Текст книги "Hallowed"

Автор книги: Cynthia Hand

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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.

“This way,” he says, tugging gently on my hand. We walk, not up the hill this time, not toward the place where a hole will be dug in the ground, my mother lowered into it, but across the hillside to a small white marble bench, framed by aspens, a rosebush planted beside it, which bears a single, perfect white rose.

Christian sees that rose and laughs in this kind of choked-up way. He lets go of my hand.

“I thought you said this rosebush never blooms,” I say, staring at the inscription on the bench. LOVING MOTHER, DEVOTED SISTER, TRUEST FRIEND. There’s a plaque in the ground, too, a plain white rectangle bearing the words BONNIE ELIZABETH PRESCOTT. An etching of a rose. No birth or death dates, which strikes me as odd, but if Bonnie were even middle-aged as an angel-blood when she passed, her birth date would have definitely raised some eyebrows.

“It doesn’t bloom,” Christian answers. “Today’s the first time.”

He takes a deep breath, reaches to touch the rose gently. Then he looks at me. There is so much emotion in him at the moment that I instinctively try to close the door between us; it’s too much, but I can still see it in his face. He has something he wants, no, he needs, to say to me.

“My mother had beautiful hair,” he says.

Okay, not exactly what I was expecting.

“It was this pale blond, like corn silk. I used to watch her brush it. She’d sit at her vanity in her bedroom and brush it until it shone. She had green eyes. And she liked to sing. She sang all the time. She couldn’t seem to help herself.”

He sits down on the bench. I stand there for a minute, watching him get lost in the memory of his mother.

“I think about her every day,” he says. “And I miss her. Every. Single. Day.”

“I know.”

He looks up at me earnestly. “I want you to know, I’m going to be there. When it happens to you. I will be by your side the whole time, if you’ll let me. I promise you that.”

People are making a lot of promises to me lately. I nod. I sit down on the bench next to Christian and gaze at the mountains, where I can barely make out the white point of the Grand Teton. A breeze lifts my hair, blows it onto Christian’s shoulder.

This is the most beautiful place for a cemetery. It’s peaceful here, removed from life and all its worries, but also still connected to it. Overlooking the town. Watching over us. This is the perfect place for Mom’s body to rest, I think, and in this moment, when I imagine her here as something other than a recurring nightmare, it’s the first time I picture what will happen after she dies. Not the funeral or the graveside, or the stuff in my vision. After. We’re going to leave her here, and it’s all right. When it happens we will put her body to rest here, in this beautiful place, by Christian’s mother. I’ll come up here once in a while like he does, and lay flowers on her grave.

Christian slips his hand into mine again. “You’re crying.”

I lift my free hand up to my cheek; he’s right. I’m crying. But it’s a good kind of crying, I think. Maybe it means I’m letting go.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” I say.

That’s when he says, “Clara, there’s something I need to tell you.”

He stands up. He keeps hold of my hand and moves in front of me. The afternoon sun strikes his hair and makes a golden lining around him. I squint up at him, into his eyes.

“Your dad’s an angel, and your mom’s a Dimidius,” he says, “which makes you a Triplare.”

“How do you even know what that is?” I gasp. I thought it was some kind of super secret.

“My uncle. When I was ten years old he sat me down and told me all about the Triplare, how rare they are—he believes only seven Triplare ever walk the earth at the same time—how powerful they are. How they must be protected, at all costs.”

Is that what he wants, I wonder, to protect me? Is that what the I’ll-always-be-here-for-you stuff is really about? Is his purpose to be a kind of guardian for me?

“I’ve been wanting to tell you for months,” he says. “I thought it was just going to burst out of me at times, like in Alien.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’ve been wanting to tell me what? That I’m a Triplare?”

“I’ve known since that Angel Club with the glory.” He runs a hand through his hair, blows out a long breath. “But I suspected it since the fire.”

I stare at him. How could he have known that I’m a Triplare even before I did?

“I’ve never told this to anybody,” he says. “My uncle has pounded it into my brain again and again: no one must know. No one. Not even the other angel-bloods. Especially the other angel-bloods, as a matter of fact. He says there isn’t anybody, not anybody, you understand, who we can trust.”

