The Summer We Came to Life (2 page)

“NO, ISABEL, IT WOULD BE LIKE ROLLER-SKATING over her grave.”

I glanced down at my pink roller skates and regretted the comparison. But no way were we resurrecting the vacation club.

“Samantha, I need you. I already told my work I'm taking the time off. You have over a week till the residency. I looked at flights—”

“No. I'm here anytime you need to talk to me. But I need to be alone.”

There was a silence, a distinctly disapproving pause.

“Sam, what're you doing? Huh? You just disappeared on us. Paris? Honduras? And now you told a man you would marry him—a man none of us have even met? I'm coming.”

I dug my nails into my palm. “I don't
want
you to come. I know that makes me a jerk. But I need to think. And I can't
just sit around and laugh and drink and make everything into a vacation. Not anymore.”

“It's not like that. You need us—”

“I'm sorry. I have to call you back.”

I hung up my iPhone and sent it sailing across the gritty floor. Slumping down against the wall, my body slid in tandem with the tears.

I
was
losing it. And I didn't have to ask one million Hondurans to know it.

Could Isabel really not get how
abominable
it would be to vacation without Mina? It wasn't the first time we'd broached the subject. After the funeral, when I was packing for France, I assumed it a nonissue, but both Kendra and Isabel mused about a summer trip in her memory, reminiscing how Mina always loved Paris. How could they not see it as a betrayal? Why didn't they understand that without Mina, everything was irrevocably different?

But I knew why.

I ran my fingers along my scalp and looked out at the night sky over my latest hometown. The stars were mostly obscured—by smog, by lights, by all the aggregate effects of human inhabitance—just like that night in Paris, the summer before we left for college.

 

Isabel's mother, Jesse, found a great apartment for rent in the bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre, and we arrived in July to a charming albeit sweltering abode bearing fuzzy wallpaper.

We had a longstanding tradition for the first night, what we playfully called The Opening Ceremony. We cooked a meal together and christened our new temporary home with a night of dancing, storytelling and laughter. It was supposed to remind us that the traveling was important but the company was what really mattered.

That first night in Paris, the sweaty kitchen was already overcrowded by Isabel, Kendra and their two moms. Mina and I took off to explore the apartment complex, and stumbled upon a door that led to the roof.

The view was so breathtaking we both gripped the railing and gasped theatrically at the same time, which made us burst out laughing.

“We are some lucky bastards,” I said.

Mina shook her head and chuckled. I remember exactly how she looked, lit up by the tangled string of lights dangling behind her. Her hair—that I was infinitely and eternally jealous of—dark, full and shiny, no taming or wrestling necessary. And only she could wear a cotton skirt and a T-shirt and look glamorous.

She didn't answer, I remember. She looked away and down, snagged by a sound from below. The apartment was directly beneath us. With the windows wide-open, voices drifted up lazily, without much gusto. But at that moment the crescendo of mothers and daughters roaring in laughter had rushed over us.

“Are we?” Mina said, asking the few stars that had wriggled free of the city haze as much as she was asking me. “Are we so lucky?”

I put my hand on Mina's shoulder. I'd let the stars answer. Mina's mother died in a car accident when she was eight months' pregnant. Her whole life, Mina heard what a miracle it was she was born at all. But it's hard to hold on to gratitude for a lifetime. Especially when it feels more like loss.

It's kind of like the balls of candy wrapper foil Lynette, Kendra's mother, kept for each of us on her windowsill. Every holiday we added a layer, Lynette's version of tick marks on a doorframe. Mina was like that about her mother. She just kept adding to a ball of mismatched feelings, wrapping layers as the years passed.

My mother bailed on my dad and me. It provided an iron stratum of anger that prevented feeling much of anything else about her.

Mina always knew what I was thinking. At that moment, on a rooftop in Paris, without even a glance at my hardening face, she put her hand over mine.

“We are lucky bastards.”

 

On a cold, hard floor in Tegucigalpa, I looked down at my empty hands lying in my lap, then up at my empty apartment in the middle of nowhere. And then I cried as loud as I wanted. There was nobody to hear.

October 27
Samantha

Our research is not “going nowhere.” We'll just dig deeper.

The essential problem, Mina, is this:

Nobody knows what consciousness is or exactly how it arises and functions.

Scientists don't really have a clue what's happening at a fundamental level of reality. They have fancy equations that explain everything from particle interaction to black holes, but the “how” is linguistically and conceptually challenging, to say the least.

