Abandon (3 page)

“Should we find a coffin for her?” I asked, pointing at the bird. I was bursting with knowledge I’d just learned at the funeral that afternoon. “When we die, we’re supposed to get put inside a coffin, and then no one sees us ever again.”

“Some of us,” the stranger had replied a bit drily. “Not all of us. And yes, I suppose we could put her in a coffin. Or I could make her come alive again. Which would you prefer?”

“You can’t make her come alive again,” I’d said, so startled by the question, my tears were forgotten. He’d been petting the bird, which was very definitely dead. Its head drooped over the top of his fingers, its neck broken. “No one can do that.”

“I can,” he said. “If you’d like.”

“Yes, please,” I’d whispered, and he passed his hand over the bird. A second later, its head popped up, and with a bright-eyed flutter, it took off from his hands, its wings beating strongly as it flew off into the bright blue sky.

I was so thrilled, I’d cried, “Do it again!”

“I can’t,” he said, climbing to his feet. “She’s gone.”

I thought about this, then reached out to take his hand and began tugging. “Can you do it to my grandpa? They just put him over there —” I pointed towards a crypt on the far side of the cemetery.

He’d said, not unkindly, “No. I’m sorry.”

“But it would make my mom so happy. Grandma, too.
Please?
It’ll only take a second —”

“No,” he said again, beginning to look alarmed. He knelt down beside me once more. “What’s your name?”

“Pierce,” I said. “But —”

“Well, Pierce,” he said. His eyes, I’d noticed, were the same color as the blades on my ice skates back in Connecticut. “Your grandfather would be proud of you. But it’s best just to leave him where he is. It might frighten your mother and grandmother a bit to see him up and walking around after he’s already been buried, don’t you think?”

I hadn’t considered this, but he was probably right.

That’s when Grandma came looking for me. The man saw her. He had to have seen her, and she him, since they exchanged polite “good afternoons” before the man turned and, after saying goodbye to me, walked away.

“Pierce,” Grandma said when she reached me. “Do you know who that was?”

“No,” I said. But I proceeded to tell her everything else about him, and the miraculous thing he’d done.

“And did you like him?” Grandma asked, when I’d come to the end of my breathless narration.

“I don’t know,” I replied, bewildered by the question. He’d made a dead bird come back to life! But he’d refused to do the same for Grandpa. So it was a problem.

Grandma had smiled for the first time all day.

“You will,” she said.

Then she’d taken hold of my hand and walked me back to the car, where Mom and Alex were waiting.

I remembered looking back. There was no sign of the man, just scarlet blossoms from the twisting black branches of a poinciana tree that hung like a canopy above our heads, bursting red as firecrackers against the bright blue sky.…

But now, like everyone I’d told about what I’d seen when I died — not a light but a man — Grandma insisted I’d imagined the entire thing.

“Of course there wasn’t a man in the cemetery, bringing birds back from the dead,” she’d said the other day in her kitchen, shaking her head. “Whoever heard of such a thing? You know, Pierce, I worry about you. Always daydreaming…and ever since your accident, I hear you’ve gotten worse. And don’t think you’re going to get by on just your looks, either. Your mother has looks
and
brains, and see what happened to her? Pretty is all well and good until Mr. Moneybags decides he’s going to let your child drown —”

“Grandma,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “How can you say the man wasn’t there when you yourself asked me if I —”

“I really hope this new school works out for you, Pierce,” Grandma interrupted. “Because you certainly managed to burn some bridges at your last one, didn’t you?” She thrust a tray of sandwiches into my arms. “Now take that in to your uncle before he starves to death. He hasn’t had a speck to eat since breakfast.”

I had left her house then and there — after delivering the sandwiches, of course — and set off on my bike for home. I felt like I had to before something awful happened. Awful things always seemed to happen when I got mad. Things that weren’t my fault. It was better for me to leave before they got worse.

Before
he
showed up.

