The Summer We Came to Life Read online

  The Summer We Came to Life

  DEBORAH CLOYED

  The Summer We Came to Life

  To Bianca, the kind of best friend who makes you want to write a book about best friends.

  To my mother, my first editor, to all my family (including mi segunda madre and my own unlikely family), who have guided and accompanied me through this world of love, loss, and above all, laughter.

  To The West Clovernook Society and women everywhere who laugh, dine, and empathize while going about their way of making the world a better place.

  To Fran and Emily, whose belief in me changed everything.

  To Jonathan. Yes, definitely to him.

  Contents

  not CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  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:

  “Mina, should I really marry Remy?”

  When my thumb settled on a page, I opened my eyes.

  October 17

  Mina

  Love is not inevitable, Samantha, like you seem to believe. It is a gift. It is the thing that wraps you up like a plush bathrobe to insulate you against cold, illness, and all of life’s indecencies. It is the thing that makes you less naked in the mirror of reality. It blankets you. It warms you. It saves you. No, that last part is a lie. It doesn’t save you. My father loved my mother from birth and she died anyway. And now me…

  Today, I planned to write about how grateful I am for the love you three have drenched me in. But I confess I am feeling sorry for myself instead.

  And I am preoccupied with the question: Does love last?

  Otherwise, how else would you describe what is left when a person dies and leaves you behind? Look at my father. I know you see him as cold and brittle, but that’s because he hides inside himself, clinging to the embers of my mother’s love.

  He came into my room last night and fed me crumbs about her, tiny things really, but details I’d been begging for my whole life—how she wore her hair, how she smelled, how she laughed. And when he went off to bed, I felt a warm buzzing cloud hanging in the room, just the same as when you and I laugh hysterically and then fall silent. It’s love that hangs in the air, lingers in the world around us. Love is what lasts.

  But, maybe…

  Maybe love is less of a gift and more of a distraction from an ugly truth: in the end we die alone. That is the truth, isn’t it?

  And it is the living’s love for the dead that lingers, not the other way around.

  So, when I die, I’m taking nothing with me, and leaving nothing behind.

  Our “research” is going nowhere, right? It’s all websites for crazies and desperate rich widows. I’m one of them, aren’t I? Desperate to believe that somehow I can still enter a world I am unfairly being asked to exit.

  P.S. Sam, I’m sorry. I’m never entirely myself after the chemo. Love is real and it’s all there is. You love so much easier than the rest of us, and you’re the easiest thing in the world to love. I’m sure you’ve got yourself a man and I’m sure he’s wonderful. Don’t get sidetracked by my bitter ramblings. Don’t listen to Isabel’s cynicism or Kendra’s fairy-tale nonsense. Love isn’t perfect, but it’s all there is.

  I snapped shut the journal and laughed—a foreign sound in my ears. I kept laughing until my eyes watered with tears. Firmly, I told myself to simmer down; forced my ears to open to the sound of the traffic, the garble of one million people going doggedly about their lives below. I leaned over the rusty railing to peer down on the city.

  Structures of every kind—body shops, gasolineras, pupuserias, makeshift beauty salons—spread out and snaked around lumpy, haphazard neighborhoods. The poorest inhabitants got pushed up the sides of the mountains, where they’d built shantytowns out of scrap metal and concrete. The shantytowns now ironically occupied the choicest real estate free of charge.

  I smiled, but with the bitterness of orange rinds. I saw in the city a metaphor for much of how I’d lived my life. I saw good intentions and big dreams and spurts of real accomplishment. But I saw them all thwarted by sudden twists and setbacks, restlessness, and reckless jumps into uncharted territory.

  I went inside to get my camera and tripod.

  Click went the shutter, and I closed my eyes and listened to the city’s soundtrack. Men cheered goals in open-air sports bars. Children played pickup games of kickball on dusty back roads. Mariachis cued up their first love songs of the night, unfazed by the harmonies of chickens and stray dogs. Click, and I opened my eyes.

  My art combined photographs on canvas with drawings, oil paint and text. I’d had small shows in six major cities around the world, as I bounced about traveling, but never real, lasting success. My Artist Statement said I combined different mediums to “explore connections between nature, people and emotion—looking for meaning in synthesis.” Right then My Life Statement would have branded me jumbled and disconnected.

