The Summer Remains (31 page)

25

Two days without Summer turned into three. I grew mad at time for daring to distance me from her, because every day that came was another day further from when she’d been here; every sunrise just threw her deeper into my past. And the hangover just compounded my misery and confusion.

After the blunt force trauma of the initial days, I found that the hardest part was missing her. Just the simple, devastating sensation of wanting to hang out with her and not being able to do so. I missed her golden hair and her hazel eyes that always looked like they knew something the world didn’t and the adorably awkward way she always fidgeted with her hands. I missed it all. I wanted to reach into my medicine cabinet more than ever, but I shut myself in my room and somehow forced myself to abstain.

Here on the edge of sanity, I could see it all: I was haunted by the summer. Every moment I hadn’t spent with her over these last few months struck out at me like a viper; every opportunity I’d had to give her love and failed jumped out at me from the quiet. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the wedding thing. I pictured how longingly I’d seen her looking at other couples’ photos, the bitter edge that would come to her voice when discussing their Facebook posts. And I knew that deep down, all she’d wanted was to shine for the world like they had. Sure, we’d known each other for way too short a time to get married, but still: why hadn’t I just fucking gotten over myself and let her load some fucking selfies of us? Why hadn’t I at least
hinted
that I wanted marriage down the line, since that was all she wanted in the world? What was wrong with me? The invisibility and futility of it all made it even more devastating. Oh, and what made me even more miserable was the fact that the only copy of
Eighty Eight
was gone. I’d somehow lost the book during my blackout at the hospital, and after thirty calls from my mom, they’d finally admitted that it had probably been thrown away by a janitor. The Word file containing the book was on a computer that had burned up weeks before, and the book that Summer had made me, my only shot at a future, was now rotting in a landfill somewhere. The thought was unendurable.

One of the most pathetic things was how friendless I suddenly was. Before, every little thing that happened, I’d store it away in my brain and tell Summer later that night. Now, whenever I saw a cute dog or a funny commercial or whatever, I had to no one to tell. It was so sad, let me tell you. And the only person I wanted to vent to was her. Sometimes I even found myself having long conversations with her in my head – or at least the version of her that was stored away in there somewhere. Once I jolted upright in bed at midnight and realize I’d been stuck in twilight sleep for an hour, having a completely one-sided talk with her about how much I hated my annoying neighbor Mr. Richards. Was I cracking up?

It was also surprising to me that I still loved her just as much as when she was alive. I was in love with a memory. Nothing had faded in the slightest, and I hoped it never would. When I envisioned my biggest, most golden moments with her, I still got zapped by the electricity that came with her touch, felt the goodness of her smile, saw the light in her eyes. I missed those moments so much it made my chest feel like a sinkhole again. Whenever I thought of her laugh, so goofy and silly, my hair still stood on end and my stomach collapsed into a nervous mess on the floor of me. I guess it spoke to the power of our love that she held that sway over me even in death. Did she know the effect she had on me when she was alive? I hoped to God she had.

~

Because of allegiance to Summer at the hospital, details of the surgery started leaking quickly. In fact, only two days post-Summer, a nurse pulled aside Summer’s aunt’s friend at a grocery store and confided that people were furious behind the scenes. A wrong slide had been put up in the operating room, and Dr. Dill – I couldn’t even think of the name because I would literally drive to his house and kill him if I let myself – had gone into her body on false information. When her vitals started plummeting and it became clear something had gone wrong, the nurses begged him to stabilize her and life-flight her somewhere else with a more equipped operating room, but he refused out of arrogance and kept trying. I could sense it the moment he’d walked into that chapel, so nonchalant and casual: he had done this. Rumors were swirling between nurses that he was already hiding documents and covering his tracks, and because the world is slanted towards rich white men with nobody to answer to, a future lawsuit was looking more impossible by the day. Nobody was even thinking about that yet, but still: someone, somewhere down the line needed to pay for this,
deserved
to pay for this, if only to give the Johnsons closure, and I was already getting the unspeakably awful feeling that they never would.

The mountain of anger in front of me stretched to the heavens, but in this story, there was no clear-cut villain. Summer had been killed by a chain of accidents and negligence and unchecked ego, not a masked criminal with a gun in the middle of the night. There was no villain. Life was the villain. She was just
gone
. It was absolutely infuriating that something so accidental had led to something so final. It just didn’t make sense, and that made
nothing
in my life make sense. The monsters in this nightmare story weren’t evil men with guns or ghouls and goblins lurking in the night, but tenuous, intangible things like numbers and odds and percentages and careless hospital employees. In the end, the girl who was obsessed with odds had been taken from this Earth because of a silly, easily avoidable fuck-up. The most elegant and articulate and profound voice in the world had been silenced for nothing. The love of my life was dead because of a simple doctor’s mistake.

