The Summer Remains (20 page)

He stood up and picked up a bag I hadn’t noticed him bring. “And now that we’ve made our introductions, I think I’ll settle in before you have another change of heart. And even if you
do
, I’m much bigger and stronger than you are – especially now – so you can’t get rid of me now even if you wanted to. These four walls contain everything I need, including you, and I am staying here indefinitely, so now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fucking pee before I humiliate myself any further by acting like a begging, groveling bitch for one additional second.”

He turned, marched into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him.

~

The next day I had a videoconference with Steinberg and Dr. Dill, the specialist from Alabama who’d volunteered to do the surgery under Steinberg’s supervision, to go over the new plans. Listening to them talk about my possible death was on a level of awkward that I did not even want to comprehend, so I tried not to. But Dill did talk me through everything he’d be doing, and on a rational level at least, it all made sense. My impression of Dill, the man who was going to cut my body open and try to save my life, was…nothing, actually. He was being so clinical and using so much medical-speak that I couldn’t really get any glimpse of his personality at all, which wasn’t that unusual. He was going to split my flesh with a scalpel, not meet me for coffee and some gossip. Doctors were there to fix you, not befriend you. Steinberg was just a rare, friendly gem, and I didn’t expect his level of personality from the others. And in the end, it was decided: because my health was plummeting so quickly, we were out of time, and the surgery would happen in eight days. In eight days I would undergo the procedure that would determine my fate. I could not stop shaking for the life of me.

“You understand the stakes, and what you need to do, right?” Steinberg asked me afterward, during a private moment.

“I think,” I said, and his eyes narrowed.

“No, really. We are going to move heaven and Earth to save you in eight days, Summer, and things are actually looking much better than they were before, but still, this is a maybe-goodbye thing. I want you to know that, and be ready for it.”

I nodded as some ancient sense of purpose settled into me. “Right. A maybe-goodbye thing. I understand. I do. I promise.”

If things had felt surreal before, the next few days were in dream territory. I literally didn’t even have time to think, things were happening so quickly. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for what was coming because I didn’t know
how
to prepare myself – getting ready for an eighty percent chance of death was not something I was not exactly accustomed to. I assured my mom over and over that I was young and strong and would perhaps emerge from the surgery in one piece, but her theatrics knew no bounds, the parameters of logic included, so I just dealt with it.

Most of my time was taken up by the army of well-wishers that descended on me like mosquitos at sunset. (Well-wishers – what did that phrase even
mean
? Who would show up at a hospital and
not
wish the sufferer well, except if they were an evil stepmother with a billion-dollar will or something?) Anyway, aunts, cousins, neighbors, all sorts of family members I had forgotten existed – and not to mention my boss, awkwardly – either called or came to the hospital, and greeting them all and pretending like I remembered meeting Aunt Linda’s new husband and that yes, I totally noticed the Facebook news about Cousin Gina having twin granddaughters, was a total blur. How had so much gone on while I was wrapped up in Cooper Nichols world?

But through it all I sat there in my bed, often with Chase, helping him with Fast Track, the online program he had to do over summer because his reading wasn’t yet on par. Why I cared about something so trivial, I had no idea – I just did. In the eye of the storm, sometimes you reach for anything you can, no matter how small. I guess I just needed to know that something, somewhere out there was real and normal and not revolving around My Problems. Autumn groveled her way into the room and apologized in five thousand different ways, saying she’d spotted Cooper at the beach after a day of drinking at the pier and flagged him down to talk. Her mom had just told her the big news that morning, and, totally heartbroken, she’d blabbed to Cooper and tried to take solace with him about how I’d kept it from them both. I told her I didn’t care, and that I wasn’t mad, because for the most part I really wasn’t. He needed to know, and besides, I wasn’t going to spend my last week before the surgery being angry at people.

Speaking of Cooper, he didn’t leave my side the whole time. Literally: he wouldn’t leave the Plastic Recliner of Uncomfortability beside my bed. Steinberg had confined me to a wheelchair for good, which was fine because A: I was quickly becoming so weak and thin that walking anywhere was becoming crazy difficult, and B. I’d had enough surgeries and been in a wheelchair enough times to know that although it is extremely fucking annoying, it’s also a great way to get people to reach for things for you. And Cooper had to reach for a
lot
of things. I felt ten kinds of terrible that our time together had gone from sitting in the sun to lying around in a fluorescent hospital room, but what could I do? He was an absolute godsend, shooing Shelly away when I needed a moment, acting as a middleman between me and the rest of my huge extended family when I needed to be alone. Our time together had an eerie urgency to it now, and I didn’t really know why. I could guess, though.

When he wasn’t helping me he sat in the corner scribbling away into some notebook that he said was his diary. I didn’t question it. His constant presence created some awkwardness, for sure, and he let his lingering anger about my Summer of Lies slip out more than once. I didn’t question this, either – after all, I was lucky he hadn’t sworn me off forever that night in the garage. He also had to pretend he didn’t see a lot of things he did see, like the nurses stripping me down to perform tests, changing my catheter, and walking me to the bathroom where I would vomit for twenty minutes straight. Being sick wasn’t like what you saw in the movies, where an actor in full hair and makeup lay in a rosy, well-lit hospital room surrounded by flowers and cards and loving family members. In the real world sickness was a messy, gruesome, disgusting, and above all embarrassing business, not for the faint of heart or stomach. It was humanity at its most basic level, which wasn’t even really humanity at all, just animalism. We are animals, and there’s nothing to remind you of that like spitting bile onto your chest because you didn’t have time to grab a cup. But since humans fear oblivion above anything else, we’ve elevated ourselves in our own minds to these God-like creatures in order fool ourselves into thinking we’re headed for somewhere better than the rest of the beasts walking the Earth. After all, why do you think people found fart jokes and poop stories and husbands’ horrified tales about witnessing their wives’ C-Sections so funny? Humans hate being reminded that they’re just animals, carcasses made of water and melanin and bone and blood, and so they laugh nervously at the fart joke to avoid that little voice that reminds them
oh God I’m no better than the animals in the safari videos oh God I’m gonna die one day and nothing will be left of me but this rotten carcass Oh god it’s all futile just kill me now
. We want to believe we are gods walking a doomed planet, both originated from and heading for somewhere else, and so we dart our eyes around and laugh about the joke reminding us we’re animals with organs suspended in blood headed for oblivion. We’re nothing but monkeys toiling away on a watery rock we decided to name Earth, and nothing can save us from that non-fate.

