“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, in the same way I picture the evil that tumbled from the box poor Pandora opened and then let loose on humanity.
But if anyone had mentioned to me before I moved here that the name of the place meant Island of Bones in English — and why the Spanish explorers who’d found it had named it that — I probably would never have agreed to go along with Mom’s “we’re going to make a new start in Isla Huesos” plan.
Especially since it’s hard to make a new start in a place where you met the very person who keeps popping up to ruin your life over and over again.
Only I could hardly mention that to my mother, either. The fact that I’d ever even been to Isla Huesos once before was supposed to be this big secret (not a bad secret. Just a secret between us girls, Mom always said).
That’s because Dad can’t stand Mom’s family, which he feels (not without some justification) is filled with convicts and kooks, not exactly proper role models for his only child. Mom had made me promise never to tell him about the day trip we took to her father’s funeral when I was seven.
So I’d promised. What did I know? I’d never told…
…especially the part about what happened after the funeral, in the cemetery. The truth was, I never really thought I had to tell anyone, since Grandma knew all about it.
And grandmas never let anything bad happen. Not to their only granddaughters.
So I didn’t even know anyone at Mom’s party except Mom and Alex and Grandma, all of whom had sat in the same row with me at Grandpa’s funeral. That had been a decade earlier, back when Mom’s brother was still in jail.
Uncle Chris wasn’t adjusting very well to life on the “outside.” He didn’t seem to know quite what to do, for instance, whenever one of the caterers walked over to refill his champagne flute. Instead of just saying, “No, thank you,” Uncle Chris would cry, “Mountain Dew!” and jerk his glass out of the way, so the champagne would pour all over the pool patio instead.
“I don’t drink,” Uncle Chris would say sheepishly. “I’m sticking to Mountain Dew.”
“I’m so sorry, sir,” the caterer would reply, looking with dismay at the growing puddle of Veuve Clicquot at our feet.
I decided I liked Uncle Chris, even if Dad had warned me that he would embark on a dark reign of terror and revenge immediately upon his release from prison.
But all I’d ever seen him do since I’d gotten to Isla Huesos — where he now lived with Grandma, who’d been raising Alex in his absence because Alex’s mom had run off when he was just a baby, after Uncle Chris was sent away to prison — was sit on the couch and obsessively watch the Weather Channel, sipping Mountain Dew.
But Alex’s dad did kind of scare me in one way: He had the saddest eyes of anyone I had ever seen.
Except maybe one other person.
But I was trying hard not to think about him. Just like I tried never to think about when I died.
Some people, however, were making both those things extremely difficult.
“Not everyone who dies and comes back,” I said carefully to Uncle Chris, “has the exact same experience —”
It was right as I was saying this that Grandma came teetering down the steps of the back porch on her little high heels. Unlike Uncle Chris and Alex, she’d made an effort to dress up, and had on a filmy beige dress and one of her own hand-knitted silk scarves.
“There you are, Pierce,” she said, in a voice that made it sound like she was annoyed. “What are you doing out here? All these people are waiting inside to meet you. Come on, I want you to say hello to Father Michaels —”
“Oh, hey,” Alex said, brightening. “I wonder if he knows.”
“Knows what?” Grandma asked, looking bewildered.
“What the light was that Pierce saw when she died,” Alex said. “I think it was the Pearly Gates. But Pierce says scientists say it’s…what do they say it is again, Pierce?”
I swallowed. “A hallucination,” I said. “Scientists say they’ve gotten the same results in test subjects who weren’t dying, by using drugs and electrodes to their brains. Some of them saw a light, too.”
“That’s what you’re standing out here doing?” Grandma asked, looking shocked. “Committing blasphemy?”
After I died and came back, my grades took a downward plunge. That’s when my guidance counselor at the Westport Academy for Girls, Mrs. Keeler, recommended that my parents find something outside of academics in which to get me interested. Children who fail to do well in school can often still be successful in life, Mrs. Keeler assured my parents, if they discover something else in which to “engage.”