Transcendent (7 page)

“The name Joseph started with a little teasing from your mom soon after you were born,” my dad said, the words nearly a whisper. “But my name was Jesse back then. Jesse Spero. We decided it was safe enough to keep my last name—we were just two people in millions here in New York, after all.”

I shook my head slowly, all my thoughts colliding at dangerous speeds. “Okay. So now you've told me this . . . this
story
. And what do you expect? You tell me that I'm some half human, half . . . half—what, God? Angel?
Messiah?
Do I have a mission? A job to do? Can I fly off of buildings or bring people back from the dead? Tell me, please, what the hell am I supposed to do with any of this information?”

They froze at the words, their lips paused in gaping round circles. I shook my head and started toward the door, not knowing anything except that I needed to be outside of this house. Away from both of them.

“I don't know, Iris,” my mom whispered. I turned back to face her, but her head was down, her face buried in her hands. “I don't know the answers. Iris—the other Iris—she said she'd be back when the time came. So I tried to be the best mom I could be for you in the meantime. But I don't know what comes next. I wish I did, sweetie. I really, really wish I did.”

Somehow her looking so sad and weak just enraged me even more. “Who
are
you?” I asked. “Do I even know either of you at all?” The words burned my lips on their way out, but I couldn't stop the fire, red-hot and blazing through every last inch of me.

Before either of them could answer, I flung the door open and ran out of the room. I ran away from them before I let myself ask the real question, the question that was too scorching, too combustible to let out.

Who am
I
?

•   •   •

I didn't think to take a jacket with me when I left. Or my phone. Or my keys. I regretted the jacket mostly, now that the sun was setting and the cool early autumn air was cutting through my flimsy cardigan. But getting out of the house had been first priority, any kind of planning a distant second. My feet traced their usual path to Prospect Park, and the rest of me followed.

My mind kept looping through my mom's story. This couldn't be real—none of this could be real. But my parents had never been good at telling even the littlest of white lies. Or so I'd thought, at least. How could I tell anymore? They'd kept this secret, after all. For more than
seventeen years
. Still, the dread on their faces, the agony—it had all felt so real. They'd meant what they said, I felt eerily certain of that much, and that thought alone made my stomach clench in fear. Were they insane? How could my predictable, stable, rational parents disappear so quickly? Disappear and leave me with
this
.

I passed through the park entrance, and my feet kept moving, making my decisions for me, until I came around a bend in the path. My lungs heaved for breath. I stood at the entrance of the playground, paralyzed. No matter how many times I'd walked here in the past month and seen the signs and the flowers and the teddy bears—and the photos, those devastating photos—I wanted to sob all over again.

I stared straight into the light green eyes of the faces hanging up right in front of me—a boy and a girl, maybe even twins, they looked so similar, with their bright red hair and their freckled, dimpled cheeks as they posed in swimsuits by the ocean. There was an article taped to the poster. An obituary. Molly and Matty Michelson. Both of them gone. And the parents—the parents had both survived, somehow. Though, like Kyle Bennett, I'm sure they felt more punished than blessed to have escaped their children's fate.

I rested my palm against the cool gloss of the next poster over, a fiercely grinning little blond boy. There were small handwritten messages scrawled on every free space of the poster, prayers and wishes that he would recover. He was in a coma now, a sign explained, and he'd lost an arm, possibly his eyesight—possibly everything, since there was no way of knowing whether he'd ever wake up. Most of the words and pictures and offerings left at the playground—at playgrounds all around the city and all around the country—were about love. Love for the survivors and for the victims. Love for those who were still fighting and would probably always be fighting, never able to escape that day. But there was hate everywhere now, too. Hate for the Judges.

I closed my eyes and stepped back from the memorial, swallowing the nausea rising up from the pit of my
stomach. I realized that I'd somehow managed to forget about my own problems in that moment, and for a second I was grateful. Then a pang of guilt flared through me. I was still alive. I had my family and my friends, all safe and healthy.

