The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

36





“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?”