Unearthly

I stared at her in horror.

“I don’t know how long I lay there,” Mom said after a minute. “When I opened my eyes again I saw the figure of a man standing over me. He leaned down and said,

‘Be still, child.’ Then he lifted me in his arms, and the bricks slid off my body like they weighed nothing. He carried me to the window. All the glass was broken out, and I could see people running out of their houses into the street. And then a strange thing happened, and we were someplace else. It still resembled my room, only different somehow, like someone else was living there, undamaged as if the quake had never happened. Outside the window there was so much light, so bright it hurt to look.”

“Then what happened?”

“The man set me on my feet. I was amazed that I could stand. My nightgown was a mess, and I was a bit dizzy, but aside from that I was fine.

“‘Thank you,’ I said to him. I didn’t know what else to say. He had golden hair that gleamed in the light like nothing I’d ever seen before. And he was tall, the tallest man I’d ever seen, and very handsome.”

She smiled at the memory. I rubbed at the goose bumps that had jumped up along my arms. I tried to picture this tall, fine-looking guy with shiny blond hair, like some kind of Brad Pitt sweeping in to rescue my mom. I frowned. The image made me uneasy, and I couldn’t put my finger on why.

“He said, ‘You’re welcome, Margaret,’” Mom said.

“How did he know your name?”

“I wondered that myself. I asked him. He told me that he was a friend of my father’s.

They served together, he said. And he said that he’d been watching me from the day that I was born.”

“Whoa. Like your own personal guardian angel.”

“Exactly. Like my guardian angel,” Mom said, nodding. “Although he wouldn’t call himself that, of course.”

I waited for her to go on.

“That’s what he was, Clara. I want you to understand. He was an angel.”

“Right,” I said. “An angel. Like with wings and everything, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t see his wings until later, but yes.”

She looked dead serious.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I pictured the big old angel in the stained-glass window at church, wearing a halo and purple robes, huge golden wings fanned out behind him. “Then what happened?”

This really can’t get any weirder, I thought.

And then it did.

“He told me that I was special,” she said.

“Special how?”

“He said that my father was an angel and my mother human, and I was Dimidius, which means half.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Come on. You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” She looked at me steadily. “It’s not a joke, Clara. It’s the truth.”

I stared at her. The thing was, I trusted her. More than anybody. As far as I knew, she’d never lied to me before, not even those little white lies that so many parents tell their kids to get them to behave or believe in the tooth fairy or whatever. She was my mom, sure, but she was also my best friend. Cheesy but true. And now she was telling me something crazy, something impossible, and she was looking at me like everything depended on my reaction.

“So you’re saying. you’re saying that you’re half angel,” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Mom, really, come on.” I wanted her to laugh and tell me that the angel stuff was some kind of dream she had, like in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up and finds out the whole Oz thing was a big, colorful hallucination from getting conked on the head. “So then what happened?”

“He brought me back to Earth. He helped me find my grandmother, who was by that point convinced I’d been crushed. And when the fires burned through our neighborhood, he helped us evacuate to Golden Gate Park. He stayed with us for three days, and then I didn’t see him again for years.”

I was quiet, bothered by the details of her story. About a year before, my class had gone on a field trip to the San Francisco museum because they opened up a big exhibit about the great San Francisco earthquake. We’d looked at all the pictures of the broken buildings, the cable cars thrown off their tracks, the blackened skeletons of the burned up houses. We’d listened to old recordings of people who’d been there, their voices sharp and quivery as they described the terrible disaster.

Everybody had been making such a huge deal out of it that year because it was the hundred- year anniversary of when the quake had happened.

“You said there were fires?” I asked.

“Terrible fires. My grandmother’s house burned to the ground.”

“And when was this?”

“It was April,” she said. “1906.”

I felt like I was going to throw up. “That would make you what, a hundred and ten?”