“Pretty much what Jeffrey said. Just keeled over in front of everybody.”

“Oh, honey.” She offers me a sympathetic pout.

“When I woke up, there was this girl who helped me. I think she could be a friend. And then . . .” I swallow. “He came back with the nurse and carried me to the nurse’s office.”

Her mouth drops open. I’ve never seen her look so astonished. “He carried you?”

“Yes, like some lame damsel in distress.”

She laughs. I sigh.

“Did you tell her his name yet?” comes Jeffrey’s voice from the kitchen.

“Shut up,” I call.

“His name is Christian,” he calls back. “Can you believe that? We came all this way so Clara could save a guy named Christian.”

“I’m aware of the irony.”

“But you know his name now,” Mom says softly.

“Yes.” I’m unable to hold back a smile. “I know his name.”

“And it’s all happening. The pieces are coming together.” She looks more serious now. “Are you ready for this, kiddo?”

It’s all I’ve thought about for weeks, and I’ve known for the past two years that my time would come. But still, am I ready?

“I think so?” I say.

I hope.

Chapter 4

Wingspan

I was fourteen when Mom told me about the angels. One morning at breakfast she announced that she was keeping me out of school for the day and we were going on a mother-daughter outing, just she and I. We dropped Jeffrey off at school and drove about thirty miles from our house in Mountain View to Big Basin Redwoods State Park, in the mountains near the ocean. My mom parked in the main lot, slung a backpack over her shoulder, said, “Last one up is a slowpoke,” and headed straight off along a paved trail. I had to practically jog to keep up with her.

“Some mothers take their daughters to get their ears pierced,” I called after her. There was no one else on the trail. Fog shifted through the redwoods. The trees were as much as twenty feet in diameter, and so tall you couldn’t see where they stopped, only the small gaps between the branches, where beams of light slanted onto the forest floor.

“Where are we going?” I asked breathlessly.

“Buzzards Roost,” Mom said over her shoulder. Like that helped.

We hiked past deserted campgrounds, splashed across creeks, ducked under gigantic mossy beams where trees had fallen across the path. Mom was quiet. This wasn’t one of those mother-daughter bonding times like when she took me to Fisherman’s Wharf or the Winchester Mystery House or IKEA. The stillness of the forest was punctuated only by our breathing and the scuff of our feet on the trail, a silence so heavy and suffocating that I wanted to yell something just to shatter it.

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.”