The entire ride back I’ve been trying to speak, been trying even to think about the things that we saw. About our encounter with Coyote Blue and with Starshine and the eerie quiet of the commune. And about how I hated it all. Every single thing about it.
I attempt to sort through the reasons why a person who has been resurrected would choose to join a commune. Is there actually a spiritual transformation that takes place during the dying process or is it only the perception of one? Or worse, do the commune members merely wish for a transformation in order to place some meaning on their deaths that was never there in the first place?
I picture the serene faces, all twisted illusions of people. I think I’d rather be dead than live in a commune. But Penny? What would she think? She cried over an injured bird. She thought the full moon was magical. How would she perceive the shift that she inevitably would make in the natural order if she were to be resurrected?
I worry.
I worry that she would be tempted to seek meaning with people like Coyote Blue. It’s a concern that clenches me in the gut and won’t let go as I start to imagine Penny in linen, face smoothed to unnatural perfection and unflinchingly serene. She wouldn’t cry for birds or for whales or for anything. Would Penny stay my Penny or would she become…something else?
I hate the thought of her going to live somewhere I can’t and wouldn’t follow. If she were tempted by the empty, meaningless spirituality of the commune, my resurrection choice would have been wasted.
When I think about the experience of the commune, the same word keeps slipping into place: unnatural.
I swallow down the meaning of this like a dose of cough syrup, but my throat still itches, itches, itches, and I want to say something that I’m nearly too scared to breathe.
What if I’ve made my decision? It feels impossible. Wrong even. But I suspect that I’ve felt it the entire drive home, percolating through my bones, hardening into a choice—yielding a name now balanced on the tip of my tongue.
My palms sweat.
I tell myself that there is no good resolution but that I will do the best I can with the information I have.
“Ringo?” I’m holding my breath and squeezing my abs tight to try to hold together the pieces of myself that I have left. “I think I’m going to resurrect Will,” I say. “I don’t think Penny would like it. The whole resurrection thing.”
We turn onto Lemon Drive, then Orange.
Ringo seems to have given up speaking, like it’s a sacrifice for Lent. But then he finally says, “Oh.” And nothing else.
“That’s all you can say?” I respond, really and truly kind of pissed.
He pushes a little harder on the gas pedal. My stomach lurches and I grip my fingernails into the stiff stitching of the seat.
The pedal pushes closer to the floor. We go fast, faster, fastest. I watch the speedometer dial climb the outside of the circle.
“Right now, yeah.”
His face is calm, but I notice his fists clench almost imperceptibly around the wheel.
Fear threatens to crush my windpipe. My heels are bearing into the floorboards. “Can you…can you please slow down, Ringo?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the effect is that I feel like we’re going even faster and I can’t see where we’re going, which means it could be anywhere. I am barreling. Too much. Too quick. Waiting, waiting, waiting for impact. I brace myself. So tense. I cannot move.
“Slow down!” I shout. Eyes still shut tight.
And this time, he listens. He eases off the accelerator. “Sorry,” he says, flatly, but I can’t help the deluge of images that flood in at the sense of panic. They layer together one on top of another, coming, coming, quick, quick, quick—blond hair, red blood, glittering glass, white bone, crushed metal, limbs, intestines, open flesh, suffocating, ocean, dead—I gasp, tearing myself from the sinkhole of frightening pictures.
“Lake?” he says. His hand is on my leg. I’m shaking my head. I can’t look at him. “Lake?” he asks again. And then I hear the blip-blip-blip of the blinker and we’re curving to the side and coming to a stop. Horns honk. Cars whoosh by Ringo’s door. But he has pushed the gearshift into park and we are no longer moving.
He turns toward me. I’m shaking violently. Ringo leans across the center console and wraps his arms all the way around me. His nose is resting in the nook between my shoulder and my neck. His mouth is warm there. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, this time with real concern. “Are you okay?” he asks. My teeth chatter so much, they might chatter right out of my mouth. Ringo pulls away and ducks his head down to look into my eyes. I drink in the marine blue and trace the intricate edges of his birthmark with my own eyes, like it’s a map back to the present. He holds one of my shoulders firmly and strokes the back of my head with his other hand. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t mean to, Lake.” He watches me until I nod and then he pulls me into him again. He presses my nose into his shirt collar, tucks me into him like a doll. He is much more solid than I thought he’d be.
“I’m fine.” My words are muffled.
I feel his head above me shaking back and forth. He doesn’t let go and I don’t try to move. His Adam’s apple bobs sharply and I think I feel a slight tremor in his chest when he says, “‘Anna.’ The Beatles, they knew what they were talking about when they covered ‘Anna.’” He only holds me for a moment longer, squeezing me once tightly before letting me go. Then he wipes his hand over his face, shudders some emotion free and drives.
At the Southshores complex, I watch the back of Ringo’s head disappear into his apartment and I think that I want to cry. How can a heart be full and empty all at once? I wish for the days to pass. I wish I could wake up and for it to be the day after my birthday. Lately, there only seem to be wrong turns and I’m taking every single one of them. I’m forced to replace Ringo at the wheel and drive the distance back to my house, slowly and cautiously, always on the lookout for a silver Lexus.
