But Then I Came Back

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Before (November)

You Blame the Internet for the Whole Thing.

Lucille and I are down to skivvies.

And I do.

The Sinking Girl is in the room next to mine.

I give blood.

A week after that, on December 19, it’s our birthday.

I knew he would be here, and that’s super weird.

I’m three days post-birthday, and I’m out of here.

During (January)

I should mark my bedroom wall like they do in prison movies.

Reggie waits in my driveway.

So this is being young and alive.

Sometimes breathing is hard.

I lost six more days of my life.

This therapist looks like she could use some therapy right about now.

What I connect to is a chair.

Then there is Jasmine.

Joe’s house is not what I expected.

Gigi doesn’t do comas.

I should be flipping out right now.

You stole my car!

I hold the box from Madame in my lap as though it is a biting, stinging thing.

That Sunday night, I had a dream about Jasmine.

After that dream, school is, like, what am I doing here?

She’s throwing pots, not painting.

Chop wood, carry water.

There are secrets in there.

Joe guides me across the street to Gigi’s.

I’m charging Jasmine’s room when Spock blocks my path.

We’re in the bowling alley.

When I get home, I decide to clean out the garage with my dad.

Dr. Marlene Gat is extremely smug.

I’m going to try for heaven, I guess, even though it feels like hell.

A Few Days Later I Have Another Dream.

I spend days analyzing the dream.

Jasmine finds me in midair.

I should tell Joe about Jasmine.

Digby has his headphones on.

Parker’s house is mayhem.

Insomnia sucks.

It’s time to deal with the shrine.

My mother is in bed.

It’s a hell of a day for a funeral for a leather jacket.

I know it’s rude to abandon your own funeral.

Jasmine’s room.

When I Die, It Won’t Be the Earth I’ll Miss, Its Flora and Fauna, Its Tail Feathers and Pomp, Its Seasons.

After

Acknowledgments

Sample Chapter from THIS RAGING LIGHT

Buy the Book

Singular Reads

About the Author

Connect with HMH on Social Media

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 by Estelle Laure

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

Cover photograph © Andrei Frolov/Getty Images

Cover design by Cara Llewellyn

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Names: Laure, Estelle, author.

Title: But then I came back / Estelle Laure.

Description: Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017].

Summary: After a month in a coma, eighteen-year-old Eden finds it hard to resume her life and relationships but forms an unlikely connection with Joe, who visits his best friend, Jaz, another coma patient, every day.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029372 | ISBN 9780544531260 (hardback)

Subjects: | CYAC: Coma—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | Supernatural—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L38 But 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029372

eISBN 978-0-544-86822-9

v1.0317

For Chris—With you, I am awake.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.

​—​W. H. Auden

You Blame the Internet for the Whole Thing.

Your mom made tequila-lime pie for dessert. You didn’t have any because dessert always tastes like too much, but you did pilfer the bottle of Patrón Silver she used and sneak it to the river. You needed it because you had to walk down the hill in the middle of the night and your leather jacket wasn’t warm enough for early November, but you were stubborn and stupid and wouldn’t wear a puffer coat because gross. You didn’t wear snow gear, either. Not even your combat boots, idiot. You wore flats. Flats in this weather, Eden. But you also took the tequila because, aside from an awkward exchange at Fred’s Restaurant where Lucille works, you hadn’t talked to her in six weeks and you figured, why not bring a little help for the both of you? Still, you don’t blame the tequila for what’s happening now.

You blame the Internet. It informed you, on a site it tricked you into, that there was going to be an epic once-in-five-years supermoon and that the universe was demanding you change your ways.

Move or be moved, it said. It was like a storm watch for the soul. You could practically hear the voice, see the guy standing in front of the monitor in some bad suit, waving his arms about in warning.

Fatepocalypse is coming in from the southwesterly direction at roughly eighty miles per hour, you imagine him saying in his uptight voice. Citizens should be on the lookout. It’s headed straight for all of us, but I’m especially talking to Eden Jones. Oh boy, oh buddy, this one is coming for you, girl. Safety Department recommends you cease carrying on like a human and stay indoors. Preferably forever.

If you were naive enough to believe in a universe that communicates with humans (which you are not), one that you might, in fact, be able to have a conversation with (which you cannot), you would demand to know why it speaks in staticky gibberish made up of planets and symbols and expects people to understand it.

At first you blew off the Internet’s warning because astrology is ridiculous nonsense, but then the whole week was such a suckfest, you began to wonder. It was so bad that you got paranoid about that moon, and ever more pissed off at the Internet, because brains are so powerful, just the fact that you read the warning could have made it true. But when Lucille texted you telling you she needed you, you thought maybe if you went, things would go back to their regularly scheduled pleasant level of suck instead of this extreme. Secretly, even secretly from yourself, you thought you might appease the nonexistent, confusing entity that was having its fun toying with you, by showing up for Lucille after, admittedly, being kind of a bitch to her when she needed you most.

