On the words don’t wear it, he turned and threw it — my beautiful necklace — as hard as he could. It went sailing through the night sky to land somewhere in the vast darkness of Isla Huesos Cemetery’s nineteen acres.
It shouldn’t have been like watching him throw my heart away.
But it was.
He governs everywhere, and there he reigns;
There is his city and his lofty throne;
O happy he whom thereto he elects!
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
The next time I saw him after that day in the cemetery with Grandma, I was dead.
Of course I said the first thing everyone says when they open their eyes after hitting their head, sucking in a gallon of pool water, and then going flatline.
“Where am I?”
Because I wasn’t at the bottom of our pool anymore…though I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on when I fell into it. They were damp now, and clung to me like a chilly second skin. I wasn’t on a hospital gurney or in an ambulance, either.
Instead, I was in a vast, subterranean cavern that seemed to go on forever, along the shore of a windy lake.
I wasn’t alone, though.
“Name?”
A towering man in black, having heard my Where am I?, turned towards me, raising the glowing tablet he held in his palm.
I was too dazed to do anything but reply, “Pierce Oliviera.”
“You’re over there,” he said, after inputting my name.
I looked in the direction he was pointing. We were standing, I realized, in a crowd of what looked like thousands of other people — mostly senior citizens, but some my own age, or even younger — all of whom seemed as miserable as I was.
They just weren’t necessarily soaked to the skin or dazed from a violent blow to the head.
But they were, like me, being ordered into two lines by huge men dressed all in black. The men looked the way the older girls from school who took the train into New York City to sneak into nightclubs described the bouncers who carded them — muscular, bald, black-leather-clad, and tattooed all over. In other words, super scary.
Unlike my best friend, Hannah, I’d never had the courage to try to sneak, underage, into a club in the city. I didn’t have a fake ID. I could barely remember where I put my real one.
So I didn’t dare disobey the orders of the man in front of me. The lines snaked towards the lake, into which two docks jutted. One line was extremely long. The other was a bit shorter. He was pointing towards the shorter one.
“Stay in your own line,” he growled. It was an order.
I hurried wordlessly to the end of the shorter line, too frightened to utter another sound.
It was only when I found myself standing behind a tiny, sweet-looking old lady that I tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Excuse me, ma’am?”
She turned around. She had the wrinkliest face I’d ever seen. She had to have been a hundred if she were a day. “Yes, dear? Oh, look at you. You’re all wet!”
“I’m all right,” I lied. I was shivering so badly, my teeth were chattering a little. “I was wondering. Do you know where we are?”
“Oh, yes, dear,” she said with a huge smile. “We’re getting on the boat.”
I didn’t even know how to respond to that. Was this a dream? But if it was, how was I able to wring the water from my scarf and actually feel the drops as they squeezed through my fingers?
“Where is the boat going?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” the old lady said, with another sweet smile. “No one will tell us anything. But I do think it must be somewhere wonderful. Because look how badly everyone over there seems to want to get into this line over here.”
She pointed at the longer line, a few dozen yards from ours.
It was true. The people in that line, apparently having heard the same thing the old lady had, were almost rioting in an attempt to escape their line and get into ours. Some of the bald, tattooed men in the black leather coats were having to hold them back, like bodyguards at a rock concert trying to contain unruly fans.
“Hey,” the guy in line behind me said. He was older than me, but younger than the old lady. Maybe in his twenties. “Can you get any service?” He was holding up his cell phone. “I can’t get any service.”
I patted my coat pockets. They were empty. Of course I didn’t have my phone. This was usually how my nightmares went.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t —”
That’s when I saw him. The tall man dressed all in black — black boots, black leather gloves, black leather coat — cantering towards the riot on a huge black horse.
I recognized him at once, even though it had been so many years. A rush of relief surged through me. Finally, a familiar face.
Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate — not even when I saw that everyone else had scattered, giving him a wide berth — to duck out of the line and head towards him.
“Oh, dear, I wouldn’t if I were you,” the old lady called after me.
“It’s all right,” I said over my shoulder. “I know him!”
“Crazy,” I heard the guy behind me mutter (I had no idea at the time how often I’d be hearing this later). “She must be trying to get herself killed.”
They hadn’t put it together. Neither had I.
Not then.
Not everyone is comfortable around horses, I told myself as I ran towards him across the sand. That’s why they, unlike me, were so afraid.