The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Yeah, the tree Dad carved their names into.’ Pea sits up. ‘Are you sure you’re up to it? You still look really pale.’ Pea had gone back to the store with Milo and spent the afternoon there, and there’s a little glow about her that I haven’t seen in a long time; she’s even twirling her curls around her fingers like she used to when she was a little girl. I wish I didn’t have to throw her into the middle of this, but I need her.

  ‘The thing is I have to tell you something,’ I say, bracing myself. Pea leans forward, her brow creasing at once. ‘And I am going to need you to believe me, right off the bat. And you’re going to find that hard, and I wish I didn’t have to tell you, but … I can’t do it on my own.’

  ‘Luna, you’re scaring me.’ She sits on the edge of the folded out sofa bed. ‘Are you ill? Is it … cancer?’

  ‘No, I’m not ill.’ When I see the relief that floods through her face I feel sick with guilt. Sitting up, I reach for my jeans. ‘I know the address of the tree,’ I say, calmly. ‘I wrote it down. Let’s go and see if we can find it, and when we do, I’ll tell you everything.’

  ‘Tell me again,’ Pea says, standing under the fourth plain tree on the right-hand side of 83rd Street, her fingertips pressed into the carved ‘R + H’, enclosed by a roughly hewn love heart. It had been the one thing that Dad has asked of us when we came out here to get the building sold: check if it was still there and take a photograph of their history.

  ‘Tell me again,’ Pea repeats as I take another picture of the tree.

  ‘I’ve told you twice already,’ I say, I reach for her hand but she pulls it away. ‘Look, I know it sound—’

  ‘Tell me the fuck again.’

  Her expression isn’t one of derision or disbelief; it’s something else. Fear, maybe.

  ‘The first time it happened was on our first night here,’ I tell her. ‘Although … do you remember when I was small, I had a vivid imagination? I thought for a while it was that, or that maybe I was sick. That first time, I thought I’d passed out, or I was having a dream or something, but it wasn’t a dream. I woke and I was wearing the medallion.’

  ‘The medallion that Dad gave to you the day we buried Mum.’

  ‘Yes, you remember that,’ I said, ‘because it’s true now. But, before I picked it up and gave it back to Riss in nineteen seventy-seven, it wasn’t true. The second time, I nearly lost the camera. I had the friction marks around my neck; they’re still there. The third time, I took that photo. The photo of Mum. It’s not a picture of a photograph. It’s her. I was there with her in nineteen seventy-seven.’

  Pea covers her mouth with her hands, walking away from me.

  ‘Look, I don’t know how it happens. It shouldn’t happen; it defies every single one of the laws of physics. Pea, don’t you see, if I can stop her from meeting with the man that attacks her, I can change the rest of her life: no more sadness, no more pills, no more fear or guilt. No reason to kill herself. If I can save her from what he did. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but—’

  ‘Oh, I do believe you,’ Pea says, as she turns her face towards the tree.

  ‘You do?’ The noise of the surrounding city seems to hush in an instant, as if the world around us is holding its breath. Waiting.

  ‘I saw her too.’ Pea says with a shrug, and whatever I expected her response to be, it was never that. ‘The evening I went back to get the projector? I was in her room, packing away the stuff, and I heard voices downstairs. At first I thought that some kids had followed me in or something, so I went running down there, ready for a fight. But there was no one there, it was quiet. Not just quiet, but silent. Like the world outside wasn’t there anymore. And I felt cold, freezing, even though it was boiling hot outside. I wanted to get the box and get out, but as I was going back to her room, just for a moment, just a second, there was this shadow in the doorway.’ Pea swallows, moistening her lips, and when she speaks again her voice is strained. ‘I didn’t see a face, it didn’t speak, I certainly couldn’t touch it, but it was her, I know it was her, I felt it. I felt her, and she felt so sad. If I’d known, there’s no way I would have been crazy enough to go back up the stairs and get the box. I thought it was her telling me not to leave her there alone.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I put my hand on her bare arm; it’s rough with goosebumps.

  ‘Because … I thought you’d think I’d been drinking or taken something. I swear to you, I hadn’t, Luna. It’s been hard, but I haven’t.’

