The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  Before that day, the day Dad last told the story in church, this was the part where Mum would always add, ‘Yes, it was just then by the tree on Eighty-Third that I knew for sure it wasn’t a fling or a summer romance, I knew that whatever it took I had to be with Henry, no matter what it cost me. That something that special was worth fighting for. When I was with him, for the first time in my life I knew who I was. Not a daughter, not a sister, not a girl in a pretty dress, but who I was, and what I was capable of. Loving Henry made me stronger than I ever knew I could be.’

  On that day, Pea and I had sat holding hands, remembering the hundred other times we’d heard that story, saying Mum’s part in our heads. Now, looking back, I can see what it meant, that flint-hard glint in her eye when she said that being with Henry was worth fighting for; what she meant was that it was worth fighting to stay alive for. Worth killing for.

  Somewhere a church bell tolls the midnight hour. My heart quickens as I hurry on, fearing that I am lost. I’d been keeping an eye on the streets that I passed, counting them down, but after Michael, in the few seconds I was thinking about him, I lost track and perhaps I have come too far. Turning one corner and then another, the right street, but am I too late? … A long sigh of relief escapes as I see them, two figures in the shadows as they embrace beneath a tree. Riss and Henry. Mum and Dad.

  ‘Riss!’ I’m so relieved I call out her name when I don’t mean to.

  ‘Luna?’ Riss steps into the streetlight. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  Faltering, I shrug, staring at her in her sunflower-yellow halter-neck shirt pulled on over some faded and very short jean shorts. Riss is beautiful in a way that I never recognised in Marissa my mother. Beautiful in a way that Pea and I never have been, carrying that youthful belief in herself that is untouched by life and loss. My sister and I have never had that shine, not even for a little while. We were born touched with sadness and the certainty of loss, our DNA imprinted with what our mother had lived through, my DNA infested with it. To see her like this, utterly unaware of how vulnerable she is, is wonderful and heartbreaking in equal measure. God, how I miss her, this woman I never knew, I miss her so much that it takes all my strength not to blurt it all out, who I am, who she is to me, and to beg her to never change.

  Instead I say, ‘Couldn’t sleep, so thought I’d go for a walk.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Riss is cross with me. ‘Anything could happen to you.’

  ‘I’m fine, really, I know karate.’ I chop through the air in Miss Piggy-style to emphasise my point. ‘Who’s taking care of you?’

  It’s such an absurd thing to say it makes them both laugh.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m taking care of her.’ The voice is gentle, reserved, uncertain of me. Henry is in the shadows, as am I. Riss stands alone in a little halo of light. Should he see me? Does it matter if he sees me?

  ‘Hello,’ I say, a little too warmly.

  ‘You’re English.’ Polite, wary – there is something about me that makes him nervous. Perhaps he senses our back-to-front connection.

  ‘Yes, my name is Luna.’

  ‘Henry Sinclair.’ Still in shadow, he extends his hand, and mine moves to meet his. As our hands briefly connect and I smile at him from the safety of the dark, and he peers at me through his glasses, round, wire frames whose style has rarely changed in thirty years.

  ‘Where are you from, Luna?’ he asks and Riss laughs.

  ‘Is this what English people do, make small talk, even on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the middle of the night? You’ll be suggesting high tea next! Luna, why are you out here? It’s dangerous. You shouldn’t be alone at this time of night, karate or no karate.’

  ‘I know, I suppose I forgot,’ I say. ‘I went for a walk and now I wish I hadn’t. But I’m going back soon, now I mean. What are you two up to?’

  They exchange a look, a smile.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Riss says, in a way that actually means ‘everything, ever’.

  The longer I am near them, the more I find myself falling in love with their love, the more the thought comes, faintly at first, and then stronger and stronger, that this is what love looks like.

  ‘Won’t your father kill you if he catches you,’ I say, but I’m grinning to see them like this, their fingers intertwined, hips touching. It makes my heart sing.

  ‘Which is why I have to go back soon.’ Riss looks longingly at my father and I see him instinctively step towards her. They want to be alone; I want to never leave them. Awkward.

  ‘Let us walk you home,’ Henry says eventually, although he is gazing at Riss.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘It’s just down the block …’

  ‘The Obermans?’ Riss looks puzzled, and I have forgotten my back story.

  ‘I moved, another place. I can see it from here. You stay there.’

  I go to say goodbye before she can ask me any more questions.

  ‘It’s been really nice to meet you.’ I inch a little closer to Henry and he steps out of the shadows. I almost expect some level of recognition on his face, but of course there is none. Putting one hand on my father’s back, I lean in, kissing him on the cheek, at the same moment slipping the knife from his pocket and concealing it in my hand.

  ‘We’ll watch you go in,’ Riss calls after me.

  ‘There’s no need,’ I say. But I know they are watching me as I pocket the knife and walk on down the road. I stop outside a house that’s as good as any, acutely aware that she probably knows the people that live there. Offering them a final wave, I trot up the steps, hoping the stoop will hide my presence. When I look again they are gone.

  I run down the street to the tree and unsheaf the blade, which is dull and difficult. My heart racing, I carve my own name into the wood, just below their initials. It’s rough and awkward, angry looking almost, but I do it as deeply and as certainly as I can.

