Isabel laughed and swam over. “Did you hear what I said?”
Juxtaposed with the Honduran sea and palm trees, I had a vision of ultraconservative Washington, a million yuppies running around in business suits. “I can’t move back to D.C., Belly. I’d fit in there now like Laffy Taffy in a dentist’s office. Now that you’re laid off, why don’t we go somewhere like Indonesia? Well, unless I marry Remy, I guess.”
So misleading, Isabel’s delicate hands. I knew what was coming, as I watched her swish her dainty fingers across the surface of the water. I squinted past her across the shimmering ocean, felt the undertow tug me off balance, when I knew I should get ready to stand my ground.
On cue, Isabel flipped her hair over her shoulder and glared at me. “Sam, he asked you to marry him spur of the moment, with a two-bit ring.”
I braced my feet in the shifting sand. Each side of my split personality had an entirely different life plan, and it was getting exhausting defending them both. “Like I said, I thought it was romantic.”
Isabel pursed her lips. “Or arrogant. Let’s see.” She counted on her manicured fingers. “Forty-three. Bachelor. Playboy. Domineering. And suspiciously good in bed.” She held out her palm, five fingers splayed. “Do these sound like good qualities in a husband?”
I smacked her hand and laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”
Isabel rolled her eyes but quickly turned serious. “Ok, but what about your life? Your dreams became my own, you know.”
I never thought about it that way. But, yes, somewhere along the way, four little girls had aligned their hopes, invested in one another’s plans. “But dreams age and wrinkle, too. At what point does a starving artist just become a failure?”
I hid my welling eyes by looking away at an oncoming wave. It looked monstrous from our vantage point, hungry.
As I turned back again, Isabel adopted a soothing tone. “Don’t give up. It just takes time. Less time if you’d stop running away.”
She was right. But if Remy wanted to hand me a perfect new life on a silver platter—“Wouldn’t marrying someone like Remy be faster?”
“Duck.”
“What?” I said before getting smacked in the head by a wave and dragged into a thirty-second washing machine of water. A laugh waited at my lips right up until the instant I realized I couldn’t touch bottom.
Jesse looked up the moment Isabel and I went under the wave. “Should we call them in?” she asked Arshan.
“Eh?” Arshan grunted, absorbed in his research journal.
Jesse looked at Lynette, who didn’t look the least bit concerned. Well, Jesse Brighton wasn’t about to start worrying if nobody else was worrying.
She pushed her sunglasses back up her nose and flipped a page in her gossip magazine. Blue fingernail polish was back in. “Even with women Demi Moore’s age.” Ha! What happens after Demi Moore’s age? You decide cracked old toenails are hot? Jesse craned her neck to see Lynette’s toenails. Gleaming fire-engine red. Thatta girl.
“What?” Lynette said, catching her.
“Nothing.”
Lynette looked out at the ocean. I told them not to go so far out. She looked back at Jesse, who was absorbed in her magazine and didn’t seem worried. They’ll be fine.
At last I made it to the surface. I groped for sand with my toes, feeling only a vortex trying to suck me back under. So I treaded water, exhausted, and whipped my head side to side looking for Isabel. There was nothing to see but water and clouds, and flashes of me somewhere in between.
A new wave had me in its talons. Panic reigned as I tried to swim forward only to watch the beach slip farther away. Defeated, I ducked under the wave and let it barrel over me, let it yank me back two yards by my heels. Then I decided to fight. I scissor kicked my legs and dug my hands into the water as though I was clawing my way out of an avalanche. It took about a millisecond to realize I had not a smidgen of control over my locomotion.
When I was sure I wouldn’t last another second, I inexplicably shot to the surface again. The instant my face emerged from the sea, I opened my mouth, gagged on acid water, and screamed, “Isabel—”
Jesse and Lynette heard the scream at the same time. Jesse jumped up and knocked her drink onto Cornell.
“Damn, Jesse. What the—”
Lynette and Jesse were already running for the water. Arshan jumped up and ran after them. Cornell caught up to them at the water’s edge.
