He runs his hand through the back of his hair. "School courtyard."
"Jeez. And Annwn and I combed that entire place..."
"What is an Annwn?"
"A girl. She's in my Precalc class."
He murmurs noncommittally. I admire the way the swan glints under the ceiling lights.
Swan. Swan Nebula. My stomach feels tight.
"Azel?"
"Now what?"
I almost laugh. So temperamental. "That nebula... You said your mom liked it?"
When recollection dawns on his face, it's like the parting of granite dust clouds, the firmaments of the sky visible at last. "The Swan Nebula," he confirms.
My tongue feels like chalk in my mouth. "So it's real..."
Azel ducks his head, the better to peer straight at my face. It's unnerving. It makes me want to hide.
"Did you see it in a book or something?" he asks.
"A book..." Literature. I have homework.
"Hello?"
I guess I spaced out. "Sorry."
"Don't be."
"Thank you," I say. "For bringing me my bracelet."
That's when it occurs to me: He didn't have to bring it to my door. He could have waited until Monday. He could have caught up with me in school.
I steal a curious peek at his face. The same thing must have occurred to him, too; because he's standing very rigidly; and I could be wrong, but his cheeks look a little more red than brown.
When I smile, it's real. "Do you want to come in?"
He hesitates. "I shouldn't."
"Oh." Oh. "Why not?" Does that sound juvenile?
Azel stalls for an answer. He doesn't find one.
He follows me inside. I close the door behind him. He glances briefly at the paint-streaked wall in the sitting room. I lead him to the kitchen and search the cabinets for teabags. If I didn't buy them, they're not here.
"I don't want anything." Azel preempts me.
I close the cabinet. "If I don't pour you a drink or something, I'll feel weird."
"Why?" Azel prompts.
I consider it. I don't know why.
Azel spots the lit book on the table. He draws it across the surface to him. "You're doing homework?"
"You sound like someone who's never done it before," I joke.
He shows me a cross face. He opens the front cover. I've dog-eared the Plath poem. Horrible schoolbook etiquette, I know.
"What do you think of this piece?" Azel asks.
"Can't read it."
"Why?"
"Can't concentrate. The words. They jump around."
His eyes linger knowingly on the scar on my cheek. Green eyes, bright as emeralds and soft as seas. Warmth trickles down my spine, pleasant and unpleasant.
"Sit," Azel says. You'd think this was his apartment. "I'm getting tired just looking at you."
What a charmer. I roll my eyes and sit down.
"Pay attention," Azel says, his eyes scanning the poetry page. "Lady Lazarus," he begins.
He's reading to me. He's reading for me. I sit up in my chair. The warmth down my spine cools over in ice feathers.
" 'I have done it again,' " he reads.
The poem is horrible. A lady with red hair tries desperately to kill herself. Every time she dies, she rises again from her own ashes. Crowds start to gather. They point at her as though she's a circus spectacle. I don't understand it: why she wants to die; why they won't let her.
The only saving grace is Azel's reading voice. His voice is warm and tumbling. I think of stars tumbling past me, the supervoid cloaking me in endless violets and blues. I think of planets painted in enigmatic green. It looked so real. It felt so real. When I close my eyes I can see the cosmos, can feel the planets and their moons brushing past me. If it looks real, if it feels real, how can it be anything but real?
Azel stops reading. By the time I'm aware of it, he may have been silent for a handful of minutes. He studies me quietly.
"Do you want to see it again?" Azel asks.
I'm afraid to ask what he means.
"The Swan Nebula," Azel says.
My skin feels cold.
Azel closes my lit book silently, almost reverently. He pushes his chair back, standing from the table.
"Come on," Azel says. "I'll show you."
* * * * *
The sun is slow to set tonight. We walk through The Spit's streets, the sky between the white buildings runny in shades of salmon and saffron. I can't see the sun itself, corporate towers obscuring it, windows flashing their wares in dim holograph commercials. You'd think they'd at least wait until dark.
