whole encounter behind me. But I had the most memorable dream of my life that night.” She closed her eyes and took in a long,
shaky breath. “Bursts of light, the most intense colors. Colors I could never have imagined myself, colors I'd never seen before then. It was like fireworks, I remember thinking the next morning. But so much better.” She paused, expectant maybe. Like she was waiting for me to put together the pieces, to make sense of what she was saying without her having to spell it out altogether.

I stared at her, my face likely as blank as my mind.

“Iris, this woman, she was talking about
you
,” she said quietly. “
You
were the child.”

My head was suddenly so cloudy, so light. I pulled my hand from hers and gripped the edge of the love seat.

“I don't understand what you're telling me,” I said. “At all. You were pregnant? Is that what you're saying? With Dad, or with . . . ?” I couldn't finish the question. My stomach was now swirling as wildly as my brain, and I swallowed hard, fighting down the bile creeping up the back of my throat.

“No! Well, yes. But
no
, not like that, sweetie . . .” My mom slipped out of the chair, crawling until she was kneeling right in front of me, our faces now only inches apart. “I didn't realize until a few months after that night what it all meant. That I—that I was actually pregnant. The symptoms were all there, but I didn't see them. Of course I didn't see them, because I was a
virgin
, Iris. I had a boyfriend at the time, not your dad, but we'd never had sex.
Nothing even close. So there was no chance, none at all, that he could have been the father. I didn't believe that I was pregnant until the tests were staring me in the face. The doctor confirmed it, too, and then . . . then there really was no denying it. No denying that something strange had happened that night at Frankie's. Something
miraculous
, even. Because of Iris.”

“Iris?” I asked, stunned. There were so many other things to ask, but—
Iris
?

“Yes.” My mom sighed. “Iris. That was her name, the old woman. She's the whole reason you're here, sweetie. She's the one who brought you to me. And her eyes, those green eyes—they were exactly like yours. When you were born, I just knew. I knew that you were my Iris, too, that no other name could ever possibly fit.”

“But how . . . how could anyone ever believe this? Anyone back then? How could I believe this now? What you're telling me, it's . . . it's not real. It can't possibly be
real
.”

“Most people didn't. Not at first. Your grandmother, though—she was amazing to me. Unquestioning. Aunt Hannah was great, too. Your grandfather and Aunt Izzy . . . they took much longer to come around, though eventually, of course, they did. Surprisingly, there were some wonderful strangers out there, too; people from all over, who believed and supported me, came to my defense.
But not my old boyfriend, and not most of the people in my town, either, or around the world when the story spread.”

The whole
world
knew her story? And her daughter—her own daughter knew nothing?

“They called me Virgin Mina. And some people got angry, Iris. I was . . . very controversial, to say the least. I was claiming to be a pregnant virgin, after all, and a lot of people couldn't accept that. It got bad, so bad that during one particularly violent protest, I got knocked down by some of the people in the crowd. So we decided to tell the public that I'd miscarried after that. That you were gone. Your dad and I, we ran away then. We came to New York. Changed our names. And here we've been ever since. Keeping you safe, just as Iris had wanted us to do. Your dad”—she reached out and pressed her cool palm against my cheek—“your dad believed me from the very beginning. He barely knew me, and he believed.”

I squinted, staring at my mom's face as all of the odd bits and pieces of her story floated in the air between us, shimmering, weighted flecks of impossibility. I blinked, hoping that they would blow away, scatter beyond the reach of my memory. This conversation had been a dream, maybe, or some type of hallucination. Had Kyle even knocked on our door, or had I invented him, too? Where did reality end and this ridiculous dream begin?

A soft, high-pitched laugh bubbled from my lips. Of course my mom hadn't really said all those things! And my dad hadn't sat there nodding his head, so somber, scared to look at me as my mom explained that he'd actually had nothing to do with her pregnancy. No. He
was
my dad, half of my genes, my blood.

