From the award-winning author of The Storyteller’s Death comes a riveting, multicultural story about what it means to love, heal, and take flight.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ann Dávila Cardinal’s We Need No Wings, which is out September 10th 2024.
To be free, we must learn to fly.
Teresa Sanchez has always known who she a professor, a wife, a mother, and a friend. But when her husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university, Teresa hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead, she spends a year consumed by grief.
Until the day she levitates.
Suddenly, Teresa’s life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she’s reminded that her family is related to the renowned levitating mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found. Teresa will soon have to decide whether to remain shrouded in her grief, or open her heart to a world where we need no wings to fly…
CHAPTER ONE
The first time Tere Sánchez levitated, she was in the garden.
She aimed the hose in an arc over the lush peony bushes, the stream of falling water glinting like diamonds in the sunlight. The blooms were releasing their clean, sweet scent in clouds, and she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, her mind and body slowing. Her husband had planted them for her since she found the scent of the many- petaled flowers intoxicating. She remembered the day she’d come home early from the university to find his muddy but fine jean- covered ass sticking out from between three young bushes. He was so excited for her to see the new additions to his immaculately mani-cured garden. The man wasn’t effusive, rarely expressing his emotions or complimenting her, but he demonstrated his affection in more tangible ways, in ways that lasted. They’d made love right there on the grass, next to the newly patted- down earth that still held imprints of his big-knuckled hands.
Now, ten years later, the peonies were wild and unrestrained, their bloom- laden branches breaching the careful mulch boundaries he’d laid for them, and in this state, the bushes were more like her. As she inhaled, a feeling of lightness spread through her body, not the dizziness that sometimes plagued her, no. More like the restraints of her day- to- day life released their hold, and Tere felt as if she had slipped outside her body, outside time, place. She let out an audible sigh in that moment of near ecstasy, then slowly opened her eyes to see the pink flowers getting farther away, the stream of water lengthening like a bartender lifting the bottle as he poured. She looked down and saw her green- stained sneakers hovering a foot above the grass.
“What the actual fuck?”
The familiar electric heat of panic flooded her body in a wave, and suddenly she no longer felt weightless but rather unbalanced, out of control. She pinwheeled her arms and kicked her legs, but all this did was upend her in the air, until she was horizontal to the ground, frantically swimming with her limbs and getting nowhere. She held tight to the bright green hose, the only thing tethering her to the earth. Her stomach lurched, and she wondered if she was going to vomit; meanwhile, all she could do was impotently flail about like a fish on a dock.
Then, ever so slowly, she lowered to the ground, until she lay grabbing at the grass with her fists, breathing heavily, her pulse racing. She tried to take mindful breaths in through her nose and out through her mouth, then flipped over onto her back putting her hands to her chest. She let go of the hose, and now it whipped around like a cobra, occasionally spraying cold water into her side and across her stomach, soaking her well- worn Ramones T- shirt.
Tere lay there, looking at the cloudless blue Vermont sky, occasionally glittering with drops of hose water, wondering what the hell had just happened.
Or if anything had happened.
Had she finally lost her mind?
It wasn’t the first time she’d questioned her sanity, though every-one else in her life thought her overly capable. She’d been told she came across as infinitely competent: always stayed organized, never missed an appointment, with all needed materials in hand. But there had been times over the past year, hours spent sitting in a chair staring off into space, wondering what the purpose of it all was— times when she felt as if the silence of the empty house had weight, like a pile of cinder blocks that pressed down on her.
But this? No, this was on an entirely new level, and she had to admit she was scared shitless. She was afraid to move, afraid she would float up again. She could picture grabbing on to the branches of the bushes, being left with fistfuls of scented petals as she floated off into oblivion. In the moment, though, before she’d opened her eyes and reality had come crashing back, she’d felt good. More than good. Better and freer than she’d ever felt. And with that realization came a crushing wave of guilt. She was a woman in mourning. There was no joy to be had in that.
Even more disturbing, there was something achingly familiar about the…experience. She couldn’t call it what it was in those first moments, not even in her mind. But familiar to what? She struggled to remember, but in the past decade, the card catalog of her brain had grown disordered, inaccessible, rusty. Unlike the brains of her young colleagues, it did not respond with the cerebral equivalent of a Google search; instead she was often left groping blindly for a term or memory in the cobwebbed corners of her mind. Was that why she hadn’t gone back yet from bereavement leave? That she felt inadequate? Old?
She had to admit that for much of the year since Carl’s death, Tere felt as if it were she who haunted their home, walking around aimlessly, as if she had lost something but didn’t remember what it was. But in the past few months, she’d started to feel a stirring in her chest, at her core. Almost like when she’d felt that first butterfly-wing flutter of a baby in her womb. Was the new stirring related to the…incident she’d just experienced?
