The Summer of Impossible Things Page 6

  ‘Luna?’ He follows me a few steps as I hurry away. ‘Goodnight!’

  I see the world exploding into the air. A million tiny atoms collide and ricochet away; one picture fades in, another fades out, and just as I sink to the ground, rolling onto my side, clutching at the cracks in the sidewalk trying to keep myself anchored to the planet, I see him turn around and walk away. He doesn’t look back.

  My mind tilts, my stomach lurches, I close my eyes and feel the stars swing like a million bright pendulums on the other side of my lids. Finally, finally I am still. Opening my eyes, the first thing I see is the waning moon.

  It’s still the same moon, I find myself thinking.

  CHAPTER NINE

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  ‘Hey, lady, you OK?’ a young woman, still holding her boyfriend’s hand, bends to peer at me as she asks.

  ‘I’m fine, I just fell, but I’m OK.’ I drag myself to my feet. The street around me swirls and spirals, and I want them to leave so I can find something solid to hold on to.

  ‘You sure?’ She looks uncertainly at her boyfriend, who pulls her away, eager to be gone. I nod, and feel fluid rush around my head. As I watch them walk away, I realise that I am not in the same place where this all began, by the side entrance of the Lupo building. Somehow I have moved, and moved quite far. Slowly, very slowly, feeling as if lead weights are rolling to and fro in my head, I sit up wincing with every iron clank. The thought that I might have been wandering around caught up in some sort of hallucination terrifies me, but my wallet is still in my back pocket, at least, and so is my photo of Mum.

  Taking great care, I trace my way back along 3rd Avenue to 93rd Street. It’s only a couple of blocks but I walk very slowly, gaining a little confidence and energy with every step I take that is met with a hard surface, that doesn’t fall away into nothing. As I finally climb the steps up to Mrs Finkle’s place, my face is beaded with sweat and my hands are trembling. The front door key is just where Pea left it, behind the statue of Mary.

  Well, I’m here. I am not dead. Whatever happened, it was … it was substantial. I need to call Brian, see a doctor as soon as I can. I can’t hide from this anymore.

  Pausing for a moment, I compose myself, taking a seat on the top step. This isn’t something that I want to share with Pea, or anyone, quite yet. Whatever it is, it is mine alone. And as much as everything that happened tonight was impossible and terrifying, it was fascinating and beautiful too. I’d been afraid that by not falling to pieces when Mum died it somehow meant that I hadn’t loved her enough. And then when I found out about my parentage, I’d been caught up in my own guilt, the awful certainty that I’d missed something, some hidden detail that could have saved her. But she was there, right at the centre of this catastrophe my brain was going through, like a beacon. A light I could home in on. There is something very wrong with me, something I can’t ignore for very much longer. Whether it’s psychological or medical, I don’t know; all I know is that, whatever it is, it’s bound to change my life. But for this moment, I am grateful for whatever is happening in my head. Grateful to experience just a few moments where I didn’t have to miss my mother, to fear for her and mourn her.

  Mrs Finkle opens the door behind me, startling me. ‘You’ve been out very late all by yourself.’

  ‘You’re up very late,’ I reply. Mrs Finkle winces as she takes a seat on the step next to me.

  ‘I don’t sleep so good anymore,’ she says. ‘Night comes and I watch it pass by following the shadows on the wall. It’s very dull, getting old. Comes a time when you find a young woman weeping on your doorstep and you punch the air a little. Something to do, you know?’

  She smiles as I smile, and leans into me.

  ‘Your sister made her excuses after barely twenty minutes. I figured you’d be home a good while before now. You OK?’

  I nod. No words will come.

  ‘Nothing good ever came from bottling stuff up, you know,’ Mrs Finkle tells me. ‘It festers, spreads like an infection. Better out than in. You can tell me anything, I’ll be dead soon anyhow.’

  ‘You won’t!’ I say. ‘I’m fine, really. I think being here, everything is catching up with me, that’s all. No work to keep my mind focused away from everything that has happened. That’s how I cope. I work, or deal with other people’s problems. Pea’s usually. And then suddenly we’re here, and it’s all about my mum. Everywhere I look, I miss her.’

