The Summer Remains (23 page)

“Ugh. Stop making my heart beat like that,” I said. “I’m not supposed to get worked up, remember?”

“Deal,” he laughed. Just then we passed a bridal shop, and inside I saw a pack of bridesmaids around my age fawning over a bride-to-be as she marched out into the showroom in a totally over-the-top dress, her mom tearfully snapping photos with her iPhone from a chair in the back. As I watched them I couldn’t help but think of everything I was missing, and all the things I’d maybe never get to experience, and all the acres of organza I’d probably never get to feel on my skin, and suddenly my eyes glassed up. Then they locked with Cooper’s in his reflection in the window, and I noticed that he seemed to be deliberating something again. But what?

Once again, he snapped out of some trance. He shook his head, appeared to make up his mind about something, and turned abruptly.

“Hey, where are we going?” I asked as we hit a curb a little too forcefully, and I was sent flying up three inches into the air.

“You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. “And sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” I winced. “Hey, what was it like growing up here?” I asked to change the subject.

“It was…boring, I guess. Trust me, St. Augustine is much better to visit than it is to grow up in. It’s mostly retirees from, like, Connecticut, and older artists and stuff. I mean, it’s pretty, but pretty doesn’t keep you company after school when you wanna play baseball and there are two kids living in a ten block radius.”

“That sucks,” I said. “Does being back here, like, I don’t know…inspire you? You know, to write?”

His shadow fidgeted on the sidewalk. “I don’t know about that.”

“Okay. And, speaking of your past, um…can I ask you about the whole pill thing?”

“I guess?”

“Okay. Well, why did you start?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Why does
anyone
start a bad habit? I already had addiction in my genes, and things just got out of control. As soon as my dad left my family, it was just me and my mom, and we were dirt poor. She got worse every year, and I would
never
call her a burden, but – you know. It was difficult. Anyway, after high school I got hired by the Jacksonville newspaper straightaway as a writer for some reason-”

“Because you’re a genius,” I interrupted, and the shadow of him shook its head.

“Whatever. They saw some of my work in a local contest and hired me as a columnist who could hopefully reach out to younger readers. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t afford college and I knew I couldn’t leave my mom, so I said yes. But working and caring for her at the same time became too much, and taking half a Xanax every night to help myself sleep and drown out my mom’s crying and moaning turned into a lot more than that, and…yeah. I just sort of cracked. I got myself together, though, and ever since then I’ve just been sort of drifting from freelance gig to freelance gig while helping Colleen. I have no idea what I’m going to do in this job climate without a degree, and I’m terrified of what’s going to happen when my mom isn’t around anymore and I have nobody to distract me from the fact that I’m lost, but…yeah. We’ll see.”

I considered all that as he pushed me. We really were the same: just two lost souls drifting through an uncertain world, waiting for a future we were almost too afraid to even imagine for ourselves.

“What was your dad like?” I asked for the first time, taking advantage of this rare, open moment.

“Not fun,” he said.

“What do you mean? Am I prying?”

“No, it’s fine. Hmm – how can I explain this? The thing is, women don’t really understand father-son dynamics. There’s this weird layer of male competitiveness a lot of the time. Or there was on his side, at least. He was threatened by me by the time I was in the fifth grade – you know, the classic testosterone-fueled pissing contest. He drank a lot, and he was a failed artist himself, and every time I’d get a good grade on a paper, win a local contest, whatever, he’d get drunk, throw a fit, call me worthless, say I’d never make it, etcetera.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He never did anything, you know,
physical
or anything, but he was definitely abusive in other ways. I guess that’s my biggest fear – turning into him. That’s what drove me towards pills, that’s the nightmare that pops into my head once a week. That’s why I can’t leave my mom with some part-time nurse and go start my life, you know? I would die if I ever left my mother and became my father. Literally – I’d rather just roll over and die. I hate him. If I ever saw him today, I’d spit in his face. I will
never
be him. Never.”

As I stared ahead, lost in thought, he laughed a little. “God, listen to me, dragging you down on your special weekend.”

“No, you’re fine. I was the one who asked. You’ve never told me half this much about your past before.”

“Yeah, but I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, either. Hey, all these old houses on this road remind me of that Saviour song.”

“Oh, yeah,
that
one.”

“Ha, shut up – I’m talking about
Gold
. Do you know it?”

“Eh, maybe I heard it once or twice.”

