The Summer We Came to Life
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Maliheh was always the stronger one. She told Arshan that their child could not be born into such sorrow, that he must promise her to be kind, to be open, to laugh. Arshan’s heart was reborn, looking into the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved. He promised her then and there that the three of them would be happy and safe.
But he’d failed. He’d failed them all.
Suddenly, he felt Lynette staring at him. He glanced over and she looked past him, embarrassed.
Arshan smiled, even though his skin was still scalding. He broke his driving rules to look at Cornell asleep in the back-seat, drooling on a pillow.
Lynette looked at her husband and smiled, too.
I was thinking about Remy. I sipped a Coca-Cola and slipped into my new favorite fantasy: being married to Remy Badeau. I pictured an art opening with flashing paparazzi. I pictured us on the covers of French magazines. I pictured a home chef serving us dinner under a chandelier. I started to picture us in bed. Suddenly I felt a little carsick. This had happened a few times recently, as a matter of fact. I was attracted to Remy. He was ruggedly handsome. Other women obviously thought so, too. And the man certainly had skills between the sheets. So what did the spin-cycle stomach mean?
I tried thinking about him again, starting with his smile—the smile that melted me like butter on a skillet every time. Remy must’ve gotten away with a lot packing that smile. It was disarmingly boyish and more contagious than chicken pox.
I remembered the day he threw out my collection of trinkets. I’d been collecting them since I arrived in Paris—matchbooks, scraps of advertisements, discarded ticket stubs. The plan was to incorporate them into a new series I’d begun, have them morph into photos or get mired in paint. Yes, they looked like junk, but weren’t they obviously collected in a pretty box for a reason?
Remy tossed them out along with my fashion magazines. Man, was I furious. Livid. I’d barged in on him when he was working, with my chin thrust out for a fight. When he understood what he had done, he chuckled. I checked my earlobes—yep, hotter than a newly murdered lobster. A sure sign I was as angry as I could get. He dismissed his assistant and held out his hand. I shook my head, so he laughed again, and swept his arm wide to suggest a place to sit. Dizziness was fast replacing my rage, so I sat and watched him, fuming.
Remy scratched his head for comic effect, then turned his pockets inside out. From the floor, he retrieved a match-book and a few coins and a mint wrapper. He crawled on the carpet to the wastebasket, sniffing and wagging his butt like a puppy, and took out a magazine, scripts, and a newspaper. He shredded them with his teeth, growling, then got on his knees at my feet. When he looked up at me, presenting his peace offering of garbage, he smiled that smile of his.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, naked under crisp white sheets. Remy reclined on fluffy pillows and I curled around him, my head on his chest until he said it was too hot. He twirled my curls around his fingers and teased that my skin betrayed my every emotion—from anger to desire. He kissed the top of my head and told me stories about his life, his travels, his work. Entranced, I lifted my head to kiss him and he moved smoothly to meet me halfway. We kissed slowly, Remy brushing his petal-smooth lips side to side across my mouth, flicking his tongue ever so softly to part my lips. I loved the way he touched me, knowing every muscle, every sensitive spot, as if he were reciting a manual on female pleasure. I slid my body atop his lean torso and muscled stomach, easing myself down onto him, him inside of me. We both exhaled and moaned into each other’s mouths, lips hovering centimeters apart.
Isabel bumped my seat. I yelped when the ice-cold soda hit my broiling thighs.
“Shit!” I sprung my legs apart and caught myself panting.
“Sorry!” Isabel yelled overly loudly, on account of rocking out to her headphones.
Jesse looked at me closely. “Well, I have a purty good idea what you were thinkin’ about.”
Jesse kept thinking about Kendra’s last-minute bailout. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something wasn’t right. She remembered what Lynette had told her about the conversation. Kendra blaming her crazy boss and her incompetent assistant. Normal. Kendra letting it drop about a fancy client dinner. Normal. Kendra stressed-out and overworked and feeling guilty about spending too much on shoes. Totally normal. Worrying about missing work was Kendra since her first job. But that girl cared about this group and about her family.
Maybe Kendra and Lynette had some latent issues. Lynette had confessed only a handful of times that she wasn’t sure she’d done a good job raising a mixed-race daughter. Jesse had to smile. She didn’t think the problem had to do with Kendra being half-black so much as it had to do with Kendra being Kendra.
