The last image that played itself across my mind’s eye was something that happened when I was young. Maybe seven. Possibly eight. I’d been surfing. Or trying to. Just getting the hang of it. My mom was sunbathing, and rubbing sun tan oil on a guy I didn’t know and didn’t like. Gorilla hair covered his chest and back. His toupee sat canted at an angle, making me want to tug on one side to straighten it. He wore several thick gold chains, and a Speedo two sizes too small. But my mom was broken and blind. Had been. She was looking for a Band-Aid. I was, too. Only problem was this poseur lying next to her. When she finished greasing him up, he returned the favor and made a real show of it. I’d taken a spill in the surf and was walking up the beach dragging the two halves of my board. My head hurt. Blood ran down my leg. Mom saw me coming and waved me off. Attention elsewhere. “Go wash it off.” Standing there on the edge of that giant ocean, dizzy, the salt stinging my cut, holding two jagged pieces that would never again comprise a whole, an emotion pierced me. While the water around my shins turned red, and my broken board slipped from my fingers and drifted away, I whispered, “Charlie, you are alone and always will be.” Right there, nothing but a kid bleeding on the beach, life stained my soul.

The lights of the plane dimmed and I felt someone’s face close to mine. Tears dripped onto my cheeks. Lips pressed against mine. Breath forced into my lungs. Chest expanding. Somewhere in between this world and the next, I saw how the Loneliness had colored my DNA. Of all the days in my life, that day on the beach was the one day I wanted back. I wanted to grab that kid, wrap him in my arms, doctor his leg, wipe the tears and snot off his face, buy him a shiny new board, and cradle his very soul.

While the blood trickled out, staining the new carpet in that $7 million plane, the truth flooded in and laid bare the wound. The simplicity struck me. I’d spent my life medicating that wound. Since that moment, I’d bought into the idea that isolation would ease my pain and indifference was the remedy for rejection.

Clarity was quick in coming. Isolation is a prison and indifference is a lie. Neither work.

As the breath exited my lungs and the screams and cries faded above me like a passing siren, the video of my life ended with a sequence of sepia-colored slides. The first depicted me standing on the shore as that broken and bleeding kid, sun-bleached hair, bronzed skin, with the beginnings of hardened muscles in my back. I was climbing into the skiff Hack and I built and paddling out through the waves and onto open water. But as I tried to paddle out, all stoic and self-reliant, Leena held on to the stern, pulling back, digging her heels into the sand. She was shaking her head. “Don’t…” But she was no match for the current of my life so I slipped from her fingers. Out beyond the breakers, I turned back. Her mouth was moving but the pounding waves between us garbled her words. When I reached the horizon where the ocean fell off the side of the earth, I turned and found her still standing there. A dot on the shoreline. Hand shading her eyes. Beneath me, the boat jolted, rocking side to side, balancing on the same knife’s edge where I once so confidently and coldly held my life and those I valued. Straining to see her, I teetered on the same precipice where I’d once been so willing to nudge others if circumstances arose contrary to my freedom. As if they didn’t matter. She beckoned, “Charlie…Please—”

The bow dipped and the stern rose, blocking my view of the beach. The world had gone black but her breath washed my face. Charlie, let me give you me.

Two hands violently jerked my head toward Leena while powerful, stinging blows pounded my chest. I turned and readied myself for the frothy death by drowning on the rocks below when Hack appeared in my boat. Legs crossed. Not a care in the world. His hair had grown. Gone was the yellowed cigarette stain. Regal white had taken its place. His skin looked younger. No wrinkles. No crow’s-feet. He dipped Alejandro’s well bucket in the water and held it sloshing over my head. “Charlie, lonely washes off.” He waved his hand across the sea. “It’s why God made the water.” He laughed deep and long as he turned that bucket upside down. I expected hot and salty. What I got was cold, sweet, and tasted like mango. At first, the water that ran out of me was India-ink black. Just what I expected. Undeterred, Hack kept pouring. Flushing out the stain. Soon, the color changed, and as it did, the pain eased. When the color turned red, the pain was gone altogether.

