The Summer We Came to Life (16 page)

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

Mina smiles sadly. “I think it's a projection.” She brings a hand up in front of her face and then waves it across the horizon surrounding us like a snow globe. “Alternate worlds, Sam, like you said. Alternate possibilities. I created this one. From memory.” She fingers the frayed edge of my sundress, an old favorite stitched up in three places. “Including us. Apparently, I can't imagine a world where we don't breathe.”

So of course I have to try to stop breathing. But there's no way to stop without holding your breath, making me hyper-aware of my lungs, the air pushing against them, and the fact that I'm about to pass out.

Mina snorts in laughter. “Nice try, Einstein.”

I deflate noisily, but I don't feel like laughing anymore. “You've been here the whole time. Locked up here by yourself.” My head is a bag of Jiffy Pop, kernels of questions about to explode like a machine gun.

“Not exactly.”

I look around at the eerily tranquil summer day, my skin prickling like I'm being watched. “I don't get it. An alternate world? You just—poof—landed on a dock?”

Mina frowns. “Well, that's the thing. When I went, I heard a different voice—my mother's, I think. She was guiding me, helping me to create a space where I could join her.
Same as how I got you here. But I kept thinking about you, about our plans, our research. And the light scared me, so I conjured a favorite memory—this place. Then I ended up here all alone.”

I study Mina's face, sadness draped over it like a funeral veil. And, I realize now, she's trying not to show me she's afraid. Her mother's voice, she said she heard, like all those stories of near-death experiences. My next words I whisper. “But why do you think it's an alternate world, Em? And not just—” I shiver in the sun “—death?”

“Well—” Mina's face turns purposefully mischievous, a twinkling in her black eyes I know all too well “—I'll show you.” She takes my hand, pressing my fingers together hard. Her eyes catch mine and hold, like now I'm the soap bubble hovering on a breeze. “I have no idea if you're ready.” She scoots forward on the dock, pulling me along. “We'll find out.”

I resist her tugging. The last thing I want to do is go for a dip. “What do you want me to do?”

“Jump.”

Mina yanks me into the water and everything goes black. I scream like a fish hooked through the eyeball must scream inside its head.

“SAMANTHA, STOP SCREAMING.”

A house. The beach house. I'm on the beach, and there's the gate splayed open to the rustling palm grove and the empty patio beyond.

“Are you here?”

I ignore the disembodied voice. I'm back! I'm alive! The dock was a dream. Isabel must be waiting for me in the house. We'll swap horror stories about the near drowning. Jesse will laugh and Lynette and Cornell will hug me tight. I look down at my feet, ready to take off running.

No!
Dammit. No feet. No legs. No hands. I freeze my racing thoughts and wait, trying not to panic.

No heartbeat. No breathing. Terror without a body is difficult to describe. As is despair. I have nothing. I feel nothing, like trying to caress a hologram.

Unable to make sense of things, I focus my attention back on the house. This time as I try to make out the outlines of the hammock in the palm grove—Whoa! I'm
at
the
hammock. Wherever I look, my vantage point moves, my mind positioning itself at will. I look down.

Isabel. Oh my God.

She's lying oddly still with her eyes open. Her body is sunk into the hammock at an unnatural angle, her arm hanging listlessly over the side. Isabel's eyes are so red and swollen I can't see the whites. But somehow that makes their blue more piercing than ever.
Oh, Belly.
A whimper emits ever so softly from Isabel's lips, but no words that I can understand.

 

“Samantha, please. Are you here?”

Isabel. Why can't she see me? I want her to.

“Samantha, answer me.”

“Well, then what do you mean,
am I here?
I'm
not
here. I died, Mina.” The truth stings. The truth is a homicidal jellyfish.

“I know.” Mina's voice is the saddest thing I've ever heard. It ripples the air around me, a kaleidoscope of colors. “So you see her, right?”

I look down at the hammock. Isabel is crying. She doesn't move to wipe the tears, they simply run their course down into her nose and over her lips. Her hair is matted and stuck to her forehead. She begins to move her head right and left, making the hammock cut into her skin.

“Come on, Sam. Come with me inside.”

I turn in the direction of the invisible voice and in an instant I'm at the kitchen table inside the house.

Arshan and Cornell are playing cards in slow motion without speaking. They're not making eye contact either. They look old, like gloomy daguerreotypes of defeated generals. Between them is a bottle of rum. Cornell picks it up and splashes sloppy helpings into each of their glasses. Big glasses considering the clock says 11:00 a.m.

“Jesse and Lynette must be in the back.”

Even before Mina's voice fades, I'm inside Jesse's bedroom.

Lynette sits on the bed, while Jesse paces the room—scraping her sandals angrily across the weathered boards. They're not speaking either. Jesse keeps licking her lips and bringing her fingers to the side of her mouth like she's about to speak, but then stops. Lynette watches her, with a look that is both concerned and chary. Jesse stops in her tracks, picks up a coffee cup from the nightstand and chucks it at the wall. As the cup becomes jagged pieces oozing murky coffee over the plaster, she snarls like a cornered Rottweiler. “Goddammit, Lynette. Goddammit all to hell!”

“Mina, I want to go back to the dock.”

“Okay. But I have to do something first. Go back to Isabel.”

I'm at the hammock. Isabel's in the same painful position, but now there is a tomato-red scratch on her cheek from slicing it against the coarse netting. I see a shimmer on the wooden boards beneath the hammock—a shiny American penny.
A penny for your precious thoughts
, Mina always said to Isabel and all of her big save-the-world ideas. Isabel blinks.

 

“How did you do that?”

“I'm not sure, really.”

“So, you've been doing it to Isabel, too.”

“Of course. And Kendra. Didn't they tell you?”