Boundless (Unearthly) (7 page)

“I see them, in my vision.” Angela pulls me past the burghers, until we’re standing at the top of the steps looking out at the Oval and beyond it Palm Drive, the long street that’s lined with giant palm trees and marks the official entrance to the university. The sun is setting. Students are playing Frisbee in the grass wearing shorts and tank tops, sunglasses, flip-flops. Others are stretched out under trees, studying. Birds are singing, bicycles whirring by. A car makes its way around the circle with a surfboard strapped to the roof.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think: October in California.

“It happens here.” Angela stops and plants her feet. “Right here.”

I look down. “What, you mean where we’re standing?”

She nods. “I’m going to come from that direction.” She points to the left. “And I’m going to climb up these five little steps, and there’s going to be someone waiting for me, right here.”

“The man in the gray suit.” I remember her telling me.

“Yes. And I’m going to tell him, ‘The seventh is ours.’”

“Do you know who he is?”

She makes an irritated noise in the back of her throat, like I am bursting her “guess how brilliant I am” bubble by bringing up something that she doesn’t know. “It feels like I recognize him, in the vision, but he’s got his back to me. I don’t ever see his face.”

“Ah, one of those.” I think back to the days when I had my first vision, the forest fire, the boy watching it, and it was frustrating as all get-out that I could never see what he looked like. It took me a while to get used to seeing Christian from the front.

“I’m going to find out, obviously,” she says, like it’s not important. “But it’s happening. Right here. This is the place.”

“Very exciting,” I say, which is what she wants to hear.

She nods, but there’s something troubled in her expression. She chews on her lip, then sighs.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She snaps out of it. “Right here,” she says again, like this spot has magical properties.

“Right here,” I agree.

“The seventh is ours,” she whispers.

On the way back to Roble we cut through the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden. In among the tall trees there are dozens of sculpted wooden poles and large stone carvings done in the native style. My eye goes right to a primitive version of
The Thinker
, a man bent over with his huge head framed in his hands, wearing a contemplative expression. Perched on top of his head is a large black crow. As we approach, it pivots to look at me. Caws.

I stop walking.

“What is it?” Angela asks.

“That bird,” I say, my voice dropping in embarrassment at how silly this is going to sound. “This is like the fourth time I’ve seen it since I got here. I think it’s following me.”

She glances over her shoulder at the bird. “How do you know it’s the same bird?” she asks. “There are a lot of birds here, C, and birds act weird around us. That’s kind of a given.”

“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling, I guess.”

Her eyes widen slightly.
You think Samjeeza might have followed you here?
she asks silently, which startles me. I forgot that she can speak in my mind.
Do you feel sorrow?

I feel instantly dumb that I never thought to feel for sorrow before. Usually around Sam the sorrow overwhelms me without me having to seek it out. I gaze up at the bird, slowly open the door of my mind, and wait to be flooded with Samjeeza’s sad, sweet despair. But before I can discern anything beyond my own anxiety, the bird squawks, almost in a mocking way, and flaps off through the trees.

Angela and I stare after it.

“It’s probably just a bird,” I say. A shudder passes through me.

“Right,” she says, in a voice that conveys she doesn’t believe that for a second. “Well, what can you do? I guess if it’s a Black Wing, you’ll find out soon enough.”

I guess so.

“You should tell Billy about it,” Angela says. “See if she has any, I don’t know, advice for you. Maybe some kind of bird deterrent.”

I want to laugh at her choice of words, but for some reason I don’t think it’s so funny. I nod. “Yeah, I’ll call Billy,” I say. “I haven’t checked in with her for a while.”

I hate this.

I’m sitting on the edge of my bed with my cell in my hand. I don’t know how Billy will react to the news that I’m possibly seeing a Black Wing, but there’s the high likelihood she’ll say I should run away—that’s what you do when you see a Black Wing, we’ve all been taught over and over and over again. You run. You go to someplace hallowed. You hide. You can’t fight them. They’re too strong. They’re invincible. I mean, last year when Samjeeza started showing up at my school, the adults went full lockdown on us. They got scared.

I might have to leave Stanford, is what that would mean.

My jaw clenches. I’m tired of being scared all the time. Of Black Wings and frightening visions and failure. I’m sick of it.

