19
Over the next few months I show Autumn everything there is to show about the world she has entered. We ride the backs of dinosaurs and view the birth of this universe and the billions of universes before it. We visit small towns and big cities and observe all the love and all of the fury each of them contain. She is blown away, in the best way.
Before long I feel like I’ve finally gotten the little sister I always wanted. This joy does not last me long, however. Because the universe works on a trade-off system. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart, a soul for a soul. When one arrives, one must depart. And soon a departure occurs that everyone in my grey area saw coming.
I’ve been watching Hank from next to Autumn, and it is so difficult. His days are long and similar. He wakes up late, does a few hours of halfhearted work in his home office, and then goes to sleep again. He is not moving on and we both know it. Autumn cries celestial tears for him daily. She misses him, and that will not fade. He reminded me of myself at thirteen, when I was listening to lots of Avril Lavigne in my room at full blast and slamming things around in the kitchen to let the general public know I was adrift in a sea of humanity and that nobody in the world understood me. Except his misery was real. He would not stay much longer, and all three of us knew it. Like me with Cooper, Autumn has tried to help Hank, but this is a different kind of sadness. He doesn’t have the tools to make himself float. He is sinking.
Soon he finally decides to do it. Muttering to himself on the pier, he ties the brick to his leg, and that’s when Autumn and I have to leave the scene. Some things are just better left unshared.
For days, we wait for him at the crossover to the Confluence. We see thousands of souls streaking past, but Hank never comes. Neither of us really knows what this means. And by the third day of waiting, she starts getting restless. Autumn looks at me, and I know everything that look envelops.
“Don’t say it, Autumn. Don’t.”
“Summer,” she says. “You know as well as I do that I have to go. I was meant to be with him.”
“But you just got here! I’m so sick of being alone. I was alone for so long, and then you came and it was amazing, and now…”
“He will come to you,” she whispers. “You won’t be here forever.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have the faith you never did.”
I stare at a meteor several million miles away. “Do you think they’ll get better? Down there, I mean? Do you think watching will get any easier? Do you think Cooper will ever…wake up?”
“No,” she smiles. “Because then they wouldn’t be humans. But that’s half the fun of loving them, isn’t it? They are so clueless, it’s almost adorable.”
“Almost adorable,” I say. “Almost.”
I follow her to where she needs to go. She can’t spend her death apart from him any more than she could her life. They were fused forever. They were one. I knew it was useless to argue, too. You couldn’t argue with love. Just look at my life, and the one after it. I would chase Cooper until the day we both evaporated into the universe.
We drift out to the place where the sky meets the sun, and she turns around.
“I can’t be without him, Summer,” she says. “This might be death, but it feels like a breakup. It’s the worst. It’s being without the one you dream about.”
I nod.
“Will I see you again?” she asks. “You still know so much more about this than I do.”
“I hope so,” I say. “But I have my own person to wait for.”
Her resolve wavers a bit. “God. Why did we have to die, again?”
“We never really died, Autumn. We got to leave love behind. We couldn’t have won more spectacularly.”
We hug. She turns as the light breaks over the horizon, and I know she is heading for the Confluence.
“Autumn, wait,” I say, going after her. She turns to me again, and I wave my arms and wrap her in the most glorious golden silk gown anyone has ever seen. “I want you to arrive in style,” I say. “When you were a human, you always liked gold. Remember when we got bored and dressed up your old Barbies with fabric from your grandma’s gold curtains and she threw a fit?”
“Like it was yesterday,” she smiles. “God, I am going to miss you so much. Dead or alive, in the grey area or beyond it. We’re sisters.”
As we share one last hug, we hear a roaring sound, and she halts her departure. Carried by some ghostly wind, the Confluence suddenly arrives, that whirling, screaming tube of souls, and we stand together and wait for fate to present itself. Is this him? Is this Hank? Has he come for her?
We see a pair of alabaster eyes somewhere inside the light, smirking at us, and Autumn’s soul jumps for joy. It’s Hank. As the angels erupt and start to shout their hymns, I am overcome with awe – he’s back. He’s found his way to her. This is their reunion, the one I might never get with Cooper.
Autumn cannot wait one more minute. Brushing her hand cross my arm one last time, she soars towards the vortex, and it begins to swallow her. Hank watches us from afar, his arms out, waiting. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, Autumn is sucked into the Confluence, into the forever she has gotten with the soul she loves. And as I watch their immortal reunion, filled with otherworldly jealousy, I can’t help but wonder: is the same thing in the stars for me? Will Cooper join me after he dies? Or I will I watch Cooper roar past me, hand-in-hand with Lily, and be cursed to eons of loneliness? Just what, exactly, am I headed for?
Autumn finally slips into the wormhole. I watch her soul embrace Hank’s and then join with it, two combining as one forever, and somehow it looks like stars exploding. I catch one last glimpse of her face, mischievous even in the cosmos, and then just like that, they float on into eternity together.
