Autumn awoke the next day with a hall-of-fame hangover and a darkened mood to boot. But it didn’t go away. Spencer’s warning had opened a chasm in her, and she felt it opening, deepening. As the week went on she started drinking wine with dinner, and then with lunch, and then with brunch. And the worst thing, the thing that made her really panic, was when she started hearing the voice, the same one that had made her flee from every bit of happiness in her life up to this point. Leave, it said. This is going so well. He loves you. Lose interest in him. The clock is ticking. Leave.
And this time, she couldn’t silence it.
The strangest thing of all happened when she walked into work one Monday to find an almost empty office. A message on the whiteboard said the company had “restructured,” aka fired almost half of their workforce. Teary-eyed girls were packing staplers and pens everywhere she looked. She cringed, crept to her own cubicle, and then saw that, yes, it was empty, and she’d been laid off, too. She thought of all the times she’d come in late, all the times she’d mouthed off to coworkers, all the times she could’ve done more to keep her job. And then, for the strangest reason, she felt relieved.
“Congratulations,” a passing guy from sales said.
“Can you not?” she hissed. Congratulating someone on getting sacked – what a dick.
“What?” he asked. “I was just saying good job on the promotion.”
“You were…the…what?”
He stared at her. “I think you should maybe go see the boss lady.”
Two minutes Autumn was corralled into the cramped corner office belonging to Lisa Simcox, her bony, middle-aged supervisor who had the body of a coat hanger and the face of a confused racehorse. She smiled literally all the time, her eyes large and empty and terrified like a child lost at a water park, and she was in the middle of a nuclear divorce with another loser stuck in middle management. Becoming Lisa was Autumn’s worst nightmare, and just looking at her made Autumn shudder. It also made her hate herself for having such knee-jerk negative thoughts about someone who was so clearly helpless and miserable.
“You’re a true asset to the company, Autumn,” Lisa said once they sat down, smiling that suicide smile of hers, so off-putting this early in the morning. Her business suit looked like it had been made of recycled plastic, and the plant in the corner was an inch from oblivion. The children in her photos had dead, hollow eyes, and it made Autumn look away. “You’re bright, you’re personable, when you come in here every morning it’s like someone turned on a light. Sure, you have a mouth on you, but so do all the greats. I was just telling Denise in marketing, heck, we’d be lucky to have ten more Autumns around here, you can be dang sure of that!”
Autumn didn’t know what to say.
“Is something wrong?” Lisa asked, eyes growing even larger, if that was at all possible.
“No, I just…I thought I was getting fired, that’s all.”
“Heavens no, sweetheart!” she said with a tragic little laugh. “We were just staging your things in the break room until we finished reorganizing. In no time you’ll have an even bigger cubicle, and you’ll be back to work, yes siree!” She bent down and started flipping through a filing cabinet. “Now let’s get all your paperwork situated. Your raise this year will be four whole percent, followed by a slight bump in benefits next year and an invitation to our official managers’ holiday party at the Ramada Inn downtown. Last year they even let us each take home a champagne glass…”
As Lisa rambled on, Autumn sat there and saw her future stretching out before her like vast sand flats at low tide on a January day. She saw ugly suits, careers that stalled in middle management for decades, free champagne glasses that cost seventy-nine cents, kids with dead eyes being raised by teenagers at tragic after school programs, staring out from sad cubicle picture frames. Shitty lives leading to shittier lives. Then she saw herself being sacked at forty-six years old for a twenty-three-year-old college grad who would do her job for half the price, the fate that was no doubt hurdling at poor Lisa faster and faster by the day. It made Autumn want to reach out and hug her, warn her of what can happen to people who lost sight of what they loved about the world. And suddenly Autumn wasn’t so sure if she was making the most of the life she’d been allowed to keep while Summer’s had been taken away. She saw herself getting up, thanking Lisa for the opportunity, turning it down, and creating her future. She saw herself breezing triumphantly out of the office, an instant legend, the girl who’d quit on promotion day to follow her dreams. But what were her dreams, anyway? What would she chase? What was her plan, besides this job?
And the fear of it all made her decide to sit taller and take a breath. “Thank you so much for this opportunity. I can’t wait to show the company what I’m capable of,” Autumn said with the acute sensation that she was falling backwards, her words and her smile as plastic as Lisa’s suit.
