Unearthly

Chapter 4 Wingspan

I was fourteen when Mom told me about the angels. One morning at breakfast she announced that she was keeping me out of school for the day and we were going on a mother-daughter outing, just she and I. We dropped Jeffrey off at school and drove about thirty miles from our house in Mountain View to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, in the mountains near the ocean. My mom parked in the main lot, slung a backpack over her shoulder, said, “Last one up is a slowpoke,” and headed straight off along a paved trail. I had to practically jog to keep up with her.

“Some mothers take their daughters to get their ears pierced,” I called after her.

There was no one else on the trail. Fog shifted through the redwoods. The trees were as much as twenty feet in diameter, and so tall you couldn’t see where they stopped, only the small gaps between the branches, where beams of light slanted onto the forest floor.

“Where are we going?” I asked breathlessly.

“Buzzards Roost,” Mom said over her shoulder. Like that helped.

We hiked past deserted campgrounds, splashed across creeks, ducked under gigantic mossy beams where trees had fallen across the path. Mom was quiet. This wasn’t one of those mother-daughter bonding times like when she took me to Fisherman’s Wharf or the Winchester Mystery House or IKEA. The stillness of the forest was punctuated only by our breathing and the scuff of our feet on the trail, a silence so heavy and suffocating that I wanted to yell something just to shatter it.

She didn’t speak again until we reached a huge outcropping of rock jutting out of the mountainside like a stone finger pointing to the sky. To get to the top we had to climb about twenty feet of sheer rock face, which Mom did quickly, easily, without looking back.

“Mom, wait!” I called, and scrambled after her. I’d never climbed so much as the rock wall in a gym. Her shoes flicked a spray of rubble down the slope. She disappeared over the top.

“Mom!” I yelled.

She peered down at me.

“You can do this, Clara,” she said. “Trust me. It will be worth it.”

I didn’t really have a choice. I reached up and grabbed at the cliff face and started to climb, telling myself not to look down where the mountain dropped off beneath me.

Then I was at the top. I stood next to Mom, panting.

“Wow,” I said, looking out.

“Pretty amazing, right?”

Below us stretched the valley of redwoods rimmed by the distant mountains. This was one of those top-of-the-world places, where you could see for miles in every direction. I closed my eyes and spread my arms, letting the wind move past me, smelling the air — a heady combination of trees and moss and growing things, a hint of dirt and creek water and pure, clean oxygen. An eagle turned in a slow circle over the forest. I could easily imagine what that would feel like, to glide through the air, nothing between you and endless blue heaven but little tufts of cloud.

“Have a seat,” Mom said. I opened my eyes and turned to see her sitting on a boulder. She patted the space beside her. I sat down next to her. She rummaged in her pack for a bottle of water, opened it, and drank deeply, then offered the bottle to me. I took it and drank, watching her. She was distracted, her eyes distant, lost in thought.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

She started, then laughed nervously.

“No, honey,” she said. “I just have something important to tell you.”

My head spun with all of the things that she might be about to spring on me.

“I’ve been coming to this spot for a really long time,” she said.

“You’ve met a guy,” I guessed. It seemed like a distinct possibility.

“What are you talking about?” Mom asked.

Mom had never dated much, even though everyone who met her liked her immediately, and men followed her around the room with their eyes. She liked to say that she was too busy for a steady relationship, too wrapped up with her job at Apple as a computer programmer, too occupied with being a single mom the rest of the time. I thought she was still hung up on Dad. But maybe she had some secret passionate affair she was about to confess to me. Maybe within a couple of months I’d be standing in a pink dress with flowers in my hair, watching her marry some guy I was supposed to call Dad. It’d happened to a couple of my friends.

“You brought me out here to tell me about this guy you met, and you love him, and you want to marry him or something,” I said quickly, not looking at her because I didn’t want her to see how much I hated the idea.

“Clara Gardner.”

“Really, I’d be okay with it.”

“That’s very sweet, Clara, but wrong,” she said. “I brought you out here because I think you’re old enough to know the truth.”

“Okay,” I said anxiously. That sounded big. “What truth?”

She took a deep breath and let it out, then leaned toward me.

“When I was about your age I lived in San Francisco with my grandmother,” she began.

I knew a little about this. Her father was out of the picture before she was born, and her mother died giving birth to her. I always thought it sounded like a fairy tale, like my mom was the orphaned, tragic heroine in one of my books.

“We lived in a big white house on Mason Street,” she said.

“Why haven’t you taken me there?” We’d been to San Francisco many times, at least two or three times a year, and she’d never said anything about a house on Mason Street.