  ‘I know,’ I tell her. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I grabbed the box and ran out of there as fast as I could. Didn’t matter if I thought it was Mum’s ghost, I was still frightened, and that’s why when I saw that photo you had the other day …’ Her eyes widen. ‘That was her, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I have no idea how it worked or why, but, yes, that’s her.’

  We rest our hands flat against the tree, against the carving, our feet occupying the spaces where her feet would once have stood. Riss and Henry’s.

  ‘You said you always had a vivid imagination!’ Pea says, suddenly, and I’m afraid for a moment she’s going to do what I should want to do, to rationalise this whole thing away. ‘Remember you used to tell Mum that you’d been talking to the old lady in rocking chair in your room again, and Mum said she always thought the lady was your imaginary friend, a sort of replacement granny. And then one day, you and her had been sorting out stuff in the barn, ready for Dad to make it into his studio, and she’d found a box of these old Edwardian photos, mostly eaten away by mice and damp, and all stuck together, but you’d found this one image of this old lady with a pipe, and you’d said, “Oh, there’s my friend Ellen.” You’d recognised her.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m seeing ghosts?’ I shake my head. ‘They don’t feel like ghosts. I touched her, she was warm, she smoked! She was flesh and blood.’

  ‘No.’ Pea shakes her head. ‘I’m saying that maybe every moment of time does take place at the same instant, like you said. And maybe, sometimes, some people catch little glimpses of it, déjà vu, or a chill up the spine, or even see a shadow, like I did. Glimpses of a million other moments that are happening at exactly the same time. And maybe you see more than other people. Maybe you can step through into other moments, moments that mean something. Like the last week Mum was truly happy, the last few days before she killed the man that raped her. That makes perfect sense to me. So yeah, I believe you.’

  I don’t expect the hot tears that flood my eyes, or the sense of relief not to be alone in this anymore, whatever this is.

  ‘I do,’ Pea says. ‘But Luna … I want Mum alive and happy, I want to save her. I don’t want to lose you. You know that if you do this … well, what will happen to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I walk away from the tree to the curb. A little way down the street there is a group of people, laughing and talking outside a bar. In less than a minute Pea and I could be amongst them, connecting to now, connecting to life, talking, maybe even flirting at a push. Life, going on as it should do without Mum, is just a few feet away. Life, which, after a few weeks, would become less painful, after months and years, full and happy and sad, in all sort of ways that have nothing to do with one brutal night thirty years ago. We could just walk away; we could just live that life and perhaps everything would be all right. Maybe. But Riss would still be there, huddled in a scalding bath, washing away the blood of the man she killed. She would still be there, in the moments before and afterwards, forever, and I can’t leave her. I just can’t leave her, but I have to be sure Pea is with me. ‘What should I do? Should I try to save her?’

  Pea raises her dark eyes to mine, and finally she takes my hand.

  ‘Do it,’ she says. ‘Because, unlike you, I believe. In God and fairy tales and unicorns, and I believe that at the end of all of this there will still be you.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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  Darkness creeps up on us as we unlock the security gate to gain access to the building once again. Neither one of us wants to be here, but we need to test what’s possible, and, short of waiting for something to happen, the only place I have been able to influence the movement of time around me is here.

  ‘It feels like we’re breaking the law,’ Pia whispers, as I unlock the door that leads into the workshop.

  ‘We’ve got keys – and it’s half ours …’

  ‘Then why are we whispering?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whisper, and then testing my full voice against the dark. ‘I don’t know.’

  As I speak the atmosphere seems to shift, moving from a passive collection of dust particles and gasses into something watchful, knowing. Pea falls silent, and I know she senses it too. The building sees us here, and it’s waiting to see what we do next.

  ‘I think it’s going to happen,’ I say, as the ground seems to drop several inches, leaving me feeling as if I am suspended in mid-air. ‘I think being here is enough to trigger it. Let’s go to her bedroom.’

  Pea follows behind as I race up the narrow stairs, inhaling a thousand footsteps worth of disturbed dust, reality melting around me as I stumble into Riss’s room.

  ‘We should go.’ I hear Pea as if she is at the end of very bad telephone line. ‘Luna, I’ve changed my mind, I’m frightened.’

