Hallowed

Chapter 15 Angel on My Doorstep

From then on I can feel Samjeeza in that field almost every day. He doesn’t always call to me, that sad seductive music that I can’t keep out of my head. But he shows up even if it’s just for five minutes. He wants me to know he’s there.

He doesn’t cause any trouble, doesn’t harm any of the students, doesn’t show himself. He doesn’t attack us coming and going to school, but he knows where we live now. He follows us home. I can’t usually feel him while I’m in the house, since our land is all hallowed and there’s so much of it, from the main road to the woods to the stream behind the house. He can’t come close enough to bother me. Still, if I try, if I listen for him, I can sometimes hear him. Waiting.

I wonder if Mom can feel him, too.

“You have to learn to block him,” she says when I ask her. “It would be a good idea to learn how to block your empathy completely, because there are times you’re going to need to.”

“How?”

“It’s like closing a door,” she answers. “You erect a spiritual barrier between you.”

“A spiritual barrier?”

“You close yourself off from the force that connects us to each other. It’s not good for you, in the long run. It will make you numb if you do it all the time, but it might be the best solution for now. Just so you can get through school without so many distractions. Try it.”

“What, you mean right now? With you?”

“Yes,” she says. She reaches out and takes my hand. “Use your empathy on me.” For some reason this scares me a little.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t control it. The only times my empathy really works when I ask it to is when I’m with Christian. And sometimes. . it’s not just feelings I get from people.

It’s thoughts, too. Why is that?”

“Our thoughts and feelings are entwined,” she tells me. “Memories, images, desires, feelings. You seem to have a knack with feelings. It will be stronger when you touch the person, skin to skin. And sometimes you might get an image or a specific sentence that they’re thinking at the moment. But mostly it will be feelings, I think.”

“Can you do it?”

“No.” She lowers her gaze for a minute. “I don’t often pick up feelings. But I am telepathic. I can read thoughts.”

Hello, news flash! No wonder she always seems two steps ahead of me. When I was a kid I seriously thought she had eyes in the back of her head.

Yes, it’s been a particularly effective parenting tool, she says in my mind. She smiles.

“Don’t look at me like that, Clara. I haven’t been reading your every waking thought. Most of the time I choose to stay out of people’s heads, especially the heads of my children, because you deserve some privacy.”

Now let’s practice, she says. Open yourself up. Try to feel what I feel.

I close my eyes, hold my breath, and listen, like what she’s feeling is something I could hear. Suddenly I see a flash of pale pink behind my eyelids. I gasp.

“Pink,” I whisper.

“Concentrate on it.”

I try. I try to look into the pink until my head starts to ache, and just when I’m about to give up I see that it’s curtains, pink eyelet curtains hanging in a window.

Pink eyelet curtains is not a feeling.

But there’s more — laughing, a baby laughing, that kind of laugh they get where you think they’re going to pee, they’re laughing so hard. And a man laughing, a sweet, delighted kind of laugh. I recognize it. Dad. My throat closes up a bit, thinking of Dad.

“Don’t let your own feelings interfere,” Mom says.

Pink. Laughter. Warmth. I can feel what it is to her. “Joy,” I say finally. I open my eyes.

She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “That was joy.”

“Mom—”

“Now try to block it out.”

I close my eyes again, but this time I visualize building an invisible wall in the space between us, brick by brick, thought by thought, until there’s nothing left behind my eyelids, no color, no feeling, nothing but a gray and empty void.

“Okay, I don’t feel anything.” I open my eyes again and she has a strange expression on her face: relief.

“Well done,” she says, and pulls her hand from mine. “Now you’ll just have to practice it until you can shut out who you want to, when you want to.” That would certainly be handy.

So all that next week, whenever I feel Samjeeza at school, I work on erecting a spiritual barrier between us. At first, absolutely nothing happens. Samjeeza’s sorrow continues to flow into me, making it hard to think about anything at all. But slowly but surely I begin to feel the ways in which I am connected with the life around me, with that energy inside me where the glory is, and when I recognize it in myself I can then work on shutting it down. It’s like the opposite of using glory, in some ways. To bring glory, you have to still the inner voices. To shut it off, you have to keep yourself completely occupied by your thoughts. It’s hard work.

What makes it even worse is that on Friday, Mom lies down and never really gets back up.

She stays in bed in her pajamas, laid back on the pillows like a porcelain doll. Sometimes she reads but mostly she sleeps, for hours, day and night. It becomes a rare thing to catch her awake.

In the middle of the next week a nurse shows up, Carolyn. I’d seen her before at the congregational meetings. Her specialty seems to be end-of-life care for angel-bloods.

