Kendra smiles. “No, it’s fine. Really. That’s not actually the news. That’s the preamble. I’m—” She straightens up in the sand, looks at each of us in turn. “We’re having a baby.”
Isabel gasps and we both break out in big goofy auntie grins. I think of the swimming pool, of the pain on Kendra’s face. I remember the horrible scene in her bedroom. I am so overcome, a tear dribbles onto my smile.
Lynette, though, raises a hand to her gaping mouth.
Kendra’s eyes are on her mother. “Mom, are you okay?”
Jesse glares at Lynette as she slumps against Cornell’s chest in response, a Scarlett O’Hara caricature of ruination. “Oh, hush, Lynette, don’t you dare. I always knew that Michael was a jerk. And so did you.” She grins at Kendra. “I’m sure you’ll tell us the details when you’re good and ready, but— God dog—you’re glowing like a big ol’ pile of uranium, gal. If you’re happy, we’re happy.” She kicks Lynette with her foot. “That goes for all of us.”
The beachgoers spring back into motion, with Cornell clapping his hands together and saying, “Lordy Lordy.”
I can’t help but think the circle of life. I look at Arshan and his sad smile tells me he is thinking the same thing. Jesse lets out a loud whoop but Lynette still looks shaken. She hasn’t said anything or cracked a smile.
Jesse turns to her again. “Seriously, Lynette, think about it. This baby’s gonna have more love and more family than it knows what to do with. Kendra, I think that you are one very brave woman.” Jesse gives Kendra a wink.
“Takes one to know one, Mama.” Isabel points a finger at Jesse.
Arshan gives Jesse a long, lingering look. Then he smiles and turns to Cornell. “Well, my man, I’d say—”
Arshan pauses to sweep his eyes over everyone in the group. He appears young and happy looking at all of us. I follow his gaze. Kendra has one arm linked in Isabel’s and one hand on her belly. Isabel’s twirling a piece of Jesse’s hair. Cornell places a featherlight kiss on Lynette’s ear. I think of all the stories I’ve heard this trip, all the mountains of love and loss we’ve experienced—these are the legends of my unlikely family.
“I’d say we are surrounded by some pretty amazing women.”
When I finally open the door to the bedroom, Kendra and Isabel are huddled together, whispering like detectives in an alley.
“Finally,” Kendra says. “Shut the door. Sit down. We’ve been dying to talk to you.”
Isabel pokes Kendra at the word dying.
I rush to the bed opposite them. “Me, too.”
Kendra straightens up, making this official. “Isabel and I— We had the same dream. At the same time. While you two were in the water, and I was asleep—”
“You died,” Isabel finishes and her face crinkles like cellophane thrown in the fire.
Kendra takes Isabel’s hand, but her eyes lock on mine. “You died and it was horrible. And I—” she averts her eyes “—I got rid of the baby. But something went wrong—so much blood—”
“I couldn’t take it. I was shattered.” Isabel’s eyelashes glisten. “I went back into the ocean.”
Kendra looks at Isabel. “Mina.”
Isabel nods. “We both saw Mina.”
Kendra and Isabel continue to stare at each other, and Isabel rubs at goosebumps along her forearms.
“On the dock?” I say and both turn to look at me like a ghost just flew in the window. I take a deep breath. “What if I told you it was real? That I did die? And I reunited with Mina, and we saved you both?”
The silence is like a blanket of snow. Or like the light in between worlds. I breathe out slowly. It’s okay. I can wait. I have a lifetime now to make them understand.
Finally Kendra speaks. In a whisper. “But Sam, that’s crazy—”
Isabel rubs at her arms again as if she feels the snow.
But Kendra stops short and exhales briskly, a familiar gesture of wresting control. “You were drowning,” Kendra asserts, like she’s listing the facts to an office assistant. “You were unconscious. You were dreaming—”
“The exact same dream.” Isabel’s face is a flip-book of human emotion—sadness then incredulity then awe.
I lean forward, intending to recount the vision from Ahari as proof, and I take both of their hands at once.
My mouth opens, but the words catch in my throat like a stone rolling atop a spring.
