The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

32





THE GARIFUNA GIRLS WERE NOWHERE TO BE seen when Isabel and I walked onto the sand. But Jesse was there, set up in her chair with a magazine. Next to her Arshan pored over a science journal with a Hi-Liter. Cornell and Lynette stood by the edge of the water.

“Whoa, you guys are up early,” I said, and sat down in the shade of the umbrella.

“Well, it’s our last day, isn’t it? No breakfast yet, though, girls,” Jesse said without looking up from her Vogue.

“I’m not hungry.” Isabel threw her fuchsia towel on the blanket.

“The wonders never cease,” Jesse said.

“It’s probably only because I’m still full of your famous Mai Tais, Mother. Ready, Sammy?”

I was looking back at the palm grove. Ahari was in his usual position. Watching me. This time he raised a hand. First he held it out toward us, like signaling to stop. Then he turned his hand around, almost as if beckoning me to him.

“Sam?”

I glanced at Isabel and when I looked back at the spot where Ahari stood, his hands hung motionless by his side. He continued to stare.

“It’s creepy the way he watches us,” Isabel whispered. “You ready to go in the water?”

I shook off the eerie feeling. “Ready, Freddy.”

“Dork,” Isabel said.

“Nerd.”

Jesse shook her head as we headed for the ocean. We passed Lynette and Cornell on their way back to the blanket.

“The waves are much bigger today. Don’t go out too far,” Lynette advised.

I looked past her. She was right. They looked like waves from a surf magazine. Hawaii Five-O. “Don’t worry, we’re just going to get wet enough to cool off.”

Isabel grabbed my elbow. “My feet are burning off. Let’s go!”

We took off running, my metallic gold swimsuit glittering in the sun.

I let out a loud laugh, happy to release the tension from my conversation with Isabel. She held tight to my hand as we charged into the water and dove in unison under a wave. We came up sputtering and laughing.

“Why don’t you move back to D.C.?” Isabel asked with a salty smile. “Everything is better when we live in the same city.”

I dipped my head backward into the water to smooth my hair out.

“Watch out,” Isabel said.

“Huh?” I couldn’t hear with my ears underwater and got pummeled. I came out of the whitewash coughing.

“Blech. I just swallowed a crap-load of water. That can not be good, considering the first night’s fiasco.”

Isabel laughed and swam over. “Did you hear what I said?”

Juxtaposed with the Honduran sea and palm trees, I had a vision of ultraconservative Washington, a million yuppies running around in business suits. “I can’t move back to D.C., Belly. I’d fit in there now like Laffy Taffy in a dentist’s office. Now that you’re laid off, why don’t we go somewhere like Indonesia? Well, unless I marry Remy, I guess.”

So misleading, Isabel’s delicate hands. I knew what was coming, as I watched her swish her dainty fingers across the surface of the water. I squinted past her across the shimmering ocean, felt the undertow tug me off balance, when I knew I should get ready to stand my ground.

On cue, Isabel flipped her hair over her shoulder and glared at me. “Sam, he asked you to marry him spur of the moment, with a two-bit ring.”

I braced my feet in the shifting sand. Each side of my split personality had an entirely different life plan, and it was getting exhausting defending them both. “Like I said, I thought it was romantic.”

Isabel pursed her lips. “Or arrogant. Let’s see.” She counted on her manicured fingers. “Forty-three. Bachelor. Playboy. Domineering. And suspiciously good in bed.” She held out her palm, five fingers splayed. “Do these sound like good qualities in a husband?”

I smacked her hand and laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Doesn’t sound so bad to me.”

Isabel rolled her eyes but quickly turned serious. “Ok, but what about your life? Your dreams became my own, you know.”

I never thought about it that way. But, yes, somewhere along the way, four little girls had aligned their hopes, invested in one another’s plans. “But dreams age and wrinkle, too. At what point does a starving artist just become a failure?”