Lynette came from a conservative Southern family, but turned out a hippie actress. Jesse knew Lynette had envisioned being the understanding mom to a wild artistic daughter. But kids don’t care much about a parent’s plans. Kendra used to infuriate Lynette by playing businesswoman and asking her why she didn’t own any pantsuits. It was during Lynette’s latest incarnation of the red phase—when she was directing community theater and into wearing scarlet felt clogs and burgundy tunic sweaters over leggings.
Jesse smiled. At least Lynette and Cornell had each other. It had been hard sometimes—raising Isabel by herself and running the salon—to constantly be reminded what it would’ve been like to have a partner. Cornell and Lynette were sickeningly meant for each other. That might not have been so bad.
Cornell was half dreaming, half thinking about Sandra Miheso. He imagined them in court, defending the case they’d been working on together for months. He also pictured the way she laughed over Chinese takeout when they worked late in the office. Sandra Miheso was such a difficult woman—proud, stubborn, with a laugh like a queen. She wore traditional African attire, wound her hair up in scarves. Cornell loved those bright, colorful scarves.
It made him feel young to talk with Sandra. Their fiery conversations brought Cornell back to the days before he discarded his Black Panther convictions, or his vows to move to Africa.
It was slippery territory, for those were the days when he had lost Lynette for almost a decade. A long, lonely decade. What was his problem? It was just that there could not be two more different women in the world than his Lynette and Sandra Miheso.
Just then, Lynette reached out from the front seat and laid a hand on his leg. He opened his eyes slowly to look at his wife—her wrinkled, rumpled shirt, her hair slightly mussed. His Lynette, on yet another adventure with him, after all these years. Cornell smiled and patted her hand.
November 12
Samantha
Aaahhh!
I’m going to drive myself crazy reading all this stuff. I just plowed through another New York Times bestselling physicist autobiography. I don’t know what to think. I love you; I want it to be true, but it’s an awful lot to swallow, Em. On one hand, how can so many case studies and anecdotes be wrong? I’m talking about the guy at UVA who studies past lives. UVA has a whole division devoted to scientific study of the paranormal—and after-death communication. It gives me goosebumps; it gives me hope. But it also rouses my inner whispering skeptic that wonders if human desperation is not what is driving all this science. Sorry.
Most scientists are determined to peg consciousness as a side effect of brain function.
Why the rush to equate the two? Because it would discount the alternative—that we have souls that operate freely and live on after death. It makes scientists happier to kill a notion without a tangible basis in science.
It all goes back to the double slit experiment. There are different theories about what’s really going on. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that the wave that travels through the two slits is not an actual wave, but a wave of probability, and that the human act of observing collapses the probability wave into a single outcome (i.e. an electron). That means, in a nutshell, that the human mind dictates the physical world, not the other way around.
This has kept scientists in a tizzy for the last eighty years, while spawning a landslide of New Age books on how to literally rethink your life. Maybe, using the power of consciousness and subconsciousness, the living can join the dead in some kind of…in-between state.
It may unnerve the scientists, but if there is a way, Mina, it has something to do with this theory.
CHAPTER
11
NOW THE HIGHWAY WAS DARK, BLACK AS VULTURE feathers. Only a jellybean-shaped keyhole view of the road was granted by the headlights. There were no streetlamps, no reflectors to indicate lanes, no metal railings to keep you on the road. Just a dusty snake you had to ride as it wound its way through the mountains. Jesse squinted into the night, her fingers gripping the wheel. We were stuck behind a truck piled high with bananas, going twenty-five miles per hour. I searched for soothing music on Isabel’s iPod. I settled on Cowboy Junkies, but it sounded haunting in the darkness.
The Ford stayed close behind us now, Arshan still at the wheel. Lynette, Cornell and Arshan were listening to Norah Jones and discussing Kendra’s marriage prospects with Michael.
“This is crazy. Screw it,” Jesse said, and reached for the gearshift. She gunned the accelerator and swung beside the banana truck.
Arshan sprang to life. He’d been anxious to get around the truck, too. He floored the gas, feeling exhilarated.
I gulped, didn’t say anything, turned up the music, and pretended it was exciting. Isabel wasn’t even paying attention. Man, she has the good seat. I turned to look at the banana truck as we came up beside it. The driver was an old man hunched over the wheel. There was the shadow of a child next to him. Or maybe a dog. I leaned closer to the window to look.
“Oh shit!” Jesse yelped. I spun back around to see a tractor trailer barreling down the mountain, around the curve. His horn blared and the lights blinded us. Jesse looked in the rearview mirror to check on Arshan. I could see his surprised face lit up in the glare. No way was he moving back fast enough. Jesse squeezed her eyes nearly shut, floored the gas pedal and sped into the lights. Isabel and I screamed at the top of our lungs.
