Unearthly

Chapter 18 My Purpose-Drive Life

I’m sitting in a boat with Tucker, smack in the middle of Jackson Lake, when Angela finally calls me back.

“Okay, what’s up?” she asks. I hear bells ringing in the background. “Has the fire happened yet?”

“No.”

“Did you finally get some action with Christian?”

“No!” I stammer, completely flustered. “He’s — I’m not — He’s not in town.” I glance at Tucker. He raises his eyebrows and mouths, “Who’s that?” I shake my head slightly.

“So what’s the big emergency?” she asks impatiently.

“I sent that email weeks ago. You only now got it?”

“I haven’t had an internet connection for a while,” she says a bit defensively. “I’ve been kind of off the beaten path. So everything’s okay now? Crisis averted?”

“Yes,” I say, still looking at Tucker. He smiles. “Everything’s fine.”

“So what happened?”

“Do you want me to take us in?” Tucker asks. I shake my head again and smile to show him that everything is, like I said, completely fine.

“Can I call you back later?” I ask Angela.

“No, you can’t call me back later! Who was that?”

“Tucker,” I answer with forced lightness. He moves across the boat and slides into the seat next to me, grinning wickedly the whole time in a way that makes my breath catch and my heart accelerate.

“Tucker Avery,” she says.

“Yes.”

“And Wendy’s there, too?”

“No, Wendy’s still in Montana.”

Tucker lifts my free hand in his and starts to kiss my knuckles one by one. I shiver and try to pull my hand away, but he doesn’t let go.

“So just Tucker,” Angela says.

“Right.” I stifle a laugh as Tucker nips one of my fingers.

“What are you doing with Tucker Avery?”

“Fishing.” We’ve spent the afternoon turning in slow circles on the lake, kissing, splashing each other, eating grapes and pretzels and turkey sandwiches, kissing some more, snuggling, tickling, laughing, oh yeah, some kissing, but in there somewhere was definitely fishing. I distinctly remember a fishing pole in my hands at some point during the day.

“No,” says Angela in a low voice.

“What?”

“What are you doing with Tucker Avery?” she asks again, pointedly.

Sometimes she’s too smart for her own good.

I sit up and pull away from Tucker. “This really isn’t a good time. I’ll call you back.”

She refuses to be sidetracked.

“You’re screwing it up, aren’t you?” she says. “You’re losing your focus at the time when you should be sharpening it, preparing yourself. I can’t believe you’re messing around with Tucker Avery now. What about Christian? What about destiny, Clara?”

“I’m not screwing up.” I stand up and walk carefully to the other end of the boat. “I can still do what I’m supposed to do.”

“Oh, right. Sounds like you’ve got it all under control.”

“Leave me alone. You don’t know anything.”

“Does your mom know?”

When I don’t answer, she gives a short, bitter little laugh.

“This is perfect,” she says. “Wow.”

“It’s my life.”

“Yes, it is. And you are totally screwing it up.”

I hang up on her. Then I turn and face Tucker’s questioning blue eyes.

“What was that all about?” he asks softly.

He doesn’t know about Angela’s angel-blood status, and it’s not my secret to tell.

“Nothing. Just somebody who’s supposed to be my friend.”

He frowns. “I think we should go in. We’ve been out here long enough.”

“Not yet,” I plead.

Overhead there are storm clouds darkening. Tucker gazes up at them.

“We really should get off the lake. We’re starting into storm season, when the thunderstorms pop up out of nowhere. They only last for like twenty minutes but they can be brutal. We should go.”

“No.” I grab him by the hand and tug him to the end of the boat, where I pull him down and sit curled against him, arranging his arms around me and retreating safely into his heat, his familiar, comforting smell. I press a kiss against the pulse that beats in his neck.

“Clara—”

I put a finger to his lips. “Not yet,” I whisper. “Let’s just stay here a little longer.”