Summer had been dead for two hours before they’d even come out to say anything to the family.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that day, and what she’d known during the surgery and her death, if she’d known anything at all, God forbid. I’d like to imagine that she sank into a peaceful sleep, and that was it. But I wasn’t so sure. She was so strong for her size, and I knew the sedatives probably wouldn’t have worked as well on her as some others. Oh, God…just the thought of her being aware of her own death ripped me in half. And little things about the surgery haunted me endlessly; dark little remarks she’d made about her own mortality that had come off as gallows humor at the time but seemed like eerie premonitions in the rearview. How did she know she was going to die? She must’ve known, right? Why didn’t she say anything? Why would she have willingly gone to her death? I knew I’d have to give up on most of these questions eventually, because they were unanswerable, and this fight was unwinnable. But still, I
wanted
to be mad. I savored the madness. I deserved to wallow in this misery, because I should’ve been there to save her. I should’ve done
something
, anything at all. But I didn’t.

And now it was useless.

When a little boy in my hometown disappeared near a train station and was found rotting in a ditch a week or two later, my town quickly filled with hot, yellow outrage. The killer was tracked down within days, though, and sympathy for the family and devastation for the victim filtered in where the anger had been. Ribbons were tied to lampposts and group prayer meetings were held in coffee-stained cafes and whispery memorial vigils were held two weekend sunsets in a row, paper cup candles flickering in the Florida wind for Little Boy Lost. Summer had been killed just as thoroughly and as concretely as that boy, and yet I knew that none of that would ever happen for her. Nobody would ever sing a hymn for her beside a marsh while the crickets welcomed the night, and her killer would never be captured beside a quiet gas station at the break of dawn and then have to stare down the lights at a big front-page trial before roasting on an electric chair after the verdict came in. This crime was suspect-less, this story villain-less. The tragedy of it all was as big and as open-ended as the sky.

~

I had not known true horror until now. To distract myself from the fury whirling within me, I took out my phone and pulled up the only photo Summer had ever taken of me. That day under the pier with Kevin she’d taken a Snapchat of my back as I’d reeled in what had turned out to be a gigantic catfish, the waves stretching out beyond me as my puny back muscles strained in the sun. At the time I’d been so struck by her caption – “FIGHT” – that I’d taken a screen shot and saved it.

Fight
. That word suddenly struck me like a swordfish and started spinning around and rhyming in my head.

Fight…

fight…

write.

And then it hit me.

26

In the still misery of that night three days after it happened, the idea came to me:
a book
.
Write a book
. A real book, not just a diary. Summer’s book. The one I’d promised her. So what if
Eighty Eight
was gone – I’d start all over again. I had to. I would take the thoughts clawing out of me and turn them into something real. I would expand my diary for Summer, which I still had, and elaborate on it until it was a full book, a
real
book, a complete document of our summer together, through
my
eyes. I’d be fulfilling my promise to her
and
hopefully immortalizing her in one fell swoop.

Part of me thought I was crazy to even try. I could barely walk to the bathroom without collapsing to cry a new surface – how in the hell did I think I was going to write an entire
book
? But I fought on. Ernest Hemingway said to write one true thing and start from there, and so that’s what I did. I took out my laptop and wrote the following sentence:
I love Summer Johnson
. Because I did. And I do. And that fact will rule my entire existence.

My blood warmed as I sank into writer mode. Yes, this was going to be something, alright. I didn’t know what yet, but
something
. A Summer level of something. I would make absolutely sure of it. I would spin this tragedy into gold or die trying. I owed her that much. She had fought this world like hell, and so what if she’d made all the right moves and still lost? It was my turn to head into battle.

They say that if a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. Summer’s name would never be carved in stone in monuments or tributes, but she had still carved her name onto my soul, and she deserved the same to be done to her legacy – but in a much larger sense. And so, with the windswept notion that I was hurtling toward destiny, I held my hands over my keyboard and prepared to etch my vanished girlfriend onto the storm-scraped surface of history – one keystroke at a time.

