The Summer We Came to Life

I’m not ready, Sam. I’m not ready to leave you guys.

I looked out across the city, and gradually up at the clouds. Why did I stop looking, really? Why did I stop believing? I looked back at the journal. I flipped toward the back to the page that held the drying maple leaf. Twirling the leaf by its stem, I went back to the entry.

P.S. Call Kendra. I know she hates being so far away in New York. It’s ridiculous how much that girl works. But she does it to herself, now doesn’t she? LOL

I wiped my nose and went to look for my cell phone. What was the deal with Kendra? I smelled a big fat decomposing rat on that one. Initially, maybe I was surprised that she’d agreed to come on a moment’s notice, her being so easily offended by anybody’s lack of planning. But Kendra worked for a clothing distribution company where the absent owner, off gallivanting, compensated her handsomely and let Kendra make all the decisions. Kendra worked seven days a week, whether she was in the office or not. She’d assured us she could still get work done in Honduras, and had even said it was good timing because a lot of her clients were on vacation, too.

Then she suddenly changed her mind, something Kendra didn’t do.

I fired off a text and waited. When no response came, I sat on the balcony cradling the maple leaf in my left palm and stroking it with my right.

Just me and the city and the leaf.

CHAPTER

8

ISABEL WANDERED OFF TO FIND COFFEE WHILE I stood near the welcome gate at the airport, one of the few gleaming new buildings in the city. I shivered in the air-conditioning and realized how excited I was for the vacation club to arrive.

Mina and I had struck out in the family department; it was our greatest bond. A mother that dies versus the one that runs away. It’s hard to measure which is worse.

I was two, so I can’t say if my mother left the man I know as my father, or if my father turned into that man once she left. My dad is a brilliant surgeon. Once I read about a child he miraculously saved, about how he wept at her bedside. I cut that article into fifty pieces and burned them one by one, because I never knew that side of my father at all. When he was home, which was rarely to never, he asked me about my grades and that was about it. He dismissed any discussion of my mother or her whereabouts. No photographs remained. As I got older, I postulated mental illness, love affairs, cult brainwashing. My father would pull off an amazing feat of glaring at me while looking straight through me, and say only, “Better left alone, Sam.” I hoped she was dead. Otherwise, she’s a monster.

In any case, that’s why the vacation club was never just summer camp for me. Isabel’s mother, Jesse, loved to tell how she scooped up Mina and me like two stray kittens, two lost little girls trying to be each other’s parents. Of course, after Arshan Bahrami, Mina’s father, became Jesse’s bridge partner, it wasn’t such a nice story to tell anymore. You don’t call someone a bad father to his face.

“Isabel, they’re here!” I pointed to a cloud of blond hair and laughter emerging from customs.

Clicking heels and a squeal, and Jesse Brighton was charging through the crowd toward us. Typical Jesse—her long ash-blond hair flowed over her leopard-print shirt tucked into skinny jeans, tucked into five-inch leather boots.

“Oh my stars! Look at those two gorgeous women! Those are my girls!” she shouted into the ears of the poor passengers she plowed over to reach us. “Hug me quick before I die of excitement!”

I fell happily into her warm embrace that always smelled of Chanel No. 5. Jesse splattered me in lipstick kisses.

Lynette, with her carefully bobbed blond hair and her red tunic and jeans, waited a step behind before taking her turn hugging us and laughing.

The two men hovered awkwardly back a few paces. Arshan looked ready for class, with his collared shirt, pressed khakis and stern expression. Cornell’s clothes were more casual, but his face was just as manly serious.

“Oh come here!” I hugged them both. Cornell instantly relaxed, but Arshan tensed more. I thought of Mina, trying to remember if I’d ever seen them hug.

Jesse took my hand and petted it like a Chihuahua. “Ok, my precious little angel, let’s get those automobiles, shall we? Let’s get this show on the road! Tradition is tradition. The Opening Ceremony begins.”

The party was a huge success. Shakira blasted from speakers attached to Isabel’s iPod. Isabel spilled her news and Jesse launched a campaign to get her to move home. Lynette and Cornell danced and smooched in the middle of the room. Arshan helped me in the kitchen with the drinks. I’d insisted on Johnny Walker Black with club soda, the Honduran drink of choice, and Arshan was effusively appreciative. Well, effusively for Arshan.