I recited the lines in my head as he pushed me along the cracked sidewalks under the age-old oaks:

I was thinking back today, back to when our days were golden

Back to when we were young and free, so emboldened

Running those grimy streets of town, you were King and I was Queen

Nobody could fuck with those crowns of thorns, babe, royalty

But where did you go? Where are you now?

I’m still that girl, just older now

Just know that if you wanted me there

I’d run, run, run until I found you, I swear

Now all I see is this dying day, time flying by

Running out, flashing gold up in the sky

But will you love me in my December as you did in my July?

And would you still come to me now that I’m no longer flying high?

(Run, run, run, I swear)

“Here we are,” Cooper said as we stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “This is where I wanted to come. The Kissing Tree.”

“The what?”

“It’s, like, ‘a thing’ here,” he said as he leaned down, sounding nervous for some reason, as I looked up and saw a palm tree sticking out of the middle of a large oak. “It’s dumb, but I thought we’d stop by. For some reason a palm tree grew right out of the heart of an oak tree, and I guess they depend on each other now, since their roots and trunks are linked up and everything. If they’re ever separated both of them will die immediately, and so because of that, they say that if you kiss someone under the tree, your love will last eternally or whatever. I don’t know, it’s kinda cheesy, but still, I thought we could…I thought you’d want to…you know…take a picture, since all the girls our age are posting wedding selfies and everything, and…”

I cringed as I realized he’d seen straight into my brain back at the bridal shop. The sentiment was sweet, but still, he must’ve thought I was the biggest wedding-obsessed psycho in the world after all this.

“Cooper, it’s fine. I don’t care about-”

“No it’s not, Summer,” he interrupted. “I’m not stupid. I hear the way Autumn talks about marriage, and I see the way it makes you feel. I have eyes. And a heart. I just don’t want you to miss out. I want you to be able to make the annoying Facebook posts just like all those morons, and have all those rites of passage. I know how much this situation sucks – nobody knows what’s gonna happen, you know? I just feel bad that all these other girls are getting to do all this normal-girl stuff while you just sit here in a wheelchair, and I just wish I could fix it.”

“It’s okay, Cooper,” I said, melting into my wheelchair. “I’m fine. Really.”

He stared down at his feet, looking almost ashamed of himself. “It’s
not
fine. It’s not. I would do
anything
to make you happy, Summer, as pathetic as it is to admit that. Anything. But I’m just not ready for…for
that
right now, and, you know, it’s just that, we’re so young, and…”

He trailed off as my heart rate spiked.
Omg
. How could I possibly save this conversation before he decided I was a maniac bridezilla and ran for the hills?

And wait: if this trip wasn’t some marriage/proposal/whatever scheme, then why in the hell were we here in the first place, anyway?

“Cooper, listen,” I began, grabbing him by the shorts. “That’s not…that’s not what I was crying about back there. I don’t want to get married right now. I swear. I just think it’s sort of hilarious and embarrassing how girls these days use Facebook as a forum to throw their supposed happiness in everyone’s faces and force everyone to bask in their Marriage Glow or whatever, and I wasn’t…I wasn’t really saying that I wanted to…you know…do that. I’m totally happy with the way things are with us. I’m grateful for every second of this, let me tell you.”

Cooper didn’t say anything. I looked up at his face. He was crying.

“What is it?” I whispered. “What’s wrong?”

An old man sitting on the porch of an antique shop across the street suddenly called over to us, shattering the moment.

“Ah, the kissing tree!” he cried as he stood up, his belly stretching against his plaid button-up. “If ever a couple kisses under it, their love shall last forever! Would the young couple like a Kissing Tree shot?”

I looked back at Cooper. Keeping his glassy eyes on the old man, he clenched his jaw, bent down, and then whispered this through his teeth:

“I just want you to know that I am so sorry about all this, and that even sick and skinny and stuck in a wheelchair, you still have more dignity in one strand of your hair than any woman I have ever known.”

“Really!” the man yelled, splitting my attention yet again. “Let me take a shot of you two!”

I swiveled in the chair and saw his smile twitching from under his bushy white beard. Finally, Cooper sniffled and blinked the tears from his eyes.

“Ugh. We can’t just turn the poor guy down, can we?” I shook my head. “Yeah, why not, then?” he told the man as he stood tall and wiped his face. “We’d love to!”

