The Summer Remains (25 page)

“Oh my God, you’re a vision!” she cried. We both tried not to notice how sunken in my eyes were, and how obviously the dress hung off my skeletal frame, and how I was aging at warp-speed. We both failed.

Cooper was late, which was unusual for him, and so I buried my attention in my phone and pulled up Facebook to
shamelessly search for validation
see who was pregnant, who was engaged, and who was going nowhere fast like me. The comments had been pouring in for days, because when Shelly Johnson is involved with something word travels quickly, and I clicked on my notifications to see if anyone had said anything new. There was only one comment, from me and Autumn’s old high school art teacher, a sweet older lady who had become sort of a mentor to us over the years:

So sorry about your health setback. Jim & I have been praying nonstop. Remember that in art, the brightest colors always show up next to the darkest lines. Your brightest shades are on the way, sweetie. Blessings & Love, Miss Patti.

I responded with a short little comment underneath, trying and failing to believe in her polite sentiment. I had just as good a chance at never seeing color again as I did at swimming in the stupid shades of the rainbow, and I knew it. Then I went to another messaging app and signed in under my username,
arbitraryonlineusername
. I found a message from Scott, this guy from school that I’d “talked to” for two minutes last year before he’d ditched me for some bimbo named Chrissy:

Hey, sorry we haven’t spoken in a while. I’ve been so busy with work and everything, you know how it is. Anyway, I heard from my neighbor about what happened, and I’m really sorry. I would say good luck, but you’re a warrior and you’re gonna be fine. Thinking of you. Bye.

I went back to Facebook and clicked on his profile. He wasn’t busy with work, he was busy getting engaged. And his bride-to-be looked like a total nightmare, staging cheesy photo shoots for every single wedding-related event. They’d even held an elaborate photo op just to capture them putting their save-the-date notices into the mailbox.
Gag
.

Suddenly I was interrupted by Aunt Susan throwing open the front door and saying a few words to someone I couldn’t see. Then she looked back at me and scream-whispered, “Sum, a boy’s here for you! A
hot
boy!”

“
Susan
!” my mom scolded.

“What? He’s gorgeous!”

“Let him in then, and don’t say a word to him!”

Susan smirked and then stood aside. Cooper walked in, his gorgeousness dampened temporarily by confusion, looking like a kitten that had just stumbled into a lion’s den. I instinctively sat taller in my wheelchair and fussed with my hair.

“Uh, hi there, ma’am,” he told Susan. “I’m, uh, Cooper. A good friend of Summer’s.”

“Hi,” Susan breathed, batting her lashes. “I’m Susan. Her aunt. Her very
young
aunt.”

“Um, hi. Nice to meet you, Summer’s Very Young Aunt.”

He greeted my mom quietly but politely and then made his way over to me. There he was, all six feet whatever of him, dressed in a black suit that didn’t quite fit him that well, a red tie with white stripes, and a bouquet of pink flowers. But he was still gorgeous. Too gorgeous for the broken girl in front of him, and we all knew it. He was strong and I was weak and he was beautiful and I was scarred and he was captivating and I was unremarkable, and that had never been more apparent than now. It all fed into this fear I think all girls have, this irrational little voice that says,
Sure, my guy wants me now that we’re twenty and I look okay in a bikini, but what the fuck’s going to happen when we’re fifty and I look like shit and he’s George Clooney
? My situation was just sped-up: here I was, aging at light speed, decaying in front of his eyes, and here
he
was, apparently as devoted as ever. I could not comprehend it, so I didn’t even try.

His face lit up when he saw me, giving me the fireworks I’d missed on the Fourth. Every time he looked at me was a thrill. Still. Even after all this.

“You look…I can’t. Hi, Summer.”

“I guess ‘I can’t’ is a good thing?” I asked.

“A great thing. A wonderful thing. And oh, shoot, I forgot something. Hold on.”