Now, here I was on my bike again, only this time I was pedaling with no particular destination in mind. I just needed to get
away…from Grandma. From questions. From the sound of all that party chatter. From the splashing of the waterfall into that pool…especially from that pool…

Unlike “the incident” last spring at my old school, the accident was my fault. I tripped — on my own scarf — and hit my head, then fell into the deep end of our pool back in Connecticut.

I’d been trying to rescue an injured bird…yes, another one.

That bird survived, and without the help of the stranger from the Isla Huesos Cemetery.

I was not so lucky.

The temperature of the water when I hit it was as paralyzing as the blow I’d received to the back of my head. It quickly soaked through my winter coat and boots, making my arms and legs too heavy to lift even to dog-paddle, let alone swim. The heavy canvas pool cover that Dad had forgotten to get fixed collapsed instantly beneath my weight and tangled around me, as constricting as the embrace of a python.

I was too far from the safety ladder or the steps to swim to them, weighted as I was with my clothing and all that canvas pulling me downward. If I had managed to reach the steps, I doubt I’d have had the strength to pull myself up.

I tried my best, though. It’s amazing what a fifteen-year-old, even one with a subdural hematoma, can do when she’s desperate to stay alive.

Dad had been on a conference call in his study at the time, way at the far end of the house. He’d forgotten that Mom was at the library, working on finishing her dissertation on the mating habits of roseate spoonbills, and that I wasn’t over at my best
friend Hannah’s or the animal shelter, where I volunteered, and that it was the housekeeper’s day off.

Just like he’d forgotten to mention to anyone that a couple of the metal rivets that were supposed to hold the pool cover in place had rusted through over the course of the winter.

Not that it would have made much of a difference — at least to me — if Dad had remembered any of these things, or even if he’d been off the phone. I never got a chance to scream for help. Drowning doesn’t happen in real life the way it does in the movies. By the time it entered my contused skull that I was in any kind of trouble, the weight from all the water I’d reflexively swallowed from the shock of the cold — it was February in New England — had already caused my body to sink to the bottom of the pool like a stone.

After the initial panic and pain, it was actually quite peaceful down there. All I could hear was my own heartbeat and the sound of the bubbles coming from my throat…and both of these were growing fainter, and further apart.

I didn’t know at the time that this was because I was dying.

The afternoon sunlight — streaming through the leaves that had blown across the top of the water — made beautiful patterns on the floor of the pool around me. It reminded me of the way the sun had streamed through the stained-glass windows in the church where they’d held my grandfather’s funeral. Even though I wasn’t supposed to talk about it, I’d never forgotten that day, or how hard my mom and grandmother had sobbed throughout the service.…

Nor had I forgotten how tightly Grandma had held my hand as she led me away from the cemetery afterwards, and how red
those blossoms from the branches of the poinciana trees had looked against the sky above our heads…

…red as the tassels on the ends of my scarf floating up and around my face as I lay dying at the bottom of our pool.

Maybe that’s why when I saw them again after I rode away from the party — not the tassels, of course, but the poinciana blossoms — I jammed on my bicycle’s brakes.

I hadn’t realized I’d ridden as far as the cemetery. My feet had taken me there unconsciously.

I knew why, of course. It wasn’t the first time it had happened.

I’d ridden through the cemetery more than once since arriving on Isla Huesos — Mom had even included it on the little “orientation” tour she gave me on my arrival. Because all the coffins were in aboveground crypts and vaults, the graveyard had become one of the island’s top sightseeing destinations. It turns out if you bury bodies in a place regularly flooded by hurricanes, all the skeletons will pop up out of the ground. Then you’ll find your loved ones’ remains dangling from trees and fences, or even down at the beach, like something out of a horror movie.

“That’s why,” Mom had informed me, “Spanish explorers who discovered this island five hundred years ago christened it Isla Huesos — Island of Bones. When they got here, it was covered with human bones, probably from a storm that had washed up an Indian burial ground.”

But though I’d ridden through the cemetery several times since my arrival on Isla Huesos, I’d never been able to find the
tree I’d seen that day when I was seven. Not until the night of the party.

