The Summer Remains (19 page)

Finally Dr. Steinberg came in one more time, his eyes twinkling, as they did. “Ms. Johnson, could I interest you in sharing a mug of coffee outside so we can go over the latest news?”

I flashed him a small but grateful smile. He knew I was tired and was trying to get her out of here to let me rest and think.

“Oh, yeah, o’course, yeah, she needs to sleep,” Shelly said before giving me one more kiss on the forehead, smelling just as she had since I was a girl: like Estee Lauder perfume and oily Revlon lipstick. She was a mess, that was for sure, but I loved her for it. “Bye, babe.”

“Bye, Shelly. Oh, and Dr. Steinberg?” I asked. He turned back around. “I feel really bad that you’ve been on call for so long just because of me, especially around a holiday, so why don’t you just go home when you’re done talking to my mom? I’m sure your family misses you and everything.”

He just smiled down at me. “Typical.”

“What’s typical?”

“You just got life-changing news, and you’re worried about
me
.”

~

So when were you going to let me in?
Cooper texted me after everyone left.

Ohhh, sorry, I’m not home yet,
I responded, cringing at our night of disaster in the garage.
I won’t be for a while. There’s, um, a key under the potted rosebush if you need something?

His response came quickly:

I’m not at your house.

I looked up at this nurse, Cassie, who was cleaning my feeding tube while rambling away, asking me question after question.

“…And by the way, Summer, when was your last general checkup? We’ll need documentation of that, since they’re bumping up the surgery and all.”

I paused, and suddenly I got really nervous. Wasn’t that one of those things you were just supposed to just
know,
as an adult? Why was what I did and didn’t know about myself suddenly so terrifying?

“I’ll find out for you,” I said. “But hey, have I had any visitors?”

“You mean besides that boy?”

“I already saw my brother, remember? Earlier?”

“Not your brother,” she said as she walked over to the dry erase board. “The other boy.”

“What boy? What?”

“The boy who’s been waiting for you nonstop in the second floor waiting room.” She sort of tittered and glanced over at me as she said it, like all the nurses had been talking about it and had been waiting for the gossip. (Over the years I’d learned that patient gossip, romance novels, and Sun Chips were the primary time-passing methods of the nursing community.) “There’s also been some other girl, Annie, I think?”

“Autumn?” I guessed, waiting to feel outrage at her name, but honestly I felt nothing – Cooper deserved to know. Autumn was just being Autumn, and I wasn’t even really surprised. I was more annoyed with Shelly for blabbing to half the town.

“Yeah, her, she’s come and gone, bringing your mom Burger King and whatever, but that boy won’t leave.”

Suddenly my face felt all warm and weird and tickly. Oh, Cooper. It didn’t even occur to me that Cooper – I mean, I
assumed
it was Cooper – would even care about me after his discovery, much less come visit me, much less stay here. This wasn’t his battle to fight, and that was fine.

Only now was I starting to think that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to fight it with me.

“I...I didn’t know anyone was waiting,” I said as Cassie fussed around with my charts, a quiet joy settling into my bones.

“Well this boy’s hot, so I wouldn’t suggest making him wait long,” she said, and I raised an eyebrow. “
What
? He is.”

I scoffed at her, held my breath, and looked down at my phone. What the hell could I possibly say to him after all this?

I started to text a response, but my phone told me he was typing, and so I erased what I’d written and waited until I received the following message:

I know I broke your heart, but you are the only thing on Earth to me now, and I really wanna make this right.

“Cassie?” I asked after I’d caught my breath.

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“Do you happen to have any makeup I can use?”

17

My teenaged dream walked in half an hour later, after I’d let Cassie dab some foundation on me and gloss my lips and, okay, yeah, hide my scar a little. I didn’t want him to see me like this, because I knew he would pity me, and pity is my least favorite thing in the world to deal with besides, like, falling off a building or unrest in the Middle East or whatever. But I also wasn’t going to keep him waiting alone outside like a bitch, and there was yet another thing, too – I was excited to see him, in this weird and giddy and destructive little way. I missed him.

He appeared in the doorway, staring at the floor and looking somewhere between terrified and exhausted. The brave, golden boy of this summer was gone, replaced by this ghost, pale and scared in his Polo. He was still beautiful, though, his dark stubble enhancing his already-perfect bone structure. And that’s when I realized it was official: my eyes would
never
get used to him.

“You look like a hangover,” is the first thing I said after he walked in, and he finally looked up at me.

“Ha. Hey, kid. Sorry, it’s been a rough day or two.”

“Tell me about it.”

The machines beeped and the nurses murmured outside, but he said nothing. I decided to push him along. “So, um, yeah…you wanted to talk?”

He swallowed hard and finally sank down next to me, onto one of those weird reclining chairs upholstered with the world’s cheapest vinyl that hospitals seemed to order by the boatload. “First of all, how are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’ve been better.”

