The Summer Remains (15 page)

A very long time ago I had decided the world was generally a bad place and subsequently locked my soul away for good, figuring the only way to avoid being broken by this cold cruel planet was to turn myself off and drift unfeelingly through the icy meadows until death came,
whenever
it would come. But all at once, Cooper was making me come alive again – and that wasn’t good. Because we were building a palace on pebbles, and every passing moment was just another moment closer to when it could all fall down. No matter how much my brain had told my heart to run away and save him from my fate, I had let myself drown in Cooper Nichols. Shelly was right: now that he was drowning in
me
, I needed to get out of fantasy mode and fix this mess before my dream collided with reality and exploded like fireworks in the summer sky.

14

So, above all, I was still a rational person, and the way I saw it, I had three options: I could turn away from Cooper for good, cold turkey, just delete his number and forget I’d ever known him. I was also rational enough to know that this would make me go fucking crazy. I was in too deep now. So, option two: I could always just tell him about my diagnosis and confess about lying and see what happened. He would either get mad at me for lying and then ditch me, or…

Or
. That was the key word: there was no
Or
. I didn’t really see an option besides that. I had misled him by not telling him, and that was wrong, and he’d probably never forgive me for it.

But there was also a third option. A dangerous one. And that option was to say nothing and hope the surgery would be successful and therefore make all of this worrying unnecessary. I’d disappear for a few weeks in September, and then poof, I’d be back, cured and mended. The German girl was proof – maybe the procedure could fix me, and maybe I was getting all worked up over nothing.

And maybe, just maybe, my health was cratering and I was ignoring the signs and I wouldn’t even make it long enough for any of this to matter, and trying to find love before death was as futile as a crab trying to stand against the rising tides and hope to stay in place.

I gave myself a week to decide.

Sure enough, Autumn was furious with me for neglecting to tell her about the Cooper thing, and she called me in the middle of the week and ordered a Starbucks session to investigate. After she commandeered a prime corner table in the coffeehouse, she peered through the window toward the passing cars on Third Street, but it seemed like she was looking
through
them instead of at them.

“So what’s up?” I asked after a moment. “I thought this would be an interrogation session, but you look totally weird. You didn’t like him?”

“No, no, of course I liked him,” she said, snapping back to the present. “I mean, God, have you
seen
the kid’s forearms? Holy shit. You could carve wood with those tendons. No, it’s just that that night, like, made me sad for some reason, that’s all.”

“What? Why?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. The way he looks at you…I just want someone to look at me like that. To love me like that.”

“
Love
?” I asked. “Um, we’re not using words like that yet, Pollyanna. It’s been, like, a month or two, at most. Who do you think I am, one of the Facebook psychos we make fun of?”

“Yes. Apparently you are. I mean, come on – sneaking around, showing up at Anti-Support with someone like
him
? I feel like I barely know you. And it
is
love,” she continued, searching me, as she shook her head. “I could see it. I could
feel
it, almost. Do you know what you’re doing, though?”

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes strip-searched me down to the bone, and suddenly I wondered just how much she knew. “You know what I’m talking about, Sum. Your surgery and everything – it’s pretty big, and maybe he deserves to know. I told you to be slutty and everything, but this is clearly becoming…
something
. Does he know what he’s getting into?”

“Stop.” I ignored the shiver that ran up my back at her words. “I’m figuring it out as I go, I promise. Lay off me. You got to have all the fun forever. Please don’t tell him anything – I just want to enjoy him for a bit, especially since the Fourth is coming up and all.”

“Okay,” she said, glancing away again, the far-off look in her eyes making a whole new ocean of anxiety well up within me. It’s not like I thought she’d run off and tell him everything to purposely hurt me, but that was the thing about Autumn: sometimes she couldn’t help herself.

After I sat with her for a few more minutes we started drifting towards the door. “Here,” she said as she threw away her empty cup, “take a hug before you go off with Cooper again and I lose you.”

“Thanks,” I said as she embraced me with a Patented Autumn Hug. “I needed that.”