~
Unbidden by Autumn’s departure, I refocus on my family and start visiting my mother and brother as often as I can. My mom is puttering along, and that is the best way I can describe it. I send her little injections of love whenever I can, trying to convince her of my invincibility, and they are helping a bit. But not much. On her birthday, she found that none of the men she was currently messaging on her dating sites had sent her anything, or even acknowledged the day. So when I saw the flower deliveryman stopping by a house down the street to drop off an arrangement for a recent widow, I told him exactly what to do with the extra bouquet that had just appeared in the back of his truck. And when my mother found the pink roses on her porch that evening, she knew. I could feel it.
She does get very close to breaking sometimes, though. Sometimes when the bills are adding up and her son needs her and the refrigerator is acting up and her daughter isn’t there anymore, she grows dizzy and nauseous and sits down and wonders if she will be able to make it much longer. But she will. I’m here – not that she even needs me. When it does get really bad, though, I do send her on two trips: first, on a walk down the beach, and then on a walk to the wine section of the grocery store.
Besides, I am so proud of my mommy. She is doing so much better than she fears. She has been placed into such a difficult situation, and yet she is shining. She is battered and she is beautiful. She is broken and she is strong. She had the worst of the world thrown at her and she did not fall – if anything, she rose. She pushed and fought and clawed and stood back up and then smiled at the monsters and reached down and used her brokenness as motivation to burn even brighter and rise even higher. Because in heartbreak there is power, potential lurking in the shadows of your soul, just waiting to be used as fuel. Being brave enough to bare your wounds to the world and flash a smile that says you are here to stay: this is true human courage.
And I am doing all I can for my brother, too. An unavoidable and devastating fact of grief is that after a child dies, a parent can never again look at their other children and see anything but their ghost offspring. My mother sees me in the way Chase walks, she smells me when he walks by in the morning, she notices me in the way he jumps on the trampoline on a hot Thursday evening. Every time she looks into his eyes, she sees me, and falls apart a little bit more. So one day I send a life raft. They have gone to St. Augustine for the Fourth of July, and they’ve found space on the bay front to watch the firework show over the water. My little brother is thrilled, as all children should be, but my mother is sick with gloom. Sure, I may be gone, but my mom still has one gorgeous, perfect, living child in front of her, and she needs to be reminded of it. Too many people with beautiful lives don’t know they have beautiful lives. She wants to recoil from the horror and duck back into herself, but I won’t let her. She has a job to do. So I sink myself into the scene. I stand right behind my mom as the show starts, oohing and ahhing with all the humans as the fireworks pop, even though they will never hear me. And as the blues and golds and reds explode over the bay, my mom swears to God that she feels her daughter. This lifts her spirit, and she bends down and hugs my brother for the first time in weeks. And for perhaps the first time since I died, touching him doesn’t make her wince. She is feeling him instead of me, and I weep with gratitude. My little family is healing, in its own little way. But Chase has another guardian, and this one isn’t even dead.
Autumn and Hank’s deaths hit my circle hard. When the next December 15th comes around, my birthday, my mom knew she wanted to mark the occasion with a Funfetti cake and all my closest friends who still lived in the area. (If she didn’t, she knew she’d drown herself in wine and hate the world from her bed.) My memory was fading, and it broke her heart, so she sent out some hasty e-invites. In the end, my family, Cooper, Lily, and a few stragglers from the Anti-Support group came over on a drizzly evening and crowded my mom’s dining room, which she had finally started decorating for the holidays again after years of ignoring Christmas. The twinkling lights and festive candles seemed to breathe some life into my death house, but not much. Still, as soon as Cooper saw Chase playing a video game on the loveseat, he melted into himself.
I could not have foreseen what a force Cooper would become in my brother’s life. When Chase started failing middle school science, it was Cooper who showed up at the house to raise hell and force him to study until he raised his average to a B minus. When Chase was mocked by the older boys for being goofy-footed and tried to quit the basketball squad, it was Cooper who hit sunset rim shots with him in the driveway until the confidence seeped back into his soul. Cooper has dropped everything, time and time again, to be with Chase. He even kept a spare room for Chase in his mother’s home. He wasn’t perfect as a caregiver, and he was mentally absent many times, staring at his phone or off into space while Chase went on about his crush or a mean teacher, but still, he was there. No master poet that humanity has ever produced could ever put into words how important it is for a man to simply be there for a child. And I am so grateful to him for stepping in, for taking my place when he didn’t have to.
The group sings happy birthday to me, and there are many glassy eyes around my mom’s little yellow kitchen table. (Little SJ, who was already a terror, was currently pulling my cat’s tail on the porch, but nobody needed to know that.) As I watch I want to wipe their cheeks and tell them not to cry, that I am safe and content up here, that I am beautiful forever, but I cannot. And when my mother says that it “would’ve been” my birthday, I correct her that is “IS my birthday,” but of course she does not hear me. Just for old time’s sake, though, I do bend down along with Chase and blow out my candles with him. How magical, to be able to do this again. Chase feels the ghostly breeze on his shoulder and knows I am there, as all children know. He says nothing, but I see him wink, and it makes the heart I don’t have feel ten degrees warmer.