“I don’t want you to worry about any of the details,” Mom says one day when Jeffrey and I are both keeping her company. “Billy is going to take care of everything, okay? Just be there for each other. That’s what I want. Hold fast to each other. Help each other through. Can you do that?”

“Okay,” I say. I turn and look at Jeffrey.

“Fine,” he mutters, and then leaves the room.

He’s been pacing around our house all week like a caged animal. Sometimes I feel his rage like a blast of heat, at how unfair this all is, our mom dying because of a stupid rule, our lives dictated by some force that doesn’t seem to care that it’s ruining everything. He hates his own powerlessness. And he especially hates all this isolation, having to stay inside, hiding out. I think he’d rather just go out there and face Samjeeza and have it over with.

Mom sighs. “I wish he wasn’t so angry. It’s only going to make things harder for him.” But truth be told, the isolation is starting to get to me too. All I have now is school, where the presence of Samjeeza keeps me on constant alert, and then home, where the thought that Mom’s about to die is always with me. I talk to Angela on the phone, but we decided it was best for her to lie low since Samjeeza showed up, since he doesn’t know about her. Plus she’s been quiet in an offended way since I told her about Aspen Hill Cemetery.

“I have a theory,” she says to me one night over the phone. “About your dream.”

“Okay.”

“You keep thinking that the reason Tucker’s not there is because he’s hurt or something.”

“Or something,” I say. “What’s your point?”

“What if he’s not there because the two of you break up?” It’s funny that somehow that thought scares me even more than the idea that he’ll be hurt.

“Why would we break up?” I ask.

“Because you’re supposed to be with Christian,” she says. “Maybe that’s what the dream is telling you.”

It hurts me, that thought. I know I could make it better by going to see Tucker in person, by kissing him and assuring him that I love him and letting him hold me, but I don’t dare. It doesn’t matter what Angela thinks. I can’t risk putting him in danger. Again.

I’m upstairs doing the laundry, sorting the whites from the darks, and all I can think about is what Angela said. Maybe we break up. And not because I’m “supposed to be with Christian,” I think then, but because I want him to be safe. I want him to be happy. I want him to have a normal life, and I’d have to be tripping to think that kind of thing is possible with me. I toss the whites in the washer and put in some bleach and I feel such a heaviness and a sense of dread that I want to scream, fill this silent house with my noise. This is not another person’s sorrow, not a Black Wing’s, but my own. I’m bringing it on myself.

I go to my room to take a crack at my homework, and I’m sad.

I talk on the phone with Wendy, and I’m sad. She’s all excited about college, going on about what the dorms are like at WSU and how awesome it’s going to be, and I’m sad. I try to play along, act like I’m excited too, but all I feel is sad.

Sad, sad, sad.

Later, the washing machine beeps. I go to transfer the clothes to the dryer. I’m elbow deep in damp clothes when suddenly the sadness lifts. Instead I feel this incredible, permeating joy, warmth flooding me, a sense of well-being, a whirl of true happiness so overwhelming it makes me want to laugh out loud. I put my hand over my mouth and close my eyes as the feelings wash over me. I don’t understand why. Something strange is happening.

Maybe I’m finally cracking under the pressure.

The doorbell rings.

I drop a pair of Jeffrey’s underwear on the laundry room floor and run downstairs for the door. I get up on tiptoes to peer out the small window at the top of the door. My breath catches.

There’s an angel standing on my doorstep. I can feel him. An angel. A White Wing, to be exact. A tall golden-haired man with such love pouring off him that it brings a whole different kind of tears to my eyes.

I fling open the door.

“Dad?”

He turns to me and smiles, a goofy lopsided grin that I had totally forgotten about until right this minute. I stare at him wordlessly, take in the way the sun glints off his hair with this definite unearthly kind of light. I examine his face, which hasn’t aged a day, not since I saw him four years ago, not ever, in all my memory of him. He hasn’t changed. Why did I never notice that before?

He’s an angel.

“Don’t I get a hug?” he asks.

I move zombielike into his arms.

Here’s what I would expect to feel in this moment: Um, surprised. Amazed. Astounded.

Knocked over flat by the sheer impossibility of the idea. But all I feel right now is his joy. Like pink curtains, Dad’s hands on my waist, holding me up high. That kind of joy. He hugs me tight, lifts me off my feet, laughs, then sets me down.

“I’ve missed you,” he says.

He’s stunningly handsome. Just like Samjeeza, like he was molded from the perfect male form, sculpted as a statue, but where Samjeeza has this dark beauty to him, Dad’s all golden.

Golden hair. Golden skin. Silver eyes that seem cool and warm at the same time, something ancient about them, so much knowledge in their depths. And like Samjeeza, he’s ageless, like he could pass for twenty, thirty, or forty, depending on how closely you look at him.

