Not long after Autumn Mahal and Hank Basara moved in together, she stole a message from Tumblr and hung it in her kitchen. “May your coffee always be sweet, your alcohol always be plentiful, and your bed always be warm with the body of the one your soul wishes for.” And suddenly this was their life. Warm coffee. Smooth sailing. Very little money. Simple happiness. During the day they would drive around listening to Autumn’s pop music and arguing over which gas station was cheapest, and at night they would lie awake in bed and share all the beautiful haunted thoughts that you would never usually tell anyone because they made you sound crazy. They were in love. And slowly but surely, they started escaping the ghost of Summer Johnson. Together.
Autumn’s house felt so different now, so worn and lived-in, like love lived there now. She was both in awe that her life had become like this, and utterly terrified that she would fuck it all up. She also struggled with hiding all the weird gross things you did at home when nobody was around, and once she let down her guard and picked her nose in bed and then flicked it off into the darkness of her room. When she remembered she was not alone, her heart crashed into her stomach, but when she looked over, Hank was silently laughing. It felt like sinking down into a hot bath, and that night she decided she never wanted to sleep alone again. Even when he farted.
Autumn was soaring, even when the part of her that loved Summer was still belowground. Because life breaks your heart. That is how this place works. What you must do is find someone who will fall into bed next to you every night and stare at you with burning eyes and put you back together again. Find a love that replenishes you – the rest will figure itself out. And as the first dogwood leaves in her front yard started fading to golden brown, Autumn found her replenishment.
A long weekend with Hank’s family at St. Simons Island in Georgia brought them on their first real vacation. The most shocking thing about Hank, considering that he was such a depressive, was that he had a close and beautiful and loving family. He just seemed like he was forever floating on the outskirts of it. It was a bit awkward for Autumn at first, but she charmed them, as she always did. Autumn loved his parents, because they were just as cynical as she was. They quickly grew to love her, too, despite her various flaws, because she made their son happy for the first time in years. At their first meeting, Autumn did shove her foot into her mouth when flirtatious old Grandpa Basara remarked that Autumn had beautiful dark eyes that could “just knock somebody unconscious.”
“Oh, I was acquitted,” Autumn smiled, as Hank’s family’s facial expressions slid from amusement to horror. “That woman punched herself in the face at that Nordstrom Rack sample sale, or so my lawyers proved, after the surveillance video of our brawl over the last pair of size eight Tory Burch heels mysteriously disappeared. Best five thousand dollars I ever spent, let me tell you.”
Eventually, they came around. “A force of nature,” Hank’s father even called her after she single-handedly talked the pizza delivery guy into giving them a hefty discount after showing up half an hour late. Hank’s younger sister was gorgeous in a weird, art gallery sort of way, and Autumn couldn’t lie, having a hot sister made him that much more attractive to her. He was beautiful with his two little nieces, patient and kind and funny, and it made Autumn so full of feelings for him, she had to look away before she cried.
As usual, though, Autumn and Hank had totally separate experiences. Hank loved the outdoors, while for Autumn the outdoors were an excuse to break in a cute pair of boots before retreating to a couch and a throw blanket. During the days, Hank would go jet skiing while Autumn suntanned miserably on the deck of their bayfront rental house, eaten up by bugs, unable to concentrate on even her gossip magazines, which were extremely important to her. But things were fine until the last day of the trip, when Autumn was searching through Hank’s car and found a program from Summer’s funeral. She tried to toss it back under the seat and act like she’d never seen it, but something seemed to fall down inside her, and she cried for the rest of the night.
The night after returning, Autumn lounged in a sagging hammock on her back porch only yards from Summer’s family home, as the ghosts beckoned in the night. Soon Hank dropped down next to her and sank into her silence.
“Babe, I wanna tell you something,” he finally said.
“Okay?”
“First of all, thanks for dealing with my family. I know my grandpa is…a bit much, and my nieces are a lot, but you were great, and I’m happy you got along with them.”
“Stop. They were basically the modern Brady Bunch. And besides, my Nani invented being ‘a bit much.’ Your uncle is adorable, by the way.”
“What?” he smiled. “I don’t have an uncle.”
“Yeah you do. The one with the dark hair, who came for dinner the night we got takeout from Outback?”
“What? That’s Aunt Hil, short for Hilary.”