She couldn’t have actually done that, she told herself. People don’t hover above the ground. Everything looked the same. How could everything be the same? With shaking hands, she wrangled the hose and twisted the tip to turn it off, then got to her feet to find she was exhausted, like just-finished- a- marathon exhausted. She stood, adjusted to being upright, and started walking back to the house. She had to step over a rake and then accidentally kicked an empty pot onto its side. She could almost hear Carl’s bitching from beyond: the abandoned yard implements scattered about the lawn would have made him insane. He liked everything in his garden just so, in its proper place. As she closed the sliding glass door, she looked back at the long green snake of a hose and the puddles of water around the peonies, then shrugged. She missed him desperately, but part of her appreciated this small rebellion even though there was no one to notice.
Now safe inside, she was suddenly so very tired, but still the anxiety wasn’t receding. It felt as though a swarm of bees were buzzing around inside her head, their furry bodies bashing against the inside of her skull in panic and impotence. “No,” she said aloud. She would not freak out. Tere would handle this as she did any other problem; she was a scholar after all. She walked over to the desk and sat in front of her sleeping laptop. As she faced the blinking cursor of the search engine, she typed out the word “levitation” for the first time, though seeing it on the screen in black and white disturbed her. She scanned through the initial results that included a music festival, magnetic fields, and architectural projects. It was just too broad a subject; she had to focus the query.
Before she could type a new search, her leg started buzzing, and she leapt in the chair, almost upending it. “Christ, get ahold of your-self, Tere!” Hands shaking again, she pulled her phone from her pocket, and water dripped off it. She did a cursory wipe on her pants and saw the handsome bearded face of her son, Rowan.
She whipped up what she hoped was a smile and pressed Connect. “Good morning, honey! You’re up early for a Sunday!”
He paused at that, his eyes narrowed. “Mom, it’s Tuesday.”
Her hand went to her throat in an old- lady gesture her mother used to do, reminiscent of ancestral pearl clutching. “Oh, it is?” She forced a laugh. “Yes, of course it is!” There was nothing convincing about her response, nothing at all.
He stared at her through the glowing rectangular screen. “You’re really starting to worry me.”
She waved her hand in dismissal. “Oh, I’m fine, Rowan. How are the kids?”
“They’re fine, and you’re changing the subject.” He regarded her for a beat more. “You feeling okay? You haven’t had any more of those dizziness episodes, have you?”
Tere could see that she had actually scared him. She’d been look-ing at that face for thirty- two years, and she could read it like a book. Hell, she was scaring herself that morning, but Son, I levitated in the garden was not something you dropped on someone over FaceTime. “No, no, nothing like that. I’m really fine. It’s just, when you don’t go to an office every day, weekday, weekends, they become all the same. It’s a good thing, right?” Her falsely cheery voice was fooling no one.
“I guess…but you are checking in with the doctor regularly, right? Uncle Richard said that fainting spell when you were hiking really freaked him out.”
She waved her hand in dismissal. “I did not faint! And Richard gets freaked out when they’re out of his favorite brand of kombucha.”
“Still…someone has to watch out for you.”
She sighed. “Honey, I appreciate the concern, but trust me, I can take care of myself just fine.”
Rowan let it go. “Doesn’t that summer course you’re teaching start in a few weeks?”
Tere froze. Why did the question feel like a punch in the gut? She missed teaching, the give- and- take with the students, connecting with her colleagues…didn’t she? “Right. Yeah.”
“Well, what have you been up to?”
“Oh, I was just doing some gardening.”
“Ha! You? With the gangrene thumbs of death?”
Though she and Rowan had always had a teasing relationship, she was actually kind of hurt at that. “I’m trying! Besides, I like spending time in your father’s garden.”
“Yours.”
“What?”
“It’s your garden now, isn’t it?”
“No. It will always be your father’s.”
“Look, Mom, I miss him too. More than I can possibly express, but don’t you think it’s time you, you know, start moving on?”
“You working today?”
A long sigh. “Yeah, I was about to log on but thought I’d check in with you.”
“About something in particular?”
“No, I just worry about you, Ma. All by yourself in the house. Uncle Richard told me he never sees you anymore.”
So all this anxiety was being fed by Richard. Damn him. He was not actually Rowan’s uncle but rather her friend and colleague at the university, but since Carl had died, he and her son had been bonding. She was glad Rowan had the male mentorship but hated that they talked about her as if she were some grieving old lady. Well, she kind of was, but she still didn’t appreciate it. “Well, Richard can be a lot to take on a good day.”
He laughed at that. She loved his laugh; it was deep and reached down to his belly, much as his father’s had. “Speaking of the old blow-hard, didn’t you have some kind of presentation to give to Richard’s class this afternoon?”
Tere looked at her watch and read the date and time. “Holy shit! I’m supposed to be there in forty minutes to give a guest lecture!”
“See? This is what I’m worried about. It’s so unlike you, I— ”
“Gotta go, honey! Love you!”