When Beyoncé came on, Jesse called us onto the dance floor/roller rink. We danced and shook our hips until Lynette begged me to turn on the air-conditioning and I burst out laughing. Everyone collapsed into plastic chairs to fan themselves and started gabbing again. I went out to the balcony to get some air.

I was out there less than a minute when Arshan joined me, sliding the door closed behind him.

“Hey,” I said, surprised. I could count on a single hand the number of times I’d spoken one-on-one with Arshan Bahrami. Even in all our research, Mina and I hadn’t included her father the astrophysicist. It was mostly at her request and I hadn’t insisted; I knew how difficult it was to forgive fathers who let you down.

“Hello, Samantha. I want to thank you for inviting me on this trip. It’s been very hard since Mina—”

“It wasn’t my decision—” That sounded like I didn’t want him to come. “I mean, we all thought you should come.” That wasn’t exactly true. Jesse didn’t ask me before inviting Arshan and Cornell. Things change, Jesse said later. Adjust, darling. Or sit in a corner and lament. Sitting around lamenting was a cardinal sin in Jesse’s book.

Arshan was no dummy. He knew who had invited him. He stood and looked out across the city lights. “It’s beautiful, no? It reminds me a bit of Tehran, the city lights in the mountains.”

I peeked at him out of the corner of my eye. I always forgot he spent half his life in Iran.

“So, you’re going to become a married woman, huh, Sammy?”

I don’t know what shocked me more—his question or the nickname. “They told you? Lynette and Jesse?”

Now he seemed surprised. “What do you think we talk about?” He looked at me. “We talk about the four musketeers.” His gaze darted away quickly. “About all you girls.”

Three musketeers, not four. A pointy triangle that doesn’t roll. Oh, Mina. Why am I here and not you?

Something cool and smooth touched my shoulder. Arshan picked it up between his fingers and stared at the maple leaf in wonder. He looked up at the sky, then behind us on the balcony. He’d raked thousands of these in his yard. The deep line between his eyebrows almost made me giggle. I took this new leaf by its stem and twirled it between my fingers.

“There are so many things Mina and I never talked about,” he said as he watched the leaf.

I didn’t respond and we both lapsed into thought. I remembered when Mina and I were children, how we were left to ourselves, how we played “house” for hours in the woods and made TV dinners together.

“Is he the one?”

“Excuse me?”

Arshan continued as if he was no longer talking to me. “You will give him your youth, your idealism, and your capacity for hope. He will seal or destroy your belief in fate and love. You only get one chance at these things. He will fill your life’s bowl, Samantha. So is he worthy?”

I reminded myself to breathe. My heart pounded in my throat. How dare he, of all people? “Was Mina’s mother worth it?” Worth becoming so bitter? I thought.

Arshan laughed so unexpectedly and so loud that I got goosebumps. “You bet she was.” He slapped the balcony railing and laughed again. I had no idea he could laugh like that.

Seemingly having surprised himself as well, Arshan cleared his throat and smoothed his slacks. He nodded his head at me, his dark eyes still crinkled from laughing. Then he turned to walk inside.

“Mr. Bahrami? Arshan?”

He turned back. I held out the maple leaf. He took it from my fingers like a long-stemmed rose and studied its colors of campfire embers in the moonlight. His face assumed a softness, like milk spilling over jagged marble. Then he opened the door and the party music flooded the balcony, rinsing away the moment.

November 10

Samantha

Okay, Mina, tell me this: What is the difference between matter and non-matter?

The craziest lesson of quantum physics is that at the most fundamental level, we don’t know what the world and/or us, as human beings, are made of.

Particles are hard, substantial points in space, like electrons. Waves are spread out and immaterial, like sound. Things have to be one or the other, right?

Wrong. The most famous experiment in modern physics is The Double Slit Experiment. Electron particles are fired through a screen with two slits onto a particle detector one at a time. You would expect the electron to go through one of the two slits and be detected somewhere directly behind one or the other. But after you’ve fired thousands of electrons, you see not two slits of accumulated particles, but a series of thick and skinny bands—an interference pattern indicative of a wave. But how did each particle know where to end up on the wave interference pattern? The electron somehow interacts and acts both as a wave and a particle at the same time, completely defying classic notions of space, time and matter.

See, Mina, we really have no clue about “reality.” At what point are we separate from everything around us? How are thoughts different from, say, your collection of maple leaves?

Scientists aren’t any closer to solving the mind/body debate than the Pope of Rome.

Which is not to say that there aren’t theories….

CHAPTER

9

WHILE THE OPENING CEREMONY STRETCHED into the night, Kendra nestled in Michael’s arm, savoring the familiarity. They always lay the same way, on their same respective sides. Kendra loved all things that had that kind of automatic comfort—cutting her banana over her bran cereal, the concierge hailing her daily cab, the TiVo bloop when she sat down on Sunday to watch all her favorite shows Michael wouldn’t watch.

After the previous night’s fight, Kendra and Michael hadn’t discussed the issue further. Both had said what they had to say for the moment, and neither one was the type to repeat themselves for the sake of drama. Michael came over late with Chinese takeout. They’d watched ESPN and gotten into bed. They hadn’t had sex, but that wasn’t unusual on a weeknight.

The problem was that Michael thought he had won, and figured Kendra didn’t want to discuss the details of abortion. Kendra figured Michael just needed time to adjust and might even propose soon. But this was just a fleeting whisper at the edge of her mind, because really she was happiest ignoring the whole situation.

Then Michael furrowed his eyebrows, and Kendra’s world was just about to explode.

Kendra didn’t see it, of course, in their usual pose, so she was stroking his arm contentedly when Michael said, “I’ll go with you, baby.”

Kendra knew exactly what he meant before he even finished saying it. Words are often superfluous between lovers. Skin speaks its desires; moods hang in the air; intention travels faster than words. Kendra’s face crumpled halfway through “I’ll go,” and Michael said nothing more after that sentence because he could feel her disappointment seep into his skin.

So, with both of them finally on the same page, minus the words to confirm it, their usual pose turned into something entirely different, as Michael hugged Kendra so tight it squeezed out the sobs Kendra took immeasurable pains to contain, at which point she sprang away as if from a branding iron, and curled up on the far edge of the mattress.

Michael wanted to comfort her, but he knew that they were back on the battlefield. He would lose his last five years of youth if he went soft on this one.

Kendra was crying because she knew exactly what he was thinking.

Later, after she was sure Michael was asleep, Kendra picked up her phone to reread my text from that afternoon. She read the words several times, pushing the star key every time the phone darkened to sleep mode.

Kendra, I know something’s wrong. Call me. We all love you no matter what.

Kendra touched her hairline, which had broken out in a fine sweat. She hadn’t gotten her hair redone, a fact that set off alarm bells in the secretary when Kendra came in late that morning with a hat squashed atop a tangled mass of hair.

Kendra hid in her office all day, but hardly accomplished a thing besides staring at her in-box and managing not to cry.

Remembering, Kendra got out of bed. She tiptoed into the living room and picked up the picture of the four girls. Their very first summer trip. Kendra stroked a finger over Mina’s beaming face. She sat down on the couch, studying the picture like an Italian Vogue. Four girls and two mothers in Paris. Kendra’s mother and Isabel’s mom, Jesse, were already best buddies by then, soldiers in the battle against suburbia. They’d started the vacation club to get the girls out of Conformia every summer. Kendra smiled. She was old enough to understand that both mothers secretly loved the celebrity status afforded them by the Conformia of the conservative little burb outside of Washington, D.C. Jesse got to brag about being a supermodel, and flaunt her taste for leopard print. But her mother? Kendra hadn’t quite figured out what made Lynette Jones so wary of the picture-perfect neighborhood, though she was sure it had to do with her father, a civil rights lawyer in D.C.

Kendra set down the picture. It wasn’t fair to worry them. She grabbed her BlackBerry and sent a group text:

Swamped with work. Wish I was there.

One lie and one truth. Kendra looked back at the photo, but this time she saw her reflection in the glass of the frame, her frizzy hair and sallow skin illuminated by the streetlight seeping through the window. Kendra stood up slowly and shuffled over to a full-length mirror. She stood stiller than a sentry, a judging scowl on her face. What was she guarding?

All my sacred plans, she answered the reflection wryly. Career. Wedding. Family. In that order.