“Shit,” she said. “I thought it was a man! Poor thing. I was calling her Mr. Hill the whole time! I even asked her how it was being a single bachelor at his age. Oops.”
“Well I’m sure you did no damage at all to her self-esteem,” he laughed.
“Sorry! Anyway, I was happy to go.”
He stared at her.
“Anything else?” she asked, and he closed his eyes.
“Yes. I love you. I really, really love you. And I am so glad this is happening.”
Autumn closed her eyes, too. Deep down she had been waiting for this all her life. Barbie smooching with Ken and Disney princess movies and preteen romantic comedies had all prepared her for this moment, when she would hand over her heart to the one who was meant to hold it forever. And maybe the cynics were wrong. Maybe love really was forever. And if she was about to get diagnosed with cancer again, she wanted to freeze-frame this. On the other hand, if she was meant to grow into an old woman instead, she wanted to sit on a rocking chair and share this moment with her grandchildren, children who would hopefully have Hank’s eyes, and soak in the triumph of his love.
Because nothing could compare to a love like this. You feel the ancient forces of the universe propelling you forward, rising and pushing and transporting you to a place you never knew before, and suddenly your life isn’t so dull anymore. It isn’t even really about you anymore – not a You that you have ever known, at least. Suddenly you are noticing things you never noticed before, marveling at things you never glanced at, even your nose is smelling things it never detected before. Bakeries, cheap grocery-store roses, the soft watery scent of a passing baby sucking its toes in a stroller: it is all so beautiful. The rain falls in the afternoon and instead of dreading the soaking walk back to your car, you breathe in the soil-y smell of the water splattering on the pavement and you stare at the sparkle of the endless droplets of water exploding against the blacktop and you take a moment to think about how strange and wonderful it is that you live on a floating planet where liquid falls from the sky and creates life. You rise above the everyday sadness of your world and you walk with a little kick in your step and your eyes are wide and open and ready and suddenly you are not fretting over your phone bill so much anymore. You are being swept away from yourself on a timeless journey of humanity, a journey you are suddenly grateful and humbled to have originated from, into a brave new world that thrills and terrifies and overwhelms you in equal measure. You are smiling at the falling rain. You are smelling the pretty flowers. You are in love. What a rare and spectacular blessing, to be alive and in love with someone with all of your beating heart.
Autumn turned and kissed Hank. For some reason, though, her eyes kept opening, settling on the dark treetops swaying in Summer’s front yard.
~
Two weekends later Hank left town – his aunt was sick in the hospital down in Gainesville, and so Autumn settled into her evening, figuring she’d go it alone while he visited her. So she drank some wine with her grandma before dinner, who chastised her for leaving the mudroom dirty and called her eye shadow ugly. Then Autumn kissed her on the forehead and went out to the porch, where she called her Uncle Spencer. Spencer was decades older and sort of a queeny bitch, but he’d had a hard life, and something in his eyes had always told Autumn there were things in there he’d never let out, words he’d never unleashed, wisdom just waiting to be mined. Spencer was babysitting his neighbor’s kid and didn’t really want to talk, but Autumn got a bottle of white zinfandel and broke him down, and soon they were in deep. And as it always does, the wine brought out two things from Autumn: emotions, and the truth.
“What’s going on with this Hank, anyway?” he asked after Autumn’s third mention of him. “Something’s different with you lately. You seem so…sane.”
“Shut up,” she said. “It’s going really well…a little too well, maybe.”
“Since when is that a problem?”
“Since I’m a self-sabotaging psychopath,” she said, and he laughed. “No, I’m kidding, mostly.”
She went silent. He tsk-ed. “You’re not kidding,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She breathed. “You know, it’s just that…sometimes it almost feels like too much good luck, all at once. I guess I’m just waiting for the storm to hit.”
“Hmm. How serious are you two?”
“Pretty serious.”
“Have you exchanged phone passcodes yet?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d rather expose my colon than my camera roll, and I’m pretty sure he feels the same.”
“Point made. And…do you love him?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Autumn! Do you love him?”
“Yes,” she said then, her voice tiny. “And it fucking terrifies me.”
“I figured,” he sighed. “Listen, don’t be a girl. Don’t make a mess of this. Let it happen. You deserve it. Especially after-”
“Don’t say it,” Autumn said. “Don’t say her name. She’s already a cloud over us, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What?”