“You needed what? Hugs, or your boyfriend?”

“Both,” I said. “Always. And that kind of terrifies me.”

The Fourth of July in Jacksonville Beach was absolute heaven, even for a Cynical Cindy like me. Thousands upon thousands of people hit the streets on bikes and skateboards and scooters, parties and cookouts and Slip N Slides filled every driveway and yard in town, and fireworks popped in the sky from sunup to midnight. Usually I rode the back of Autumn’s bike from cookout to cookout until we got tired and went to take a nap, and then we’d walk down to the pier at sundown and watch the fireworks shoot off the end. They’d zoom up and explode over the shimmering black seas, burning red and blue and gold and white against the dark sky for one brilliant moment, and at the end of the fifteen-minute firework show I’d always find myself convinced that there was beauty in the world again. Then I’d take that hope and fortify myself with it for the next year until I could see the fireworks again on the next Fourth and refill my dwindling Hope Reserves once more.

And the prospect of never experiencing all this again just broke me in the worst way. Not in the way Cooper’s smile broke me or a photo of a baby Yorkie broke me – just broke me, thoroughly and senselessly, like when you drop a glass bowl from pretty high up and it doesn’t even bother with cracking or shattering, it just makes that
pop!
sound and explodes into a million tiny shards. And since my self-imposed deadline was Monday the Fifth, I figured I’d try to let myself enjoy one final weekend before making the big Cooper decision. I had to. I couldn’t live without the summer.

The first Thursday of the holiday weekend I went over to his place while his mom made a late breakfast. This may sound creepy, but I loved to watch the way his mom looked at him, and admire the way her eyes lit up when she did so, and think about why they did. And as he picked at a Nutella pancake a while later, his mom watching
Discovery
in the next room, I kind of gently asked about her prognosis. Long story short, it wasn’t good – her MS was advancing quickly, and it wouldn’t be too long before she’d have to be sent off to some expensive nursing home. The only thing keeping her out of one, I guessed, was Cooper’s presence. Barely anyone in her situation had an able-bodied young man at her beck and call, and I got the sense that he knew it, but still couldn’t stay there and wait on her forever. Nobody would be able to. I’d seen the same silent battle being waged in my mother’s eyes my whole life –
should I sit here with my child and nurse her for another week, or should I go out and get back my life before it’s too late?

Anyway, Colleen’s disability checks from the government were helping to keep both of them afloat, but Cooper’s savings from his newspaper days were about to run dry – which was all the more incentive for him to take his chances at getting a book published, in my eyes. But what did my opinion matter?

“But it’s fine,” he said after he finished explaining, as he pushed around the remains of the pancake on his plate. He ate
a lot
, and very often, and although I had no idea how his body stayed so perfect, I kind of hated him for it. “She’s fine as long as I’m here. That’s why I got her that geode necklace.”

I smiled. I’d noticed the necklace before, actually, a beautiful geode with purple crystals inside that had been sliced in half and then strung from a fine silver cord that dangled from Colleen’s neck.

“Just wanted to remind her that beautiful things can grow in ugly places,” he told me. “She lived in a bad situation for a long time, but she has me now, and she always will. At least…I hope she will.”

Cooper sank into himself, his frown shading his features. He did that a lot, disappear in front of me, and lately he’d been doing it more and more for some reason. He’d done a good job of acting sparkly and light and happy-go-lucky, that dazzling boy from Joe’s Crab Shack, but now I knew the truth: he was lost. I could see it in the shadows in his bottomless eyes; hear it in the silences he let drag on for far too long during our conversations about his life. He was just better at hiding it than I was. It all made so much sense now: of
course
he wrote stories about people who dreaded the future; of
course
he constantly obsessed over these Big Life Issues like death and fate and legacy. He was stuck in the past, dwelling on the ruins of his dreams and dealing with his ailing mother every day, unable to move forward. They said that people stopped maturing at the exact age of the onset of their health problems, frozen in time by the pity that suddenly descended upon them like molasses, but I’d never imagined the same being true for that person’s family members, too. Perhaps this explained my dad’s flight from our family like a college student who had impregnated a one-night-stand and then run for the hills; my mother’s shaky emotional state; my little brother’s immaturity and lack of self-confidence and weight issues. Cooper was exactly like me, a girl frozen at the age of her diagnosis, held back from truly experiencing adulthood by a smothering but well-meaning mother and sympathetic strangers and by having to literally feed myself milk every day like a baby. In a world of already-stunted growth, we were practically children. I’d had no idea we were so alike.