It makes me think of when I was a kid, maybe six or seven, and I went through a scared-of-the-dark phase. I’d lie with the covers clutched up to my chin, convinced that every shadow was a monster: an alien come to abduct me, a vampire, a ghost about to lay its chilly dead hand on my arm. I told my mom I wanted to sleep with the lights on. She humored me that way, or let me sleep in her bed, curled against the security of her warm, vanilla-scented body until the terror faded, but after a while she said, “It’s time to stop being afraid, Clara.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” She handed me a spray bottle. “It’s holy water,” she explained. “If anything scary comes into this room, tell it to go away, and if it doesn’t go away, spray it with this.”

I seriously doubted that holy water would have any effect on aliens.

“Try it,” she dared me. “See what happens.”

I spent the next night muttering, “Go away,” and spraying shadows, and she was right. The monsters disappeared. I made them go away, just by my refusal to be afraid of them. I took control of my fear. I conquered it.

That’s how I feel right now, like if I just refuse to be afraid of the bird, it’ll go away.

I wish I could call Mom instead of Billy. What would she say to me, I wonder, if I could magically go to her, if I could run downstairs to her room in Jackson the way I used to and tell her everything? I think I know. She’d kiss me on the temple, the way she always did, and smooth the hair away from my face. She’d draw a quilt around my shoulders. She’d make me a cup of tea, and I’d sit at the kitchen counter and I’d tell her about the crow, and about my vision of the darkness, how I feel inside it, about my fears.

And here’s what I’d want her to say:
It’s time to stop being afraid, Clara. There’s always going to be danger. Live your life.

I turn the phone off and set it on my desk.

I won’t let you do this to me,
I think at the bird, even though it’s not present at the moment.
I’m not scared of you. And I’m not going to let you drive me away.

The days start zipping by, October leaning toward November. I get caught up in the busyness of school, the “Stanford duck syndrome,” which is where it appears like you’re swimming calmly, but under the water you’re furiously kicking. I go to class five days a week, five or six hours a day. I study roughly two hours for every hour I spend in class. That’s at least seventy-five hours a week, if you do the math. Then once you subtract sleeping and eating and showering and having sporadic visions of me and Christian hiding in a dark room, I’m left with about twenty hours to hit the occasional party with the other Roble girls, or get my Saturday afternoon coffee with Christian, or go snack shopping with Wan Chen, or go to the movies or the beach or learn how to play Frisbee golf in the Oval. Jeffrey’s also calling me every once in a while, which is a huge relief, and we’ve been having an almost-weekly breakfast together at the café where Mom used to take us when we were kids.

So there’s not much time to think about anything but school. Which suits me just fine.

I keep seeing the crow around campus, but I do my best to ignore it, and the more times I see it and nothing happens, the more I believe what I keep telling myself: that if I don’t engage it, everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s Samjeeza or not. I try to act like everything’s normal.

But then one day Wan Chen and I are coming out of the chemistry building, and I hear somebody call my name. I turn around to see a tall blond man in a boxy brown suit and a black fedora—I’m thinking circa 1965—standing on the lawn. An angel. There’s no denying that.

He also happens to be my dad.

“Uh, hi,” I say lamely. I haven’t seen or heard from him in months, not since the week after Mom died, and now
poof
. He appears. Like he walked off the set of
Mad Men
. With a bicycle, bizarrely enough, a pretty blue-and-silver Schwinn that he takes a minute to lean against the side of the building. He jogs over to where Wan Chen and I are standing.

I pull myself together. “So … um, Wan Chen, this is my dad, Michael. Dad, my roommate, Wan Chen.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Dad rumbles.

Wan Chen’s face goes greenish, and she says that she’s got another class to get to, and promptly takes off.

Dad has that effect on humans.

As for me, I am filled with the sense of deep abiding happiness I always get when I’m around my father, a reflection of his inner peace, his connection with heaven, his joy. Then, because I don’t like feeling emotions that are not my own, even the good ones, I try to block him out.

“Did you bike here?” I ask.

He laughs. “No. That’s for you. A birthday present.”

I’m surprised. Never mind that my birthday was in June, and it’s November. I can’t remember ever receiving a birthday gift from Dad in person. In the past he usually sent something extravagant in the mail, a card stuffed with cash or an expensive locket or concert tickets. Money for a car. All nice things, but it always seemed like he was trying to buy me off, make up for the fact that he’d abandoned us.