“I feel it,” she said, “and I know Hank does, too. Do we honor her by keeping her memory around and let it ruin our relationship by driving us both into depression, or do we banish her existence and see if it helps us?”
He paused, and his voice changed. “Neither. You know I lost someone close to me when I was very young, right?”
Ding ding. This is why Autumn had called – she knew he could offer something to help. “No, I didn’t know, but I’m sorry. That’s the worst.”
He breathed into the phone as the ghosts rushed in. “I know. Anyway, it took me forever to understand that remembering them quietly is the best thing to do. You don’t have to cover your room in posters of them and make a new Facebook status about them every day, and whatnot. But then again, you don’t have to pretend like they’d never been born, never suffered, never died. Keep a candle for them, but don’t let it engulf your life, and don’t let it blow out, either. I mean, they’re here. They know. I don’t doubt that for one second. Things have happened in my life that were absolutely statistically impossible, if you look at it from a scientific angle. They’re around – they never leave. They want you to remember them – they just don’t want it to end you.”
Autumn took a breath, staring out at the flickering lights on her neighbor’s porch. “You are exceedingly smart, Spencer.”
“You are an exceedingly bad niece.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve always been smart. You just never asked me for advice. Also, I’m gonna be constructive here.”
“Yeah?”
“If I were dating you, I’d probably want to kill myself.”
“…How was that constructive?”
“Because. You should tone it down a bit. Take a Xanax. Be positive about life. Find a facial expression that doesn’t look like you just walked in on your grandma squatting over a toilet.”
“Gross. And tone what down?”
“Everything. Your general Autumn-ness.”
The thought made a splinter of panic slide into her. Why was Spencer saying this? Suddenly her mind raced with horrible possibilities. What if Hank wasn’t as amused with her antics as he said he was? He definitely went dark sometimes, but she usually told herself it was about Summer. What if he just didn’t know how to tell her when she took it too far? Was Autumn a big fat annoying joke? Had Hank fallen out of his infatuation with her, and he was just too nice to say it? She’d seen the couples who’d married too young and now hated each other, but stayed together because of kids or jobs or pity or mortgages or any other of those awful things that locked two people in mutual misery forever. Maybe he loved her, or maybe he was just too afraid to break up with her, so he was coasting, delaying the inevitable.
Autumn nodded, breathing through her nose. “Okay. I’ll try. But…”
“But what?”
She sighed. “Can I be honest?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Loving him is so hard sometimes. He likes me so much it makes me shudder, and half the time I’m just begging myself not to make some stupid remark to push him away and make it all come tumbling down.” She paused and heard Spencer’s hope for her over the phone, sparking in the darkness. “But when he lays those eyes on me...”
Hank sped into her driveway at ten that night, frazzled and breathless, and she nearly had a heart attack getting herself together before she met him on her bed. (No matter how much Autumn loved someone, she would never allow them to see her without a little contouring, and that was a cardinal rule.)
“Um, hey,” she said, leaning in and hugging him from behind.
“Hey. Wow, you look good,” he said as she sat next to him.
“Shut up,” she blushed. “I just fell off the couch from a nap, and I haven’t done a thing to myself. I’m sure I look like a disaster. By the way, don’t touch my cheeks, the makeup is fresh.”
“Never,” he said. “And hey, I have something for you.”
“A present? For me? You didn’t have to, I totally wasn’t expecting anything! By the way, this isn’t the Celine bag I was trying to bully your sister into forcing you to buy me, is it? Because if so, we’re going to need to stage some selfies for Instagram.”
“Stop,” he said. “I just saw this book at the hospital gift shop and it reminded me of you so much, I had to get it right then and there and drive it to you.”
He held out his hand, which contained a grey-black copy of Strange Fiction, Summer’s favorite book. Autumn almost wanted to cry, but she forced herself to smile.
“Aw! You remembered!” she said, and then she recalled her annoyance at having him show up unannounced. “But you could’ve called, though. You could’ve said something about the book. Why the surprise?”
He placed a tender-ish kiss on her cheek and then tossed the book onto her lap, a gift from the sky. And she was comforted, at least for now. “I just wanted to remind you that I’m the best, baby.”
And they drank gas station wine and had lazy sex into the early morning.