The View From Who I Was (21 page)

Wake up!
I yelled.
Wake up! You'll die!

Corpse was two hundred yards from the lava rocks lining the cliff's base.

Wake up!

She slept.

Could I survive if she died? Alone? A ghost? And Dad. He could be alive.

As Corpse rocked on the waves' rise and fall, she resembled a mermaid offering. One foot had lost its flip-flop. I slunk close and tried to hear her breaths. Heard instead the frothy water churning Dad.

She'd taught me that touching was more than skin. I now liked touching people. Even loving them. I even loved her.

And then there it was. The answer. The key: me. I was what drove us to suicide. I was the bullshit. Not Ash. Not Mom. Not Dad. Me. Reasoning, doubting, judging me.

I longed to evaporate. To rise to the clouds. Become indiscernible, even to myself. But then Corpse would die. Dad too. I had to wake her. To return. But not to exist as two selves. I wished for one Oona, only. Now or never. I funneled between her parted lips.

Her cough rolled me through her echo-y body. Her eyes shot open. My world grew confined to her vision. She remembered cold's deadliness.

“No!” she said.

I coursed into her limbs as she rolled onto her belly. Ahead, waves foamed over the black rocks at the cliff's base. She swam toward shore.

Dad!
I yelled.

She paused, turned, and trod water hard so she bobbed up and saw the yellow and tan blur of his body. She swam toward him, furiously at first, but the current wore her out. He was inching toward her, but it was so cold.

She started again, ignoring her numb fingers. She neared him and tasted his blood on the water. She shook him. He didn't wake. She tried to shout, but her numb lips wouldn't form words. A distant siren wailed.

Hurry!
I said, weak with dilution.

She wrapped her arm across his chest, his head lolled back against her shoulder, and she swam with one arm, kicking hard. Her strokes turned clumsy. Sleep was like a drug, but she forced it back and found efficiency if she floated right at the water's surface.

Fish do not swim, they are swum.
Sugeidi's image, hand over her heart, rose before Corpse. She sobbed, but found strength. She listened to her heart, blew out stronger breaths to its rhythm.

She neared the rocks, but could not feel her body. Her eyelids weighed a thousand pounds. She lay her cheek on the water.

Swim!
I shouted.

She closed her eyes.

DEAD GIRL DROWNS!

She started a dim crawl, kept it up. Lava rock rose beneath her, ripping her numb skin. The waves rolled them, like driftwood, till they flopped on their backs.

Shouts fell from the cliff top. Corpse squinted at their tiny figures. Within her, our confluence. No feeling now. No pain. She groped for Dad's hand. Gripped it.

A thwapping consumed the air. A shadow passed across her. A rectangular silhouette lowered down. It got close and became an orange stretcher with a man astride, dangling from a cable to a helicopter. Just as he knelt beside us, Dad squeezed her hand.

“Dad!” she croaked through wet hair wrapping her face.

“
Pai
?” the man said.

She barely nodded.

Like a comet across that sleepy veil, I realize
this
had been our life's map. Now, dwindling, our entire journey has played out before me. That suicide, one swaying step.
We
and
she
become
I.

Epilogue

From Oona's journal:

The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly to the heart.

—Viktor Schauberger

What do you suppose evil is? Does it exist? Or is it just the way some people juggle terror, or guilt? I've thought about that a lot since Portugal. Especially when Ash's ghost whispers
User.

I have to believe Dad was trying to kill only himself. No doubt I pushed him there. I've also thought a lot about love. How before we can expect it from others, we have to be willing to give it to ourselves. We are all so fragile. Such precarious concoctions.

One thing's for sure: the ability to live when our spirits are dead runs in both Dad's and my veins. He stayed in Portugal to heal, Tia Célia nursing him. He had broken limbs, a broken heart, all resistance gone. Yet he'd held my gaze with a new, ragged hope. I'll visit him this summer, but I miss him with an ache cradled in that suffering voice of Amália. I have a word for it:
saudade. Saudade
is about enduring.

Dad's absence yawns at Mom, Sugeidi, and me. Even after moving into this condo. A
For Sale
sign stands in front of Chateau Antunes now. It's a hard property to sell. No local wants a house so laden with tragedy. A rich tourist will probably own it someday.

Sugeidi, after being so busy during and after the move, mills about now. “You no need me,” she said one day.

“We'll always need you, Sugeidi,” Mom said through a sad smile. “You're part of our family.” Her eyes shot to mine, because our family's new definition includes divorce.

“Besides,” I said, taking a huge breath, “Mom needs someone to keep track of her next year, with me gone and her starting college herself. Someone has to make sure she does her homework.”