~

Hundreds, sometimes thousands of words an hour flowed out of me, and in remarkably good form, too. I hadn’t written like that in years, actually – maybe ever. I felt a sense of purpose sink down into my every pore as I wrote every detail of her, every detail of me, every detail of
us
; every flaw every facet every moment until she felt almost real again. Because she was real, she was broken and she was gorgeous.

As I wrote I soon discovered that as an artist, she was the ultimate muse: there was so much to work with, so many peaks and valleys to explore. She wasn’t some one-dimensional cardboard cutout character of a human; she had flaws and quirks and weird little habits that drove me nuts sometimes. She could be cynical to the point of being jaded, she never met a curse word she didn’t like, and no matter how close we got, there was still this side of her that felt unknowable, unreachable, like when you peered into a dark lake and saw its muddy bottoms descend into murky black nothingness. I always got the sense that there was much I would never know about Summer, and I was right. Basically, she was touched by fire – lightning in a bottle. She seemed to know something the world didn’t, and everything from her thoughts to her eyes seemed to burn with that secret. Her spitfire radiance warmed me up for the first time in my life, and soon I became addicted to that heat.

I should’ve known she burned too brightly for my broken world. All I knew for sure was that I would’ve done anything to sit by her fire again for just one more hour. But in the meantime, the least I could do for her was write.

Soon I found that it wasn’t the bad memories of her that pulled me down, the fights or the tears – it was the good times that stuck out at me. It was every moment I’d touched her skin and saw my future; every time she laughed that hall-of-fame laugh in the car with me; every night she’d called my name in the heat of the July air. I was haunted by happiness, because every glimpse of her glory was just a reminder of what I’d lost; a peek of the castle in the sky that never was; an echo of the love I’d never feel again. A passing chill from the ghost of what could’ve been.

I wrote on and on, but like vomit, the words burned on the way out, and when the pain became too much I grabbed my laptop for a break. I don’t know why, and I knew Summer would probably never see it, but suddenly I got the need to message her. I knew she didn’t believe in heaven with a capital H and all that, but I missed the fuck out of her, and this seemed as direct a line of communication to her as any. The prospect of calling her voicemail absolutely terrified me for some reason, and reading her texts – the digital remains of her life – was out of the question. The set of letters and emojis sitting in my messaging folder had outlived my girlfriend, and that was something I could not deal with. So I figured Facebook would be the next best thing.

After I reactivated my account, the website asked for my relationship status. Without thinking, I entered “In A Relationship with Summer Johnson,” because I was, and always would be.

“Thanks,” my screen said. “This information will be displayed once Summer Johnson logs in and approves your relationship request.”

Needless to say, Summer would never log in and approve my request.

I wiped my nose and clicked on her profile. Holding my hand over her photo because I still couldn’t bring myself to look at it, I opened up the messaging feature and wrote this:

I’m still in love with you. Come back

I sniffled and sent the message. And call me a masochist, but after that I scrolled down her page to see what people were saying about her – and the Facebook crowd was saying a lot, surprise of the century. Her closest friends had been quiet, of course, as they knew Summer was mortified by public displays of emotion or affection, but that had not stopped every random acquaintance and classmate and former coworker from crawling out of the woodwork to moan and wail and air-dry all their grievances online.

I bit my lip and scanned the dozens of comments and posts she’d been tagged in, and the first unexpectedly broke my heart. It was from some girl who’d gotten married right after the surgery, and instead of doing a bouquet toss, she’d thrown the flowers into the lake behind her wedding venue. She’d posted a picture of white petals floating on the still surface of a dark pond, along with this caption:

This is for you, Summer, wherever you are. We just wanted you to catch it for some reason. Love and miss you. Wish I could walk through that door at work and see that million dollar smile one more time.

–Love, Brianna from work.

I “liked” the photo with tears in my eyes and scrolled down, but the posts just got more and more annoying and attention-seeking. In fact, most of the kids had mentioned their
own
names, and how
they
were coping, more frequently than they’d mentioned Summer. The way people in my generation ran to their phones to post about the dead had always perplexed me, but in this case it was infuriating. Why were we such whores for attention? These were probably some the same girls who had made Summer feel so inferior with their showoff wedding posts, she’d downloaded the Spark app to keep up with them. What was wrong with us?

I put on a Saviour song and thought about it as I sank back into writing mode. As children we were obsessively rewarded and praised and doted upon –
you mean you finished second-to-last in the race in P.E. class? Here’s a golden star. You’re a star! You’re all stars! And oh, shit, now there are towers falling from the sky and white powder is being sent to news networks? Your world is falling apart, so take ten more golden stars!