I try mentally repeating the same thing I told Ringo: I think I’m going to resurrect Will. I think I’m going to resurrect Will. I try not to think about the other side of the coin. Cause and effect. Push and pull. Life and death. And the person whose face I’ll be choosing never to see again.
The sun is warm. I slide Penny’s journal out from its hiding place, grab a towel and sneak out onto the beach behind our house. Salt water sprays up between the jetty rocks. I think about walking out there, the way I used to when I was younger until my parents forbade me from scaling the rocks, but I spread my towel out on the gray sand instead. My toes dig ten holes in the beach.
Penny’s journal keeps me company next to my hip. I imagine carrying her with me this way, adding to the notes she kept with some of my own observations. I could tell her about college and how I hold a Save the Whales run each year in her honor. I can explain to her about Ringo. Lines and words would fill up the page and maybe somehow they’d reach her.
Or maybe they wouldn’t.
The thing I’m hoping to feel as I’m sitting out here, watching the waves lap just short of my feet, is peace. Or at least relief.
If I’ve decided Penny might not want to be resurrected, then that should be it, shouldn’t it? That should be my decision. It’s finished. Six days to spare.
But if it’s peace I’m looking for, it’s hiding well. I start to build a sandcastle as a distraction. I burrow my hands in the damp, sticky grains, hollowing out a place for my structure. Matt and I had spent so much time making sandcastles when we were younger, we’d practically become master architects, at least when the medium was sand.
I keep it simple. Four cylindrical towers that I form with my palms. I dig a tunnel through the middle one, then use drippings to make spindly turrets on top of each.
My mind merely turns down the volume, it doesn’t shut off. Happy thoughts should include thinking of Will, what our faces will look like to each other when we see each other for the first time since the crash, how I can lie in
his bed again with the sheets pulled over our heads, how I can wrap my hands around his smooth back and let him warm me like a space heater, how our love story won’t have an end.
I will have to tell him about Ringo and about Harrison. Eventually I’ll need to ask him about the ChatterJaw thread too.
It turns out that turning the voices in my head to a lower volume helps. There’s room for happiness and it’s seeping in like the rising tide as I work. The last thing I do is build a wall of sand around my completed castle, as tall and as sturdy as I can make it, so that the water won’t sink my work into oblivion.
ChatterJaw and Ringo and Harrison and the absence of Penny and the relationship between Will’s mom and Tessa—these are all things that we can deal with later, together, which is the way that we’ve dealt with everything for the past four years.
I sit back onto my towel and pull Penny’s journal into my lap. I open it up. The sight of her handwriting hits me with a fresh wave of pain, the deep-down throbbing kind—but I’d expected it, more or less, and so I turn to the back half where I’d left off and I begin reading, like she’s talking to me one last time.
I don’t know how long I’ve been reading against the backdrop of the sea, which is becoming choppier and noisier, and the flecks of salt gathering more thickly on my neck and lips—thirty minutes? forty-five?—when I cross a line that I have to reread: I’m a mosaic made from sharp edges and broken things, I read.
The page begins to quiver between my fingers. I wrench my eyes onto the next line, and the next:
I’m a mosaic made from sharp edges and broken things
As long as no one looks too closely—not even me—none of the ugly bits show through
Those parts that want to smash love and tear holes in hearts
But I’m still made up of the broken things
Even if nobody knows
I still feel them
Ripping into my soul
Thud-thud-thud goes my heart, thud-thud-thud.
I lose count of the number of times I read through the page. There’s no attribution. Nothing but Penny. Thud-thud-thud.
Make it stop. Because I know the lines. I know the words. I know where I’ve seen them before.
What had Harrison said to me the first moment that he told me about the ChatterJaw thread? I know. He’d said he was pretty sure the two writers had gone private. That my Will had gone private. And now I know who with.
I watch Penny and Will walk away until they disappear through the hospital-wing doors. The slaps of their flip-flops stop and I’m left alone again amid the sound of heart monitors and IV drips.
Maybe it’s my own fault. After all, they’d asked if I wanted company. I could have spoken up then. But the problem is, I didn’t want them to ask. I didn’t want to be the one to tell them not to go without me. I wanted them not to be able to fathom going without me.
But of course they could. It was spring break. Their choices were (a) a water park trip we’d been planning for a month, or (b) sit in a hospital waiting room for six hours with nothing to do.
And yet I still find myself with this gnawing feeling that I wished they’d chosen to stay. I take a sip from the milk shake they brought me as a consolation prize, but it doesn’t even taste good now, which is saying a lot, since I’ve been munching on food from the hospital cafeteria for the entire week of spring break so far.
Five whole days while Penny and Will have been out enjoying the time that we should have all enjoyed together. I scuff my shoe against the white tile floor, letting myself wallow for another few moments in my great, big helping of bitter pie.
“Lake?” Mom pops her head out of one of the rooms while a nurse in pink scrubs is slipping out. “What’s taking so long?”
I slouch toward the door and slink in past her. “I don’t know why I have to be here anyway,” I mumble.
