Guardian (15 page)

“-spend all hours of the day searching the city, assuming you were doing the same! And yet yesterday we had to call you for help, because you were late meeting Daniel! Come to find out you’ve been spending time with a
girl
every day!” The man was shorter than Rafael, but that didn’t keep him from berating him. His movements were jerky and agitated as he paced and waved his arms to illustrate all his points.

Rafael stood with his hands cross over his broad chest, and far away as I was, I could feel the fingers of his aloofness touching me. “I don’t appreciate being followed,” he said in a dangerously low voice, one that would have sent me running.

The other man stood his ground. “What else were we supposed to do? You wouldn’t tell us anything! We’re supposed to keep everything we do a
secret
, Rafael! To be discreet with our actions and what we can do. Spending so much time with that girl is
dangerous
!”

“Don’t lecture me about spending time with her, Matthias,” Rafael said, and now his voice was sharp as a knife, his body wound a little tighter, more menacing as he addressed his apparent friend. “You, out of all of us. Not too long ago you and Rachel-”

“Rachel was thirty-three!” Matthias cried out. “Not a child in high school! I-” Suddenly he stopped speaking, and both he and Rafael stood straight to attention, their heads cocked to some noise that I couldn’t make out.

“We need to go,” Rafael said without preamble, and immediately the two of them turned and ran around the corner of the hedges, out of my view and too quickly for me to have a hope of catching them.

I quickly gathered up Colton and Grace and took them home, leaving the bracelet for lost, since there had been little hope of finding it to begin with. I had more important things to think about.

That night, I allowed Colton and Grace to stay up later than normal and watch television, to console Grace for the loss of the bracelet. It was a hollow victory for the two of them, since only half an hour into the Disney movie, they were out cold. I chuckled softly to myself and kept on with my calculus homework, letting the world, inside the house and out, darken and quiet around me. It grew so still, in fact, that when a loud
POP
echoed, I nearly jumped out of my skin, and then froze, looking toward the window. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard a gunshot go off in our neighborhood, and since we definitely didn’t live in the best part of town, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

This point was proved to me just a moment later when I heard it again, a
CRACK
that sounded as if it came from directly next to my house. Before I could even process whether it was a good idea or not, I was up and running to the front door, bursting onto the front porch and looking wildly up and down the street. I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to go out and check on things, since my normal reaction to gunshots were to hide in my bedroom. But all my hair was standing on end this time, as if I already knew what I was going to find.

There! At the corner of where Broad Street intersected with my street, two figures stood under a street light, one crumpling to the ground as I watched. A tall, dark form that seemed eerily, creepily familiar to me. The other man was holding a gun, I could see it clear as day as he still held it upright, pointing to where the other figure had been.

“NO!” I screamed, and stumbled down the steps of my porch, sprinting for the street corner.

The shooter, by the grace of God or simply because he was scared, ran away, disappearing down Broad Street. I ran faster than I ever had before in my life, my breath coming in desperate pants, exiting my lungs with a shock at every thump of my foot against the pavement. And then I was there, falling to my knees next to Rafael. He lay on the ground, his dark t-shirt shining in the dim yellow light. Shining with blood.

My vision blurred as I began to cry, carefully touching Rafael’s face before ripping his shirt open. I gasped as I saw the bullet holes in his body, both about the size of my thumbnail but bleeding, still bleeding. One in his chest, the other lower, underneath his ribcage. I tore off my sweater and pressed it against the wounds, but could hardly feel his chest moving.
He wasn’t breathing
.

“Don’t be dead,” I sobbed, my whole body sagging in despair. “Please, don’t be dead!”

There was no one else around to help, no one at all roaming the streets, and Rafael was going to die before I could do anything about it. A sudden shock seemed to run through him, his whole body tightening, and for a moment I thought it was the end, that his heart was stopping. But then his arm moved, twitched, and reached up to grab mine. My own breath caught and I leaned over him once more, not even daring to hope, cupping his face in one hand.

