The Summer Remains (28 page)

“Yes, Mom,” I said, and her eyes filled up with tears again – I’d never called her that before, not that I could remember, at least. “Okay. And thanks for everything you’ve done for me, too, Mom. God, why can’t I stop saying Mom, Mom?”

“Don’t ever stop, baby. And, oh, quit with the gratitude,” she said as she dabbed a tissue at her eyes, waving me off. “I was happy to care for you.”

I took a breath. “Okay. And there’s something else, too.”

“Yes?”

“If anything happens to me,” I said slowly, “I want you to take care of Chase.”

“Okay,” she frowned.

“Wait. More specifically, I want you to
back away
from him. Let him breathe. Let him have a childhood. No more phantom colds or nonexistent fevers. He’s not me and he never will be, God willing, so let the kid be a kid. God knows he won’t have the chance when he’s grown.”

“Okay,” she nodded again, giving a smile that did not show in her eyes. “Okay. I know what you mean. I’ll cool it. I swear.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Say it again,” she said with her eyes closed, smiling with everything in her, and I took her hand in mine and kissed it.

“Okay, Mom. No more Shelly. You’re Mom forever. I promise.”

The last visitor was Cooper. My sad, beautiful Cooper. The hospital nametag on his shirt had his name on it, and I smiled at his horrid handwriting. He appeared in the doorway and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. But even after all this time, he still made me dizzy. He was so beautiful it made my insides hurt.

He stopped beside me. A tanned god of a boy, careful not to slip into anyone and get hurt; a pale phantom of a girl, desperately lashing out to leave love behind before she left too early. He got pulled down deep. I reached out and left a mark. How in God’s name would we ever make that mark last?

“Hey, kid,” he finally said.

“Hi.”

He put his hand on my arm, and I flinched involuntarily.

“Oh, shit,” he said, pulling away, “did I hurt you?”

“Noooo, no no no. Here, put it back, I was just cold.”

He returned his arm and smiled at me. “Good. I wanna be your cure, not your pain,” he said, quoting Saviour again.

“Oh, gosh, Cooper. You were. Trust me.”

He turned, showing me his beautiful profile: his strong chin, his soft, full lips, his stately nose like a Roman general heading into battle. He stared out of the window and inhaled through his nostrils, chewing on his lips.

“So life is not a cheesy romantic comedy after all,” he finally said. “I don’t remember the part in that Kate Hudson movie where she was strapped to a gurney.”

“I know, Cooper. I know.”
Damaged people get no stories
, I thought to myself. Nobody posted gushy love posts about them or exalted them from the heavens. They just broke and suffered in the dark. Until Cooper came along, at least.

“Are you afraid?” he asked. I looked away, towards the medical equipment across the room. This was getting so real now. Things were welling up within me, anger included, threatening to spill out.

“I wanted a forever,” is what I said next. “Not this. God, I hate this world sometimes.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Stop, Summer. Please. Every second I spent with you was a gift. I beat the odds by finding you. I-”

I reached up and grabbed him, unable to control it anymore. “Stop it, Cooper. Stop! This isn’t some Hallmark Channel movie. This is real. I’m skeletal and I have a scar on my face and I might fucking die, and oh God, I wanted so much more from this life, and-”

He bent down low, took my free hand, and rested it on his chest. Two humans, tangled up in each other, for now at least. “Feel this, Summer. Do you feel it?”

His heart was thundering.

“Yes.”

“I feel that every second I am around you. I love you, Summer, and you are feeling that love right now. You found a dead boy and made his heart beat again. You are the only thing in the world that makes me feel this alive. You squeeze so much life into every second I have with you, and I don’t care how fucking cheesy or stupid or Hallmark that sounds – I’m thankful. A little angry at the situation, yes, but thankful underneath that. So thankful. Thank God for you, Summer.”

“Look at you,” I smiled after a minute. “Mr. Agnostic, thanking God in front of me. I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Remember when I told you I needed something to believe in? I found it. I believe in God now.”

