Abandon - Meg Cabot [8]
Nor had I forgotten how tightly Grandma had held my hand as she led me away from the cemetery afterwards, and how red those blossoms from the branches of the poinciana trees had looked against the sky above our heads…
…red as the tassels on the ends of my scarf floating up and around my face as I lay dying at the bottom of our pool.
Maybe that’s why when I saw them again after I rode away from the party — not the tassels, of course, but the poinciana blossoms — I jammed on my bicycle’s brakes.
I hadn’t realized I’d ridden as far as the cemetery. My feet had taken me there unconsciously.
I knew why, of course. It wasn’t the first time it had happened.
I’d ridden through the cemetery more than once since arriving on Isla Huesos — Mom had even included it on the little “orientation” tour she gave me on my arrival. Because all the coffins were in aboveground crypts and vaults, the graveyard had become one of the island’s top sightseeing destinations. It turns out if you bury bodies in a place regularly flooded by hurricanes, all the skeletons will pop up out of the ground. Then you’ll find your loved ones’ remains dangling from trees and fences, or even down at the beach, like something out of a horror movie.
“That’s why,” Mom had informed me, “Spanish explorers who discovered this island five hundred years ago christened it Isla Huesos — Island of Bones. When they got here, it was covered with human bones, probably from a storm that had washed up an Indian burial ground.”
But though I’d ridden through the cemetery several times since my arrival on Isla Huesos, I’d never been able to find the tree I’d seen that day when I was seven. Not until the night of the party.
Which was what made me do it.
“Don’t make any stops,” Mom had said. “Stay on your bike,” she’d said. “A storm is coming.”
And now that I was standing in front of the poinciana tree, I could see that the storm coming our way wasn’t just the one Mom had referred to.
It was something much, much worse.
Most of the flowers from the tree had fallen to the ground. Dried and withered, they lay around my feet like a red carpet, whispering to one another as the wind picked them up and scattered them farther down the paved path.
The crypt beneath the tree didn’t look much different from the way it had the day of my grandfather’s funeral. The plaster was still falling off in places, revealing bricks that were as red as the blossoms beneath my feet.
The main difference was that now I could see a name carved in block lettering above the entrance to the vault, a scrolled wrought-iron gate.
No date. Just a name. HAYDEN.
I hadn’t noticed the name when I was seven. I’d had too many other things on my mind. The same way I’d ridden through this cemetery so many times during the past week and never recognized the tree until tonight.
“He wasn’t real, Pierce.”
It hadn’t just been Grandma the other day in her kitchen who’d said it, either, but all those psychiatrists my poor parents dragged me to after my accident, unable to believe the reports they kept receiving from my teachers that their precious daughter wasn’t performing at an above-average or even average level.
It’s very common for patients who’ve lost electrical activity in their heart or brain for any interval of time to report having seen some sort of hallucination during the period they were flatline.
But it was vital for my mental health, all those doctors told me, to remember that it had been only a dream.
Yes, it had been very realistic. But couldn’t I see how there’d been some things I’d read about in books at school, or seen on TV, or maybe seen years earlier — though I never told any of them about what had happened at Grandpa’s funeral — in the vision I had during my near-death experience?
This was important to keep in mind, too, as was the fact that while it was happening, I’d been able to control my own actions. This was what was known as lucid dreaming. Had what happened