Summer did not really end in Florida, it just took a breather for a few weeks in January before descending again, but Autumn did her best to fill her house with holiday-scented candles and wear turtlenecks until she felt sufficiently festive. One day Hank “liked” one of her Instagram photos, and it was like being touched by a passing ghost. Was he really stalking her again, or was it a slip of his finger? That was a strange thing she hadn’t expected, being unable to escape the digital remains of their love. There was a sense that they were inextricably linked forever, that she would never escape the ghost of him through the Internet. Facebook comments, texts, iTunes playlists, messages: they were all there, begging to be stared at every time she was drunk and filled with hatred for herself. But whenever his name came up on her feed, happiness still visited her, a quick hot breath on a foggy window, before vanishing again, quicker than when you made accidental eye contact with a stranger and skipped your eyes away again. Speaking of social media: after Thanksgiving break Hank started getting tagged in photos with a blonde, and it made Autumn want to disappear. She wondered what we ever did without the wonderful fucking Internet. We lived without seeing what our neighbor’s ex-girlfriend ate for brunch. We got by without knowing who our great aunts were voting for in the midterm elections. We survived without watching the loves of our lives start over again without us. We were happy.
In early December came the voicemail: five seconds of background breathing before he abruptly hung up. He had pocket dialed her, probably. She deleted it after the second replay. Autumn had been so stupid to believe in the myth of love. Love wasn’t real. Love never worked out. Love only happened to people in Kate Hudson movies, to strangers on Instagram. She had been sold a lie. All love ever did was make two people get lost. Lost in each other, lost in the world, lost in a culture that forced you together with its expectations and then wrenched you apart with its demands. Autumn was done with love. Love was death. Love was Summer, too, and look at her – she was gone. Love just left. That was all it did, all it was good for.
Autumn’s December appointment was rushing closer, flying at her with all the inertia in the world. All she wanted was to sit on the porch and hold Summer’s hand, revel in her friendly silence. But she couldn’t. So she turned to carbs. And one day, in the midst of a panic attack in a grocery store, her phone rang. Autumn was trying desperately to stay away from the buttercream carrot cake cupcakes in the bakery section, and she was failing miserably. So she was surprised when she answered the random number calling her and heard the hot metallic sound of Mrs. Basara’s voice bursting over the line.
“He did it!” she cried, and in the background Autumn could hear someone rustling through the contents of what sounded like a trunk or a closet.
“Uh, excuse me? Who’s done what?”
“Hank!” she screamed. “He’s done it! He’s killed himself!”
And all the panic in the world just slid down into her.
Autumn raised her free hand to her forehead as she fell against the wall beside a giant green scale in the pharmacy. “Okay…okay…how do you…what happened?”
“He left me some weird message,” she said, frantic, “and he won’t answer his phone, and his gun is gone, and I don’t know-”
“A gun?” Autumn screamed, making several shoppers look over at her. “You let an army veteran keep a gun?!”
“He wouldn’t give it to me! He said it was for protection, and for hunting trips! Oh God, my son is dead!”
Autumn really fell apart then, because oh my God, this made so much sense, and now all of it had been for nothing – the breaking of the walls and the lowering of the guards and the joining of the souls. They had turned on each other, the world had turned on them, and now all they would ever have was the summer.
And then all at once, it hit her: the pier.
“I’ll call you back.”
Autumn got up and ditched her basket right there, the contents skittering across the floor, as she ran through the entrance hall to her car. Blood pounding in her ears, she flew out of the parking lot and sped towards the pier. This couldn’t be happening…it was all too horrible…it was all too perfect. He had made the promise once, after all: I don’t want to live without you. She could even remember getting nervous one night after they’d watched a horror movie where the main character killed herself. In a tiny voice, she’d asked him if he ever felt suicidal urges anymore, and he didn’t answer – he just stared over at his closet.
Ohmygod – the closet. Suddenly Autumn pictured Hank’s closet in her house, the one she had never cleaned out, or even gone into. She didn’t remember him taking much when he’d left. Maybe he’d put the gun in there a while back…maybe he’d stopped there today…maybe she would run into him…maybe she wasn’t too late.
She turned, hurdled around three blocks, and screeched to a stop inches from her garage door. His old 4Runner wasn’t there. As fast as she could, she reached her room and started throwing things around senselessly, desperately. “Hank? Hank! Where are you?”
Silence echoed.
Okay, Autumn, she thought. Chill. The. Fuck. Out. Think like Hank: where would he hide something? Where would a gun be?
Opening the door to the closet, she saw nothing out of place. His dirty tennis shoes, his boxes of childhood photos, his old guitar he never used: she was being assaulted by the past she had run from, and the sight and smell and feel of it all made her stomach turn over on itself. She pushed back a row of hanging clothes and found something peculiar on the inside shelf: a hospital gown, with a rainbow stain on the front – her Funfetti stain. She picked it up and smelled it as the ghosts rushed out at her, invisible vapors from her past. Yes, it was hers, she realized as Viktor & Rolf’s Flowerbomb hit her nostrils, a whisper of the summer. But why would Hank have kept this? At the time Autumn just figured the nurses had thrown it away. And then she balled it up, ready to toss it aside and keep looking, when a sticky note fell to the floor. She reached for it and read a message in Hank’s spare, neat handwriting that slammed into her and made her pine for the summer with everything in her:
in case I never see her in another white dress
Autumn clutched the note and stared up at the ceiling as the tears came. The room still smelled like him. Summer’s scent was gone, already washed from the Earth, but Hank’s wasn’t – he was still here. She could feel it. And she was going to find him.
Autumn darted out of the closet. She was not going to let go of this love for a second time. She had to get to him before he did something unfixable. She was not about to let this slip through her fingers again. Quite simply, she would not recover.