“Rafael? Rafael!” His eyelids fluttered, his hand tightened on my wrist and then went limp, dragging my hand away from where it was holding my sweater against bleeding wounds. “No, you have to let me keep it-” I stopped talking abruptly as my sweater fell away from Rafael’s body, and instead of seeing the two small holes, as I had before, I saw nothing marring Rafael’s torso. No bullet holes, no wounds, there wasn’t even blood.

I lifted up my hands, expecting to see the blood that had stained them as I tore his shirt open, but they were clean too. I picked up my sweater, unsure of what to think, but it wasn’t even damp. I looked back down at Rafael, unbelieving. His eyelids fluttered again, and I put my hands on his shoulders and shook him roughly.

“Wake up! Wake up, Rafael!”

As I was leaning over him, his eyes suddenly snapped open, his face a hard mask as he grabbed my arms reflexively and pushed me away. I stumbled backward onto my bottom, gasping as Rafael sat up, pushing his hair off of his forehead.

“How?” was all I could say, from where I was sprawled in the grass. “
How
, Rafael?”

By then he was standing, and seemed to finally register that it was
me
sitting there. His face darkened, an expression unlike anything I had ever seen on his face before, a look of unbridled fury, and he reached down to yank me to my feet. He pulled so hard it hurt my arm, and I let out a small cry of pain, though it didn’t keep him from dragging me along behind him, taking us both back to my front porch.

He thrust me up the steps but stayed on the sidewalk, and warned in a quiet, intense tone, his face close to mine, “Tell no one of what you saw, Lyla, no one, not ever. Do you understand me?”

“No!” I cried, sobbing again because I didn’t understand why he was being so
mean
. It was so unlike Rafael, so opposite of everything he had ever done before. “What
happened,
Rafael? You were shot, why are you-”

“
Tell no one!
” Rafael thundered, shocking me into silence. And then, surreal as a dream, wings sprouted from his back. Long, birdlike wings, each one at least as long as Rafael was tall, seeming to grow out of his back. I would have thought I’d imagined them, except he lifted them up and down, and a chilly rush of wind cut through me, raising goose bumps as I watched Rafael lift himself up into the air and fly away from me. He
flew
away from me.

The next day, I sprinted to the park. I ran so fast, the world was a blur around me. I didn’t know what extraordinary events had happened the night before, but I knew that the time had come to demand some answers from Rafael. I had let things go after he had rescued me from Austin, and I had ignored his strange compulsion, his glowing edges, the fact that he seemed to have followed me and knew secret things about me, but this, this was going too far.

I knew several things for certain, though they were making my stomach twist and turn as I ran; Rafael had been severely hurt last night, but between the time it took me to apply pressure to his body, and then lift my sweater to check the bleeding, the wound had disappeared. All the marks on his body were gone, miraculously healed. Then, once again, Rafael had completely brushed off my questions about this incredible event, so coldly it had made me feel slightly ill. And finally, Rafael had flown away. On wings. He had
flown
away on his
wings
.

The image of him, so dark and threatening, rising up into the air on his enormous wingspan, had stayed in my head all night. Thinking about it, I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life.

And that was the reason I was running, plaid skirt flapping and my math book still clutched in my arms from my final period, to our bench in the park. Colton and Grace trailed after me, shouting and yelling like it was all a game. When I arrived, cheeks apple red and gasping for air, he hadn’t arrived yet.

That was all right, I told myself firmly. He would come. Hadn’t he been a little late the past few days? He would be here. I let my backpack and book fall to the ground and began pacing. I checked all the entrances, and began pacing again. Four-fifteen, four-thirty, five o’clock. The threat of tears loomed but by five-fifteen I had regained control. I finally whirled around to the bench, wondering if he had been too busy to come today, when I saw it.

