In the distance, a car turns toward the house, its headlights scouting ahead in shafts of yellow-bright light. When the light touches them, the trees go still. The car whips around and parks along the curb. The lights cut off.
He hears the sound of a door opening, then the easy rhythm of In the weak interior light, he sees Madelaine sitting in the passenger seat.
She climbs out of the car. The streetlamp casts a net of golden light around her, and the image reminds him of icons he has seen. She is smiling for the first time in days. He knows instinctively it is Angel who has given her back her smile.
It should hurt, seeing her look at another man with love in her eyes, and so he waits for the pain to hit, but it never comes, and the absence surprises him.
He knows he can still feel pain. He’d felt it earlier today when Madelaine had come out of the house. Her eyes had been puffy and red from crying, and he knew she’d been crying about him. The image of her standing there on the porch, wearing his old shirt, had made him hurt. Deep, deep inside him, in the place where his heart used to be.
But now she is smiling, and so radiantly beautiful that he finds it difficult to draw an even breath. She seems to float up the walkway toward him, her head cocked toward Angel, her beautiful face cast in golden light.
He realizes all at once that they look young and happy, both of them. It is the way they used to look at each other all the time, the way she never looked at him.
Strangely, the knowledge warms him, makes him feel light enough to float off the porch swing. A prickling sensation moves through him—this time he almost believes that it is real. It starts in his toes and works upward. It feels as if pure white-hot sunlight is slipping through his veins, illuminating him from the inside. He gets an almost giddy sense of weightlessness.
He expects to float away, and when he doesn’t, he looks down, and finds that more of him is gone. From the waist down, he is nothing but shadow steeped on shadow.
It surprises and confuses him, the slow disappearing of his body, but it doesn’t scare him. It feels… right.
When he looks back up, he sees that Madelaine is on the porch beside him. He can hear the hushed sound of her voice as she talks to his brother, though he can’t make out her words. Angel’s answer comes in a droning sound not unlike the whispering of the trees.
He wants to be near them, to wave his hand and say I’m here, see me.
She opens the door and flicks on the porch light, and there, in the golden glow, he sees a shadow standing alongside them.
He knows somehow that it is the shadow of the man he once was. Mesmerized, he watches himself slip into his brother’s shadow and stand there, close enough to touch them.
It feels so right to be there in his brother’s shadow, a part of Angel and yet separate. He can feel himself relaxing, easing back into the porch swing. A relieved sigh slips from his lips, and at the sound, a bird flaps its wings and soars from the apple tree in the front yard.
He knows at last what he has been waiting for, and the wait is almost over.
Lina looked up at the sky, and felt as if a whole new world had opened up for her. She didn’t know why exactly. It was the same old night sky she’d been seeing since she was a kid, the same old stars. But tonight she noticed them in a way she never had before. The Milky Way was a smeary wash of gray-white light, dappled with twinkling stars. As she lay there, staring upward, a star shot across the heavens, leaving a glittering trail of light before it disappeared.
“Make a wish,” Zach said.
Lina smiled. Jett wouldn’t have been caught dead saying anything as corny as that. Yet even as she noticed the geekiness of the statement, something about it warmed her. The more she thought about it, the more whimsical and fun it became, almost a game.
She rolled onto her side and studied him. He lay stretched out beside her, his arms crossed behind his head. Sandy blond hair fell away from his face. She could see the starlight reflected in his eyes, and she thought dreamily that it was fitting—for it was he who’d shown her the magic in a night sky.
He turned to look at her and gave her a slow, sleepy smile. “Did you make a wish?”
She almost touched him then, but he’d never given her any indication that he wanted that. They’d spent the last two weeks together—eating lunch, hanging out at study hall, waiting for the bus. They talked about everything, about how it was lonely to be sixteen sometimes and about how parents had a hard time understanding. It was Zach who first made Lina question her feelings for her mother. He’d said it easily, on a night just like this one, when they’d sat on the bleachers at the twenty-yard line. She didn’t think he meant to change her views, he was just talking, and she listened….
“I remember when the hospital called,” he’d said, leaning back into the bench seats behind them. “One minute my folks were there, flipping me shit about my hair and my clothes and my grades, and the next minute they were gone. Just poof! you’re alone.”
She’d leaned closer to him, not knowing what to say.
“I’d give up everything, Lina—everything—just to hear my mom bitch at me one more time.”
Lina remembered the last hurtful things she’d said to Francis, and how she’d never gotten a chance to apologize, to tell him that he was the father she’d been searching for. She knew now that sometimes life didn’t give you a second chance to apologize. Sometimes a terrible, tragic phone call ruined everything.
She loved her mother. It came to her in that instant, sweeping through her with a sudden, painful ferocity. If anything happened to her mother, Lina would want to curl up and die. And yet, she’d hurt her mother time and again, thrown stinging, hateful words at her as if she had forever to say she was sorry.
“You’re so lucky,” Zach had whispered into the darkness, his voice quiet.
She’d wanted to tell him that she felt lucky, but she felt bruised by her new maturity, ashamed by the awareness of her own selfishness. But she felt something else, too. Hope. She’d spent the last year reacting to life—being a rebellious brat to rile her mother or a foul-mouthed smoker to please Jett. Now she just wanted to be herself—whoever that was. Suddenly the world felt as if it were opening up to her, glittering and full of possibilities.
And Zach had given that to her, with nothing more than a few honest words. She’d thought about taking his hand and holding it, squeezing it to let him know she understood, but she hadn’t dared.