How is this guy the awkward, absent father of all those tortured phone calls over the years?

“Dad. .,” I say. “How?”

“There will be time for explanations. But right now, can you please take me to see your mother?”

“Sure.” I step back into the entryway, watch as this glowy, broad-shouldered man comes into our house, his movements fluid and graceful, so clearly not human. There’s something else about him, too, something that makes me see him in two layers, like that human suit Samjeeza wears, a blurring around him when he moves. With Dad both layers seem more solid, shifting over him. I can’t tell which is the real him and which is the suit.

He smiles again. “I know this must come as quite the surprise now that you’re able to perceive these kinds of things.”

Understatement of the year. My mouth feels dry, like it’s been hanging open for a while.

“Your mother?” he prompts.

Right. Here I was just staring at him. I start down the hall.

“Can I get you anything? Like a glass of water or juice or coffee or whatever?” I babble as we pass the kitchen. I realize that I don’t know him at all. I don’t know my father well enough to know what kind of beverage he prefers.

“No, thank you,” he says politely. “Just your mother.”

We reach Mom’s door. I knock. Carolyn answers it. Her eyes go straight to my dad, and her face instantly goes slack with astonishment, eyes so wide it almost looks cartoonish.

“He — uh — he wanted to see Mom.”

She recovers quickly, nods, then steps out of the way so we can pass into the room.

Mom is sleeping, propped up on pillows, her long auburn hair spread out around her face, her face pale but peaceful. Dad sits in the chair next to her bed and touches a strand of hair, that one at the front that’s gone silver. He reaches down and gently takes her hand in both of his.

She stirs, sighs.

“All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me,” Dad whispers.

Her eyes open. “Michael.”

“Hello, beautiful.” He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it, places it against his cheek.

I don’t know what I expected if my parents ever happened to bump into each other again.

Not this. It’s like there was never any leaving us standing in the driveway while he drove away.

Never any divorce. Never any separation at all.

“How long can you stay?” she asks.

“A while,” he answers. “Long enough.”

She closes her eyes. Smiles this beautiful smile. When she opens her eyes again there are tears in them. Happy tears. My dad is making my mom cry happy tears.

Carolyn, who’s been standing at the back of the room, coughs delicately. “I’m going to be on my way. I don’t think you’ll need me.”

Mom nods. “Thank you, Carolyn. And if you could do me an enormous favor, please don’t mention this to anyone. Not even the congregation. Please.”

“Of course,” Carolyn says, and then she closes the door.

Mom finally seems to notice I’m here. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Hi,” I answer dazedly, unable to look away from my parents’ hands, still joined.

“How’s your day going?” she asks, the hint of mischief in her voice I haven’t heard for weeks now.

“Oh, fine. I just found out that my dad’s an angel,” I say offhandedly. “It’s kind of blowing my mind.”

“I thought it would.”

“This is the thing, right? The thing you’re not telling me?” Her eyes sparkle. I’m floored by how happy she looks. It’s impossible to be mad at her when she looks like that.

“I’ve been waiting to tell you for so long. You have no idea.” She laughs, a weak but delighted sounded. “But first I’m going to need two things. A cup of tea. And your brother.” Dad volunteers to make the tea. “I think I can still remember how,” he says, and strides off to the kitchen.

That means I’m in charge of fetching Jeffrey.

He’s in his room, as usual. Music blaring. As usual. He must not have even heard the doorbell, or maybe he didn’t care. He’s lying in his bed reading a Sports Illustrated, still in his pj’s and it’s getting close to noon. Slacker. Where was he when I was neck deep in laundry? He glares at me when I come in. As usual.

“Don’t you knock?”

“I did. You might want to have your hearing checked.”

He reaches and turns down his stereo. “What do you want?” I can’t decide how much to tell him here, or how to break it to him. So I go for the direct approach. “Dad’s here.”

He goes still, then turns to me like he really does need to have his hearing checked. “Did you say Dad was here?”

“He showed up about ten minutes ago.”

How long has it been for him, I wonder, since he last saw Dad? How old was he then?

Eleven? Jeffrey wasn’t even two years old yet when Dad left, not old enough to remember anything but those few times we visited him, the birthday cards with cash in them, the gifts, which were typically extravagant (like Jeffrey’s truck, which was his birthday gift from Dad this year), the handful of phone calls, which were generally brief.

“Just come downstairs,” I tell him.

We arrive in time to see Dad burn himself on the tea-kettle. He doesn’t curse or jump back or anything. He examines his finger like he’s curious about what just occurred. There’s no damage to his skin, not even a red mark, but he must have felt it. He goes back to pouring Mom’s tea, setting her teacup on a delicate china saucer with some vanilla cookies he must have found in the pantry. Two lumps of sugar. A dollop of cream. Just how she likes.