Mom goes rigid. She abruptly closes the door. She snatches my elbow and pulls me in the way she used to when I was five years old and in trouble. “Your brother is in pain, young lady,” she hisses, as if trying to prevent Matt from hearing. “This is the least you can do.”
Spittle lands on my cheek. She’s right. I’m ashamed at my attitude. But instead of erasing all the other nasty feelings that are swimming inside me, I just add shame to the internal cesspool of emotions already there.
“Sorry,” I say quietly.
Her fingers release the fleshy part of my arm and I rub at the spots dramatically, like she’s really hurt me.
She runs her hands over the front of her jeans and stands up straighter. When was the last time she went home? Two days ago? Before even then? I can’t remember.
I follow her into the room, where my dad is snoring in a chair and Matt’s lying in the same spot he’s been for the past five days. In a hospital bed.
His breathing is labored. An infection rages in his lungs. His face is red and feverish. His pupils move slowly to focus on me. “Oh,” he rasps. “It’s you.”
I shrink back a step. See, I want to scream, he doesn’t even want me here!
“Didn’t mean to break up social hour,” he says with a snarl.
“You didn’t. They just wanted to stop by to see how you were.” Lies.
“Did you tell them my back’s still broken? Did they want to help change my bedpan? Or how about my underwear?”
I hug my elbows. “No.”
“Oh, shut up, Lake. Stop acting like I’m the freaking big bad wolf and you’re scared of me. Nobody feels sorry for you, you pathetic, petty excuse for a human being.”
My mouth drops open. It’s the meanest thing he has ever said to me. His words have the exact opposite effect from what he intended, because I feel sorrier for myself than ever. I sniff in quick breaths, trying to stave off the tears that have begun to bubble up on the rims of my eyelids.
This time when Mom touches me, it’s gentle. “He’s in pain.”
“Of course you’re pandering to her.” Matt stares up at the ceiling now. His breath is coming in seething fits. It’s strange to see his body lying completely limp. A normal person would be writhing in pain. Clenching their fists. Kicking their legs. But not Matt. He has to marinate in the hurt and I guess that’s why he tries to spoon some of it onto me. “I swear. If you weren’t good for a resurrection…” he says.
And I can feel the hatred in those few words as clearly as if they were a spike shot through my back. The tears won’t stop now. I don’t understand why he hates me. I don’t understand what I did to deserve this. I tried. So many times I tried to reach out to him. He forgets: he was the one who rejected me.
All I know is that being here is making me miss out on the last spring break I have with the people that actually do care about me—Will and Penny—and so I can’t help it. I hate him right back.
I decide on a plan. Or at least the beginnings of one. I try not to feel bad that I’m actually going to need Matt’s help.
I knock on my parents’ bedroom door, but there’s no answer. Instead, I hear voices coming from the study. The voices sound angry, angry enough to bring my dad home early from work, I realize.
I creep toward the closed doors until I’m close enough that the sounds of angry voices arrange themselves into words I can understand.
“That’s why I’m telling you.” My mom’s tone is shrill. “She needs to know.” I stop breathing to hear better. The end of my mom’s thought is drowned out by the booming sea outside. I plant my foot another step closer to the door.
“That’s not your call to make.” My dad, unlike my mother, keeps his voice even, like this is a conversation he’s rehearsed over and over again. Have they had this conversation before? “It’s against his wishes.” I feel the hair rise on the back of my arms and then a little prickling sensation as I realize that the “she” they’re talking about is me. “This whole thing. It’s about choice. Isn’t that what we decided together? You know what we have to do. We have to stay the course.”
This isn’t
the first time I’ve heard my parents argue about Matt’s resurrection. Of course they never seem to bother to include me in the discussion.
“We’re their parents, Peter.” I move closer to the door.
“We are. But Matt’s not a child.” Dad’s raising his voice now. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“You’re wrong. Everything’s different after what’s happened.” She’s pleading now. My throat feels scratchy. “He’s going to make himself a martyr and you’re going to let him.”
“He’s our son. We owe him this much.” Dad’s voice has the air of reluctant finality. He’s tired. Tired of bills. Tired of taking care of my brother. Probably even tired of me.
“We’re not going to have a son after all this!” Mom says. “Not unless we do something!”
I swallow.
“I’m finished with this discussion.” I hear his fist come down on something solid and wooden, like the desk.
“Tell her, Peter. This is on you.”
Tell me what? That I have to use my resurrection choice on Matt? That they’ll disown me if I don’t? Or that they’ll drag me into the office themselves and force me to write down Matt’s name as the resurrection candidate?
Or is there something else? Between Will, Penny, and my parents, I’m beginning to feel as though I’ve been living my life constantly in the dark, as though everyone knows things that I don’t.
Heavy footsteps come from the other side of the door. I have just enough time to take a few steps back, so that it doesn’t look like I was hovering, before my dad emerges from the study. He’s already in the process of buckling the strap of his bike helmet under his chin
“Hi, Dad.” He jumps. He hasn’t had enough time to rearrange his face. It looks exhausted and drawn, like he’s stayed up all night, and his hair is tousled.
This is Not the End Page 23