The Summer of Impossible Things

by Rowan Coleman

  Before I can move, he hurls himself at me in a rage, and for a moment I think it might be my creator who is also my destroyer, that both us are going over the railing, but I keep my grip as momentum propels him forwards, past me, above me, beyond me. There is a shout, cut short by a sickening thud. I wait for a scream of agony. But there is only silence.

  My legs tremble as I pull myself into a standing position and peer into the darkness below. In the flickering light of the sea of votive candles, I can see him, sprawled broken across two rows of pews, his back twisted out of shape, his eyes open and blank, watching me. Staring at me, but seeing nothing. He’s dead, I’m sure. But even so, I run down the stairs as fast as I can in the dark, and go to where he’s sprawled, flung across a row of pews. His skin is already cooling as I lift his wrist and feel for a pulse. This time I wanted to be sure it was done.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ I ask Riss as I return upstairs to find her still crouching in the corner, frozen by shock.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice is trembling, and I almost weep when I hear it. ‘Yes, my arms, my neck. He was choking me, I almost passed out …’

  ‘Did he … ?’

  ‘No, you came before he could. Oh God, Luna …’ She crawls through the darkness and into my arms, and as I hold her, this woman who was once my mother, my friend. I expect the world to set on fire around me, burning me away to embers, but it doesn’t.

  And I know why. I’m no longer hers, I’m no longer his. I am no longer anything.

  A sense of deep peace settles in me as I hold Riss in my arms and she weeps, and talks of her fear and her shock, her certainty and her fury. I hold her and I listen.

  ‘What are we going to say?’ she asks me eventually.

  ‘It’s dark,’ I say. ‘There’s a blackout and he fell. It was an accident. We don’t have to say anything.’

  ‘Did anyone see you come up here?’

  ‘One person, Father Delaney. But he has just left town.’

  ‘So, we don’t have to tell anyone about what he was going to do?’ she asks me.

  I think for a moment. I am sure there have been others, others before Riss, but now there will be no more after, and that is the only justice I can offer those that came before. The next time they hear his name, they will hear that he is dead, and that might offer them some little comfort.

  ‘No, we don’t tell them anything. You tell them that you spoke to him, that he was going to talk to your father about Henry. That he heard a noise below, went to look and tripped and fell. And then you tell your family that you love Henry, and you want to marry him.’

  ‘Will you be there with me?’ she asks me, holding hard onto my wrist, and I want her to squeeze harder, I want to feel the pain.

  ‘No.’ I smile. ‘I’ve got to go now. But you’re safe, everything is OK. Just remember, remember to marry Henry and be happy, and one day all of this will just seem like a weird dream to you. And maybe …’ I hesitate, would it be so wrong to ask for one thing to be remembered by? ‘Maybe if you have a daughter you’ll call her Luna.’

  Outside, as the lightning crackles on above, the heat builds all around me still, even in the night. I know it’s not the summer but the fire inside me igniting in my brain, and this time burning brighter than a supernova, pulsing through my arteries, stopping and starting my heart, or what used to be my heart. The world goes dark and I feel the slam of the sidewalk against my head, and maybe that is the last thing that I will ever feel. This precious fragile vessel that has carried me so far and for so long is done, and the last thing I will see will be the silver of a waning moon, and the stars shining over Brooklyn, and the last thing I will feel is this all-abiding stillness. This peace.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

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  I didn’t expect to be able to see, but I can – or, at least, it seems like I am seeing, white. Brilliant white all around me, and it feels like I have woken up. It’s unexpected.

  I didn’t expect to wake up to anything.

  Perhaps this is heaven, perhaps some kind of limbo, where lost or decommissioned souls go to wait, maybe forever.

  Except this white void smells of good coffee and bacon, and I feel hungry. Hunger is also unexpected.

  Stretching out my fingers, I find that I do have fingers, which seems curious to me. Raising my hand in front of my face I look at them, long and pink. Steady and flexible, just your run-of-the-mill fingers, except to me they seem like miracles.