His hand tightens in mine.

“But he’s wrong,” he says fiercely. “Even though you say you’re bad with secrets. You didn’t tell Tucker, when you thought he was going to die. That took strength. You’re so strong, Clara, you don’t even know. You’re amazing. You’re beautiful and brave and sarcastic and hilarious and I think . . .” He takes a breath. “My visions keep telling me, over and over and over again, that I can trust you. I can trust you.”

Something shifts in his face. He’s going to tell me. He’s going to throw caution to the wind and put it all out there.

“My mother was a Dimidius. She was beautiful, so unbelievably beautiful it almost hurt to look at her sometimes. Like you. And almost twenty years ago, she was seduced by a Watcher, who thought he could collect the most beautiful angel-bloods in the world. And that’s how she ended up with me.”

I’ve had a lot of bombs dropped on me this year, enough mind-shattering revelations to last a lifetime, in my opinion. But nothing quite like this, like Christian staring me down with gleaming green-gold eyes, eyes like his beautiful mother’s, telling me that his father was a Black Wing.

“You’re a Triplare, too,” I whisper.

“Yes.” There’s relief in his voice. “Don’t you see what that means?”

He doesn’t say it, but I know. We belong together. We’re two of a very rare kind. Meant to watch out for each other, meant to join hands and walk side by side, through fire, through death, meant to guard and protect and . . .

I feel like I’m falling from far up, plummeting to earth, and at the same time, drowning in a deep pool, struggling upward toward the surface, my lungs bursting for air.

He pulls me to my feet. “I didn’t know at first, how I felt about it. I didn’t want to be forced, you know? I wanted it to be my choice. But every time I’m around you, it feels right,” he says. “I feel stronger. Braver, even. I feel the glory inside me, this power moving through me. I feel like I could do anything, face anything. With you.”

I wish he would stop talking. I wish the forest would stop spinning around me, wish I could step outside of my body right now and ask myself, So, Clara, what do you think?

But I don’t know.

I love Tucker, I think.

His eyes grow sober. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I loved Kay. Whatever that says about me, I did love her. Part of me still does. My uncle says it’s because she was my first love. He says we never really get over our firsts.”

Right. But Tucker’s not just my first love. He’s my present.

“I had to choose,” Christian says. “Last year, when I started to understand that my vision was more than a search and rescue for some mystery girl.” The side of his mouth hitches up briefly. Me. His mystery girl. “When the vision showed me how it was supposed to be, the way we took hands, and . . . touched, and how I felt in that moment, I knew then that I had to choose. It wouldn’t have been fair to Kay. So I broke up with her.”

He closes his eyes for a second, and I catch a hint of the turmoil he still feels when he thinks of Kay.

There must be something I’m not seeing in that girl. There must be.

“I had to choose,” he says again. “And it wasn’t like I had to choose between you and Kay; I hardly knew you then. I had to choose who I was going to be. But now . . . Clara, I think . . .”

“I have to go,” I say, pulling away from him abruptly. “I can’t think. I can’t choose.”

To my bewilderment, he smiles, this completely sweet, sinful smile that sends a flock of butterflies straight to the pit of my stomach.

“What?” I demand to know. “What is it now?”

“You’re not going to go,” he says.

“Watch me.”

“I’ve been having a vision of this place, too.” This stops me from my wild, cowardly (how can he think I’m brave?) retreat back to the road. I turn. He’s still standing there by his mother’s grave, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking at me with such heat behind his eyes that a tremble works its way through me from my head to my toes.

“You’re having a new vision, too?” I ask.

“It’s right here.” He walks toward me, his strides long and purposeful across the grass. “Right now. I’ve been seeing it for weeks, and it’s happening right now.”

He stops in front of me.

“This is the part where I kiss you,” he says.

And that’s when, there under the swaying pines, the trembling aspens on Aspen Hill, in the waning sunlight of that late spring day, with birds singing over our heads, traces of earlier tears still drying on my face, and the faint smell of roses in the air, Christian Prescott kisses me for the first time. He pulls me in.