He frowns, an expression that’s not quite natural on his face. “Your mother arranged the presents,” he confesses. “She knew what you’d want. She was also the one who suggested this bicycle. She said you’d need it.”

I stare at him. “Wait, you mean it was
Mom
who sent all that stuff?”

He nods in this half-guilty way, like he’s admitted to cheating on the good-father test.

O-kay. So I was actually getting presents from my mom when I thought I was getting presents from my absentee father. That is messed up.

“What about you? Do you even have a birthday?” I ask, for lack of something better to say. “I mean, I always thought your birthday was July eleventh.”

He smiles. “That was the first full day I got to spend with your mother, the first day of our time together. July the eleventh, 1989.”

“Oh. So you’re like twenty-three.”

He nods. “Yes. I’m like twenty-three.”

He looks like Jeffrey, I think as I scrutinize his face. They have the same silver eyes, the same hair, the same golden tone to their skin. The difference is that while Dad is literally as old as the hills, calm, at peace with everything, Jeffrey is sixteen and at peace with nothing. Out there “doing his own thing,” whatever that means.

“You saw Jeffrey?” Dad asks.

“Don’t read my mind; that’s rude. And yes, he came to see me, and he’s called me a couple times, basically because I think he doesn’t want me to look for him. He’s living around here somewhere. We’re going out to Joanie’s Café tomorrow. That’s the only way I can get him to spend time with me—offer free food—but hey, whatever works.” I have a stellar idea. “You should come with us.”

Dad doesn’t even consider it. “He won’t want to talk to me.”

“So what? He’s a teenager. You’re his father,” I say, and what I don’t say, but what he probably hears me think anyway, is
You should make him go home.

Dad shakes his head. “I can’t help him, Clara. I’ve seen every possible version of what could happen, and he never listens to me. If anything, my interference would make things worse for him.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I came here for a reason. I’ve been given the task of training you.”

My heart starts beating fast. “Training me? For what?”

Something in his jaw works as he considers how much to disclose. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am a soldier.”

Or the leader of God’s army, but okay, let’s be modest. “Yeah, I kind of did know that.”

“And swordplay is a specialty of mine.”

“Swordplay?” I say this too loudly, and the people walking by flash us alarmed looks. I lower my voice. “You’re going to train me to use a sword? Like … a flaming sword?”

But that’s Christian’s vision, I think immediately. Not mine. Not me, fighting.

Dad shakes his head. “People often mistake it for a flaming sword, from the way the light ripples, but it’s made from glory, not fire. A glory sword.”

I can’t believe I’m hearing this. “A glory sword? Why?”

He hesitates. “It’s part of the plan.”

“I see. So there’s a definite plan. Involving me,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Is there a copy of this master plan written down that I could take a peek at? Just for a minute?”

The corner of his mouth lifts. “It’s a work in progress. So, are you ready?” he asks.

“What,
now
?”

“No time like the present,” he says, which I can tell he thinks is a joke. He goes over to retrieve the bicycle, and together we meander slowly back toward Roble.

“How’s school, by the way?” he asks, like any other dutiful dad.

“Fine.”

“And how’s your friend?”

I find it bizarre that he’s asking about my friends. “Uh—which one?”

“Angela,” he says. “She’s the reason you came to Stanford, isn’t she?”

“Oh. Yeah. Angela’s doing okay, I think.”

The truth is, I haven’t hung out with Angela since that day at MemChu, almost three weeks ago. I called her this past weekend and asked if she wanted to go to the new gory slasher film that came out on Halloween, and she blew me off. “I’m busy” is all she said. She’s also not interested in going to parties or even poetry readings, which I assumed she’d be all over, or doing much of anything besides going to class, and even in our Poet Re-making the World class she’s been oddly quiet and nonopinionated. Lately I’ve seen more of her roommates than I have of Angela: Robin is in my art history class on Mondays and Wednesdays and a lot of times we get coffee after, and Amy and I always seem to show up in the dining hall for breakfast at the same time, where we sit together and chat up a storm. It’s through them that I know that Angela’s either been hanging out at the church or holed up in their room, glued to her laptop or reading big intimidating-looking books or scribbling away in her good old black-and-white composition notebook, wearing sweats most days, sometimes not even bothering to shower. Clearly something more intense than usual is going on with her. I figure it’s her purpose heating up—her obsession with the number seven, the guy in the gray suit, all that jazz.