Arshan moved his foot to the brake, then veered to the right, barely slipping in behind the truck, which then slammed on its brakes, trying to avoid the Honda. Arshan jerked the car to the right again without looking.
I closed my eyes. I heard the tractor trailer fly past with clanking metal, searing horn and screeching brakes. I opened my eyes to see another car appear in our headlights. Jesse cursed again and spun off the road, wheels skidding toward the edge.
Arshan jerked the steering wheel and veered around the truck toward the edge of the mountain. In front of him, out of the dust, like a desert mirage, appeared the Honda. Cars rushed by on his left. There was nowhere to go. He slammed on the brakes and grimaced, his eyes squeezing shut.
They were going to hit.
Oh, thank God we didn’t go over the edge. I was a hunchback statue, gulping in shaky breaths like a winded Chihuahua, a hand on my chest to both affirm and calm my racing heart. WE, breathe in, ARE, breathe out, ALIVE, breath in—
Bam! We were struck from behind. The seat belt karate kicked my ribs, and my palms slapped the dashboard. Isabel, the idiot not wearing a seatbelt, crashed full body into my seat, adding more sounds of crunching metal and thudding body parts to the night. Jesse let out a groan. Then silence.
Silence.
Silence in both cars.
If both of us died, Kendra would be an orphan.
So help me God, I will never look at Sandra Miheso again.
Maliheh. Reza. Mina. Almost joined you.
Jeezus H. Christ. No one else here is allowed to die. You hear me, Mister Almighty? I should have told Isabel about her father.
You take me if you’re going to take anyone else. You stay away from my friends.
Mina, did you save us?
“Holy crap!” I said so I wouldn’t cry. I opened my car door and nearly walked off the edge of a mountain. “Holy crap!” I said again. “Jesse, get out so I can climb across.”
Jesse didn’t move.
“Everybody okay?” I heard Arshan call out.
Jesse started at the sound of his voice. She whipped around and looked at Isabel.
“I’m okay,” Isabel choked out and looked down at her still intact body in awe.
Arshan called out again and Jesse finally stumbled out of the car. I climbed across and made it out just in time to see Jesse fall into Arshan’s arms. Arshan stroked her hair with his eyes shut tight until Isabel jumped out of the car and Jesse hugged her fiercely. We really did almost just die, didn’t we?
I looked quickly at the bumper of our car and the hood of the Ford. Both were banged up, but most likely they’d still run. When I got closer to the other car, I saw Cornell huddled in the back, Lynette nearly hidden in his arms. I held my breath. I could make out Cornell whispering into her hair, “I love you I love you I love you.”
I stood up and took in the scene, like standing in the empty parking lot of a drive-in movie theater. I watched the dark forms of Jesse, Arshan and Isabel locked in an embrace on the side of a road on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, adding shallow breaths and tears to the silent black cloak around them. Cornell and Lynette were wrapped up in a world of intimacy, each silently bargaining for an eternity more of each other.
I felt suddenly cold, seeing all those arms intertwined and holding tight. The darkness threatened to swallow me. Or abandon me to infinity. Distant, haze-dusted stars were as comfortless as a burning lighthouse. I realized I was waiting to see if anyone was going to remember I was there. The silence quickly told me that the only person who’d truly needed me was gone. I mourned Mina’s absence as if she’d just tumbled over the edge of the mountain.
But instead of imaginary screams, I heard one clear, simple question in the night air: Now what? The movie playing in front of me and the chill in the night air were all too clear in their message.
But another part of me bristled at this thought. The old Samantha—the fearless one—was offended. Every message has a flip side. If I never let anyone get as close as Mina, I would never feel this pain again. If I went my way alone, I could stand on the fringes and observe and laugh. I could focus on my art. Or go back to science. Achievement is like love, with less risk. It would be better that way, just me. I was tough. With my screwed-up family, I should have learned the danger of human attachment long ago. It was like what Jesse said about the outhouse. I should know better.
A truck flew by on the road, blowing dust and the scent of cattle into my face. My eyes began to penetrate the darkness. Graffiti appeared on rocks lining the highway. My arms broke out in goosebumps. That meant people lived in these mountains. Or bandits. Was that the sound of pebbles falling or scrambling feet? I suddenly felt exposed, like an action hero surrounded by invisible bad guys in the bushes.
“Everybody get back in the cars!” I said. “Now!”