“Oh, there you are,” he says when he sees us. “Hello, son.”

“What are you doing here?” Jeffrey’s voice is sharp, almost cracking. “Who are you?” Dad’s expression sobers. “I’m your father.” It’s impossible to deny that, seeing the two of them standing so close together. Jeffrey is like a shorter, bulkier carbon copy of Dad. They have the same hair, the exact same eyes.

“Let’s go see your mother,” Dad says. “She can explain.” It takes her all day to tell the story, because she doesn’t have the strength to tell it all at once. That and we keep getting interrupted, first by Billy, who bursts in and gives Dad a giant bear hug, calls him Mikey, actually gets all teary-eyed for a minute, she’s so happy for Mom. She knew, of course. All this time, she knew. But I guess I stopped being surprised by that kind of thing a while ago.

Then there’s the fact that Jeffrey keeps freaking and walking out of the room. It’s like he can only stand to hear so much before he thinks his head will explode. Mom’ll say something about the way she always knew, deep down, that she and Michael (my dad’s name, which we have almost never heard her utter, these last fourteen or so years) were meant to be together, and Jeffrey will get up, tug at his hair, nod or mumble something incoherent, then leave. We have to wait for him to come back before she can finish the story.

But what a story it is.

It starts with the day of the great San Francisco earthquake. That’s when she and Dad officially met. By the time she gets to this part of the lurid tale, I’d already figured out that Dad is the angel who saved her that day, the one who broke the news to her, told her she was special, an angel-blood. She was sixteen then.

And when she was ninety-nine years old, she married him.

“How?” I ask her.

She laughs. “What do you mean, how? We showed up at the church, said the words, exchanged rings, you may now kiss the bride, all of it.”

“He was allowed to do that? An angel can marry anybody he wants?”

“It’s complicated,” she answers. “And rare. But, yes, an angel can choose to marry.”

“But then why did you divorce? Why did he leave?” Jeffrey asks with an edge of sullenness.

Mom sighs. “An angel can’t stop being an angel. They have duties, tasks that require their constant attention. Your father was given a vacation, so to speak, a seven-year period where he could stay with me in linear time and live a human life. Marry me. See the two of you born, spend some time with you. Then he had to go back.”

For some reason this makes me want to cry. “So you’re not divorced?” She smiles. “No. We’re not divorced.”

“But you couldn’t see him, all this time?”

“He visited on occasion. Once a year, sometimes twice, if we were lucky. We had to make do with that.”

“He couldn’t visit us?” Again, Jeffrey with the anger. He’s not taking this whole your-dad’s-an-angel-and-he’s-back surprise very well. I guess he doesn’t feel the incredible-joy thing. “His kids?”

“I wish I could have,” Dad says from the doorway to Mom’s room. He does that. Appears, out of thin air. It’s weird.

He comes in and sits next to Mom on the bed, takes her hand. They’re always touching each other, I’ve noticed. Always in contact.

“We decided that it would be best if I stopped seeing you. For your own good,” Dad says.

“Why?”

“Because, when you were little, it was easy for me to hide what I am. You didn’t notice anything unusual about me, or if you did, you didn’t know enough to understand it was unusual.

But when you got older, it became more difficult. The last time I saw you, you could definitely feel my presence.”

I remember. It was at the airport. I saw him and I felt his joy. And here I thought it was because I was hopelessly screwed up.

“But I have watched you from a distance,” he says. “I’ve been with you your entire lives, in one way or another.”

Okay, so this is the fantasy of every child of divorced parents, come true. Turns out, my parents love each other. They want to be together. My dad, all this time, wanted to be with me.

But it’s also like watching someone take an eraser to my life story, and then rewrite it as something completely different. Everything I thought I knew about myself has changed in the past few hours.

Jeffrey’s not buying it.

“Who cares if we knew what you are?” he says. “You said it was for our sake, but that’s bull. So our dad’s an angel? So what?”

“Jeffrey. .,” Mom warns.

Dad holds up his hand. “No, it’s all right. It’s a good question.” He looks at Jeffrey solemnly. There’s something regal about him, something that commands respect even if you don’t want to give it to him. Jeffrey swallows and lowers his eyes.

“This isn’t about me. This is about you,” Dad says.

“Michael,” Mom whispers. “Are you sure?”

“It’s time, Maggie. You knew this would come,” he says, caressing her hand. He turns back to us. “I am an Intangere. Your mother is a Dimidius, a half blood. That makes you and your sister a very rare, very powerful breed of angel-blood. We call them the Triplare.”