But the glassiest of eyes were Cooper’s. He was terrified. Chase was growing up, moving on, and soon he would be off to college. What would become of the bond they shared? Would it wane and fade, would Chase forget the man that had stepped in and shepherded him into adolescence? Had all of this been for nothing? He also felt guilty for even stepping into my shoes in the first place. Survivor’s guilt: never was there a crueler curse of death. He looks over his shoulder like an imposter every second he spends with my brother, feeling like an inferior older brother, like anything but a worthy successor to me. How can I let him know that he is enough? How can I tell him how grateful I am for picking up my slack? How can I show him how much Chase loves him?
“What is it?” Lily whispers, wearing an elegant white suit of the creamiest fabric I have ever seen. (She is pissed and confused about being at my house, but she came anyway, since she knew Cooper’s devotion to my mother and brother were a nonnegotiable part of his life. I overheard her telling her friend she’d rather attend the party and see what happened for herself than sit around and wonder.) Sometimes when she walks into her closet, full of the most tasteful clothes on any continent, I can’t decide whether I want to kill her or become her. Could she be a little less perfect, just for my sake?
Cooper stares down at Chase from across the table, his eyes wide. “It’s just…his hands,” Cooper says quietly. “He has Summer’s hands. If he moves away for college or something, I might never see Summer’s hands again. And her voice…I’m never going to hear her again, except through his lips.”
“Oh, Cooper…”
She hugs him close then, or as close as she can in such an awkward situation, and realizes this situation is much bigger than her vanity. I wrap my arms around them there in my dining room too, shielding them from the world, blanketing them in love, even thought they would never know it. We were all family, after all – a clan on two sides of the spectrum.
“He looks sad, too,” Lily says, wiping away a tear. “Go talk to him. It’ll help you, too.”
Cooper nods at his wife and slowly makes his way over to Chase, who turns away and tries to conceal his feelings, as all teenaged boys did.
“What’s the matter?” Cooper asks. “Oh, no, little guy. It’s okay to miss her, you know. We all do.”
Chase looks away and wipes his face, hiding tears. “That’s not what I’m crying about.”
“What, then?”
Chase swallows. He looks almost like a man now, and it is jarring. I think he has my eyes and cheekbones, but maybe that is my pride speaking.
“It’s my dad,” Chase says. Cooper looks over at my father, who is ignoring his son, as he always did. And instead of continuing to cry, Chase does a funny thing after that: he says thank you.
“For what?” Cooper asks, baffled.
Chase sniffs. “For…being there after Summer left. For being there…when my dad wasn’t. For sticking around.”
Cooper leans back a little, overwhelmed. I’d heard Cooper talk about this with Lily, but only once. He was worried that he hadn’t done enough to make a difference, that he’d arrived too late into Chase’s life, that the damage had already been done. He had basically become a surrogate father, and it made me die a thousand times all over again. Lily seemed to understand, and she did not meddle in their relationship, but sometimes I thought I saw jealousy in her eyes whenever he left her alone to attend Chase’s school plays or take him to Chili’s for dinner.
“I know you didn’t have to do this,” Chase says as they sit at the table, Lily watching from a distance. “You’ve had other stuff going on. But thank you for helping me.”
“Helping with…with what?” Cooper says, and Chase blushes.
“The ice cream trips, the lunches at Chick fil A, that time we went camping on Amelia Island. I know what you were doing, and you didn’t have to, but you did. I just want you to know that I… I just appreciate you, that’s all.”
And all over again I am reminded of what generous and beautiful creatures humans can be, when they just try.
“Oh, Chase,” Cooper says, “I don’t…”
And all of a sudden, I can see it up here: I get a glimpse of the man Chase will become one day. He is sitting at an office desk with basketball ribbons from his college career behind him, no longer the slumped-shouldered, chubby boy whose sister died and whose father walked out on him. Cooper’s influence has made him sit straight and tall in his seat. He is broad-shouldered and happy and proud. He is a strong man that came from a strong man – he is Cooper’s boy. And I am so grateful.
To relay my gratitude, I sink the image into Cooper’s mind. He stands up straighter and looks around with dazed eyes, and I know he is seeing it too: Chase, as the adult Cooper has ensured he will become. Cooper will never need to worry again. His work here is done.
Cooper falls back in his seat, and suddenly he is the one who is crying now. He wraps Chase in his arms and quietly sobs into his shoulder. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t need to. Chase knows, both as the wrecked boy he was and the rescued and renewed man he would become. Chase would always know.
Cooper’s love was a launching pad for Chase, a stable base from which to build, a soft comforter on a January morning. With Cooper, Chase wasn’t the poor little boy whose family had fallen away – he was just Chase. This is the most potent magic the universe has ever spun: what humans can become when they are allowed to rise above the station their lives have saddled them with, and simply be allowed to live. The two most important days of a human life are the day they are born, and the day they find out why. And in my cramped dining room, on my birthday, Cooper Nichols discovers that shepherding Chase Johnson into the world was a piece of his own destiny.
Chase hugs Cooper back, and even though he will never feel my touch, I send my essence through my little brother. And just like that, Cooper feels the love of a Johnson. Even if it isn’t me.
And I leave the scene singing my grandparents’ love song, on my way to believing in humans again.