Hallowed (27 page)

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.