Pieces of Hope

by Carter, Carolyn

  Against my better judgment, I said, “Let’s not keep the big fish waiting.”

  As though an invisible curtain had hung there the entire time, Daniel drew back a huge Fir tree strung with massive, brown blobs—and together we dove into the turquoise blue waters of the Indian Ocean, just off the southern coast of Bali.

  Based on the location of the sun, it appeared to be noon. Since we were several miles off shore, bumping into the living wouldn’t be an issue, and this gave me a small measure of comfort. By now, Daniel was acutely aware of my fear of that occurring. But ever since my death-defying leap into Ethan, he seemed a little paranoid that I might begin to enjoy it. Then again, I knew that that had nothing to do with leaping.

  We were about thirty feet below the surface, swimming faster than the fishes, and without the aid of any equipment. Needing no air tanks to dive was a definite plus, but it was depressing not to feel the slippery warmth of the water. A school of monster-sized fish passed within a hair’s width of me, their wide-open O-shaped mouths an ominous threat in my current state. I screamed as one passed through me, got a disgusting fishy taste in my mouth, and shot twenty feet to my left.

  “It’s just a giant sunfish, Hope—a Mola-Mola,” Daniel laughed. “They won’t eat you, I promise.”

  “But it might swallow me by accident!” I shrieked. I tried to recall when I used to be brave. It seemed so long ago.

  Suddenly, at one of the spots where the sunlight filtered through the water above us, we spied a group of Great White sharks. They looked deadly, scary, and enormous—even from here.

  “You could leap with me,” he suggested. “That way you could feel the water.”

  “Stop listening!” I scowled, balling my hand at his tugging. “I notice you forgot to mention that I’ll also feel the fish dying when he eats them. How awful . . . Remember, I was a vegetarian when I was alive.”

  “You have no idea what you missed, Goo. Meat taste good!” Daniel sounded like a hungry caveman.

  “You don’t plan on eating any humans while you’re out there, do you?”

  “Of course not!” He laughed harder. “Besides, sharks don’t like the taste of humans any more than Bengal tigers do. Their being man-eaters is just a myth.”

  “Good to know,” I muttered under my breath, frantically glancing around for stray fishes. “I’ll stay right here and pass that along to wayward surfers.”

  I grimaced as Daniel swam straight into the mouth of the nearest Great White and stayed there. When the shark threw his flattened head my way, his bleak, black eyes were now a watery bluish-gray. Daniel opened his mouth wide, revealing triangle-shaped teeth with a double row along the bottom. I could tell that he was smiling. In a violent swoosh of water, he flicked his powerful tail once and was gone, chasing after a distant school of Mola-Mola fish. The instant Daniel disappeared; I thought I saw a shadow from the corner of my eye. I looked again. Nothing. Great, now I was becoming paranoid.

  Hours later, I stood inside the barrel of yet another wave. Watching the moonlight cast prism-like rainbows in every direction, I caught myself daydreaming about how much Brody would have loved this if he didn’t have such a phobia about the ocean. Even if I couldn’t feel the liquid on my skin, my vision and reflexes worked better without a body than with one. I could sense when the massive barrel of water in which I hovered was near collapse, could see it moving in a graceful swirl around me, could even pinpoint the single drops of water as they arced over my head. Too often, I’d let it collapse on me only to have disappointment set in again.

  Still dry. Still wishing I could taste the salt on my lips, just as I had at my coming home party. Still missing him. Though it was torturous, I kept reliving the moment when I arrived on that doorstep without knowing where I was or who was on the other side. I kept hearing the doorbell ring, kept seeing it open to Ethan’s beautiful, smiling face.

  About time the guest of honor arrived. We’ve been expecting you.

  I’d stood inside so many waves that I’d lost count, but the sheer magnificence of the water continued to captivate me—how it curled into a perfect barrel, seemingly solid, yet not. I was stunned by the complexity and beauty of the living realm. I had looked past it for eighteen years, and only now after death did I seem to value it at last. I was so caught up in its splendor, so lost in my own thoughts that I careened straight out of the water, high above the monstrous waves when an innocent little voice disrupted my trance.