We walk past the sandstone clinic, past a bottle recycling center and a tetrad of competing gas stations. We walk past a rusted memorial statue molded in the likeness of Charles Babbage. Just ahead of us stands a cluster of low-rise garden apartments. I didn't think anything so cozy could survive in a city like The Spit. On the other hand, the gardens are mostly of the dead variety, patches of brown weeds curled up in the hard soil.
My cell phone's in my pocket. I touch the pockets of my woolen jacket, just to be sure. Judas would freak if he came home early and I wasn't there. I stop and think about how weird that is, that my-brother-the-murderer is the conscientious adult. Manslaughterer, says a nagging voice in the back of my head. There's a legal difference.
Azel lets us into his apartment. It's a cozy little maisonette with a short staircase to one side, a coat closet to the other, the sitting area in the far back. Azel steps out of his loafers and leaves them by the door with a tiny pair of girls' shoes. I untie my sneakers and put them aside, just the same. In white stockings, I follow him across the lush gray carpet.
The sitting room's lit by gauzy yellow lamps. A glass door looks out on an artificial pond, its surface glowing faintly with the light thrown off by dozens of paper luminarias. A little girl lies on her belly on the sitting room floor, favoring the carpet over the plush, wine-colored sofa. She giggles naughtily at a cartoon character on the tiny television set. Her hair is wild and bushy, a shade darker than Azel's.
"Go upstairs," Azel says rudely to her.
"You're not the boss of me," the little girl replies, equally bratty. I think she's about eight years old.
"Go upstairs," Azel says again, "or I'll hide all your dolls."
"Stupid. Now I know to beat you to it."
"Aisha!"
Aisha looks at me. Her mouth forms a little "o" of surprise.
I laugh, scarcely able to help myself. She's cute. "You don't have to leave," I say, although it's really none of my business. Girls need to stick together.
"Who are you?" Aisha plows right on. "You're not related to me, are you?"
"Nope." Is it bad that I already want to hug her? "Not that I know of."
"Oh," Aisha says. She rolls away from me, uninterested. "Azel," she says, "can I go play on the computer?"
"Have or have I not been telling you to go upstairs for the past two minutes?"
Aisha hops up off the floor. She trots out to the staircase. Azel shuts the TV off, grumbling.
"Sorry," I say, still laughing. "She's so sweet."
Azel twitches. "You're joking."
"I always wanted a sister," I tell him. I sit down on the carpet, cross-legged. "Especially a little sister. Somebody's hair to braid."
"I'm not about to braid hair anytime soon."
"Why not? Broaden your horizons."
Azel sits down with me, his eyebrows spasming. I want to laugh all over again at the sight of it, but I suppose he's had enough laughter at his expense.
Instead I take in the rest of the sitting room. Rolled up prayer rugs sit together underneath an ornate, semicircular niche in the wall. Another wall's devoted to nothing but report cards. But there--above the space heater--I see it: a photograph. A swan-shaped cloud bursting free from an ocean of gold and green and gray.
Azel takes the picture frame off the wall. He hands it to me. Swan Nebula, reads the little placard under the phot
ograph. Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, 1999.
"That picture hung in my mom's office for ten years," Azel says. He sits back down, rubbing his shoulder. "She was a professor at the university in Nizwa."
It's real. It's real. Seeing it in front of me confirms it, the blood freezing in my veins, my head light on my shoulders. I didn't imagine it. I'm not insane.
"But that means--" I shut up.
"What?" Azel asks. I hand him the photograph and he takes it. He puts it on the floor. He pinches his eyebrows together thoughtfully. "What's the matter?"
"I..." Back at square one. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me."
I don't know where to begin.
So I let it out, all at once, regardless of how nuts it sounds.
"I had a headache. A bad one. I saw... It was like it was in my head, but it wasn't, it was like I left my body-- I saw planets and stars. I saw that nebula. I swear I saw it. I had never seen it before."
I draw in a deep breath. Dizzy. Afraid.
Something is very wrong with me.
Azel's face slackens. He closes his mouth.
