The Girl With Borrowed Wings (10 page)

He put me down outside the house. When he was satisfied that I wasn’t showing any resistance, he quietly pushed open our front door. Then he waited, watching, until I stepped inside.

CHAPTER TEN

In Which I Jump Out the Window

It was cold inside. He made me take my shoes off first. Then my room—I ended up there somehow, my feet on the chill floor, looking straight ahead as I heard the door close behind me. My bedroom looked exactly the same as I’d left it. I stood delicately balanced on a high wire above hysteria.

There was a big empty space inside of me struggling. I wanted the sun to explode and swallow up the world. I wanted the universe to be dark, all the tiny stars to be snuffed out, as easily as my father had rolled the bird up, like a bit of scrap paper in his hands. He’d constructed me—he’d crushed the bird—it was all the same to him.

It’s true that I’ve always been his creation, as if I’m a project he put together for school when he was young. I’m the child, the miracle of life, the baby who has to be fed, kept clean, and told what to do. But he has never thought of me as a thinking, feeling person. Around him, I’m not real.

I considered throwing myself onto the bed and crying. But that was too dramatic.

And then I was disgusted at myself for calmly trying to calculate the best way to express my grief. It made everything seem so artificial. That was the worst thing. Even alone in my bedroom, I was too inhibited to cry.

After a moment my bedroom door opened. I turned to see my mom stick her head in.

“What did you do now?”

“Tried to save a bird,” I said tonelessly.

Her eyes widened, just for a second, but then she threw me a look of exasperation. Probably my father was in a bad mood now, taking it out on her, and she blamed me. She didn’t say anything, only sighed and left.

Suddenly a bubble of cramped anger swelled in my chest.

I wish we could be like animals, abandon our young after a certain age. I’d like to just wander off one day, over the vast plains, and never come back.

I wouldn’t mind if my parents outright hated me. It’s the fact they pretend to love me that I can’t stand. Could
that
be love? It’s a crippled, painful, sour, unnatural thing. But I know that’s only how I feel because I’m unnatural myself—because my heart is as clean and empty and unfeeling as the open sky.

I saw now that it had been dumb to go outside.

The door opened again. This time it was my father. He had his sternest face on.

“I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said. “Have you?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“I don’t know what’s got into you lately, Frenenqer. It started with the souk,” he said, in the tight voice of a sculptor watching a masterpiece developing flaws, growing cracks. “I’ve decided that you must be reading too much. These books are teaching you disrespect.”

“But—”

“No answering back.”

I fell silent again.

He said, “I am sick of this teenage rebellion phase.”

I didn’t answer back.

He took that as insolence too. “You think you’re smart, don’t you?” he said.

The problem is, there’s always something inside me that’s watching, and thinking, and judging. God knows I try to hide it, but I can’t turn my mind off; and my father
hates
to be judged. Leaving the door open behind him, he came in and heaved a stack of my books off the floor.

“What—what’re you doing?” I said.

No answer. He left the room with the stack and I stayed standing there, awkwardly, like an idiot. After a moment he returned for another armful. And another. And another. It took a long time. He didn’t glance at me as he worked. There was a dark closed-up look on his face that reminded me of a soldier. Steadily, he dismantled the walls of books that protected my bed. I watched it all fall apart. Some of the novels he didn’t bother to carry. There were too many of them, so he kicked them along the floor instead. As he was lifting up the final stack of books, one—
The Innocence of Father Brown
—slipped off the top and fell with a quiet thump to the floor, pages splayed. I bent over and picked it up. I slid the book on top of his stack and stood aside as he carried it away. Then the door closed and he was gone.

My room looked very bare without the books, smaller than I had remembered. There was dust all over the white floor. And cockroaches. A black wave of them rippled away into the walls.

I stared at the new emptiness around my bed.

In Spain last night I’d told Sangris that, when I was a little girl, I used to love my parents, but that I had stopped. And it’s true. Now I remembered the exact day, the exact moment, when I stopped.

