I spent the next night muttering, “Go away,” and spraying shadows, and she was right. The monsters disappeared. I made them go away, just by my refusal to be afraid of them. I took control of my fear. I conquered it.
That’s how I feel right now, like if I just refuse to be afraid of the bird, it’ll go away.
I wish I could call Mom instead of Billy. What would she say to me, I wonder, if I could magically go to her, if I could run downstairs to her room in Jackson the way I used to and tell her everything? I think I know. She’d kiss me on the temple, the way she always did, and smooth the hair away from my face. She’d draw a quilt around my shoulders. She’d make me a cup of tea, and I’d sit at the kitchen counter and I’d tell her about the crow, and about my vision of the darkness, how I feel inside it, about my fears.
And here’s what I’d want her to say: It’s time to stop being afraid, Clara. There’s always going to be danger. Live your life.
I turn the phone off and set it on my desk.
I won’t let you do this to me, I think at the bird, even though it’s not present at the moment. I’m not scared of you. And I’m not going to let you drive me away.
5
I REALLY WANT A CHEESEBURGER
The days start zipping by, October leaning toward November. I get caught up in the busyness of school, the “Stanford duck syndrome,” which is where it appears like you’re swimming calmly, but under the water you’re furiously kicking. I go to class five days a week, five or six hours a day. I study roughly two hours for every hour I spend in class. That’s at least seventy-five hours a week, if you do the math. Then once you subtract sleeping and eating and showering and having sporadic visions of me and Christian hiding in a dark room, I’m left with about twenty hours to hit the occasional party with the other Roble girls, or get my Saturday afternoon coffee with Christian, or go snack shopping with Wan Chen, or go to the movies or the beach or learn how to play Frisbee golf in the Oval. Jeffrey’s also calling me every once in a while, which is a huge relief, and we’ve been having an almost-weekly breakfast together at the café where Mom used to take us when we were kids.
So there’s not much time to think about anything but school. Which suits me just fine.
I keep seeing the crow around campus, but I do my best to ignore it, and the more times I see it and nothing happens, the more I believe what I keep telling myself: that if I don’t engage it, everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s Samjeeza or not. I try to act like everything’s normal.
But then one day Wan Chen and I are coming out of the chemistry building, and I hear somebody call my name. I turn around to see a tall blond man in a boxy brown suit and a black fedora—I’m thinking circa 1965—standing on the lawn. An angel. There’s no denying that.
He also happens to be my dad.
“Uh, hi,” I say lamely. I haven’t seen or heard from him in months, not since the week after Mom died, and now poof. He appears. Like he walked off the set of Mad Men. With a bicycle, bizarrely enough, a pretty blue-and-silver Schwinn that he takes a minute to lean against the side of the building. He jogs over to where Wan Chen and I are standing.
I pull myself together. “So … um, Wan Chen, this is my dad, Michael. Dad, my roommate, Wan Chen.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Dad rumbles.
Wan Chen’s face goes greenish, and she says that she’s got another class to get to, and promptly takes off.
Dad has that effect on humans.
As for me, I am filled with the sense of deep abiding happiness I always get when I’m around my father, a reflection of his inner peace, his connection with heaven, his joy. Then, because I don’t like feeling emotions that are not my own, even the good ones, I try to block him out.
“Did you bike here?” I ask.