Angel wings
“There were giants on earth,
In those days, and also after
That the Children of God have arrived
To the daughters of men,
And they bore them children.
These were the Brave
that since ancient times
They were Men of renown.”
Book of Genesis 6:4
_______________________________
I got into the car with a sigh. And I looked at the house one last time. I clutched my backpack to my chest, as if it were my best friend. In him was everything that was important in the world. And he was going to accompany me to a town that I was not expecting and that I did not want to know. I ignored my wet face. It had already become common. Exile always made me cry.
We had moved more than twenty times in the last fifteen years. Alice, my mother, a nurse by profession, waited patiently for me to finally adapt.
" Are you okay, Eden?"
My mother's sweet voice forced me to sit up straight in the seat. I wiped my face quickly and tried to smile.
" You will see that you will like Crescent City."
“You said the same thing about the other towns,” I murmured.
My mother bit her lip in mortification and stared at the road.
“You know well why we move so much, Eden,” she said with a broken voice.
And she turned her clear eyes towards me. I watched her in silence.
She was such a beautiful woman, even though she seemed to make no effort to achieve it. Her fine, caramel-colored hair and her big, sweet, blue eyes made her look like a beautiful woman. I had not inherited from her either her beauty, her sweetness, or her multiple talents.
"Remind me, Eden, why we have to move."
"So that Albert doesn't find us," I sighed.
Albert Mason, my father. (I preferred to use my mother's last name). He had married my mother, very young, at a stage in life when it seems that one does things simply to annoy adults. Authorities that we usually do not listen to when they tell us to be careful, that our actions always have consequences...
The consequence of my mother getting married without finishing school was that, the following year, she found herself on the street, alone - well, alone, no, I was only a few months old - fleeing poverty and an alcoholic and violent ex-husband. . But who always found a way to appear and remind us that we were not safe. That abandoning him had been a bad decision and that we were going to pay for it. Just thinking about him, and his macabre, discordant laugh, made my body start to shake.
But by the time I was twelve, Albert Mason no longer appeared in our lives. We didn't know if it was because he was tired or because he already had a new victim to torment. Or because my mother had perfected our way of hiding.
With two low-paying jobs, my mother managed to finish her studies at night and she graduated as a nurse with honors. So our financial situation improved a little.
Still, we didn't stay in the same place for too long. Which didn't allow me to put down roots. Not attracting attention, wherever we were. That was always the order. Go unnoticed. My mother had chosen that occupation on purpose. She could find work practically anywhere.
We had already lived in almost all fifty states of the Union. Now it was our turn to the west. California to be precise. My mother's index finger had fallen, on the old map, on the name of a small town that, by chance - I believed - appeared on the map, what was her name? Ah yes: Crescent City. (For some reason I had a hard time remembering it) Population: between five thousand and twenty thousand. On the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Humid, cool climate and frequent rains all year round. At least there was a beach (even if it was cold and arid, according to what I had researched on Google) but a beach nonetheless. We came from Texas, hot and dry. This was going to be different.
I have always preferred the cold and the rain, to the heat and the sun. Maybe it was because it matched my mood better.
I only came back from my thoughts when we were leaving the urban area. My mother's old car was also left behind. One where almost every seat was broken and the gearbox made a deafening grinding noise every time it got stuck. But it was an adorable car because it was the only thing - besides what was in my backpack - that I had left from my childhood. It hadn't been a very good childhood, but at least it was the only time in my life when I remembered staying in the same place for more than a year.
As we passed an endless line of tall trees, on the side of a deserted road, I opened my backpack and looked inside. Along with some old photos, some colored stones that always accompanied me - something like small amulets - was my great "treasure": a porcelain cup, with a wide mouth, painted a lustrous black on the outside and a beautiful, warm light mustard inside. It had a forked handle and some lines crossed the top in white, green and red tones, as if someone had painted them with large, very loose brush strokes. It was probably worth a couple of dollars and I could get it at any store. But for me it was invaluable.
I took it out of the backpack carefully, as if it were some ancient and rare relic, and looked at it. I smiled when I saw the base. I still had what I thought was the serial number engraved on it: 1 8 7. That number had already become my lucky number.And I used to look for that number everywhere. And when he found them - a clear product of chance and probabilities - regardless of the order in which they appeared, he used to take it as a good omen. It didn't matter if I saw them in one direction or another. He always made me smile. It made me smile warmly and comfortingly because it was associated with a nice memory.
Still with one of those smiles, I put the cup in my backpack, without looking at the other things I kept there.
I was surprised to see that we had already left the main route and were entering the airport. There my mother would deliver the rental car we were traveling in and we would take the plane to Los Angeles. From there, a new car was waiting for us to where chance had taken us.
Although life was going to show me very soon that things do not happen by chance but by causality.
I unconsciously clutched my angel wing that hung from my neck by a dark cord; strangely, it felt cold to the touch. I shuddered.