“That’s so sweet. But are you calling yourself beautiful?” I asked to swivel the conversation toward a heart-melting direction.

“Of course I am. Have you
seen
this ass?”

“Touché. And sorry for asking about your mom,” I said, and he shook his head.

“Don’t be. It’s whatever. But seriously, like I was saying before, I really want you to have fun today when we go to the beach.”

I gave him a weird look. “We’ve gone to the beach, like, ten times. Of course I will.”

“No, like,
really
,” he said. “We’ve done what you like to do, now it’s time to do
my
routine. It’s Florida, and it’s summer, and that’s what people do in Florida in the summer, Summer. Swim, boogie board, run around – they don’t just sit there in their clothes reading books, like you.”

I swallowed hard, imagining a crowd of beachgoers awkwardly staring at my many surgery scars and the plastic tube protruding from me. “Thanks, but you know I….I can’t do that,” I said. “I have a one-piece, but my tube still pokes out, and it’s weird. People stare, and it gets awkward and stuff. Like,
I
don’t care, but I don’t want
you
to feel weird or anything.”

Cooper looked away. “Oh, um, well, speaking of that, I, um, got you something.” He went into the living room and then brought back a bag from Dillard’s, the local department store.

“Cooper! It’s not my birthday or anything,” I said as he put it on the table in front of me.

“Yeah, but I saw it and I, like, thought you might like it, or whatever.”

I took a box out of the bag and opened it. Inside was a brown one-piece bathing suit with a white sarong.

“I just know you can be self conscious about your feeding tube and whatever,” he said, looking away from me, “and I, uh, got you something to maybe help fix that.”

I took out the bathing suit. It was
super
brown, and nothing I would ever buy for myself or anything – but it was still the most perfect thing I’d ever gotten.

“It’s great, Cooper. Thank you. I can’t believe you did this.”

“You don’t think it’s weird or anything?”

“It’s not weird, Cooper, it’s…”

Suddenly I spotted a handwritten note in the box and took it out.
All I want is to show you off,
it said in his trademark awful script.
Please let me now.

I looked up and smiled. “It’s not weird. It’s perfect.
You’re
perfect.”

“Good,” he said. “And before we – wait. Are you okay? You’re looking a little pale. You’re almost green, actually. Everything good?”

“I’m fine,” I said, messing with my arm in a weird little way. “This whole ‘not eating’ thing does take its toll every once in a while, I guess. But I’m splendid.” I took the bag and stood up. “Okay, I’m gonna go out to the car to get something and change and stuff. I’ll meet you downstairs in-”

“Hold up,” he said as he held out a hand. “I know where you’re going. You’re getting your makeup kit.”

My shoulders fell. “Um…yeah. And?”

“And I refuse to allow you to keep hiding under all that stuff. You’re beautiful. You don’t need it.”

“Oh,” I said. “But-”

“There is no
but
,” he said as he got up and kissed my cheek, his stubble scratching against my skin, reminding me that I was a human capable of feeling things, no matter how hard I’d been trying to avoid that fact up until now. “You’re hot and you need to show it. And plus, it’s the beach. Who puts makeup on to go to the
beach
?”

“You do have a point,” I smiled. “I guess it is kind of tacky.”

I turned for his tiny bathroom with the fake wooden walls. After I changed into my new super-brown bathing suit that I loved completely, a spare tube of concealer fell out of my bag and rolled under the sink. I turned and left without picking it up.