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 some 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
Our research is not “going nowhere.” We’ll just dig deeper.
The essential problem, Mina, is this:
Nobody knows what consciousness is or exactly how it arises and functions.
Scientists don’t really have a clue what’s happening at a fundamental level of reality. They have fancy equations that explain everything from particle interaction to black holes, but the “how” is linguistically and conceptually challenging, to say the least.
Light really does behave as both a wave and a particle. Matter and energy are interchangeable. Particles really can influence each other at opposite ends of the earth instantaneously. A single electron does somehow go through two holes at once to interfere with itself.
It is the “how” of envisioning such things, and the metaphysical implications, that are disturbing.
Or encouraging.
Mina, this is gonna work. I promise I’ll find you.
Sleep tight.
—Sam.
CHAPTER