"I believe you," he says.
My heart just about stops, I swear. "No way is it that easy..."
"Why? You think I'm supposed to jump to conclusions and assert that you're crazy? I try not to believe or disbelieve in anything unless I have a reason to."
"Then what's the reason?"
"The Prophet Muhammad somehow knew exactly what stages an embryo has to go through to become a fetus. An embryo. You know how small that is, right? And we're talking about the year AD 610. There's no way the prevailing science at the time could have looked inside a mother's womb. But there it is in the Quran. Bones come before muscles. Hearing comes before seeing and seeing comes before feeling. How did Muhammad know that? How could anyone have known that? Sometimes ordinary human beings can do things they shouldn't be able to do. You say you saw something with your eyes that nobody's ever seen in person. If I'm going to tell you you're wrong, either I'm the most arrogant person on the planet or I'm God itself."
Hearing it like that--I don't know--I almost feel like I could start crying. I don't start crying, of course. I rub my eye with the heel of my hand. There's someone on my side. I've been wandering through a confusing mire since June. I can stop and rest now.
"That accident," Azel says, but doesn't finish.
"What is it?" I ask. I smile a wavering smile.
He bites the inside of his mouth. He looks contrite. "I don't want to bring it up if it's going to bother you."
"It happened," I say. "I can't pretend it didn't."
He frowns apologetically, but continues. "It could have interrupted the functions in your brain. I don't pretend to know anything about that. But--"
"You think..." Oh. "You think the accident's the reason I saw that--had that--"
"Out-of-body experience. That's what it was, wasn't it?"
I falter. Out-of-body experience sounds so hokey.
"It's just," Azel says. "I believe humans can do things they don't know they can do. I also believe science exists to explain the unexplainable."
For a moment I imagine what it would be like if Kory were sitting here with us. Probably Kory would commandeer the conversation from the get-go: I read all about this in the American Science Journal, perfectly explicable phenomenon, nothing woo-woo about it, get me some potato chips...
"Well," I say, attempting another smile. "I'm in the same boat as you are."
Azel closes his mouth. His gaze is soft. I wish I knew what was going through his head. Just wondering about it, my face feels hot.
The front door swings open and claps closed. A petite girl strides into the sitting room, fluffing her thick black curls with an agitated hand.
"That study session was a bust," the girl says. She stops and inspects me.
"Uh," I say. I choke out an embarrassed greeting.
"This one looks stupid," the girl prophesies.
Azel's whole body jerks. "Layla!"
"If you're going to invite girls over, the least you can do is warn me about it. I don't want to come home to this garbage. You're trying to make me puke, is that it?"
"Go upstairs!" His face is red.
"Fine," Layla drawls. "God knows you're not going to get any other opportunities. Wait until I tell Dad about this."
Layla leaves the sitting room. Azel buries his face in his hands.
"Holy crap," I stammer. And he lives with that...
"Tea!" Azel shouts. He leaps up like a bullet through a barrel. "I'll make some!"
He scurries out of the sitting room through a side door. I watch him in a daze. Somewhere along the line, I realize, tea became codeword for A Plausible Diversion.
* * * * *
The pot on the tray is still steaming. Azel pours the tea into two delicate cups, strainers catching the leaves. The tea is rose-colored and rose-scented, a viable contender for Azel's face.
"What are those?" I point at the snack on the tray, tiny little pastries glazed in honey.
"Luqaimat." Azel won't meet my eyes.
The tea tastes good. The luqaimat tastes better. Too many calories, Joss would have blanched. I smile at the memory. She can't leave me if I carry her with me, the little swan on my wrist.
"You're a gymnast?" I ask Azel.
He blows on his tea. I don't know why--it should have cooled off by now. He looks at me over the brim of the cup. "No."
"Really? I thought--" But that's strange. "I thought you were wearing a singlet. That day in the gym."
He puts his teacup down. He looks a little embarrassed. He scratches the back of his neck. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.
"I'm a dancer," Azel says.
