Hallowed (29 page)

We end up at a car dealership in Idaho Falls. We come down behind a building, Dad in the lead, and he makes us reappear.

Angela would have peed herself to see this, I think. Serves her right.

But I used to be jealous, too. All that time, thinking she was the strong one, the one who always had it all together. She knew everything before I did, even about my mom dying. She mastered flight first. She could change the form of her wings. She’d met a real angel, and spent her summers in Italy.

“Don’t dwell on it,” Dad says. “Her reaction was natural. As was yours, before.”

“You read minds?”

“I can. I’m better with feelings. Like you.”

Like me. I can’t help but shake my head at the craziness of that idea, that he and I resemble each other, even in that small way.

“So, we’re in Idaho Falls,” I glance at my watch. Four p.m. It took us twenty minutes to get here, what would be more than a two-hour drive by car. We flew
fast
.

“What are we doing here?” I ask.

“I want to buy you a new car.”

What sane girl would say no to that?

Dad turns out to be quite the haggler. I’m pretty sure we get the base bottom price for the new white Subaru Forester we end up driving off with.

I drive us home, since driving is another thing he hasn’t had to do in a while. I wonder if this is going to become a regular thing, spending time with him. Or if, the moment Mom is gone, he will be too.

“I will be here as long as you want me,” he says. “Not every minute, by your way of seeing things, but in a sense I will always be with you.”

“It’s a time thing, right? Yeah, Mom tried to explain.”

“For you, time is like a line drawn across a piece of paper, a succession of events. A to B

to C, one moment following another. Where I come from, there are no lines. We
are
the paper.”

“Okay, totally confused now.” I pull over into the Rainy Creek Country Store, a gas station.

“You’ll understand, someday.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Swan Valley. You’ve got to taste their square ice-cream cones.”

“
Square
ice-cream cones?” he repeats, blank-faced again, like this must be another newfangled thing he hasn’t learned about yet.

“See, you don’t know everything. I get to teach you something, too.” We get our ice-cream cones, made with special scoopers that shape the ice cream into perfect squares. Dad chooses chocolate mint. I go for strawberry.

“When you were small, you were my strawberry girl,” he says as we’re leaving the store.

“Your mom planted a patch in the backyard in Mountain View and if we couldn’t find you, that’s often where you’d be, eating strawberries, smeared with juice. Your mother had quite the time getting the stains out of all your tiny outfits.”

“I don’t remember.” I walk around to behind the building where there’s a bench to sit on.

I sit. He stands behind me for a minute, then sits next to me. We look out in the fading light at the mountains, listening to the voice of a small stream gurgling not too far away, the sounds of cars passing on the highway, which sets a kind of rhythm. “I don’t remember much,” I admit.

“I know. You were very small.”

“I remember you shaving.”

He smiles. “Yes. You were fascinated with that. You wanted to do it yourself. Your mother came up with the ingenious idea of cutting up old credit cards into the shape of razors, so then you sat up on the bathroom counter and shaved along with me.”

“Weird that an angel would have to shave.”

He rubs a hand over his smooth chin. “I don’t. Although sometimes, in my profession, I’m required to wear a beard.”

His
profession
. I turn the word over in my mind.

“In those days, with your mother, things were different for me, physically speaking. I had to shave, wash my body, eat, and drink.”

“And you don’t now?”

“I can. But I don’t have to.” He takes a big bite of his ice cream, crunching the cone. It dribbles down his chin, and he tries to wipe at it. I hand him a napkin.

“Because you have a different body.”

“There are two parts, to all of us,” he says. “Body and spirit.”

“So the body is real. And the spirit is . . . ghostly,” I say.

“In humans. The body is solid, and the spirit, translucent. Until the two separate, and the body returns to dust, and the spirit passes to another plane. Then the spirit becomes solid.”

“What about me?” I ask. “What’s my spirit like? Can you see it?”

“Beautiful.” He smiles. “You have a gorgeous spirit. Like your mother’s.” It’s fully dark now. A few feet away a lone cricket starts to chirp. We should go, I think.

It’s still more than an hour’s drive to home. But I don’t get up.

“Will Mom . . . go to heaven?”