He disappeared outside again and then returned behind a sleek, expensive-looking wheelchair that he’d painted this icy, silvery shade of blue. It even said SUMMER-MOBILE on the seat in his terrible handwriting. “This is for you. My mom didn’t need it anymore,” he blushed, “so I grabbed it and, like, painted it for you, or whatever. I know you like that shade of blue.”

“Wait, how?” I asked in disbelief. Transparent blue was my favorite color, because it was the color of the sky just before the sun rose
and
immediately after it set. It reminded me that whatever you were dealing with in the present, you had survived your past and had no choice but to face your future, so you’d might as well square your shoulders, chill the fuck out, and deal with what life has put in front of you.

“Um, I don’t know. Your phone case and your comforter are both ice blue, I guess?”

I ran my hand along the wheel as tears burned my eyes. Here was the knight I’d never believed in, steering a wheelchair instead of a white horse, but still – he was here, and I was a believer.

“Cooper, it’s…amazing. I’m gonna be the most stylin’ wheelchair lady in town,” I laughed, trying not to cry. “Can you help me get in it? I’m sweating like crazy in this vinyl hospital contraption.”

After some maneuvering, he lifted me by the armpits and set me down gently in the chair. It was embarrassing, but I didn’t say anything. It’s not like I had any dignity left to lose after that hospital stay and St. Augustine trip, anyway. This chair was much less clunky than the hospital chair and much easier to push, not that he let me push myself, anyway. As he led me to the foyer I tried not to think of how surprisingly strong he was, and of how good his hands felt on me, and of how much I already missed his touch.

“Shall we?” he asked.

“We shall.”

“Hold on, Mr. Nichols,” my mom said. They’d apparently bonded in waiting rooms and hallways during my bout of unconsciousness after the Fourth, and lately she couldn’t go an hour without mentioning him. I could tell she was afraid of what would happen to him if the surgery failed, but what could she do? She was powerless against his charms, just like everyone on Earth, basically.

“Yes?” he asked, and she called him over and started whispering to him.

“Set a good example, please. Don’t eat too fast or too much in front of her. She needs to pace herself or she’ll be sick all night.”

“Oh, wouldn’t dream of being insensitive about her eating issues, Ms. Johnson,” Cooper said loudly as he winked over at me. “The guilt would just eat me alive. I’d never be able to swallow all that.”

“He literally wouldn’t be able to stomach hurting my feelings,” I chimed in. “I’m going to stand on my own two legs today, I don’t need guidance.”

“But if you ever need a leg up,” he said, “I’ll be right beside you.”

Shelly stared at us for the moment and then shook her head and walked into the kitchen. “Whatever. You two are
seriously
weird.”

We left my leering Aunt Susan at the little kitchen table and headed into the sticky night.

We valeted his car at the restaurant, which was a first for me. It took super long for Cooper to lift me out of the seat and lower me into the wheelchair, and we tipped the guy a little extra for waiting. There were no hostesses around, so Cooper held open the door for me and sort of awkwardly maneuvered me through the doorway with one hand. He was so attentive. Ruth’s Chris looked just like any other fancy restaurant, dark and sleek and quiet, with big windows that overlooked a lake and a highway. After we sat at a table near those aforementioned windows, someone showed up with a bottle of Rosé out of nowhere, and we smiled and accepted it.

“So,” Cooper said after we settled in, a foreboding sense of finality settling over our little table. This was it. There would be no more days at the beach for us; no more St. Augustine getaways. Fate had contracted our time together before the surgery to this one final night, and whatever I didn’t tell him tonight would perhaps never get said at all.

“So,” I said, figuring I’d start with the easy stuff.

“Yeah. God, I can’t even believe we’re here. Was it just me, or has this all come at light speed?”

“I know. It doesn’t even make sense.”

“What’s it like?” he asked quietly.

