The Summer Remains (33 page)

I wished so many things. I wished she hadn’t loved so perfectly and died so young. I wished she’d known that she was beautiful, truly beautiful. I wished she’d known the way the world lit up when she laughed. I wished she’d known the way the air crackled and popped and sizzled around her when she entered a room. I wished she’d known she was vital and important and precious. I wished she’d loved herself like I had loved her. But she’d never gotten the chance to, and that absolutely wrecked me.

I tossed my phone deep into the abyss that was my comforter, took some melatonin my mom had given me, and prayed for sleep.

~

The night dripped by, and soon morning broke over the ocean, warm and cruel. The viewing and funeral were both being held in a tacky brown funeral home off Third Street on a cloudy, humid Saturday morning just like any other. A queen was being honored in a dump. So it goes.

I woke slowly, filled all the way up with a dark, solid, heavy dread. This was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, go sit in a hall full of strangers and listen to them air out their grief for their own selfish purposes, but I knew I had to rise to the occasion. Summer was daring me to be okay. Even her sentence, “
everything will turn out okay – it has to
,” was practically goading me to be alright, and so I decided to get out of bed and go through the motions, if only for today.

Before I left, though, I grabbed Summer’s book, printed out her letter, and slid it into the beginning, as an introduction. Nobody was fit to introduce Summer but Summer. Then I hand-wrote and inserted a short note in front of the letter:

When you grow older, your heart dies. This was true in
The Breakfast Club
and it is true now. Your bones get bigger and your toys lose themselves in closets and trunks and cardboard boxes and your dreams become buried under more pressing matters like exams and bills and engagement parties and life insurance policies and before you know it you’ve let go of your desires completely, your soul collapsed, your dreams burned out like the embers of a day-old campfire, and you become content with mediocrity. But for the first time since my bones got big, you made me feel small and new and excited to get out of bed in the morning, Summer. You made me dream again, and I will never be able to repay you for that. This book is at least one small initial step in that direction, though.

So, to whoever is reading this: this is the story of Summer Martin Johnson and the eternal summer she spent with Cooper Nichols on the shores of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, soon after the dawn of a new century. No one has ever been more grateful for three months. Words alone cannot do her justice, but love can try.

All my love,

C

Then I closed the book, took out my laptop again, and typed up a new book cover inspired by Saviour’s last album. I smiled to myself as the printer roared to life and spit out my new cover:

~

On the way to the funeral parlor, my mom looked over at me from the driver’s seat with the same worried frown she’d had on her weathered face for a week. She could drive with the help of these special hand pedals that attached to the steering wheel, but she’d never quite gotten the hang of it, and this was the first time I’d let her take me anywhere in years.

“Cooper, you know I-”

“Don’t ask again,” I said as she jolted to a stop at a red light. “I don’t want any wine before the funeral. You know that drinking is a slippery slope that leads me straight to pills. I’m fine.”

My mother drank often and even dared me to join her sometimes. This shocked people, as they wanted to believe that the disabled were faultless saints who sat there smiling all day, thinking about angels and babies and kittens, when in reality they were normal people who maintained their own faults and habits and neuroses and monsters just like everyone else in the transition from Well to Unwell. And sometimes their bad habits became even worse when thrown through the prism of disability, actually, because what else could harden a human more swiftly and thoroughly than being erased from the eyes of ninety percent of the world? My mother saw the world, but it didn’t see her back, and sometimes that just made her wheel towards her liquor drawer even faster. She broke my heart every day, but I wouldn’t have lived with anyone else in the world. Well, besides Summer, obviously.

“I’m not asking if you want wine,” she said after a moment. “What are you going to do with that book you wrote?”

I fidgeted a little. My mom was always trying to do this; make me envision and prepare for the day when she would no longer be here. That time would come, obviously, and I’d eventually have to deal with being set out on my own, but right now I was trying to deal with one crushing heartbreak at a time. I was a kid in a man’s body, maybe forever.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Why?”

She rearranged her shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with her condition. “Well, don’t be mad at me, but I read some of the book when you were in the shower this morning, and it was gorgeous. Absolutely beautiful. I cried on the first page, actually. Your teachers were right – you really
are
a genius.”

I shifted a little. “Oh, um, thanks, but that wasn’t my – I wasn’t trying to make people cry, Mom.”

She shrugged. “Life makes people cry. The truth makes people cry. Reality makes people cry. It happens.” She threw a glance at me, testing me. “You know, you could always turn it into an Amazon book and use it to start your career as an author. I’m sure Summer wouldn’t mind. It could be like one of those popular cancer books or something, and-”

“
Esophageal Intresia
!” I shouted so loud, she slowed down and looked over at me. “Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. Another long moment passed, and she cleared her throat.

“I want to know something else about her, too.”

“Yes? What?”

“Are you angry?” she asked, searching me with her brown eyes. “With
her
, I mean? You know I loved her, but this is all so…complicated. I know she never told you about the surgery – I could see it in your eyes, that day you found out. She knew what was happening when she signed on to date you, and yet she said nothing. She knew where the cards were going to fall. She had to.”

My stomach turned over as I looked out of the window again. I’d thought about this, obviously, as I’d known everyone and their moms would be wondering about it, but I was still forming a response that conveyed everything I felt.

“I could never be angry at a dead person,” I began. “Summer deserved love, just like anyone else, and she tried to find it in the only way she knew how. I’m just sorry that she felt like she had to resort to lying, and that she thought it was the only way. I would’ve loved that girl healthy or sick, broken or whole. I just wish she would’ve known that.”

“Oh, Cooper,” Colleen said, and for a minute she just stared at me while we waited at an intersection. But then she snapped back and cleared her throat again. “But, still: you bore the brunt of those decisions. Here you are, in pieces, on the way to her funeral. Who knows – maybe your father was correct in doing what he did to me, severing ties before they sank too deeply and-”

“
Don’t
bring up that man on a day as holy as this,” I said through clenched teeth, lifting a hand. “I’m not done yet.”

“Okay?”

“Am I angry at the
situation
?” I asked. “Am I angry at certain
decisions
Summer made? Am I angry that she didn’t share certain things with me? I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out in the years to come, in the way I deal with this.” I paused and bit my lip, something big and blubbery crawling into my throat. “But God, did I love that girl. I was so lucky to get wrecked by Summer Johnson, let me tell you.”

I didn’t know where that last part came from, I just sort of added it on. My mom couldn’t say anything anyway. She was crying too hard.

“I know she thought I was angry, though,” I said as she shakily wiped her nose. “That’s why she was always pushing me away. But at the same time she’d also wanted to leave something behind. She watched her friends post about their weddings and all their nonsense and she started to feel so small, like she’d be forgotten if she died. And that’s the
worst
thing. I just want to prove to her that she did leave an impression, that she was successful, and that my gratefulness outweighs my anger, by a million to one. A
billion
to one. She was a numbers girl – she should understand that.

“And you know, I’m so proud of her,” I said as a smile escaped to my face, my tear ducts pumping again. “She was so pretty and nice and sweet and smart, but not smart in some bullshit, smart-kid-in-the-corner-with-no-social-skills kind of way. Her intelligence was so real and concrete and useful – she could look right into any situation and cut through all the bullshit and see it for exactly what it was. I hope I can become more like that one day.”

My mom sort of shrugged in a sad, weird way as she cried – this was all way over her head – and focused on driving.

“Don’t worry about this, Coop,” she finally said. “You’ll find another girl one day, and get married, and-”

“I don’t want another girl,” I interrupted. “I just want Summer. I’m going to see that girl’s face in every crowd I get lost in for the rest of my life.”

She stared ahead and bit her lip.

“You are better than me,” she said next, shaking her head. “That’s all I know. You are better than me. If I died tomorrow, my life will have meant something, because I improved the world by bringing you into it. I tried to raise you to be good and kind and strong, but you have exceeded my expectations in every single way. I never even
dreamed
of having a son like you, because I didn’t even know it was possible. I am so proud of you, Cooper. I just…God. Wow.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that, as I’d never really been good at taking compliments. Some people considered me self-centered, but what they didn’t understand was that I was only “self-centered” in the sense that all my thoughts revolved around how inferior I was as a human. Still, I reached over and took my mom’s hand, and she smiled and let me.

“I thank the good Lord every day for you, kid.”

“Yeah,” I said. I had a God now, and she was a girl with a scar who wasn’t here anymore, but still, I squeezed my mom’s hand a little harder. Things like this had gotten easier since Summer’s death for some reason, and I hoped I would never go back to that cold boy I’d been before. Old Cooper would’ve maybe smiled in my mom’s direction and looked away, but New Cooper was all too aware of how careless Old Cooper had been with love, letting relationships fizzle out and loved ones drift away. I treasured love now, and I was not about to let something so precious slip away. So I leaned in and kissed my mother on her bony shoulder for the first time in years, making her smile down at me with every muscle in her beautiful and ravaged face.

And speaking of Summer: Saviour’s brand-new song called
The Summer Remains
came on the radio as we headed south on Third Street – a song Summer would never hear, I realized with a stifled sob that came out of nowhere. I stared out of the window again at my sepia-toned town as Saviour’s creepy voice pierced the silence:

Ankles in the emerald waves

Hand in hand, hip to hip, trynna be brave

But what we can’t say, we both know

Our love won’t make it past this horror show

Looking for heaven under these palms, finding hell instead

Getting closer to the fire with every fight, every sip, every breath

Got lost in your glow, thought it was a halo

Turns out that elixir was poison, and those devils, they gotcha on the down low

Now we’re side by side as the day breaks, ‘bout to face the sun

Golden hair, golden skin, the golden ones

Angels headed straight to hell and we both know it, here in these waves

‘Least I got you beside me while we face the flames

But hold up, babe, take my hand