I’ll never, if I live to be my full hundred and twenty years, forget the way he tastes. It’s not anything I can describe, it’s just Christian, a little sweet and a whole lot of spice, and it feels, in that moment, absolutely right. His fire and mine combine, and it’s greater than any forest fire, hotter than the hottest part of flame. Any walls I’ve tried to build between us crumble down. His heart pounds beneath my palm. He wasn’t lying to me just now. This is his vision, his dream literally coming true, and it is everything he thought it would be. More. I am more than he ever could have hoped for, ever could have dreamed. His mystery girl. The girl he was meant to find. And now I belong to him like he has always belonged to me.

It’s this thought that brings me back to myself. I reel backward, breaking the contact between us with an agonizing force of sheer will.

“I’m not yours,” I gasp up at him, and then I run. Because if I stay one more second I will kiss him back. I will choose him.

So I push away, tear off through Aspen Hill Cemetery like the devil is chasing me, and then I fly, not caring if anybody sees me, shooting like a falling star across the sky, toward home.

Chapter 18

The Alternative to Me

I stay home from school the next day, and no one gives me grief about it.

After school Angela calls me.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m really, really, ridiculously sorry, okay? It was stupid to get jealous. I’m so over it.”

She thinks I cut school to avoid her.

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have read you. You kind of deserve what you get, when you read what somebody else feels about you.”

“Still, it wasn’t cool. I shouldn’t have felt that way.”

“We can’t always control what we feel,” I tell her. Boy, is yesterday the perfect example of that. “Hey, I’ve been jealous of you, too, occasionally. And this thing with my dad was a big surprise. You’re only half human.”

This last bit was meant to be a joke. Only she doesn’t laugh.

“So you . . . forgive me?” she asks. It’s strange whenever Angela sounds vulnerable, when she’s usually so strong. It lets me see through a tiny window into her world, where I’m her only real friend. If she screws it up with me, she’s totally alone.

“Sure. Water under the bridge,” I tell her.

She sighs. Relief. “Want to come over?”

“I can’t. I have something I have to do today.”

I’m going to see Tucker.

The regional high school rodeo competition this year is being held in the Jackson Hole Rodeo Arena, one of the few times this year the team is competing at home. At the entrance the owner, Jay Hooper, waves me by when I try to pay admission. I’d almost forgotten he’s an angel-blood.

“Because you’re Maggie’s kid,” he tells me.

I don’t argue.

I pick a seat way in the back of the bleachers. I shouldn’t be here, I know, shouldn’t be away from home right now, when no one else knows where I am. But I want to see Tucker. Part of me thinks that if I can just lay eyes on him, I’ll find myself again. I’ll know.

I watch the rodeo as they start up with the calf-roping section, but I can’t concentrate. Ever since yesterday I’ve felt lost in a sea of my own guilt, and it truly feels like I’m underwater. The voices of the announcers sound muffled. I can’t see clearly. I try to breathe and I get a mouthful of guilt.

I let Christian kiss me. I can still feel it tingling on my lips, still taste him.

The thought makes me feel physically ill. This is not me, I think. I can’t be that girl who makes out with another guy when her boyfriend is this strong, amazing, wonderful, loving, honest and totally funny, hot and tumble, you’d-have-to-be-freaking-crazy-to-cheat-on-this-total-catch kind of a guy.

I groan and close my eyes. Tucker is all of those things, and so much more. Right now I feel like I’m that empty beer can under the bleachers.

I hear Tucker’s name called. There are hoots and hollers from people in the stands. Then he and Midas are out of the gate chasing down a black-and-white calf. Tucker has a long loop of rope in his hand, swinging it almost gently around his head, one, two, three times, then lets it fly. It catches the calf perfectly around the neck. Tucker slides down from Midas’s back, runs to the calf’s side, holding another piece of rope between his teeth, flips the calf expertly into the dirt, and ties his legs. The whole thing takes all of two minutes, maybe less. And he’s done. He waves at the crowd.

My eyes fill. It seems like I’m crying all the time these days, but I can’t help it. He’s so beautiful, even dusty and dirty and sweating with effort, he’s the most beautiful boy in the world.