Sugeidi still wears that maid dress. I've come to love it. Today, though, she wears a belted dress the color of sky. I don't have the heart to tell her it's the exact color I soared through in that convertible.

Mom wears a clingy designer dress, but she hasn't gotten the pearl buttons near the top right. “Here,” I say, and I fix them for her.

I step back. Her eyes travel over my lavender dress, the shiny new scars on my arms and shins. She studies my face, swathed and saved by all that hair. She smiles and shakes her head.

“Survivors,” she says.

We three look at each other, Dad in our gaze.

“Let's survive our way to graduation,” Mom says. She grabs her purse, and Sugeidi grabs her purse, and we head out the condo's front door.

Graduation is at the town's amphitheater, so we walk. This late-May afternoon whispers summer. We follow the bike path Gabe and I first strolled along, tentatively holding hands, almost exactly a year ago. Crystal Creek churns with runoff. Always when I look at rivers now, I see the Tagus, and they all seem the linked veins of one omniscient body.

We don't walk fast. They know I'm dreading all those eyes. When we turn off the bike path, I look down it and wish I could escape with Gabe to our spot beneath the spruce.

Our car crash made the newspaper:
DEAD GIRL SURVIVES AGAIN.
Flowers from Dad's financial world laced Chateau Antunes with a melancholy perfume that suspended that crash in present tense. I tried to imagine those suited, groomed strangers, wondering if any of them really knew one another. All the while, Crystal Village's eyes watched me. I'm looking forward to Yale. I'll be anonymous there. Just a girl with four missing digits and a constellation of scars. No, not a girl. A woman.

The river is so loud, I can't hear the music in the amphitheater till we enter its gates. Gabe and his father stand just inside, each holding a program. Gabe holds out my cap and gown. Mr. Handler has arranged for my late arrival. Like I said, he's smart as a fox. I can feel Mom and Gabe's dad looking at each other, then working not to look at each other.

Mom admitted that while I was in Portugal, it was Mr. Hernandez she'd dined with. After what happened to Dad, they haven't gone out again, but I hear Mom talking with Gabe's dad on the phone sometimes. Her voice sounds younger, lighter, brighter, when he's on the line. It makes me miss Dad so much I choke. Standing between these two, here, feels like standing between the north and the south halves of a magnet.

Gabe and I glance at each other and he raises his eyebrows. I kid Gabe that maybe Hernandez men love twice, yet we've talked about how our parents seemed destined for each other. We've decided this attraction's in our genes, but still, it's weird.

Sugeidi turns me to her. She hands Mom her purse, takes bobby pins from her breast pocket, and secures my mortar board. She straightens its gold tassel and pulls a lock of my hair forward over each shoulder. She kisses my forehead. “
Querida
.”

My eyes brim, and I'm thankful for surface tension.
Querida
. That's what Tia Célia called me in that Lisbon hospital. She has my address. She said she'll write.

Gabe takes my hand and we walk behind the stage to where the other 113 seniors are milling around. Brandy, with Tanesha gone, only frowns at us.

We find our alphabetical places in line, me near the front, like always. The processional starts and we file onto the stage. I follow Todd Adams, Brian Alonzo, and Norma Alvarez down the aisle between two banks of chairs to the far side of the first row on our right. Following me is Nick Bowlton, who's suffered a crush on me since second grade. Not anymore.

I sit and look up at the audience, half in the sheltered seating, the rest on blankets patchworking the bowled lawn. I picture the worn blanket Dad hated so much, see him refusing to sit down, and I blink.

I do the math and figure that easily eight hundred eyes are on me. I take a long sip of air and find Mom, Sugeidi, and Mr. Hernandez in the seats halfway back. Mom and Sugeidi dab their eyes with tissues. I have to look away but mentally thank Mom again for telling her bullying parents not to come. It's the first time she's ever stood up to them.

My eyes meet Norma Alvarez's beside me. She's one of the immigrant girls I passed each morning on the entry steps. When she smiles, I smile back. She waves to a man and woman on the lawn. They sit amid maybe forty friends and family. On the woman's lap is a little girl in a frilly white dress.

I notice the police officers who entered Dr. Bell's office after Tanesha attacked me. They stand, uniformed, to the side on the wide sidewalk between the seats and the lawn. Today must be a reprieve from deportations.

Dr. Bell strolls down the aisle between our rows to a podium at the front. He lowers the microphone, mugging a face, and the audience laughs. “Welcome,” he says, “to the graduation of the class of 2014.”

