On Wings of the Morning
by Marie Bostwick
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780758222565
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
Prologue
Morgan
Knowing who I am, you might think I was born to fly. Probably
there is something to that. If the yearning for flight is something you can inherit from your parents like blue eyes or a bad temper, then I suppose I come by it honestly enough. But if that is true,
then it might just be the only honest piece of my birthright.
Though it was years before we could talk about my father, Mama
says that even as a little boy I sensed the truth, or at least part of it.
She still speaks in hushed amazement of the night of my fourth
birthday, the night she tucked me in under her present to me, a quilt
of the Oklahoma night sky appliquéd with star points over a field of
cobalt and midnight, stitched by hand with the three-strand thread
that held Mama’s whole world together—imagination, determination, and secrets. There was so much we couldn’t, or didn’t, talk
about.
And I wanted to know everything. Things about her. About me.
About why, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she would fix her
eyes on closed doors as though waiting for someone to open them.
Who was she waiting for? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Somehow I
sensed that if I pulled on the strand that stood for secrets, all of us
would unravel at the seams.
Maybe that’s why I made up the story I told her that night, about
the father I’d imagined for myself, a father who’d died and flown a
recon mission to Heaven, just to make sure the coast was clear for
me. I knew he was an invention, but an invented father was better
than a void. Mama’s eyes welled up when I told her my story, but they
were happy tears, I could tell. Somehow I’d hit upon something
right, something that caused a flickering light of hope to shine through
her tears. I rolled my tale out as a bolt of whole cloth, woven with
equal parts of plausibility and fabrication, and Mama did what she
always did: she embellished it with explanations and appliquéd on a
desire for things the way they should have been, and by the time I
closed my eyes to sleep we’d stitched a story so sincere and inviting
that it could nearly have passed for truth. Nearly.
If the truth is to be told, and I think the time has come, it wasn’t
my heritage that drove me to the sky. It was the secrets. The first
time I pulled the stick back and nosed my plane skyward, breaking
through a bank of bleached muslin clouds into a field of edgeless
blue, I realized that I’d finally found the place I belonged, the only
place where my skin didn’t feel as if it were bound too tight around
my soul. The longing was always there, but how could I have known
what it was I longed for? I was just trying to outrun the secrets.
The family history Mama and I patched together was warm and
comfortable and tightly sewn; we wrapped it around ourselves as a
shelter from the hard blows of life, but at the end of the day it was
just a collection of lies.
There are no secrets in the sky. There is no need for them. When
I see the heavens stretched before me, it does not matter where I
came from, or where I am going, or who came before me. No one
asks me questions, and I don’t ask them of myself. That moment is
the moment for me. There is no time and no regrets, nothing to
weigh me down.
The closer you fly to Earth, the more your craft will be rocked
and battered by turbulence, and if the tumult is strong it can throw
you completely off course. But if you fly high enough, where there
isn’t oxygen enough to sustain a lie, you’ll find bright skies and air
so smooth you can cut through the clouds, slippery and free. That is
where I live.
I am the eagle’s son.
Excerpted from On Wings of the Morning © Copyright 2012 by Marie Bostwick. Reprinted with permission by Kensington Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
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