Christian might be right. We belong together. That’s hard to deny. He’s my purpose, at least a big part of it.

But Tucker is my choice. I love him. That isn’t going to go away.

I wanted an answer, and that’s as close to one as I’m going to get. Now I should slip out of here before he spots me and sees the guilt that has to be plain as day all over my face.

The crowd around me cheers again as the time is announced. He’s done well. Even with all the other emotional garbage piling up on top of me, I’m proud of him.

I stand and edge my way over to the aisle, then move quickly down the stairs. Almost out. But then someone whoops loudly at Tucker from the front row of the stands. A female someone. And something about the whole thing makes me pause.

It only takes me a second to locate her: a girl wearing formal western wear, a white button-up shirt with stars on the shoulders, white jeans with fringe, white boots. A cascade of long red hair flows in perfect curls down her back. She’s looking at Tucker with this kind of light in her eyes that instantly twists me up inside.

I feel like I should know her. There’s something familiar—she must go to our school, of course—and then it hits me. This is Allison Lowell. She’s one of the girls Tucker took to prom last year. She was sitting right next to me when he drove us all home that night, a petite redhead in a deep navy dress.

Don’t do it, Clara, I tell myself. Don’t read her.

But I do. I lower the walls, just a smidge, and I reach for her with my mind. I feel what she feels. And I don’t like it.

Because she thinks he’s beautiful, too. He makes her palms get sweaty and her voice get squeaky in this mortifying way. But he’s always nice to her. He’s really nice, which is so rare in a guy so gorgeous, she knows. He doesn’t even seem to know how hot he is. She remembers dancing with him, his rough and calloused palm as he held one of her hands while they danced a two-step, the other on her waist. She thought she would burst. His eyes blue as cornflowers. Writing his name in the margins of her notes in Spanish class. She has a million things she wants to say to him.

Me gustas. I like you.

Still, she knows it’s fantasy. He’s never looked at her. He doesn’t even really see her standing here now. If only he could see her, and the longing that shoots through her in this moment causes me physical pain. If he would only open his eyes.

“You showed them, Tuck!” she cries, cheering for him.

I back away from her, reeling, dizzy. There were all these jokes between him and me, about little Miss Allison Lowell. And all this time she’s been totally crushing on him.

I take a good long look at her. The first thing that strikes me is the red hair, a natural, shiny copper, not like the orange nightmare mine was last year, but the color of a new penny. She’s willow thin, but I get a sense of muscle about her, too, regular exercise, fresh air. She’s stronger than she looks. Pale, milky skin smattered with freckles, but it suits her. Coral lips. Expressive brown eyes.

She’s pretty.

And she does rodeo. And she’s from around here, maybe wants to stay. She’s a regular girl. A redhead. He likes redheads. And she likes him.

If I had never shown up at school last winter, maybe he would have seen her in her prom dress that night. They might have talked. He might have even ended up calling her Carrots.

She’s like the healthy alternative to me.

I can’t breathe. I head for the exit. Now more confused than ever.

But as I push through the crowd, I turn one last time to look for Tucker, who’s back on Midas now, and I can barely make out his head, his hat, his serious eyes as he pivots the horse back toward the gate, before I turn to go.

That night I curl up next to Mom in her bed and we watch home videos together. Dad comes in every now and then, watches with us with this half-sad expression, seeing the evidence of all he missed. Then he goes out. I never know where he goes when he’s not in the house. He’s just gone.

This one we’re watching now is of the beach. I’m around fourteen. It must have been right before Mom took me out to Buzzards Roost, told me about the angels. I am your typical girl here, walking along the sand, checking out the hot surfers. It’s kind of embarrassing how obvious I am, when the cute guys come along. I try to act all poised, toss my head to show off my hair, move with a dancer’s grace along the shore. I want them to notice me. But when it’s just us, just Mom and Jeffrey and me, I’m a total kid. I splash in the water, run around in the sand with Jeffrey, build sand castles and destroy them. At one point I grab the camera away from Mom to film her. She’s wearing a flowy white cover-up over her bathing suit, a large straw hat, big sunglasses. She looks so vital, so healthy. She joins in with our play, laughs, darts along the shore being chased by the waves. It’s funny how when people change, you forget the way they used to be. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was, even though she’s still beautiful. It’s not the same. There was an energy about her then, an unconquerable spirit, a light in her that never went out.