Light really
does
behave as both a wave and a particle. Matter and energy
are
interchangeable. Particles really
can
influence each other at opposite ends of the earth instantaneously. A single electron
does
somehow go through two holes at once to interfere with
itself.

It is the “how” of envisioning such things, and the metaphysical implications, that are disturbing.

Or encouraging.

Mina, this is gonna work. I promise I'll find you.

Sleep tight.

—Sam.

I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING TO THE SOUND of fluttering pages. I wrested my heavy head from the air mattress in pursuit of the source.

Mina's journal lay open, its pages oscillating. I watched it for a second, mesmerized, then smacked it still and dragged it over.

But then I couldn't help thumbing through the pages myself, touching Mina's elegant script and grinning sheepishly at my surplus of graphs and exclamation points. Page after page I read the words I'd read a thousand times.
Luv, Sam. Always, Mina. I'll find you. Promise me.

In the margins were notes I'd added after her death, next to specific tasks we'd planned. I landed on a page from October, where I'd rambled on about Amit Goswami's
Physics of the Soul
and consciousness. I'd boldly listed methods of communication Goswami mentioned. The first thing on the list was automatic writing.

I closed the journal.

I lay back on the air mattress and clenched and unclenched my hands at my sides. My mind drifted to a night in my second month in Paris. I watched myself slip out of bed, leaving Remy snoring upon his Egyptian cotton sheets, and walk onto his balcony in the middle of the night. High above the rain-soaked streets, I watched my shaky hand hover over a blank page in the journal, willing every part of my soul to disband or vibrate or do whatever it was supposed to do to connect with Mina's. I envisioned her—down to the tiny scar on her cheekbone. I conjured her seven different ways of laughing. I replayed our favorite memories. Then I brushed away every sound and image like sweeping a storefront, and waited.

I didn't even realize I was sobbing until Remy appeared like a ghost on the balcony. When our eyes met, it would be hard to say who was more startled. Without a word, he took off the plush bathrobe he was wearing and wrapped it tight around my shoulders. Then, with a cooing “silly girl,” he took the journal and the pen away, and led me back to bed.

 

The air mattress protested as I lifted my arms and hugged myself. I had no desire whatsoever to roller-skate that day.

And then my phone rang.

“
ET TU,
JESSE?” I QUIPPED, HOPING IT WOULD make me sound less like the puddle of misery I was that morning. Isabel's mother had absolutely no tolerance for misery.

“Samantha, get that tush o' yours out of bed this instant!” She took a loud slurp of something for emphasis, and I imagined a mocha frappuccino.

“Jesse—”

“Don't Jesse me, sister, get out your calendar and tell me if you prefer Monday or Tuesday.”

“I don't get it.”

“We're comin', honey. All of us.”

I sat up so fast my butt smacked the floor through the air mattress. “What? Didn't you talk to Isabel?”

“You bet I did. And Kendra and her mama, too. If ever there was a need for a Honduran vacation, this is it, kiddo.”

“Are you talking about
this
Monday and Tuesday?”

“Yup and yup.”

“Um, no and no. And I'm done discussing it, so please don't plan on calling in any more reinforcements.”

“Well,” Jesse said, and slurped, “just so happens I've considered your reservations in advance and have called in
new
reinforcements to address 'em. The boys are comin', too.”

The journal's cover flipped open again next to the bed, a breeze shuffling through the first few pages. “What boys?”

“What boys do you think? Cornell and Arshan.”

The thought of Kendra's and Mina's fathers joining in on the already unwelcome festivities made my jaw clench in indignation.

“Sorry, Jesse.” I was shaking. “I have to call you back.”

 

I shut the journal and shoved it under the air mattress.

I paced the stuffy room until I was sure I was suffocating. My phone read noon when I hauled myself out onto the balcony. The city was in full gear, engines chugging along clogged streets, shouts of every emotion fighting to be heard. I looked at my phone. How was I going to fix this? How could I explain? Could I really tell them
I don't fit anymore? You're not my real family. My life's a mess. I don't want you to see me like this. I failed Mina just like I'm failing at everything else.

Halfway to the railing, my foot scraped across something soft and scratchy at the same time. I froze in trepidation.
Please don't be a squished tarantula, please don't be—

A curling red and yellow maple leaf bolted out from under my toes, so sudden I dropped my phone while bounding after it, just barely rescuing the leaf from a nosedive over the edge.