  And here, standing alone in the same small pool of light that Riss occupied just minutes before, I make my own promise, swear my own vow to them, to Riss.

  No matter what it costs, I will save you.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

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  Somewhere, thirty years from now, Pea is waiting for me in the building. It feels important that I get there before Riss does – to avoid meeting her – and try and get home. After all, I could hardly explain to her what I’m doing hiding in her home if she happened to run into me on the landing. Breaking into a run, I wish that running here, in this time I am not meant to be in, was like flying in dreams, effortless and magical. Instead, I am sweating and gasping for breath in the hot, thick night. Pausing for a second as I slam against the wall of the building, I catch my breath before letting myself in.

  My mouth is full of the fear of discovery as I edge ever so slowly up first one flight of stairs and then the next. Her bedroom door is shut, and I don’t remember shutting it. Hesitating outside, I feel as if I am glued to the floorboards by adrenalin. Did she beat me back, climbing in through the window via the fire escape? I can’t risk opening the door.

  Uncertain of what to do now, of how to try, I stand in the darkness of the landing and listen. A faint humming coming from Riss’s room, and a masculine cough from downstairs; it must be my grandfather. Then I catch the scent of white lilies, and I sense my sister is near me again; the veil is thinning. Following her trail back down the stairs, treading as light and carefully as I can, I walk into the kitchen where her scent seems to be the strongest, and close the door. Feeling the hard edge of the knife press against my hip, I take it out, looking around for a place to hide it. There’s an air vent in the wall, and it doesn’t take much effort to pull up one corner and slide the knife behind it.

  As I imagine Pea waiting for me, I try to will myself back to her.

  ‘It’s time to go back,’ I say as purposefully as I can, as loudly as I can, trying not to be afraid of waking anyone up
. ‘Go back, go back! GO BACK NOW!’

  There is a creak in the floorboards up ahead, and I hear footsteps.

  ‘NOW!’ I make myself shout, the words filling the corners of the room.

  All that is solid blows apart in one great explosion at incredible speed, before somehow rewinding and coming together again; the same but different, older. I come to in the present with a panicked start, leaning up against a door, my legs heavy as lead, lost inside my own body. It feels as if every drop of life has been wrung out of me.

  Opening the door, I’m disorientated. Nothing is where I thought it would be. I thought my sister would be on the other side of it.

  ‘Pea?’

  She appears out of the shadows in the living room, pointing a torch right at me, forcing me to twist my head away to avoid the glare.

  ‘FUCK.’ Pea presses her hand to her mouth. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  ‘What?’ I ask her. ‘What happened, what did you see?’

  ‘I opened the door to Mum’s room, just like you told me to and you weren’t there. You’d vanished.’

  ‘Really?’ Until that moment, I still half believed it might some sort of delusion, or a kind of illness – a seizure that brought me to a physical standstill while my mind travelled on. But Pea says I vanish; I actually disappear into another time. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Luna,’ Pia repeats my name as if she wants to make sure I am real. She points over my shoulder. ‘You just came out of the kitchen. And I have been standing here, freaking the hell out, the whole time. There is no way you walked past me. Pea stares at me. ‘Luna, you vanished in the bedroom and came out of the kitchen.’

  Pushing past her I race back up the stairs and into Riss’s room. ‘Quick, shine the light on the mattress.’ My fingers fumbling, I finally grasp the zipper and pull hard. It is stuck and rusty, and I pull hard again, this time ripping the mouldering material. Reaching inside I feel decaying sponge give way beneath my fingers and, yes, a small hard object, one that is so familiar to my fingers. I pull my phone out and stare at it in the torchlight; the plastic casing has collapsed on itself, there is a crack across the screen. I hand it to Pea and reaching again under the mattress find the book, yellow and thick with dust, the inside pages now glued together with mould. I can’t open the title page, but I don’t need to. I know what’s written on the inside.

  ‘Be brave.’

  Pia and I hold hands as we run back to the tree; the sound of our soft shoes impacting on the sidewalk seems unnaturally loud. Pia shines the torch onto the tree and we scan the bark, our fingers running over every groove.

  ‘Crazy bitches,’ a couple of teenagers say as they walk by, out way too late for boys their age. ‘Feeling up a tree, dude.’

  ‘You should both be in bed!’ Pia snaps at them.

  ‘You offering?’ They punch each other in the shoulder, pleased with their wit, as they turn the corner.

  ‘Fuck.’ Pea breathes the words out, long and hard. ‘Fuck.’

  The torch is shining on Mum and Dad’s initials and beneath them is the crude carving of my name, faded, mottled with moss, that I made about twenty minutes and thirty years ago.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, staring at it. ‘Shit.’

  ‘Understatement of the year, years, all of time, whatever.’ Pia is blinking fast, walking away from the tree and then back again. Away and then back.

  ‘We did it,’ I say, because with Pea by my side it feels like it’s both of us that are making this happen. Without warning the adrenalin that has kept me on my feet depletes, and I sit down hard on the curb before I fall down. ‘I went through when I wanted to and came back, too. And I changed the past again. That means we can do this, we can really do this.’