“It burned down years ago,” she said. “There’s a souvenir shop there now, I think.

Anyway, early one morning I woke up to the house violently shaking. I had to grab on to the bedpost so I wouldn’t be tossed right out of bed.”

“Earthquake,” I assumed. Growing up in California I’d been through a few earthquakes, none that lasted more than a few seconds or done any real damage, but still pretty scary.

Mom nodded. “I could hear the dishes falling out of the china cabinet and windows breaking all over the house. Then there was a loud groaning sound. The wall of my bedroom gave way, and the bricks from the chimney crashed down on top of me in bed.”

I stared at her in horror.

“I don’t know how long I lay there,” Mom said after a minute. “When I opened my eyes again I saw the figure of a man standing over me. He leaned down and said,

‘Be still, child.’ Then he lifted me in his arms, and the bricks slid off my body like they weighed nothing. He carried me to the window. All the glass was broken out, and I could see people running out of their houses into the street. And then a strange thing happened, and we were someplace else. It still resembled my room, only different somehow, like someone else was living there, undamaged as if the quake had never happened. Outside the window there was so much light, so bright it hurt to look.”

“Then what happened?”

“The man set me on my feet. I was amazed that I could stand. My nightgown was a mess, and I was a bit dizzy, but aside from that I was fine.

“‘Thank you,’ I said to him. I didn’t know what else to say. He had golden hair that gleamed in the light like nothing I’d ever seen before. And he was tall, the tallest man I’d ever seen, and very handsome.”

She smiled at the memory. I rubbed at the goose bumps that had jumped up along my arms. I tried to picture this tall, fine-looking guy with shiny blond hair, like some kind of Brad Pitt sweeping in to rescue my mom. I frowned. The image made me uneasy, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.

“He said, ‘You’re welcome, Margaret,’” Mom said.

“How did he know your name?”

“I wondered that myself. I asked him. He told me that he was a friend of my father’s.

They served together, he said. And he said that he’d been watching me from the day that I was born.”

“Whoa. Like your own personal guardian angel.”

“Exactly. Like my guardian angel,” Mom said, nodding. “Although he wouldn’t call himself that, of course.”

I waited for her to go on.

“That’s what he was, Clara. I want you to understand. He was an angel.”

“Right,” I said. “An angel. Like with wings and everything, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t see his wings until later, but yes.”

She looked dead serious.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I pictured the big old angel in the stained-glass window at church, wearing a halo and purple robes, huge golden wings fanned out behind him. “Then what happened?”

This really can’t get any weirder, I thought.

And then it did.

“He told me that I was special,” she said.

“Special how?”

“He said that my father was an angel and my mother human, and I was Dimidius, which means half.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Come on. You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” She looked at me steadily. “It’s not a joke, Clara. It’s the truth.”

I stared at her. The thing was, I trusted her. More than anybody. As far as I knew, she’d never lied to me before, not even those little white lies that so many parents tell their kids to get them to behave or believe in the tooth fairy or whatever. She was my mom, sure, but she was also my best friend. Cheesy but true. And now she was telling me something crazy, something impossible, and she was looking at me like everything depended on my reaction.

“So you’re saying. you’re saying that you’re half angel,” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Mom, really, come on.” I wanted her to laugh and tell me that the angel stuff was some kind of dream she had, like in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up and finds out the whole Oz thing was a big, colorful hallucination from getting conked on the head. “So then what happened?”

“He brought me back to Earth. He helped me find my grandmother, who was by that point convinced I’d been crushed. And when the fires burned through our neighborhood, he helped us evacuate to Golden Gate Park. He stayed with us for three days, and then I didn’t see him again for years.”

I was quiet, bothered by the details of her story. About a year before, my class had gone on a field trip to the San Francisco museum because they opened up a big exhibit about the great San Francisco earthquake. We’d looked at all the pictures of the broken buildings, the cable cars thrown off their tracks, the blackened skeletons of the burned up houses. We’d listened to old recordings of people who’d been there, their voices sharp and quivery as they described the terrible disaster.

Everybody had been making such a huge deal out of it that year because it was the hundred- year anniversary of when the quake had happened.

“You said there were fires?” I asked.

“Terrible fires. My grandmother’s house burned to the ground.”

“And when was this?”

“It was April,” she said. “1906.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. “That would make you what, a hundred and ten?”

“A hundred and sixteen, this year.”

“I don’t believe you,” I stammered.

“I know it’s hard.”

