She didn’t speak again until we reached a huge outcropping of rock jutting out of the mountainside like a stone finger pointing to the sky. To get to the top we had to climb about twenty feet of sheer rock face, which Mom did quickly, easily, without looking back.
“Mom, wait!” I called, and scrambled after her. I’d never climbed so much as the rock wall in a gym. Her shoes flicked a spray of rubble down the slope. She disappeared over the top.
“Mom!” I yelled.
She peered down at me.
“You can do this, Clara,” she said. “Trust me. It will be worth it.”
I didn’t really have a choice. I reached up and grabbed at the cliff face and started to climb, telling myself not to look down where the mountain dropped off beneath me. Then I was at the top. I stood next to Mom, panting.
“Wow,” I said, looking out.
“Pretty amazing, right?”
Below us stretched the valley of redwoods rimmed by the distant mountains. This was one of those top-of-the-world places, where you could see for miles in every direction. I closed my eyes and spread my arms, letting the wind move past me, smelling the air—a heady combination of trees and moss and growing things, a hint of dirt and creek water and pure, clean oxygen. An eagle turned in a slow circle over the forest. I could easily imagine what that would feel like, to glide through the air, nothing between you and endless blue heaven but little tufts of cloud.
“Have a seat,” Mom said. I opened my eyes and turned to see her sitting on a boulder. She patted the space beside her. I sat down next to her. She rummaged in her pack for a bottle of water, opened it, and drank deeply, then offered the bottle to me. I took it and drank, watching her. She was distracted, her eyes distant, lost in thought.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked.
She started, then laughed nervously.
“No, honey,” she said. “I just have something important to tell you.”
My head spun with all of the things that she might be about to spring on me.
“I’ve been coming to this spot for a really long time,” she said.
“You’ve met a guy,” I guessed. It seemed like a distinct possibility.
“What are you talking about?” Mom asked.
Mom had never dated much, even though everyone who met her liked her immediately, and men followed her around the room with their eyes. She liked to say that she was too busy for a steady relationship, too wrapped up with her job at Apple as a computer programmer, too occupied with being a single mom the rest of the time. I thought she was still hung up on Dad. But maybe she had some secret passionate affair she was about to confess to me. Maybe within a couple of months I’d be standing in a pink dress with flowers in my hair, watching her marry some guy I was supposed to call Dad. It’d happened to a couple of my friends.
“You brought me out here to tell me about this guy you met, and you love him, and you want to marry him or something,” I said quickly, not looking at her because I didn’t want her to see how much I hated the idea.
“Clara Gardner.”
“Really, I’d be okay with it.”
“That’s very sweet, Clara, but wrong,” she said. “I brought you out here because I think you’re old enough to know the truth.”
“Okay,” I said anxiously. That sounded big. “What truth?”
She took a deep breath and let it out, then leaned toward me.
“When I was about your age I lived in San Francisco with my grandmother,” she began.
I knew a little about this. Her father was out of the picture before she was born, and her mother died giving birth to her. I always thought it sounded like a fairy tale, like my mom was the orphaned, tragic heroine in one of my books.
“We lived in a big white house on Mason Street,” she said.
“Why haven’t you taken me there?” We’d been to San Francisco many times, at least two or three times a year, and she’d never said anything about a house on Mason Street.
“It burned down years ago,” she said. “There’s a souvenir shop there now, I think. Anyway, early one morning I woke up to the house violently shaking. I had to grab on to the bedpost so I wouldn’t be tossed right out of bed.”
“Earthquake,” I assumed. Growing up in California, I’d been through a few earthquakes, none that lasted more than a few seconds or done any real damage, but still pretty scary.
Mom nodded. “I could hear the dishes falling out of the china cabinet and windows breaking all over the house. Then there was a loud groaning sound. The wall of my bedroom gave way, and the bricks from the chimney crashed down on top of me in bed.”
I stared at her in horror.
“I don’t know how long I lay there,” Mom said after a minute. “When I opened my eyes again I saw the figure of a man standing over me. He leaned down and said, ‘Be still, child.’ Then he lifted me in his arms, and the bricks slid off my body like they weighed nothing. He carried me to the window. All the glass was broken out, and I could see people running out of their houses into the street. And then a strange thing happened, and we were someplace else. It still resembled my room, only different somehow, like someone else was living there, undamaged as if the quake had never happened. Outside the window there was so much light, so bright it hurt to look.”
“Then what happened?”
“The man set me on my feet. I was amazed that I could stand. My nightgown was a mess, and I was a bit dizzy, but aside from that I was fine.
“‘Thank you,’ I said to him. I didn’t know what else to say. He had golden hair that gleamed in the light like nothing I’d ever seen before. And he was tall, the tallest man I’d ever seen, and very handsome.”
She smiled at the memory. I rubbed at the goose bumps that had jumped up along my arms. I tried to picture this tall, fine-looking guy with shiny blond hair, like some kind of Brad Pitt sweeping in to rescue my mom. I frowned. The image made me uneasy, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.
“He said, ‘You’re welcome, Margaret,’” Mom said.
“How did he know your name?”
“I wondered that myself. I asked him. He told me that he was a friend of my father’s. They served together, he said. And he said that he’d been watching me from the day that I was born.”
“Whoa. Like your own personal guardian angel.”
“Exactly. Like my guardian angel,” Mom said, nodding. “Although he wouldn’t call himself that, of course.”