But I was no miracle baby, no daughter of any kind of god. I'd never believed in God; my parents had never taken Caleb and me to church, except for funerals and baptisms and choir recitals. They didn't identify as Christians—they'd always just said they believed in a greater power. A higher purpose. I believed in people, though. I believed we created our own destiny, our own happiness, and our own sadness, too.

And really, after this kind of tragedy, how could
any
of us believe in a god? How could any supreme being sit back and watch so many children be slaughtered—for what? For political power, for some sort of statement, a reminder of how egotistical and despicable America could be? We didn't deserve this. No one would ever, could ever, deserve this kind of suffering.

But of course, Disney World was related to what was happening to me now, wasn't it? Disney World was the reason Kyle Bennett had come to find my mother. Disney World was the reason he was so desperate for the kind of miracle that even doctors couldn't give him.

What if Kyle told other people? What if suddenly
everyone was frantic for something
more
, something bigger and better? If at least some people had believed my mom eighteen years ago, what was to stop them from believing now? From believing even more powerfully, maybe, because there was nothing else left. Hope was all we had now—the only thing left besides fear and hate.

It was all too much. I dragged myself toward my usual bench and curled into a tight ball along the worn wooden planks. But even when I squeezed my eyes shut, I could still see my mom's face. I could see the belief in her eyes.

There was something she had said that suddenly struck me now, like ribbons of smoke curling and coiling up from some deep, dark place inside of me. I was
different
,
special
, she had said, and I always had been. She had mentioned Johnson—a stranger I'd met at this same park when I was four years old: my very first memory. I remembered it partly, I think, because it was the first time my dad had
really
yelled at me—though I understood later it was more out of fear than anger. And it was also the first time that I realized there were bad things in our world, bad people even—but that I wasn't scared of them in the way other people were. I wasn't afraid.

I had been sitting with my dad on a bench by Prospect Park Lake, coloring a picture of the sunny, sparkling water while he read the newspaper. He must have dozed at some point, and I had gotten tired of coloring, so I'd wandered
off toward a beautiful patch of wildflowers. There was an older man there, dressed in just a stained, too-small T-shirt and ripped jeans that were tied at the waist with a piece of rope. He was sitting on a ratty blanket with a cup of deli coffee, staring across the park, at nothing or everything, I couldn't be sure. I said “hi” to him like I would say to anyone, and when he didn't answer me back, instead of walking away I sat down next to him on the grass. I remembered that he didn't smell good, but that I didn't really care, and I tried my best not to crinkle my nose because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. I told him my name, and he turned to me, seeing me for the first time, and said that he was Johnson. I asked him if he lived outside, and when he said yes, I asked why. He started telling me about his life, mostly things that, at four, I didn't understand, and then all of a sudden my dad was sweeping me up in his arms, yelling at me for running off and yelling at Johnson—for what, I'm not sure, because he hadn't done anything. He hadn't done anything but talk to me when I had asked him to talk.

I saw Johnson a few more times after that, always in the same spot near the lake, though I was always with my parents, who kept a much tighter lock on me from then on. I would wave, though, and he would always wave back. Sometimes he would even smile. And then one day he wasn't there anymore, and I never saw him again. I would never know if he had died alone in a dark alley or if he'd
decided to make a different park his home or if maybe, just maybe, he had found a job, a friend, a piece of hope. A better way.

But did wanting to be nice to people who happened to be homeless mean that my mom's story was any more believable? I was friendly; I was compassionate. I liked listening to other people's life stories. All of that was true, sure. But that didn't make me something more than or better than human. It just made me Iris Spero, the same Iris I was yesterday and the same Iris I would be tomorrow. Why couldn't that be all there was to it? Why couldn't that be enough?

As if I'd been thinking these questions out loud, I felt a soft tap on my shoulder in response. My eyes flew open to see Mikki looking down at me, those bright eyes filled with worry.

“Are you okay, Iris?” She remembered my name.

“I'm okay,” I said, knowing that neither of us probably believed it. “How are you?” I asked, noticing how thin her patched denim jacket looked over the baggy flannel shirt and the same old corduroys from before. “It's getting cold so fast this year. Will you . . . do you go somewhere else? With winter coming?”