  ‘Where did you go anyway? You look like you been gone a real long time.’

  It seems like a strange thing to say, but I suppose she is talking about my rumpled and dirt-smudged T-shirt and tangled hair. The sheen of feverish sweat that I can feel pricking my skin can’t look so good either.

  ‘Just walking around the neighbourhood,’ I say.

  ‘Would you like to have a drink with me? I know a lot of stories about your mom.’

  ‘I would,’ I say. ‘I really would, but right now I’m dead on my feet, do you mind?’

  ‘I don’t mind. I wish I’d known, when I was younger, how falling asleep easy wasn’t something you got to hold on to forever. You rest, sweetheart; seems like you lived a whole lifetime tonight.’

  The apartment is cool, dark and quiet. I walk to Pea’s bedroom and push the door open a little. She’s sleeping on top of the covers, on her back, her arms flung out as if she is about to break into song. There is a glass of water by her bed. Just water.

  Daybreak can’t be too far away now; it would be nice to sleep before I wake up again, perhaps a sleep full of dreams and people that I love. In the morning I’ll phone Brian; he’ll help me, I know he will. He’ll tell me what to do. And I’ll talk to Pea, make sure she’s got the support she needs before I begin the long process of finding out what is wrong with me, and watching my life change forever.

  Now, though – oh, I am so tired – I simply want to sleep.

  Tiredness sweeps over me in shuddering waves, and I’m grateful that Pea has already pulled out the sofa bed for me and made it up. Mustering the last of my energy, I wriggle out of my jeans, leaving them in a pool on the floor, finding a vest to sleep in. I search for my toothbrush in my luggage, and with my eyes half closed stumble into the bathroom, turning on the tap and waiting for the water to run cold. As I brush my teeth, I look in the mirror, studying my reflection that is studying me right back, and something is different. Something is unfamiliar. Prickles of disquiet punctuate my spine as I lean in closer, searching my blue eyes for some sign of what’s going on behind them, and then as I put my brush down, about to shake away the uncertainty, I see it: the glimmer of silver on my throat.

  In an instant I am wide awake, adrenalin racing through me.

  I touch a quivering finger to my neck, and feel the object, real and solid. I’m sure it is. Resting just below the hollow at the base of my throat – my mother’s medallion, the one I gave back to her in my … dream? My mother’s Saint Maria Goretti medallion is hanging around my neck.

  And yet, until tonight, I barely remembered it had existed.

  Is it really there?

  ‘Pea!’ I turn the light on in her room and she rolls over, covering her head with a pillow. ‘Pea, wake up! I need you to look at me, look at me!’

  ‘What Looney Tunes, what?’ Pea sits up pushing her hair out of her face blinking at me. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Is there something around my neck? Can you see something around my neck?’ I keep my hands at my side, very still.

  ‘Did you score crack or something when you went out?’ Pea asks.

  ‘So … so there’s nothing there?’ My fingers fly to my throat, stopping short of actually touching my skin, too afraid of what I might feel.

  ‘Only your necklace, you nutter,’ Pea says. ‘Did you think you’d lost it?’

  ‘My necklace?’ As I ask the question an answer seems to hover just out of reach, something that I almost know.

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, Luna, seriously! The only thing around your neck is the medallion Dad found when we were clearing out Mum’s things. He said it was her confirmation necklace. You’re the one who’s been wearing it ever since her funeral! Can I please go back to sleep now?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, slowly, turning off the light and closing the door behind her. It’s there, it’s really there, the necklace that Mum almost lost, but I gave it back to her. It’s there around my neck, where it wasn’t before.

  That’s not possible. And yet it’s true all the same.

  CHAPTER TEN

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  I find my jeans in a tangle on the floor, my hands fumbling as I try to shake them out, coins falling to the floor, a lipstick rolling under the sofa. Hesitantly I reach into the back pocket and touch the edges of Mum’s photo, of Riss’s photo.