  ‘Save her?’ Pia sits down next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I wind my arms around her and suddenly we are ten and five again, sitting on a felled log in the moonlight, pretending that we are running away, although we both know we’ll sneak back in to bed before the clock strikes one.

  ‘I’ve already changed two things,’ I say. ‘I’ve changed the history of Mum’s medallion. I’ve changed the carving on the tree. I can save her. If I can change what happens, what she does, then I can stop her being attacked, raped, and I can stop her from killing him. If I stop her life from being ruined, if I do that, everything will be different, she’ll be different, she’ll be happy. She’ll be alive.’

  Pea’s huge, dark eyes widen in the darkness, her pupils dilated so that her irises are almost invisible.

  ‘Luna, I’m scared. I’m not as brave as I thought, now I’ve seen this … now it’s so real. I’m afraid of being lost to chance. I want to save Mum, but I want my life too. I’ve been shitty and a fuck-up and stupid for most of it, but it’s still mine, and I love it.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, taking her hand. ‘Look, I don’t know how to explain it, or how to reassure you, but somehow I just know that you’ll be a part of an altered future, I feel it. In just the same way that I can feel the past just a few millimetres away, I can feel the future too, all of them, all of the variables. And I just know you’re there in every version, Pea. I know what I said before, but the truth is, if I wasn’t sure of that, I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t sacrifice you. You’re their child, Mum and Dad’s. You’ll always be their child. You’re a constant, something, someone, who is meant to be.’

  Pea’s fingers tighten around mine, and for the first time today I feel the chill of the night air on my cooling skin.

  ‘But not you, Luna, that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You’re saying that you don’t belong in any other version except this one.’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s probably right,’ I say, steadily. ‘I think that’s what I am saying. And maybe that’s the whole reason that the universe has given me this chance to correct what’s wrong.’

  ‘What? What reason?’ Pea asks.

  ‘That I was never meant to be born at all.’

  11 JULY

  ‘Forever – is composed of Nows –’

  —Emily Dickinson

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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  Sleep came easily, and it was dreamless, as if my mind had no images left to conjure up mere dreams. As Pea wakes me, it feels like being dragged out of a very dark, very still, river, a thick tapestry of weeds, writhing above my head.

  It takes a moment for everything to come trickling back, to remember where I am, who I have lost, what I am doing, who I am not.

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you, last night after you … you know. You looked so pale, like if you stood in front of a strong light I’d be able to see right through you.’ Pea hands me a strong mug of coffee. ‘But Mr Gillespie called Mrs Finkle to ask us to come down to his office.’

  ‘Why?’ I take a scalding gulp of coffee and scramble out of bed. ‘We don’t have to give the keys back for three more days.’

  It surprises me, how calm I am. None of the bad stuff matters anymore, it’s as if I have already erased it all; I feel light and happy … peaceful. Like I don’t quite exist in this painful reality where the people I love are hurt, and the people I love die too soon. And it’s a good feeling. The business of now doesn’t concern me anymore. I need to get on with the business of then. I sink back into the pillows.

  ‘I know, but it’s Mum’s sister. It’s Stephanie.’ Pea gathers her hair back from her face, pinning it into a knot. ‘Apparently she flew in from Florida last night. She’s with Gillespie right now. She wants to see us.’

  Stephanie does not look up when we enter Gillespie’s office. She’s sitting in his ancient leather-backed chair, and he is standing by the window.

  An unfinished conversation hangs in the warm, still air, and as we sit down they make a conscious effort to realign their body language. We heard no raised voices, but I think they were arguing as we arrived.

  ‘Well.’ Stephanie sits back in the chair, and exami
nes us. ‘You look like her. Both of you, in different ways. And you …’ She stands up slowly as she examines me, and I realise I am wearing almost the same clothes as the last time I saw her, in the workshop, right down to my lazily laced Converse. ‘Luna. What it is it you do? You remind me of someone, like I’ve seen you before …’

  ‘I expect I remind you of Mum,’ I say. ‘And my father; you knew him after all.’

  I don’t say Delaney’s name out loud. I don’t have to; she knows who I am talking about. Somehow I know she does.

  Stephanie doesn’t flinch, her face remains impassive.

  ‘Perhaps we should all sit down,’ Mr Gillespie suggests with gentle authority, and takes a seat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says eventually, shifting uncomfortably in her chair as Mr Gillespie watches her. ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t at the funeral. You’ve got to understand … letting her go, saying goodbye, that night when she … when she left, was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. I felt abandoned. So I didn’t come to the funeral. How could I show up then, when I hadn’t showed up for so long before?’

  There is no movement in the room, just the sound of traffic outside the open window, and the faint tap of Lucy’s fingertips on a keyboard in the next room. I’d realised it would be hard to see Stephanie as she is now – plumper and yet harder around the edges, her hair sculpted and short, her skin florid and aged by so much sunshine – but not how hard. She doesn’t even seem loosely connected to the girl who danced to Donna Summer. That girl, though tough and aloof, was suffused with colour and vitality. This woman seems stiff, not with age, but with a lifetime of fighting against feelings she doesn’t want to have.