“Triplare?” Jeffrey repeats. “Like three-quarters?”

“This is a dangerous world for a Triplare,” Dad continues. “They’re rare enough that their powers are largely unknown, but there has been speculation that the Triplare, who are, after all, more angel than human, have nearly the same abilities as full-blooded angels, but with one crucial difference.”

“What difference?” prompts Jeffrey.

“Free will,” Dad says. “You’ll feel the repercussions too, your subtle sorrows or joys, whatever your actions lead you to, but in the end you are utterly free to choose your own path.”

“And this is dangerous because. .” I say.

“It makes you very, very attractive to the darkness. The few Triplare who have walked this earth have been greatly sought after by the enemy. They are relentlessly hunted, and if they cannot be converted to the cause, destroyed. That’s why your mother and I have taken great pains to make sure that no one knew about you. It was crucial to keep your identities hidden, even from yourselves. We only wanted to keep you safe.”

“So why tell us now?” Jeffrey asks.

He smiles faintly. “It seems you’ve already caught the enemy’s attention. That was inevitable, I think. Therefore your safety has become a relative concept. We always knew we couldn’t hide you forever. We just wanted you to have as human a life as possible, for as long as possible. Now that time is over.”

It gets quiet while Jeffrey and I try to absorb this news. Triplare. Three-quarter angel. Not Quartarius, after all. And there’s something Dad said that burns like a live coal in my mind.

More angel than human.

So Dad’s an angel. Which makes us freaks, even among angel-bloods. Suddenly it makes sense that Mom never took us to the congregation before this year. She was hiding us, even from the other angel-bloods. Even, as Dad said, from ourselves.

Mom is quieter now, sleeping a lot. It took a lot out of her to tell the story, which she’s worked so hard and for so long to keep buried inside. She’s tired, but noticeably happy during those times when she’s awake. Unburdened, is the word. Like telling us the truth has set her free.

I spend all that evening Dad-watching. I can’t help it. Sometimes he seems like a normal man, joking around with Billy, eating the dinner she whips up for us, which he digs into with gusto. This makes me wonder if angels need sustenance the way we do. And then there are other times where he seems like, quite frankly, an alien. Trying to use the remote, for instance. He gazes at it for a while like it’s some newfangled magic wand. He understands how to use it quickly, though, and then he gets all amped up about the wonder of cable.

“So many channels,” he muses. “Last time I watched television there were only four.

How do you decide what to watch?”

I shrug. I don’t watch a lot of TV. I’m pretty sure Dad’s not going to be into The Bachelor.

“Jeffrey always watches ESPN.” Dad gives me a blank look. “The sports channel.”

“There’s a channel entirely devoted to sports?” he says with a kind of awe.

Turns out Dad’s a huge baseball fan. Too bad that Jeffrey won’t hang around to watch it with him. I can’t stop looking at Dad, can’t help but scrutinize every move he makes, but Jeffrey can’t stand to be around him. The minute he was “excused” from our family powwow, he bolted for his room. There hasn’t been a peep out of him for hours, not even the regular music.

I try to feel him out, which isn’t too hard. I’ve been getting better at turning my empathy on and off since my lesson with Mom. Sitting here, feeling Dad’s barely contained glory pulsing out from him, it’s ridiculously easy to cast my awareness upstairs to Jeffrey’s room.

He’s mad. He doesn’t care why they did it. He wants to, but he can’t stop being mad.

They betrayed us, both of them. It doesn’t matter why. They lied.

He doesn’t want to play by their rules anymore. He’s sick of it. He’s sick of feeling like a pawn on some cosmic chessboard.

I get it. Part of me feels exactly the same way. It’s just hard to be mad when Dad, with his sheer joyous presence, sweeps everything dark and hurtful out of my mind. Which in and of itself feels kind of unfair, like I’m not even allowed to feel what I feel. Maybe I’d resent him for it if I could.

“I think we could have handled it,” I tell Mom later. I am helping her walk back from the bathroom. There’s something so undignified about it, I think, this tiny shuffling walk she has now, the way she has to have help even to pee. She doesn’t like it, either. Every time we do this she gets this grim expression, like she would do anything for me not to see her this way.

“Handled what?” she asks.

“The truth. That Dad was an angel. That we’re Triplare. All that. We could have kept the secret.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Because you’re so good at that.”

“If it was life or death, if I knew that, I could be,” I protest. “I’m not an idiot.” I pull back the covers and carefully steady her while she slides into the bed. Then I pull the covers up to her waist, smooth them.

“I couldn’t risk it,” she says.

“Why not?”

She gestures for me to sit down, and I do. She closes her eyes, opens them again. Frowns.

