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