The fact that it was cold to the touch gave me a bad feeling. And then I remembered the strange dream I had had just before dawn.
a young man whose face I couldn't quite make out, mesmerizing crimson wings, and my name spoken in a strangely familiar way, though with a voice I'd never heard before.
Only when the plane ascended and took its place among some fluffy clouds did I realize that my home in Texas was behind me forever. I received the juice and cookies from economy class and set them aside. I didn't feel like eating. I had a knot in my stomach. It was incredible that after so many times I had done the same thing I still didn't seem to get used to it. The first times were the worst. Then I began to swallow the bitter pill and that's it. And for a while I stopped feeling. Since I knew that I would be leaving as soon as the school term ended, I did not intend to make any friends or become attached to any place. The houses began to look like simple hotel rooms. And so the games became a little easier for me.
This time, however, the school term had already started. We were in the first days of September and that meant that I was going to be the new one in a school where everyone else already knew each other.
I leaned back in my seat and looked at the seats around me. A couple of young people, a woman and a man - with all the appearance of university students - were dozing in their seats. I made an effort not to look at the young man. I would die of embarrassment if he ever realized I was looking at him. Besides, they never saw me. I was like invisible to the eyes of others, especially if they were handsome. Beyond, a couple of seats ahead, an elderly couple was chatting among themselves. Towards the other side, near the windows, a mother and her four small children were all talking at the same time. What a trip that was going to be! My experience told me that if there were children on a trip, it would be a noisy trip. Screams, sobs, outbursts. All inclusive. Still, I liked children. I liked to see them smile and play, unconcerned about their surroundings. They lived in their own world. Just like me.
The rest of the seats were empty. I rummaged in my backpack again. This time I didn't take out my cup but the photos. There were three. In the first one - in black and white - I appeared, at one year old, in the weak arms of my grandmother. She barely remembered her. She had passed away when I was four and, of course, I couldn't say goodbye to her. I couldn't because we were in a neighborhood on the outskirts of New York, when she was hospitalized - for an illness that consumed her at a young age - in a hospital in Louisiana. And even if we had been living closer to her, my grandfather would have prohibited us from visiting. We found out thanks to a call from my uncle Jasper. That had been the last time my mother and her brother spoke on the phone.
My grandfather had never forgiven her for running away from home to marry “that good-for-nothing guy” – as he called Albert, my father. And he had not been wrong. But when he found out that we were on the street, he forbade her from returning to her house. And they never spoke again. My grandmother - on furtive trips when my grandfather, she went on her own business trips - came to visit us in the state where we were. After her death, it was just the two of us who did it again. Nobody else.
My mother had told me thousands of anecdotes about my grandmother. So I felt like she knew her deeply, when in reality I only vaguely remembered her. Unconsciously I clung to my necklace: a silver angel wing with a small but very shiny purple quartz rock - also known as amethyst - embedded. It was not expensive but it was part of my “treasures”. It had been my grandmother's. And she had given it to my mother to give to me when I was old enough to understand its meaning.
With a sigh, I moved on to the second photograph. The boy reflected there was five years old and he was surrounded by the warm arm of a boy with dark hair and thousands of freckles on her face. We both had such smiling smiles...
When I saw that image, I was immediately transported to that day. They had taken that snapshot of Adam and me on the last day of school, as a souvenir.
Adam Bleu was the only friend I ever had.We shared only one semester in kindergarten in Florida. But it seemed like we'd known each other forever. He was the only child who had approached me, my first day, with a wide smile and a candy in his hand - whose wrapper I still have in my backpack. After that day we had not separated until saying goodbye.Being the new student was always difficult. And I'm not very sociable, so to speak. Not really sociable at all. But I don't do it out of pride - as I have heard people talk about me, more than once, in the hallways or bathrooms of schools - but out of shyness.
I feel different. I have always felt different from others. And also inferior. Inferior in talents and beauty. I am not very attractive nor do I attract the attention of the opposite sex. I rather went unnoticed. I admit that I don't do anything to improve my appearance either. I don't want to say that I am disheveled or dirty but my wardrobe is chosen based on my comfort and not based on fashion or seeking to stand out. I'm not tall, but I am quite gangly and I almost always feel like I have a hundred hands and a hundred feet. I blush for anything and in any situation. I'm usually clumsy. I trip quite easily, I tend to knock people over me, because I always walk looking at the ground. And things fall out of my hands when - on rare occasions - a stranger looks at me or talks to me.
Remembering the name Adam, filled my body with a strange shiver, and once again my mind led me back to that enigmatic dream of the night before.
And again I shuddered at the memory of the mesmerizing way in which, to the murmur of its wings, it pronounced my name over and over again.
“A human angel who knows my name... What kind of dream is that?” I mumbled without thinking.
“What were you saying, angel?” my mother asked, without looking up from her book.
“Nothing...”
She continued engrossed in her reading; and I shuddered again... Angel... My mother never called me that. I prepared myself. Although I didn’t quite know why. I wasn’t superstitious, but, as I said, I never believed in coincidences either.