“Where’s your dad?”

“Gone. Where does he go, anyway?”

“He probably has work to do.”

“Yeah, gotta go burn a bush for Moses,” I quip.

She smiles. “Marge Whittaker, 1949.”

It takes me a second to understand what she’s referring to. “You mean the one before Margot Whitfield?”

“Yes.”

“Marge. Nice. Did you always go by some form of Margaret?” I ask.

“Almost always. Unless I was running from something very bad. Anyway, Marge Whittaker fell in love.”

I get the feeling that she’s not talking about Dad. She’s talking about the time she mentioned before, the time she almost got married. In the fifties, she said.

“Who was he?” I ask softly, not sure I want to know.

“Robert Turner. He was twenty-three.”

“And you were. .” I quickly do the math. “Almost sixty. Mom. You cougar, you.”

“He was a Triplare,” she says. “I’d never known too many angel-bloods before, Bonnie and Walter, who I met when I was thirteen, before I even knew what an angel-blood was, and Billy, who I met during the Great War, but never anybody like Robert. He could do anything, it seemed. He was capable of anything. One day he walked into the office where I was working as a secretary, and he asked me to dinner. Naturally I was surprised; I’d never seen him before. I asked him why he thought I’d agree to go to dinner with a complete stranger. And he said we weren’t strangers. He’d been dreaming of me, he said. He knew that I liked Chinese food, and he knew exactly the restaurant he was going to take me to, he knew I’d order sweet-and-sour pork, and he knew what my fortune would say. So you see, I had to go, to find out if he was right.”

“And he was right,” I say.

“He was right.”

“What was it? Your fortune, I mean.”

“Oh.” She laughs. “‘A thrilling time is in your immediate future.’ And his said, ‘He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.’ And both of those were right, too.”

“You were a part of his purpose?”

“Yes. I think he was meant to find me.”

“And what happened to him?” I say after a minute, because I sense it’s bad.

“The Black Wings found out about him. When he would not join them, they killed him.

Samjeeza was there. I asked him to help us, but. . he wouldn’t. He stood by and watched.”

“Oh, Mom. .”

She shakes her head. “That’s what happens,” she says. “You need to understand. That’s what happens when they know. You have to fight for your life.” The next morning Billy drives us to school, as usual. Everybody but Jeffrey seems way more relaxed about the Samjeeza problem since Dad showed up. If Samjeeza is powerful, I figure that Dad must be twice as macho, with no sorrow to impede him, the righteousness of the Lord and all that. We don’t talk most of the way, each of us lost in our own world, until Billy suddenly says, “So, how you holding up?”

Jeffrey stares out the window and acts like he didn’t hear her. She looks over at me.

“No idea,” I tell her.

“Not the kind of news you get every day.”

“Nope.”

“It’s good news, though,” she says. “Your dad being an Intangere. You know that, right?” It seems like it should be a good thing. Except for the part where it means Jeffrey and I were pretty much born with a target on us. “Right now it just feels weird.” She glances at Jeffrey in the rearview mirror. “You alive back there?” Affirmative grunt. Usually Billy can charm Jeffrey, coax the occasional smile out of him, no matter what mood he’s in. Probably because she’s so pretty. But today, Jeffrey’s not cooperating.

“I bet it feels weird,” she says to me. “Everything’s been turned upside down on you.”

“Have you ever met a Triplare?” I ask after a minute.

She scratches the back of her head, considers. “Yes. Two of them, besides you and Long Face back there. Two, in all of my hundred and twelve years on this earth.”

“Could you tell they were different? From other angel-bloods, I mean?”

“Honestly, I didn’t get to know either of them. But on the outside I’d say they looked and acted like everyone else.”

“You’re a hundred and twelve?” Jeffrey suddenly pipes up from the back.

Her pleasant smile stretches into a mischievous grin. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you never to question a woman about her age?”

“You just said it.”

“Then why’d you have to ask?” she shoots back playfully.

“So you only have eight years left.” He looks down into his lap as he says this.

I feel a pang of something like loneliness then, knowing that Billy only has eight years left. I won’t get to have her in my life very long. In some ways I was taking a lot of comfort in the idea that Billy was going to hang around after Mom died. She was like a tiny piece of Mom I got to keep. She has all these memories of her, all this time they spent together. “Eight years isn’t very much,” I say.

“Eight years is plenty of time for what I have planned.”

“Which is?”

“I want to get to know you two, for one thing. That’s one part of your parents’ master plan I never agreed with. You know, when you were babies, I used to change your diapers.” She winks at Jeffrey. He blushes.

“Don’t get me wrong. They had their reasons for keeping you isolated. Good reasons. But now, I get to spend time with you. See you graduate. Help you pack up for college. I hear it’s Stanford, right, Clara?”