I pinched the leaf by its stem in between my thumb and forefinger and stared at it as if I'd found a diamond ring in my salad bowl. Not willing to risk the slightest breeze, I held it fast against my chest before leaning forward to peer in every direction around the balcony. Barely any trees at all, and certainly no autumn maple trees like the ones in
Virginia outside Mina's window. I gripped the balcony with one hand to steady myself as I gasped aloud. Then I burst out laughing.

Holding the leaf up to the sun, I wept and laughed simultaneously like a hurricane survivor—juggling hope and grief inside a single human heart. The leaf was a labyrinth of glowing gold and amber veins. The way they were lit up, they looked like crisscrossing canals or waterways. Like the routes of ships. Or airplanes.

I picked up my phone, pressed the call button and listened to it ring.

“Tuesday will be just fine.”

SO, TWO DAYS LATER, MONDAY EVENING, AFTER I'd done all the shopping and arranged the rental cars, and talked to my sole Honduran friend, Ana Maria, about renting her uncle's beach house, the vacation club, freshly reorganized, was packing bags in Virginia. Minus Isabel. She was already en route.

 

Jesse Brighton, Isabel's mother, picked up the gift—a deck of cards with a little red bow—from her nightstand. A glitter of a tear appeared at the corner of her eye. Jesse wiped it with the back of her hand, not worried about smearing her black eyeliner. It was tattooed on—a service Jesse offered at her beauty salons. She set the cards back down and clasped her hands together, her scarlet acrylic nails pressing into her tan skin. After all this time, she might actually be falling for someone.
The Cranky Professor,
no less, Jesse thought and chuckled at the frowning visage of her neighbor and bridge partner, Arshan Bahrami. Jesse put a hand to her throat and
felt her fluttery pulse. It wasn't the world's most romantic gift—the new cards commemorated their winning streak in bridge. But he'd said yes to coming on the trip, just as soon as she'd asked him.

Jesse clapped her hands together and shook her butt in her leopard pajamas. She looked back to the bed, where her red suitcase perched like a treasure chest longing for booty. Jesse pumped up the stereo and Michael sang his heart out about Billie Jean. She reset herself to “packing,” by which Jesse meant dancing around the bed, picking up an item—lace panties, a beach cover-up, a container of Texas RedEye Bloody Mary Mix—and tossing it into the suitcase. She paused and looked around the room for anything else she might be forgetting.

An itemization of Jesse Brighton's bedroom would produce a most befuddling mix of clues about a woman's life. A picture of her daughter, Isabel, hung next to the Don't Mess with Texas sign and an original Dali, next to a framed poster of an eighteen-year-old Jesse on a 1975 cover of Vogue. Jesse leaped up and kissed the photo of Isabel and then of herself, before plopping down on the bed. She pulled a gold lamé stiletto out from under her as she dialed Lynette's number. Lynette could decide which swimsuits Jesse should bring now that you know who was coming. Jesse sighed. How to hide the ravages of time?

Jesse was about to hang up when Lynette picked up on the fourth ring.

“The Chanel one-piece or the Christian Dior bikini? Which one do you think makes my ass look less like a wrinkled elephant?”

“Jesse, I can't talk. I'll call you in a bit.”

“Why? Ooohhh—”

“I'm hanging up.”

Jesse looked at the clock. “Nookie Night! Are you doing that thing? From Cosmo? That lucky dog—”

A man's voice from the background bellowed, “She'll call you later, Jesse!”

“'Bye, Jess,” Lynette said, and laughed her throaty Kathleen Turner laugh.

 

Lynette Jones set down the phone and looked at herself in the mirror. She smoothed down the nurse's costume that had arrived in the mail in an unmarked brown envelope. Who would've thought a size large would ever be too small on Lynette Jones?
That's why you married a black man, honey
, her husband always said when she cursed the scale.
We appreciate extra curves
. Lynette wouldn't be sorry to have a few less curves to haul around, but make no mistake, Kendra's mother would always be beautiful. Lynette smoothed her shaggy blond bob and made her mirror face—that puckered Pamela Anderson look all women make at themselves in the mirror. Then she spun around to face her husband.

“Are you ready for your exam, Mr. Jones?”

Cornell was lying on the bed in his boxer shorts and favorite argyle socks. He was tied to the bed frame with some of Lynette's pantyhose. It was number three on
Cosmo
's most recent “Spice up Your Sex Life” list. She bought it at the grocery store when they had the Saturday special on scallops. Of course,
Cosmo
mentioned black lace thigh-highs, not the control-top hose Lynette used to hide her varicose veins. And the socks were a modification, as well. But Cornell had insisted: “You know my feet get cold, baby. Bad circulation.”

