The Summer We Came to Life (6 page)

IT WAS ANOTHER HOUR BEFORE WE CROSSED over the bridge into Tela, and wound our way down a dirt road to the beach house. We arrived by trial and error, going back to look for a “right at the old Coca-Cola sign,” per Ana Maria's instructions, and a “left after thatched-hut bar.”

Both cars pulled into a dusty driveway. The headlights showed a large but basic clapboard wood house.

And a slender, barefoot black man sitting on the front porch.

That must be the caretaker
, I thought, and waved out my window. Ana Maria had told me about a watchman who lived in a cement house nearby and maintained the vacation home while her family was away. Which, I only now realized after the car accident, must be because the area was unsafe. The beach house was surrounded by the local Garifuna population, whom I was excited to photograph. Their culture blended Indian blood with that of shipwrecked slaves and had grown to inhabit the coastline of Central America. They
were supposedly an easygoing and self-sufficient people, but modern world poverty allows few exemptions from discontent and rebellion.

The watchman was lanky and tall, ancient-looking yet nimble. His skin was like shiny wet pebbles in the headlights of the cars. He had his hands in his jeans pockets and stood perfectly still, watching and waiting.

I got out and went to him with my hand outstretched. “
Soy
Samantha.
Mucho gusto,
” I said, it dawning on me as I did that he might only speak the local Garifuna language.

The man hesitated then smiled a perfunctory smile of yellowed ivory teeth. He held out his hand. It was smooth and warm.

“Ahari.”

Ahari walked toward the Ford. Arshan got out of the driver's seat. He looked at me for assurance. I had never mentioned a caretaker.

“You guys, this is Ahari. He's the watchman.”

Arshan popped the trunk in response.

Ahari grabbed two armfuls of groceries and started for the house.

The vacation club piled in on his heels. It looked like any typical beach house, sandy and worn, with mismatched chairs and tables and paperback books and board games piled along the walls. Truthfully, I had expected something far more luxurious based on Ana Maria's stories from college. I hoped nobody would feel let down.

“Sammy, I love it!” came Jesse's voice, as if in answer. “It's fabulous!”

 

Everybody went off to choose rooms and unpack, while Lynette threw together a salad with liberal mounds of the unidentified veggies we had bought.

The house was shaped like a horseshoe, with two pri
vate bungalows on either end, and palm trees strung with hammocks in between.

Jesse and Arshan headed straight to the opposing bungalows with doors to the outside, and Cornell and Isabel took their bags to the inside rooms. I followed Isabel.

Isabel had said barely a word since the accident. When I entered the room behind her, she spun around. Her scared eyes looked searchingly into mine.

“You okay?” I asked warily. Isabel had truly not been herself these past two days.

“I want you to promise me something.” Not a hint of joking in her turquoise eyes.

I nodded, waiting.

“I just almost watched everyone I love die in a car accident.”

Of course Isabel wouldn't consider that she had almost died, too.

“You have to promise me that you won't die before me.”

Isabel's emotion singed my skin. “Promise.”

I didn't know how to reply but she read my heart, breaking at her fear, and seemed satisfied. Isabel sank down on one of the twin beds and unzipped her backpack. She took out a book and lay down with her back to me. It took me a second to realize she was reading Mina's journal.

“Read me something.”

Isabel didn't answer.

“I'll let you read mine. I don't think Mina would mind. She probably expected us to.”

I could see Isabel's back moving with her breath.

“You know what I do? I ask a question and then a flip to a page for the answer. It makes me feel like I'm talking to her.”

Still no answer. Oh shit, I made her feel worse. I started to apologize, but then I heard her flip to a page and take a deep breath.

I looked closer to see what Isabel was doing. She was stroking a shiny penny taped at the bottom of the entry.

Isabel closed the journal and lay back on the bed. She looked at me with wide eyes, a technique that dries out watering tear ducts. Thought I'd invented that technique.