Because a surge is coursing through us, a river of electricity. I feel it flow into and out of me through my hands, joining us like a ring of fire. Instinctively, I close my eyes.
A flash. I see the four of us from above, like Ahari showed me. Four girls aging at the speed of racecars.
Kendra jerks her hand free and gasps, breaking the vision.
My eyes fling open to find them both staring at me, eyes like saucers.
“Sam, what the hell is going on?” Kendra whispers.
I look at their scared faces and I have to remind myself that they weren’t there. They weren’t part of the research project with Mina, and they weren’t on the dock with us. They didn’t die.
My whole life I’ve told them everything, down to the most banal preoccupations like bathing suits and traffic jams. I think it is this openness that wove the cloth that binds us, like quadruplets swaddled in a cradle. But now the world is bigger, my sense of it fractured. I need to find my own two feet, something Mina must have known when she sent me back alone. So, for now, the dock and the vision from Ahari must become like gifts from a secret lover, meant to be treasured and considered before shared.
“A second chance,” I say and smile. “That’s what’s going on.”
Kendra relaxes ever so slightly as she considers this. Then she puts a hand on her stomach and nods. “A second chance.”
Isabel takes my hand, perplexed. “She said she knew you’d succeed if you believed she’d be there. Does that make any sense?”
A whimper escapes my lips. Now, only now, after all that has happened on this long day, can I cry for Mina. She didn’t choose her mother over me. She sacrificed herself for me, for all of us. Like she always has. I start to cry and it is the way I cried on the dock, my heart heaving as if the whole world’s crying with me.
Because it is. Kendra and Isabel both wrap their arms tight around me and their tears are as indistinguishable from mine as streams flowing into a river. We cry like we did in the days after Mina’s death. We cry because it is so unbearably unfair. Because we miss her. Because we know we will always miss her.
But at least we will bear it together. The only consolations in life, Mina said. Love and best friends.
CHAPTER
58
PACKING TO LEAVE TAKES THE WHOLE MORNING. From the second Lynette opens our door and shoos us out of bed, she and Cornell hardly leave us alone for an instant. They sweep and laugh and clean and bark out orders. I’ve never seen anything like it, those two. It is only by the grace of their incredible organizational harmony that we are all packed by brunch time. I add my suitcases to the lineup by the door and head out to the porch to help Isabel set the table.
“Are you going to do the happy dance again?” I’m only half mocking. Consoled by the idea of a second chance, they’ve been positively giddy all morning.
Isabel smoothes down a napkin and looks at me. “Yep. Every day till we’re a hundred years old.”
Lynette comes out with a plate of sandwiches. “You girls still giggling like a pack of crazies out here? Three women about to turn thirty, one unemployed and one, my daughter, eager to be a single mother. Now what do you guys have to be so happy about, huh?” Lynette’s fake frown reveals itself as a grin.
Isabel takes my hand. “Well, as it turns out, Lynette, a whole helluva lot.”
Cornell appears with a fresh round of iced tea on a tray. “Honey, where’d Jesse and Arshan get to?”
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen either of them all morning. “They’re packing, I hope.”
Suddenly we a
ll jump at a loud thud. Isabel takes off running and I’m right behind her. We all pile up at the door to Jesse’s room.
Please don’t let anything bad happen. Please don’t let anything bad happen. “Oh my God, I swear I can’t handle—” I say as I raise my hand to knock.
“Well, me neither, missy,” Lynette snaps as she pushes past me and swings open the door.
Nothing, not even coming back from the dead, could have prepared me for the sight before my eyes.
At my feet is an entire bookcase dumped clean of its contents.
And beyond the mound of seashells, romance novels and knickknacks are Jesse and Arshan doing it on the couch. A flash of crepe-paper skin, varicose veins, and—oh, Jesus— Jesse’s five-inch heels.
Jesse tucks a long, sweaty shock of hair behind her ear and looks up at Arshan, who’s turned to stone and pretending none of this is happening. “Great guns, y’all, march your sweet little butts outta here!”
