Pierce has a tendency to disengage. Sometimes she just drifts off. And when she does choose to pay attention, she tends to hyperfocus, but not generally on the point of the lesson. Wechsler and TOVA testing suggested.
But that particular report had been written during the semester directly following the accident — more than a year before “the incident” — when I’d had a few more important things to worry about than homework. Those jerks even kicked me out of the school play — Snow White — in which I’d been cast as the lead.
How had my drama teacher put it? Oh, yeah: I seemed to be identifying a little too much with poor, undead Snow White.
I don’t see how I could have helped it at the time, really. Because in addition to having died, I’d also been born as rich as a princess, thanks to Dad — he’s CEO of one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries (everyone’s heard of his company. It’s been in the news a lot, especially lately) — and I also happened to have been born looking like one, thanks to Mom. I inherited her delicate bone structure, thick dark hair, and wide dark eyes.…
I also, unfortunately, inherited Mom’s princess-tender heart. It’s what ended up killing me.
“So was it at the end of a tunnel?” Alex wanted to know. “The light? That’s what you always hear people say.”
“Your cousin didn’t go into the light,” his father said, looking worried beneath his baseball cap. “If she had, she wouldn’t be here. Quit pestering her.”
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling at Uncle Chris. “I don’t mind answering his questions.” I did, actually. But hanging around in the backyard with Uncle Chris and Alex was better than being inside with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Turning to Alex, I said, “Some people do say they saw a light at the end of a tunnel. None of them knows exactly what it was, but they all have theories.”
“Like what?” Alex asked.
Thunder rumbled off in the distance. It wasn’t loud. The people inside the house probably couldn’t hear it, what with all the laughter and the splashing of the waterfall over in the pool and the music Mom had playing on the indoor/outdoor stereo speakers, not so cleverly designed to look like rocks.
But I heard it. It had followed a burst of lightning…not heat lightning, either, even though it was as hot at eight o’clock at night in early September in South Florida as it ever got back in Connecticut in July at high noon. There was a storm out to sea, and it was heading in our direction.
“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.