Cooper pushed me over to the sun-dappled driveway beneath the Kissing Tree as the old man followed. After handing him his phone and explaining how to snap a picture, he came over and sank onto one knee beside me, rendering holy ground this patch of oil-stained asphalt in sticky northern Florida. As Cooper wrapped his arm around the back of my wheelchair and gave the old man a proud, dazzling smile, I closed my eyes and suddenly became enveloped in a happiness I’d never felt before. I didn’t know exactly what the nurses had wanted me to accomplish on this trip, but I guessed this must’ve been a step in the right direction. I didn’t care if we weren’t at the beach, under the pier, summer-ing it up anymore – this was all I’d wanted. Just him.

And maybe I was just like this town. Maybe I was a mess underneath, being kept together by a coat of paint and a smile, and I was doomed in the end. But right then and there, under that weird tree, I prayed that even if I was destined to die, even if I’d never get a wedding and a baby and a minivan and the dozens of annoying Facebook statuses to go along with it all, I’d still be able to package this moment away and take it with me, wherever I was going, and keep it forever.

“Ready for your love to last forever?” the old man asked the sick girl and the healthy boy. I looked up at the branches of our very own Oak Tree of Love fanning out above us, blocking the midday sun, and realized I’d become someone from my nightmares – and had had an absolute dream of a time doing it.

“Ready,” I said, and as the old man grinned and pressed the screen, Cooper leaned in and whispered something else: “Fuck all them and their weddings. We don’t need an overpriced gown and a crying mom to make this thing last forever.”

Eyes wide open, I smiled and said another prayer: a foolish, somewhat desperate wish that the tree’s stupid powers would actually work this time.

~

On the way back to St. George Street we passed a sort of rat-faced boy in a pair of faded jeans and heard him whispering about “the cripple” to someone who looked like his brother. I held up my hand, but Cooper dismissed me and clenched his jaw: I could tell there would be no politeness this time.

“Hey, Farmer Joe,” he called, and both of them immediately looked over. “My girlfriend may be in a wheelchair, but she’s still way better looking than your fugly ass will ever be, so unless you want to come over here and let me beat you into the dirt you crawled out of, why don’t you keep your monosyllabic thoughts to yourself?”

They turned the color of the strawberry ice cream cones they were eating and quietly disappeared into a nearby candle store.

19

Later that night I sat alone in our room while Cooper tinkered downstairs. We’d spent the rest of the afternoon at that Oldest Schoolhouse place, and truthfully it was kind of boring. We’d pretty much grasped the whole concept – that it was, indeed,
a really old school
– within the first five minutes, and then we’d spent the rest of the hour listening to some weird guy in a pirate costume talking about the history of the building. After all the Oak Tree of Love intensity I may have even dozed off once or twice, actually, as it was getting harder to stay awake even on the most exciting of days.

Suddenly Cooper sauntered into the room wearing only a towel, which hung deliciously from his torso. He had a Heineken in his hand and held it out, offering me a sip, and I shook my head. He smirked, tossed his backpack onto the bag, and turned into the bathroom, and suddenly an evil idea came to me regarding the Mystery of the Jewelry Box. I leaned over, reached into his bag, and rooted around while he brushed his teeth. Finally I found the jewelry box and lightly pushed it open, and what was inside flummoxed me.

It was a pen. It hadn’t been a jewelry box at all, but a case for a fancy fountain pen. A notebook was in the bag, too, a battered one with a black cover. What on Earth was Cooper writing? Was it that book he’d mentioned? And if so, why would he be covering it up?

“Check your phone,” Cooper said over his shoulder, cutting my surveillance mission short.

“What?” I asked as I snapped the box shut and dropped the bag.

“Check your phone. By the way, did you ever post that oak tree photo?”

“Nah, I decided to keep it to myself – some things are just better left unshared, in my opinion.”

“Atta girl.”

I reached into the pocket of my wheelchair for my phone, which somehow I hadn’t checked since the schoolhouse – guess I’d been too tired. In between Facebook messages from cousins and coworkers about the surgery – thanks to Shelly’s big mouth, the cat was fully out of the bag now – there was a longish text from Cooper from three hours ago. I held my breath and opened it:

We’re sitting here in the oldest schoolhouse in America and I’m in love with you. You just nodded off a little and got yelled at by the weird tour guide for not paying attention and now we’re both laughing like crazy under our breaths and I’m in love with you. I don’t really know how to put all this into words, the fact that you’re golden and dazzling and triumphant and that you’re the best person I’ve ever met and that you sank into my being and scraped my dirty soul clean and that you make me smile all day like a total fucking maniac, so I’m just gonna text you this: I’m in love with you.