Lynette shuts the door before any of us can blink, and we stand there rooted in place, the image seared onto our eyeballs like a nuclear explosion. I bite down on my knuckle and wait to follow Isabel’s lead.
Cornell has no such tact. “Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” he yells, slaps his hand to his forehead, and starts laughing so hard he punctuates the phrase the second time with barnyard snorts. “You’ve got—” snort “—to be—” snort “—shitting me!”
“Cornell!” Lynette makes an earnest attempt at consternation but takes another look at her husband and lets out a guffaw even louder than his.
I’m laughing so hard I think I just peed my pants. Isabel looks a little green around the edges but she’s being a good sport. Kendra looks at me slyly and busts out with the happy dance. “Go Arshan! Go Jesse!”
And in some weird perfect moment in time, all five of us follow suit in a conga line back to the porch, laughing all the way.
While, I presume, Jesse and Arshan carry on about their business of falling in love. Finally.
CHAPTER
59
HONDURAS IS STUNNING.
To be fair, we could be driving through a chicken coup after what we’ve been through and I’d think that was stunning, too. But Honduras does got the goods, as Jesse put it a few miles back. We’ve passed plantation homes next to aging military barracks, palm tree farms that stretch out like Iowa corn fields, vegetable gardens clear up the sides of mountains, and houses no bigger than a toolshed with eighteen people, a cow, and some chickens sitting out front. Kendra’s got my camera pointed out the car window and I’m teaching her about drive-by shooting.
“Aim at something way ahead of you, then watch as it rushes in close, hold your breath, try to capture it one second sooner than you think you should, and then watch it fly away.”
Click. Kendra takes the picture of a child balancing two yellow water jugs on a stick across her shoulders.
“If you get it right, the object of your desire appears crystal clear in a blur of swirling life. You get it right maybe one time out of a hundred.”
“There’s a poem in there somewhere.”
“Me? Or out there?”
“All of it, Sam. Everything.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “I know what you mean.”
We’re at the airport. Kendra’s staying a day with me; everybody else is on the same return flight. The parents are off dealing with the roughed-up rental cars when I turn to Isabel. “Iz, you sure you don’t want to change your ticket? Stay a day with Kendra?”
Isabel looks uncertain, then she smiles. “You two bond. I’m going to spend time with my mom. I’ve got a lot to think about.” She gives me a hug. “Anyway, we’ve got plenty of time, right?”
Again, I desperately want to ask her about Ahari’s vision. What did they see? “Iz—”
Jesse calls out to us, rushing over and tugging Arshan by the hand.
Isabel smiles at me again. “But, hey—no job and a severance package. Maybe I’ll come back after your residency or you can meet me in Indonesia.”
Kendra holds up her hand. “Whoa, there. If you need somewhere to go, missy, come to New York and help me figure out how the hell I’m going to do this by myself.” She points at her midsection.
Jesse and Arshan butt in and give me a hug goodbye.
I take Arshan by the elbow. “Listen, I’m serious about the quantum physics chat. I’m going to call you.”
“Astrophysics. Stars and planets. Not the spooky stuff. But I’ll do my best.” He narrows his eyes. “You staging a return to science, then?”
Before I can answer, Lynette comes up and kisses me on the cheek. Then she takes my face in her two hands, squeezing it like a vise. “Call your father. You hear me? You heard my story and Jesse’s story. You might not have forever to set things right, kid. Okay?”
I gulp. I do want to talk to my father. I suddenly have a million questions about his life, about my mother. Why did I ever think it was too late to forgive someone who’s been there since birth?
Cornell pries Lynette’s hands from my face. He puts out his hand to shake, then scoops me up in a crushing hug. “Great trip, Samantha. Everybody survived. Good job.”
I hear Isabel take a breath.
Jesse pulls me away and takes up my hand. “Time to go,” she says, and kisses each of my fingers. “Samantha Anne Wheland. You gonna marry that man or not?”
My stomach flutters like a flight of fireflies on a summer’s eve. I look around the circle at six peering faces that make up my entire world. Breathe, Samantha. “I’m not positive, but most likely I will. You all know I like to jump before I think about it too hard. Although I would prefer we chalk it up to my undying belief in love.”