He nods, and something in his face brightens. He’s happy, I realize, about her dying.

Because in heaven he’ll probably get to see her all the time. He’s happy, but for my sake he tries to dampen it down, understand it from my point of view.

“Her body is fading now,” he says. “Soon she will give it up entirely.”

“Can I go and visit her?” Hope blooms in my chest. We can cross, I know we can, back and forth from heaven and earth. Mom’s already been to heaven at least once. I could go there. It wouldn’t feel so terrible if I could see Mom every now and then, talk to her. Fill up on her advice and her jokes and her witty remarks. I could still have my mom.

“You can travel to heaven,” Dad says. “As a Triplare, you have the ability to cross between worlds. Dimidius must have help, but historically the Triplare can learn to travel there alone.”

I almost laugh, this is such good news.

“But you are unlikely to see your mother,” he says then. “She has her own journey to undertake when she arrives, and you cannot accompany her.”

“But why?” I know I must sound like a three-year-old, crying for my mama, but I can’t help it. I wipe at sudden, infuriating tears. I jump to my feet, hurl the rest of my ice-cream cone into the trash can behind us.

He doesn’t respond, which only makes me feel more embarrassed.

“We should go,” I tell him. “Everyone will be wondering where we went.” He finishes off the last of his cone and follows me back to the car. We drive in silence for the next half hour, past the glowing farmhouses tucked back from the roads, the silhouettes of horses in the fields, then up into the forest of lodgepole pines, past the YONDER IS JACKSON

HOLE sign at Teton Pass. Dad doesn’t seem angry, but like he’s respecting my need for space. I appreciate that, and resent it, at the same time. I resent that he can make me appreciate that, even though he thinks it’s perfectly okay to waltz back into my life and start dropping bombs on me.

And then I feel guilty that I resent him, because he’s an angel, and he’s the epitome of good.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally as we start to descend the hairpin turns into Jackson.

“I love you, Clara,” he says after a long moment. “I want you to feel that. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“And I promise, you will see your mother again.”

I remind myself that he’s the kind of guy who never breaks a promise.

It’s quiet at dinner, me and Dad and Jeffrey at the table. Jeffrey practically inhales his food to get away from us, which makes Dad sad, or as close to feeling sad as Dad is capable of.

“Nice talk, today,” he tells me as we’re loading dishes into the dishwasher. “I’ve wanted that with you.”

“You used to call me,” I remind him. “How come you never seemed to want to talk to me then?”

“I was uncomfortable with the pretense,” he says, looking down.

“You mean lying to me?”

“Yes. It does not come naturally. It causes me pain.”

I nod. It makes sense. Finally, it’s starting to make sense. Not that it makes up for it. But it helps.

I smile at Dad and excuse myself and go up to my room to knock out my homework. I’m not in there ten minutes before Christian alights on the roof. He comes right up to the window and stands there, staring at me, then raps on the glass.

I open the window. “You’re not supposed to show up here. It’s not safe. There’s a Black Wing hanging around, remember?”

His green eyes are sharp, assessing me. “That’s funny, because I thought I saw an angel banish Samjeeza from the field today. I figured it was safe now.”

“You saw that?”

“I went to the window at the end of the second-floor hallway. Pretty impressive, I thought.

Those wings, wow.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say something dumb. “You want to come in?” He hesitates. He’s never been inside my room before. “Okay.” I’m embarrassed by the girliness of my bedroom, the sheer amount of pink stuff I have lying around. I kick a pink teddy bear under my bed, snatch a bra from where it’s draped over my bedpost and try to discreetly dump it into my hamper. Then I tuck a strand of runaway hair behind my ear and try to look anywhere but straight at Christian.

He seems embarrassed, too, unsure of what to do in this situation. Imagine our mortification when at exactly that moment there’s a gentle knock on my door and Dad comes in.

“Oh, hello,” he says, looking at Christian.

“Dad! Don’t you . . . this is . . .”

“Christian Prescott,” Dad supplies. “I’d recognize those eyes anywhere.” Christian and I look at each other, him all confused about Dad knowing anything about him, me freaking out because I don’t want Christian to think I’ve been waxing poetically about his eyes to my dad.