Which was what made me do it.

“Don’t make any stops,” Mom had said. “Stay on your bike,” she’d said. “A storm is coming.”

And now that I was standing in front of the poinciana tree, I could see that the storm coming our way wasn’t just the one Mom had referred to.

It was something much, much worse.

Most of the flowers from the tree had fallen to the ground. Dried and withered, they lay around my feet like a red carpet, whispering to one another as the wind picked them up and scattered them farther down the paved path.

The crypt beneath the tree didn’t look much different from the way it had the day of my grandfather’s funeral. The plaster was still falling off in places, revealing bricks that were as red as the blossoms beneath my feet.

The main difference was that now I could see a name carved in block lettering above the entrance to the vault, a scrolled wrought-iron gate.

No date. Just a name.
HAYDEN.

I hadn’t noticed the name when I was seven. I’d had too many other things on my mind. The same way I’d ridden through this cemetery so many times during the past week and never recognized the tree until tonight.

“He wasn’t real, Pierce.”

It hadn’t just been Grandma the other day in her kitchen who’d said it, either, but all those psychiatrists my poor parents dragged me to after my accident, unable to believe the reports they kept receiving from my teachers that their precious daughter wasn’t performing at an above-average or even average level.

It’s very common for patients who’ve lost electrical activity in their heart or brain for any interval of time to report having seen some sort of hallucination during the period they were flatline.

But it was vital for my mental health, all those doctors told me, to remember that it had been
only a dream.

Yes, it had been very realistic. But couldn’t I see how there’d been some things I’d read about in books at school, or seen on TV, or maybe seen years earlier — though I never told any of them about what had happened at Grandpa’s funeral — in the vision I had during my near-death experience?

This was important to keep in mind, too, as was the fact that while it was happening, I’d been able to control my own actions. This was what was known as lucid dreaming. Had what happened to me been real, I would not have been able to escape my captor.

So I had absolutely nothing to worry about! He wasn’t coming back for me. Because he was a figment of my imagination.

I’d sat across from those psychiatrists, and I’d nodded. They were right. Of course they were.

But inside, I’d felt so…

…
sorry
for them.

Because the walls behind those doctors’ desks were filled with so many framed diplomas and degrees — some of them from the
very same Ivy League schools my parents now despaired of my ever being able to get into.

And that was what made me saddest of all. Because my parents couldn’t see that it didn’t matter. All those diplomas, all those degrees.

And those doctors still didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.

Because I had proof. I always had. As I stood in front of the crypt beneath the poinciana tree, I undid the first couple buttons of the too-tight dress Mom had suggested I wear to the party, and pressed my fingers against it. I could have pulled it out at any time in any one of those offices and shown it to them and said, “Lucid dreaming? Really? What about this, then, Doctor?”

But I never did. I just kept it where I always did, tucked inside my top.

Because — despite the fact that they didn’t believe me — all those doctors had tried so hard to help me. They seemed so nice.

I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

And I had found out the hard way that bad things happened to people who took too much interest in my necklace.

So after that, I never showed it to anyone. Not even Grandma when she’d said that thing in her kitchen. Not that it would have made a bit of difference to her.

It wasn’t until I was standing there in front of the crypt where we’d met that I suddenly realized maybe
I
was the one who was making the bad things happen.

Because I’d come back. Not only come back from the dead, but come back to the place where it had all started.

What was I even doing there? Was I as crazy as everyone back in Connecticut kept saying I was? I was
in a cemetery by myself after dark.
I needed to get out of there. I needed to run. Every hair on my body was standing up, telling me to run.

But of course by then it was too late. Because someone was coming, crushing the dried-up flower petals on the path beneath his feet as he got closer.

Bones. That’s what it sounded like as those flowers got trampled. The breaking of tiny bones.

Oh, God. Why had Mom told me that story? Why couldn’t I have a normal mother who told normal stories about fairy godmothers and glass slippers, instead of stories about human skeletal remains scattered across beaches?