Guarding them against whom?

“Against you,” she whispered at the unkempt woman in the mirror.

She stared down the imposter, eyes narrowed and chin up as though she could reshape the image by force of will. But she couldn’t. The frazzled, disheveled lady continued to glare back at her. Kendra let her nightgown slip to the floor. She saw a woman that was no longer the youngest, prettiest girl in every business meeting.

Stretch marks scurried around her nipples. Her stomach was soft and fleshy. Her waist was narrow but flared into wide dimply hips. The woman’s face was a Picasso of curves and shadows, but with lips as full as marshmallows.

“Kendra?” Michael called gruffly from the bedroom.

The woman’s eyes filled with tears. She put her hand out to Kendra, until their fingers touched on the surface of the glass.

CHAPTER

10

“ROAD TRIP! GET UP! COME ON, UP. UP!” JESSE stood over me, completely dressed. I sat up on the air mattress next to Isabel. She opened one eye when I poked her. Jesse kissed my forehead and then Isabel’s. “Get your little butts up. We gotta hit the road, girls.”

We were driving to the beach house I’d rented in Tela. It was an all-day affair and Jesse was right—if we didn’t get a move on it, we’d end up driving in the dark, which was a very bad idea on a Honduran highway.

I got ready in a hurry, nudging Isabel along every step of the way. Lynette and Cornell had almost everything packed and ready. I’d never seen anything like those two. Lynette had always been our organizer, but to see her and Cornell work in tandem was a lesson in harmony.

“Arshan, you’re with us.” Lynette was doling out seating arrangements. “Jesse, you drive the girls.”

I caught Jesse give Lynette a look. Why wouldn’t she want to drive with us? Well, fine, then. “Jesse, you can go with Lynette, I can drive.” I picked up the last bag of groceries. “Actually, I would prefer to drive.”

Jesse caught herself and smiled. “Samantha, darling, good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”

“What in the hell does that mean?” Isabel asked.

“It means I’m drivin’. Let’s go.”

So, twenty minutes later, a canary-yellow Honda and a tan Ford climbed the mountainous snake-shaped highway above the congested city, en route to Tela on the eastern coast.

In the Honda, Isabel was in the back and I was up front in the passenger seat. I gave Jesse a crash course on Honduran highway driving, best summarized as follows: throw out every rule you’ve ever learned and drive like a madwoman in a high-speed chase.

There were two speeds on any Honduran highway: chicken truck creep along may break down any minute and speed demon passing uphill on hairpin turn. There was no in-between. In-between was deadly. In-between would get you rear-ended into a pickup truck carrying five relatives, a dog and a chicken. At all times, you watched for stray dogs, small children carrying water jugs, old men with canes or cows, sudden rains that made the edge of the mountain invisible, and potholes big enough to swallow the front end of your car.

Isabel had the best seat. It was best not to look.

I had the worst seat. A complete view with a complete lack of control.

The road climbed and twisted, each new curve revealing a cluster of fresh sights. Cement-block shacks opened to supersize hammocks strung in the main room. Vegetable stands sported men in cowboy hats with crossed arms, posing against a bull. Rickety roadside stands sold dark watery honey in dusty reused bottles with dirty screw tops.

Jesse pulled over at a produce stand to add to our cache of groceries. Our place in Tela was outside town—better to stock up in advance. We parked in the ditches and haggled over bananas and mangos. Jesse made us buy one of every fruit or vegetable we’d never seen before, which amounted to a lot of strange-looking potato-ish and pear-ish items among the plantains. And of course, we bought mango verde as a snack. Unripe mango, doused in lime, salt and chili, was a seasonal treat sold by women alongside men brandishing puppies for sale. I sucked on the sour pieces of fruit and watched the scenery.

“There it is! Stop, Jesse! Pull over, quick,” I yelled when we came upon a roadside shack with a line of cars out front.

Jesse whipped the car into a dirt patch out front, nearly getting clipped by a tailgating utility truck.

“My God, Sammy, what?” Jesse looked unimpressed by the one-room store.

“Queso petacon!” Lucky I saw the sign. “Cheese! No trip to Honduras would be complete without it,” I proclaimed like an expert, quoting Ana Maria. I hopped out of the car and spotted an outhouse around back. “If you have to pee, looks like there’s a…bathroom around back. I think I’ll wait for the next Texaco.”