It was the day my father took away a book I was halfway through. I forget why he was angry, but that was his punishment. He didn’t even bother to hide the book properly. He knew that I wouldn’t dare to retrieve it. And I crawled into the bathroom and I cried—I still cried freely in those days. My mind was like a whirlpool when I was younger, constantly sucking me down. Nowadays I have myself under better control.

I remember the bathroom and the cracked khaki sink. I knelt on the floor, held on to the sides of the sink to keep myself steady, and shook hard with hatred for half an hour. I muffled the noises coming from my mouth so that no one would hear.

I don’t know why it affected me like that. Such a small thing, and I dreamed of running away. I was eleven years old. New to the oasis. I remember that incident because it was the first time the feeling didn’t go away afterward. It stayed, and it’s still there, a round hard lump where my heart muscle has cramped.

After that, I felt very alone and cold and miserable, but in a good way. Everything became better once I stopped caring for my parents. Things hurt less. Though for months afterward, whenever I went outside, I expected the sky to spit on me, because no matter how much improved my life seemed to be after the emotion stopped, I knew perfectly well that children
should
love their parents, and that I was a monstrosity. But I’m okay: With time, I settled, I grew used to it—after all, people can get used to anything—and it became mere background noise to my life.

But now I stood in the middle of my room, stunned by the flat blankness of the floor. And slowly, slowly, my mind caught up with what had just happened.

I’d handed my father the book that had fallen. I’d practically held the door open for him.

The anger and bitterness stirred up inside of me then. I can ignore the feelings if they’re left alone, but a gust of wind sends them all whirling. I felt the sparks catch fire. My back—the emptiness where there should have been wings—ached. Itching so that I could barely breathe. I shut my eyes. I was trapped. I stood in the center of the room, walled in. Then I remembered. There was one thing that my father hadn’t forbidden me to do, because he hadn’t known about it. I went to the window, shoved it open. I felt my ribs screaming under some enormous pressure. I didn’t allow it to reach my mouth. I couldn’t. He would have heard. I shoved my head and shoulders out into the heat. Above me was the chemical blue sky; up ahead, the road with rows of white cars sleeking across it; below, the mingled dust and sand by the side of the pavement. Now that the bird wasn’t moving, I couldn’t spot it, and I was glad about that. I’d hate to see.

I wanted Sangris to come. There were many things I wanted. I couldn’t believe anymore that out there, somewhere, were the wide lands of Free people, and the coolness and the open spaces of eternity. Right now the world felt about the size of the trunk of a car. I shut my eyes hard and the blaze of red almost knocked me over. I held on to the ledge tightly until the wave passed.

How was I supposed to grow and live stuck in a place like this? Even weeds couldn’t grow here, so what chance did I have? The bird was lucky that it had turned to bone—it suited the desert better now. Bone and dust is natural. Flesh isn’t. I could tell that the desert sensed me as something impudent and short-lived, and it was slowly creeping around, sucking the air out of me, turning me into a part of the place I hated. A dry hard land and a dry hard girl to match. I wanted shadows and movement and mossy things, and a living sun instead of a dead one, but it was all out of reach and my body was useless, wingless. I don’t know how long I stood fixed there. The pressure building up. I couldn’t think.

Then the familiar voice, clear as a sudden stream of cool water: “Nenner?”

I opened my eyes and there he was. His eyes were like lemon ice, and that was all I could see of him against the white blaze of light. But I reacted as if I had expected him to be there. At once the frustration snapped and I pulled myself up onto the windowsill. “Sangris,” I said, “quick!”

“What?”

His eyes widened in surprise. He was human, but I didn’t pay close attention. It was enough to see that wide, dragonfly-transparent wings were glimmering at his back, moving so fast they were a blur.

He was studying my face with a frown. “Nenner, are you okay?”

“No, I’ll explain later, but I need to get out of here,” I said, all in one breath.

He looked bewildered. “It’s daytime. What if your father needs you and can’t find you? You said he’d—”

I had to crouch. The window frame was too small. I was inside that square, tight and trapped, the glass above me wouldn’t move when I touched it, and claustrophobia was squeezing me, and the heat pushed at me, trying to force me back into the room, and Sangris was being irritating, so I jumped.