CHAPTER
60
KENDRA AND I HOP INTO A CAB OUT FRONT OF the airport. We fall into a comfortable silence. Our two faces stare out opposite cab windows, absorbed in our own worlds of thought, both knitting future scenes of our lives with new handfuls of thread.
So for me, the whole way back, past the stadium and the vegetable market, along the grimy alleyway streets with the broken windows and the corner bars, across bustling Boulevard Morazan with its parade of fast-food chains and electronics stores, and up the hill past the barb-wired police headquarters, I can think of nothing but Remy. My chest and toes hum and buzz and tingle with nervous energy. Outside the dusty cab window, I see flashes of life scenes to come.
Remy’s hello when he answers the phone. His laughter turning to relief as I relate the vicissitudes of the trip. In three weeks, he picks me up at the Charles de Gaulle International Airport with roses and a waiting limo. He takes me by the waist and dips me like a movie star kiss in the middle of baggage claim. People clap. Old women cry.
The cab jerks to a stop outside of the apartment, jolting me out of my daydream. I look at Kendra and smile.
“Home sweet home, for a day,” I say, and tug on the rusted handle of the cab door.
Kendra looks a little queasy. Is it morning sickness or the errant cow that just parked itself outside her cab door? I remind myself that Kendra isn’t Isabel on the traveling front. She’s a Green Zone traveler. Predictable five-star resorts with exotic letterhead.
“Come on, honey,” I say, and tug her over to my side to exit, while I hand the cabbie some lempiras.
When Kendra comes out of the bathroom holding a wash-cloth to her forehead, I’m sitting on the balcony. I called Remy twice but got no answer. I left a positively ebullient message I’m now regretting. He knew I was getting home today and, what, he’s not waiting by the phone? Kendra looks at me and then my phone and starts to ask questions I don’t want to answer. I hand her a glass of iced tea and cheers her with my beer.
“So, Ana Maria—the girl’s house we stayed at—she called, to see if we had a good time. And she invited us to a dinner party tonight.”
Finally Kendra smiles. Dinner parties are a concept she can relate to.
I pat the seat next to me and Kendra sits
down, putting her feet on the railing, an echo of the day Isabel arrived a week before. As I watch her look out over the city, I think of everything that has changed. Mina is gone. I know she was before, but now the absence is final in a very different way. Not sad, but in a way I would gingerly describe as freeing. It wasn’t my fault. It isn’t my fault that Mina is gone and can’t return. The responsibility, the guilt—they’ve lifted. Mina gave me that. Now my choices are mine alone.
Kendra looks over like she heard me. “Are you really going to just marry him, Sam?”
“Just marry him?” I don’t look over yet, but I can feel her eyes running over me, searching. Now I look. Hers aren’t the judging eyes I was expecting. More like thoughtful concern. Who is this Kendra? Are we all changing then, so fast? “Not so long ago you were the one who would’ve been thrilled.”
Kendra nods but rests both hands on her belly pointedly. “Yes, but things change, don’t they?”
“Why did you break up with Michael?”
“Ah, now there’s the question. I suppose I always knew what he was, who he was, but I was lazy. Lazy and in a hurry. A bad combination.”
“I don’t get it. You always seemed to adore him.”
“I certainly adored giving that perception. On paper, he was perfect. But underneath, he was mean and lacking in integrity. Which is so painfully obvious now that I’ve had some time alone to think. Something I never took much time to do before.”
It’s true. Kendra surrounded herself with acquaintances and boyfriends in succession. She quantified her self-worth by her social network.
Kendra sees my answer and smiles sadly. “I think we choose people who mirror our own insecurities, either in contrast or collusion. My biggest fear was always that I was weak, that I wasn’t a good person—”
I start to protest.
“Lemme finish,” she says. “I play tough. But I’ve always suspected that I lack conviction, that when push came to shove I couldn’t make the hard decisions you and Isabel make. That I wasn’t quietly brave like Mina. And I knew I wasn’t a woman who could be alone. I wanted to seal the deal on that one as soon as possible.“
The Summer We Came to Life Page 22