The Summer We Came to Life

Chapter

42





“YOU OKAY?”

I can’t answer. I feel that I’ll explode if I so much as breathe. Isabel’s sorrow is physically painful for me. It’s like the needles of a cactus, carving every inch of my skin.

At the first boom of thunder, I open my eyes. The rain falls timidly upon us. I look at Mina, but she nods and gently smiles. “Go on, it’s okay. Just don’t overdo it, yeah?”

So I laugh until I cry. The rain absorbs my tears and sends them back down, plastering my hair to my face. I close my eyes but lift my chin up to the sky. It feels so much different from anything when I was alive. This world cries with me, for me, for everyone I loved.

I feel so sorry for myself I can hardly bear the weight of it. I feel sorry for Kendra and Isabel, for my father, and for Jesse, Lynette, Cornell and Arshan. I feel sorry for Mina most of all. Where was the light taking us before we ended up here? To me, the light felt like obliteration, but Mina said she heard her mother. Now I beg the light to come back. To tell me the secrets of this world and the next, to guide me and teach me. It will take away the pain of dying and the pain of remembering. I wait for it, for the white light that erases everything in its path as effortlessly as water carves stone.

But it doesn’t come.

The rain eases and I can hear myself breathing. The sun breaks through the clouds as I let out a shuddery sigh.

I’m alone on the dock.

I blink in the sunshine. Then I hear a voice skim across the lake like water spiders.

“I’m listening to my father, Sam. He’s continuing the story.”



Silence.

The sun, the gently drifting clouds, the barely lapping water. And silence. Funny how silence can be the loudest sound.

Without Mina’s presence, I study the landscape with a new intensity. Time to experiment. I put out my palm and a beetle scurries across it. I close my eyes and open them to a mosquito buzzing in front of my nose. I chuckle and jump to my feet on the dock. With my arms spread wide, I twirl in a slow circle. A fish jumps out of the lake, is snared in an eagle’s talons, and dropped through a cloud of bees into grizzly bear’s mouth. The bear looks at me and then ambles off on the plain of grass, making me smile like a new mother at her firstborn.

Wildflowers spring up, the dock is freshly painted, flipflops and a magazine flutter in the breeze. An idea forms in my head, clear as koi swimming to the surface.

It’s up to me.

This is my job.

I won’t tell Mina until I figure it out. But there is a way back. There is a way to bring us both back, and I’m going to find it.



“Samantha, are you coming or not?”

“I’m coming.”