The Summer We Came to Life

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

not CHAPTER

1

BIRTH AND DEATH ARE THE TWO OCCURRENCES in a person’s life that seem to say one thing: we are not the ones calling the shots. “The only consolations are love and best friends.” That’s what Mina told me two days before she died.

This much is true—June 25, a Friday, in the summer of 2010, we were alive—me, Kendra and Isabel—and Mina had been gone six months.

I was renting an apartment in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, until my “artist in residence” began at the university. It had been planned for a year. I remember thinking I would have to cancel it in order to spend time with Mina in her final days. But the doctor’s estimates were generous, and her death left me instead with six months to wander or languish. I chose to wander, as per usual.

After the funeral and the long, unanchored days that followed, I took a friend up on an offer to stay with her in Paris. That’s where I met Remy. Remy Badeau—Parisian bad-boy film director. I welcomed the whirlwind he provided with open arms. It distracted me from the pile of dead leaves I would have been otherwise.

Summer came faster than expected, like it always does. But for once, the surprise solstice wasn’t gleeful.

For the first time since we were little girls, there would be no summer vacation with Isabel and Kendra and their mothers, Jesse and Lynette. Mina and I, both motherless, had struck a cozy balance with the mother-daughter pairs. And every summer the six of us took off for some exotic locale for a week of laughter and memory making. But now what would I be except a pathetic fifth wheel? It was bad enough going from a circle of four to a tottering triangle. Maybe if life had been sold to me as a tricycle, but I thought I’d bought an ATV. No more Mina, no more vacations. But wasn’t my life like one big vacation, an escape from responsibility?

I already felt guilty enough about the laughing.

In the six months following the funeral, I was continually ashamed by my residual tendency to laugh. At the fruit stand. In the shower. On the metro. I’m the type that shares conspiratorial giggles with children. I flirt with old men. I laugh at myself when I stub my toe.

But grief hacks away at the soul, leaving only vestiges of your self behind. So every time I chuckled with Parisian strangers, I felt guilt like a dropkick to the sternum. It created many an awkward silence when my smile snuffed out, catching them in the laugh like a Peeping Tom in a flash-bulb. Sometimes they shuddered as if a chill had found its way into the smoggy city. Then they looked at me with pity. Europeans are good at spotting the haunted.

So, that’s when Remy proposed, when I was practicing not to laugh anymore. He proposed on the day before I left Honduras, in a hasty manner that smelled of panic, with a ring he said he would upgrade after my return.

I said yes, because saying no was too final, and had too many immediate consequences. I said yes because I wondered if it would fill me with genuine lingering laughter. I said yes to cloak the fact that I had failed to fulfill my best friend’s dying request.

Now I had to figure out if I really intended to marry him.

CHAPTER

1

SO, ON A FRIDAY, JUNE 25, I WAS ROLLER-SKATING around my Tegucigalpa apartment, watching the sun set beyond the sliding glass doors, watching the golden light transform the grimy city into a shiny postcard. First thing I’d done when I arrived was move all the furniture into the bedrooms along with my rolled-up canvases and camera gear. The floors were just like a high school cafeteria, providing a flat expanse to soothe my bumpy thoughts.

Roller-skating was my therapy. You had to give the body something to entertain itself with so the mind could tackle all that metaphysical, esoteric, life-decision stuff bouncing around between the ear canals.

I was almost thirty. Why is it that just before thirty the carefree blur of your life stops and you hear an unfamiliar voice you identify as your grown-up self ask: Aren’t you getting too old for this? And I don’t think the voice was just talking about the roller-skating.

Hey, I was on the track to normalcy and respectable over achievement once upon a time. I graduated from Yale in Physics. Ask me how many of my classmates were lanky redheaded females. I had both feet pointed toward graduate school when I decided to spend six months backpacking Eastern Europe instead. I took a camera. Turns out I took to the artist/gypsy life like a baby to his first taste of sugar. Or like Isabel to social causes. Or Kendra to a six-figure salary in the fashion industry. Besides, Mina was the one meant to be an academic.

I rolled to a stop, near a gold journal on the floor. When the final diagnosis was in, Mina started three journals, one for each of the girls. Mine was a team effort, an earnest plan to contact each other after her death. I moved back in with my dad in the D.C. suburb where we all grew up, and stuck to Mina like Elmer’s. My job was to compile all the physics—translating everything I could find about consciousness and death into laymen’s terms for Mina. Her entries came from the heart. We passed the journal back and forth between visits, and spent most every afternoon discussing, forming our plan. In this way—as the maple tree outside her window set its leaves on fire then shook them to the ground—we spent the days, the hours, and the last minutes of Mina’s life like we’d spent the twenty-four years prior—laughing, crying, and together.

When she died, I read the journal over and over, obsessively trying all the ways we’d devised for me to contact her, with no results beyond excruciating sobbing fits. I felt silly and naive, totally unprepared for the weight of real grief.

In Paris, I eventually abandoned the rituals. And by Honduras, I’d begun to read the journal like the I Ching—pose a question and flip to a random page for the answer. My questions varied from day to day. Where should I go next? Is it time to give up on my dreams? Why did you have to die?

I reached down and untied the roller skates. I picked up the journal and headed out to the balcony. “Isn’t Gmail more practical?” I’d chided Mina, but she wanted something tangible, something that “would last.” I touched the antiqued cover and had a vision of growing old with that journal, my arthritic hands resting atop the thinning pages. It gave me the chills. One deep breath and I placed my right hand flat like a plaintiff, squeezed shut my eyes, and added my voice to the din of Tegucigalpa: