The Summer Remains (27 page)

“To shine,” I admitted with a nod. “I feel so gross admitting that, but it’s true. To be noticed. To be seen. To have grown up the way I did, to sit and watch everyone else breeze past me and fall in love and get married and the rest…it made me feel so small, so unnoticed, like nobody would care that I was ever alive.”

I looked over at him. “But I was so wrong, Cooper. The way you’ve loved me…you know, we’ve posted zero selfies, uploaded no Instagram pictures, and yet I am
so
happy with the way you’ve loved me. I don’t care if anyone sees this. This is real.”

He frowned, his fresh scent catching my nostrils in the wind. There were still so many things I wanted to know about him. What lived under those chocolate eyes?

“What is it?” I asked.

“I just…like. I don’t know. I don’t like to hear you talking like that, Summer. Even if the worst does happen and it all goes dark, you’ll…people will…”

He wiped a tear off his cheek and jumped up. “Speaking of colors, I wanted to remind you of something.”

He walked over to the railing and started pulling on a rope that was tied to a post. Soon he procured a bucket that had been submerged in the ocean.

“Sorry I was a little late picking you up today, but I had preparations to make,” he said as he lugged the bucket over and dropped it in front of me. “Since you couldn’t go in the ocean, I thought I’d bring the ocean to you. Take off your shoes and put your feet in.”

“Are you serious?”

“Totally.”

I slid off my shoes and dipped my feet into the perfectly cool water. Sure enough, the bucket lit up with the beautiful blue-green glow of the plankton.

“You glow, Summer,” he smiled. “You’re glowing. Still. Even in that wheelchair, you’re still so beautiful to me.”

“I’m glowing,” I breathed as I looked down into the bucket with endless and timeless wonder.

After that we just sat there for a while, enjoying the universe. It was a little cloudier than I would’ve wanted, and the breeze was a little chilly, but the moon was almost full and the light on the water was so beautiful.

“True or false,” I said, thinking back to our first Spark date, when he’d said the same thing to me. “True love lasts forever.”

“Ugh, do we really have to go there?”

“Excuse me for having it on my mind under these circumstances. And besides, that weird old dude at the Oak Tree of Love got me thinking.”

“Okay,” he said after a while. “Okay. Ugh, you know, I’ll never forget when my grandmother died. I mean, I’ll remember it for obvious reasons, but there was more than that. She had really bad Alzheimer’s and she declined for a long time, and by the time she had a stroke and the end was coming, she was literally a vegetable, lying there with no clue what was going on. But even during all that, my grandpa never left her room, and he only ever called her ‘his bride.’ Like, even as she lay there dying, he’d say things like ‘where’s my bride? Has anyone seen my little bride?’ and stuff. Yeah, it was tough. So then she had a bigger stroke and they called us to the hospital the day she started shutting down, and as her breathing slowed and she started taking her last gasps of air, my grandpa leaned in and whispered, ‘I was so lucky to have you.’ Even after all that, even after years of her having Alzheimer’s and staring up at the ceiling and not knowing how to eat or talk or fucking breathe sometimes, he was still grateful. It blew my fucking mind.”

I was crying now. Again. But I didn’t try to stop this time.

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make you sad, Sum. But I definitely think love can conquer death. I mean, words are energy, and who’s not to say that my grandfather’s words – and his love – aren’t reverberating out there in the universe somewhere right now, finding new life in some star a million galaxies away, giving new love to some alien couple sitting on an alien pier on their alien planet?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The odds of soul mates and everything, it just doesn’t-”

“You talk about odds?” he interrupted. “Us seven billion humans weren’t even supposed to happen according to you, remember, Mrs. ‘Life is an Accident?’ My grandparents, us,
nobody
. The word ‘fate’ comes from an old Latin word meaning ‘it is spoken,’ but who spoke it? Where’s the proof that someone made us happen like this? And what were the odds of
us
happening? Nothing, and nada. We are a brilliant little series of happy accidents – you taught me that. So, humans appeared on a watery rock spinning around a ball of flames suspended in the middle of an endless ocean of nothing, and yet you
still
tell me you don’t believe in a miracle like the idea of soul mates? If all that can happen, and all these weird wonderful humans can accidentally pop up on a little blue ball spinning in the dark, can’t you find your one and only true love? Seems like small potatoes in the scheme of things.”