For some reason this meeting jarred Autumn, gave her a glimpse of a future she didn’t want, made her fear she was headed towards something she’d never get to take back. So she got dark. As the days went on, the fights with Hank escalated. Autumn thought she had outrun the ghost of Summer, but it started catching up with her again. If Summer couldn’t succeed, Autumn didn’t deserve to, either. So she lost her interest in work and stopped going to Pilates and began stockpiling Hershey’s kisses in that hidden compartment in her car under the gearshift. Even when they were half-melted, she would still shove them into her mouth, punishing herself with chocolate poison. Hank was her only constant, but as her appointment loomed ever closer, even that was thrown into question. Because soon there was another problem: it was engagement season, and everyone was getting fucking hitched, again. It added some intangible pressure to their relationship, like either of them could fall off a cliff at any minute and land in a pile of white taffeta. They could both feel these pressures seeping in, getting between them, society and rules and fear and all the other things that kept people away from each other. Because Hank and Autumn were not built for marriage. He was damaged and she was diseased. They were built to fall apart, and if they weren’t, Autumn would wreck them herself.
Early afternoon. Hank was dropping Autumn off at the hospital for her November appointment, and they’d been locked in a tense fog of anxiety and unsaid words all day. She’d been seized by an anxiety attack that morning, a cold wave of dread rolling down over her, so she’d thrown herself down a vortex of WebMD articles until she’d convinced herself that not only did she have cancer again, but she’d been stricken with Mad Cow Disease as well. She’d gotten diarrhea after a trip to Burger King the week before, and rather than accepting this as the karmic punishment everyone got for eating at Burger King because Burger King was fucking disgusting, she was suddenly sure she’d somehow consumed diseased beef, and she was now only days away from a tragic and dramatic death. As Hank drove, she clung to that anxiety with everything in her, silently punishing him for daring to disagree with her self-imposed death sentence.
At a stoplight Hank started playing some war book on Audible through the speakers.
“Oh, come on,” Autumn said as she reached over and turned it off. “You’re boring me to death, and I’m already dead inside.”
“Could you chill?” he asked, and she threw him a look that could’ve started a forest fire. Spencer’s voice called out in her head: tone it down. But she couldn’t.
“Okay, sorry,” Hank said. “I won’t question your decisions anymore. We all know you’re an…opinionated feminist.”
“I prefer life-ruining she-devil,” she smiled.
“Whatever.”
It was silent for a moment. He’d been quiet a lot lately, actually, and she didn’t even want to think about why.
“What are you thinking about right now?” he asked a few minutes later.
“About how I’m thinking of doing a red wash at the salon tomorrow.”
He looked over at her. “Really? Now?”
“Yeah. I really want red hair. But, like, dark red – merlot red. Lindsay Lohan at her height, before the crack and the daddy issues set in.”
He shook his head, still not seeming to understand. “Why are you thinking about this right now?”
She stared out of the window as a palm tree passed. She saw Summer’s face looking back at her. “If I didn’t run from some of the things in my life, Hank, they’d suffocate me.”
He pulled into a parking spot at First Coast Cancer Center. Just the sight of it made Autumn’s stomach sink. “Okay. Fair enough.”
Autumn looked around. “Hey, why didn’t you pull into the entry circle thingy?”
He stared at her. “Because I’m coming with you.”
“What?” she asked. “My grandma is already leaving her volunteer job early to come, and you wouldn’t be able to come inside without meeting her. Besides, do you really want to sit through all that?”
“…Um, do you really think I drove you all the way here expecting to not come with you?”
She shrugged. “I just figured you didn’t want me to be late, like usual.”
“Well, that too. You’re probably going to be late to your own funeral, come to think of it.”
“Oh,” she assured him, “I will be. I already wrote it into the will I had to make when I got cancer. My casket is going to show up no earlier than twenty minutes late, just for a bit of added drama.”
He smiled, and she tried to gauge how he really felt about this. Looking at him was like looking at a thunderstorm from directly below, instead of from miles away: you could see the clouds boiling and folding over on themselves, but it was still impossible to gather the actual intensity of the storm from so close – not until the seal broke and the rains unleashed themselves, at least.
“You’re sure you want to come?” she asked one last time.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He brought a hand to his forehead and crumpled his face, staring down at the floorboard. “This is all scary for me, too, you know. It terrifies the shit out of me, actually. I want a future with you, and maybe marriage, and maybe kids. Why can’t you respect that? Why would you not let me come?”
“But why do you want all that?”
“Because I can’t find my way out of you,” he said, and just like that, she came undone.