I looked up at him. I didn’t care about marriages or proposals or rings anymore. I wanted him, exactly as he was, immediately.

“Come here,” I said as the oldest feeling in the world rose up into my chest.

“What?”

“Come here.”

He padded back into the room in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, looking
delicious
. Raising an eyebrow, he sank onto the bed next to me, and I sang a silent hymn of thanks that I was at least wearing cute-ish pajamas – it seemed that not even a death sentence could curb my vanity.

Cooper blushed when he saw my phone, the rosy glint giving his dark eyes this wonderful boyish quality. “Sorry for not just telling you all that in person,” he said, “but I was already wiped out from that stupid tree. And besides, what kind of millennial would I be if I had social skills?”

“Touché.”

Suddenly the intensity of my feelings for him (along with the mild painkillers Steinberg had prescribed for my throat, probably) started messing with my brain, and I didn’t know why, but I started feeling
really
turned on. Sure, I acted Spunky and Upbeat and Plucky and all those other things that Sick People were supposed to be, but the truth was that I was a human just like anyone else, and I had needs. And sitting a foot away from Cooper for days on end, watching the muscles in his forearms flex and unflex, had made me experience those needs more than ever.

I put my hand on his thigh and squeezed, and it was just as firm and delicious as I’d imagined. He peered down, eyes expanding, and I could tell he knew just what I wanted.

He looked at me, and I looked at him. This was it. Just us. No phones or texts or Facebook statuses or tangled headphones to drown out the pain and mask the quietly aching voices in our minds – just the humming silence of humanity filtering in, sinking into the shallow pools in our souls to remind us that we were alive and human and hurting and reaching for more.

“Summer,” he asked, “really?
Now
?”

I nodded.

“But how do you, like, feel? Are you well enough to…?”

“Yes. I want to.”

He set his jaw, and the light in his eyes changed. “Good. Because I want that, too. Badly. You have no idea how badly, actually. I used to be afraid of hurting you, but not anymore.”

“You do, really?” I asked, my resolve melting for a moment. “You want me?”

He put a hand on my leg. “I do.”

For one last time, I wanted to wreck this for myself. “But I, I look terrible,” I said, “and I don’t know if I can give you what you want, and…”

“Oh, Summer.” A desperate, animalistic sheen came to his brown eyes, and he scoffed up at the ceiling. “Just like Saviour said in
Strange Fiction
, enough with the fucking sunshine and rainbows and happy endings. I want what you’re hiding from me,” he growled, loosely quoting her again. “I know there’s more. Give it to me. Give it all to me. I want your ugly, your broken, your twisted; I want the monsters that pick away at your soul while you lie awake at night thinking of us. Let’s burn each other to the ground in all the best ways, until there’s nothing left but you and me and love and the future.”

Something deep within me coiled up and then lit aflame. I was ready.

Finally I looked him in the eye one last time, brown to hazel, heart to heart. A girl who didn’t deserve love, asking a boy for it nonetheless.
Don’t break me down
, I silently quoted Saviour as I tried to look past his eyes, at whenever was underneath.
Don’t let me down now.

“Cooper?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“You might want to take off your shirt now.”

“I want to see you, too,” he said after I laid myself out, his ab muscles resplendent in the soft light from the lamp in the corner. “Take off your dress.”

I reached underneath and wiped at my stomach tube. Thankfully it was clean of the bile that sometimes leaked out of it and dried into a brownish film that caked around the plastic tube, and so I lifted off my dress and tried not think about what a skinny, bony, pale mess I must’ve looked like. Sure enough, he was staring at me like I was an apparition.

“What is it?” I asked. “I look bad, I know, and-”

“No,” he said. “You’re just beautiful.”

“I am?”

“Yes, Summer. I like you, immensely, as the You that you are, the You that I see right now, the You that you hide away because you think the world wants you to be someone else. Just…
you,
without a filter. That’s the You that I like.”

“I…I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything, then. Just feel. And you’re sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Maybe a little tired.”

“Well I’m about to change that.” He licked his bottom lip, making some delicious feeling sink into me and then heat me from within.

“Shall we?” he asked with a dirty grin.