“Right. Stanford.” I did accept their offer. I’m destined to go there, according to Angela.

Billy nods. “Mags always did have a thing for Stanford.”

“Did you go with her?”

She snorts. “Gracious, no. I never had any tolerance for school. My teachers were the wind, the trees, the creeks and rivers.”

We pull up to the school.

“And on that note,” Billy says cheerfully, “off you go. Try to learn something.” I want to tell Tucker about my dad, but every time I open my mouth to say something about it, try to frame the words, it sounds so dumb. Guess what? My dad just dropped into town yesterday. And you know what else? He’s an angel. Which makes me this super-special-über angel-blood. What do you think of that?

I glance over at him. He appears to be actually paying attention to the lecture in government class. He’s cute when he’s concentrating.

Mr. A’s about to call on you.

Christian. I tune in just in time to hear Mr. Anderson say, “So, who knows the rights included in the First Amendment? Clara, why don’t you take a crack at it?”

“Okay.” I glance down at my blank notebook.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, Christian reads off in my mind.

I repeat what Christian said.

“Good.” Mr. Anderson looks impressed that I had the whole thing memorized. He moves on, and I relax. I smile at Tucker, who’s looking at me like he can’t believe he landed such a genius for a girlfriend.

Thanks, I say to Christian silently. I look over at him. He nods slightly.

My empathy blinks on like one of those fluorescent bulbs that takes a minute to charge up.

Sorrow descends on me like a cloud moving over the sun. Loneliness. Separation, always this sense of separation from everything good in this life. The field where Samjeeza stands is full of sunshine, but he can’t absorb its warmth. He can’t smell the new grass at his feet, the fresh rain from this morning’s spring shower. He can’t feel the breeze. All of that is beauty, and it belongs to the light. Not to him.

I should be used to it by now, the way he pops up and plays with my head.

He’s here again, isn’t he? Christian again. Now worried.

I give him the mental equivalent of a nod.

What should we do?

Nothing. Ignore him. There’s nothing we can do.

But it suddenly occurs to me that maybe that’s not true anymore. I sit up. I raise my hand and ask Mr. Anderson for a hall pass, suggest in a vague way that I need to use the restroom, possibly for female reasons.

Where are you going? Christian asks, alarmed, as I gather up my stuff. What are you doing?

Don’t worry. I’m going to call my dad.

I call my house from the phone in the office. Billy picks up.

“Trouble?” she asks immediately.

“Can I talk to my dad?”

“Sure thing.” Silence as she sets the phone down. Muffled voices. Footsteps.

“Clara,” Dad says. “What do you need?”

“Samjeeza’s here. I thought maybe you could do something.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he says finally.

It literally takes him a minute to get here. I barely have time to sit down on one of the hall benches to wait for him before he comes striding through the front door. I stare at him.

“Did you fly here?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Wow.”

“Show me.” There’s a fierceness in his eyes that strikes me as familiar, like I’ve seen this look on his face before. But when? I lead him outside, across the parking lot, to the field. I hold my breath as he steps without hesitation over the fence and onto unprotected ground.

“Stay here,” he orders. I do.

Samjeeza is standing, in human form, on the far edge of the field. He’s afraid. It’s his fear that I’m remembering, I realize, from the day of the fire. Mom suggested that someone was going to come looking for her, and Samjeeza pictured two white-winged angels, one with red hair, the other blond, glowing and fierce, holding a flaming sword.

My dad.

Samjeeza doesn’t move or speak. He stands perfectly still, his fear radiating out of him along with the sorrow now, and humiliation, that he would be so afraid.

Dad takes a few steps toward him, then stops. “Samyaza.” The man suit Samjeeza wears seems transparent, false, next to Dad’s solid radiance.

Dad’s hair glitters in the sunlight. His skin glows. Samjeeza wilts before him but tries to sneer.

“Why are you here, Prince of Light? Why do you care about this weak-blooded girl?” He’s going to be playing the part of super-villain in today’s performance.

“I care about her mother,” Dad answers. “I warned you about that, before.”

“Yes, and what is your relationship with Margaret, I wonder?” Dad’s joy wavers. “I promised her father I would look after her,” he says.

Her father? Good grief. So there’s more stuff I don’t know.

“Is that all?”

“You’re a fool,” Dad says, shaking his head. “Leave this place, and don’t bother the child, or her mother, again.”

“Don’t you mean the children? There’s a boy too, isn’t that right?”

“Leave them be,” Dad says.

Samjeeza hesitates, although I know he has no intention of fighting Dad. He’s not that crazy. Still, he lifts his chin, meets the quicksilver of Dad’s eyes for a few seconds, and smiles.

