Transcendent (10 page)

“Did your mom tell you . . . ?” Nanny asked, sitting next to me as Pop settled on my other side. My mom sat on the sofa arm next to Nanny, and my dad plunked down on the floor right in front of us. I was completely surrounded.

I looked up, meeting Nanny's worried brown eyes for the first time. They were dry now, but the redness and the puffiness lingered from what had clearly been a morning filled with tears.

“No. She wanted to wait. Somebody . . . somebody
please
tell me what's going on.”

All eyes turned to my mom.

“Sweetie,” she started, her brow furrowing as she frowned. “I wanted to protect you from knowing, stupid as that sounds—but I can't hide anything, not anymore. I told you that Kyle had tried buzzing again, and calling, but . . . I've seen him outside now a few times. Just leaning against the tree across the street, looking up at the house. Watching us. Waiting.”

Waiting
. I felt the word tear through me like icy, clawed fingers.

“I saw him this morning, and . . . I couldn't help myself,” she continued, shaking her head. “I just lost it. I had to go out there. I started yelling and screaming, asking him what he could possibly achieve by stalking us like this. And Kyle, he looked at me dead-on, said as calmly as I've ever heard him talk, that all he wanted was for you to meet his daughter, Ella. To spend some time with her. He said, ‘Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it won't do a thing, but I need her to try. It's her
duty
.'” She shuddered as she said it, her thin shoulders trembling, making her look more fragile than I'd ever imagined possible. She was my mom. She was invincible.

“I said no, of course, and how dare he say it was your
duty
, and I moved to go back inside. But he stopped me. He said that if you wouldn't meet his Ella, he had no choice but to tell everyone the truth about you. That he'd tried to be patient, calling, waiting around outside, and that he'd respected your distance as a minor by going through me. But if we wouldn't do him this favor, he'd make sure the whole world found out you were here. That you were alive.”

The room fell silent.

Pop wrapped his arm around me, pulling me in close.

“Your mom called us as soon as she came back in the
house,” my grandmother said. “Asked us if we'd heard anything from our old Green Hill friends. I don't talk to any of them, though. I used to keep in touch a little, but it got too hard. I'd always change the subject when they asked about your mom, and I could never talk about you. I hated denying you like that. So I just cut all ties instead.”

I nodded, numb.

“Your mom told us why she called . . . she told us that you knew. Everything.”

“I just don't get it. How did he find us in the first place?” I asked, blinking back the hot tears threatening to spill down my cheeks. “If it had been a secret for so long?”

I realized now, thinking about it for the first time, just how discreet my family had always been. My mom had the stock author photo on her website and her book jackets, but always black-and-white, dark and mysterious, so it didn't give everything away. She didn't do readings, rarely appeared anywhere publicly as Clemence Verity other than a few award ceremonies over the years. She didn't blog, she loathed all forms of social media—now I knew why—and she'd never been one to keep family albums. My dad was on IMDb and other film sites—his job made at least some Internet presence mandatory—but he refused to post anything personal, and Caleb and I had been banned from Facebook, Twitter, all of it, until we
were thirteen. Even then, I hadn't cared all that much. I hated being at the computer more than I had to for school.

“Oh, sweetie, it seems like anyone who wants something bad enough can find it on the Internet these days,” Nanny said, hugging me against her chest. I shut my eyes and inhaled, burrowing deeper into her knobby knit cardigan. She smelled like cinnamon cookies and chamomile tea, cream and molasses and just a little bit of warm, cozy spice. “He'd probably had his suspicions for a while, about what had really happened to your mom. A lot of people speculated. Maybe he searched every Spero he could find in the country . . . And really, the how doesn't matter much, not anymore.”

She was right. It wasn't the past that mattered now—it was the present. The future.

“So is that really everything?” I asked, turning to my mom. I felt a new anger rising up, resentment and distrust. “Was that all Kyle said? You need to stop keeping secrets to protect me. You should have told me he's been outside watching.”

“You're right,” my mom said, leaning in closer behind Nanny. “You should know everything. And there's just one more thing, really . . . The last words Kyle said to me, before I ran away and slammed the door . . . was that we'd ‘robbed the world of a miracle.' He said it was selfish, doing
what we did. That in protecting ourselves, protecting you, we took away something that God had meant to share with everyone.”

“I'm . . . I'm m-meant to be
shared with everyone
?” I stuttered, the question so bizarre, unnerving on my lips. I pulled back and stared, baffled, at my mom. “Why? Does he really think I can bless people somehow? That I can heal with my touch? Make cancer disappear, undo brain damage, raise the dead? I can't wave my hands and make anything or anyone better. I'm not magic. I'm not
special
. Kyle has to know that—he has to, Mom.” The words were tumbling out faster, louder, because they needed to understand,
everyone
needed to understand.

