I worry that she would be tempted to seek meaning with people like Coyote Blue. It’s a concern that clenches me in the gut and won’t let go as I start to imagine Penny in linen, face smoothed to unnatural perfection and unflinchingly serene. She wouldn’t cry for birds or for whales or for anything. Would Penny stay my Penny or would she become…something else?
I hate the thought of her going to live somewhere I can’t and wouldn’t follow. If she were tempted by the empty, meaningless spirituality of the commune, my resurrection choice would have been wasted.
When I think about the experience of the commune, the same word keeps slipping into place: unnatural.
I swallow down the meaning of this like a dose of cough syrup, but my throat still itches, itches, itches, and I want to say something that I’m nearly too scared to breathe.
What if I’ve made my decision? It feels impossible. Wrong even. But I suspect that I’ve felt it the entire drive home, percolating through my bones, hardening into a choice—yielding a name now balanced on the tip of my tongue.
My palms sweat.
I tell myself that there is no good resolution but that I will do the best I can with the information I have.
“Ringo?” I’m holding my breath and squeezing my abs tight to try to hold together the pieces of myself that I have left. “I think I’m going to resurrect Will,” I say. “I don’t think Penny would like it. The whole resurrection thing.”
We turn onto Lemon Drive, then Orange.
Ringo seems to have given up speaking, like it’s a sacrifice for Lent. But then he finally says, “Oh.” And nothing else.
“That’s all you can say?” I respond, really and truly kind of pissed.
He pushes a little harder on the gas pedal. My stomach lurches and I grip my fingernails into the stiff stitching of the seat.
The pedal pushes closer to the floor. We go fast, faster, fastest. I watch the speedometer dial climb the outside of the circle.
“Right now, yeah.”
His face is calm, but I notice his fists clench almost imperceptibly around the wheel.
Fear threatens to crush my windpipe. My heels are bearing into the floorboards. “Can you…can you please slow down, Ringo?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the effect is that I feel like we’re going even faster and I can’t see where we’re going, which means it could be anywhere. I am barreling. Too much. Too quick. Waiting, waiting, waiting for impact. I brace myself. So tense. I cannot move.
“Slow down!” I shout. Eyes still shut tight.
And this time, he listens. He eases off the accelerator. “Sorry,” he says, flatly, but I can’t help the deluge of images that flood in at the sense of panic. They layer together one on top of another, coming, coming, quick, quick, quick—blond hair, red blood, glittering glass, white bone, crushed metal, limbs, intestines, open flesh, suffocating, ocean, dead—I gasp, tearing myself from the sinkhole of frightening pictures.
“Lake?” he says. His hand is on my leg. I’m shaking my head. I can’t look at him. “Lake?” he asks again. And then I hear the blip-blip-blip of the blinker and we’re curving to the side and coming to a stop. Horns honk. Cars whoosh by Ringo’s door. But he has pushed the gearshift into park and we are no longer moving.
He turns toward me. I’m shaking violently. Ringo leans across the center console and wraps his arms all the way around me. His nose is resting in the nook between my shoulder and my neck. His mouth is warm there. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, this time with real concern. “Are you okay?” he asks. My teeth chatter so much, they might chatter right out of my mouth. Ringo pulls away and ducks his head down to look into my eyes. I drink in the marine blue and trace the intricate edges of his birthmark with my own eyes, like it’s a map back to the present. He holds one of my shoulders firmly and strokes the back of my head with his other hand. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I didn’t mean to, Lake.” He watches me until I nod and then he pulls me into him again. He presses my nose into his shirt collar, tucks me into him like a doll. He is much more solid than I thought he’d be.
“I’m fine.” My words are muffled.
I feel his head above me shaking back and forth. He doesn’t let go and I don’t try to move. His Adam’s apple bobs sharply and I think I feel a slight tremor in his chest when he says, “‘Anna.’ The Beatles, they knew what they were talking about when they covered ‘Anna.’” He only holds me for a moment longer, squeezing me once tightly before letting me go. Then he wipes his hand over his face, shudders some emotion free and drives.
At the Southshores complex, I watch the back of Ringo’s head disappear into his apartment and I think that I want to cry. How can a heart be full and empty all at once? I wish for the days to pass. I wish I could wake up and for it to be the day after my birthday. Lately, there only seem to be wrong turns and I’m taking every single one of them. I’m forced to replace Ringo at the wheel and drive the distance back to my house, slowly and cautiously, always on the lookout for a silver Lexus.
I try mentally repeating the same thing I told Ringo: I think I’m going to resurrect Will. I think I’m going to resurrect Will. I try not to think about the other side of the coin. Cause and effect. Push and pull. Life and death. And the person whose face I’ll be choosing never to see again.
The sun is warm. I slide Penny’s journal out from its hiding place, grab a towel and sneak out onto the beach behind our house. Salt water sprays up between the jetty rocks. I think about walking out there, the way I used to when I was younger until my parents forbade me from scaling the rocks, but I spread my towel out on the gray sand instead. My toes dig ten holes in the beach.
Penny’s journal keeps me company next to my hip. I imagine carrying her with me this way, adding to the notes she kept with some of my own observations. I could tell her about college and how I hold a Save the Whales run each year in her honor. I can explain to her about Ringo. Lines and words would fill up the page and maybe somehow they’d reach her.
Or maybe they wouldn’t.
The thing I’m hoping to feel as I’m sitting out here, watching the waves lap just short of my feet, is peace. Or at least relief.
If I’ve decided Penny might not want to be resurrected, then that should be it, shouldn’t it? That should be my decision. It’s finished. Six days to spare.
But if it’s peace I’m looking for, it’s hiding well. I start to build a sandcastle as a distraction. I burrow my hands in the damp, sticky grains, hollowing out a place for my structure. Matt and I had spent so much time making sandcastles when we were younger, we’d practically become master architects, at least when the medium was sand.
I keep it simple. Four cylindrical towers that I form with my palms. I dig a tunnel through the middle one, then use drippings to make spindly turrets on top of each.