The next time the phone chirps at me I’m eating pork tenderloin with apples and fennel, one of Mom’s more impressive recipes. It’s delicious, of course, but I’m not thinking about the food. I’m not thinking about Angela either. It’s been two days since the phone call on the lake and I’m doing my best to forget about it. Instead, I’m all wrapped up in some Tucker daydream. He’s been out on the river for the last couple days, working so he’ll have the money to buy his girlfriend a steak dinner for our monthiversary, he said. We’ve been together one entire month, which is crazy. Every time he calls me his girlfriend I still get a thrill. He’s going to take me dancing, teach me how to two-step and line dance and everything.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” Mom asks, arching an eyebrow across the dinner table. Jeffrey stares at me, too. I try to collect my jumbled thoughts. I pull the cell out of my pocket and look at it.

It’s an unknown number. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I hit the TALK button.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hey there, stranger,” says a familiar voice.

Christian.

I almost drop the phone.

“Oh, hi. I didn’t recognize your number. Wow, so how are you? How’s your summer?

How’s New York?” I’m asking too many questions.

“It was boring. But I’m back now.”

“Already?”

“Well, it’s August. We’ve got to go back to school soon, you know. I actually plan to show up this year. Graduate and stuff.”

“Right,” I say, and try to laugh.

“So, like I said, I’m back, and I’ve been thinking about you all summer and I’m asking you to have dinner with me tomorrow night. An actual date, in case that wasn’t clear,” he says in a voice that’s deliberately light but has so many serious undertones that it feels like the air suddenly got sucked out of the room. I look up to see Mom and Jeffrey staring at me.

He waits for me to say yes, yes I’d love to have dinner with you, when can you pick me up, I can’t wait, but I’m not saying anything. What can I say? Sorry, I know it seemed like I was crazy about you before, but that was before. I have a boyfriend now? You snooze you lose?

“You still there?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. ”

“I can’t tomorrow night,” I say quickly, quietly, but I know Mom heard me. She has very good ears.

“Oh.” Christian sounds surprised. “That’s okay. How about Saturday?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you,” I say, totally chickening out.

“Sure,” Christian says, trying to act like it’s no big deal, but we all know, him and Mom and Jeffrey and me, that it’s a very big deal. “You have my number.” Then he quickly mumbles a good-bye and hangs up.

I close the phone. There’s a minute of uncomfortable silence. Mom and Jeffrey have nearly the same expression: like I’ve completely lost my mind.

“Why did you say no?” asks Mom. The million-dollar question, the one I so do not want to answer.

“I didn’t say no. I just can’t do it tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“I have plans. I have a life, you know.”

She looks angry. “Yes, and what could possibly be more important to your life right now than Christian?”

“I’m going out with Tucker.” All this time, I’ve been telling her that I was going out with people from school, and she believed me. She’s never had a reason not to. And she’s been too stressed out and preoccupied with work to pay attention.

“So cancel,” she says.

I shake my head and say, “No,” to indicate that she’s misunderstood me. I look at her. “I’m going out with Tucker.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” chokes Jeffrey, and I know it’s not because he doesn’t like Tucker, but because it’s simply so unbelievable to anybody in my family that I’d be interested in anyone but Christian. He’s why we came here, after all.

“No. Tucker’s my boyfriend.” I love him, I want to say, but I know that would be over the top.

Mom sets down her fork.

“Sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I say awkwardly. “I thought — I don’t know what I thought. I mean, I’ll still save Christian, just like in the vision.”

Only not like in the vision, I think, with the hand-holding and cheek touching and mushy stuff. But I will save him. That much I’ve decided. “I’ve been practicing my flying. I’m getting stronger, like you said. I think I can carry him.”

“How do you know your purpose is about saving Christian?”

“Because in the vision I fly him out of the fire. That’s called saving, right?”

“And that’s all?”

I look away from her knowing eyes. We belong together. That thought’s been like a piece of glass in my brain ever since I had the latest version of the vision. I’ve been going over and over it, trying to find a way that I might have misinterpreted what it meant. I don’t want to be in love with Christian Prescott. Not anymore.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’ll be there. I’ll save him.”

“This isn’t some random errand you have to do, Clara,” says Mom quietly. “This is your purpose on earth. And it’s time. Teton County went on high fire alert yesterday.

The fire could happen any minute. You have to focus. You can’t allow yourself to be distracted now. This is your life we’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” I say, my chin lifting a notch. “It’s my life.”