Right now she’s quiet. I think she might be asleep, but then she says, “That was my happiest time, right then.”

“Even without Dad?” I ask.

“Yes. You two made me so happy.”

I offer her my bag of popcorn, but she shakes her head. She’s completely stopped eating now. Carolyn can only get her to take sips of water, maybe a bite or two of chocolate pudding on good days. It bothers me, because living people have to eat. It means she’s not really living anymore.

“I think maybe that was my happiest time, too,” I say, watching myself smile up into the camera.

Before visions. Before purpose. Before fires. Before all these choices I’m not ready to make.

“No,” Mom says. “Your happiest times are still to come.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve seen it.”

I sit up to look at her. “What do you mean?”

“All my life, I’ve seen glimpses of what’s to come, mostly for myself, like the visions, but sometimes for others as well. I’ve seen your future, or variations of it, anyway.”

“And what do you see?” I ask eagerly.

She smiles. “You go to Stanford.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You like it there.”

“So Stanford equals happiness? Great then, I guess I’m all set. Can you tell me the color scheme for my dorm room, because I’m trying to decide between a lavender theme or royal blue.” Yes, I’m being sarcastic, and maybe I shouldn’t, when it seems like she’s trying to tell me something important. But the truth is, I can’t imagine real happiness. Not without her.

“Oh, sweetie.” She sighs. “Do me a favor,” she says. “Look in the top dresser drawer. In the back.”

I find a dusty red velvet box hidden behind her socks. I open it. Nestled inside is a silver charm bracelet, old and a little tarnished. I hold it up.

“What is this?” I’ve never seen her wear it before.

“It’s for you to wear to the cemetery.”

I look at the charms, which seem ordinary enough. A heart. A horse. A couple of what I think must be fake gems. A fish.

“It was mine, a long time ago,” she says. “And now it’s yours.”

I swallow. “Aren’t you going to tell me that you’ll always be with me? Isn’t that what people say? You’ll be in my heart, something like that?”

“You are part of me,” she replies. “And I am part of you. So yes, I will be with you.”

“But not a real, conversational part, right?”

She lays her hand on mine. It feels so light, lighter than a hand should be, her skin like the softest white paper. Like she could blow away on the wind.

“You and I have a connection that nothing, not on heaven or earth, or even hell, could ever break. If you want to talk to me, talk to me. I’ll hear you. I might not be able to answer, at least not in a timely manner. . . .”

“Because a day is a thousand years . . .”

She smirks. “Of course. But I will hear you. I will be sending my love to you every moment.”

“How?” I’m unable to push back the tears in my voice.

“In the glory,” she answers. “That’s where we’ll find each other. In the light.”

I’m crying again and she wraps her arm around me, kisses the top of my head. “My dear sweet girl. You take on so much. You feel things so deeply. But you will be happy, my darling. You will shine.”

I nod, wiping at my eyes. I believe her. Then I go ahead and say the next thing that pops into my head.

“Mom, are you ever going to tell me about your purpose?”

She pulls back, looks at me thoughtfully. “My purpose is you.”

That night she tells me another story, a different version of the one she told Jeffrey and me earlier, about the day of the earthquake. What she didn’t mention before.

That when she saw Dad, when he lifted her out of the rubble that had been her bedroom, when he carried her off to heaven, she recognized him.

“I’d been dreaming about him,” she says.

“What was the dream about?” I’m sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed so I can face her as she talks.

“A kiss,” she confesses.

“A kiss?” I get a twinge of guilt, just hearing the word. Remembering Christian’s lips on mine.

“Yes. In the dream, I kissed him. He was standing on a beach.” Her eyes flick up to the television, the glittering, rolling water. “And I walked up, took his face in my hands, and kissed him. Not a word passed between us. Only a kiss.”

“Whoa,” I breathe. So romantic. “So when you saw him after the earthquake, you recognized him as the guy you kissed.”