I wasn't a savior. I couldn't be.

Maybe I was a scientific anomaly, a slip of nature, a sign that there could be mysteries in this world. But if there had been some larger intention, some big grand plan—then it had broken down somewhere in the execution. Iris—the first Iris, the Iris who had started this all—had failed to achieve her goal, whatever that goal may have been.

Because I was as normal, as
human
, as anyone else in this world. There was nothing electric in my blood, nothing otherworldly radiating from my skin. I didn't shimmer, I didn't soar, I didn't walk on water or make myself
useful at parties by turning water into wine or cheap beer. I wasn't stuffed with light and love and fairy dust.

“How do we prove it to him, to everyone?” I asked, desperate for a way to turn this around, to make all of it disappear. For good this time. When my mom ran away, she had simply hit pause. We were back in play now, but there had to be a way to stop—to put an end to all of the speculation.

To put an end to all of the
hope
.

“Do I go to Kyle, to Green Hill? Meet Ella and show them how nothing happens? Make a sick old lady poke and prod me just so they'll shut up about it when she doesn't suddenly rise out of her wheelchair?”

“Iris . . .” my dad started, talking for the first time since we'd sat down. “I don't think that's the answer. I think that sometimes people, when they're desperate . . . they can find a way to see what they want to see, no matter what.”

“He's absolutely right,” Mom said. “I had people begging me for pieces of my clothing, my hair, anything I had touched. I didn't give those people what they wanted—just once, to a little girl who'd needed something for her mom, and I . . . I couldn't say no. But I suspect that if I had sent my belongings, meaningless scraps of junk from my bedroom, they would have found a way to create their own miracles. Found a little shred of good that happened in
their life afterward, and pinned it to the artifact. Pinned it to
me
.” She sighed, her blue eyes cloudy and distant, like she was suddenly seeing too many memories, too many pieces of her past all flooding back in at once. “So no,” she said, more quietly now, “I don't think just going back and showing them that you look normal,
seem
normal, will solve the problem.”

“I don't just
seem
normal, Mom,” I said, my voice trembling, with fear or anger I wasn't sure. “I
am
normal. You know that, right? You all know that?”

I spun around, my eyes skipping from Nanny to Mom, Dad, Pop. They were all staring back at me, their eyes so
full
, so full of something I couldn't quite place. Didn't want to place, didn't want to put into words. No one spoke, their mouths gaping, at a loss for how to answer this clearly very easy, very obvious question.

Pop let out a long sigh next to me, and I turned, grateful that he was finally going to put my question to rest, so that we could all move on. Start working on a strategy to dig our way out of this mess.

“Oh, Iris, sweetie.” He smiled at me, a small, sad twitch of his lips. His blue eyes seared into mine, freezing me in their intensity. “Do you really not see, Iris? Do you not see what all of us here in this room see when we look at you? What we hear when we talk to you? Feel when we're
hugging you, when we're even just standing near you?”

I stared at him.

Pop shook his head. “You really don't see it, do you? In that case, you'll have to trust me. When they meet you, they will know. They will know just how right they are.”

“I
DON'T UNDERST
AND,”
I said, when I finally found the air necessary to make words. “You're making no sense to me, Pop.”

“You made me a believer, Iris. You read, I've heard, an account your mother wrote of the whole time?”

I nodded, my skin still burning, hot and itchy and a few sizes too small to contain everything happening inside of me.

“Then you know what a—excuse my language—jackass I was at the time. Even at the bitter end, right up until you were born, I didn't actually
believe
her. I loved her. I supported her, yes, in the end. But that was still very different from actually believing her story, believing that an honest-to-God miracle had happened in our very own family. Anywhere, anyone, and it happened to us. To my little girl.” He sniffed, pulling out a faded, checkered blue hankie from his chest pocket and dabbing at his eyes. “But
then you were born, and when I held you . . . Iris, I swear to God, the whole world spun into nothing all around me and it was just you and me and light, so much light.”

“Pop . . . I'm your grandbaby. Your first grandbaby. Of course it was special. That doesn't mean it was a supernatural experience.”

“Now, sweetie, understand that I've held other newborn babies whom I loved very much. I held your mom and Gracie, and I held my little Caleb just as soon as he was born, too. And they were special—they were all special. Every damn baby on this earth is special. But they weren't
you
. The world didn't shake itself all up the way it did when you were first put in my arms. I'm a practical man. A reasonable man. But even I couldn't explain how you made me feel from that very first second you breathed the same air I was breathing. And I still can't.”