  “Hello, Hope. You’re a heck of a person to find.”

  “Charlotte!” I flew back down to her and flung my arms around her neck. Rin was beside her. Before she had a chance to speak, I hugged her, too. “This is some surprise!” I said, wondering if they would notice any difference. Did I look dead to them? “Where have you two been?”

  “Where have we been?” Charlotte looked a little startled. “We’ve been looking all over for you. That’s where we’ve been.”

  “If Gavriel hadn’t helped us, we might never have found you,” Rin grumbled. She looked agitated, much the way Daniel and Ethan did when they were near each other. “It’s not our fault Daniel was hiding you in the living realm.”

  “Hiding me in the living realm?” I laughed, picturing the movie, Sixth Sense and the number of dead people who chased that poor morose kid around. I hadn’t noticed any since I’d arrived. Typical. Hollywood. “Sure, like there’s so many dead people here.”

  “Dead?” Charlotte looked puzzled. “Why would you say that?”

  Then Rin cut in, “Where’s Daniel? Is he somewhere near?”

  Charlotte held my gaze. Only half-hearing Rin, I muttered, “I guess you haven’t heard yet.” I softened my voice to break the news. “I’m dead.”

  “Where’s Daniel, Hope?” Rin repeated more urgently.

  “No, you aren’t,” Charlotte insisted. “We just left your body.”

  “Hope! Where’s Daniel?” Rin broke in, shouting now. It was difficult, but I yanked my attention away from Charlotte to shut Rin up.

  “When I last saw him, he had swum off in a Great White. He’s probably off the coast of Australia by now.” I was still smiling like an idiot, thinking that Charlotte was playing some kind of joke on me—a very bad one—unable to assemble the pieces.

  “We should go.” Rin sounded tense. She peeled back a curling wave, preparing to take a shortcut somewhere. Instead, I grabbed one of each of their hands and shot like liquid vapor to the sandy beach. My mind felt distant, millions of miles away. Too many things were disrupting my ability to think—the roaring of the waves; Charlotte and Rin’s tennis-match style of speaking; and most urgently of all, the matter of whether or not I was actually dead. How could I not be? My phantom heart pounded. Ached, really. It was unbelievable how real it felt. I couldn’t get over it. And I was shaking from the inside out. That usually only happened when my body sensed something before my mind could process it.

  “What did you mean when you said you’d just left my body? Where exactly did you leave it?” I asked, still trying to work it through. Charlotte and Rin bunched their eyebrows together, but said nothing for a moment.

  Finally, Rin snarled, “That’s a stupid question. Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Maybe we should sit down,” Charlotte suggested nervously.

  “Just tell me where it was!” I insisted. How could this be real? My phantom heart thrashed out a new rhythm, something akin to a death metal band gone mad.

  In a quiet voice, Charlotte asked, “Hope, why do you think you’re dead?”

  Sucking in a calming breath, I gathered my wits enough to speak. “Well, for one . . . I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel the water or this sand . . .” I dug my toes into the sand, but moved nothing. I made a face. “That didn’t used to happen.” I tried to recall my last visit to Ethan’s. Had I felt the floor beneath my feet? The bedding as I touched it?

  “That’s normal!” Rin’s anger was stifling. I shrank from her. “You’ve been away from your body too long!�
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  Charlotte stepped forward, blocking my view of Rin.

  “Rin is right,” Charlotte said patiently. “Didn’t Creesie tell you that some changes happen faster than others? “That’s why temporary visitors shouldn’t stay away from their bodies too long.” She paused for several heartbeats and looked softly into my eyes. “See, there’s nothing else to—”

  “Daniel said . . .” I hesitated a moment. Had Daniel actually told me I was dead or had I mistakenly jumped to that conclusion? The details were unbelievably fuzzy, as if I were looking at my memories through a thick piece of cloth. As I struggled to think, my pulse raced once again.

  Charlotte took my hands in hers and my heart rate slowed considerably. “If Daniel said that, he was probably just confused,” she reasoned.