  I sit up, my eyes adjusting to the blinding sunlight that is streaming in through the window. And I know where I am; I’m in the apartment at the top of Mrs Finkle’s house. That’s where I am.

  How am I?

  Did I fail? Did I somehow still fail, and I’m back here again?

  Opening the door, there is laughter in the sitting room, Dad’s and Pea’s but another laugh too: my mother’s laugh.

  I follow the trail of their chatter, and, as I see them, I wonder if this is my exhausted, beaten-up brain’s last gift to myself? This mirage of my family, my beautiful wonderful family.

  ‘You’re here,’ I whisper. ‘You’re all here.’

  ‘Where else would we be, numbskull,’ Pea says, laughing.

  ‘I knew we should have woken her earlier,’ Mum says. ‘She always gets so dumb when she has too much sleep.’

  ‘Mum, I love you.’ I run to her, falling onto my knees, wrapping my arms around her waist.

  Laughing, she kisses the top of my head. ‘Crazy child, I love you too.’

  ‘Typical looney.’ Pea sighs. ‘Always wants to be parents’ pet. Even on our first-ever family holiday to Brooklyn, she’s trying to get all the attention.’

  ‘Come and sit at the table,’ Dad says. ‘Eat your breakfast and then I am taking you on a day-long walking tour of movie locations.’

  ‘We knew this day would come.’ Pea laughs as I take a seat beside her. ‘There can be no escape!’

  ‘This is wonderful,’ I say, sitting at the table, beaming at them each in turn. ‘This is just lovely! I hope this lasts forever.’

  ‘Maybe she’s still drunk from dinner last night,’ Pea says. ‘Are you still drunk, Luna?’

  That’s when it begins, a sensation I have become familiar with. The slow process of memories dropping into me like coins into a slot machine. I remember that Mum and Dad wanted to come back to New York to celebrate the anniversary of their meeting. And for all of us to meet Aunt Stephanie and her family. I remember we went past the building which Mum and Aunt Stephanie sold for not enough money in the late 1980s and talked about how we could have been millionaires if we’d only kept it a bit longer. I remember a childhood full of sunshine and laughter, Christmases and kept promises. My sister, Pea, joyous and healthy and full of fun, a career as an illustrator that is just starting to grow. I remember I am happy; I remember I have the job of my dreams researching neutrinos in a lab in Oxford. I remember I am still me. And as each new memory blossoms, I sense an old pain or injury fading away, healed by the impossible.

  The universe returned me, my soul, to my family. The universe gave me more than I could ever have hoped for; it gave me back life, not just any life, but my life. My life, but better. And then I wonder … I can’t help but wonder, a sudden sense of urgency grips me and I stand up abruptly.

  ‘I have to go somewhere,’ I say.

  ‘In your pyjamas?’ Mum’s laugh is bright and beautiful.

  ‘Oh!’ I look down at myself. Running into the bedroom, I look around for anything to wear, jeans, a T-shirt. I jam my feet into a pair of Converse, and grabbing a hairbrush run it through my hair, which is when I stop and stare at my reflection.

  Those strange blue eyes that never belonged have gone.

  My eyes are brown now.

  My beautiful brown eyes are just like my mother’s. I look just like my mother, but with my father’s chin – Henry’s chin – and I know it is exactly how I am suppose
d to look.

  Dropping the brush, I head out of the door, down the stairs as fast as I can, running onto 3rd Avenue, because suddenly, I have to know. I just have to know.

  I stop outside the guitar shop and slowly turn to look.

  A glitter-covered Gretsch turns slowly in this glass cabinet in the window, and deep sadness chimes somewhere inside my heart.

  ‘You can’t have everything,’ I tell myself. ‘You can have your father’s chin, and your mother’s eyes and still hope for …’

  As I turn around I catch my breath.

  Across the street, a smartly painted shopfront catches my eye; the sign reads ‘Bellamo’s New Bakery and Bookstore’.