I stood up. Mom reached for my hand, but I jerked it away. Hurt flashed in her eyes.

She stood up too, and took a step back, giving me some space, nodding slightly as if she completely understood what I was going through. Like she knew that she was unraveling everything.

I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs.

She was crazy. That was the only explanation that made sense. My mom, who up to that point seemed like the best mother ever, my own personal version of the Gilmore Girls, the envy of all my friends with her beautiful auburn hair and fabulous dewy skin and quirky sense of humor, was actually a raving lunatic.

“What are you doing? Why are you telling me this?” I asked, blinking back furious tears.

“Because you need to know that you’re special, too.”

I stared at her incredulously.

“I’m special,” I repeated. “Because if you’re a half angel then that would make me what, a quarter angel?”

“Quarter angels are called Quartarius.”

“I want to go home now,” I said dully. I needed to call Dad. He might know what to do. I needed to find my mom some help.

“I wouldn’t have believed it either,” she said. “Not without proof.”

At first I thought that the sun must have come out from behind the clouds, suddenly brightening the ledge where we stood looking out, but then I understood, slowly, that this light was stronger than that. I turned and shielded my eyes from the sight of my mom with light beaming off her. It was like looking at the sun, so intense my eyes watered. Then she dimmed slightly and I saw that she had wings — enormous snowy wings unfurling behind her.

“This is glory,” she said, and I understood the words she said even though she wasn’t speaking English, but a strange language like two notes of music played on every syllable, so eerie and alien it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

“Mom,” I breathed helplessly.

Her wings extended like they were literally catching the air and pushed down once.

The sound they made was like a single heartbeat low in the earth. My hair blew back with the force. She lifted off the ground slowly, impossibly graceful and light, still glowing all over. Then she suddenly shot out over the tree line, tucking her body up and moving fast across the entire length of the valley until she was only a bright speck on the horizon. I was left stunned and alone, the rock ledge empty and silent, darker now that she wasn’t there to light it.

“Mom!” I called.

I watched her circle around and glide her way back to me, more slowly this time. She swept right up where the mountain dropped off and hovered, treading the air gently.

“I think I believe you,” I said.

Her eyes sparkled.

For some reason I couldn’t stop crying.

“Honey,” she said, “it’s going to be all right.”

“You’re an angel,” I gasped through the tears. “And that means that I—”

I couldn’t get the words out.

“That means you’re part angel, too,” she said.

That night I stood in the middle of my bedroom with the door locked and willed my wings to appear. Mom had assured me that I’d be able to summon them, in time, and even use them to fly. I couldn’t imagine. It was too wild. I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my cami and underwear and thought of the Victoria’s Secret models in the Angel commercials, their wings curled sexily around them. No wings appeared. I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole idea. Me, with wings sprouting from my shoulder blades. Me, part angel.

The thing about my mother being a half angel made total sense — as much as my mother being some kind of supernatural being made sense, anyway. She’d always seemed suspiciously beautiful to me. Unlike me with my brooding stubbornness, my flares of temper, my sarcasm, she was so graceful and even-tempered. Perfect to the point of being irritating. I couldn’t name one flaw.

Unless you count lying to me for my entire life, I thought, allowing myself a flash of bitterness. Shouldn’t there be some kind of rule, anyway, that angels can’t lie?

Only she hadn’t actually lied. Not once had she ever said to me, “You know what?

You’re not different from other people.” She’d always told me exactly the opposite, in fact. She’d always said I was special. I’d just never believed her until now.

“You’re better at things than most people,” she’d told me as we stood at the top of Buzzards Roost. “Stronger, faster, smarter. Haven’t you noticed?”

“Um, no,” I said quickly.

But that wasn’t true. I’d always had a sense that I was different from other people.

Mom has a video of me walking when I was only seven months old. I learned to read by the age of three. I was always the first in my class to master the multiplication tables and memorize the fifty states, that kind of thing. Plus I was good at the physical stuff. I was fast and quick on my feet. I could jump high and throw hard.

Everybody always wanted me on their team when we played games in PE.

Still, I wasn’t like a child prodigy or anything. I wasn’t exceptional at any one thing.

As a toddler I didn’t golf like Tiger Woods, or write my own symphonies by age five, or play competitive chess. Generally, things just came a little easier for me than they did for other kids. I noticed, sure, but I never really gave it much thought. If anything, I’d assumed I was better at stuff because I didn’t spend too much time sitting around watching crap on TV. Or because my mom is one those parents who made me practice, and study, and read books.