I’ve been saying that a lot lately.

Her face is pale, her eyes stony, lusterless. One morning when we were kids, Jeffrey found a rattlesnake curled up on the patio in our backyard, lethargic with cold. Mom went to the garage and returned with a garden hoe. She ordered us to stay back.

And then she lifted the hoe and chopped the head off the snake in one clean blow.

She has the same expression on her face now, stony and resolved. It scares me.

“Mom, it’s okay,” I try.

“It is not okay,” she says very slowly. “You’re grounded.”

That night’s the first time I ever sneaked out of the house. It’s such an easy thing, really, sliding the window open, stepping out, balancing on the edge of the roof for a minute before I summon my wings and escape. But I’ve been a good girl all my life.

I’ve obeyed my mother. My feet have never slipped off the path she placed before me. This simple act of rebellion makes my heart so heavy that it’s tough to get airborne.

I land outside Tucker’s window. He’s reclined on his bed, reading a comic book, X-Men, and this makes me smile. His hair’s shorter than it was yesterday. He must have gotten it cut for our monthiversary. I tap lightly on the glass. He looks up, grins because he’s happy to see me, and my heart twists inside me. I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be a messenger angel-blood. I hate to be the bringer of bad news.

He stashes the comic book under his pillow, and crosses to the window. He has to force it open, which takes some muscle because the air’s hot and heavy and the window sticks. His eyes dart briefly to my wings, and I see him trying to contain the instinctive fear he has every time he’s confronted with proof that things in this world aren’t quite the way they seem. Then he leans out and reaches for my hand. I put away my wings. I try to smile.

He pulls me into his bedroom. “Hi. What’s up? You look. upset.”

He leads me over to his bed and I sit down. Then he grabs his desk chair and sits across from me, his eyes worried but steady, like he thinks he can take anything I have to dish out. He’s with me; that’s what his eyes say.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yes. Kind of.”

There’s nothing left to do but tell him. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m grounded.”

He looks confused. “For how long?”

“I don’t know,” I say miserably. “Mom wasn’t very specific. Indefinitely, I think.”

“But why? What did you do?”

“Uh—” How can I explain that it’s all because I turned Christian Prescott down for a date? That my mom is punishing me because I didn’t tell her about being Tucker’s girlfriend. Not that I hid it from her, exactly. I simply didn’t tell her, because I expected her to frown on the idea. Just not this much.

My face must betray something because Tucker says, “It’s me, isn’t it? Your mom doesn’t approve of me?”

I hate the hurt I detect in his voice. I hate looking at him and spotting the Avery brave face in his expression. This is so unfair. Tucker’s the type of guy most mothers would love their daughters to date. He’s respectful, polite, even downright chivalrous. Plus he doesn’t smoke, drink, or have any crazy piercings or tattoos. He’s golden.

But my mother doesn’t care about any of that. After she grounded me she told me that if I was a normal girl, she would have no problem with me dating Tucker Avery.

But I’m not a normal girl.

“Is this about Christian?” he asks.

“Sort of.” I sigh.

“What about him?”

“I’m supposed to be concentrating on Christian. My mom thinks you’re distracting me from that. Hence the grounding.” He deserves a better explanation, I know, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to feel like I’m cheating on him, when none of this is my choice, and that’s the way he’s looking at me now.

He’s quiet for another long moment.

“What do you think?” he asks then.

I hesitate. I don’t know any stories of angel-bloods who didn’t fulfill their purpose. I hardly know any stories about angel-bloods, period. For all I know they shriveled up and died if they failed. Mom certainly never presented me with another option. She always made it sound inevitable. What I was made for.

“I don’t know what to think,” I admit.

It’s the wrong answer. Tucker blows out a long breath.

“Sounds like we have to see other people. At least you do.”

“What?”

He turns away.

“You’re breaking up with me?” I stare at him, shock waves moving through me like an earthquake. He exhales, runs his fingers over his shortcropped hair, then looks back into my eyes.

“I think so.”

I stand up. “Tuck, no. I’ll figure it out. I’ll make it work, somehow.”

“Your mom doesn’t know, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“She doesn’t know that I know about you. That I know about the angel-bloods and all of that.”

