The Girl With Borrowed Wings (11 page)

“Remember, it’s just until tonight,” said Sangris into my ear. “Then we can get out and go somewhere new.”

This time I didn’t say “No, it’s the weekend.” I nodded and we submerged ourselves into the airless oasis.

Sliding back through my window, I was struck by the cold. My room looked so hollow without books. But the next second Sangris distracted me. He shrank into a cat, leaving his uniform in a careless heap on the floor, and I shoved his clothes out of sight behind the bed. I sat cross-legged on the ground with my back against the door. At least, this way, we’d have prior warning if my parents tried to burst in.

“If the door knocks me over,” I said, whispering, “you jump out the window. Got it?”

“Yep.”

My shoulders grew a little less rigid. But then Sangris added: “I promise. Although, you know—”

“No ideas!”

“Just thinking,” said Sangris innocently. The huge black cat flicked his tail and tried to ease himself into my lap. “If your dad annoys you, I could always turn into a tiger and rip his face off. If you want. It’s a possibility to keep in mind, that’s all.”

I tried to picture my father fighting a tiger. Instinctively I felt that the tiger would lose, but I couldn’t quite picture how.

“No.”

“Oh, all right. If you say so,” he said cheerfully, and flipped himself over onto his back. With his paws sticking up in the air that way, he looked like any silly cat waiting to be petted.

Having Sangris in the same house as my father, separated only by an unlocked door, was enough to make my nerves ripple, but it was better than the alternative. While Sangris was here, the claustrophobia couldn’t get hold of me. And even if my father burst in, he would only see a cat, right? I kept my back against the door. Slowly my fear turned to dark-sparkling adrenaline.

“You,” I told Sangris, “are living proof against the existence of a well-ordered universe.”

“Really?” he said, flattered.

“A Free thing in the oasis? Doesn’t make any sense. You’re going to be struck by lightning any minute now.”

“Oh, come on. This isn’t a bad place to be in. As far as prisons go.”

I looked around the room, at the exposed walls where my books had been. “Easy to think that, if you haven’t been stuck in here for years.”

“Pssh. Shut in a room with you? If this is a prison, it’s fine with me.” He nudged my hand with his head, and immediately a low, warm rumble came from his throat.

“Are you
purring
?”

“No,” he mumbled, and purred louder. After a moment his eyes slid shut.

I sighed. “Lucky Sangris,” I said, still listening at the door for my father’s footfalls. “Must be nice to be so easygoing. Nothing ever matters to you, does it?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said, eyes still shut.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In Which I Walk Through My Childhood

Everything changed after that.

In the dimly lit back of the classroom, Anju said to me, “What’s going on with you?”

“What do you mean?” I doodled intently in my notebook. “Here, look at this.” I shoved the sketch over the table to her. “Is it any good?”

I had covered the page entirely with straight lines, but in such a way that, through the bars of ink, you could make out the impression of our teacher’s face. Bald head, curved nose, a toothbrush mustache. It was, I thought, a pretty good resemblance. I had captured his half-wild expression as he ranted about moving vectors.

She glanced at it. “Very artistic,” she said, in her rounded, monotonous voice. No matter what she was talking about, that voice of hers made it sound as if she were reciting quadratic equations. “But what’s going on with you?”

I rocked back in my flimsy orange plastic chair. On two legs, and then only one, tilting as far as I could without falling. “What do you mean? Am I acting weird?”

“Yes.”

“You know me. That’s normal.”

“A different weird,” she insisted. “You’re acting almost . . . happy.” She said the word with distrust.

“Sorry.”

But I couldn’t help it. In those days, I don’t know which I valued more: Sangris, or his wings. Walking through my school in the tiny oasis, I’d come across a thousand different memories of places I’d been with him—a piece of juice-sodden fruit tasting like the jungle, sunlight splashing my classroom walls brilliant cloud white, the air suddenly smelling of Spain. And I’d want, instantly, nothing more than to fly again.

Even my father was struck by my new mood. One day at dinner he laid down his fork and gave me a long look over the table. “You haven’t been pestering me to return your books,” he observed.

And he was right, I realized, surprised. I had almost forgotten about them.

“I didn’t want to annoy you,” I said simply.

A pause. “Well . . .” he said. He didn’t look pleased, but there was something on his face: hope. Like somebody working on something massively important, who doesn’t dare to believe it when the pieces seem to be coming together. “Maybe you’re improving.”