My world was spinning, too. Now, here, this very damned second in this very damned room. “No, you're wrong,” I said, jumping up from the couch, breaking my grandmother's hold around me. “You're all wrong. You see something special because you want to see something special, because you
expected
to see something special. It would have been anticlimactic after everything you went through to be stuck with a normal baby after all. But that's what you got. A
normal
baby. And now I'm just a normal seventeen-year-old, who only wants to do normal things
like go to school and hang out with friends and maybe even have a boyfriend one of these days.”

“It's a lot to take in, I know,” Dad said, his voice low, shaky. “This is
huge
, Iris. Gargantuan. You have to process it bit by bit.”

“It's only huge because you guys are making it huge. You and Kyle, but he doesn't know any better. He doesn't know any better because he hasn't met me, so he can still pin his crazy hopes on me somehow curing his kid, curing the
world
, of whatever ailments need curing. So please, why can't I just go there now, at least try to make them believe that I'm normal?”

When no one answered, a new and terrifying question occurred to me.

“Mom,” I started, focusing all my energy on keeping my voice steady. I stared into her worried eyes, needing to see her answer, not just hear it. “Mom, please tell me that you know that what Kyle Bennett was asking for—it's not possible. That I can't, in any way, on any level, help his little girl, as much as I would love for her to get better. That I can't help any of the kids who were hurt at Disney, or anyone at all. Tell me. Tell me that you know that. Please, Mom.
Tell me
.”

I saw the answer instantly—I saw the truth, the hope, and the fear that she didn't want to voice—and every last bit of me crumbled on the inside.

“I can't say that, Iris,” she said, the words hitting my brain one at a time, as if they were floating out of her mouth in slow motion. “I don't really know, not for sure. But I can't lie to you. I can't pretend there's not a chance.”

“So why?” I asked, barely able to suck in enough air to speak. “Why are you all here? What is the
plan
? What do you want me to do next, now that Kyle threatened to tell everyone the truth?”

“I'm scared for you, Iris,” my mom said, “so scared. I think we should leave. Leave Brooklyn, leave New York City, until we can figure out how best to keep you safe. We'll find somewhere for you and me to go, as soon as tomorrow morning maybe, and Nanny and Pop will stay here for now with Dad and Caleb—”

“I'm confused,” I interrupted, raising my hands up in front of me. My head was throbbing, splintering straight down the middle. “You're saying you think maybe I can
actually
help. But you don't want me to? You want me to hide? Is that what you're saying?”

“I'm terrified, Iris,” she whimpered, like a child, a helpless child. “I just don't think you're ready for this yet, the chaos it would start. I think that first we need to get you away from here, far away, we need . . .”

I stopped listening then. It was as if every organ, every vein, every bone and blood cell, were suddenly in free fall, spiraling and plummeting with no net, no support system,
no foundation to keep everything where it belonged.

Run away, just like my mom had? Leave everything? My friends and family, school, my violin classes, my college auditions, the fall recital?
No
. I wouldn't do it.

I turned and, with every last ounce of power I had left, ran up both flights of stairs, slamming and locking the bedroom door behind me.

They couldn't—they couldn't make me leave. I didn't know what I would do, how we would keep people away. But this was my home.

This was my life.

•   •   •

The hours right after were blurry, uncountable. I kept my door locked, despite everyone's frequent attempts to get me out. My mom was the most persistent, coming up every twenty minutes or so to plead her case through the door.

Ignoring the voices, I grabbed my laptop from the desk and settled back into my bed to search for something I should have watched days before. My dad's video on Virgin Mina. I needed to see it now for myself, see what Ethan had so passionately described to me.

I typed in “Mina Dietrich,” and my heart thudded and went still. There were thousands of pages—
hundreds of thousands of pages
—with information about my mom. I added “documentary” to the search and narrowed the
hits. I opened the top listing, a virtual shrine to my mother, though it looked outdated. Untouched because the creator had lost hope, maybe, or moved on to a new cause. And there, just below a long note about what my mom had meant to her, the role she'd played in this stranger's life—there was the video, a play button in the center of the box just waiting to be clicked.

So I did. I clicked.

I held my breath as I saw a beautiful old farmhouse in a sprawling green field, all lit up and golden in the morning sun. I held my breath as I saw my mom's much younger, much smoother, fuller face, as I listened to her read hate notes from the Virgin Mina website. I still didn't breathe as I saw Aunt Gracie and my grandparents, Aunt Hannah, my
dad
.

My mom's old pastor came on next, which I'd expected, since I'd read about this exact moment in her pages. But reading wasn't the same as seeing, as hearing. His words had seemed beautiful a week before, eloquent, when I was still naive enough—romantic enough, maybe—to feel enchanted by the mystery surrounding me. Now, though . . . now the words felt like a challenge, a dare.