  ‘It’s fine, let me try,’ I say, or at least I think I say it. I see the words in the air, but not as words, as pictographs that shimmer and disappear.

  ‘So what do I do?’ she asks.

  Sitting carefully on the edge of the bed, feeling for its edge to reassure myself that I am not about to sit back into thin air, remnants of the vivid-orange wallpaper pattern of abstract birds and plants clamour to be seen.

  ‘Go outside. Go away and wait. In a few minutes come back and see what’s happening.’

  ‘But, Luna …’

  Perhaps my eyes roll up in my head as I tip back into a river of shadows, because I hear her gasp, and she grabs my arm.

  ‘I don’t like this, Luna.’

  ‘Go,’ I think I say, but even if I don’t, suddenly I know I am alone.

  It’s black, total darkness presses against my open eyes, and then gradually it draws back a little to reveal a slash of electric light under the bedroom door.

  A skein of heat trickles through me; I watch it threading its silent way, a scarlet, silk snake, reaching into every nerve ending, and I sit up and look around the room. The white dress is hanging on the wardrobe, a little chiffon frill trim added to the skirt and neckline. My phone buzzes in my jeans’ pocket, making me jump – I’d forgotten I even had it. Has it just received a text?

  Taking it out, impossibly I see it is still showing a signal. I turn it off and tuck it inside the mattress cover. As I lift it, I find a worn-out and much-thumbed copy of Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. I open the front cover. ‘Be brave’, it says in my mother’s handwriting. It’s almost as if she left this message here just for me.

  ‘I will be brave,’ I whisper, carefully replacing the book. ‘I won’t let you down.’

  Outside on the landing it’s quiet, the house asleep. As I open the door, something rushes in, the scent of white lilies. I know that scent anywhere; it’s Pea’s favourite perfume, here now, in this room, in this space that I am standing in, only it is some other now. Creeping out onto the landing, I only realise I am holding my breath when my lungs begin to hurt. Second guessing each floorboard as I make my way down the stairs, flight by flight, I wonder what I would do or say if I am caught, and realise there is nothing I can say or do. One thing I know, Riss isn’t home. I know where she is, or I would never have risked this. She’s with my dad, and they are about to carve their initials into the bark of a tree.

  Once I’m outside, in the alley, the air thick with rotting garbage, I allow myself to breathe again, sucking in the tainted air as if it were nectar.

  ‘Hey, baby, let me take you for a ride.’ A car slows down and a group of guys leer out of the window at me.

  ‘Come on, honey, we can show you a real good time.’

  Keeping my eyes down I hurry on, trying to get my bearings. Left and then first right, back to where the tree was.

  ‘You giving it away for free then, baby?’ Another voice, slightly younger. Lighter.

  ‘You got fine pair of titties on you, sweetheart.’

  I keep walking, trying not to let discomfort and fear alter my purpose. Trying not to imagine them dragging me into a car, and then, what? I know that rape and murder were regular occurrences in the late 1970s, that within five years Brooklyn and the wider city of New York would be the crime capital of the world. I know that Son of Sam is stalking the streets nearby, that drug dealers and street gangs shot each other to death almost every day. Even in Bay Ridge’s blue-collar community of church-going families, you didn’t have to look very hard to find genuine danger, and it didn’t have to look at all to find you. I am not immortal here, far from it. If anything, I feel more fragile, more vulnerable, as if each time I push my way through the veil I leave a layer of skin clinging to its barbs. After all that it’s already cost me, there is no turning back, I lift my chin and square my shoulders. I will have to face much worse than some guys on the make if I am to save Riss. A few seconds more and the car shifts gear and accelerates away, with a squeal of rubber on asphalt, leaving a trail of insults in its wake.

  The risen half-moon looks beautiful and benign, perfectly clear as it sails low in the sky. Looking up at it, I feel the gravitational pull of its dark side, the half lost in shadow. I can’t see it, but I know it’s still there, and that’s what I need. I need a little faith. I can’t see Pea, or my own time, but I know that they are still there.

  No sooner have I turned a corner than another battered-looking car, riding low to the ground, with a clattering back bumper tied on with string, crawls along next to me. I steel myself.