You never meant to be horrible to her. You have long claimed that the only thing you really hate is mean girls, and you wouldn’t be one on purpose. But ever since Lucille decided your newly philandering, almost engaged twin brother is her soul mate, being around her has gotten really hard to do without violent impulses. Every time Digby moped all over you about her and loving her and Elaine, and his deep, angsty struggles between right and wrong, and what should he do, you wanted to shake Lucille by the shoulder until her head jiggled free of her neck socket.

Because first of all, if a girl has any ambition, she shouldn’t be a pawn in someone else’s drama, much less be the cause of it. Second, cheating is sordid and cheap. And third, it is a conflict of interest that isn’t actually all that interesting but is all anybody can talk about. At first the entire seamy debacle (because it is a debacle) was something to watch, but after a while, it seemed to you that it was nothing but pathetic.

So the bad moon rising is how you found yourself on your rock tonight, the flat one at the river’s edge that you used to pretend into a throne when you were little. You still do, because you fancy yourself a queen and the river your queendom. This bend of the river, flanked by rocks and ancient trees and an old train car, is your private place. The willows are all stripped down this time of year, except for the sheen of icicle glass. You like willows best of all the trees, because they know how to bow to a lady, but also because if you cut them deep, they cry.

Lucille was crying, sitting under them looking like a giant snowball in her winter jacket and hat, and the ice in you was melting as she shifted around, chewing on her lip, her nails, her nail beds, crossing her legs then uncrossing them, moving, always moving, apologizing for her flaws with every twitch.

Heart-in-her-hand girl.

You were glad to have come so you could remind yourself all about your mad, passionate love for her, which had hurt so much to try to forget, but you were distracted, too. Your whirlpool mind wouldn’t stop circling the drain, whirring on and on about your stupid, average, small-town New Jersey mediocrity, that your future was now nothing but an endless, murky path. Your third cigarette in a row wasn’t doing any good either. It spilled through your lungs. They ached, and your head, your stomach too, and you knew you should—​but you couldn’t—​stop chain smoking.

I’m really sorry about the ballet thing. Lucille’s voice glued you to the rock just as you were about to stand, to tell her you were going home. You should keep on, she said.

I will. You tried not to think about the lady in New York with the deer bones bending toward you, whispering nightmares about your future low into your ear. Just now I know it’s not going to do me any good. Denial is for losers. You said this out loud, because Lucille needed to hear it as much as you did. Face your crap and move on. Otherwise you’ll get old and depressed and turn into a scary pod person whose most pressing issue in life is when they get to trade in the can of Dr Pepper for the can of Bud. It’s true. You took one last drag of your smoke. Look around.

Lucille tittered, but that easy-chair reality wasn’t funny. It was entirely possible. Probable, even. People settle down in front of the idiot box and never get up again because it requires too much effort. Sometimes, though you would never speak it, you think it would be a hell of a lot easier to want a simple life. You long for a recliner, and for a dull, compliant mind, instead of the one you got, which is a lot more flailing octopus than floating manatee.

You crushed your smoke and stood high on your toes. You stretched, reached your arms toward the sky, and asked the moon if it was satisfied now, if you had done enough to turn things around and avoid the storm by being here, by paying respects, by cleaning up your friendship with Lucille.

That was it . . . the moment it happened.

Your feet lost their grip like an answer.

You teetered on ice, tried to steady yourself. It was too fast.

You wanted to call out to Lucille for help, but before you could, a thud that was your own head. A bright jangle. Pain. You tried to fight. You couldn’t. You were already in the water.

You waited to go unconscious, but you didn’t. At least, you think you didn’t. Rocks battered your legs, and water slipped into your lungs, heavier than the smoke but just as achy.

This was a crisis, and you knew it in your flailing octopus brain, but it didn’t touch you. Because you weren’t you anymore. You were nowhere near yourself. Not in any way. You weren’t even human. No, girl. You were the wind whipping at the pages of a book; you were a grass ocean, swaying. You were the willow, weeping, weeping, and you hum-hummed every lullaby all at once, and it was soft and beautiful and infinite.

And the cradle will fall.

And down will come—​

Hey, pay attention!

I’m telling you this so you’ll remember.

Because you’re weightless now, and you have to remember this so you don’t forget who you are.

Eden Jones. Eden Austen Jones. Age seventeen. Daughter to John and Jane Jones. Twin sister to Digby Riley Jones. Best friend to Lucille Bennett. You live in Cherryville, New Jersey, in the brand-new subdivision on the top of the hill, in your parents’ dream house. You handpicked the carpet in your room, the paint on your wall. You are a ballerina. You collect quotes from books by people wiser than you, mostly dead. You write down those quotes and repeat them aloud to yourself until they are embossed on your soul. You dream of fame. What’s in a name a rose by any other name would smell as sweet it means nothing nothing and everything and youdon’tcareyoudon’tminditatallnotonebit.

Which is why you let go.

It’s so damn sweet to be nothing but a riversong.

