She laughed. “Much better.” The dizziness she’d felt as he kissed her lingered.
They were quiet for a moment.
“Do you think he’s, like, around you somewhere?”
“Indy? Well...he’s not coming when I call his name, so...”
She smacked his arm. “You know what I mean. Do you think there’s just nothing left of the barking and running around and happiness to see you?”
She searched his face. A strange sense of urgency was grinding inside her. Lately she was too aware of the tenuousness of everything. She couldn’t stand the idea that nothing lasted.
She thought of her friends, of that night, lost in that dark neighborhood. The obliteration of light. She pushed it away.
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I hope not. I hope I’ll see him again someday. In heaven or wherever. He was a great brother.”
She sighed. A stillness settled over them as they gazed into the black expanse above, the crowd of tiny stars, the mottled moon suspended in the sky as if someone had batted it there. A particular kind of ache settled in her chest, something about the beauty and sadness of existence being so inextricably bound. “I’m not a God person,” she said. “I think we die and that’s it. There’s nothing.”
“That’s grim.”
She turned to him. “Is it?” It was. But. “Maybe it just makes this life more important.”
Their eyes caught. She felt something like love. Though she knew it couldn’t be. She turned back to the sky.
“I have this theory,” she said, “that your degree of faith is based on your prebirth relationship with your mother.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“That’s our first experience of another being, right? In the womb. A presence that can be felt but not seen—one that is hopefully, but not necessarily, protective and benevolent. And that’s when our brain starts developing, so...”
“Right...”
“Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got.”
“Wait. That’s your whole theory?” He laughed.
She laughed too. “Just that maybe you either learn to trust in something bigger than you early on...or you don’t.”
He frowned, considering.
“Look, I’m not saying it holds up, but it certainly would explain my lack of faith.”
“I mean, but even by your example, doesn’t the womb just prove the limits of our perspective? I’m sure when we were in it—which is really weird by the way—I’m sure we thought that that was all there was. We had no idea there was this whole universe out here.” He gestured toward the pool, the house behind them, the trees shivering lightly in the breeze.
“My friend Hannah thinks that when you die, your soul merges with those of everyone you’ve ever loved. Like you know how sometimes when you hug someone you’re in love with you feel like you can’t get close enough, you want to crawl up inside them? She thinks death is like one giant soul hug. Like our bodies are the prison and death is the freedom.” She paused, thinking about Henry. “Anyway... I’m not actually sure she still believes that.” She needed to stop thinking about sad things.
“I hope it’s something good,” he said. “I’m sort of afraid of death. Or at least of dying in a gruesome way. You?”
“Not at all. Don’t intend to ever do it.”
“Good plan,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her, and then his weight was on top of her and his weight was the certainty, the salve against all the instability in her life and the strange feeling she’d been having of being too light and loosely tied, made of dandelion feathers. He squeezed her and she wanted to say “Don’t let go,” wanted to glue herself to him so she wouldn’t float away on a breeze. She suddenly understood what Hannah meant about souls hugging.
“I could lie out here forever,” he said.
“Wait, how long have we been here?” She thought of her friends back at the restaurant, imagined them as she hoped they’d be, halfway through dinner in their lobster bibs, laughing and talking as they cracked claws, dipping their mini forks in butter, all of their differences set aside.
He looked at his watch. “About forty-five minutes.”
“We should probably get back.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
Neither of them moved.
“Okay. Off we go.”
“Back on the road.”
“It was fun while it lasted.”
“Yep, we should do this again sometime.”
Finally, Maya sat up, looked around at the manicured lawn, the white lights strung like musical notes across the patio, the glowing ripples of the pool reflected on the house. “It’s pretty here. I can see why Indy liked it.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, though he was looking at her and not the surroundings.
“We should get married here.”
“Indy would’ve loved that. He was a romantic at heart.”
“You think the homeowners would mind?”
“Yes.”
“Then we won’t invite them,” she said.
He smiled, and she was surprised to find that she could picture it all. She had never actually thought about marriage. She’d only been teasing. And yet. When she’d said it out loud it made sense. There was just something about him...she didn’t know what.
She’d had too much to drink, that’s what, she decided.
Still, it was sort of fun to think about.
“A fall wedding, I think. Small. Twenty people or so. I don’t want anything fancy. But I want a pretty dress. I want to be the prettiest girl you ever saw.”
“You already are.”
“So you’ll marry me, then?”
“Of course,” he said, and he said it just like she had, like they were merely playing a game—but there was an earnestness beneath the conversation, as if they realized that rescue had come for them both. Blue would hate her for a thought like that, think it was weak and dependent, but Maya was starting to think that all people were in need of love’s rescue and women were sometimes just more honest about it.
Not that this guy meant anything though. She understood how chemicals worked in the body.
She jumped up, went to the pool, bent down and ran her fingers through the still water. He followed her.
“I guess you can’t exactly spread the ashes here. That would be kinda gross for the owners. But any last words for your pooch?”