She shook her head, then turned her eyes up toward the sky. “I'll figure things out. I always do. Don't you worry about me.”

“Mikki,” I started, not sure what I was asking or what I wanted to hear. I'd only just met her the previous weekend, after all. I barely knew the woman. But I couldn't stop myself. “Have you ever . . . do you ever wonder if maybe, somehow, miracles are possible? Or that things happen sometimes that no one can explain? Not necessarily because of a god or anything like that. Just more that maybe our world isn't as black and white as we think. Things that seem impossible aren't impossible after all. Or maybe there's a different way of looking at impossible that suddenly makes it become possible. In some small way.”

As soon as it was out, I realized how ridiculous, how insensitive it was to ask something like that of someone like Mikki. Someone who had maybe never had a single stroke of good luck, let alone some kind of full-blown miracle. I could feel my cheeks burning, and I turned to her, my mind racing for the best way to apologize.

But she was staring straight at me with a small smile on her lips that quieted me. “Now, I don't know for sure,” she said softly, almost in a whisper, “but I think I'd want to believe, if I ever had the chance. Because if I knew one miracle had happened, any miracle, then I could hope for my own someday, right? Maybe it's just the believing that's important. You know?”

I nodded, but I didn't know. Her words were so eloquent, so simple and well articulated; I wondered how
long she'd been on the streets, what had happened to drive her there.

We sat in silence for a little after that, until the lamps above us flicked on and I realized how long it had been since I'd run out the front door. No matter what I was feeling about my parents, I didn't want to scare them too much. I said bye to Mikki and gave her my address on a gum wrapper from my pocket, just in case she needed food, blankets, a warmer coat.

And then, one step at a time, I walked home.

I walked back to a family, a life—an entire identity—that suddenly no longer felt like my own.

A
FTER MY BRIEF
escape to Prospect Park, my mom immediately came up to my room, asking where I'd gone, if I'd told anyone, anyone at all. I said no, I'd just been at the park, and her face lit up with unmistakable relief. “Thank God,” she said, exhaling. “Please don't talk to anyone else about this. Not even Ari or Delia or Ethan. I want this to be our secret for now—as much as it can be, at least, with Kyle Bennett knowing—until we wrap our heads around what to do next. I know you're angry with me right now, sweetie, but
please
. Please do this for me.”

I said okay, and she left me alone after that. I didn't like to keep secrets, not from my best friends, but I wouldn't have known how to tell them even if I hadn't made that promise. I needed to sort it out for myself before I could talk about it with anyone else.

Our family spent the next few days moving in quiet circles around each other, but my mom and I didn't have
to be speaking for me to know that she was a complete wreck. She wasn't writing; she was barely eating. She sent Caleb to school with an empty soup thermos in his lunch bag two mornings in a row, and she was wearing the same old ratty
Les Mis
sweatshirt every day, not bothering to shower, judging by the look of the greasy knot on the top of her head. She unplugged our landline phone from the wall and let her cell phone battery drain to nothing. And on the fourth night in, she forgot that she'd left a teakettle on the stove at full blast until the screeching woke the rest of us up in a panic. We found her in her office, staring out the window into the darkness.

I didn't have any clearer reactions or explanations after a few days of thinking about everything. If anything, I believed it all less, now that it was starting to feel like a more distant memory. I went to school; I talked to my friends; I did my homework. I showed up for my orchestra rehearsal and my weekly Wednesday night private lesson. But I still couldn't fake normal, not really. Delia and Ari and Ethan all picked up on my weird mood, asked why I was being so quiet and withdrawn. And I lied. I said that a distant relative had passed away suddenly, one whom they'd conveniently never met.

But my family couldn't go on like this, and we all knew it. Caleb was suffering just as much as the rest of us, but was even more frustrated because he was entirely in the
dark. After over a full week of pretending that we could still go through the motions of normalcy, I came home from school on Friday afternoon to find Aunt Hannah on her way out the front door. She grabbed me and squeezed me before I could even say hello, her lavender-scented blonde curls crushing against my cheek.