We can only hope and pray and open ourselves to the possibilities that God can still reach down—can touch our everyday lives in ways that we've maybe never
dreamed possible. We believe in the ideas that we read in the Bible. We believe in Jesus, in his mother, Mary. Why is it so hard to believe that miracles can still happen today, in our modern world? Ask yourself that, if nothing else. Why? Or, more appropriately,
why not?

I steeled myself for the scene I knew, from reading about it, would be coming next—my mother, my hysterical, wailing mother, falling apart on Christmas Eve. She was sobbing as she crumpled in front of a life-size nativity scene, alone in a Sunday school room at her family's old church. Jesse—my dad—had been watching, filming, without her knowing. He'd recorded the image of this sad pregnant girl, transformed into an utterly unforgettable symbol because of her backdrop here—the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, made out of construction paper and bits of real straw, their smiling crayon faces.

Seeing her, seeing Mary . . . it was too much. I snapped my laptop shut and curled into a tight ball under my blankets. Another knock pounded on the door, and I pulled my comforter up higher, wrapping it around my ears to muffle the noise.

At some point, the knocks faded away and I managed to drift off, lost somewhere in that hazy in-between state of consciousness. Suddenly I was younger, much younger, my body smaller and less sure of itself as I walked the halls
of my old middle school. The specifics of the scene were achingly familiar: the smell of burned pizza crust and too-sweet sauce emanating from the cafeteria, the squeak of my new green sneakers against the shiny tile floors, the sound of my sixth grade social studies teacher droning on about the Battle of Gettysburg from an open classroom door. Something was about to happen. My skin prickled with the knowledge of it, the memory that was still snagged in a shadow, just outside my reach.

But then—the voices. Laughing, howling, the distinct crackling of boys who might be turning into men physically, but mentally and emotionally still had light-years to go.

I remembered those voices, that feeling, that day.

It was the moment I met Ethan.

I followed the sounds now as I had six years ago, drawn by some strong, innate sense that I was needed. That somebody needed me. I turned a corner and faced a boys' bathroom. The laughter was louder now, clearer, but beneath the glee and the pride, I heard another, softer sound, a sob, a plea. “No,” a voice said, shaky and desperate, “please, no!”

“Shut up, you fat dweeb. You love math so much, start counting the seconds you can go without needing any air. Entertain yourself at least.”

“God, he's so fucking heavy,” another voice complained. “My arms are getting tired.”

“Pussy.”

“I'm not a pussy! He's the pussy.”

“Agreed.” Another round of laughter, the sound of slapping palms.

I didn't think—I didn't consider the fact that this was a boys' bathroom, that I was a girl stepping into out-of-bounds territory—I just put my hands on the door and shoved my way in.

“Stop.” Even I was surprised by how calm I sounded, how strong and confident. “Stop. Now.” I was staring at three hulking eighth graders, boys I recognized as some of the popular kids who hung around the gym entrance at the end of the day.

Dangling in the air between two of them was a fourth boy, upside down, unrecognizable because his face was hidden in the water of the toilet bowl below him.

The three boys stared at me, their mouths hanging open, first in amusement but soon morphing into what seemed to be more like wide-eyed shock.

And then, as if I had physically walked over, yanking down their arms, they let him go. Pulled his head back into the fresh air, placed him down—gently—onto his own two feet. They nodded at me, cheeks red, eyes turned down to the floor. The three of them shuffled toward the door, and one of them—the leader perhaps, as he'd been observing the other two while they did the dirty work, arms folded
across his bulky chest—even mumbled what sounded like “sorry” as they disappeared into the hallway.

The bathroom was quiet, silent except for the slow sniffle of the lone boy who still stood in front of me, water dripping from his dark black hair, broken glasses dangling around his ears. We'd never met, but I'd seen him in the music room before, playing his clarinet.

“Thank you,” he said, not able to meet my eyes.

I walked over and hugged him, not caring that I could feel drops of toilet water splashing down onto my shoulders.

“I'm Iris,” I said, still holding him tight. I didn't know why I cared so much exactly, so deep down inside of me, but I did.

“Ethan.”

The scene seemed to pause there—a fuzzy, glowing freeze-frame as we hugged—when my mom called through the door again, louder and more distraught this time, jerking me awake.

“Iris,
please
, open the door so we can talk about this. You wouldn't have to go forever, but just for now. Just until we figure out what to do in the long run. Let's get you out tomorrow. We can go wherever you want, honey, I don't care how expensive the flight is . . .”

She wanted me to fly out the next day.
The next day
.

No. I wouldn't do it. I didn't know what I would do
instead, but I could figure that out later. For now, I needed peace and quiet away from my mom's relentless pleading. I needed to be somewhere no one could find me, not my family, not Kyle Bennett.