“What happened? Where’d they go?” Cornell bellowed, grabbing Jesse’s arm.
“They’re out there!” Jesse wailed, wrenching her arm free and splashing into the water up to her waist.
Arshan rushed into the sea past her. He collided with the first wall of waves.
Jesse yelled for him to stop and pointed. They watched my head bobbing on the surface a long way out. Arshan plunged awkwardly in my direction.
Jesse said, “Wait. They’re too far out. You won’t make it.” She scanned the beach for assistance but saw no one. Then she thought she saw a shadow in the palm trees that might be Ahari, standing, watching. She squinted her eyes and swore she could make out—
“There!” Lynette spotted Isabel burst from the whitewash only to land in the path of the next gobbling wave.
The water was torrential. They stood anchored in fear, a row of bronze soldiers affixed to a slab. Jesse pointed as my red hair started to cut sideways through the whitewash.
All four of them watched in shock as I swam into the wave for Isabel and we joined hands for a fleeting second before being dashed into the grave beneath the shimmering surface.
We’re really going to drown.
My assessment was not a scream. At first, when we crashed back under the water and I lost hold of Isabel’s hand, I’d shrieked inside my skull and thrashed about like a reeling centipede. Now, the realization of real impending death was more of an incredulous observation. With the new stillness of thought, I listened to myself drown. I experienced my underwater undulations like a dance.
In a world without water, my body would be performing an exquisite ballet in zero gravity. My arms flailed and arced, my fingers grasped at nothing. I executed somersaults in four directions, an elegant marionette on bouncing strings. My body flowed left and right in graceful suspension.
Mina, are you watching?
“Isabel!” Jesse’s bloodcurdling scream scurried across the sea. She ran deeper into the water and Arshan lunged after her.
A wave overtook them both. When they came up, Jesse was choking, sobbing. Arshan moved to comfort her, but another wave took aim at their heads. As the wave curled closer, Isabel’s body appeared at its rim.
“My God,” Jesse gasped, and raised her hands.
The sea dumped Isabel into her mother’s arms and all three tumbled into the surf and disappeared from sight.
Lynette screeched and sobbed, jumping up and down and clawing at Cornell’s arm, inwardly bargaining with the sea, with the world, with God, with fate. Please. When Arshan came up with Isabel’s limp body in his arms and they began wading toward her, Lynette ran. She ran smack into them and hugged them so hard they all fell back into the water again. Isabel came to and coughed.
“You’re okay baby,” Jesse said, pulling her daughter to her feet in the shallows. “You’re okay. See? Stand up now, sugar.”
Isabel let out a strangled laugh as though shocked to be alive. Everything was surreal, happening in slow motion. Jesse grabbed her cheeks and kissed her on the lips. Isabel was so weak, she slipped through Jesse’s embrace and fell to her knees. Arshan gripped her shoulders and, with Jesse’s help, they carried her half-conscious to the beach.
Lynette turned from them, and let out a low wail. She waded back into the water to look for me.
Cornell stood by her side, ready to catch his wife in his arms whenever she realized I was gone.
Under the water, I was sad. So, we were wrong, Em? In the end we all go alone? I always hated being wrong. P
retty flashes of light appeared in the TV-screen static behind my eyelids. I thought about everyone on the beach, overcome by guilt. It wasn’t fair to put them through more death. Forgive me, I thought, over and over.
But where was Mina? As the water tossed me to and fro, I pictured Mina’s gaunt face the morning of her death. I remembered how calm she was, making jokes to soothe us, whispering in my ear to remember our plan. I held her hand until the last second and everyone said she looked at peace.
I didn’t feel peace. I was angry. All that worrying over the rest of my life. How foolish that it was all for naught. But the fact that I was going into the unknown alone felt like betrayal. Every time I’d tried to contact Mina—every silly experiment we’d devised—came back to taunt me. How stupid we were. And the maple leaves? Wishful thinking. This was reality. This was where the path reached the cliff. Again, I envisioned Mina the morning she died, her skeleton hands, her collarbone like dried-up fish. The end was pain, injustice, loneliness—
“Come here, Sammy.”