“Wait, you did? You do?”

“Yep,” he nodded. “You’re God.”

“Ummm…?”

He laughed in this weird, rough, breathy way. “Wait, let me rephrase that. I do worship you, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here.”

“What, then?”

He studied me, looking at me from under his eyelashes, which was my favorite Cooper Thing that he did. “Well, to me, the question of God comes back to the existence of a soul – do humans have souls? And will those souls go anywhere after this, or will we just die and cease to exist, like road kill on the side of this relentless march of time and tragedy that we call life? But there is one thing humans do that no other being on Earth is capable of: we love.” He motioned down at our tangled hands. “Humans love deeply, unconditionally. Sure, squirrels boink each other and have babies for the sake of the continuation of their species, but they do hold their partner’s hand while they flicker and fade from the world, like my grandpa did for my grandma in her final hours? Do they nurse and comfort their friends through sickness and injury? Do they find twin souls and grow old and silver-haired together? No. Every time I’ve seen you reach out and love someone, take your hand and put it on a broken person’s arm and encourage them with your words, kiss me on the cheek and make me feel like the most important person in the universe, play a game with your little brother while you could be doing something else – that’s holy. Those moments when we’re together and we sink into that weird little world where it’s just the two of us and we almost feel like we’re glowing with love and then some vibrating entity that feels older than the sea filters in and hums between us – that’s religion. That’s us rising above our humanity – transcending the genre – and reaching a higher level, a galactic level. That’s love. That’s God. That’s grace. That’s majesty. And you love, Summer, so you’re God.” He laughed again, quieter this time. “To me, at least.”

A wretched sob escaped from my chest. I stretched out and smiled up at the ceiling.

“
God
, we need to stop talking like this!” I said as I wiped my nose and tried to pull myself together. “It’s just a surgery, not a firing squad. Maybe I’m gonna be fine. Maybe I’m gonna go to sleep for ten hours and wake up and everything will be back to normal, and I am not saying goodbye to you in this hospital bed right now.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking around. “I guess we could’ve found a more romantic setting than a dead-end room with industrial blinds and the faint smell of that damned disinfectant spray.”

“Not exactly a girl’s childhood dream, no.”

A flurry of activity outside told us they were waiting for me. Nurses were good at that; passive-aggressively ruffling some blinds or slamming a book closed to tell you that although they respected your time, scalpels were waiting to be stained with your blood and humanity.

“Hey. You’re gonna do it all, you know,” Cooper said, leaning closer, but fear was blooming in his eyes, and it terrified me. “You’re finally gonna be healthy and strong, and you’re gonna eat all the food in the world and then adopt a kid, a whole orphanage full of ‘em, and you’re gonna get the most obnoxious Facebook wedding in the world, and then we’re gonna go to that pier again and sit under the sky, for as long as you want, and glow again.”

“Okay,” I said, drowning in love and life and fear of the future. “Remember that poem
So It Goes
by Saviour, about her friend with cancer or whatever?”
She certainly wouldn’t have had Esophogeal Intresia
, I noted to myself, caustic to the end.

“And so it goes,” he recited, “to be a young soul trapped inside a set of broken bones. What a beautiful curse, to be young and beautiful and doomed.”

“And so it goes,” I continued, “that love will keep a soul alive. A person who was loved and left love behind cannot die so long as they are kept inside the beating heart of a human – or better yet, five.”

He wiped his eye, laughed, and then shook his head. “God. We have
got
to find some less depressing singers to quote.”

“You’re right,” I said. “From here on out, it’s Katy Perry for me.”

We both grimaced at exactly the same time, proving once and for all that I had found my one twin soul. We were soul mates, this boy on the cusp of forever, this girl on the edge of oblivion.