“We shall, Coop.”

“Oh, babe.” He smiled a dazzlingly crooked smile and then got going. “I
love
when you call me Coop.”

Part of me knew he would always be like this, in this setting. There was this intensity, this wildness swimming beneath his dark eyes that spoke of some beautiful inner turmoil, and I’d seen it rise to the surface and flash a few times – but
never
like this. It was clear that he was somewhat experienced, and although I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, I enjoyed the effects of that experience nonetheless. It was like getting to know a completely different Cooper – a Cooper that I wanted to continue to get to know as often as possible, for the rest of my life, actually.

“You know, I love every bit of you,” he said as he kissed his way down my stomach a minute or two later, veering a bit around my feeding tube. “Even the plastic parts,” he laughed, making me giggle a little.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s our imperfections that bring us to the next level. Would Amy Winehouse have been half as interesting without the crack?”

“Hmm,” I breathed. “I guess not. But why are we talking about crack right now, anyway?”

He placed another kiss on my stomach. “Because you’re mine.”

I giggled again, but the look in his eyes made me stop short.

“What is it?”

“Don’t laugh,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I want you still for when I do this.”

He pushed two fingers forward, and I gasped. His mouth followed the same trajectory, and I leaned back and clawed at my bed sheets as the attack began. I had both looked forward to and dreaded this moment for weeks, but it was more than living up to my expectations.

This was
clearly
going to be a long night.

“Our neighbors are probably terrified,” he panted after a minute, breaking a hole in my own euphoria.

“Why?”

“Listen – the heartbeat. It’s probably making the pictures rattle in their frames in the other rooms.”

I listened: sure enough, a
bumb-bump
filled the room. “Yeah. Sorry. I guess I get kinda excited.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re not understanding. It’s mine. I’ve been waiting so long to work up the nerve to do this, I think I might just explode. You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted this.”

“Oh.”

He pushed me back on the bed and continued. “I love you, Summer,” he whispered into my scarred chest. “Every second of seeing you in the hospital was torture for me. I am so grateful I downloaded that stupid dating app.”

“Me too,” is all I could say, and then it blew into me, the grand and startling and soul-stirring realization that no matter what happened between us, whether we would last six weeks or six decades, I would never ever be the same. This love had rearranged me.

You know what happened next. The sex happened. And I say “sex” because it was sort of halfway between making love and fucking. It wasn’t perfect, and avoiding the feeding tube took some getting used to, and since I was so thin and bony, there were some maneuvers that were more awkward than I would’ve preferred. But God, it was beautiful. And it was
hot
. It was everything I’d wanted and so much more, stupid feeding tube notwithstanding. When I clutched him by the shoulders and breathed in his perfect scent and started crying and said “thank you for loving me on my way down,” he cried, too, and that’s when I knew it was real and true and good and right.

Twenty minutes after the big bang, we were both trying to avoid a wet spot on the bed while simultaneously trying to pretend like we
weren’t
avoiding the wet spot on the bed. I rolled onto my side and rested my head on my elbow on the rustled-up sheets between us. Getting to know him in this way, seeing this new side of him, had made me want to know even more about him. I was a cannibal with an endless appetite for Nichols.

I studied his arms, his hair raised like blades of grass as he breathed in and out, luxuriating in his beautiful silence. I noticed a birthmark on his right forearm that I’d never seen before: pretty large, but so faint you could barely see it. This was what I’d wanted with him, this quiet observant time away from Shelly and Steinberg and the nurses and whoever else, when I could study him and notice all these craggy little human details about him. I wanted to know all of him, every birthmark, every cell, every mitochondria, right now, and I never wanted it to end. Unfortunately I could already sense him transitioning from Sex Animal Cooper back to Normal Cooper, and I could feel the magic slipping away.

I looked into the darkness, and my eyes fell on my wheelchair.

“Thank you for loving me,” I said as I put my head on his shoulder, sounding sadder than I’d meant to. “Like, that sounds cheesy, but whatever. I don’t care. You know, this story never happens. It’s always, like, the hunky bad boy who becomes disabled during a motorcycle crash while trying to save a kidnapped nun or something, and then his alluring nurse falls in love with him in the hospital and dedicates the rest of her life to pushing him around and loving him. But it never happens like this. Boys like you don’t fall for wheelchair girls. I don’t deserve you and I know that. So thanks for, you know, loving me like this.”