I didn’t say anything. Soon he punched the wooden deck.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just wish there was someone whose ass I could kick over all this,” he said. “I mean, there’s a villain in every story, you know? At least I could blame a disease, like Alzheimer’s, with my grandma. But there’s no bad guy in your story. There’s nobody to fight.”

“Oh, but there is,” I said. “Life. Life is our villain.”

“What?”

“You know, car crashes don’t kill us. Cancer doesn’t kill us. Esophageal Intresia doesn’t kill us.
Life
kills us. We all die in the game of life. Every one of us. It’s a game of numbers and we all lose in the end. That’s why we need to get to winning while we’re still here, and bla bla bla, I am impossibly full of clichés, so sue me.”

“I guess,” he finally said, taking a deep breath.

“Random question, but have you ever been in love before, Cooper?”

“No,” he sighed. “Never been in love. I mean, I thought I’d come close, but no. Nothing compares to…this. To us.” He looked over and rested an arm on my wheelchair. “To you. I’m just…stuck in you, Summer.”

We stared out at the water again. I was shocked at the amount of affection that could flow between us sometimes. We just…
got
each other, I guess. He was on my team.

“Why do you ask? Have you?”

“Psh. Obviously, no,” I said. “There were a few little things that happened here and there, but never
love
. I actually got dumped by this one guy before we even became official. I didn’t even know that was possible. It was a disaster. He said we was too busy with work and stuff to date anyone, but at a dinner party I overheard him telling his friend that he was basically repulsed by me and only talked to me out of pity.”

“And when he confessed his undying love for men, were you surprised?”

“Stop! It was fine. When he sent me the text saying me wanted his space or whatever, he used this excuse that he ‘didn’t think I was smart enough for him,’ and so I just looked up at the award I’d gotten in seventh grade for winning Florida’s statewide spelling bee and felt nothing at all.”

He stared at me. “See, that’s the difference between you and everyone else. Any other person would’ve torn into him. But you’re different. You operate on a higher plane.”

“Whatever,” I said again. How was it that he believed in me so thoroughly? How did I tell him that he made me feel so brave, I could just get out of my wheelchair and run out into a storm in my best dress and dance in the rain like an idiot? “Cooper, I didn’t…I didn’t know what love was until you. I didn’t know how to
feel
until I met you.”

“Wow, that gives me some strange sort of satisfaction,” he said, and I pulled in my legs and wrapped my arms around my knees. I was always cold these days. “What’s your biggest regret?” he asked next.

“Not meeting you sooner,” I said, and he smiled. “And also, like…”

“What? Tell me!”

“It’s stupid, but once again, I feel like I was never really
heard
. Like, I was always marginalized because of the scar and stuff, and I never felt like my voice mattered. You have no idea how isolating it was – there was just this barrier between the world and me, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was so hard to compete against all the Facebook girls with their weddings and everything, with my…
situation
I had going on. But that’s all stupid stuff.”

“No it’s not,” he said. “Stop talking like that. You’ll be heard, no matter what happens. Trust me. And I have sort of a good feeling about this, anyway. You’re young and strong – relatively, at least. This’ll just be a bump on the road.” He swallowed.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to believe him. “You’re right. I’ll be fine.”

“Wow, so you’re not such a defeatist after all!”

“Wait – really? Do you really think I’m a defeatist?”

He shook his head. “No. I was kidding. I think you are honest, and I think realism is the best armor anyone could ever give themselves in this fucked-up world.”

“Okay, good.”

Suddenly a pair of lovebugs landed by my hand, and I smiled as I watched them cavort with each other – until I realized what was actually going on. They weren’t playing at all, but one of them was hurt, and the other was struggling to get it flying again, and the effort was dragging both of them down.

I looked over at Cooper. “And one more thing,” I told him. “I appreciate you sticking with me after that night in the garage more than words can explain, but still, I am so sorry about this summer. I am so sorry for doing…all of this to you. When you matched with me on that app you thought you were signing up for a summer romance by the sea, and it has been anything but that. I’m sorry.”

“Stop,” he said, but the insistence in his voice sounded flimsy somehow. “Stop. You’re going to be fine, and you’ve done nothing to me, and-”

“No, I’m
serious
,” I interrupted. “If I could go back and un-download that app and undo all of this to you, undo
me
to you, I think I would.”

“So we’re still on this subject, huh?” he asked after a pause. “We’re really back to this again? You think I
regret
falling in love with you?”