  “Confused?” Rin turned an alarming shade of red. “Daniel lied, plain and simple—Your body’s at the hospital, same place it’s been this entire time.” She screwed up her face. “You look gray and skeleton-skinny, but Claire fixed your hair so you don’t look nearly as disgusting as you did a few days ago.”

  “Rin didn’t mean that quite the way it came out,” Charlotte said, irritated.

  “That can’t be right.” Still shaking my head, I took Charlotte’s suggestion and sat down on the sand. It felt the same as sitting on nothing. “No, that definitely can’t be . . .”

  As if I were deaf, Rin shouted, “Can you feel your heart beating?”

  I listened, nodded numbly. “Yes, but it’s a phantom thing . . . Like when someone loses an arm or a leg, but they still have the sensation that it’s there. It’s not really real.”

  I looked up at their disbelieving faces.

  “What? It’s not!” But even as I said the words, they sounded false in my ears.

  Charlotte sat down beside me and took my hand. “I don’t think he did it to hurt you. He loves you . . . you know that, don’t you?” She looked up at Rin. “And we know it, too. We’ve known it for a very, very long time.”

  Without speaking aloud, I heard Rin repeating, But he lied! He lied to keep her!

  “Daniel wouldn’t have—he wouldn’t have—” The word lie refused to roll off my tongue. “Hurt me intentionally. Something must have happened. He must have thought I had died. It was an accident, a misunderstanding.” I wasn’t sure who I need to convince. Me or them? Maybe both. “And what about Daniel, is he—is he—?”

  “Same as you,” Rin said, softening her tone at Charlotte’s glare. “Same dull gray pallor, same skin and bones—only his hair doesn’t look quite as good as yours.”

  Rin, a little sympathy, please, Charlotte whispered in her head.

  “We need to go. There is a sort of urgency, you know.” Rin was edgy, maybe not as heartless as she appeared at the moment. “Daniel might come back.”

  And as if speaking his name had somehow made him manifest, Daniel leaped out of the clear turquoise waters, his hair disheveled—as if he’d just escaped from the mouth of a Great White shark and landed in the mouth of another.

  He was the essence of composure, seemingly unrattled as he looked at us. “Hello, Charlotte, Rin.” He strolled barefoot to a spot beside me, sat down and stretched out his long legs in front of him. His demeanor wasn’t that of a guilty person. There had to be some other explanation. “What’s going on?”

  My hands were shaking. I sat on them to make them stop. “Daniel,” I began. “These two are under the impression that I’m still . . . still alive.” I tried to laugh; it came off more as a gaspy-choke. “Tell them they have it wrong. Tell them we’re in this together.”

  3 back 3 . . . You and me through eternity.

  He was looking below my eyes, staring blankly at my chin. “We are in this together,” he said in a jagged whisper. Seeming not to care that Rin and Charlotte were just a few feet away, he played with the ends of my hair. His eyes, dull gray now, looked into mine. “I mean that. I’ll always mean that. I’ll never love anyone again . . . not the way that I love you.”

  “It’s true?” I clutched at my chest, the place where my heart—not so phantom after all—still beat. The words were barely a whisper. “I can’t believe you lied to me . . .”

  “Technically, I didn’t.” He looked into my eyes. Not apologetic, just sad.

  That was it? Was that all he was going to give? Where was my profuse, tear-laden apology? And the groveling? Didn’t I deserve a little? A lot? I was on my feet in one blurry movement, stomping back and forth in the sand.

  “Technically? Technically, you didn’t say that? Do you think you can pass this off as a technicality?” Fuming, I tried to kick up some sand, but failed. “Try again!”

  Instantly, he was up, too, his lanky form easing into a casual stance as if he believed I would eventually see things his way. “Do you recall the conversation, Hope? I told you I had something important to tell you, something life-altering, something I ought to have told you a while ago . . . and then you made the sugges—”

  “I asked a question!” I froze and faced him, glaring into his unhappy face. “I can’t believe you lied to me! Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”

  “Yes, I was—I would have—eventually. After some time passed, I hoped we’d have a good laugh about it.” His tone was a little too light. I sneered at him. “I mean . . . I hoped you’d come to see that I did it out of love. I just wanted us to be together.”