  As I draw it out, I see the familiar and now meaningful words written in pencil on the back, ‘July 12th, 1977’. A few days from now, one day before she left Brooklyn with my father.

  The photo trembles in my hands as I turn it over, and I hold it under the light.

  Mum is wearing the medallion. And I know she has always been wearing it in this photo and yet, at the same time, I know, I am certain, that until just now, in this photo that I have loved and treasured, pored over and looked at almost every day of my life, there was no necklace. I know both these things at once. Something happened, something impossible, inexplicable, happened; something that makes it seem that, in picking up my mother’s dropped necklace, in something like a dream, I changed the past, I changed reality. I changed it enough to alter the present.

  That can’t be true.

  That can’t be possible.

  It’s just crazy talk.

  And yet, I can’t escape the thought that forms in my head so clearly that I can see it written large in my vision. If that was possible, if I had somehow stepped from one time into another and back again, then everything I thought I knew about space and time, everything the world thought it knew, would be wrong. But it hasn’t happened, it couldn’t have happened; this all has to be another symptom, that has something to do with my brain, it has to be. Because, imagine, just imagine for a moment if I had really visited the past and changed the future in this one small way. Imagine what that could mean. I’m not thinking of discovering who my real father is – it doesn’t matter – as far as I care it’s the man who raised me. The man I call Dad. No, I’m thinking of something better than answers.

  If I could change the past and alter the present, I could do anything. Change the course of history, just enough to stop her from doing something unthinkable; something that scarred her forever.

  I could alter my mother’s life. I could save her.

  I could bring her back from the dead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

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  The necklace is there, around my neck. I feel it. And it’s in the photo; I see it.

  And I remember the day Dad gave it to me, the day of Mum’s funeral.

  I’d found him sitting in his study, staring out at the garden, his face hollow, empty, his dark suit hanging off of him as if, when she died, she had taken a physical part of him with her.

  ‘The car’s here,’ I’d said. Pea was already in it, behind the tinted glass, sitting screwed up into a knot, and, although I didn’t know it then, washing down painkillers with vodka from a hipflask.

  ‘I knew she got sad sometimes,’ Dad said, his eyes focused on the window, a riot of flowers and blue sky reflected in his glasses. ‘Really sad, sometimes it was bad … you know that.’ Typical Dad, not mentioning directly the weeks she spent in bed, the long dark times when she didn’t smile or look at us, just locked herself away in her summer house, working on projects we never saw, waiting for her smile to come back again. ‘She had her problems. Moving here, away from everything she knew, and –’ he’d paused and looked me ‘– she had stuff to deal with. But I always thought I’d helped her, made her better. I thought, eventually she’d see what we have and she’d be happy. I didn’t see this coming.’

  ‘None of us did, Dad,’ I’d said, kneeling down at his feet. ‘This wasn’t your fault. None of us saw this, not after so long. She fought it for so long, I guess she was just tired of fighting.’

  Dad had reached into his pocket, and brought out the medallion. And I remember how my heart leapt when I saw it, this achingly familiar object that I had seen resting against the skin of my mother’s throat every day of my life, how I’d played with it as she’d rocked me to sleep as a baby, how I’d sweep back her long, midnight hair, and undo the clasp, on those times when she’d let me look at it, and tell me stories about her mother and her life as a little girl, running free on the street of Brooklyn. And as I close my eyes, I feel the same pain, the same pressure of tears, behind my eyes, and the rise of pride and love in my chest as Dad said: ‘I was going to put this in with her, but then I thought, she would want you to have it. She knew how much you loved it, and I’d like to see you wearing it.’

  After he’d fastened it around my neck, we’d hugged, and I cried until Dad’s friend, Jack, had coughed politely outside the door, and we’d made our way to the funeral car.

  That happened. I know it did, I remember it in every little detail.