I didn't expect that. I don't know why, but it sounds... It's just right.
"What style?" I take another sip of tea.
"Contemporary."
"Is it hard?"
"I find it hard."
I think he's being modest--but I don't know that for sure.
"When did you start painting?" Azel asks.
"When I was little." I smile. "One Christmas we went to Spain to stay with my Aunt Flora. She was sick at the time. She gave me this paint by numbers set. I got hooked."
A smile passes across Azel's face, shocking me. "I didn't think you were Spanish."
"Really?" I don't know what else to say. He smiled. I can't believe it.
"You're fair."
My head feels heavy, stupid. I try and think of something to say. "Dad was dark." Dad. Oh. Dad's...
"I've wanted to tell you how sorry I am," Azel says. His eyes have lost a shade of brilliance. "That I'm sorry for your loss. But I couldn't bring myself to. God knows you're probably surrounded by well-wishers and whisperers, people watching what they say around you. Everyone and everyday must be a reminder. I didn't want to be a part of that."
"I think," I tell him, "that I'd be reminded of it anyway. Whether or not you brought it up." I can never forget. I don't want to.
"Then I'm sorry for your loss."
"They were so kind," I say. Why can't I stop? Why are these words flooding out of me now? "Sea agradecido, Dad always used to say. Be grateful. Just to be alive, just to laugh with someone you love. He didn't believe in having without giving. He used to leave anonymous gifts at the church. 'Give this to someone who needs it,' he would write. He dressed up as Santa Claus for the children's hospital, the one out on Cape Meares. And Mom--she--she shouldn't be dead. She was the kind of woman you could tell anything to, and you knew she wouldn't repeat it. Everyone needs a woman like that in their life. I had one, and now she's gone. She shouldn't be gone. They shouldn't be gone. They didn't deserve it, Azel, they just--" Why can't I stop? "Didn't." I stop.
Azel touches the back of my hand.
At first I can't move; because it feels like there are tiny electric currents fluttering through my skin, igniting the blood in my veins. I'm worried that if I move my hand, A
zel will feel them, too, and then he'll think I'm a freak, and then he'll never invite me back for tea. But that doesn't make any sense, I reason, because I told him I left my body and floated through the stars and if that hasn't convinced him I'm a freak, then nothing ever will. Still, I don't move; and now I don't know why; and when I think about it, I think, I wonder, maybe I won't move because I don't want him to move, but that's--silly. That's what that is.
There's a smooth scar on the back of Azel's hand, stark white against his brown knuckles. I've never noticed it before. I've never looked.
"My mother passed away, too," Azel says. "When I was young."
I thought so. I swallow, hard. "What..." What happened? is what I want to ask. But I can't. It's too forward.
"My own stupidity, that's what happened." He takes his hand away. My hand feels cold. "Children are always doing things they shouldn't do. Playing in the attic, for example. When the shelves fell down on me... I don't know where she came from. But there she was. She wrapped herself around me. She was my shield. I felt so safe. That's always the way with mothers, isn't it?"
Always, I agree, and force myself not to look away.
"Dad took her to the hospital to get her head checked out. She was fine. They were laughing about it in the exam room. So the hospital released her." Azel peers blankly into the bottom of his teacup. "She died twelve hours later."
"It's not your fault," I tell him. I don't know why. He never said it was. But if he's at all like me--and I think he is, if only a little--
He smiles at me. The second time in one night. I never would have known he was capable of smiling like that, gentle and nonpareil. It's magnetic. I don't want to look away.
"Want more tea?" He lifts the pot.
I laugh. Quietly. "I think I'm all tea'd out for the night."
* * * * *
Azel insists on walking me home.
The streets are a flushed blue-gray under the starry sky. Neon advertisements ripple coldly from the windows of corporate monoliths, their reflections dancing dully on the smooth asphalt. The city is loud and quiet all at once, background noise polluting, permeating, the sidewalks abandoned and desolate.
"What are you going to do?" Azel asks. "About your headaches."