“Iris?” she asked, her eyebrows twisting up at the sound of my laugh. “I know this all sounds so wildly impossible. I know. I might as well be telling you that your father is Santa and that you're in line to take over the North Pole when he goes. Trust me, this was all incredibly hard for me to believe at first, too, even though I could see it happening to my own body. Even though I saw Iris with my own eyes. And not just that one time, either. I want to tell you more about her, more about all of it, but . . .” She sighed, pinching her eyes shut. “I think this is about all you can probably take for right now. You've always been different, Iris—maybe even you realized that? You've always been so special. The way you treat others, people that everyone else ignores. Remember Johnson? Even then you were so fearless, I was proud, but—”

“Stop!” I scrambled farther back against the love seat, farther away from my mom. “Just stop!” I was saying it more to myself than to them, trying to snap myself out of whatever bizarre enchanted fog I'd been trapped inside of. I wanted to get out. I wanted real life back. “This isn't
happening,” I said, grinding my palms against my eyes. “None of this is happening.”

“Iris.” It was my dad this time. Or, not my
dad
, according to this dream, anyway. My stepdad? My earth father? I laughed again before I could stop myself.

He stepped around my mom and crouched on the floor in front of me, resting his hand on my shoulder. “You need time to let these ideas all settle. Okay?” He pulled my head in to his chest, hugging me tight. “You can ask us anything you need to. You can talk to your grandparents, your aunt Gracie, Izzy and Hannah. We're all here for you, sweetie. And we have a video we can show you, too, a video I made of all of us back then, that we sent out to be aired on the news . . .” He paused, rocking me gently from side to side. “We were going to tell you, you know. Soon. I swear we were. But now that Kyle knows—the stranger who showed up to see your mom earlier—”

“I know,” I said, cutting him off, my words muted against his soft flannel shirt. I pulled back, separating myself. “I was listening from your window. I heard what he said. That he thought Mom could help his kid somehow, that
I
could help . . .” The words trailed off, the bitter truth of it sinking in. Kyle had come here because he wanted
me
. He thought that I could make a difference—that I could actually save his daughter somehow. That I was some kind of solution.

“I'm so sorry that you heard that, sweetie,” my mom said. “Because we certainly never wanted you to find out from anyone but us. I learned eighteen years ago how quickly stories spread, and how far they can go. I didn't want that to ever happen. Not again. Not with you.” She shook her head, any last remaining color in her cheeks completely drained out. She was pure white, almost glowing in her translucence.

“Kyle Bennett,” she continued, “he was a bully at my high school. He was never nice to me, called me Menius—for ‘Mina the Genius'—because I was the Goody Two-shoes, the overachiever, and he held a permanent grudge after I'd gotten him in trouble for cheating once. And when I . . . when I was pregnant, he told the whole school the news. In the nastiest way possible, in front of the entire cafeteria. He blared ‘We Three Kings' on a stereo and threw things at me, with his friends—condoms and baby oil . . .” She was shaking now, her thin wrists trembling against her knees. “And now he regrets that. He regrets how he treated me. And he's so determined to make up for it—because of Disney. He blames himself now, for the bad that's happened to him.”

“You can't,” I started, pushing myself up to stand, “you can't expect me to believe any of this. I'm some kind of miracle? I have no real dad?” I saw my father flinch, and I almost regretted saying it. But wasn't that what they were
telling me? Wasn't that what they wanted me to believe?

“I'm still your father, Iris,” he said, his voice low and rasping. I could tell that he was fighting to sound strong, to keep the tears from spilling down his cheeks. “I will always, always be your father.”

“Well, you can't have it both ways,” I said, balling my hands into fists at my sides. The words came out angrier than I'd intended, but suddenly all I felt was angry. Not confused, not disoriented, not numb. Just furious. “I don't even know your real name, do I? If Mom used to be Mina instead of Noel, then you're not really Joey, are you?”

Joey Spero. Joseph Spero.
Joseph
. The name clicked with a hollow thud in my mind.

They must have seen from the look in my eyes that I'd made the connection, gotten to the punch line of their cruel joke.