“Yes.”

“So what did you do?”

She laughs lightly, almost a giggle. “I immediately developed a huge crush on him. I was sixteen, after all, and he was . . .”

“Hotness personified,” I finish for her, a bit sheepishly, since this is my dad we’re talking about here.

“He was one gorgeous specimen, yes he was.”

“And what happened?”

“He stayed with us for three days, after the earthquake, in Golden Gate Park, and on the last night, I tried to seduce him.”

“And . . .”

“He wouldn’t have it. He rejected me, rather rudely, I thought. And the next morning he was gone. I didn’t see him again for three years.”

“Oh, Mom . . .”

“Don’t feel too sorry for me,” she reminds me with a small smile. “It worked out, in the end. I landed him.”

“But what happened when you saw him again? I bet it was awkward.”

“Oh, by then I’d decided I didn’t want him.”

My mouth drops open. “You didn’t want him? Why not?”

“For a lot of reasons. By then I knew what he was. I knew that he would want to marry me, and even if I didn’t know all that would entail, I knew it would never be a traditional marriage. I didn’t think I wanted to be married. I didn’t want my life to be decided for me. That’s probably the biggest reason of all. So when I saw him again, I let him know in very clear terms that I wasn’t interested.”

“How’d he take that?” I can’t imagine anyone refusing Dad anything.

“He laughed at me. Which didn’t help matters much. But he would not go away. I would feel his presence near me often, although sometimes years would pass where he never showed himself.”

“But what about your vision?”

“I kept having it.”

“And you just ignored your purpose?”

“Oh no,” she says gravely. “I did more than ignore it. I fought it. I resisted with every bit of strength I had in me. I wasn’t about to let anyone control my life.”

“For how long?” I ask breathlessly.

“Oh, sixty years, give or take.”

“Sixty years.” There I go, Clara the parrot. I belong on a pirate’s shoulder. “So that’s why you didn’t tell me. Aside from the fact that you were trying to hide that Dad’s an Intangere. If you’d told me that you fought your purpose, instead of the way I’d always assumed it went down, maybe I would have fought mine too.”

“Exactly,” she says. “Except you ended up fighting yours anyway. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“And they let you do that? Heaven, I mean.”

“They let me do that. I had free will, you see, and, boy, did I ever use it.”

“What did you do?”

She sighs. Something clouds her eyes. I feel a hint of regret. Obviously this part of her life was not her favorite time.

“I made mistakes,” she confesses. “One after another after another. I brought a whole world of hurt down on myself. I fumbled through my life. Hurt people, even people I loved. Became an expert at lying to myself. I suffered, sometimes in unimaginable ways. And I learned.”

I stare at her. “Did you think you were being punished? For not fulfilling your purpose?”

She meets my eyes. “You’re not being punished, Clara. But yes, it was terrible at times, and it felt like punishment. I wouldn’t want that for you. But you’re forgetting that in the end it was all as it should be. That kiss on the shore happened, after all.”

“What changed your mind?” I ask, but looking at the quiet certainty on her face, I think I can guess.

“I started seeing beyond the kiss,” she answers. “And I saw you. And Jeffrey. And I got a glimpse of that happiest time.”

She looks again at the TV. The scene has shifted. Now we’re on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. I am eating cotton candy, complaining about how sticky it is, licking my fingers. Mom demands a taste and the camera lunges in at the cotton candy. I catch a part of her face, her nose, chin, lips, as she bites off a piece.

“Yum,” I hear her say, smacking her lips for the sake of the camera.

Fourteen-year-old Clara rolls her eyes at her mother. But she smiles. Up the boardwalk, Jeffrey calls, “Look at me. Mom, look at me!” I can’t believe his voice was ever that high pitched.

The camera finds Jeffrey standing near the strong man game on the boardwalk. He’s twelve years old, scrawny as all get-out, like a stork wearing a Giant’s cap. His silver eyes are all lit up with excitement. He grins at us, then lifts the rubber mallet and brings it down hard. A ball shoots up from the base of the platform and rings a bell at the top. Lights flash. Music sounds.