Cornell answered, in an overdone baritone, “Yes, Nurse Jones,” making his big belly jiggle like chocolate pudding in an earthquake. Lynette pursed her lips to stifle a giggle, and sauntered over to her husband as best a lady could manage in white patent leather.

Lynette stepped around the suitcases and perched herself on the edge of the bed. She wasn't exactly sure what to do
next. She decided to use the stethoscope and creaked onto all fours atop Cornell. As she bent over, a boob flopped out of the costume. Lynette harrumphed as if gravely offended. Once upon a time, she'd had great boobs. She stuffed the breast gruffly back into the dress before she remembered
Cosmo
's number three. Cornell confined himself to a small chuckle. She straightened up to avoid another costume malfunction.

“Ow!” Lynette yelped.

“What, honey? Your back?” Cornell moved to comfort his wife and remembered the panty hose. At the same instant, he realized his hands and feet had fallen asleep. Lordy, that was it. Cornell's laughter filled every inch of the bedroom.

Lynette took one look at her husband tied up and shaking with laughter and added her own husky laugh. Once they started, they couldn't stop. She pointed and laughed. He couldn't wipe the tears from his eyes, and his frantic blinking made her roll over and clutch her side. Something like this always happened. Lynette and Cornell spent a lot of time deepening their laugh lines together.

“My feet are aslee—” Cornell struggled to say in between snorting fits of hiccupping.

“Bad circulation!” Lynette guffawed.

She crawled over to undo Cornell's hands and feet. After Lynette finally managed to untie him, Cornell wrapped his wife up in his arms and hugged her tight.

Lynette skinny-dipped in her husband's embrace. “Well, I hope you can see how much I love you.” She snuggled into his arms and planted a soft, wet kiss on Cornell's chest. “Can I make love to you now, Mr. Jones?”

“Proceed, m'dear. Proceed.”

 

The widowed professor looked up at the silver lamp he'd carried from Tehran so his wife would have light from the home she'd never wanted to leave. His fingers moved to their
position above the piano keys, but stopped to hover like an ominous cloud. With a frown, he smoothed his cardigan and trousers. Arshan believed pajamas were only appropriate in the bedroom, even now, years since Maliheh or children filled the house. Arshan felt how thin his legs were. He'd always been trim, but
after sixty, trim starts to look gaunt,
he thought. He pushed his glasses back into place over the pronounced crook of his nose. Arshan Bahrami, no matter where he was, ever looked the part of the respectable professor.

Arshan's eyes lingered on two identically framed photographs illuminated by the lamp. One showed a woman hugging a laughing teenage boy. The woman's expressive eyes, as big and dark as Brazil nuts, included the photographer in the joke. The other photo was of a teenage girl with teasing eyes not unlike the adjacent woman's.

Arshan began to play Beethoven's Ninth, his eyes still fixed on the photographs. Ghosts had been Arshan's only audi ence for many years. Besides bridge nights at Lynette and Cornell's, Arshan's entire outward life consisted of astrophysics—teaching and research trips to distant telescopes. Arshan slammed his fingers discordantly on the keys. He'd heard a girlish chuckle above the music. Why had he chosen that song? His daughter's favorite. He pried his eyes away from the photos.

Arshan took a breath a yogi would envy and forced himself to go upstairs. Ten minutes later, the piano watched him sneak back into the room. He plucked up the photograph of the young girl and transported it across the room to a zippered suitcase. He tucked the gold frame between two halves of perfectly folded clothing. Then, his eyes resolutely averted from the remaining picture, Arshan turned off the lamp.

 

Isabel was at the airport, the only one taking a red-eye flight through Miami. She was certifiably in a state of shock.

She hadn't told anyone yet, but she'd been fired. Laid off was more accurate, but it stung like “fired.” She'd gone in to work instead of preparing for her trip—a testament to her job dedication—and they let her go, saying the vacation only sped up the process, budget concerns meant they'd have had to do it sooner or later, as much as they hated to see her go. She'd packed her career life into a cardboard box, come home and deposited it on the side of the couch opposite her packed suitcases. Isabel sat down between her old life and her carry-on, her cat making the only sound in the room. But Isabel wasn't experiencing silence—she was awash in a deafening waterfall of thought. It was only after her Pavlovian response to the horn of the cab and the blur of arriving at the airport that she felt the desperate need to tell someone.