Beneath me were the dry pebbleless stretches of sand, and pale roadside, flaking like a diseased skin, and the hard knots of acacia trees, prickling and curling as if in pain. My room was in the highest floor of the house. The dead white light roared below—if I fell, it would be like falling onto the surface of the sun. But the next moment I thudded into him and he caught me.

The wings blurred and sent a breeze into my face until I could nearly breathe. He’d caught me awkwardly, one arm under mine and the other around my waist, and the sunlight was so bright, it was making it hard for me to see anything. “Let’s go, let’s go,” I said, clinging on, afraid to slip.

Sangris shifted, getting a better grip. And catapulted us away. I left the window open behind me, and the curtains parted, and my house abandoned in broad midday with my father awake inside. Anybody in the cars going past could have seen us too. It was the most reckless thing I’d ever done and none of it mattered. I had to breathe.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In Which I Climb a Ladder Out of the Desert

Everything inside of me was coiled tight. I struggled to draw the air in. But very soon the sky became cold and smooth, streaming pearl gray around us, like swells of water. I breathed deeply, hungrily, my pulse fluttering. We’d entered a space of low cloud. All around us was blurry paleness, as though the sky had cataracts.

This might have seemed a dreary place, the two of us lost inside the clouds, but sometimes, through a gap in the mist, the sunlight suddenly slanted through, splattering us with rainbows, gone in an instant. Sangris flew so fast, my hair billowed out in our trail, cape-like. The air was clean, the sunshine rolling like a white ghost below our feet—
that
couldn’t belong to the same sun that had beat me down just a few moments ago.

“Now are you going to tell me what happened?” he said.

“Nothing happened,” I muttered.

“Right. It’s normal for you to hurl yourself out of windows.”

“A claustrophobic moment.”

“What set it off?”

“The usual.”

“And what’s the usual?”

I wrinkled my forehead at him. But this impressive argument didn’t convince either of us. Sangris flew on, quiet. Waiting.

Still I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I want to forget about it, that’s all,” I said at last. Even as I spoke the words, I knew I wouldn’t forget. Instead of withdrawing my arms, I tightened them around his neck. I felt him studying me.

“You look tired,” he said after a moment.

“Yes, last night I had a nightmare that I was stuck in Spain with someone who wouldn’t stop throwing questions at me.”

The words were meant to sound light. They didn’t. I regretted them instantly.

Sangris didn’t say anything. I watched him focus on the sky ahead, his face unreadable. He glanced down at me. “The wind’s got your hair,” he said.

“Yours too.” There was a long pause. “I’m glad you came,” I said finally. “I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. I’m glad you can fly.”

“Well, I like making myself useful,” said Sangris.

“Really? You don’t seem the type.”

“You think I’m lazy?”

“No—” That caught me off guard. “I think you’re free.” I pursued the change of subject. “What’s it like to have a life without rules or responsibilities?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“Just fine?”

“It gets old.”

“You’d rather be cramped?” I bit my lip. My voice had sounded too bitter. His eyes were still roving over my hair, then my face, and it was a long time before he focused on the sky again. I stayed silent for a second, listening to the lonely flappings of my shirt in the wind, and the steady thump of Sangris’s wings. Then I told him.

I would tell Anju too, later on. Anju would blink and
mm-hmm,
and for all the comments she’d make, I may as well have told my story to a particularly unresponsive block of wood. She tended to accept all suffering as ordinary.

But Sangris listened. I wasn’t used to people paying attention to me. Each word dropped into the yellowness of his eyes and changed their expression somehow, as though he were a lake I was sending ripples across. When I came to my father’s hand, the crumpling, his forehead creased up and he said, “Nenner—” And because he was showing emotion, it was easier for me to be matter-of-fact. I heard my flat voice going on and on into the vacant gape of the fog.

It was better than crying. It didn’t make me feel weak or ashamed.

When I was done, he said, “Do you need to head back now?”