Isabel groaned and headed for the outhouse, as Jesse turned toward the road, leaning against the dusty car to smoke a cigarette.

When I came out with the cheese, I saw Jesse hadn’t moved a hair, still perched against the car with three inches of ash hovering precariously at the end of her cigarette. “You didn’t see the others?”

Jesse jumped like a lizard had slithered into her jeans. She took a look at her cigarette and laughed. “Did you get a closer look at that outhouse, kiddo? Nah, don’t tell me. If you gotta go, you gotta go. Better to approach life without knowing what’s comin’.”

“Jesse?” Something about her face bothered me.

Jesse dropped the cigarette on the ground. She fiddled with her purse and then her belt. Then she stood up straight to face me. “Oh, sugar, it’s just that ever since I found out about that marriage proposal of yours, I keep remembering things that ain’t worth remembering.”

I knew from experience that Jesse wouldn’t answer probing questions about Isabel’s father. But she was still looking at me expectantly, so I gave it a go. “You mean remembering things about your marriage?”

Jesse didn’t move or say anything. Then she nodded, just once, slow as refrigerated honey. I looked behind me to see if Isabel was coming. She would want to hear this, I knew.

By the time I turned back to Jesse, the look was gone. She clapped her hands together and clasped them. “Oh, now everybody knows how I feel about the institution of marriage, Sammy girl.” She looked up as we heard the door slam and Isabel curse. “About the same as that outhouse.” Jesse wrinkled her nose. “I know better.”

Arshan drove with both hands in perfect safety position, eyes straight ahead, back erect. He checked his three mirrors in clockwise order—rearview, right side, left side, straight ahead, and repeat. The sun paraded its late-afternoon glare, so Arshan pulled down the visor and adjusted his posture.

Lynette watched him and thought about how much Arshan had grown on her. He was still morose and dry, but he’d loosened up as their bridge nights had piled up over the years, and now Lynette realized that he provided the perfect balance to their little group.

She also knew that Jesse had fallen for him, even more than she’d hinted at. Lynette studied Arshan’s severe profile and his slim frame. He was a handsome man, regal somehow, and safe. He just wasn’t someone she would have ever imagined Jesse with. Jesse dated businessmen from the salon, or firemen, or attractive divorcés she met on the internet.

They had no proof that moody, serious Arshan felt the same way about Jesse, which Lynette knew must be infuriating her best friend, not to mention shaking her ample confidence. No one had been hurt more in love than Jesse, and Lynette wasn’t about to push.

She peered so long that Arshan whipped sideways and caught her. Lynette was embarrassed and pretended to be looking out the window past him.

Arshan appreciated Lynette’s silence. He had underestimated the feelings this trip would bring back. Ghosts swirled around him in the car and rushed past the windows, interlacing with the scenery. Mina was everywhere in this group. He caught echoes of all her favorite catch phrases. Samantha’s laugh sounded strange by itself. He’d always heard it aligned with his daughter’s, the mixture spilling into the hallway outside her bedroom. The way Isabel talked with her hands, the private jokes she shared with Samantha—everything was an excruciating reminder of Mina’s absence.

And then he kept envisioning his wife, Maliheh. Her laughing eyes. The jasmine scent she wore. Arshan had learned to accept these fleeting glimpses of his wife, but still they startled him, like the richness of gourmet chocolate. He slipped into the past like an egg sliding into water to be poached. Arshan regularly boiled himself alive for his mistakes as a husband and a father.

He remembered every second of the day before Mina was born.

Maliheh lay on the bed, with her puffy eyes and swollen belly. They’d moved to the U.S. in a haze after losing their son in Iran. Maliheh had hardly spoken to him in the months since. Betrayal by God. That was the only way to describe the pain of losing a child. But on that day, when Maliheh had taken his hand and put it on top of the baby, they had stopped discussing.

Maliheh was always the stronger one. She told Arshan that their child could not be born into such sorrow, that he must promise her to be kind, to be open, to laugh. Arshan’s heart was reborn, looking into the eyes of the only woman he’d ever loved. He promised her then and there that the three of them would be happy and safe.