  Through my teeth, I repeated, “But. You. Lied!”

  “You mean like the way you lied to Ethan?” His tone wasn’t accusatory, just flat and emotionless, like that of the sole survivor of an unnatural disaster. Nevertheless, it caught me off guard. I wasn’t sure which more surprised me more—that Daniel had just called Ethan by his real name (for the first time ever) or that he’d accused me of being a blatant liar. It felt like someone punched me in the stomach.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I shouted.

  “Why couldn’t you tell him?” Daniel wasn’t begging, but he was close to it. “Why couldn’t you tell Ethan that you loved me as much as you loved him?”

  I flinched, unable to answer.

  “I’ll tell you why,” he went on. “Because you couldn’t bear the thought of losing him any more than I could bear the thought of losing you . . .” In one undetectable movement, he closed the distance between us and I didn’t step away. There was a numbness in my bones. It made me ache for something I knew I would miss.

  Daniel ran his hands delicately up and down my arm. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I deserve to be punished.” His voice cracked, and I heard the pain inside it. “But if what I did is so unforgiveable, how will you ever forgive yourself?”

  “Daniel, I lied by omission. That’s not the same as—”

  “I knew you were going to pick him,” he said in a rush. “I only wanted more time to change your mind.”

  “But that’s just it.” I spoke in the lowest of whispers, turning away from Rin’s evil stare. “I hadn’t made up my mind yet.”

  “And now you have?” He squeezed my arms.

  It hurt too much to speak. It felt as if my insides had collapsed. As if I had folded in on myself. I could only shake my head. What was it Creesie had said?

  One or the other . . .

  “Say you forgive me, Hope. Say you understand.”

  I brushed his cheek with my thumb, even managed to smile a little. But inside, my heart was breaking. Here was the real choice and it had nothing to do with living or dying. My death was never part of the equation. It was about loving one and losing another—death of an entirely different kind. Daniel or Ethan. One or the other . . .

  It mattered little if I understood it. It mattered only that I knew it. Tears blurred my eyes. Daniel’s fingers locked in mine.

  “Stay,” he whispered in my ear. “We’ll make our own heaven.”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “Stay,” he repeated.

  And then I realized what Daniel wasn’t saying and fear turned me ice-cold. “You
’re coming back, aren’t you? You won’t stay here . . . permanently?”

  There was a catch in his throat, and the answer was there before he could say it. “I have things to do here first. I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t find out what happened to my mother. I thought you understood that.”

  “But Daniel, I made a mistake. I never should have come here. I think that’s why my mom hasn’t shown up; she wants me to go back and live my life.” I thought of Ethan’s gentle reminder. “Maybe we aren’t supposed to know everything, maybe we can’t know everything, at least not yet.”

  “Are you saying there’s a time for everything?” One side of his mouth twisted up in a cynical smile. I knew he was thinking about us.

  I wanted to remain focused and clear-headed as I pleaded for his return. But instead, sloppy tears rolled down my face. “Daniel, you have to come back! You just have to!”

  Folding me in his long arms once more, he kissed my forehead tenderly. He was the essence of calm as he asked, “You still don’t know, do you?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even shake my head. Whatever was the matter with me? I suddenly understood the helplessness that Ethan must have felt all along.

  A second later he whispered, “Safest of sojourns, my love.”

  “We really should be going,” Charlotte urged quietly. I jumped. I’d forgotten she and Rin were nearby. “We need to hurry.”

  “You should go, Goo.” Daniel kissed my forehead again. “You don’t want to miss your bus.” I released him reluctantly. The last thing I saw as Rin and Charlotte pulled me backwards into the shortcut was his smile—the smile—the one that made girls from eight to eighty weak in the knees. I attempted to smile back, but couldn’t.

  24 Before

  So, this was the emergency? One pit stop at the Yamhill County Fair—Oats, Goats, and Root Beer Floats.

  I could tell it wasn’t the real deal. Had we stayed in the living realm, I couldn’t have felt the softened earth beneath my feet or smelled the delightfully intoxicating scents around me. But I wasn’t alarmed by the delay. Having been nearly dead several times running now, very little frightened me.