“Trust her, Iris,” she whispered into my ear. “Your mom is the best person I've ever known.” She let go of me and stepped back, her usually impeccable makeup smudged and her big blue eyes red around the edges. “I have to get going for an editorial meeting, but please call me any hour of any day if you want to talk. Okay, sweetie?”

I knew she meant it, even though she was one of the busiest people I'd ever met—the editor-in-chief of a wildly successful women's living magazine. She was too busy to have a husband or a family of her own, maybe—not that she'd ever had a shortage of admirers—but she was never too busy for us. She'd always been a second mom to Caleb and me.

“Oh, and tell your mother to plug the damn phone back in. Izzy is going crazy with worry, but she's traveling with the team right now and can't make it to the city for a few weeks.” Aunt Izzy was an athletic trainer for a pro football team out in San Francisco, and she and her wife, Ellen, and their newly adopted baby, Micah, didn't make it across the country for visits much these days.

Hannah gave me one last tight hug before rushing off. I made my way up the front stairs, one slow step at a time, and opened our door to find my mom perched on the sofa in the living room, waiting. Caleb had tae kwon do after school on Fridays—so it would be just the two of us.

“I saw Aunt Hannah,” I said, skipping the hello.

“I'm sorry.” Her brow crinkled as she gazed up at me. “I hope she didn't bully you. I know how protective she can be of me. I haven't told anyone else yet . . . I didn't even mean to tell Hannah. She stopped by to drop off some magazines, and she knew right away something was wrong. I broke. But I wanted to give you time to process on your own before anyone else would start harassing you.”

“Okay.” I stared back at her, waiting for her to lead.

“I need to give you something,” Mom said simply. She motioned to the thick yellow envelope resting on her knees, and I sat beside her, wary but curious. “I wrote this all during the year after I had you, before I started school. Your dad was always out trying to get whatever work he could scrape up to save money for college, and I was always alone, with you. Trying to decide how I would ever be able to explain what had happened. So I did the only thing I could think of—I wrote it all down while it was still fresh, every last piece of what I was thinking and feeling and seeing in those first nine months. I wrote a book, my first book, but I only ever wanted you to read it. When
you were old enough. And once I finished this book, I just kept writing, and . . . well, here I am today. But I knew from the start that this would be the only book about
my
life.
My
heart. Everything since has been Clemence Verity's make-believe. My escape. Building worlds of my very own that could make more sense than this one that we're in right now.” She took a long, shaky breath and dropped the envelope onto my lap. “Before you say anything else or decide anything else, I need you to read this. I need you to see the world the way I saw it, to experience it all as I did. Every single word of this is true, Iris. Every last one.”

“I'll read,” I said. “But I can't promise anything more than that.”

“That's all I can ask of you right now, sweetie. Trust me—I know how hard all of this is to wrap your head around. You're not the first person I've had to ask to take a massive leap of faith with me. But you are definitely the most important. Your leap is the one that matters most.”

I pushed up to stand, my head dizzy with colliding waves of anger and excitement. I wanted to just be angry, angry that this ridiculous lie was still unraveling, still seemingly nowhere close to its end. But the weight of the pages in my hand, the idea that I was about to read my mom's first book, a book that no one else in the world would see—I wanted to tear open every little crack that
would give me a better view inside my mother's stunning, complex mind.

I went to my room and locked the door, threw myself on the bed, and then slowly, carefully peeled back the envelope. The top page was mostly blank, just a single quote attributed to Albert Einstein:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I closed my eyes and let the words drip through me, each one so solid and heavy that I could almost hear them echoing from deep inside my veins. What
if
? What if life was one constant stream of miracles? From the moment we first opened our eyes every morning to a world with sunlight and friendship and love, a world where machines flew through the skies and doctors took out old hearts and put new hearts back in, repurposed and re-created life with their own hands? What if I was looking at miracles the wrong way? What if we all were?

I looked back down and flipped to the second page, the page where my mom's story began. And then I started reading.

This is the end, but this is also the beginning.

This is the story that I'll wait to tell you until life—inevitably, I suspect—forces the truth to the surface. A
secret that I hope to keep buried until you are old enough to ask and understand your own questions. Old enough to know that life is not always what you expect, that reality is not always as neat and orderly as it may seem—and that there aren't always answers, as much as we want them, as hard as we may try to seek them out.