Cornell’s eyes found mine through the rear car window, startled. Lynette lifted her head and I saw fear scurry across their faces.
Arshan, though, looked like he didn’t hear me at all. He had Jesse and Isabel wrapped up in his arms snugger than cellophane and if I didn’t know better I’d say he looked almost happy. Certainly he looked like he had no intention of letting go. For the first time, I got a glimpse of what losing Mina must’ve been like for him. She’d left him all alone like me.
It was cruel the things that could happen to you in an instant. The way people could be ripped from your arms like mice snatched by eagles.
I felt the two Samanthas ready to argue again. There was something Mina had told me once, something she’d said.
But there wasn’t time. I hurried back to the car and tapped Arshan gently on the shoulder. In a daze, we all took our seats as before.
As the cars’ engines startled the silent air, I sank back into my seat and stared down the darkness. Soon, I thought. The internal civil war had to end and I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do. Stay lost or be found.
Lakehouse, Rappahannock, VA, 1991
“Want some more lemonade?” Eleven-year-old Isabel stood on the dock.
I looked up at her, the sun shining high in the sky above her head. She had a hand on her hip, waiting impatiently. “Come on, Kendra. Come with me.”
Kendra looked up, embarrassed. She was drawing hearts around two initials overtop the advertisements in her YM magazine. I tried to see what it said, and Kendra tried to hide it unsuccessfully with her hands.
KJ + A
Only one letter for the boy. “Adam!” I laughed. The boy staying next door to the lake house Jesse was renting that summer.
Kendra glared at me, and Mina giggled. She was floating on her back in the water but could hear us apparently.
“He’s cute,” Isabel said, to take Kendra’s side. She put out her hand with pink nail polish on her fingers.
Kendra took her hand and followed Isabel up the big hill to the house to ask for more pink lemonade.
I picked up the magazine, and flipped forward and back a few pages. Kendra had drawn, like, twenty hearts that morning.
“Hey, Sam?”
“Yeah?” I said, tracing over the amazingly symmetrical hearts.
Mina swam close to the dock, next to my knees.
“What?” I said, and raised my eyebrows.
Mina changed her mind and went back to floating. She looked up at the sky, completely crammed full of drifting fluffy clouds. I watched them, too, for a second, admiring how they arranged themselves into faces and animals and a hundred other pictures of life.
“What do you think is the point?”
“Of what, Em?”
“Any of it. All of it. Boys. School. Life.”
I looked at my feet under the water, thought how delicious the coolness felt, especially when miniature waves lapped at my ankles and left spots to be tickled by the wind. “To have fun?” I suggested.
Mina splashed me.
“I don’t know, Em. But we got lots of time to figure it out, right?”
Mina didn’t answer. She dove under the water and disappeared. I watched in amusement, but she stayed under a long time. I scanned up and down the channel, at the green water and the trees across the way.
Mina surfaced next to my feet, yanking them hard. I almost fell in and then I let myself fall in, until I came up face-to-face with Mina, grinning. My toes squished into the mud on the bottom and I made a “yuk” face. Mina laughed the way she always did at me, benevolently amused.
“I think,” she said, and waited for us both to recover from laughing. “I think the point is to find soul mates.”
I looked at the magazine on the edge of the dock and grinned. “You mean boyfriends?”
Mina crinkled her eyebrows. “I guess, but I was thinking more like us. Don’t you think soul mates are people who understand how you see things, maybe because they’ve known you so long, or maybe just because they understand all your bad parts and love you anyway? I think a soul mate makes up for everything you’re missing.”
“Well, then, if you put it that way—you are definitely my soul mate. So now we can just have fun?” I climbed the dock ladder and then pushed off with my feet and did a backflip into the water. I opened my eyes underwater and watched the flurry of particles dance through the green, moss-colored water.
When I came back up, Mina was laughing, but a different laugh from her repertoire, a sadder one. “But don’t you think there are many soul mates, in case we ever lost each other?”
I looked up at the house and saw Kendra and Isabel walking back with the lemonades, two in each hand. Mina followed my gaze and watched them. She nodded. She lifted her hand and waved. Isabel waved in a way that made Mina laugh, and we could see Kendra scold her for spilling.
Mina touched my shoulder, so I would look over. “I’m just saying, Sam. There’s a lot of people in the world. There must be lots of soul mates.”
I was wounded. “But—”
“Lemonade!” Isabel interrupted us with pink frosty glasses, and Mina’s face told me the discussion was over.
CHAPTER
12
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 private 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.”