The memory vanished and I heard Mina’s voice strikingly clear, with none of the echo of recollection.
“Samantha,” she said, as her dark eyes appeared in the rushing gray of the sea.
I felt that I was falling, tipping forward into Mina’s ink-black eyes. Inside those eyes was everything. And nothing. The ocean’s roar finally stopped.
December 20
Samantha
Thank you, Mina Bahrami, for being my best friend. Thank you for every respite of laughter, every gift of comfort. The world will never be as fun, as whole, as alive or as joyous without you. You made me who I am—for better or worse, perhaps—but certainly the better for knowing you. Even now, I can’t imagine a world where I can’t search your eyes for approval or solace, can’t hear your careful, Samantha-tailored opinions, can’t grab a hold of your chuckling to snap me out of myself. I only wish I could help you more, do more for you in these days of sorrow. I don’t know what lies ahead, Mina. Every book, every philosopher, every religion, every physicist says something different. The only thing I could find in common was talk of light, of a field of light encompassing “everything that is,” deconstructed into the pieces we experience as reality during life.
The Higgs Field. Everything, they say, has really only ever been one thing: light, or a sea, or a being—however you want to envision it—dancing with itself.
Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it, my beloved friend?
All I know is that I will miss you every day. Every single day.
CHAPTER
33
“SAMANTHA.”
“Mina? What’s happening? Mina.”
“Samantha, find me.”
Mina.
Minaminaminaminamina. I can’t see her. Mina as a little girl. Mina’s face. Why can’t I picture it?
“Mina, I can’t see anything. There’s only light. Can you see it?”
It doesn’t matter where I look, the light fills my entire body. But I can’t feel my body, I don’t have any edges, I think I am the light. I can hear my thoughts. There is only thought and light.
And panic. Panic with no heartbeat, no vise around my chest. I feel panic only in the fluttering tempo of my thoughts. The light is painful. I think I’m being erased. My thoughts are getting quieter, smothered under a pillow.
Mina. Please. I think I died.
CHAPTER
34
“SAMANTHA. YOU HAVE TO FIND ME. I THINK you have to—You have to create me.”
Mina. I can hear you. Please keep talking. Don’t leave me.
“I’m not leaving you. I will tell you what I did. I was trying to comfort myself, so I built a world. But I want us to be in the same one, so I’m going to describe it. Okay?”
You’re getting softer again. Muffled. The light is shimmering.
“Shimmering is good. That’s what I saw, too. Samantha, listen. I’m sitting by the lake. The house that Jesse rented that summer. When Kendra was in love with Adam. You remember. I’m sitting on the dock with my feet in the water. The water is mold colored, but we love it because it’s warm. The dock is warm, too, underneath my knees. I’m wearing my favorite sundress, the one with the sunflowers. We were eleven that summer, but it’s easier to stay your same age, so picture me as you saw me last. Well, before I got sick. Can you see me yet?”
The water. I think I see the water. The light’s changing colors, sparkling like the diamond glints on waves.
“I’m sitting here splashing my feet, waiting for you. I haven’t made the trees, yet, or the house. The water goes off in infinity in front of me, but it isn’t scary. It’s beautiful. Behind me is the grass, green but scratchy because it’s summer. The sky is the exact color of Isabel’s eyes. The clouds don’t move, but I can feel the sun, warming my knees and my shoulders and the top of my head. My hair is long, down to the middle of my back. I’m just sitting here waiting for you, Samantha. Listening to the water.”
CHAPTER
35
“HOLY CRAP!”
I can’t help but laugh at Mina’s words and the sound echoes like an empty silo. I’m in a house of mirrors, piecing together slivers of landscape materializing out of the light. The water does stretch into eternity—a windowpane mirage of water and clouds.
