“Let them go,” I hear Christian say as I reach the door. “They need to go home.” I don’t remember the drive back to my house. I’m just here, suddenly parked in the driveway, hands clenched on the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles are white. In the rearview mirror I see Jeffrey’s truck parked behind me. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve probably broken a dozen traffic laws to get here as fast as I possibly could, some part of me wants to drive away. I don’t want to go inside. But I have to. I have to know the truth.
Angela’s been wrong before, I think, although right now I can’t remember when. She’s been wrong. She’s full of crap.
But she’s not wrong.
It’s not Tucker’s funeral, in my dream of Aspen Hill Cemetery. It’s Mom’s.
I feel like I’ve been on the teacups at Disneyland, all vertigo, my head spinning even when the rest of me is holding still. My emotions are a jumbled cocktail of relief about Tucker, mixed with shock and crazy hurt, guilt and a whole different level of grief and confusion. I could throw up. I could fall down. I could cry.
I get out of the car and walk slowly up the steps to the house. Jeffrey falls in behind me as I open the front door and move through the entryway, past the living room and the kitchen and straight down the hall to Mom’s office. The door’s open a crack, and I see her reading something on her computer, her face the picture of concentration as she stares at the screen.
An odd calm comes over me. I knock, a gentle rap of knuckles on the wood. She turns and glances up.
“Hi, sweetie,” she says. “I’m glad you’re home. We really do need to talk about—”
“Angel-bloods only live a hundred and twenty years?” I blurt out.
Her smile fades. She looks from me to Jeffrey standing behind me. Then she turns back to her computer and shuts it down.
“Angela?” she asks.
“Who cares how we know?” I say, and my voice sounds sharp in my ears, shrill. “Is it true?”
“Come in here,” she says. “Sit down.”
I sit on one of her comfy leather chairs. She turns to Jeffrey, who folds his arms over his broad chest and holds his ground in the doorway.
“So you’re dying,” he says in a total monotone.
“Yes.”
His face goes slack with dismay, his arms dropping to his sides. I think he expected her to deny it. “What, you’re going to die just because God decided that we shouldn’t live too long?”
“It’s more complicated than that,” she says. “But essentially, that’s the gist.”
“But it’s not fair. You’re still young.”
“Jeffrey,” Mom says. “Please sit down.”
He sits in the chair next to mine and now she can turn and address us both. I watch her face as she tries to collect her thoughts.
“How does it happen?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. It varies for all of us. But I’ve been getting progressively weaker since last winter. Markedly so these past few weeks.”
The headaches she keeps having. The fatigue she blamed on work problems. The coldness in her hands and feet, the way her normal warmth seemed to leave her. The new wrinkles. The shadows under her eyes. The way she’s always sitting down these days, always resting. I can’t believe I didn’t put it all together before.
“So you’re getting weaker,” I say. “And then what, you’ll just fade away?”
“My spirit will leave this body.”
“When?” Jeffrey asks.
She gives us that sad, thoughtful look I’m so familiar with by now. “I don’t know.”
“Spring,” I say, because that’s one thing I do know. My dream has shown me.
Something hot and heavy starts to rise up in my chest, so powerful it roars in my ears, squeezes the air out of my lungs. I gasp for breath. “When were you planning to tell us?” Her midnight eyes flash with sympathy, which I find ironic, since she’s the one who’s dying. “You needed to focus on your purpose, not on me.” She shakes her head. “And I suppose I was also being selfish. I didn’t want to be dying yet. I was going to tell you today,” she says with another weary sigh. “I tried to tell you this morning—”
“But there’s something we can do,” interrupts Jeffrey. “Some higher power we can appeal to, right?”
“No, honey,” she answers gently.
“We can pray or something,” he insists.
“We all die, even angel-bloods.” She gets up and goes to kneel in front of Jeffrey’s chair, putting her hands over his. “It’s my turn now.”
“But we need you,” he chokes out. “What will happen to us?”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought,” she says. “I think what’s best for you might be to stay here, complete the school year. So I will transfer guardianship to Billy, who’s agreed to take you.
If that’s all right with you.”
“Not Dad?” Jeffrey asks with a quiver in his voice. “Does Dad even know?”
“Your father, he’s not . . . He doesn’t really have the resources to take care of you.”
“He doesn’t have the time, you mean,” I add woodenly.
“You can’t die, Mom,” Jeffrey says. “You can’t.”
She hugs him. For a split second he resists, tries to pull away, but then he gives in, his shoulders shaking as she holds him, a terrible rough sob rumbling out of his chest. I hear that hurt-animal noise come out of my brother and part of me starts to split in half. But I don’t cry. I want to be mad at her, accuse her of being a big fat liar my whole life, shout that she’s abandoning us, maybe punch a hole in the wall myself, but I don’t do that either. I remember what she told me this morning, about death. I thought she was talking about me and Tucker, but now I know she was talking about me and her.
I find myself sliding out of my chair, moving on my knees over to Jeffrey’s chair. Mom pulls back and looks at me, her eyes shining with tears. She opens up the hug to let me in, and I snuggle against her, enveloped in a mix of her rose and vanilla perfume and Jeffrey’s cologne. I can’t feel anything—it’s like I’m floating out of my body, somehow, disconnected. I still can’t breathe.
“I love you both so much,” she says against my hair. “You have made my life into something so extraordinary, you can’t even know.”