“Ugh. I…yeah. Well. What can I say?” The silence stretched between us again. “I can’t even really describe what an idiot I feel like, Summer, facing you after our last…meeting, or whatever that was.”

“It’s okay, Cooper. I understand.”

“No you don’t,” he said, and when I tried to interrupt, he raised a hand. “Look, Sum. I am
so
sorry. All I could think about for the past few days was my meltdown that night, and what I said, and how stressed I got you, and…yeah. You have
no idea
. I’ve been blaming myself over and over, and if you didn’t make it, I would’ve…I couldn’t have…”

I waved him off. “Stop, Cooper. It’s not your fault. I’ve been sick for a very long time.” I laughed a little. “And now you know that, thanks to Autumn.”

His face fell,
literally
fell, that’s how pronounced his frown was. “Don’t be mad at her, please. It’s not her fault. I basically pulled it out of her, and-”

I waved my arm again. “Trust me, she’s called six thousand times in the last hour, but I don’t care. I’m too exhausted to keep being mad. Someone needed to tell you anyway, I guess. It is, as they say,
what it is
.”

He slumped even further. “Well,
I
still feel like a pile of shit, and I want to make this right.”

I paused, the words I couldn’t say hanging in the air. What was it about hospitals that made you want to pour out your soul and lose your words in your mouth all at the same time?

“Cooper,” I began, “you don’t have to – it’s fine. I understand. I get it. None of this matters anymore. I don’t need some pity trip. Shit hit the fan for me, and it sucks. And I lied to you, and it wasn’t fair. But this isn’t your problem. You have your whole summer in front of you, and I have hospital visits and surgeries and feeding tubes and-”

“You’re right,” he said, nodding and sitting taller. “You do have all that to deal with. But you also have me, no matter what I said the other night, and I want you to prove that to you.”

I just stared at him again, confused. “What? With all due respect, Cooper…no. Just, no. You don’t get it. You will never know how this feels. I am…different. I am other. And you’re not. And it’s not fair. It’s been fun, but you don’t have to do…this, whatever this is. And I don’t want to do this to you.”

“You don’t want to do
what
to me, Summer?”

I met his eyes as the bottom fell out of my stomach. “I don’t want to do
me
to you.”

He frowned, exhaled, and then scooted the chair closer, motioning at the room around us.

“Hey. This hospital room. It’s nice, huh?”

“What?”

“The room,” he repeated. “It’s nice. Pretty spiffy, huh? Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I mean…yeah, as far as hospitals go, it’s okay, I guess.”

“Okay. Well, why don’t you just stay here forever, then?”

“What?”

A ghost of a smirk crawled across his beautiful lips. “Like I said, it’s nice. So just stay. You’re safe in here – no germs, dim lights, comfortable bed. It’s easy in here. Nobody can mess with you, or, say, fall into your soul and destroy you.”

I gasped. What was with this boy and his gasping powers?

He put a hand on my arm, and for probably the first time, I didn’t take it away. “That’s why I lost my mind the other night, Summer. You came in a few months ago and turned my world upside down, and it terrified me. I was so used to everyone in my life leaving me that I made a safe little spot in my mind where nobody else could reach me, and I told myself I’d just be alone forever. My dad walked out, my friends disappeared, even my mom leaves me more and more a little day, as her health fades. But you came in and got close and wrecked all that, and…well, when I talked to Autumn and she told me what was up, the scared little boy within me got all frantic that you were going to leave, too, and I just…well, lost my fucking mind, to be honest. I didn’t think I could deal with that again.” He locked eyes with me, and I was knocked senseless by the burning intensity of them, like those wispy clouds that huddle in front of the sun at sunset and catch fire from the inside out. “But then I remembered something important: I’m in love with you.”

I looked away and swallowed as hard as my broken throat would let me.

“I’m not afraid of speaking that truth anymore,” he told me, and I could feel his eyes on my face. “Not after all this. I’m in love with you, Summer. I know that now.
You
know that now. That’s not going to change. So get over yourself. We’ve been through the wringer already and we won’t stop now. This won’t be easy – you lied like crazy all summer, and I was a huge fucking douchebag who broke your heart. And it’s not just that. I’m clingy and I need you too much sometimes, and you let me in and then push me out again, and that’s just what we do. It’s our Thing, like smoking cigarettes on the porch is my mom’s Thing and farting in the kitchen was my dog’s Thing and lying like a bastard is a politician’s Thing and, oh God, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore, but I’m in love with you and I’m not leaving.”

“Cooper,” I breathed, “I’m-”

“So you’re facing some problems,” he said, sitting even taller, looking like he was bracing himself for a hurricane. “So what? I’ve found someone I want. You’re it. That cake you made for my mom, the way you acted at that support meeting, the way you always know the right thing to say to pull me out of myself, the general way you carry yourself through this fucked-up world…I’ve found what I want, so who cares about what comes next? Who cares about the odds? Statistically speaking, it’s perfectly possible that you could walk down the sidewalk tomorrow and get run over by an ice cream truck – does that mean I’m gonna stop loving you all of a sudden? Does that mean I need to step away? No. I need you too, you know. And I know you need me, no matter what you tell yourself. So let yourself be happy, Summer. Stop doing this. Let love destroy you – God knows life is going to, anyway.”