I sigh and shake my head.

“And you’d get in even more trouble if she knew.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“It does matter.” He starts to pace back and forth. “I’m not going to be the one who messes you up, Clara. I’m not going to stand in the way of you and your destiny.”

“Please. Don’t.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he says, I think more to himself than to me. “Maybe when this is all over, after the fire happens and you save him and all that, everything can go back to the way it was before.”

“Yeah,” I agree weakly. It will only be a few weeks, a month or two at the most until fire season’s over, and then the whole Christian thing will be done and I can go back to Tucker with nothing to stand between us ever again. Only I don’t believe that. I can’t. Something inside of me knows that if I go with Christian in the forest I’ll never be able to find my way back to Tucker. That it will be over, for good.

He’s not meeting my eyes anymore. “We’re young,” he says. “We’ve got lots of time to fall in love.”

I stay in bed for two days, the world without color, food without taste. It seems dumb, I know. Tucker’s only a boy. People get dumped; it’s a fact of life. It should have made me feel better that he hadn’t really wanted to dump me. He was trying to do the right thing. Wasn’t that what Christian said when he dumped Kay? I’m just trying to do the right thing. I can’t be what she needs. But I need Tucker. I miss him.

On the morning of the third day the doorbell rings, which almost never happens, and the first thing that passes through my mind is that it must be Tucker, that he changed his mind, that we’ll make it work after all. Mom’s off getting groceries. I hear Jeffrey jog downstairs to answer the door. I leap out of bed and run to the bathroom to untangle my hair and wash the tear streaks off my face. I throw on some clothes, look at myself in the mirror, and change into a different top, the flannel shirt Tucker loves most on me, the one he says brings out the deep ocean in my eyes. The one I was wearing that day at the Jumping Tree. But even as my hand touches the doorknob to my room, even as I step out into the hallway, I know it won’t be Tucker at the door. Deep down I know that Tucker isn’t the type to change his mind.

It’s Angela. She’s talking to Jeffrey about Italy, smiling. She looks tired, but happy.

They both turn as I come down the stairs, one slow step at a time. Considering our last conversation, I can’t decide if I’m happy to see her.

Her smile fades as she looks at me.

“Wow,” she breathes like she’s shocked at how bad a person can look.

“I forgot you were coming home this week,” I say from the bottom step.

“Yeah, well, it’s good to see you, too.” A corner of her mouth quirks up. She crosses over to me and pulls me off the steps. Then she picks up a fistful of my hair and holds it up in the light that’s pouring in through the window.

“Wow,” she says again. She laughs. “This is so much better than orange, C. You’ve changed. Your skin’s all glowy.” She presses her hand to my forehead like I’m a sick kid. “And warm. What happened to you?”

I don’t know how to answer her. I didn’t see what she’s apparently seeing when I looked in the mirror upstairs. All I really saw was my broken heart.

“My purpose is coming, I guess. Mom says I’m getting stronger.”

“Crazy.” I don’t understand the naked envy in her golden eyes. I’m not used to her envying me; it’s usually the other way around. “You’re beautiful,” she says.

“She’s right,” Jeffrey says suddenly. “You do kind of look like an angel.”

But it doesn’t matter that I’m beautiful now. I’m terrible. Tears spill onto my cheeks.

“Oh, C. ” Angela puts her arms around me and squeezes.

“Just don’t say I told you so, okay?”

“How long has she been like this?” she asks Jeffrey.

“A couple days. Mom made her break up with Tucker.”

Not quite the truth, but I don’t bother to correct him.

“It’s going to be fine,” Angela says to me. “Let’s get you cleaned up — because even with the glowy skin and everything, you’re a little rank, C— and let’s get some food in you, spend some girl time, and it’ll be fine, you’ll see.” She pulls back and gives me her excited-angel-blood-historian face. “I have amazing stuff to tell you.”

I decide I’m glad, after all, that she’s here.