  “What if I’m losing it?” I asked the sun and the birds and the one million residents of Tegucigalpa.

  And then my phone rang.

  CHAPTER

  2

  “NO, ISABEL, IT WOULD BE LIKE ROLLER-SKATING over her grave.”

  I glanced down at my pink roller skates and regretted the comparison. But no way were we resurrecting the vacation club.

  “Samantha, I need you. I already told my work I’m taking the time off. You have over a week till the residency. I looked at flights—”

  “No. I’m here anytime you need to talk to me. But I need to be alone.”

  There was a silence, a distinctly disapproving pause.

  “Sam, what’re you doing? Huh? You just disappeared on us. Paris? Honduras? And now you told a man you would marry him—a man none of us have even met? I’m coming.”

  I dug my nails into my palm. “I don’t want you to come. I know that makes me a jerk. But I need to think. And I can’t just sit around and laugh and drink and make everything into a vacation. Not anymore.”

  “It’s not like that. You need us—”

  “I’m sorry. I have to call you back.”

  I hung up my iPhone and sent it sailing across the gritty floor. Slumping down against the wall, my body slid in tandem with the tears.

  I was losing it. And I didn’t have to ask one million Hondurans to know it.

  Could Isabel really not get how abominable it would be to vacation without Mina? It wasn’t the first time we’d broached the subject. After the funeral, when I was packing for France, I assumed it a nonissue, but both Kendra and Isabel mused about a summer trip in her memory, reminiscing how Mina always loved Paris. How could they not see it as a betrayal? Why didn’t they understand that without Mina, everything was irrevocably different?

  But I knew why.

  I ran my fingers along my scalp and looked out at the night sky over my latest hometown. The stars were mostly obscured—by smog, by lights, by all the aggregate effects of human inhabitance—just like that night in Paris, the summer before we left for college.

  Isabel’s mother, Jesse, found a great apartment for rent in the bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre, and we arrived in July to a charming albeit sweltering abode bearing fuzzy wallpaper.

  We had a longstanding tradition for the first night, what we playfully called The Opening Ceremony. We cooked a meal together and christened our new temporary home with a night of dancing, storytelling and laughter. It was supposed to remind us that the traveling was important but the company was what really mattered.

  That first night in Paris, the sweaty kitchen was already overcrowded by Isabel, Kendra and their two moms. Mina and I took off to explore the apartment complex, and stumbled upon a door that led to the roof.

  The view was so breathtaking we both gripped the railing and gasped theatrically at the same time, which made us burst out laughing.

  “We are som
e lucky bastards,” I said.

  Mina shook her head and chuckled. I remember exactly how she looked, lit up by the tangled string of lights dangling behind her. Her hair—that I was infinitely and eternally jealous of—dark, full and shiny, no taming or wrestling necessary. And only she could wear a cotton skirt and a T-shirt and look glamorous.

  She didn’t answer, I remember. She looked away and down, snagged by a sound from below. The apartment was directly beneath us. With the windows wide-open, voices drifted up lazily, without much gusto. But at that moment the crescendo of mothers and daughters roaring in laughter had rushed over us.

  “Are we?” Mina said, asking the few stars that had wriggled free of the city haze as much as she was asking me. “Are we so lucky?”

  I put my hand on Mina’s shoulder. I’d let the stars answer. Mina’s mother died in a car accident when she was eight months’ pregnant. Her whole life, Mina heard what a miracle it was she was born at all. But it’s hard to hold on to gratitude for a lifetime. Especially when it feels more like loss.

  It’s kind of like the balls of candy wrapper foil Lynette, Kendra’s mother, kept for each of us on her windowsill. Every holiday we added a layer, Lynette’s version of tick marks on a doorframe. Mina was like that about her mother. She just kept adding to a ball of mismatched feelings, wrapping layers as the years passed.

  My mother bailed on my dad and me. It provided an iron stratum of anger that prevented feeling much of anything else about her.

  Mina always knew what I was thinking. At that moment, on a rooftop in Paris, without even a glance at my hardening face, she put her hand over mine.

  “We are lucky bastards.”

  On a cold, hard floor in Tegucigalpa, I looked down at my empty hands lying in my lap, then up at my empty apartment in the middle of nowhere. And then I cried as loud as I wanted. There was nobody to hear.

  October 27

  Samantha