This is the story of how you came to be, of falling in love, of starting down new paths.

This is the story of a miracle.

I reread the last page so many times I could squeeze my eyes shut and say the words out loud verbatim. So I did, letting each word burn me, scar me so that I was permanently marked by this moment. This feeling that was coursing through me right now.

Belief
.

Because as crazy as it all so obviously was—so totally nonsensical and preposterous, physically and scientifically impossible—somehow I believed that my mom was telling the truth.

I could hear my mom's voice take over my own, feel every last shape and sound of the words that had been sitting, waiting for me since I was just a baby.

Maybe I was delirious—the belief felt so strong because it was after midnight, and I hadn't gotten out of bed once since I'd opened up the envelope eight hours before.
Maybe in the morning I'd laugh at myself for being so silly and gullible. My eyes felt fuzzy and out of focus. I needed food and water and the bathroom, all so urgently that I suddenly couldn't decide what needed to come first.

I sat up and flinched as tingles ran up and down my arms and shoulders, realizing just how stiff my body was from lying tense and still for so long. I stood and stretched, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I arched my hands up toward the ceiling. The same messy brown hair, the same wide green eyes. The same easy smile with the same small chip in the front tooth from falling off my scooter and landing face-first on the sidewalk when I was eight.

I was still
me
.

No matter what I had read, no matter what I believed now, I was still
me
.

I left my room and walked down the first flight of steps, the second-floor hallway dark except for a bright sliver of light spilling out from beneath my mom's office door. I tiptoed past, creeping down to the ground floor. I used the bathroom first, and then quietly moved around the kitchen, chugging a glass of water from one hand while I spooned heaping globs of peanut butter into my mouth with the other.

Before I could talk myself down, make myself wait until the morning when everything might look different, I
walked back up the stairs and toward the office. I tapped on the door once, softly. It swung open so quickly, I wondered if my mom had been crouched in front of it, waiting for me to come. She had known, of course, that I wouldn't be able to stop until I had finished, and that I wouldn't be able to stay away once I had. She was my mother. She knew me inside and out.

We both stood there in silence, taking each other in. And then, without a word, I hugged her. I hugged her harder than I ever had in my life, and she hugged me back just as fiercely. Because we shared more than just our blood and our memories now—we belonged to each other in a different, stronger kind of way.

“I believe you,” I said, pulling away from her. “I don't know how or why, but I do. I just do. I still don't believe in
the
God or any other god, or Jesus and the Bible—I don't believe in any of that stuff. But I believe that something happened to you, Mom. Something special. Something totally crazy and unexplainable. I can't understand how or why, or who that Iris lady really was, but I don't think that you're lying. Not then, and not now.” I took a deep breath, forcing a big gulp of fresh air deep into my lungs, before I kept going. “But I'm scared, Mom. I'm terrified because I don't know what any of this means. And I'm still furious with you, too. I'm furious that you hid this from me for so long, that you and Dad could keep such a massive secret.
How can I completely trust either of you again? Ever?”

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you had to find out the way you did,” she said, reaching out to tuck my tangled hair behind my ears. “Please believe me, Iris, that I'd always planned for you to know everything. I knew deep down that we couldn't hide forever.” She let out a small laugh, but it wasn't a happy one. It was tired, defeated. After all, she had already experienced the consequences of this story firsthand. She had been through all of this before.

“Do you think Kyle Bennett will tell anyone?” I asked, the question that had been buzzing around my head like an angry, blood-sucking hornet for the last week. My mom had already told me how he'd mistreated her, but now after reading for myself—after learning about the nasty things he'd done to my mom in detail—I was even more scared, even
more
angry. Kyle Bennett as a teenager had been a bully—the narcissistic star of the football team, with an adoring parade of followers trailing his every step—a bully who hadn't seemed to care who he hurt or why, as long as it had entertained him and made him seem cooler, more impenetrable. Kyle Bennett got his way. If he wanted something, I had no doubt he'd fight until it was his.