Whoops rise behind me. I turn, knowing from rehearsal where to find Gabe. His grin is so big and his eyes shine so brightly, I can't help but grin back. I hold that image, spread my hand on my black-robed thigh, and study my missing fingers.

Dr. Bell's words are murky from where we sit behind him. The audience bursts into applause, and a woman I recognize as the famous ski racer giving the address to our class steps to the podium. I try to hear her words too, but they slip from my grasp. My mind has such a hard time focusing on anything lately. I couldn't take my AP exams, barely made it through the rest of the school year. Mr. Handler says that's normal. That I'll heal.

My brow sears from the eight hundred eyes. They see my suicide. They see Ash's and deem me responsible. That verdict spreads to Dad's crash. Even Tanesha dropping out seems my fault. Their judgment is like a downpour that drenches every part of me.

I search for Ash's parents but don't find them, realize they have no child. No reason to be here. I wonder what they're doing at this moment to keep from breaking down. My parents came so close to just that. I hunch forward in shame. The ski racer stops talking, and applause rises like the waves on those Portuguese rocks that cut me like glass.

Clark steps to the podium. He's valedictorian, and I'm glad. “Thanks for pulling out of the race,” he said on the last day of Bio, but his closest competition had turned out to be Tony Rodriguez, who moved through each day in such silence that people forgot he was there. Clark's going to CU, like Mom, and plans to study astrophysics. His voice soothes me, and I straighten. The audience laughs once, twice, three times. I smile for Clark and wish I could understand his words.

Two students approach the podium next and introduce Mr. Bonstuber as Teacher of the Year. He wears a navy blazer that flaps out from his narrow frame as he approaches them. “I'm not sure if this is an honor or a curse,” he says. His German accent fills the amphitheater. “Though I speak in front of your children every day, public speaking is my greatest terror.” The audience laughs politely.

What is a person's greatest terror when they've twice shaken hands with death? I look out furtively and realize, for me, it's always been the same. Having no home. No people to make me strong.

My eyes travel to Mom and Sugeidi. I sigh. Perhaps they are enough. There's Gabe too. And now I have Tia Célia. I say a prayer for Dad. Mom gives a little wave, leans to the side with a sly smile, and there, in the row behind her, are Angel and William.

William wears that short-sleeved Oxford shirt and tie. Angel waves, and her face transforms in that way I love as she smiles. We've texted, but I didn't expect this. I find Mr. Handler at the end of the row behind me. He gives a thumbs-up to Angel and William. William chuckles, his whole body shaking.

Dr. Bell is at the podium again. “Todd Adams,” he says. Todd, at the end of my row, walks to the podium, and there's polite applause as Dr. Bell hands him his diploma. I remember sitting next to Todd in kindergarten, how he'd hold his pencil all wrong and Ms. Miller would correct him. His face would look pulled tight with a string. I've hardly talked to Todd since, yet I hold this intimate scrap of his history.

“Brian Alonzo,” Dr. Bell says. Brian plays soccer with Gabe, but that's all I know about him. A rowdy contingent, spilling off one of the closest blankets, hoots and whistles. A stout, gray-haired woman, his grandma probably, pumps her fist.

“Norma Alvarez,” Dr. Bell says, and her people applaud timidly. The little girl in the white dress stands and yells, “Norma!” Norma looks embarrassed as she approaches the podium, wiping her cheeks.

Her empty chair beside me is a chasm. Those eight hundred eyes are eight hundred pounds pressing me down. My chest is tight. I glance back at Gabe, and he nods. My eyes skid over Manny in the same row, watching us.

“Oona Antunes,” Dr. Bell says like a verdict. There's silence, and my legs will not lift me. Guilt's weight and all those eyes paralyze them. Though Crystal Creek shouts, this audience's silence roars in my ears.

Gabe appears, helping me stand. I take two wobbling steps. Applause takes over the amphitheater. Though I work against it, there's that bob in my step. Dr. Bell hands me my diploma, and the cheering grows louder, almost wild.

I look out and see all the people in the auditorium rising to their feet. I look from Gabe to Dr. Bell, who nods. I realize there's clapping behind me and see my fellow graduates standing. Even Manny. Even Brandy, though her claps are slow. The immigrant girls bawl. Mom bawls and Sugeidi glows. Angel and William wear amazed expressions. I see the doctor and nurse who I thanked. I see the two paramedics. I see the owl-eyed bus driver. All those cheers rise beyond a spiraling bird, and I hope Dad and Ash can hear. My eyes trace the valley's ridges, ending in its jagged line of peaks: my pulse. I hear the creek's rush join this cheering sea of people who know my history, and care.

“Home,” I say, and though I cannot hear myself, my heart listens.