I took the three steps to the bench slowly and carefully, as though it was a bomb that could explode if not treated with extreme care. But that was a lie. In truth,
I
was the bomb, kept held tightly inside. And when I confirmed for my own eyes what was there on the bench, the timer went off and I burst into tears, collapsing down and burying my face in my hands. For there, sitting on the bench, was a little black rubber bracelet, the words SEEK HOLINESS imprinted on it.

I don’t think it was entirely accurate to say I was only a shell of a human being after Rafael left. I couldn’t deny I was upset and distraught, not to mention very confused. I was also extremely hurt and a little angry. Because he had made me believe in him, and just like everyone else, he had let me down. The anger I felt largely at him and myself helped the most. That was what helped get me through each day.

But more than anything, Rafael’s absence made me realize just how empty and
boring
my life had been. Each day was a monotonous repetition of the last: school, dinner, studying, watching Colton and Grace. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d actually been. I had friends, yes, but none that actually knew all my secrets, as Rafael had. None that seemed to know exactly what I was thinking all the time, as Rafael had.

That first day, of course, I scrambled to find my cell phone to call Rafael, sure that this couldn’t be happening. And there I had discovered the cruelest surprise of all. Rafael’s number had been deleted. It was gone from Colton’s and Grace’s phones as well. I knew instinctively, instantly, that Rafael had deleted them. So we would have no way to track him down or even speak to him.

Natalie was shocked the first time I asked her to study with me. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather hang out with
Rafael
?” she asked snidely.

I looked down and fiddled with my pen. “He’s gone,” I said, very quietly. “He left town or something. I don’t know where he is.” There was a long moment of silence, and then I felt Natalie’s hand on my arm. When I looked up, her eyes were sad.

“Ly’s, I’m sorry. I’ve been a real jerk about the whole situation. Who knows? Maybe he’s a great guy. Who am I to judge? I don’t even know him.”

I fought back a small burst of annoyance that Natalie had chosen to be gracious and realize this
after
Rafael was gone. “Yeah, he was really great,” I said, staring down at my desk and blinking rapidly. “But he left. So how about it? You on for studying together?”

That night, I went over to Natalie’s and studied. The next day, as I was walking home from school, I suddenly and inexplicably said, “Ready to go to the park?”

Colton and Grace looked up at me, excited. “Will Mr. Rafael be there?” they asked, jumping around me.

I stopped walking, unsure of how to explain this to them. “Colton, Grace, Mr. Rafael had to leave. He had to go to another place for his work, and so he isn’t here anymore. And, well, I don’t think he’s gonna come back.”

“Not even to visit?” Grace asked wistfully.

I shook my head, biting my lip and trying to ignore the large lump in my throat. Since it was about the size of a baseball, this was virtually impossible.

“That’s too bad. I liked him,” Colton said, almost nonchalantly. Then he took Grace’s hand and they sped off to the monkey bars.

I sat down on my bench, and as I thought longer and harder on it, I started getting mad. Colton’s words were on a constant replay in my mind. I hadn’t even realized that they might form some kind of attachment to Rafael, since he had been my friend, not theirs. But the times we had gone to the movies, the times he had taken us out to eat and bartered for the toy Grace wanted, or acquiesced to Colton’s demand they throw the baseball, all stuck out in my mind.

And suddenly I realized Grace and Colton could have seen Rafael as a fatherly figure in their lives. He and I had been joined at the hip for so long, and didn’t they see me as a mother? I could have kicked myself now, in retrospect. How could I have not realized it before?

That was when I became furious. Knowing all of this, Rafael had just up and left, with no warning or hint or reason or anything. Knowing how I was, my fears, my sensitivity about Colton and Grace, he had left me. It seemed to prove every fear, every suspicion I had ever had about people. I could trust no one,
no one
but myself, tell
no one
the truth but God. This self-righteous fury was what kept me from mourning the loss of what had truly been the best friend I’d ever had.