I must've looked like a dead bug, still stuck in the web of Mina's words, with no reply coming to rescue me. When I
finally wriggled free, I found myself still holding two very heavy bags. I dumped them on the other bed, while Isabel stared at the ceiling. She was crossing and uncrossing her toes.

“You remember Mina with those baby rabbits?”

I shuddered in the humid room. “You really wanna talk about that now?” I whispered like someone might hear us. Who?

“Mina never got over it, Sam. She told me whenever she looked at that maple tree, she thought about the bunnies.”

 

Mina's backyard, Springfield, VA, 1993

 

Mina's father loved yard work. In Virginia, there's plenty of it year-round. He left Mina and me to cook ramen noodles with frozen peas so he could rake leaves. He couldn't watch our homespun dance recitals because there was grass to cut. And there was no time for algebra help as long as mulch needed to be spread around.

Sometime when we were freshmen in high school, Mina worked up the courage to ask her dad if yard work was more important than her. He only frowned in response, but he let a whole week go by without even entering the yard.

The following week, as if Mina had angels at her beck and call, a neighborhood kid knocked on the door to ask if her dad needed help with the yard.

Not just any kid. Brandon Bateman. The hottest kid in school. A junior. He had thick dark hair like Tom Cruise and tan muscles from playing football. Mina and I had a new pastime. We drank Cherry Cokes at the kitchen table and watched Brandon go back and forth with the lawnmower or dig up weeds or prune trees. With military efficiency, we took turns offering him more water or clean towels. He knew we were watching and giggling. One day he strategically
took his shirt off and poured his glass of water down his muscled chest. The next Saturday, Isabel and Kendra joined us.

We passed two happy summer months, until one day Mina's father strolled out of his study and caught us at our schoolgirl peep show. He was so flustered he barely could find the words. “Out!” he managed, and we scattered like bats from sunlight.

Isabel and Kendra took the following weekend off, but I was a fixture at the Bahrami house. The next Saturday, when Mina and I rounded the corner to the kitchen, we came upon her father sitting at the table, still as a paperweight, his chin resting on his knuckles, watching Brandon work outside the window. I figured he would have fired him after the last weekend, but instead he sat staring at him with the saddest eyes I'd ever seen. Both Mina and I froze, completely unsure what to do. It felt like hours—those moments we watched her father unveiled as a complete stranger but somehow more knowable. Mina inhaled and exhaled raggedly as if she were reminding herself how to breathe.

He fired Brandon when he was done that day.

The next Saturday I planned to stay home. It made my father uncomfortable. He took his coffee to the basement as usual and mumbled about how he was off to the hospital soon and could I take out the trash and how come I wasn't at Mina's. I sighed and left for Mina's house, not knowing what to expect. Even still, I was unprepared for what happened.

A note on Mina's front door told me to come around back. In the backyard, I found Mina pushing the lawn mower. She was bent over with her arms extended above her head, pushing hard to make it up the hill around the edge of the mulch. She made it to the top and then she spotted me. She waved and rolled her eyes like,
can you believe this?
But she was visibly proud of herself, I could tell. She made a big show of
vrooming the lawn mower fast across the grass. I smiled and she smiled back, not watching where she was going.

I don't know when it happened, but suddenly Mina's face turned from a happy clown into a Stephen King clown, like smearing on ghoulish face paint in a dirty backstage mirror. In slow motion, I watched her look down at her legs in horror, and shove the mower away from her with all her strength. The shut-off motor produced an abrupt silence in which I struggled to get a grip on what had happened. I ran to Mina, trying to figure out the blood on her legs, the frantic grabbing at her shins, trying to understand why she was sobbing hysterically. I thought she'd mowed her feet off. When I made it up the hill, I looked at her hands as she held them out to me.

Now, I could make out the wriggling balls of flesh and blood. I looked at Mina's face, before scanning her entire body, still thinking emergency room. Mina shook her head, unable to choke out words through her tears, and dumped the contents of her hands into mine. When I realized that the warm lumps sinking into my palms were pieces of baby rabbits, I threw them to the ground and vomited. Mina ran off.