“I’m Michael. Clara’s father,” Dad says, extending his hand.

Funny how he says that exactly the same way, every time.

Christian doesn’t hesitate. He takes Dad’s hand and shakes it firmly.

Dad smiles. “It’s remarkable, really, how much you resemble your mother.”

“You knew my mother?” Christian’s voice is almost painfully neutral.

“Quite well. She was a charming woman. A good woman.”

Christian glances down for a minute, then up to meet my father’s gaze. “Thank you.” His eyes flicker over to me, linger on my face like he’s seeing it in an entirely new way. Then he says,

“Well, I should go. I just wanted to make sure Clara was okay after she left in the middle of class today.”

Dad couldn’t look more approving of the idea of Christian looking out for me. “Don’t go on my account. I’ll leave you to talk.”

And he does. And he closes the door on the way out. What kind of Dad leaves his teenage daughter alone in her room at night with a boy and the door closed? He’s got a lot of catching up to do, parent-wise, I think. Or maybe he doesn’t really see parenting as his role. Or maybe he’s just that confident that Christian would have to be crazy to do anything inappropriate with an angel on the other side of the door.

“So,” Christian says after a minute. “Your dad’s an angel.”

“So it would seem.”

“He seems cool.”

“He is. Cooler than I ever would have given him credit for.”

“I’m glad for you,” he says.

He is. I can feel it. He’s sincerely pleased to find out that I get to have a dad who cares about me, who is powerful enough to protect me, who can be here for me now during this rough time. He also has something he wants to tell me. It’s right there, like the words are hovering on the forefront of his mind, something he thinks will connect us now more than ever. But he holds it back.

“Come on, what is it?”

He gives me this mysterious, closed-lipped smile.

“I want to take you somewhere, after school tomorrow. Will you go with me?” I find my voice. “Sure.”

“Okay. Good night, Clara.” He goes to the window and steps out.

“Good night,” I murmur after him, and then I watch him summon his wings, those gorgeous speckled wings, and lift off.

Chapter 17

The Part Where I Kiss You

I drive myself crazy wondering where Christian means to take me, but when he shows up at my locker after school the next day, part of me hesitates. I’m not sure why. Maybe because of the steady way he’s looking at me now, warm gold flecks in his eyes.

“You ready?” he asks.

I nod. We walk out into the sunshine. There’s not even a whisper of Samjeeza here. Dad must have scared him off for good, because suddenly Mom is totally okay with Jeffrey and me leaving the safety of hallowed ground.

Christian unlocks his truck and I climb in. I try not to scan the vicinity for Tucker as we make our way out of the parking lot. He called me last night and we tried to talk about my dad, but neither of us had much to say. I couldn’t come right out and tell him that my dad’s an angel, even though he’s probably already guessed. It would be too dangerous for him, knowing that, a tidbit that Samjeeza would just love to pluck out of his head. The less he knows, the safer he is, I’ve realized, and anyway, he shouldn’t be here—he has a rodeo competition tomorrow and left school earlier than usual today to get in some extra hours of practice. He was preoccupied. He didn’t ask me what I was up to and I didn’t share.

Christian turns up a dirt road that curls up the mountainside behind town. I spot a sign, crane my neck to read what it says.

ASPEN HILL CEMETERY.

All at once it feels like everything inside me turns to stone. “Christian . . .”

“It’s okay, Clara.” He pulls off to the side of the road, puts the truck in park. He opens his door, swings down, and turns to look at me. “Trust me.” He holds out his hand.

I feel like I’m moving in slow motion as I put my hand in his, let him draw me out of the truck on his side.

It’s beautiful here. Green trees, aspens whispering, a view of the distant mountains.

I hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.

Christian leads me off the road into the forest. We step around graves, most of them standard pieces of marble, nothing fancy, simple inscriptions with names and dates. Then we’re to a set of concrete stairs, stairs in the middle of the forest, with a long, painted black metal bar on one side. My heart jumps to my throat when I see them, a field of gray pressing in on the edges of my sight, something I used to feel last year right before I’d have the vision. I bite my lip so hard I taste a hint of blood. But I don’t go, don’t rocket away to the day of Mom’s funeral. I stay here. With Christian.