I had to grip the metal bar along my bed to steady myself. He knew my favorite Saviour poem about love and destruction? How were all these similarities between us even
possible
?

“Okay, Cooper, let me process what I can process,” I began, gulping for air. “You just referred to Hadley in the past tense. What happened?”

He nodded sadly. “Yeah. It happened late last night, after I got home. But it was peaceful, and it was just like she fell asleep, between me and my mom’s wheelchair, down in the garage.”

“Oh, no…God, I’m sorry.”

His eyes filled up with the past. “It’s okay. She was happy. She was a happy girl. She had a good life.”

“I’m really sorry, Cooper.”

He shrugged, and I waited for him to get his thoughts together. “And that book…
God
,” he finally sighed. “It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. I have it in my pocket, actually. I’ve been reading it over and over again in the waiting room. I can’t believe my words are on a real page.” He took it out and looked down at it almost reverently. “This is a dream, Summer. A real-life dream. I had let go of those when I met you. With my depression and my mom’s issues and – with all that going on, I thought life had beaten my dreams out of me. But seeing my words in real, physical form – I could
never
repay you for the feeling this book gave me. Never. You’re making me want to fight again, and that’s huge.” He exhaled again. “And honestly, the dog situation affected me, too. When we took her in for cremation this morning, the vet told me not to cry, because although she was only around for part of my life, I was her
whole
life. And it really got me thinking.”

He got all weird and serious and watery-eyed and took my hand again, acting like he’d rehearsed this moment – which he probably had, I realized. “So, look, Summer. I know this might be the end of the road for you. You can’t hide that from me anymore. But I’d like to be here for the rest of your whole life, however long that may be, and it would be an honor to only have you around for part of mine.”

For the longest moment I just stared up at him. Finally I laughed and wiped my nose.

“Cooper, that was beautiful, but did you just compare me to a
dog
?”

He set his jaw. “Maybe I did, but it was goddamned adorable and you know it, so you’d better get over it and let yourself love me –
or else
.”

I looked out of the window at the oaks, and that’s when I finally got over the obstacle plaguing me and accepted the unthinkable: Cooper loved me back. It was true. He wasn’t just some beautiful Spark prankster, trying to fool me into some one-sided summer affair, and this wasn’t Travis Gibson And His Bet, version 2.0. Cooper Nichols loved me. He couldn’t run from this any more than I could.

“Tell me,” he said, “do you remember the lyrics to
Freedom
by Saviour?”

“It’s only my favorite song in the Milky Way and several other galaxies,” I whimpered. He recited them as I listened:

“My father once told me freedom was being in charge of your own destiny

And that my glory would be solely of my construction

But I just smiled and reached for his whiskey

Because I knew freedom was really being in charge of my own destruction.”

“I’m sad about this, Summer,” he said, biting his lower lip. “And I’m a little mad. I can’t lie. I wanted more time with you.
Real
time, not hospital time. And I wish you would’ve prepared me for this. But what rips me up even more than my anger is the idea of turning away and not having you around. So if destruction is what this is, if that’s what we’re headed toward, then I’m happy, because I really wouldn’t mind destruction at your hands, Summer Johnson. Not at all. Remember that scene from
Battle Bride
, where the girl says the only way to find happiness is to risk total destruction? You’re worth the risk, and I’m all yours. Be careful with me.”

“Ugh, Cooper,” I said, feeling heavy as a burden and light as the wind all at once. “You are
such
a writer. Can you stop being so damned poetic for a second? It is
so
distracting.”

“Speaking of that, I’m gonna write a book for you, to return the favor. A new book. I’m not confident enough yet to write one for publishers or anything, but I would totally write one just for you in a second.”

“Okay,” I smiled, “but make it about a girl named Summer, and make her super hot, and super smart, and the funniest person on Earth, and-”

“I will,” he said blankly. “That’s what it’s gonna be, if you want.”

“I was kidding!”

“We’ll see,” he said seriously. “You gave
me
a book, and now it’s my turn.”

Suddenly he pulled away and looked down at me. It was still so hard to maintain eye contact with him – he dazzled me so thoroughly it was like staring into the sun – but I tried.

“Can we just start over?” he asked. “No more secrets, no more evasiveness, no more whispers in the dark – just us?”

“Sure.” I held out my hand. “Hi, my name is Summer Johnson, and I’m twenty-four. I like Funfetti cake even though I can’t eat it, I often think myself to the point of craziness, I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up even though society tells me I’m already there, I hate the way my sentences always curl upwards at the ends like I’m asking questions, and, oh, yeah, I might die soon. And who are you?”

A glimmer in his brown eyes, he bent down and took my hand. “Hi. My name is Cooper Nichols, and I am absolutely swimming in love with a girl named Summer Johnson.”