  But I also remember, less clearly as the minutes tick by, a whole other life where there was never a necklace. Where there was no moment in Dad’s study, when it was Mum’s hair that I played with when I fell asleep in her arms, and a story, she once told of a half-forgotten Catholic medallion she had worn, but lost long ago, one night just before she ran away from home.

  Which one is real, which one is … some kind of hallucination, I don’t know. I don’t know. And it’s terrifying.

  ‘Luna?’ Brian’s voice is muddled and confused as if I’ve just woken him, although it’s gone eight in the morning there. Of course he’s not expecting me to call him; we broke up. We haven’t talked since, not because there is anger left, really. Just because it was done, and yet, if you asked me what he meant to me, I would still call him my friend. I’m about to find out if he feels the same way.

  ‘Brian, it’s Luna. I need to talk to you, I’m sorry. Is it OK?’

  ‘Of course, what’s wrong?’ I hear him moving, closing doors. His voice is warm; he sounds pleased to hear my voice, and that makes me a little braver.

  ‘I been having … experiences?’ I tell him.

  ‘Experiences?’ Brian asks.

  ‘Yes. And I think … I think there’s something very wrong with me …’

  After I finish talking, Brian is very quiet for what seems like a long time.

  ‘You’re dealing with a lot,’ he says. ‘The death of your mum, and now finding out that you may have a different father from the man you grew up with.’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘You care about it more than you realise,’ Brian tells me. ‘That man, whoever he was, his medical history, is part of you. This might be something you inherited from him.’

  ‘My mum was the one with mental health problems,’ I remind him.

  ‘Yes, but what you’re describing isn’t a mental health problem. It sounds physiological to me …’

  ‘Brian, what’s happening?’ I prompt him.

  ‘Luna, I wish you weren’t so far away.’ He’s upset, worried. I can tell he’s collecting himself before he speaks. And that frightens me.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘You need a CT scan at once,’ he says. ‘You need blood tests, to look for biomarkers … From what you’re telling me, it’s not psychosis, it could be stress related, exhaustion … It might be some kind of chemical stimulant possibly, but you’re not on drugs and this isn’t the first time you’ve experienced this kind of thing … I thought epilepsy before, but now … Why didn’t you let me
get you checked out before?’

  ‘You tried,’ I reassure him. ‘This isn’t on you. What aren’t you saying?’

  ‘That it’s more likely to be a physical anomaly.’

  ‘A tumour.’ I say the word out loud, because he won’t.

  ‘Visual hallucinations, like the one you describe, confusion, memory loss …’

  ‘It’s not memory loss, it’s memory gain,’ I interrupt him. ‘I have two sets of memories, two different versions of my life. What does that mean?’

  ‘Sometimes a trauma can repress certain memories, and other cataclysmic events, like your mother’s death, recent revelations, can throw up, muddled, even false memories that seem real and …’

  ‘This isn’t false-memory syndrome,’ I tell him.

  ‘Well … I can’t say, but it’s possible you have something going on in your temporal lobe, interfering with the optic nerve, that could cause hallucinations, although I’ve never heard of anything as vivid as you describe … Jesus, Luna, I’m three thousand miles away, I don’t know how to help you – speculation is pointless. You need to see a doctor, today. Get a CT scan, get bloods. I can find the name of a good specialist in New York and get you an appointment right away.’

  I wait for a feeling of terror to grip me, but none does.

  ‘Brian,’ I say slowly. ‘Remember how I used to tell you about my imaginary friends, the ones I had when I was little? The old woman in my bedroom, the kids in the playground that only I could see? For a lot of my childhood, right up until I was about twelve, and then I just decided not to see them anymore?’

  ‘Yes, I remember, but I don’t really see what that’s got to do with this?’

  ‘What if I am not ill, what if I just … stepped through time? What if I’ve been doing that all my life, what if we can all do it, but some of us are better at it than others. After all, people feel things, think they see things, all the time, and blame it on ghosts or the supernatural. What about déjà vu? What if it’s just that sometimes the constructs of what we think of as time break down, just enough for us to get a glimpse of all the other moments happening around us?’