My lungs expanded. He had no clue. He hadn’t seen the inside of my head. He didn’t know me well enough; his thoughts were full of a mythical Frenenqer Paje.

That night I held my breath until my father had gone to sleep. Then I dressed with a quick-beating heart, and stood on the cold marble floor of my bedroom, pushing the window up.

Furtively, I climbed out onto the sill. Under my hands the stone felt coarse and crumbly, as though it might give way beneath me at any moment.

I sat inside the square of that window as if I were a painted girl in a picture frame, trapped and unreal and static, and I looked at the black forever waiting just outside. In the silence I could hear the faraway sands giving off a high-pitched seething noise like a steaming kettle. I kept thinking of what my father would say if he saw me now. Then a movement in the darkness, and a gleam of eyes, and Sangris said, “Ah, waiting for me, are you?”

“No, I’m waiting for some other maniac with wings.”

Then I got to my feet, and, taking my arms, he drew me out of my picture frame, into the darkness and the heat, to a place where the ground was frighteningly, thrillingly far away, and the sunless sky was burning and trembling all around us. The stars were faint tinsel, and the air, smooth—not the dry sawdust stuff I had to breathe in the oasis, but sweet and full. Far, far beneath us were the manic lines of streetlights. They jagged over the oasis like stray fantasies. My prison was beautiful from the outside. And then, with one easy glance, Sangris gave me the earth.

“Name a country,” he said. Like a conjuror.
Pick a card, any card
.

“Thailand,” I suggested, naming my birthplace this time.

My family had lived there a few times too, but I’d already forgotten so much about the sounds of rattling tuk-tuks, the smells of moist earth. It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers.

Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn’t apply to him, but, I said, they applied to
me
), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.

We were in the same neighborhood as one of my old houses. Sitting on the curb and resting my cheek on the cool rim of the guppy bowl, I looked around at the buildings. Some were Western style, but many, like the one I’d lived in, were small curly-roofed boxes on stilts. It was too dark to see much except their black outlines, and the lights glimmering through slots in the wooden panels that served as windows.

“The last time I lived here was for six months,” I said. “That was pretty long for me, when I was little.”

“How old were you?” said Sangris, still peering sorrowfully down at the elusive guppies in the water. He’d failed to catch even one.

“Eight. A couple of years before moving to the oasis.” As I spoke, the neighborhood seemed to become more solid. I grew uneasy listening to the murmur of human voices in the houses. It had just occurred to me that I might know some of these people, that I was really here. It seemed to me that if I peered through the chinks in the wooden shutters I would see myself curled up inside, barefooted, loud-voiced, smelling of bug spray.

“My dad had a work contract in Saudi. That wasn’t a good place for Mom and me, so the two of us stayed here in Chiang Mai, to be near her family. It was wonderful . . .”

Mom, busy running the house and squabbling happily with relatives, had left me to my own devices. I was eight years old. My father wasn’t around. So I talked myself into only remembering the best things about him, boasting about his travels to my friends, claiming that he owned a camel (a lie, but I liked believing it). I even called him Daddy. Then, at the end of six months, he came back.

I remembered—I’d been incredibly excited for days, unable to sleep. The night he returned, I was awed by him in the airport. His face had become unfamiliar to me; he looked so different from the version I’d developed of him, so remote and stern. I didn’t make a peep, just huddled big-eyed in the back of the car while he took over the driver’s seat and Mom moved to the side. But I wasn’t fazed. I still believed. I was only waiting for him to unbend when he got home, to give me presents like Mom’s relatives always did.

When we’d arrived back in this neighborhood, and sat inside our little building, Mom just served dinner and my father stayed silent. Impatient, I wriggled on my seat. Since I didn’t dare talk directly to him, I started chattering to Mom, raising my voice on purpose to be sure he heard me.

He said, “She’s very loud.”

I was delighted. He’d noticed me. Immediately I began babbling to him, describing everything that had happened to me in the past six months, absolutely out of my mind with excitement, not noticing as his replies grew more monosyllabic and his face hardened. When he went to the bathroom, I followed, still talking nonstop, and when he shut the door in my face, I stood there calling through the wood: “And then I told my friend Pee-Mei that I never step on ants, and she said I was silly, and I said she was silly, and—”

Then my father came out and said,
“Shut up
.
”

I stopped dead.

“She’s grown completely wild,” he said quietly to my mom. Then he took her aside, and the two of them had a very serious grown-up conversation in an undertone, in which Mom seemed to bridle at first, but after an hour of steady murmurs from my father, finally gave up.

