THIS IS NOT A CANCER BOOK
It is nearly April, and we are off to the races.
She watched me surf today. I usually feel protective of it, as surfing was one of the only things my worthless father ever did with me, and it used to feel like a betrayal to let anyone else in on that. But for some reason I invited her, and she sat and watched from the beach, even though she seemed a little bored. I didn’t care that she was bored, though: I cared that she liked me enough to hide it.
Afterward I sat next to her, just sort of reveling in her presence. I hadn’t felt a physical reaction to anyone like this in ages, maybe ever, and I wanted to enjoy it. It was the strangest thing: every time I was with her, it just made me want to be with her even more. I could study the planes of her face all day.
Soon she looked over at me and frowned. I was in sort of a weird mood, and I guess the bags under my eyes gave away my sleepless night.
“It’s your mom, isn’t it?” she asked, a little nervously. She just figured things out about me sometimes – it was the strangest thing.
“Is what my mom?”
“The reason you’re exhausted.”
I looked away and bit my lip. “Maybe. There was an incident with her wheelchair, and it took a while to get her calm again.”
She stared at me. “I just want you to know that I know it’s hard, and I really respect you for what you’re doing.”
“How would you know?”
She searched me with her hazel-brown eyes. “Because I used to be just like your mom, Cooper. I spent half my childhood in a hospital.”
I had no idea how to process that one, or what to do with it, so I let it slide and nuzzled up against her.
“Where were you?” my mom asked when I stumbled into the house that night, much later than usual.
I looked away. “Um...”
“What? What is it? Are you okay?”
I stopped. I didn’t want to lie or be evasive, but I knew how territorial women were, and I had broken her heart in the past by dating around and making her my number two. So I went down the road of Summer very lightly. “Nothing. This girl just met up with me, and hung out while I surfed.” I brought over the bag Summer had given me. “By the way, she, um…made you this. So…happy birthday.”
I put the cake on the table. She looked down at it, and her eyes filled up with saltwater. “Well, this was unexpected. A girl? But you never…”
I looked away. I almost felt ashamed that I liked Summer this much, this quickly – that a virtual stranger could already mean this much to me.
“Mom,” I said. “It’s just a girl I’ve been hanging out with.”
“Huh? Who makes cake for someone’s mother? What aren’t you telling me?”
I tried, but I couldn’t contain it: I smiled. “Okay. I kind of…have a girlfriend, or whatever.”
I expected her to flip, but she didn’t. Instead, hope welled up in her eyes, and she threw up her hands at fast as she could, which admittedly wasn’t very fast.
“You’re in love with someone,” she said with misty eyes, and I turned away. “Oh, I’m so happy, I could just-”
“Don’t finish that,” I said, as I’d gotten sick of her morbid jokes lately. (Although the fact that she would probably be leaving us in a few years seemed to tickle her, just the idea of it made everything within me rock back and forth like the San Andreas.) “And I’m not in love.”
“Well, still. Can I meet her?”
I sucked in some air. “Not yet.”
I went to my room, thinking about inevitability. So what: I’d lied to my mom. I was falling in love with Summer here by this slate-colored sea, and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.
And then I wrote this:
there are only a few moments in a human life
that come along and change everything
little fireworks that pop in your sky
and shift the winds in your sails
put you on a new course
and push you to new heights and horizons
you’d never even dreamed of before
mine happened at six in the evening
humid breeze, golden sunset
the moment I met you
SEVERAL DAYS LATER
It is four PM, the air is still thick with the heat of the day even though the sun has started to fall into the west, and I am changed.
That “love” thing. I hate the word. Always have. It makes me think of overwrought Disney movies and cheesy Facebook posts and over-the-top ceremonies in overpriced event venues. But it is real. My God, it is real. My mother was right.
It’s what I feel when I look at my mom in her wheelchair and know I’m all she has in the world. It’s what I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night, all disoriented, and then feel my dog Hadley’s warm little body curled up against my leg and remember I am not alone. It’s what I feel when I lay on the floor with my cousin’s kids on a rainy Saturday morning and let them crawl all over me and remind me of what it was like when the purest joy of the day involved putting sunglasses on a family pet. And now it is what I feel when I look at Summer.
It’s what I feel when I rush to my front door and throw it open to see her standing there with that shy little smile on her face, ready for whatever the day is going to throw at us. It’s what I feel when I drive home from a date with her as the air around me hums with new possibilities, the headlights across the way seeming to glow with a new sparkle they didn’t have a few weeks ago, before I’d met the person that made me see a new future for myself.