So, like I said: shit was embarrassing. One night I looked back and realized I had left the bathroom door open as I wretched horrifically, splattering whitish bile all over the tile walls. Cooper was crying as he watched me.

I pretended I didn’t notice him.

But through all this, I was grateful, even though I would never admit it because I know it would just piss him off. I loved to feel his warmth and his presence next to me, I loved to wake up in the middle of the night all disoriented and hear the comforting sound of him snoring on the little day-bed across the room, and I loved to watch the nurses flirt with him and then see him refuse them and pay attention to only me, as miserably childish as that sounds. The forced intimacy of it all made us closer than ever before, and he told me all kinds of things about his family and childhood that made me feel like I knew him that much more.

A few days into my stay I did try to say something, though. It wasn’t lost on me that he was wasting his summer with me. I felt sort of guilty and dirty and heavy; like a lawyer or a reality television star or a mom who fights loudly with her children in public without trying to hide it, or any other garbage human. He was playing Scrabble next to me on his iPad, a habit he’d just picked up from me, and I reached over and touched his arm.

“Hey. I just want to say, like, thanks, or whatever. You don’t have-”

He held up a hand as he returned a text from Kevin. “Stop. No mushy stuff. That’s my rule.”

“No, Cooper,” I said. “Listen to me, seriously. You don’t have to do this, and it’s not your problem. You should go home and take a shower or something. Have some fun, and-”

“Take my phone,” he said, barely looking up, as he placed his phone into my waiting hand. “Now break it.”

“What?”

“Break it. Throw it on the ground and shatter it to pieces.”

“No!”

“Why not?” he asked, looking up at me. “I’m sure you could put the pieces back together if you tried.”

“Yeah, but it still wouldn’t work the same after that,” I said, and his expression turned to stone.

“
There
. Now do you get it?
Now
do you understand what you’ll do to me if you push me away again?”

I just thought for a moment. He put his arm up and held it next to mine. “I am you, Summer. You are me. You’re not a problem, you’re a gift. A gift that talks about emotional stuff too often, is a bit too stubborn, and snores extremely loudly, but a gift nonetheless.”

“Oh my God,” I said as I covered my face with my hands. “I really snore?

“Pretty badly,” he nodded. “I could barely sleep sometimes.”

I clasped my fingers together harder. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know, I thought it was funny.” And then: “You may have farted a few times, too.”

My mouth fell open, and then I reached over and pawed at the wall for the nurses’ button.

“Okay, you can take him out now, Cassie.”

~

By the next day, cabin fever was setting in. My room was getting hot and crowded and it smelled faintly of rotting flowers left in the sun, Shelly was starting to annoy the hell out of me, and Cooper, bless his heart, was starting to get fed up with Chase’s constant requests to join him in playing racing games on my TV set’s XBOX. At around lunchtime I excused myself to get some coffee and have some time alone, and on the way back one of the nurses from my floor looked up from the break area and approached me. Her name was Noelle and she couldn’t have been much older than me, and she had a no-nonsense air about her that I really liked.

“So what are you doing with Last Great Hope?” she asked offhandedly as she scanned a dry erase board.

“Nothing. We denied them, pretty much. I said to save the Cinderella stuff for someone who-”

“That’s not what I heard,” she interrupted.

“Oh. Well, what did you hear, then?”

She studied me with mascara’d eyes. “They sent over a dossier this morning. It says you’ve requested a trip.”

“
Oh
.”

I bit my lip as I thought of my mother going over my head to arrange some dramatic Last Trip To Disney World for me. If I wasn’t in the stupid wheelchair, I would’ve marched to her and yelled at her right then and there. Noticing my agitation, Noelle came closer and sank down to my level. It didn’t seem so much an act of condescension as an attempt to, well, level with me.

“Guess someone was meddling, then,” she said. “I figured. But Summer, seriously, I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, and don’t tell anyone I said this, but if the worst happens, like, you don’t want any unfinished business to be left behind. Not that ‘the worst’ will happen, anyway – this is an excellent hospital, and I’ve heard all good things about Dill. But you know what I mean. Wanna know what I recommend? Just to help you, like, deal with things, mentally speaking?”

“Alcoholism?”

“Nice try,” she smiled. “No, you really do need to go somewhere. Escape for a day or two. Or I would, at least. Somewhere close, but where you still feel comfortable. Your mom will probably be a lot to handle before surgery, no offense, and you’re gonna need a break from the action.”

“Okay, um, I get what you’re saying.”

“Good. And Summer?”

“Yeah?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Bring that boy. If you don’t, then one of the nurses is going to snatch him up, and I am including myself in that hypothesis. He is magnificent.”

Five minutes later I wheeled into my room to find Shelly and Cooper sharing a Subway foot-long on the daybed in the corner. They stopped talking immediately when I entered.