She almost called me, but was understandably wary after our last conversation. Isabel tapped her perfectly manicured fingers—from her latest biweekly appointment at her mother's salon—on her BlackBerry. She knew she should call Jesse, but her mother was liable to dispense some cloying phrase like “Lemons have a way of becoming martini decorations, sweetie.”

She would've called Kendra straight away, but it was after midnight. No way Kendra would be awake. She'd be all packed and organized, asleep in her white silk nightgown, next to her perfect boyfriend, Michael, in their meticulous SoHo apartment.

Screw it. Kendra it would have to be. She couldn't imagine boarding a sleeping plane with a head full of “what the hell do I do now?” She dialed Kendra's number and listened to it ring through to voicemail. When she hung up, deflated, she couldn't repress a curse word or two, prompting a shh from a nearby mother cradling a little girl in her lap. She dialed again. Then again. What was the deal with her friends lately? When did they become so self-absorbed? Mina would've answered on a floating ice cap in Antarctica.

 

Kendra pressed “ignore” on her phone, for the third time, without taking her eyes off Michael. He was still pacing like an agitated tiger. He was having the exact same effect as that of an angry tiger on Kendra Jones.

Kendra was sitting very still and straight on her lavender loveseat. Work papers—million-dollar orders for dresses in five shades and sizes—had fallen to the floor, and were shocked that Kendra hadn't noticed. If the papers weren't really shocked by the negligence, they were certainly appalled by the mess. As Michael paced and ranted and lectured, he navigated a very uncharacteristic rug of chaos—slippers, discarded work clothes, a full coffee cup, and a half-empty bottle of vodka. His. Not hers.

Kendra put a nervous hand to her hair. While waiting for Michael to arrive, she'd started to scratch between the tightly plaited rows of braids. Impulsively, she'd undone them, one by one, each careful braid untwisting into a frizzy poof of caramelized curls.

Kendra was having trouble concentrating on Michael's surreal barrage of words. She held tight to the phone in her hand, bearing Isabel's name, and looked to the ground. A picture lay where it had landed. The very first trip with the vacation club. Kendra longed to pick it up. A little raven-haired girl farthest to the left was smiling at her. She'd looked at Mina's face at least a hundred times that day. Suddenly, Michael's last words registered.

“I didn't do it on purpose,” she spit out.

Michael stopped, surprised. He ran his fingers through his sandy-blond hair, like he did when he was about to reprimand an office assistant at his firm. “I'm not saying that you did, I'm just saying
if
you did—”

“But I didn't. And if you think I would, then how well do you know me, Michael? Or vice versa.”

Michael rolled his eyes. He resumed pacing, nudging the framed photograph out of his path with his shoe.

Kendra watched him with widening eyes, and felt the black hole in her sternum swell, too. Kendra planned her days and future like most people would only plan Thanksgiving dinner. Down to the last detail, in full consideration of timing, with an obsessive flair for perfect presentation—that was the way of Kendra since childhood. If Michael could suddenly mistake her for the girl that tries to trap a man with—

“It's a baby, Michael. Not a death sentence.”

This time Michael didn't look up, the coward. “No, it's not. It doesn't have to be. A baby. Yet.” The yet was meant to be a loving concession. He looked at the picture of the four little girls. No, he needed to be firm on this. “I don't want it to be. A baby.”

Now he looked at Kendra, really looked at her for the first time since the news, and felt some of the anger drain away. But as he took note of her disheveled hair and clothes, the soothing visage of his girlfriend became a stranger that filled him with fear.

“Do you? Do you want it to be, K?”

Kendra tried to think of how to answer. Of course she didn't want it to be like this. This was horrible, not at all how it was supposed to be. This was the opposite of a Thanksgiving dinner of a life—her perfect boyfriend who would be her perfect husband, who would make partner while she made V.P. Their first child, a boy, wouldn't be born until three years from now, leaving just enough time for a girl the following year, taking care of the children thing so she could return to work—

“Kendra?”

“I think you should leave.”

“Ken, come on, we have to talk about this if you're leaving for freaking
Honduras
tomorrow.”

Kendra felt the vibrating phone in her hand like a low
rolling of thunder. She picked up Isabel's fourth call and put it to her ear.

“I'm not going to Honduras.”

November 2
Samantha