I chewed on my lip. “I don’t see many other scenarios.”

He leaned back and let out a long breath. “Your parents’ marriage,” he said. “You liked when they were married, right?”

I stared out at the moonlit sea as the halcyon scenes of my parents’ marriage suddenly stretched out before me, shimmering like the luminous waves. Oh, God, did I miss those days. I’d been thinking about them a lot lately, actually. In my mind’s eye I suddenly saw my parents as the people they’d used to be, before the drifting and the separate bedrooms and the harsh words that would pass over the dinner table. I saw them holding hands during Disney World weekends in July; I saw them stealing glances into each others’ eyes at the pool on Labor Day when they were supposed to be babysitting the neighborhood kids; I saw them kissing in the rows of firs under the Christmas tree tent in the Big Lots parking lot while I giggled with my friends and pretended to be grossed out but secretly shivered with the gleeful, dazzled bravery that can only be felt by a young child of two people lost in deep love. Those times were gone, and I was no longer that little girl with Daddy and Mommy at her side, but the memories remained, and whenever I felt lost in the waves of the world I would sometimes find myself clinging to those scenes with everything in me.

“I mean, yes, obviously,” I whispered.

“And you’re a little mad at the world about how things went down, and you kinda wish they could’ve remained happy and stayed together, right?”

“More than anything,” I breathed.

“And did their eventual divorce make your moments as a happy, whole family any less special? Do those childhood memories blaze any less brightly in your mind because of your anger about how they ended?”

“No,” I said, “but-”

“There is no ‘but,’ Summer. You created one perfect little summer for me, and I’m grateful, and I’m gonna take it with me, no matter what happens. This summer will remain. I promise.”

The wind whispered at our backs, and for the first time, I actually believed what he was saying, and felt a little better about everything. Another pause followed, and then: “Cooper, do you think you’ll ever love again, if…
if
?”

“Stop,” he said, the muscles in his neck tensing. “Don’t even talk about things like that. That’s not gonna happen.”

I could tell the question troubled him, so I let it go. “You’re right,” I said as I shifted a little in my wheelchair, the breeze chilly on my neck. “You’re right.” There were so many more things I wanted to tell him, so many things I couldn’t put into words because he was still too gorgeous and I was still too awkward and this was still all too surreal, but I made a mental note of how to maybe fix that when I got home. Hiding behind a keyboard one last time wouldn’t kill anyone.

“But if anything
does
happen,” Cooper finally whispered into the July breeze from beside me, his voice a quiet prayer, “remember this: I’m gonna be your boyfriend forever, Summer Martin Johnson.”

21

Shelly woke me up at five the next morning. We held each other for a few minutes, or rather
I
held
her
while she cried, and I couldn’t deny that I felt a little guilty for abandoning her this summer. But I had made my choices, and I was mostly happy with where I had placed my time. I just wished I had more to give.

Soon we started shaving my stomach and bagging up my toiletries and doing all the other last minute things that constituted getting ready for a major surgery. I wheeled myself out onto the porch at six forty and smiled as the sun started peeking over the sea down the street, illuminating my perfect little corner of the planet. The first winds of what felt like an early cold front had filtered in overnight, the coolness alien on my summer skin. Esophageal Intresia and not being able to eat fucking sucked, but still, this had been a good life. I was pretty sure of that.

I took out my phone and called Cooper. As I put my hand to my ear I noticed how different it looked compared to when I’d met him. My wrist had shrunken considerably, and my arm was now covered with the fuzzy baby hair associated with malnutrition. I was so different from the stronger, braver, tanner girl I’d been at the beginning of the summer. But I was still strong in some ways. After all, I still braved the paralyzing case of butterflies Cooper still gave me every time I talked to him. I couldn’t believe I’d done it – fallen in love this summer. What had seemed like such a pipe dream had fleshed itself out into something that was so real I felt it all around me, heard it humming in the silence, saw it sparkling in the dark. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected Cooper. Never.

I thought about where I was before him, and the problems that faced me, just like anyone else my age. Was I any more mature now? Had I gotten any more of my proverbial shit together? I guess I was happier, which was some small success, but did that
really
change anything? And I decided I didn’t know. I didn’t know if love could save me any more than my doctors could. But wouldn’t it be nice to think so? Wasn’t it pretty to believe in the rescue?

“Hi,” Cooper answered after four rings, his voice sleepy and comforting.

“Hi. I love you.”

“And I love you.”

