The Summer We Came to Life - By Deborah Cloyed Page 0,2
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.