“To not eat?” I asked, motioning at the bread on the table. “I don’t know. Food to me is like the glass of water the waiter puts in front of you whenever you first sit at a table. You could drink some, or not, or whatever. That’s how I see food.”

“No,” he said with hesitant eyes, “to…to know…”

“Oh, to know that I might die in a day?”

His shoulders fell. “I mean, when you say it like
that
…”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I mean, this
situation
isn’t fine, it’s royally fucked up, but your question was fine.”

“I hate to ask,” he said, “and I know you hate talking about stuff like this, but…I just want to know. Looking at you in that wheelchair, I feel so helpless, and I want to know so I can feel how you feel. I want to be right there with you. I wanna go there, too.”

“Hmm. Let me think.” I stared out of the window, comforted by the hum of the crowded restaurant. The day was winding down, giving me perhaps the last sunset I’d ever see. Something that was either an alligator or a large soft-shell turtle – you could never quite tell in Florida – sat on the muddy bank, and cars screamed by on A1A beyond it.

I finally turned to my beautiful Cooper. “First of all, that’s a moot point,” I said. “The first time I heard that song
Live Like You Were Dying,
I couldn’t roll my eyes hard enough. To live with the shocking, Earth-shattering news that you’re going to die one day? News flash: we’re
all
going to die one day, every single one of us, be it tomorrow or a century from tomorrow, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Might as well start living while you’re not dead, you know? And humans’ obsession with death baffles me anyway, because literally everyone dies the same way: your heart stops. A lot of different things can cause that, from cancer to old age to getting run over by an overweight bicyclist to Esophageal Intresia, but still, every human’s death certificate should say ‘cause of death: heart failure,’ since
every
death occurs because of a heart stopping. An Internet billionaire living in San Francisco, and Britney Spears, and that homeless guy at the end of your street? They’re all going to die in exactly the same way. What counts is what they did before that to make them different.”

“You’re different,” he said quietly. “No texts this time – I wanna say this face-to-face. You’re the most graceful person I’ve ever met.”

“Stop,” I told him. “Thanks, but stop. I don’t want to cry tonight.”

His eyes got sad. “Okay.”

“But to answer your death question,” I said, “well…okay. You know when you’re still asleep and you’re at the tail end of a dream, and on some level you know the morning has come and you need to wake up, but then you pull yourself under again to get some more sleep because you’re not ready to face the world yet?”

He nodded.

“This feels like that, but…backwards. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. My soul doesn’t want to acknowledge that it might be going to sleep soon. The whole ‘death’ thing is in the back of my mind, sure, but the rest of me doesn’t even want to consider it a possibility yet. So it still doesn’t seem that real. More
sur
-real than anything. And trust me, I’ve tried, but I still can’t really grasp it. Ugh, I don’t know – it’s all so hard to put into words.”

“Yeah,” he said as he looked down at the table.

“And also,” I said, my voice picking up, unable to shut my mouth, “I guess it’s all just kind of the same fear of the unknown that any other twenty-four-year-old feels, you know? I’m not
that
special. We all think about this stuff.
Am I ever gonna find a job? Am I ever gonna get married? Am I ever gonna find a place in this world? Am I gonna die during stomach surgery tomorrow?
In a weird way, it’s the same. It’s all, like, peering around a dark corner, terrified of what you’re gonna see, terrified to even
begin
imagining a future for yourself because you haven’t even figured out the present yet. My situation is just on steroids. All I can do is just deal with it and hope for a good outcome.”

“You’re my best friend,” he announced out of nowhere, his eyes wide and glassy and unblinking. I looked away.

“Stop. Not now. Not tonight. Put it in a text or something. I’ll cry.”

“You are so beautiful,” he continued, his voice catching in his throat. “You are so special and important and elegant and smart and kind and worthwhile, and you are so much better than me and everyone else I’ve ever known in every single way, and you are the only truth I have ever found in this lying world, and I love you to the floor of me, and it breaks me to imagine a future without you in it, and I just want you to know all that, just because.”