“God,” I breathed as I looked at the sunrays falling on the palms and tried to forget about this weird, non-goodbye goodbye period of the last few days. “This place is so beautiful.”

“What is?”

“This life,” I said. “This world.”

A semi-awkward silence followed. “Oh. Yeah.”

“I am so glad I downloaded Spark,” I said for probably the tenth time.

“And I am so glad I didn’t creep you out too much and make you ignore my messages.”

“Ha. See you at the hospital?”

I could hear my mom, who had demanded to drive me there, tearfully preparing a Coffee Pot of Doom in the kitchen. I noted how similar this scene was to the day I’d first downloaded Spark and met Cooper: a porch, a phone, a girl, a wish.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said. “Shall we?”

“We shall,” I said. And then we prayed.

Shelly drove me to the hospital with the windows rolled down. As we hit the highway, Saviour’s biggest hit,
Hellraisers
, came on, and I hummed along as the day was born:

Palms by the water, lights up in the sky

Wading in pools with you while my youth flies by

Pressing pause on our dreams, drinking in dusty basements

Sticky July days with no pressing engagements

You got one hand on the wheel, the other on my dead heart

And that’s when all the bad thoughts start

I thought I was destined for something greater than this

But turns out fate, it had you in mind, kiss kiss

Fucking around out here on these streets

Ruining ourselves with Fast Car on repeat

My mom calls us hellraisers for the trouble we cause

Lighting up at the park, scoffing at stupid laws

But here with you, boy, I know why they call it ‘raising hell’

Your love made the flames rise up and make me unwell

(Unwell, raising hell)

Don’t know what happens next in this life, this game

All I know now, my friend, is that I’ll never be the same

These feelings, they’re sinking right down to my DNA

(Gotta run from what you love before it burns you at the stake)

So if history repeats itself, God knows I’ll run from this love

(Unwell)

Run, run, run away

(You raised hell)

I shivered and changed the channel.

Checking into the hospital was beyond surreal, filled with wardrobe changes and mile-long instruction lists inspected with a counselor lady and stacks of paperwork that required me to literally sign my life away to Dr. Dill. Soon I found myself lying alone on a hospital bed in a light blue gown in a small room on the second floor. This was where I was supposed to meet whoever wanted to talk to me before the surgery, which was scheduled for ten AM. They were only letting people come in one at a time, something about occupancy rules, I don’t know. First was my precious little brown-haired brother. It pained me to see him so scared and nervous as he shuffled in, his dark eyes darting from side to side.

“I love you so much, stinky,” I said after he came to my bed. “You’re so smart and funny. I’m really lucky to have you as a brother. You feeling okay?”

“Yeah. Love you too,” he said quietly. I squeezed his arm.

“Hey, do you remember when I used to take you to Sierra Grille, when you were really little?”

“Yeah,” he smiled, warming up. “We’d get Southwest Burritos and sit on the benches by the window, and you’d let me get a raisin cookie even though mommy never let me have them, and then we’d lie to her when we got home and say we went to Subway.”

I smiled and bit my lip. “Yeah. Never forget those days, okay?”

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “And, uh, I wanted to tell you something, too, just in case.”

“Yeah?”

He took a deep breath and fiddled with his fingernail. “Thanks for being my mommy when mommy wasn’t being my mommy.”

“Oh, Chase…”

I couldn’t say anything, so I hugged him instead. Just like with Kim, some things didn’t need to be put out there. They just
were
.

Next was my dad and Nancy, his wife. She was crying. He wasn’t. She just sort of awkwardly stood back while he knelt beside me, and I gave her a polite smile and then faced him.

This was it. No Chase around to distract us from the awkwardness; no conversations about the weather to avoid the fact that we didn’t know each other. The time for the truth had come.

My father was a failure as a parent, something I had accepted with sadness long ago and quietly forgiven him for. Still, at the time I’d gleefully told myself that I’d filled in the Dad-shaped hole in my heart with dirt forever, and that whenever he’d surely come back to my porch begging for his little girl back one day, I’d sneer at him and slam the door in his face. But the saddest thing was that he never came back. He’d never even cared about my preemptive rejection, and he’d probably preferred having me out of his hair so he could press restart on his life with his new wife, anyway. It felt like seeing a creepy guy approach you in a bar and getting yourself all ready to turn him down and revel in the hot satisfaction of rejecting him, only to have him breeze by without even noticing you. Sometimes a kid just wanted their dad to sit by their bed and put a hand on their knee and tell them everything was gonna be alright, and my father’s steadily increasing remoteness had taken any of this behavior out of the equation. But I was okay. I’d found my heroes in books. And a dating app.