I thought of going back to the oasis and my heart gave a dull thud, like machinery grinding down to an end. “My parents will leave my room alone for a while. They’ll want me to stew,” I said. “Keep flying. Please.”

“Oh, good,” he said, not as if he was doing me a favor at all, but as if I was doing him one. And he zoomed faster, until the fog burst, opening up around us, and we shot out into clearness.

The clouds gave way so abruptly that by the time I’d gained my bearings, Sangris had already landed with a soft patter of wings against leaves. He put me down and I felt smooth wood beneath my bare feet. Pulling away, I wasn’t quite stable. Sore, aching, my mind had the thinness of new skin growing over a cut.

But then I looked around.

We were in a rainforest. A river curved soundlessly through the clustered trees, with a low wooden dock for boats tethered to one bank. Sangris had landed on this. It rocked gently beneath our weight.

The river waters were bright honey, as intensely colored as paint. A faint mist drifted over its surface. The forest massing on either side was so dense it looked black, except where, strangely delicate, a slash of flowers glowed white, or tear-shaped mangoes dripped pale green. Strange smells seeped out of the foliage, savory and disturbing. There was the sense of unknown things hiding beneath that painted-honey water, behind the screen of trees, even below the slowly creaking planks of the dock we stood on. Animal noises rumbled together in an ever-present background thunder, but no life was actually visible, apart from a single butterfly tumbling over the water, its wings flickering red as a racing heart.

It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been in, and I’d been in a lot.

“Nenner,” said Sangris, who’d been staring at me while I was staring at the jungle. “Listen—I’ll help you. I’ll stick around the oasis. As a cat, or something small, like a lizard. And if you ever have a moment like that again, if your father, you know . . . I can take you away. Anytime you want, whenever you need it. I’ll never be far. I’m your ladder out of the desert, my dear.”

“Don’t call me your dear,” I said faintly.

“I’m your ladder out of the desert, Nenner,” he said, offering me a smile. When I didn’t respond, he rushed on. “Listen, I’ve thought about this. I lead a pointless sort of life. It’s about time I put myself to good use. And—well, that’s not really why I’m offering.” He hesitated. Then he took a deep breath and lowered his voice until I could barely hear it. “You saved me from the souk.”

But his speech was still too much, too sudden. I found myself answering the way my father had trained me. “There’s no need for that,” I said, with vapid politeness.

There was another reason too: I didn’t believe him. Sangris thought promising “I’ll never be far” was enough to solve everything. But it’s impossible for a person to always be there. I’ve moved away from too many countries, and from too many friends, not to know that. And Sangris was a Free person, bound to be unreliable.

He rubbed his head, caught off guard by my reaction. I didn’t blame him. I’d caught myself off guard too.

We were both quiet for a while. I pretended to be very interested in the throbbing red of the butterfly over the river. My heartbeats felt muffled, still adjusting to the change from the claustrophobia of my bedroom. A few seconds ago I’d been so walled in, and now I was in a rainforest—

“I used to live here,” Sangris said.

He was pointing downward.

I looked at him blankly. “What, on the dock?”

“Under the dock. Inside the river. That’s why I brought you here, to show you. I got sick of Ae, the same way I got sick of everywhere I’d ever lived. I’d never spent more than a couple of weeks in one country. So I flew here to the jungle at random, and I forced myself to stay for an entire year.”

“Why?”

“I was hoping that if I lived in one place long enough, it would become a home. Stupid idea, didn’t work.”

He spoke as though this information was somehow logically related to his offer to become my ladder out of the desert. A thought struck me. “You can’t possibly want the oasis to become your home?” I said in disbelief.

“Not the
oasis,
” he said. I blinked when I realized what he meant. “I mean—getting to know someone . . . That’s almost the same thing as belonging, right?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Sangris frowned slightly at the curls of humidity sliding over the water.

“The thing is,” he said to the river, “places blur together after a while. Everywhere’s the same. Imagine how bored you can get if all the worlds are scattered like marbles at your feet . . . Free, and alone, that’s the life of a Free person. It’s like flying inside a bubble.”