  Very, very slowly, I cross the road and simply stare. He’s alive. He’s here.

  Underneath the sign, a sliver of a crescent moon is painted, and the words, ‘Always here for you.’

  In all those years since I last saw him, it’s not possible that he never met anyone else, loved someone else, is it? This, the sign, the words. They’re just nostalgia, a memory. A memory of a strange girl he met one hot summer that probably has long since lost its meaning. That’s all it is. Standing outside the bakery, I make myself look in through the window, and see that the front of the store area is a series of tables, and that bookshelves cover every wall. In the window are the latest bestsellers, and in the corner there’s a little display of a book called The Girl Who Came Back from the Moon. It has Michael’s name on the cover.

  I smile, lit up with joy for him; he did it. He did what he wanted to do.

  Then I feel it, someone looking at me, and I look past the glare of the glass and into the shop, and I see him standing perfectly still, staring back at me.

  His face is weathered, his hair is silver around the temples, but he looks strong, fit and healthy. And he is still the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  Opening the door, I step inside, and very slowly walk towards him.

  He doesn’t move.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘Do you remember me?’

  ‘You came,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to … I mean it’s been such a long time, and I know that …’ I laugh. ‘You know what? I don’t really know what to say. As far as I’m concerned we only said goodbye yesterday.’

  ‘We did only say goodbye yesterday,’ he says. ‘In my heart we only said goodbye last night.’

  ‘I told you not to wait for me.’ I take one step closer.

  ‘And I told you that I would because I had to,’ he replies.

  ‘So what does this mean?’

  ‘It means the future has finally arrived,’ he says.

  EPILOGUE

  Lazy bees drone on outside the window, and somewhere in the garden beyond I can hear Michael and Dad laughing about old times. Finally, Dad has gotten over the fact that I’m going to marry a man not much younger than him. Pea’s voice is there too, high and loud, commanding attention, and I smile.

  It all feels exactly right. Just as it should be.

  Pushing the door of Mum’s study open, I find another box, full of film. Most of them are labelled with a name, an event and a date, birthdays, weddings, holidays; there are hundreds of them, but I know the one I’m looking for.

  It’s when I’m about to give up, to call myself a fool, that I see it, pushed right to the back of a shelf, books stacked on top of it.

  Film number four.

  Glancing out of the window, I see Pea delivering a tray of drinks, and Mum returning to the kitchen; something smells wonderful.

  Quickly I load the film onto the projector, and press play.

  Prisms of light and colour flare and dance, before 3rd Avenue, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, comes into focus, bright colours, intensified by the glare of the heat. A young man blows a kiss, a child pulls a face and an old woman waves the camera away with a smile. There is a cut, a moment of white, a thin, bright glare from the sun washing out the image. It adjusts and I catch my breath.

  It’s us, the two of us, caught together on this film, my mother and me in 1977, we’re there. She laughs as I kiss her cheek. I freeze frame and stare at the image. Two women laughing, embracing, bonded by unbreakable love. Two brown-eyed women.

  I start as the door opens, and Mum leans against the doorframe smiling.

  ‘That was quite a day,’ she says, coming into the room. ‘A day and night I will never forget.’

  She bends, her cheek meeting mine, and she kisses me once before she whispers, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being brave.’

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Time is a curious thing. We all know how it seems to trickle through our fingers when all we want is a few seconds more.

  A few seconds more to hold the ones we love, savour that longed-for sleep, watch the sun go down or the moon rise. And everyone has endured a lesson, a meeting or a sermon, and wondered if the clock on the wall had stopped, or even starting ticking backwards, and that perhaps they might be forced to sit there forever, time’s hostage.

  When I was younger, I thought I had forever to start my life for real, and it’s not until half of it slips you by, in a blink of an eye, that you realise it has all been real, it’s been all you will have had. All those years of waiting when you could have been doing.