Finally a nurse entered and started going over charts and messing with stuff in the cabinet, chatting all the while. As I sat there saying my maybe-goodbyes to Cooper, the cheeriness in her voice hurt like hearing a Christmas song in January.

“…The scans are actually looking really good!” she said as she flipped a page in her notebook with her back to us. “There’s less blockage than they thought. This might even go more quickly than we expected! So that’s good! Really good, y’all!”

“
Yay
!” Cooper said in the same tone as the nurse as he looked down at me and rolled his eyes, making me giggle.

“Oh, and one last thing, Cooper,” I told him quietly, and he leaned closer.

“Yeah?”

“This is gonna sound weird, but promise me that no matter what happens, you’ll write a book. Just promise. I want to know that you’ll fulfill your dream, or whatever. Please write one. You can do it, I swear.”

“Okay,” he said, but something in his eyes was sparkling, and I didn’t understand it at all. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

“What’s funny?”

“It’s just that we’re sitting here saying…you know, maybe goodbye, or whatever, and you’re thinking about
me
. So typical, Summer. So typical. You’ll never change, will you?”

“Whatever. Maybe the nurse is right, anyway,” I said, taking a long, calming breath. “I’m gonna be fine. We’re being dramatic. I’m gonna be fine. I know it!”

“You are, Summer,” he said, tracing circles on the back of my hand. “I love you, and you have all my love. What more could you need?”

The nurse arrived behind my bed and flashed a tight smile at Cooper. It was time for him to go.

“I love you so much,” he said as she started to lead him out. “I love you so much! I’m so glad I met you. I’m gonna see you in no time! Float on, Summer. And never forget that I-”

The stupid nurse closed the door, silencing him.

~

So now I’m in another room waiting for the anesthesiologist. I don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Maybe I’ll be fine. Maybe I won’t. Maybe this will be the last time I ever breathe, ever look around at the room surrounding me, ever live, ever
be
.

I stretch my arms out again and let out a terrified, heartbroken, exhilarated
ahhhHHHHuhhh
as I look up at the ceiling and try not to cry. But as much as I want to run away and live out my days under the palms somewhere in secrecy, I know I have to do this. I’d known from the moment Steinberg brought up the surgery, actually. I wasn’t going to be a burden any longer. I wasn’t going to have Shelly fuss over me or have my dad be depressed about my life prospects or have a team of aging doctors sit around once every six months and elegantly debate the prospects of my mortality. I was going to try to normalize myself, and if I undid myself in the process, then so be it. I was going to be Healthy Summer, or I was going to be Dead Summer. Either prospect would be better than the humiliating half-life of my first twenty-four years. Every rude comment from random people on the street, every time I’d been left alone at home during a middle school dance to stare at walls while the pretty girls twirled in their dresses under the lights, every time people had gawked and laughed at me in the lunch room, every time I’d stared at my computer watching those same girls twirling down an aisle, bouquet in hand – I just couldn’t do it anymore. Oh well. You never win a match you don’t sign up for.

A thought struck me, and do you know what I did next? I took out my phone to clear my head, which I was still allowed to have until the last possible moment. (Okay, maybe I’d snuck it in. Whatever.) I opened up my Facebook and scrolled through the goings-on of all the people I’d met in my life, all with dreams and goals and problems so different from mine, and I tried to be angry, but mostly I just felt sad. I remembered something and kept scrolling, and sure enough, soon I saw her: Misty the Pen Thief, that human manifestation of a Bud Light burp, that girl who’d inspired me to download Spark all those weeks ago, who lived to brag about her fiancé and how he cherished the ground she walked on. And ultimate plot twist: she’d just been dumped.

I couldn’t believe it. There she was, posting some furious status about how she’d already sent out the invitations to her bridesmaids’ luncheon when the fiancé had decided he “needed time to think.” I guess the pretty lies had fallen away, and Misty and her man had been left with a truth neither of them could deal with: they were not a match. And I couldn’t help it: I laughed, fully and completely, with everything in my broken body.