He cleared his throat. He’d never really known the right thing to say, which was fine, because that was sort of His Thing. He was awkward, and it was kinda cute. But something told me it wouldn’t be so cute today.

“Summer, you’re going to be fine and everything,” he began, his greying blonde hair shining in the light from the window. “And I know that, but still, I, uh, wanted to say some things to you…just in case.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. Lots of people said things like “just in case” in hospitals.

My dad smiled wistfully at something I couldn’t see, his brown eyes creasing in the corners. “You know, Sum, one time when you were four, you were in the hospital for a while, and I had to stay with you and miss a work party I’d been looking forward to. I’ll never forget this next thing: after you overheard me talking to the nurses about missing it, you sat up in your bed and said, ‘I don’t want to be Summer anymore.’ I asked you why, and you crossed your arms and said, ‘Because I’m a boo boo.’”

He looked down at me. “You are not a boo boo, Summer. You never were. You’re a blessing. Some people spend so much time loving the ones around them that they forget that
they
are loved, too. I am grateful for every second I get to love you, Summer. Do you understand that?”

I nodded and glanced away.

“You know, you are the most selfless person I have ever met,” he continued, his voice cracking. “And I mean it. You never
ever
feel sorry for yourself about your scar and everything-” which was highly inaccurate, I noted to myself, I just didn’t complain about it out loud- “and you’re better than me. You’re the strongest person I have ever known, but more than that, you’re
quietly
strong, which speaks so much more of you. The world doesn’t deserve you, and neither do I, and I’m so sorry I stepped away, and if I could replay every single second of your childhood after that day and put myself back in your life, I would, and…and…”

He trailed off. It was killing me to see him like this because of me. (Pardon my choice of words.) Finally he made an awkward, throat-clearing sound. “And also, um, you’re not, you’re not to blame…it’s not your fault about the divorce,” he spat out as Nancy fidgeted in the corner. “It…it was never going to work out between Shelly and me anyway. Do you get that? I know how you must feel, and you need to understand that none of it was your fault, and, yeah...”

I nodded again, and he rested his hand on my arm as I guiltily watched Nancy start to weep in the corner. “I am so grateful for you, Summer,” he repeated. “You were such a blessing.”

I yanked my head over at him.

“
Are
,” he said quickly. “I meant to say
are
.”

Shelly was next. Her dark hair was a mess and she’d probably been crying all morning, and she looked scared shitless. She just sort of stopped beside my bed and pawed at my arm, unsure of what she could and couldn’t touch. By now she knew that any overt show of emotion or fear stressed me out in hospitals, and I could tell she was holding stuff in. A lot of stuff.

“I can’t believe it’s finally here,” she finally said. “You can talk about something, you can prepare yourself for something, but when that ‘something’ finally arrives…”

She shook her head and looked down at me. “Are you scared?”

“Yeah. But I can deal with it.”

Her lip quivered, and then she completely broke down. She bent over and sobbed against my arm.

“That’s just it,” she cried. “I am so sorry for all the things you’ve had to ‘deal’ with in your life, Sum. You deserved so much better than this. If I could take it all, all the pain and suffering, and feel it as my own, I would in an instant, you have no idea. I want to so badly. I am so sorry. It should’ve been me,” she sobbed, again and again. “It should’ve been me.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I just let her cry on me. Because all at once it occurred to me that my mother was strong. I had mistaken her exuberance for weakness, when all along she had been the one propping up my family when we needed her the most. She’d literally given up her adult life to care for me, stepping into the role of mother
and
father after my dad’s exit, and suddenly I found myself filled with gratitude. Empathy was worth its weight in gold, and here she was, spilling her empathy all over me in the form of her tears. And right then and there, I stopped expecting her to be the person I wanted her to be, and accepted her for the one she was.

Which all just fed into my guilt even more, actually. Guilt that I was lying here on this gurney putting everything through all this misery because, AHHHH, my stupid fucking body didn’t work correctly.

She wrapped both hands around my cold face. “Whatever happens, I will always be your mommy, and you will always be my little girl. Not your friend, not someone called Shelly, but your
mom
. Do you understand that?
I will always be your mommy
.”