Patient name: Eden Jones

Glasgow Coma Scale Test

Eye Opening Response: None (1)

Best Verbal Response: None (1)

Best Motor Response: None (1)

Total score: 3

Prognosis: Poor

Lucille and I are down to skivvies.

It’s June, and the water is chilly. I keep myself mostly under to the neck even though it’s just me and Lucille, because Mom still buys me underpants from the girl section, so I’m in a white bralette and underwear with butterflies on it.

I’m thirteen, Mother, I tell her all the time.

Woman. Doesn’t. Listen.

Lucille has a real bra that clasps in the back instead of going over her head. And it’s pink. It even has lace, because her mom cares about her as a person. Lucille also has flesh and fat to put into her bra while I’m more like a human hanger. Her underwear is black and rides high on her hips. She looks dangerous and like she might accidentally knock someone unconscious with the flick of a curve. Boom. Gotcha. When we took our clothes off to get in the river today, we both tried to cover up with our hands. My stomach boiled when we did that.

I can’t see Lucille, but I feel her next to me, bobbling around. That’s not accurate. She doesn’t actually bobble. She glides, slices through the water, knifelike. She moved here to New Jersey from Los Angeles when we were little, and she says before her aunt died and her parents got the house next to mine, she spent all the time at the beach, surfing with her dad. But whatever she did in LA, we’re not the same. The water and me, we dance.

We have to keep to the eddies mostly, because my mom is so ugh. Controlling, Dad says, and she claims that we’ll drown if we go too far, if we let the current take us. Might as well be a riptide. We thought she was bluffing about following us, but after she stalked us like a creepy creeper a few times, we stopped going too far out and she left us alone. Finally.

Even so, I like to get to a place in the river where my feet don’t touch down, so I can practice my ballet without pushing on bruises and blisters. I don’t complain about them out loud because they’re part of being a dancer, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.

First position, second, third.

A person needs to be efficient with said person’s time, and someday I’m going to be the most famous ballerina who has ever lived. People will be all, Anna Pavlova? Mikhail Baryshnikov? Nobodies! Now, Eden Jones, that is someone worth paying attention to.

Mom and Dad tell Digby and me that efficiency and consistency are the keys to results. In sports, business, and brushing teeth. I run my tongue across my braces and turn my face to the sun so it scalds my cheeks tight. I like how they hurt. It takes me exactly five seconds to get roasted because of my skin, so there’s no point in fighting it unless I’m going to spend my summer in a muumuu like the one Gran wears all the time.

Fry me.

Lucille splashes me, and it tingles like fairy dust.

I started swearing recently. I like it very much, so I practice now on Lucille, taste the hard consonants, the hissing s, the brick of the ck. And then I chase her.

She gets me by the leg and yanks. I raise my hands, not to keep from going all the way underwater, but because we should be as graceful in life as we are on stage, in practice, in every moment. Madame says so.

I submerge.

Submerge. I love that word.

In seventh-grade biology, we learned about eyes. Kind of ruined them for me, and so I’ve been looking at them in pieces. I can’t help myself. I don’t know whether they’re the window to the soul like people claim, but they say something important. With Lucille and me treading water, holding hands, I dissect hers into parts, those eyes I know so well.

Irises: blue

Pupils: dilated

Eyelashes: long and dark

Eyelids: full

Sclera: chalk white

More . . .

Skin: tan

Hair: blond

Lips: modelish (annoying)

Legs: long

Boobs: present and accounted for

Arches: superior

Lucille: best friend

She shakes her head back and forth, and her hair spreads into a seaweed halo.

But something is wrong.

We’ve been under the water for a long time, and Lucille is changing.

Her face is both elongating and getting smaller. Her hair falls off her head and floats away. These are not Lucille’s eyes.

Irises: green and brown with blue around the edges

Pupils: dilating madly

Eyelashes: short and black

Eyelids: thick

Sclera: almost disappeared

Skin: brown

Hair: barely a stubble

Lips: thin on top

Legs: muscular

Boobs: not much happening there

Arches: none

Name: unknown

The girl who is not Lucille who has tattoos of angels on her arms opens her mouth like she’s trying to tell me something. Bubbles drift toward the surface. That’s where I want to be. I kick my legs, but she tugs me back and forces my wrist.

She won’t let me go.

A flower blooms from her lips. It’s black, a water creature, and it swims away.

I want to go up. Up. Out.

I wriggle free, look back at her. The farther up I go, the more she sinks. I break through the surface, punch into night, into my longer body, and I land in my room.

Now.

I know it’s now instead of then because of the posters on the wall and the pairs of ballet slippers lined up from when I was eight to the ones I got last year. I also know because my book still rests on my bedside table. My journal is still on the corner of my desk. The pictures of Lucille and me on my board. Inside the desk will be a box filled with quotes, blank journals I buy and swear to fill up, and performance pictures I never look at that are shoved to the back. Pieces of me.

I want to get into