When Mom gets home from town she discovers Angela and me in the living room, Angela painting my toenails a shade of deep rose, me fresh out of the shower. They exchange this look where my mom says, without words, how happy she is that I’m finally out of my room, and Angela says that she’s got everything under control. I do feel better, I’ll admit, not because Angela’s a particularly comforting person, but because I hate to look weak in front of her. She’s always so strong, so sharp, so focused. Whenever we hang out it’s like we’re continually playing a game of truth or dare, and right now we’re on dare, and she has dared me to stop moping around and be a freaking angel-blood for once. My time to be a heartbroken teenager is officially over and done. Time to move on.

“It’s a beautiful day outside,” Mom says. “You girls want to go out for a picnic? I’ll whip you up some sandwiches.”

“Can’t. I’m grounded.”

I’m still mad at Mom. Because of her I lost Tucker, and I still refuse to believe it had to be that way. In fact this whole mess, my purpose, my shipwrecked love life, my current state of misery, not to mention my utter cluelessness about how this is all going to work out, leads back to her. Her telling me about this divine obligation that I was supposed to fulfill. Her idea to move to Wyoming. Her insisting and her reassuring me that there are reasons for things and her stupid rules and her keeping me in the dark. All. Her. Fault. Because if it’s not her fault, it’s God’s, and I’m not ready to be pissed at the Almighty.

Angela frowns at me, then turns to Mom and smiles. “A picnic would be awesome, Mrs. Gardner. We obviously need to get out of the house.”

Angela wants to eat outside, find some picnic table in the mountains, maybe Jenny Lake, she says, but I can’t handle it. It makes me think of Tucker. Just being outside makes me yearn for Tucker. I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I may never go outside again. So we go to the Garter. The stage is set for Oklahoma!, complete with rows of fake corn, a broken-down wagon, trees, bushes, and a yellow farmhouse, a blue sky in the background. Angela spreads out a blanket in the middle of the stage and we sit down on it and eat our lunch.

“I’ve been studying about Black Wings,” she says, taking a big bite of a green apple.

“Is that safe? Considering what Mom said about the consciousness thing, and all that?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think I’m more conscious of them than I was before. I just know more.” She pulls out a new notebook, one of those plain, black-and-white composition books, the pages covered front and back with all that she’d gleaned about angels. Angela typically writes in a tight, loopy cursive, but the writing in her notebook is always hastily scrawled and smeared, like she can’t get the words down fast enough. She flips through the pages. I think about my own journal, which I started with such passion and determination the first week I got my vision. I haven’t touched it in months. She puts me to shame, really.

“Here,” she says. “They’re called the Moestifere, the Sorrowful Ones. I found this old book in a library in Florence that mentioned them. Sad demons, it translated.”

“Demons? But they’re supposed to be angels.”

“Demons are angels,” explains Angela. “It’s more of an artistic distinction, really.

Painters would always depict angels with beautiful, white, bird wings, and so the fallen angels had to have wings, too, but it wasn’t enough to simply give them black feathers. They made them bat wings, and then it evolved to the whole horns and tail and pitchfork image that people think of now.”

“But that guy we saw in the mall, he looked like a regular man.”

“Like I said before, I think they can look however they choose to. I guess it’s how they make you feel that’s important, right? Suddenly bawling your eyes out, for example, would be a bad sign.”

“The sorrow in my vision, my mom said it could be a Black Wing.”

Angela’s expression is sympathetic. “Have you been having the vision more now?”

I nod. I’ve been having it about once a day, every day, for the past week. It only lasts a few minutes, a flash really, nothing substantial. Nothing more than what I already know: the Avalanche, the forest, walking, the fire, Christian, the words we say to each other, the touching, the hug, the flying away. I’ve been trying to ignore it.

“Mom keeps saying I need to train, but how? I can fly fine. I can carry stuff; I’m getting stronger, but it’s not my muscles that need to get stronger, right? So how can I train? What am I supposed to do?”

She chews on my questions for a minute, then says, “It’s your mind you have to train, like your mom said that one time, you have to separate yourself from all the crap, get down to the core, focus. We can do it together.” She smiles. “I’ll help you.

It’s time, C. I know this thing with Tucker sucks, but you can’t really turn your back on this. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So let’s do it,” she says, clapping her hands together and jumping up like we’re going to start right this minute. “No time to lose. Let’s train.”

She’s right, as usual. It’s time.