Now I didn’t know what to think. Everything was falling into place. And out of place, at the same time.

Mom smiled. “So often we only do what we think is expected of us,” she said. “When we are capable of so much more.”

At that point, I got so dizzy that I had to sit down. And Mom had started talking again, telling me the basics. Wings: check. Stronger, faster, smarter: check. Capable of so much more. Something about languages. And there were a couple rules: Don’t tell Jeffrey — he’s not old enough. Don’t tell humans — they won’t believe you and even if they did, they couldn’t handle it. My neck still tingled when I remembered the way she’d said “humans,” like the word suddenly didn’t apply to us. Then she had spoken about purpose and how, soon enough, I’d receive mine. It was important, she’d said, but it wasn’t something she could easily explain. After that she’d basically shut up and stopped answering my questions. There were some things, she’d told me, that I had to learn over time. By experience. And then there were other things I didn’t need to know quite yet.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before?” I’d asked her.

“Because I wanted you to live a normal life for as long as you could,” she’d answered. “I wanted you to be a normal girl.”

Now I would never be normal again. That much was clear.

I looked at my reflection in the bedroom mirror. “Okay,” I said. “Show me. the wings!”

Nothing.

“Faster than a speeding bullet!” I announced to the reflection, striking my best Superman pose. Then my smile in the mirror faded and the girl on the other side stared back at me skeptically.

“Come on,” I said, spreading my arms. I rotated my shoulders forward so that my shoulder blades stuck out and squeezed my eyes shut and thought hard about wings. I imagined them erupting out of me, piercing the skin, unfolding themselves behind me the way that Mom’s had on the mountaintop. I opened my eyes.

Still no wings.

I sighed and flopped down on my bed. I switched off the lamp. There were glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, which seemed so silly now, so juvenile. I glanced over at my alarm clock. It was after midnight. School tomorrow. I had to make up a spelling test I’d missed in third period, which seemed even more ridiculous.

“Quartarius,” I said, my mom’s name for a quarter angel.

Q-U-A-R-T-A-R-I-U-S. Clara is a Quartarius.

I thought about my mom’s strange language. Angelic, she’d called it. So uncanny and beautiful, like notes of a song.

“Show me my wings,” I said.

My voice sounded strange that time, like there were other higher and lower echoes around my words. I gasped.

I could speak it.

And then I felt my wings under me, lifting me upward slightly, one folded beneath the other. They stretched nearly to my heels, glowing white even in the darkness.

“Holy crap!” I exclaimed, then clapped both of my hands over my mouth.

Very slowly, afraid that I’d make the wings go away again, I got up and turned on the light. Then I stood in front of the bedroom mirror and looked at my wings for the first time. They were real — real wings with real feathers, weighty and tingling and absolute proof that what happened earlier with my mom was no joke. They were so beautiful it made my chest tight to look at them.

Gently, I touched them. They were warm, alive. I could move them, I found, the same way I could move my arms. Like they were truly a part of me, an extra set of limbs that I’d been oblivious to my whole life up to now. I would have guessed that I had a good ten- to twelve-foot wingspan, but it was hard to be sure. All that wing simply didn’t fit in the mirror.

Wingspan, I thought, shaking my head. I have a wingspan. This is insane.

I examined the feathers. Some were very long, smooth and sharp, others softer, more rounded. The shortest feathers, the ones closest to my body where my wings connected at the shoulder, were small and downy, about the size of my thumb. I grabbed one of them and pulled until it came free, which stung so fiercely my eyes teared up. I gazed intently at that feather in my hand, trying to get my head around the fact that it came from me. For a moment it just lay there in my palm, and then, slowly, it started to dissolve, like it was evaporating into the air, until there was nothing left.

I had wings. I had feathers. I had angel blood in me.

What happens now? I wondered. I learn to fly? I dangle from a cloud strumming a harp? I’ll receive messages from God? Dread uncurled itself in my gut. Our family was hardly what you’d call religious, but I’d always believed in God. But I was finding out then that there was a big difference between believing in God and knowing that he exists and apparently has some great master plan for my life. It was pretty freaky, to say the least. My understanding of the universe and my place in it had been turned completely upside down in less than twenty-four hours.

I didn’t know how to make the wings go away again, so I folded them against my back as tightly as I could and lay down on my bed, angling my arms so I could feel the wings underneath me. The house was quiet. It felt like everyone else on the earth was asleep. Everyone else was the same, and I had changed. All I could do that night was lie there with this knowledge, amazed and frightened, stroking the feathers under me gently, until I fell asleep.