“This is a trick,” she says.
“Oh yeah? And what I am trying to trick you into?”
“You want me to …”
“Marry Dad?” I fill in. “You think he—Michael, my father, an angel of the Lord and all that—wants to trap you into a marriage that you don’t want to be in?” I sigh. “Look, I know this is surreal. It feels strange to me too, like any minute I might disappear like I was never born, which would be a total bummer, if you know what I mean. But I don’t care, really. I’m so glad to see you. I’ve missed you. So much. Can’t we just … talk about it? I’m going to be born on June 20, 1994.” I take a slow step toward her.
“Don’t,” she says sharply.
“I don’t know how to convince you.” I stop and think about it. Then I hold up my hands. “We have the same hands,” I say. “Look. The exact same. See how your ring finger is slightly longer than your index finger? Mine too. You always joked that it was a sign of great intelligence. And I have this big vein that goes horizontally across the right one, which I think looks kind of weird, but you have that too. So I guess we’re weird together.”
She stares at her hands.
“I think I should sit down,” she says, and drops heavily to sit on the rock.
I crouch next to her.
“Clara,” she whispers. “What’s your last name?”
“Gardner. I think it’s what Dad chooses as his mortal surname, but I’m not sure, actually. Clara, by the way, was like the most popular girl’s name in something like 1910, but not so much since then. Thanks for that.”
She stifles a smile. “I like the name Clara.”
“Do you want me to tell you my middle name, or can you come up with it on your own?”
She puts her fingers to her lips and shakes her head incredulously.
“So,” I say, because the sun is definitely on its way toward the horizon now, and she’s going to have to go soon, “I don’t want to pressure you or anything, but I think you should marry him.”
She laughs weakly.
“He loves you. Not because of me. Or because God told him to. Because of you.”
“But I don’t know how to be a mother,” she murmurs. “I was raised in an orphanage, you know. I never had a mother. Am I any good at it?”
“You’re the best. Seriously, and I’m not just trying to make my case here, but you are the best mother. All my friends are superjealous of how amazing you are. You put all the other moms to shame.”
Her expression’s still cloudy. “But I’ll die before you grow up.”
“Yes. And that sucks. But I wouldn’t trade you for somebody who’d live to be a thousand.”
“I won’t be there for you.”
I put my hand over hers. “You’re here now.”
She nods her head slightly, swallows. She turns my hand over in hers and examines it.
“Amazing,” she breathes.
“I know, right?”
We sit for a little while. Then she says, “So tell me about your life. Tell me about this journey you’re going on.”
I bite my lip. I worry that if I tell her too much about the future, it will disrupt the space-time continuum or something and destroy the universe. When I tell her this, she laughs.
“I’ve seen the future all my life,” she says. “It tends to work as a paradox, in my experience. You find out something is going to happen, and then you do it because you know that’s what happens. It’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario.”
Good enough for me. I tell her everything I think I have time for. I tell her about my visions, about Christian and the fire, the cemetery, and the kiss. I tell her about Jeffrey, which shocks her, because she never considered that she might have more than one child.
“A son,” she breathes. “What’s he like?”
“A lot like Dad. Tall and strong and obsessed with sports. And a lot like you. Stubborn. And stubborn.”
She smiles, and I feel a glimmer of happiness in her at the idea of Jeffrey, a son who looks like Dad. I blab on about how Jeffrey’s vision got him all messed up and how he ran away and has been living at our old house, how he’s dating a bad Triplare, how I can’t find him now, and she sobers right up.
And finally, I tell her about Angela and Phen and Web, and what happened in the Garter, and how I’m starting to believe that Angela’s what my purpose is really about.
“So what do you have to do,” she asks, “to save her?”
“I made a deal with the devil, so to speak.”
“What devil?”
“Samjeeza.”
She flinches like I’ve slapped her. “You know Samjeeza?”
“He considers himself a friend of the family.”
“What does he want?” she asks grimly.
“A story. About you. I don’t know why, really. He’s obsessed with you.”
She bites the end of her thumb gently, contemplating. “What kind of story?”
“A memory. Something where he can imagine you alive, like a new charm on your bracelet.” She looks surprised. “Which you gave me, and I gave back to him, the day of your funeral. It’s complicated. I need a story. But I can’t think of anything good enough.”
Her eyes are thoughtful. “I’ll give you a story,” she says. “Something that he’ll want to hear.”
She takes a deep breath and gazes down at the trees below us. “As I said before, I was a nurse once, during the Great War, working at a hospital in France, and one day I met a journalist.”
“At a pond,” I supply. “In your underwear.”
She looks up, startled.
“He’s told me some stories, too.”
She’s mortified at the idea, but pushes on. “We became friends, of a fashion. We became more than friends. At first I think it was only a game for him, to see if he could win me, but as time went on it became … more. For both of us.”
She pauses, her eyes scanning the horizon like she’s searching for something, but she doesn’t find it.
“Then one night the hospital was bombed by the Huns.” Her lips tighten. “Everything was on fire. Everyone was …” She closes her eyes briefly, then opens them again. “Dead. I clawed my way out of there, and it was just fire, fire everywhere, and then Sam rode in on a horse and said my name, and reached out his hand for me, and I took it, and he pulled me up behind him. He took me away from there. We spent the night in an old stone barn near Saint-Céré. He pumped some water and made me sit down, and he washed the soot and blood off my face. And he kissed me.”
Kissed in a barn. Must be a genetic thing.
But this story isn’t going to cut it, I realize. Samjeeza already knows it. It’s the horse charm.
“He’d kissed me before,” Mom continues. “But after that night it was different, somehow. Things had changed. We talked until the sun came up. He finally admitted to me what he was. I had already guessed that he was an angel. I felt it when we first met. At the time I wanted nothing to do with angels, so I tried to ignore him.”
“Right.” I smile. “Angels can be a pain in the ass.”
Her mouth twists, her eyes twinkling for a moment before she gets serious again. “But he wasn’t merely an angel. He told me how he had fallen, and why. He showed me his black wings. And he confessed that he’d been trying to seduce me because the Watchers wanted angel-blood offspring.”
“Whoa. He just admitted it?”
“I was furious,” she says. “It was all that I’d been running away from my entire life. I slapped him. He caught my wrist and asked me to forgive him. He said he loved me. He asked me if I could ever love him back.”
She stops again. I am transfixed by her story. I can see it, the images pouring out with her feelings into my brain. His eyes, earnest, full of sorrow and love, pleading. His voice, soft as he told her, I know that I’m a wretch. But is it possible that you would ever love me?
I gasp. “You lied.”
“I lied. I said I could never care for him. I told him I never wanted to see him again. And he looked at me for a long moment, and then he was gone. Just like that. I never told anyone about that night. Michael knows, I think, in the way he seems to know everything. But I haven’t ever talked about it until now.” She exhales through her lips like she’s just set down something heavy. “So there’s your story. I lied.”