Well, after that he never left me alone with my mother again. Wherever he went, we followed. He started training me properly around that time too. And I think he still blames those six months of his absence for my long-lasting imperfections.

“You actually did love your father that much, then?” said Sangris, staring at me.

I flushed in the darkness. But I couldn’t lie, not here. It had taken years before I was able to purge my heart of that pathetic yearning. “I guess I did.” I shook my head. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.” I got up and scrunched my face, looking into the night where my old house was hidden. “Ye gods, I’m glad I’m not that kid anymore.”

He’d been fiddling with the pot while I told my story, but now he scrambled to his feet as well. “Cheer up,” he said, pulling lightly at my shirtsleeve.

“I don’t need cheering up,” I said, forcing a smile. “
I’m
not the one who was too ham-fisted to catch a single fish.”

Solemnly, Sangris pulled out one hand from behind his back. The world’s ugliest little guppy was flopping around in a small puddle on his palm.

“It’s for you.”

Its fins looked deformed, and I was sure that’s why he’d been able to catch it; but he was watching me hopefully. I accepted the gift like a bouquet, then released it reverently back into the water.

The next night it was Sangris’s turn, so we visited
his
country of birth—a flat, flat place where the horizon seemed so far away it made my heart ache. It was nighttime here, but he found a hole in the ground and crouched down. “Listen,” he said. I lay on my stomach and heard a song, a bubbling, high-pitched song, reverberating somewhere deep inside the hole. He explained that it was the sound of stone-creatures below the surface. In this world, nobody lived above the ground. He got on his stomach beside me in the darkness, panting slightly from our long flight. “I was born way down there, in a groundwater lake. At least, I think I was. My first memory is crawling out, so . . .”

“Alone?”

“’Course. All the normal creatures stayed. It’s like Ae. They’re too afraid to come out.”

“Except the birds,” I said, remembering what he’d told me before.

“No, there aren’t any birds in this country,” he said, but I pointed upward. High above, I could just make out a massive animal, its wings navy blue dotted with white, for camouflage against the stars.

“That’s not a bird,” said Sangris, coming convulsively closer to me. “It’s a Free person.”

“Another one?” I jumped up in excitement. “Isn’t that rare?”

“For somebody who can’t fly, maybe,” he scoffed, staying on the ground. “But we move so much, trails are bound to cross once in a while . . . Depending where you go. There’re some favorite spots that can even get sort of crowded.” He frowned up at the creature.

“Hm,” I said. We’d never come across someone else before. Keeping my eyes on the shape overhead, I asked, “What do you consider crowded?”

Sangris looked aggrieved. “Sometimes three of us on a world at a time. Can you imagine?” He shook his head as if unable to express the horror.

“Oh, the audacity of some Free people,” I said gravely. He looked at me with suspicion, but I kept a straight face. Never mind all that, I wasn’t about to miss this opportunity. I tried to tug him up. But, fanning out its midnight-colored wings, the creature had already glided away.

“Showoff,” muttered Sangris.

“Let’s follow it.”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to say hi?”

“Why should I?”

“It’s your own kind.”

“Free people are not my own kind—I don’t have an
own kind
. I told you—‘Free person’ is a description, not a species, all right? They’re no closer to me than any animal.”

“No need to be defensive.”

Sangris subsided a bit, enough to look sheepish. “It’s a territorial thing,” he mumbled. “Like I said, we take up an awful lot of space . . .” He shrugged as if shaking away the other Free person.

When it was time to leave, Sangris remained human, his favorite form nowadays. He simply grew an assortment of wings: sometimes dark sculptural bat wings that curled above his back and made him, with his wavy black hair and yellow eyes, look like a veritable demon; sometimes big soft feathery wings that made him look like a little boy playing dress-up. In the hot afternoons when I took naps alone in my room, I could still feel the rocking of those wings, up and down, before I went to sleep, and I’d drift off on a sea of imaginary waves. The beat of flying had become the rhythm of my dreams.

The next night we found that we’d both once lived in Glasgow, so we went there. Dying leaves shivered down from the trees along the street, falling around us like showers of sequins. We were running, in a rush, toward the city’s cold milky river, when I stopped suddenly. I’d spotted a bush so transparent in the wan sunshine that people on the other side were visible as floating shadows, like ghosts. “Here! I used to walk here,” I exclaimed. “When my father was at work, every day, after school.”