So as we grew up into a broken world that had no place for the monsters it had created, we’d transferred this deep-seeded lust for kudos and acknowledgment online and chased our broken American dreams onto social media, broadcasting our grotesque need for validation through the ever-expanding network of Ethernet cables quickly unfurling across the land and encircling the Earth like prison bars. We were a billion little celebrities – a billion little Brangelinas in our own minds – smiling for the selfies and sending them out for a brave new world to gawk at. We had stars on our report cards and stars in our eyes and we were stars in our own minds. We were all lost and searching and drowning out the silence and the pain with the noise, because like Saviour had said, the truth of our burned-out America meant nothing as long as the lie was pretty enough. We were the new American nightmare, so snap some photos of our bulbous wedding cakes – we’d arrived, validate us with your love and your likes.

But I wanted the cycle to end. I wanted people like Summer to stop being immortalized without her consent on a fucking Facebook wall; I wanted girls like her to stop being made to feel inferior because of a few people begging for some stupid marriage spotlight. And in a way, Summer
was
her generation: a girl coming into the light of love; a generation coming into the light of the Internet. How could I prove once and for all that true love lived in the darkness; that human dignity really existed in the shadows?

Soon I got bored with writing and went back to Facebook, as any Millennial would, and within minutes I found the worst post of all, from some redhead I’d literally never even heard of before:

This still doesn’t even seem real! Only the good die young. RIP, Summer. Cancer is such a monster. Please pray for me, y’all, I’m not taking this very well. But at least her death is teaching us so much. Miss ya, girlie, but I am so comforted to know that you will remain in our hearts forever, until…

I couldn’t read anymore
. No,
I thought with a frown that suddenly twisted up from the bottom of me.
No
.
No no no no no. No.
This was a level of narcissism I could not tolerate. Summer had lost her fucking LIFE, and THIS girl wanted prayers?

Okay, hear me out on this one: after being raised around my mother, I’d formed this theory that all healthy people secretly held the outrageously patronizing and megalomaniacal belief that all sick/flawed/challenged people were put on this planet to Teach Them Lessons and Be Shining Examples Of Triumph In The Face of Doom. All this Facebook nonsense was just corroborating that hypothesis. Like, every time a sick person died, healthy people went around saying things like “her life was not in vain, since it taught us all so much about ourselves” and “aren’t you thankful for what you learned from her death?”

No. Summer Johnson was not an experiment in humanity, and she did not die to teach me some corny lesson about Life and Love and Loss and Angels Finding Their Wings. She died because she died. She was a person who had thoughts and dreams and fears and fetishes and failures and glories just like anyone else, and she also happened to get sick and die. Sick people were not put on this Earth for any more or less of a reason than healthy people were, and to imply anything else was both infuriating and just plain stupid. She was not a dancing monkey whose sole purpose was to teach me shit, and I really wished people would get that, but I didn’t know how to tell them without sounding like a dick.

And the saying “only the good die young” was the ultimate disservice to her, too, because it made her no better than any other young person who bit the dust. Like, this one kid I knew who accidentally shot himself while showing off his new gun to his friends at a party? It sucks that he died, but he was a
total
asshole. He would taunt freshman in the halls and call people names and shout four letter words at people for daring to make eye contact with him, and just because he died at nineteen didn’t mean he had anything to do with Summer. She was better than him. A lot of good people died young, that was true, and it sucked. But a lot of idiots died young, too – it was just that no one was allowed to mention it, because that would be cruel, right? Nobody wanted to be the one shit-talking a dead kid, so they washed everyone in the same angelic tones and called it a day. They called death the great equalizer, and it was – because in the rearview mirror, everyone was a hero.

But Summer really
was
a hero. In every sense, she was mine, at least. I wanted everyone in the world to know it, but I didn’t know how to talk about her in a way that wouldn’t embarrass her or seem condescending. It all went back to her modesty: she deserved recognition, but shunned attention. I knew I had to do something to let the world know how golden she was, and I knew I wanted to try to put a period on the end of the abbreviated, unresolved sentence that was her life. I thought that maybe the book could do that, but I still wasn’t sure.

As I reached up to close my laptop, the page refreshed and two new posts popped up on her wall. Amanda was praying for Jesus to meet his new angel with open arms, Bekah was hoping that we would all remember the lessons of Summer’s death forever, and I was headed to my fridge for another beer.

~

The next day I was writing like a madman while listening to a Saviour track,
Say Anything: