The Summer Remains (34 page)

Diamonds, platinum, wedding bands

What we had, it’s gonna stay

Even though this world, it’s headed for the grave

The summer remains

I bolted up straighter than a sunray at dusk. The song blew my brain open, and all sorts of words started flying out at me and revolving around in my head, including a few key phrases from Summer’s email…

Rings…

Remain…

Say our vows in front of our family and friends…

No one will ever know our story…

I may never get that white wedding…

And all at once, I knew exactly how to make Summer remain.

I grabbed
This Is Not A Cancer Book
from my bag. “Turn around,” I told my mom, who snapped out of some dreamy state and stared over at me.

“What? But the service starts in-”

“Turn around!” I shouted, throwing up my hands again. “Do not disagree with your poor grieving son!
Turn the damned car around!”

“Alright alright alright,” she said as she U-turned into a Krystal parking lot. “But where are we going?”

I set my jaw and willed myself to do what I had to. For Summer. For us.

“Home,” I said. “And then Summer’s house. And hurry – we don’t have much time.”

My mom gave me an uneasy look and then turned and bled back into traffic. We passed the pier, already crawling with people, and I just watched them. I’d been doing that more lately, too, just noticing things. I couldn’t help myself. A middle school soccer team was walking home from the practice fields on the sidewalk along the road, and an overweight girl hung back behind the other chattering girls, staring at the ground as she trudged along. I looked at her face and saw Summer – everyone had a little Summer in them, actually. Isolation, disappointment, the futile hope for a better future. This girl just had more Summer than usual, and so I leaned out of my window and called “Hey, you!”

The other, popular girls thought I was looking at them and started giggling, but I pointed at the one behind, the one they had cast from their group. When I got her attention, I yelled, “You’re beautiful. Truly beautiful. Just hope you know that. Never forget it, either.”

The girl in the back blushed furiously and started walking faster, a new spring in her step, and I returned to my seat. Now that I knew a loss this searing, never again would I take for granted a day I had been given under this burning star of ours. Never again would I fall prey to fear and insecurity and self-doubt and busyness and distraction and all the other things that kept us from loving the people in our lives in the way they deserved. Never again would I overlook outcast teens and widows and orphans and old men and next-door neighbors and the disabled and all the other people in this chronically unloved world who deserved to be noticed and appreciated. Because the best kind of love, even if it ends, pushes out the edges of your heart, expands the dimensions of it and leaves space to let more in later – and that’s what Summer had given me. I was full of her love, and I couldn’t fucking wait to start spreading it around.

As I watched all those varied Jacksonvillians by the pier I remarked to myself how fucked up it was that most of them would never know or care that Summer Johnson existed. She was anonymous to them as the waves that came one after the other, all day every day, eternally. But at the same time it was sort of beautiful to know that there was a big wide world out there, filled with cliffs and oceans and hills and bays and humans, all with their own dreams and agonies and hopes and vices and Summer Johnsons – or their own knockoff versions of her, at least.

But still, I didn’t like that they didn’t know of my girl. Not at all. Summer needed to be acknowledged. After all, she had said it herself – she didn’t care about getting the world’s approval, but she
would
get its acknowledgement. And why not acknowledge her in the way modern society had deemed most significant?

Summer Johnson was never incorrect about anything. She was smart and wise and impossibly self-contained and never made a misstep. But many times I’d heard her say that she would never get a wedding because of her circumstances, and therefore she would never be remembered. And for the first time, I wanted her to be wrong.

And maybe
I
was wrong, too. Maybe I wasn’t my father. Maybe I could still fix this.

“So why are we going home?” Colleen asked as she turned back onto my street. I took a breath.

“I have to stop by your safe. There’s a ring I want to grab.”

She looked over at me, her brow creased into a deep
V
, a trait I had inherited from her.

“You mean your Grandma Nash’s ring? But I thought you were saving it to give to your wife whenever you got married one day?”

“I was,” I said. “And I am.”

Her breath caught in her lungs as her eyes increased by ten sizes and her mouth fell open.

“Oh my God –
Cooper
.”

28

We crept into the service fifteen minutes late and sank into foldable chairs at the very back of the overcrowded, musty-smelling hall. I guess because the crowd was so big, the service was running behind, too, and there was still a line waiting to see her. Summer didn’t want anyone to worry and had kept the surgery news pretty quiet, but still, little bits and pieces of information had trickled out to her extended family and friends over the past few months, so they’d known
something
was coming – but nobody had expected this. It was like we’d braced for a thunderstorm and gotten a blizzard instead. An air of quietly stunned confusion surrounded the random assortment of second cousins and distant friends and former neighbors as they stopped at the casket, awkwardly looked down at Summer’s remains, and said a few quiet words, looking totally unsure of themselves the whole time. I almost got up to say something when some blonde lady stopped at the casket and said what a shame it was that “Sarah” had died so suddenly “from her cancer,” but my mom grabbed my arm.

The funeral home people started to clear out the crowd and ask everyone to sit, and my stomach churned harder than ever as an organ started playing from the corner. I still didn’t know exactly what I was going to say, and how I was going to say it. The thoughts were swirling around in my head but I couldn’t stick them together in any way that made sense, and so I just stared at the edge of the casket, thinking about life, and how much I still loved her, and all the things she would never get to do, and all the things I would get to do, and how both of those things infuriated and devastated me all at once.

I noticed Kevin’s teenaged sister typing away on Facebook a few rows up, posting God only knew what in an attempt to drown out the noise.
Noise
, I thought. Just
what
were we drowning out? Why were we running from our human-ness and masking our beating hearts with Beats headphones? What was so wrong with, as Summer had put it, “living in the dark?” What was so good about shouting about yourself from the heavens? Did that really make your feelings deeper, your relationships more important, your life more vital? Why did my generation have to throw our lives under lights to make them feel real?

I thought of how poor Summer had always stuck earphones into her own ears to drown out what she herself was feeling:
I am alone. I will die young and lonely, leaving zero obnoxious wedding posts to signify that I was here, since love seems to be my era’s main signifier of life. 
So upon hearing her diagnosis she’d finally fought against her instinct to isolate herself and had made one last dash to reach out and find love. In reality this was a rash and ill-thought-out decision, but at the time, it had made perfect sense. Not that I regretted her actions – I was hers and always would be – but not according to the standards of a society that demanded you tie up your love in a white ceremony in front of the world. Maybe I could rectify that, though.

When I was in the seventh grade, my favorite teacher ever, Mrs. Gregory, came up to me and told me the story I was writing was getting away from me. “Too many random things are happening,” she said, her red hair shining in the light from the windows facing the bus loop, “and you’re losing control. Take back the narrative, Cooper. Take charge. I know you can.”

Summer was dead. Her story had been written for her, her narrative overtaken by odds and ends and careless doctors. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t take back control of her story and write one final chapter. I knew she didn’t believe in happily ever after – it was the “after” portion that had always scared her – and yet here we were, After Summer, and it was time for the Ever part. Two out of three wasn’t bad. After all, who’d ever said that both parties needed to be alive for the “ever after” part to ring true?

My leg shivered with a gathering adrenaline as I sat in the back of that sweaty funeral hall. This wasn’t over. Not yet. Not until the fat lady sang. Not until the sad-eyed boy gave Summer her last speech.

After we listened to a hymn about walking through some flowery meadow or some bullshit, Autumn read
So It Goes
by Saviour, which just killed me. Pun intended: Summer liked dark humor. The poem, written for Saviour’s friend who had died of cancer at fifteen, went like this:

you are a 

Dandelion wish

A prayer sent out into thin air,

a hymn that came back cold

A sunset sinking into treetops too early in the day,

blurring greenery

A whisper on the surface of time

all too brief.

you were

Love between bones:

dust to bone, bone to love, love to dust

as it came,

So it goes:

drenched in love.

Then some pastor dude said a few words about how she’d never stopped fighting and kept her dignity until the very end or whatever, which was all true, but still –
bullshit
. Then he asked the eulogizers to get ready. The first was Autumn, who told some funny stories about Summer’s past to try to lighten the mood. I guess she
could
be counted upon to do that. Then a few more people from Summer’s group came up, and after the one-armed army guy Hank started his speech by saying “Summer Johnson’s compassion saved my life,” I started crying too hard to listen, and focused my attention on a plastic tree in the corner until he stopped talking. After Hank was Kim, who had to have the microphone handed down to her because she couldn’t get up the stairs in her wheelchair. “Summer was the only person in the world who ever made me feel pretty,” she began, and then I stopped listening to her, too, because I was breaking inside.

But nothing could prepare me for Shelly. I hadn’t seen her since the day of the operation, but I’d heard she was in bad shape. She’d already lost a good deal of weight, and her skin was as pale as her whitish-pinkish dress, which I knew she’d worn because of Summer’s roses in her front yard. And I don’t know if this will sound mean or even make sense, but this was the first time I had seen her and thought that she looked like an adult.

She stopped at the podium and cleared her throat, her eyes sullen but determined.

“You know, a lot of people are angry today,” she began, sounding surprisingly strong. “A lot of people are frustrated. A lot of people are confused. My daughter’s death feels senseless. It feels random. It feels pointless. It feels like we are being manipulated by the world. But Summer of all people knew that sometimes the most senseless mistakes can teach us the most about the world, and about who we are in the world, and about what to do with who we are in the world.” A few people gasped. 

“According to a good friend of mine who is going to be a very famous author one day, madness is going to strike,” she said, and that’s when I realized she was partly reading from
Eighty Eight
. She glanced at me, and I swore to God, I thought I saw her wink. I blushed, but when a few people in the crowd assumed she’d been talking about me and looked my way, I shook my head and listened in. This was Shelly’s moment.

“Things will fall apart,” she continued, “and you will get some bad letters in Scrabble and, hey, maybe your doctor will even put up the wrong chart before your surgery and kill you. But this is why you must start living today. People often fear the future until they realize the future is now, and that they are living in it. Time will come – that’s what it does. You can push against it, run from it, fight it like you fight the snooze button on a groggy morning, but still, it will run at you like it stole something. It’s how we react that counts. And damn it, my daughter made the most out of her short little life.”

She wiped her eyes as her voice cracked. Everyone waited for her to gather herself, and finally she glanced up at the ceiling one last time, as if pleading for Summer’s help, and then returned to her notes.

“Everyone is scarred on the way to adulthood, but my daughter had to wear her scars on the outside, and she wore them honestly and openly. She didn’t live long, but she did live wide, leaving no stone in the field of life unturned, and all of us in this room were touched by her open arms. She was brave enough to dream her fantasies into reality, and that is human triumph.”

Shelly swallowed hard. “You know, I will never get over the way Summer was taken from us, but I do know I know I will get
past
it. Because she left me with the strength to walk forward. She was the most fearless person I ever knew, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. It means she was brave enough to set her shoulders back and walk straight towards what scared her. She took the card she had been dealt in this life and played it to the best of her ability – no whining, no fussing, just quiet acceptance and progress.”

Rage bubbled up into her voice, but I saw her shift her shoulders and swallow it.

“I know that no amount of words can make this any easier or better. My daughter is dead. But we can still try. I know some of us would like to place blame on certain people and let the fury consume us, but I am here today to tell you that the second you let the monsters see you cry, you lose, and that living well and standing tall is the bravest form of revenge of all. There is unspeakable horror out there, that is true. There is heartbreak and loss and misery and loneliness and disability and hatred and Monday mornings. But there is also beauty and goodness and innocence and generosity and sweet tea, and those are the things we must focus on – the world demands it of us. They can take everything away from us, but they can never take away our spirit. Summer had the worst of the world thrown at her, and she shrugged and walked on – I wish the same for all of you. Also, I urge you all once again not to be angry at the people who took her from us. God knows they will live in the hell they have created for themselves.” She paused. “I love you, Summer. I miss you, and I will spend the rest of my life thanking God for the twenty four years I had with you.”

She glanced at me. “And to Cooper: thank you for granting my daughter her one last wish, and thank you for your unwilling help on the eulogy I just read. Colleen did a great job raising you, and I am going to love you forever. I will do everything in my power to get your books published, I promise. And by the way, you should stop leaving manuscripts in hospital chapels for doctors named Steinberg to find two days later.”

She faced the general crowd. “And to the rest of you: carry on. That is all any of us can do in this very large and messed-up world. As I read in a book called
Eighty Eight
, the only two choices humans are given are to sink or swim. I, for one, am about to swim for my life. Thank you.”

She nodded and left the podium. This was it. It was time. My vision tunneled and my heart contracted in my chest as I gave myself one last chance to back out. The task before me was impossible.

But then I saw Summer smiling big and proud in her wheelchair and stood up. I wouldn’t run like my father. I would face this.

Life is a game of odds. I knew that much by now. It is Scrabble on steroids. There is no order, symmetry, or destiny. We are on our own. Sometimes you win dazzlingly and sometimes you fail spectacularly. That’s just how it is. I learned all that from someone I loved a lot. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find order in the numbers; miracles in the odds; magic in the madness. Summer was the miracle I found in the random chaos of the world, a spirit in the dark. I don’t have to wonder about God anymore, because I found my own religion on the streets of Jacksonville Beach this summer. And now it was time to send her off in style.

As I got up and walked up the aisle, though, I thought of something strange I’d noticed: everyone had talked about Summer in the past tense, with pity in their voices, when there she was, right in front of us in that casket, flesh and bones and love, for one last time. Why not talk
to
her instead of
at
her?

So I tossed my little speech aside as I approached the podium, my surroundings blurring together again like the air was melting. I felt hundreds of eyeballs on me, and I could hear the murmurs spreading through the crowd as I turned and leaned into the microphone. I spotted
Eighty Eight
under me on the lectern, winked at Shelly, and straightened my coat.

But as I did so, the crowd erupted into whispers. “There he is,” I knew they were saying. “There’s the dead girl’s boyfriend. Poor thing. I can’t believe she led him on like that.”

Just love
, I told myself in Summer’s voice, to combat the fear welling up within me.
If you ever lose your way, just love someone. The rest will fall into place. It has to.

“Summer Martin Johnson was and is the love of my life and the best person I ever knew,” I said as I reluctantly faced the crowd, pushing down the ball of terror rising into my throat. “Her love changed me, and made me push myself up on my feet and wish for more, and bla bla bla, you know how these speeches are supposed to sound. But here’s the thing: too many people talk
about
the dead, and not
to
them. So I’m gonna talk
to
you, Summer.”