I hid my welling eyes by looking away at an oncoming wave. It looked monstrous from our vantage point, hungry.

As I turned back again, Isabel adopted a soothing tone. “Don’t give up. It just takes time. Less time if you’d stop running away.”

She was right. But if Remy wanted to hand me a perfect new life on a silver platter—“Wouldn’t marrying someone like Remy be faster?”

“Duck.”

“What?” I said before getting smacked in the head by a wave and dragged into a thirty-second washing machine of water. A laugh waited at my lips right up until the instant I realized I couldn’t touch bottom.



Jesse looked up the moment Isabel and I went under the wave. “Should we call them in?” she asked Arshan.

“Eh?” Arshan grunted, absorbed in his research journal.

Jesse looked at Lynette, who didn’t look the least bit concerned. Well, Jesse Brighton wasn’t about to start worrying if nobody else was worrying.

She pushed her sunglasses back up her nose and flipped a page in her gossip magazine. Blue fingernail polish was back in. “Even with women Demi Moore’s age.” Ha! What happens after Demi Moore’s age? You decide cracked old toenails are hot? Jesse craned her neck to see Lynette’s toenails. Gleaming fire-engine red. Thatta girl.

“What?” Lynette said, catching her.

“Nothing.”

Lynette looked out at the ocean. I told them not to go so far out. She looked back at Jesse, who was absorbed in her magazine and didn’t seem worried. They’ll be fine.



At last I made it to the surface. I groped for sand with my toes, feeling only a vortex trying to suck me back under. So I treaded water, exhausted, and whipped my head side to side looking for Isabel. There was nothing to see but water and clouds, and flashes of me somewhere in between.

A new wave had me in its talons. Panic reigned as I tried to swim forward only to watch the beach slip farther away. Defeated, I ducked under the wave and let it barrel over me, let it yank me back two yards by my heels. Then I decided to fight. I scissor kicked my legs and dug my hands into the water as though I was clawing my way out of an avalanche. It took about a millisecond to realize I had not a smidgen of control over my locomotion.

When I was sure I wouldn’t last another second, I inexplicably shot to the surface again. The instant my face emerged from the sea, I opened my mouth, gagged on acid water, and screamed, “Isabel—”



Jesse and Lynette heard the scream at the same time. Jesse jumped up and knocked her drink onto Cornell.

“Damn, Jesse. What the—”

Lynette and Jesse were already running for the water. Arshan jumped up and ran after them. Cornell caught up to them at the water’s edge.

“What happened? Where’d they go?” Cornell bellowed, grabbing Jesse’s arm.

“They’re out there!” Jesse wailed, wrenching her arm free and splashing into the water up to her waist.

Arshan rushed into the sea past her. He collided with the first wall of waves.

Jesse yelled for him to stop and pointed. They watched my head bobbing on the surface a long way out. Arshan plunged awkwardly in my direction.

Jesse said, “Wait. They’re too far out. You won’t make it.” She scanned the beach for assistance but saw no one. Then she thought she saw a shadow in the palm trees that might be Ahari, standing, watching. She squinted her eyes and swore she could make out—

“There!” Lynette spotted Isabel burst from the whitewash only to land in the path of the next gobbling wave.



The water was torrential. They stood anchored in fear, a row of bronze soldiers affixed to a slab. Jesse pointed as my red hair started to cut sideways through the whitewash.

All four of them watched in shock as I swam into the wave for Isabel and we joined hands for a fleeting second before being dashed into the grave beneath the shimmering surface.



We’re really going to drown.

My assessment was not a scream. At first, when we crashed back under the water and I lost hold of Isabel’s hand, I’d shrieked inside my skull and thrashed about like a reeling centipede. Now, the realization of real impending death was more of an incredulous observation. With the new stillness of thought, I listened to myself drown. I experienced my underwater undulations like a dance.

In a world without water, my body would be performing an exquisite ballet in zero gravity. My arms flailed and arced, my fingers grasped at nothing. I executed somersaults in four directions, an elegant marionette on bouncing strings. My body flowed left and right in graceful suspension.

Mina, are you watching?



“Isabel!” Jesse’s bloodcurdling scream scurried across the sea. She ran deeper into the water and Arshan lunged after her.

A wave overtook them both. When they came up, Jesse was choking, sobbing. Arshan moved to comfort her, but another wave took aim at their heads. As the wave curled closer, Isabel’s body appeared at its rim.

“My God,” Jesse gasped, and raised her hands.

The sea dumped Isabel into her mother’s arms and all three tumbled into the surf and disappeared from sight.

Lynette screeched and sobbed, jumping up and down and clawing at Cornell’s arm, inwardly bargaining with the sea, with the world, with God, with fate. Please. When Arshan came up with Isabel’s limp body in his arms and they began wading toward her, Lynette ran. She ran smack into them and hugged them so hard they all fell back into the water again. Isabel came to and coughed.

“You’re okay baby,” Jesse said, pulling her daughter to her feet in the shallows. “You’re okay. See? Stand up now, sugar.”

Isabel let out a strangled laugh as though shocked to be alive. Everything was surreal, happening in slow motion. Jesse grabbed her cheeks and kissed her on the lips. Isabel was so weak, she slipped through Jesse’s embrace and fell to her knees. Arshan gripped her shoulders and, with Jesse’s help, they carried her half-conscious to the beach.

Lynette turned from them, and let out a low wail. She waded back into the water to look for me.

Cornell stood by her side, ready to catch his wife in his arms whenever she realized I was gone.



Under the water, I was sad. So, we were wrong, Em? In the end we all go alone? I always hated being wrong. Pretty flashes of light appeared in the TV-screen static behind my eyelids. I thought about everyone on the beach, overcome by guilt. It wasn’t fair to put them through more death. Forgive me, I thought, over and over.

But where was Mina? As the water tossed me to and fro, I pictured Mina’s gaunt face the morning of her death. I remembered how calm she was, making jokes to soothe us, whispering in my ear to remember our plan. I held her hand until the last second and everyone said she looked at peace.

I didn’t feel peace. I was angry. All that worrying over the rest of my life. How foolish that it was all for naught. But the fact that I was going into the unknown alone felt like betrayal. Every time I’d tried to contact Mina—every silly experiment we’d devised—came back to taunt me. How stupid we were. And the maple leaves? Wishful thinking. This was reality. This was where the path reached the cliff. Again, I envisioned Mina the morning she died, her skeleton hands, her collarbone like dried-up fish. The end was pain, injustice, loneliness—

“Come here, Sammy.”

The memory vanished and I heard Mina’s voice strikingly clear, with none of the echo of recollection.

“Samantha,” she said, as her dark eyes appeared in the rushing gray of the sea.

I felt that I was falling, tipping forward into Mina’s ink-black eyes. Inside those eyes was everything. And nothing. The ocean’s roar finally stopped.



December 20

Samantha



Thank you, Mina Bahrami, for being my best friend. Thank you for every respite of laughter, every gift of comfort. The world will never be as fun, as whole, as alive or as joyous without you. You made me who I am—for better or worse, perhaps—but certainly the better for knowing you. Even now, I can’t imagine a world where I can’t search your eyes for approval or solace, can’t hear your careful, Samantha-tailored opinions, can’t grab a hold of your chuckling to snap me out of myself. I only wish I could help you more, do more for you in these days of sorrow. I don’t know what lies ahead, Mina. Every book, every philosopher, every religion, every physicist says something different. The only thing I could find in common was talk of light, of a field of light encompassing “everything that is,” deconstructed into the pieces we experience as reality during life.

The Higgs Field. Everything, they say, has really only ever been one thing: light, or a sea, or a being—however you want to envision it—dancing with itself.

Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it, my beloved friend?

All I know is that I will miss you every day. Every single day.