She pulls her shirt back down. “Get out,” she says, almost a whisper.
“Ange, wait.”
She stands up and crosses to the door, holds it open for me. “I don’t need this from you right now.”
“Ange, I only want to hel—”
“Sounds like you’ve got your own stuff going on,” she says, still not looking at me. “You should worry about that.”
“But what about your purpose?” I say. “What about ‘the seventh is ours’ and the guy in the gray suit?”
“Don’t talk about my purpose,” she says fiercely between clenched teeth.
Then she shuts the door in my face.
I wander to the Old Union in a daze, sink to a bench next to the Claw fountain in White Plaza. I sit there, staring at the falling water, until the sun is much lower in the sky. People are all around me, coming and going from the CoHo on their search for coffee. I don’t hear them. I only hear the fear in Angela’s voice.
I’m pregnant.
This is how Christian finds me, dazed and silent on the bench. He takes one look at me and drops to his knees in front of me, peers up into my face.
“Clara?” Clara? What’s wrong?
I blink, look into his worried green eyes. Should I tell him?
I don’t have a choice. He can read the shocked thought like I’m shouting it. His mouth drops open.
“She’s …” He can’t even finish the sentence.
My eyes burn. What is she going to do? I keep thinking. What is she going to do?
Christian puts his hand over mine.
“Clara,” he says quietly. “I think it’s time you told me about what happened in Italy.”
So I tell him. I tell him about how, this one night in Rome, on the metro, of all places, we ran into this guy, and Angela totally freaked just looking at him. How she sneaked away that night to see him, and didn’t come home until morning. How he turned out to be Phen, the mentor angel she’d told me about before, but he was clearly more than her mentor. I tell Christian about how Angela desperately wanted me to like Phen, but I just couldn’t. I saw Phen for what he was—a gray soul, weary with the world. How I didn’t think he could truly love her, but Angela loved him, and acted like she didn’t love him, so she could keep seeing him and call it casual.
“So what do you think?” I ask Christian when I’m done with the story.
He shakes his head. “I think this changes everything.”
8
WHEN I MET YOUR MOTHER
It’s a few weeks later, winter break, and I’m standing next to Christian, holding his hand as we watch Walter’s coffin being lowered into the ground. Snow is coming down, thick and heavy, blanketing Aspen Hill Cemetery. The circle of faces around us is familiar, all members of the congregation: Stephen, the pastor; Carolyn, who was my mother’s nurse; Julia, who’s an all-around pain in the butt, if you want my opinion, but at least she’s here; and finally I settle on Corbett Phibbs, the old Quartarius who was my high school English teacher, who looks especially somber, his hands folded as he gazes into the grave. He must not be that far away from this fate himself, I think. But then he glances up at me and winks.
“Amen,” Stephen says. The crowd of mourners starts to clear out, everybody headed home in case the storm (because it’s December in Wyoming) becomes a blizzard, but Christian stays, so I stay.
The snow, I’m pretty sure, is Billy’s doing. She’s standing on the other side of me, wearing a long white parka that makes the shining black of her hair look like spilled ink down her shoulders, and the snow is swirling around her, drifting down as she stares at the hole before us with an anguish in her eyes that makes me want to hug her. The snow’s her way of crying. It’s hard to see her this way when normally she’s so strong and steady, so quick to make a joke to break the tension. At my mother’s funeral she smiled every time she met my eyes, I remember, and I was oddly comforted by that, as if Billy smiling was proof that nothing truly bad had happened to my mom. Just a little death, is all. A change of location.
But this is her husband.
They start to fill in the grave, and she turns away. I reach out and touch her shoulder. The sharp, aching chasm of her grief opens up in my mind. So little time, she thinks. For all of us.
She sighs. “I need to get out of here.”
“Okay. See you at the house?” I ask. “I can make us some dinner.”
She nods and hugs me, a stiff hug.
“Billy—”
“I’ll be all right. See you later, kid.” She strides off through the snow, leaving a trail of dark tracks behind her, and after she’s gone, the snow lets up.
Christian doesn’t say anything as the men work to fill in the hole. A muscle moves in his cheek. I step closer, until our shoulders touch, and I will my strength to flow into him the way his came into me the day we buried my mother.
I wish I’d known Walter better. Or at all. I don’t know if more than three sentences ever passed between us. He was a hard man, always guarded, and he never quite warmed up to me or to the idea that I was involved in Christian’s vision. But Christian loved him. I can feel that, Christian’s love, his hurt now that Walter’s gone, his sense of being alone in the world.
You’re not alone, I whisper in his mind.
His hand tightens in mine. “I know,” he says out loud, his voice hoarse with the tears he’s holding back. He smiles and looks at me, his eyes dark and red-rimmed. He reaches to brush snow out of my hair.
“Thank you for coming here with me,” he says.
A bunch of trite responses spring to mind—you’re welcome, don’t mention it, no problem, it’s the least I can do—but none of them feel right, so I simply say, “I wanted to come.”
He nods, glances briefly at the white stone bench beside his uncle’s grave that serves as his mother’s headstone. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out. “I should get out of here, too.”
“You want me to go with you?” I ask.
“No. I’ll be all right,” he says, and for a moment there’s the shimmer of tears in his eyes. He turns away, then pauses and turns back. He smiles in a sad way and gazes straight into my eyes. “This is going to sound weird and inappropriate, probably … but will you go out with me, Clara?”
“Out where?” I ask stupidly.
“On a date,” he says.
“What, you mean now?”