  ‘You want a ride, baby?’

  Pivoting on my heel, I shout, ‘No, I don’t want a ride, you lecherous … Michael?’

  The guys he is with in the car fall about laughing, actually hooting, and if it wasn’t so dark I think I might be able to see him blush.

  ‘Shut your holes, already,’ he says to his friends, climbing out of the passenger side, stumbling a little as his sneakers hit the sidewalk. ‘Where did you go before, and what you doing on the street at this hour?’ His expression is part concern, part a desperate attempt not to lose face in front of his friends.

  ‘What are you doing on the street at this hour?’ I retort, hurrying on, keen not to miss my appointment, and the car explodes into laughter and jeers again, and he edges me away from the curb, lowering his voice.

  ‘You can’t be out here on your own, it’s not safe, and, anyways, you’ll get a reputation.’ In every angle of his stance, it’s clear how important it is to not lose face in front of his tribe, almost as if he’s asking me not to shame him.

  ‘Why you again?’ I say thoughtfully. ‘I mean, what are the chances I’d run into you now, again?’

  Michael’s brow furrows into a frown; he sees my question as a challenge.

  ‘Well, that’s my dad’s car, and those are my guys, and see that over there?’ He points over to a house, lost in shadow, with one light burning in an upstairs window. ‘That’s my house. My folks’ house, anyways.’

  I study him for a moment in the streetlight, allowing the emotions in my chest to settle. It’s not disquiet I feel seeing him again, it’s pleasure. It’s butterflies, bona fide thrilling butterflies, and that is simply ridiculous.

  ‘Look, thank you for worrying about me, but I’ve got somewhere to be …’ I try to walk on but he blocks me.

  ‘You meeting someone?’ he asks.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ I am a little sharper than I mean to be.

  ‘Nothing, I guess.’ His voice softens as he glances back at the car, three grinning faces watchin
g his every move. ‘I just, I feel responsible for you, kind of. You don’t know what it’s like round here. You got to be careful.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I find my hand reaching for his as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. When our fingers touch a kind of recognition and expectation fizzes through me. ‘But I’m fine, really. You go and drive around with your friends and do whatever it is four guys in a car do and, I swear, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Is it a guy you’re meeting?’ Michael’s regret at asking shows on his face at once. ‘I’m not trying to be … Look, it’s just that … well, I like you, Luna. I’d like a chance to get to know you. I thought you might have got that by now?’

  There’s something about the way he stands there, the slight drop in his shoulders, the dip of his chin. Artifice, posturing, falls away for just a second and I see him, just him, and he’s sweet and kind, and worried about me.

  ‘It’s not a guy, it’s a friend,’ I say gently. ‘And I’m late.’

  ‘OK.’ He nods, and on impulse I lean forward and kiss him briefly on the cheek. As I turn and hurry away I can hear the cheers coming from the car. The feel of his cheek lingers on my lips.

  The story of the tree carving is legendary in our family, one that has been told and retold to us all our lives long; it’s the story that Dad chose to tell at Mum’s funeral. For the night that Dad carved their names into a plain tree on 83rd Street was the night they admitted out loud to each other and to the universe that they never wanted to be apart again.

  ‘I was walking Marissa home, just past midnight,’ Dad had said in the watery grey light of the church on that March morning. ‘It was a quiet night, no one around very much and we were just dawdling down this street, a street like any other in Bay Ridge, nothing special about it, nothing magical. Just houses and trees, and cars on the street and the half-moon in the sky, and it was all so ordinary, so commonplace, and yet with her hand in mine I felt like I was walking on stardust. I felt – we felt – invincible. Which was how I knew that I loved her. I mean, I’d fallen in love with her the instant I had seen her, but on that street, under that moon, I realised it was much more than that. I realised I’d do anything for her, for all of my life. That there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do, that would change how I felt. And when we stopped and she looked into my eyes, I knew she felt the same. And it seems foolish now, seems like we were a couple of kids in love, but at the time, when I took out my pocket knife and put our initials in the wood, it felt like we were making vows. I don’t know if that tree is still there or not, but I like to think it is. I like to think that no matter what else has happened in life, the vows we made to each other that night still stand, and always will, even after we are both gone.’