Finished, he handed me the bucket and patted me on the shoulder, chuckling. He glanced at Leena on the beach and raised an eyebrow just slightly. “We’re made to walk ‘with.’ Not ‘without.’” Glancing over the side of the boat and down into precipice, he cocked his head at an angle and asked, “What’s that in your hand?”

So I started paddling back.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I’d always thought that when you died and came back that you were supposed to see people dressed in white and hear angels singing the “Hallelujah!” chorus. Not so. I couldn’t see a thing and the only thing I heard was hospital bells and alarms and a blood pressure cuff on my right arm. I woke to complete and total darkness. Not a ray of light touched my eyes. Despite that, I knew that I was holding a hand in each of my right and left hands.

Over me, to my left, I heard the whisper, “He’s awake.” Then I heard a bunch of shuffling and talking and it seemed like the room filled with people.

In my right ear, I heard Leena’s voice. “Charlie, can you hear me?” When she spoke, someone squeezed my right hand, causing me to think that she was holding my right hand. And in my left ear, I heard Shelly say again, “He’s awake.” When she said this, I felt someone both squeeze and pat my left hand. One minute I was paddling, rain on my face, and the next I was waking up with Shelly in one hand and Leena in the other.

Weird.

Somewhere beyond my feet, I heard the voices of Colin, Marguerite, Zaul, and then in my left ear, I heard the angelic whisper of Maria. “Uncle Charlie, Aunt Shelly says we’re twins now.”

I raised my hand, reaching for her, and she took my hand, kissing it.

All the world was right.

I couldn’t talk as there was a tube down my throat. I made a signal like I wanted to write something. Someone placed a pen in my right hand and paper in the left. I wrote, “Tube out, please.”

They laughed.

Throughout the day, I got bits and pieces of the story.

*  *  *

I was attacked by Zaul’s friends, who had somehow crossed paths with and been hired by the foreman. A nasty combination. Unfortunately for them, after killing me, their escape was hindered by several hundred Nicaraguan farmers. In pretty bad shape themselves, they were turned over to my good friends the chief of police and the mayor of León. Their futures are not bright.

Zaul called his dad, who immediately dispatched the jet, which landed on the highway about seven miles from the plantation. Paulo drove us down the mountain, Leena grabbed her passport from the house, and we met the plane as it was landing. They loaded me up, turned around, and took off before Nicaraguan authorities ever knew they had a plane in their airspace. Given the speed of the G5, we landed in Miami a little over an hour later. I died twice on the plane; both times Leena brought me back. I died a third time in the ambulance, where the paramedics shocked me until they got me to the hospital. In the truck and on the plane, Leena had cradled me while also attempting to keep pressure on the bleeding, keeping my face elevated; she’d also packed me in as much ice as she could get to lower my pulse—which explained the cold. At the hospital, Colin had the best trauma surgeons he could find on standby, and they immediately went to work. Colin also went to work finding B-positive blood, which he said he found in a myriad of donors. He laughed as he told me. One unnamed pop diva, himself, Zaul, my new friend Liv-ed (aka William Alfred Butler), and Leena. I’d lost most of my blood, so it took a lot of donors to bring me back. Colin said if I started speaking in rhyme, that’d be the Mr. Butler part of me. Once I’d been stabilized, and my collarbone set and my shoulder put back in its socket and the cartilage in my knee repaired, Shelly was brought in to put my face back, as the guys who attacked me had done a pretty good job of carving it off—which explained the blood. Shelly had done what she could and chances were good that I’d smile again, but it’d take a while. They were afraid that I’d lose my right eye, but she thought she was able to save it. We wouldn’t know that until they pulled the gauze off sometime in the next few days. Colin continued to say that Leena had not left my side since I’d been there and she had kept me alive—when she got off the plane, she was covered in me. And I’d been in a medically induced coma for a week in order to give my body a chance to heal.