I waited for the nausea to subside enough for me to stand, then I went inside. Mina wouldn't let me in the bathroom, so I methodically washed my hands in the kitchen sink, drying them each time before deciding to wash them again.

The whole time, I could hear her crying over the sound of the faucet.

Her father came into the kitchen, looking panicked, and caught me standing there. “What happened?”

“Mina killed some bunnies. With the lawnmower.” He put his ear to the bathroom door. For the second time in all my life, I could see the raw emotions Mina's father normally concealed with blanket anger. “I think she'll be okay,” I said to him.

He waited a long time before he looked at me and nodded. When he disappeared again, I sat on the floor against the bathroom door so Mina would know I was there.

When I finally heard the doorknob turn, I didn't have time to stand before she was there looking down at me. She smiled crookedly, her face a big red puffer fish. “We're having a funeral. Go call Isabel and Kendra. We'll bury the bunnies under the maple tree.”

BY THE TIME ISABEL AND I MADE IT OUT TO THE porch, the salad they'd saved for us was wilting. Even if they hadn't heard us, anybody could see I'd been crying my eyes out.

Isabel sat down next to Jesse, but I walked to the railing to look into the palm tree grove and the blackness beyond that must be the ocean. I breathed in the musty, salty night air. It was soothing—the sound of the ocean mixing with the hushed conversations behind me. Jesse had Isabel laughing quietly. I wasn't quite ready yet, though, because I was still living in the echoes of a summer tragedy.

And I wanted to mull over Mina's words Isabel read me from her journal.
Why had I failed her?
She left it to
me
to make her immortal. My journal was filled with notes Mina made about meditation, and things like white noise recording, often whole passages copied from books. She obviously hadn't put any of that in Isabel's journal. She picked me to do it.
Ask Samantha,
she'd told Isabel. Maybe she'd picked
me because she thought I was the only one crazy enough to believe in it, but still she'd picked
me
. I thought of the physics tomes I'd shelved, the meditation sessions I'd attempted before leaving for Paris, and how I'd since abandoned my promise. I thought of the maple leaves. I was an asshole. I'd been reading Mina's journal like a magic eight ball for my petty problems instead of as an instruction manual of my best friend's dying wishes. The last thing Mina asked of me. I wiped at my sore eyes.

“Sammy, honey?” Jesse called out from the table. “Sammy girl, now that's enough. We've had enough tears today. We're on vacation, dammit.”

 

After dinner, we lay under the stars on the beach, watching the black water curl and crash onto the sand. It was warm and humid, and the air was scented with the intersection of sweet vegetation and briny sea. Conversation babbled back and forth with the gentle lull of long-standing friendship.

I lay with my head in Jesse's lap and listened to the laughter float above me while she played with my hair. Ever since I was little, Jesse had tucked me in at sleepovers, tickled my back and played with my hair. I let the gentleness of it soothe my jagged edges. I was starting to understand that Mina would've been appalled (not honored) if I didn't appreciate my time here with them. It would be lemon in a paper cut, to quote one of her favorite sayings. I listened to Isabel tell some silly story about one of her admirers and I thought,
how is Kendra surviving without this?

 

November 13
Samantha

If we somehow pull this off—what will it be like? Will you leave me messages, appear in my dreams, warn me of dark alleys?

Because I want more. I want you to sit next to me and laugh too loud at Rose's Café. I want to see you finish your Ph.D. I want you to hug me when life hurts. I want you to be there at every Thanksgiving, on every crazy vacation with Lynette and Jesse. I want us to make mac ‘n' cheese and frozen burritos in honor of our screwed-up latchkey childhood. I want you to visit me in Honduras for the artist residency.

I want you to outlive me. That's what I want. I want you, Kendra, Isabel, everyone, to outlive me, because this…this is too horrible. Watching you die has to be worse than death.

I don't feel like talking about physics today.

—Sam.