I hesitated. “It used to feel that way before we settled down in the oasis. When my family moved around a lot.”

“Then you know what it’s like.”

“But I was with my family.”

“Still alone.”

“You’re sharp today,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“Oh, I know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, shrugging. “Limitations give things meaning, but Free people don’t
have
limits. It’s like living without the outlines that would define your shape. There’s no rhyme or reason for us.”

I’d never imagined he would complain about it. “Don’t you like being a Free person?”

“Oh, sure. It has its perks,” he said, still casual as ever. He probably wouldn’t mind if he had been born as a cockroach. “But you give up a lot of things. No ties, no background. You’re always lost—because if everywhere’s the same to you, it doesn’t matter where you are. Free and light as air, and just as empty—” He stopped for a moment. Then he made a small motion with his hand, as if brushing it all aside.

I frowned. Evidently, Sangris wasn’t a cat who could shape-shift. It was more difficult than that. He was a nothing who occasionally pretended to be a cat. “I wish I could know what it’s like for myself, that’s all,” I said. I felt rather the way a jail inmate would if a bird flew up and shouted through her window bars:
This freedom thing? Yeah, not so great.
“Is it just you? Or do most Free people think this way?”

“No clue. It’s not like Free people organize social gatherings. Lone wanderers, remember? Part of having no species. Though there are exceptions. I have noticed from a distance—among the older ones, sometimes when the coldness gets too much, they try to find some normal species and settle down with them. Once in a while it actually works. With migrating bird-people, normally.”

“Not humans?”

He scrunched up his nose. “Humans . . . ugh. No offense, but your species isn’t very popular.” Then he brightened. “But you, you’re kind of like a migrating bird, aren’t you, Nenner?”

I didn’t say anything, but secretly I liked the idea.

He went on quickly. “Anyway, me, I never did get along well with big flocks. A Free person couldn’t truly fit in. It’s just exchanging one kind of loneliness for another.”

“Ah, so that’s why you don’t have any other friends. I thought it was just because nobody else can stand you.”

For some reason that made him crack into a huge grin. Turning away from the river at last, he looked straight at me.

“It’s just my luck that my only friend can’t show affection in any other way than by insulting me.”

“Affection? Me?” I began indignantly, but he plowed right on.

“And that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You know what I realized that other day in your room, when we made our deal? You’re practically a Free person yourself, Nenner.”

I started laughing. “Are you kidding? I’m the most un-Free person I know.”

“Yes, but how many countries have you lived in? Okay, you can’t fly, and you’re not much of a wild spirit—”

“Thanks a bunch—”

“You’re welcome—but still, I’ve never met a non-Free person so unrooted.”

Smiling, I shook my head. “You mean I have all of the bad bits without any of the advantages.”

But then the thought snuck up on me:
It’s true
. No human could be more like Sangris than I am. After all, I don’t know where I’m from or what I am; to be honest, I’m not anything at all. I have four passports and none of them mean much to me. When people ask “Where are you from?” the question doesn’t even make sense.

I looked at Sangris with an odd feeling, almost like a shock of recognition. He had no species, but I had no ethnicity. He had no world, but I had no country. Why had I felt amazed that he was a constant alien? I
knew
what that was like.

His head was bent, and he was looking at me more seriously than was usual for him. The hint of wickedness in his face, the sharp cheekbones and the black straggles of hair, now just gave him an earnest look.

“It’s a weird feeling,” he said, “having a connection to someone.”

And he actually flushed as I stared at him.

“So,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, “so, as one foreigner to another, Nenner, now tell me—am I allowed to stay with you?”

I wanted to shuffle my feet and refuse to look up from the creaking wood of the dock. But I thought he deserved a proper answer, especially when he was making so much effort to keep his own eyes steady. So I met his gaze as I nodded. “Let’s go back,” I said. “If you come, I think I can handle the oasis until tonight.”

Before I could even finish the sentence, gravity dropped away. He had scooped me up and we shot into the cool, sticky white sea of the sky again.

Too soon, I felt myself being lowered back into the tightness and heat.