“It’s hard not to fall in love with them, isn’t it? There’s a Watcher somewhere in you too, Michael.”

The glow around Dad brightens. He whispers a word that feels like wind in my ears, and suddenly I see his wings. They are enormous and white, a pure sweet white that reflects the sun so it’s hard to look directly at them. I have never seen anything so magnificent as my father — my throat closes on the word — this creature of goodness and light, standing there protecting me. He is my father. I am part of him.

“I will crush you under my heel,” he says in a low voice. “Go. And do not come back.”

“No need to get excited,” Samjeeza says, taking a step back. “I’m a lover, not a fighter, after all.”

Then he simply closes his eyes and disappears.

Dad’s wings vanish. He walks back across the grass to me.

“Thanks,” I say.

He looks sad. “Don’t thank me. I’ve just put you in more danger than you know. Now,” he says in a completely different tone of voice. “I would like it very much if I could meet your boyfriend.”

We wait around until the bell rings. People flood the halls. They part around us, giving Dad a wide berth, staring at him.

Dad looks a bit strained.

“Are you okay?” I ask. I wonder if that bit that Samjeeza said, about Dad being like a Watcher, got to him.

“Fine,” he says. “It’s just that around so many people I have to work harder to hold back the glory. Otherwise they might all fall down on their knees and worship.” He sounds like he might be joking, but I know he’s not. He’s completely serious.

“We don’t have to stay here. We can go.”

“No, I want to meet this Tucker kid.”

“Dad. He’s not a kid.”

“Don’t you want me to meet him?” he asks with the hint of a smile. “Are you afraid I’ll scare him off?”

Yes.

“No,” I say. “But don’t try to scare him off, okay? He’s been pretty cool with all the crazy stuff so far. I don’t want to push it.”

“Got it. No threatening his life if he doesn’t treat my daughter right.”

“Dad. Seriously.”

Jeffrey appears at the end of the hall. He’s talking with a buddy of his, smiling. He sees us.

The smile fades from his face. He spins around and walks the other way.

Dad stares after him.

“He’ll come around,” I say to Dad.

He nods absentmindedly, then says, “So, lead the way. I promise I’ll behave.”

“Come on, then. His locker’s this way.”

Down the hall we go to Tucker’s locker. He’s there, as I thought he would be, fumbling around with his notes. Last-minute studying for a makeup test in Spanish.

“Hola,” I say, leaning up against the locker next to his. I’m suddenly a bundle of nerves.

I’m about to introduce my dad to my boyfriend. This is huge.

“Hi,” he says, not looking up. “What happened in government? You just left.”

“I had something I had to take care of.”

“What’s the Spanish word for slacker?” he says wryly. “Mi novia, la chica hermosa que huye. ” Translation: My girlfriend, the beautiful girl who runs away.

“Tuck.”

“Sorry,” he says, still not looking up from his notebook. “I am panicking over this test. I swear, my palms are sweating and my heart’s going and I’m this close to an anxiety attack. I think. Never had an anxiety attack before. But I have under three minutes to fill my brain with useful information.”

“Tuck, can you just stop for two seconds? There’s someone I want you to meet.” He glances up, sees my dad standing behind me. Freezes.

“Tucker, this is my dad, Michael. Dad, this is Tucker Avery.” Dad smiles, holds out his hand. Tucker swallows hard, staring, then shakes it.

“Sir,” he manages. He looks at me. “Your dad?”

“He showed up yesterday, to help us, since Mom. .”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Dad says warmly. I think Dad says pretty much everything warmly. He’s a warm guy. “I’ve heard so much about you. Sorry to take you from your studies, but I wanted to meet this young man who stole my daughter’s heart away from her.” Stole being the operative word. I give Dad a sharp look.

“Pleased to meet you, too, sir,” Tucker says. “You’re a physics professor at NYU, right?” I swing around to look at Dad. I haven’t asked him about that particular falsehood yet.

“I’m on sabbatical,” Dad says.

Smooth. Very smooth.

“Well, um, geez, nice of you to show up to help,” Tucker says haltingly. He doesn’t know what to say. “I, uh, really admire your daughter.”

This is not going well. Tucker’s face is beyond pale now. It’s actually getting green.

There’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead. I worry that Dad’s barely suppressed glory is going to make him throw up. Time to bail.

“So, I wanted to introduce the two of you, and now I have, and Tucker’s got a big test in a minute, so we should go.” I loop my arm in Dad’s and pull him away, shoot Tucker a look that I hope he understands as an apology for springing all this on him. “Call me later, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t go back to his Spanish. He leans against his locker, long after the bell rings, catching his breath.