I turn to see the grass and revel in surprise at the return of my body. It feels like goosebumps from a lover’s touch—every inch of my skin springs back into being and sings in the sun. I surrender to an avalanche of sensation; I celebrate it—the air coursing down every alleyway of my insides. It feels so good I start to cry. When the hot tears traverse my cheeks, they are like drops of sunlight dripping off the tip of my nose.
And the dripping sunshine brings me face-to-face with Mina.
Seeing her is a spark of static shock, as all the details of her face rush over me at once. Her smooth, clear skin. The tiny scar above her left eyebrow, her thick hair always swinging from behind her ears, that tremble of her lips when she’s about to smile—
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
I reach out like she is a soap bubble that might vanish at any moment, but the shock of raven hair between my fingers is coarse and soft at the same time, in any case tangible.
“I tried to find you.”
Mina smiles. “I know.”
I hug her. Blasts of memory superimpose over the warmth of her skin, the grip of her fingers. I’m bowled over by the sensation of existence, and by the contradictory feeling of surreal familiarity. She pulls back and winks.
“This isn’t exactly what I had in mind,” she says.
And then we burst out laughing, like the day we rode a roller coaster seventeen times, like the time we ice-skated in the middle of the night, or gorged on pancakes after prom, like all the thousands of times we shared a perfect moment of happiness in life.
Except that none of them felt like this.
Our laughter is a thousand flashlights clicking on at once. Happiness bubbles between us like warm, oozing honey. She is every good thing that ever happened in my life, and the reason that all the bad turned out okay. Memories stream from her and rise around me like a warm bath after a long day. Listening to us laugh, I am five years old; I am seven. I am nineteen.
And everything is okay. Everything is alive. I still exist. The lake laughs with us. The sky is smiling. The clouds chuckle. I feel like I might burst of glee. It feels a little bit like falling, like a stream of water arcing toward the earth. I am a balloon filling with water. No, wait.
Light. I’m filling up with light.
The expression on Mina’s face changes and then everything is obliterated by white blinding light.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, Sam. Where are you?” She sounds scared.
Green. Everything is greenish-brown. I think I’m in the lake.
Tinkling laughter. “Figures.”
The water starts to swirl around me, rushing like a river, no, like an
ocean. A dark, menacing ocean. I don’t love the water anymore. I don’t know how to swim anymore. I am a bronzed version of my former self, like baby shoes. And I am sinking.
“Sam, what’s wrong?”
I’m drowning. I’m sinking at lightning speed into a black void beneath the surface. Everything swirls gray and blue, and cold like the dead dust of the moon. Dark. The water is so loud. And angry.
“Samantha, stop it. I should have warned you. I’m sorry. I’ll find you. Just listen to me. Like before. I will always find you.”
Your eyes. I can see your eyes.
“There you are, silly girl. Come to the surface now. Come on.”
I rise through the placid water and break through the surface. I can see the sky, blue and clear, the clouds anchored in place, like I could pull myself up by them. I look at the dock. Mina waves, trying not to laugh.
“Don’t make fun of me!” Wow. When I shout, it’s really loud.
“Yes, it is. Come sit with me.”
I swim to her and climb the wooden ladder to the dock. I sling a dripping arm across Mina’s shoulders and smack a wet kiss on her cheek. “Okay, Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do. Where the hell are we?”
Mina’s face falls a little, softens. “I’m not exactly Dante’s Beatrice, kiddo. I didn’t know you were going to die.”
My stomach lurches into my throat. I’d been so focused on feeling alive that I’d bounded past the truth. In a flash I remember swimming purposefully into a gigantic wave, up, up, and reaching her, gripping her freezing cold hand—
“Isabel! Is she alive?”
Mina nods silently. Thank God.
But that means I didn’t make it, doesn’t it? I put a hand to my chest, try to keep my thundering heart from being ripped out. But— “But I have a body. I’m breathing.” I look at Mina’s chest rising and falling. “You’re breathing.”
The Summer We Came to Life Page 16