Abandon - Meg Cabot [2]
“I don’t know,” I said. I thought of some more things I’d read. “Some of them think the light is the pathway to a different spiritual dimension, one accessible only to the dead.”
Alex grinned. “Cool,” he said. “The Pearly Gates.”
“Could be,” I said, shrugging. “But scientists say the light is actually a hallucination produced by the brain’s neurotransmitters firing all at once as they die.”
Uncle Chris’s eyes looked sad.
“I like Alex’s explanation better,” he said. “About the Pearly Gates.”
I hadn’t meant to make Uncle Chris feel bad.
“No one really knows for sure what happens to us when we die,” I said quickly.
“Except you,” he pointed out.
I felt more uncomfortable than ever in my too-tight white dress. Because what I saw when I died wasn’t a light.
It wasn’t anything close.
I didn’t like lying to Uncle Chris. I knew I shouldn’t have been talking about any of this. Especially since Mom had wanted everything to be so perfect tonight…not just tonight, but from now on. I really didn’t want to disappoint her. She’d gone all out, buying the million-dollar house and flying in the famous friend from New York to decorate it. She enlisted the aid of an environmentally conscious landscaper who planted the backyard with native growth, like ylang-ylang trees and night-blooming jasmine, so the air always smelled a little bit like a magazine ad for one of those celebrity perfumes.
She’d even bought me a “beach cruiser” bicycle complete with a basket and bell — because I still didn’t have my driver’s license — painted my bedroom a soothing lavender, and enrolled me in the same high school she’d gone to, twenty years earlier.
“You’re going to love it here, Pierce,” she kept saying. “You’ll see. We’re going to make a new start. Everything’s going to be great. I just know it.”
I had good reason to believe everything wasn’t going to be great.
But I kept it to myself. Mom was just so happy. For the party, she even hired professional caterers to cook and serve the shrimp cocktail, conch fritters, and chicken skewers. She’d released a flotilla of citronella candles in the pool to keep away the mosquitoes, then turned on the waterfall and thrown open every French door in the house.
“There’s such a nice breeze,” she kept saying, choosing to ignore the giant black storm clouds filling the night sky.…
Kind of like the way she was choosing to ignore the fact that she’d moved back to Isla Huesos to further her research on her beloved roseate spoonbills — which look like pink flamingos, except that their beaks are pancaked like spoons — right after the worst environmental disaster in American history had killed off most of them.
Oh, and that her bright, animal-loving daughter had died and come back not quite…normal. And because of that, her marriage to Dad had gone down the tubes. Their divorce proceedings started while I was still in the hospital, in fact, when Mom kicked Dad out of the house for “letting me” drown. Dad went to go live in the penthouse apartment he keeps near his company’s office building in Manhattan, never imagining that, a year and a half later, he’d still be calling it home.
“It’s much better to forgive and forget, Pierce,” Dad says every time we speak. “Then you can move on. Your mother needs to learn that.”
But really, the term “forgive and forget” doesn’t make sense to me. Forgiving does allow us to stop dwelling on an issue, which isn’t always healthy (just look at my parents).
But if we forget, we don’t learn from our mistakes.
And that can be deadly. Who knows this better than me?
So forgive? Sure, Dad.
But forget?
Even if I wanted to, I can’t.
Because there’s someone who won’t let me.
I don’t blame Mom for wanting to come back to the island where she was born and raised, even if it is ungodly hot, often battered by hurricanes, and may or may not have clouds of mystery chemicals billowing around it,