Hank walked her inside, and something funny happened: Nani met Hank and absolutely detested him. She’d been living with Redmond, and somehow they hadn’t crossed paths yet. Things got off to a bad start when he walked in, mistook her for a hospital worker, and politely asked her where the bathroom was. “You think I must be a sanitation worker because my skin is brown?” she spat while he ran for dear life. Things only slid downhill from there. They disagreed on where Autumn should sit in the waiting room, which magazine she should read, how she should rest her leg when it cramped up because of her stress.
“Why’d you stop?” Autumn asked sarcastically after they both gave up on their latest argument and turned away. “I haven’t gotten this much attention since prom.”
“But you didn’t go to prom,” Nani said. “You were grounded. I locked you in your room that night, remember?”
“Oh, you’re right! I didn’t go.”
“Figures that you lied,” Nani said. “Just like when you drove my new minivan into a lake and then said someone stole it out of the driveway and crashed it while trying to escape. We all knew it was you when the car was towed out of the water and it was full of Krispy Kreme boxes.”
Autumn rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, that happened one time. And I still maintain that a homeless vagrant stole the car and crashed it.”
“No. A lie is a lie.”
“Come on, she doesn’t lie,” Hank said, “she just suffers from a tenuous relationship with the truth.”
“How would you know? You have known her for a week,” Nani sniffed.
And then Autumn started tearing up. She wanted to be okay, but sometimes you just weren’t okay, and that was okay, too. Cancer wasn’t okay. Chemo wasn’t okay. This being your life wasn’t okay, not when there were so many people out there who threw away their okay-ness like it was bad milk.
Nani rolled her eyes, and Hank put his hand on Autumn’s leg.
“Autumn,” Nani said, “can your friend save the funny stuff for when you’re-”
“You guys!” Autumn screeched, and both of them froze. “This is hard for me. You have no idea. I used to bring Summer to all these things. I would sit in these same chairs with her and stare at these same walls with her and she would hold the hand that I’m looking at right now. I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’ve got an entire wedding planned on Pinterest that I might never get to have, pending the outcome of this stupid appointment. Can you two please be quiet and let me hurt?” She slid down in her seat. “Ugh. Beyoncé wouldn’t have to deal with this.”
Hank and Nani met eyes. Someone had to handle this, and they both knew it. Finally Nani looked away, deferring. Hank leaned in so nobody could hear and put his arm on her leg. He pointed at his nub with his hand.
“They took my arm, Autumn,” he said in a quiet but firm voice as she really started crying. “Doctors sawed off my arm and threw it in the trash. I cried for two days. I will never get that back. But when I woke up on the third day, the guy in the bed next to me had died overnight, and as I stared at the empty bed I just felt like the shittiest asshole in the world, and I thought: oh my God, I’m alive, and this poor guy isn’t anymore, and I’m crying about a fucking arm?!”
He looked down at her with those destroyed, resilient eyes, and it was like meeting him all over again. “Life takes almost everything from us, you know? But what I learned that day, while the nurses wiped my own ass for me because I was in such bad shape, was this: we are not what we lose in life. We are what is left of us. And right now you’ve got me and your grandma, and we’re not leaving.”
A few Fourth of Julys ago, some guy taped a recorder to a drone and flew it into a massive fireworks display by a river, and the video went viral. Autumn watched it on her phone at work, in total awe of this completely new perspective on something she’d grown up watching every year. She sat in her cubicle hiding from Lisa as she stared open-mouthed at the popping colors and sizzling lights, all appearing so different from above and inside, and for the first time since she could remember, she rediscovered that explosive childhood joy she’d felt on the beach watching the light show pop-pop-popping over the waves, clutching Nani’s Florida Marlins fanny pack and slipping breathlessly into love with the world she was growing into. And as she sat there with Hank in that chilly waiting room, she realized that even though she’d watched love play out all her life in movies and shows and books, none of it could’ve prepared her for the soul-shaking storm of the real thing. Love looked so similar to fireworks from within the heart of it: so many colors, such loud roars. She was a girl in love – she was young again. Hank’s love was a revolution, undoing all she had done to herself, opening all she had closed. All she had to do now was hang on until they could escape their demons together.
And when they were called into the room and Doctor Caldwell gave Autumn a high-five and the all clear was given, she hugged Hank by the waist and blubbered like a toddler. Hank brought out a Funfetti cake he’d hidden in his car, hideously cooked, with melted icing running everywhere, and Autumn promptly ate half of it. She was so emotional, she dropped some cake and smeared icing all over the front of her gown, but she didn’t care. She was free to be with Hank for another month without the cloud of disease looming over them, and she was suddenly grateful. All she wanted was him, forever.
But not like this.