  It’s well documented that in moments of extreme danger, your brain slows time down, or at least that’s the way you perceive it, allowing you the time and space to react to what is happening around you, a chance to avoid that high-speed collision or pull back from that cliff edge. A chance to make a life or death decision that will alter the course of events.

  I’m a writer. I try to capture emotions, moments, on the page, and hold on to them forever, captured in words. It’s that desire to keep hold of those rare golden seconds that makes me human. Our very machinery is built to make time stand still.

  Many scientists now believe that the moment of death, though physically instantaneous, unravels itself in the mind in slow motion, flooding the brain with neurochemicals that can trigger hallucinations that, to the person experiencing them, can seem to go on for hours, days – maybe even years. We can only guess at why this happens, a sort of inbuilt anaesthesia to protect us from the shock of dying, perhaps. Or, as some people believe, a glimpse into heaven. Or maybe that tunnel with the light at the end of it leads to another universe entirely.

  How time works within us is something that is only partially understood; how time works across the whole of the universe is something we can only comprehend by the set of rules we impose on it. We need years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds to make logic from entropy, the decay that began the moment both the universe and we were born; to make sense of our lives passing and to understand why we can’t have back what we have lost. Time passes, flowing away from us never to return, impossible to revisit. Past, present and future – that is how we make sense of the world. But sometimes, the one thing we forget, for all of our rules, theories and ideas that we impose on this strange unfathomable place we miraculously exist in, is that we didn’t make the universe.

  The universe made us.

  Rowan Coleman, 4 August 2016

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are so many people to thank who have come on this journey with me, and cheered me on all the way.

  Thank you to my wonderful publisher and editor Gillian Green, who is always unfailingly supportive and insightful, and who never tired of having complicated time travel conversations with me. And to the amazing Ebury team, I feel very lucky to be part of, including Emily Yau, Tessa Henderson, Stephenie Naulls and everyone there who works so hard on my behalf.

  I can’t thank my brilliant agent and dear friend Lizzy Kremer enough. She is simply one of the best humans I know and I’m grateful every day to have her on my side; not to mention the whole fantastic David Higham team, including Harriet Moore, Laura West, Alice Howe, Emma Jamison, Emily Randle, Camilla Dubini, Margaux Vialleron and Georgina Ruffhead.

  Last yea
r an old school friend, Michelle Knight, bid on a charity auction to have her name included in this book and the acknowledgements, and it’s great that I get to include someone I grew up with; thank you Michelle.

  Thank you to my father-in-law John Evans, for lending me his 70s Pentax and talking me through film photography. And to Lisa J Hill who answered my questions on neuroscience. Thank you to the people of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I spent several very lovely, very hot days working out the places where Riss and Michael walked and lived, and chatting to the community about their memories of the 70s.

  A writer is nothing without the support of faithful readers. Thank you so much to mine. I feel very lucky to have readers who are willing to come on these journeys with me. A special mention to Tracy Fenton and The Book Club members who have been amazing over the last couple of years.

  To all the brilliant bloggers who never tire of reading and championing books. You have my heartfelt thanks.

  My dear friends Julie Cohen, Tamsyn Murray, Miranda Dickinson, Kate Harrison, C.L. Taylor, Kirstie Seaman, Catherine Rogers, Margie Harris, Jenny Matthews, Katy Regan and everyone who is there for me in good times and bad. I’m so lucky to have you in my life.

  The writers’ community is a very warm and supportive place, so thank you to all the writers I interact with every day, and who make the lonely business of book writing much more fun.

  Finally, thank you to my family, who I love more than I can say: my hilarious and inspirational children, who give me something to be thankful for every day and, of course, my husband Adam, who I love very much and who probably doesn’t know how much he helps me stay on the right side of sane. Of course, I mustn’t forget my dogs, Blossom and Bluebell, who have accompanied me on many long walks and sat at my feet as I have worked this book out.

  As I write this, I realise if I had the opportunity to go back in time, I wouldn’t change a thing.