“There are no animals on the commune,” Coyote says, evoking a chill on the back of my neck, like an icy hand.
“You mentioned families…?” I venture. I can’t imagine that there are many wholly resurrected families—not even many parent-child pairs. The likelihood would be too small.
“Ah, yes, well, you’ll see,” he says. “This is my home.” He gestures to a trailer on our right. Large sheets are tied to wooden poles propped up to create a canopy on one side. “Come in and you can meet my daughter.”
I raise my eyebrows at Harrison. Daughter? I mouth as Coyote squeaks open the screen door.
Harrison shakes his head. “My cousins are alive. I don’t know.”
I swallow hard. We scale a step stool into the trailer. It’s crowded with us all inside. The decor is a wash of tan and brown. “Starshine,” he calls into the back. “We have guests.”
I take a seat on a faux-leather bench. There is a watery stew boiling on a hotplate nearby. My arm presses into the sticky skin of Ringo’s beside me.
A girl materializes from somewhere in the belly of the trailer. She is younger than I am, I would guess no more than fourteen. She has fiery-red hair and a pale face oddly free of freckles, given her complexion. Starshine has the posture of a ballerina, but it’s obvious at once that she has none of the confidence or presence of one.
From the corner of my eye, I see Harrison grip his knees more tightly. “Your daughter’s name is Kate,” he says to Coyote, stiffly.
“Darrell’s daughter’s name was Kate,” says Coyote Blue. “Coyote’s daughter is Starshine.” He looks at her proudly as she stands pressed into the corner with her hands folded at her waist. I offer an awkward wave, not sure what to do. My brain has started to scream, Cult! Cult! Cult! Yet my heart has started to sense the peeling shell of a creepy old man. “Starshine died when she was only eleven.” He says this like it’s a good thing and it turns my spit sour. “The best I can tell, she was killed by her stepfather, who found her sometime after she had run away, though she doesn’t remember so it’s really all just hearsay. She was homeless, begging on corners. A pimp thought she had promise and had one of his girls use her resurrection choice on Starshine and she was brought back to life to become one of his working girls when the time was right.” He raises his eyebrows disapprovingly. “I noticed her on one of my trips in,” he says, referring to life outside the compound. “And I brought her here to be my daughter.”
I feel Harrison flinch again.
“But…why not live with your real family?” I try.
Coyote’s lips form a straight line. “Starshine, would you get our guests some soup?” She obeys like she’s someone used to obeying. For a second, I think that he’s going to avoid my question. “There’s no place for me with my family anymore. I’ve died and been reborn. My family doesn’t grasp that. Besides, my first-life wife—Harrison’s aunt—had already fallen in love by the time that my daughter, Kate, used her resurrection choice on me.”
Harrison jolts, nearly knocking a bowl of soup from Starshine’s fragile hands. “She never did anything with that guy. She waited for you. We all did. She waited for you so long that he married someone else after you were resurrected. And you didn’t even want our family.”
Starshine hands Ringo and me small bowls of the soup along with a pair of dented metal spoons.
Coyote narrows his eyes at Harrison. “I don’t expect you to be able to understand.” But as he says this he switches his stare to me and I feel guilty that I’ve made Harrison go through this for me.
I take a sip of the scalding soup and jerk back. The mixture tastes like dirt.
“Do you feel different?” I ask him.
“Stronger, smarter, more pure,” he replies.
“Do you remember dying?” I say. Starshine turns her shoulders away to stand over the hotplate and stir.
“It was a long process, dying of pancreatic cancer, so yes, I remember every excruciating detail up until the last day of my life. Then it’s blank. I was a part of the Other for two full years before I was reborn.” Again, I detect a hint of pride and I wonder if, here, the amount of time spent dead carries with it some twisted badge of honor.
The quiet presses in on me from all sides. Coyote is able to go as still as Matt. And there is nothing natural about Starshine, though I feel a pulse of sympathy for her. By Coyote’s account she had no place else to go. I wonder what her name was before all this. I wonder whether she had anyone to love her. Most of all, I wonder if she’d be better off dead.
Unease creeps up my back, onto my neck, until it reaches my scalp. Ringo has been strangely quiet beside me, but he never wavers or stands to leave and for that at least I’m grateful.
When the conversation dies, we all tumble out of the trailer, nearly on top of one another, so eager are we to escape the muted chambers of Coyote Blue with his dreamy, thousand-mile stare and his daughter who’s not a daughter and the muffled peacefulness that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. Once out, I look up to a blank slate of blue sky and feel it confining us, like a ceiling.
We drop Harrison off at his house, I thank him, and he says something like, “What are friends for?” and I’m pretty sure that I’ve accidentally become friends with Harrison Vines and that I don’t even hate it.
After that it’s just me and Ringo in the car. I relish the return to civilization, with the seagulls squawking overhead and the boom-crash of the ocean and the tourist shops with their sidewalk sales that draw in women with white shopping bags. We drive down Pineapple Avenue, through the heart of the town, past a statue of a sailor kissing a flapper girl.
The entire ride back I’ve been trying to speak, been trying even to think about the things that we saw. About our encounter with Coyote Blue and with Starshine and the eerie quiet of the commune. And about how I hated it all. Every single thing about it.
I attempt to sort through the reasons why a person who has been resurrected would choose to join a commune. Is there actually a spiritual transformation that takes place during the dying process or is it only the perception of one? Or worse, do the commune members merely wish for a transformation in order to place some meaning on their deaths that was never there in the first place?
I picture the serene faces, all twisted illusions of people. I think I’d rather be dead than live in a commune. But Penny? What would she think? She cried over an injured bird. She thought the full moon was magical. How would she perceive the shift that she inevitably would make in the natural order if she were to be resurrected?
I worry.