“Why do you like me?” she asked under our pier the other day. I could barely even look at her, because her beauty made me ache inside for some reason.
“Sum,” I sighed as I traced my finger in circles around her arm. “Are we really here again?”
She propped her head against her other hand, defiant. “Yes. Forgive me for being realistic. I’m just a mess, and you’re…well, you.”
I stretched out my whole body and then stared up at the Florida clouds, soaking in the comfort her presence brought me. “Because with you I can just be…me, filterlessly. You take me out of myself.”
“That’s all?” she teased.
“Well, you also have a really good set of boobs.”
She tried to act offended, but she giggled nonetheless as the waves rolled in.
As I walked home I heard her voice in the crickety silence of Neptune Beach, saw her eyes in the glare of the halogen headlamps blurring past as I turned onto Ocean Avenue. Love has never felt like this. She makes my skin feel all weird and cold, my cheeks all flustery. My mom even got all worried and asked me why I was in “such a state” when I walked into the kitchen. I knew what she was really asking – are you high right now? – and I could see the terror in her eyes that she even had to ask such a thing. Still, all I could do was smile like a little boy and look away.
This is a state of grace.
TWO DAYS LATER
Summer is still perfect. I am getting stuck in her, sinking down like the quicksand on the edge of a tidal pool in August. But something’s up. I think she’s hiding something.
We were trying to play Frisbee, and she really wasn’t very good. I accidentally tossed it kind of hard, and she jumped in a really awkward way, and ended up falling into a tidal pool in a heap of limbs and shame. We both heard what came next – someone nearby laughed and called her a “retard” to his friends. I bit my lip to quell the immediate rage that rose into my chest, hot and urgent. I wanted to beat him into the sand, but the devastated look in Summer’s eyes made me stop. Instead I took her gently by the jaw and waited, the Atlantic breeze whipping her hair into a golden halo around her beautiful face. Finally her eyes, injured and haunted, made contact with mine.
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you who you are, Summer Johnson.”
Instead of responding, she got up and walked away. But what was she walking from?
Uneasy, I went home and wrote this:
I remember the night things changed
The night I looked around and realized this was all out of my range
Time’s slipping by, adulthood’s tides are rising high
So take my hand, babe, swim harder, stay by my side
You’re it
You’re the one for me
I’m never gonna stop loving you
But this thing might not last eternally
So stop right here, I just wanna freeze this
That sunny laugh, our sidewalk kiss
That John Mayer song in the air
And me, wishing we could be a forever pair
And when I’m old and fading away
If time comes along and blasts us apart, stupid fate
When I hear John Mayer sing about speeding down that highway
Into that I-85 night, I hope you think of this
And when he asks Georgia why, I pray I taste your kiss
~
We haven’t had the official boyfriend/girlfriend talk yet. I don’t want to come off like a psycho, but obviously I want to be her fucking boyfriend. She slips away sometimes, drifts off right in front of me, and I want to lock her down before she comes to her senses and realizes what a loser I am. I want her to be mine, and I want to be hers. But then that stupid app kept coming up in my mind. Was that what was bugging her – that we’d med on a hookup app? I knew she was probably talking to other guys on it. Or had been, at least. And the thought made me unspeakably jealous, filled me with a hot rage that licked at my chest and made me want to strap on a pair of my old boxing gloves and fight ‘til the literal death. Weren’t men supposed to have evolved past all this cavemen shit? Weren’t we supposed to be well-dressed dandies sending emoji love poems from hipster coffee shops? I felt like a crazy person. And maybe I was crazy. Maybe I’d drifted through the safe fog of sanity all my life, and finally I was stepping into her torrid waters of beautiful madness. But if this was insanity, I wanted it forever. She was stripping off my persona, cutting deep, revealing the Cooper that had been eroded by years and years of playing a part. I had no idea what it was, but she just made me feel okay with myself. Perhaps it was the scar thing. I never really cared or paid attention, but I suppose the scar on her face did lend an accepting quality to her, made her look at someone and see beneath the skin. And she saw me, in so many more ways than one.
At any rate, she’s changing all my rules now. She’s bumped Colleen to the number two spot in my life, which breaks my heart. It turns out my mom was wheeling home from the 7/11 yesterday when she passed a garage sale and bought a magnet saying #1 Girl in big pink letters. Then she hung it up on the fridge and jokingly told me I’d bought it for her when I was little.
“You said it was for the woman you loved most in the world,” she teased, and at the same exact time, she said “your mom” while I blurted out “Summer.”
She paused. Then stared over at me.
“Cooper,” she said, her voice filling up with tears and fear.
Oh God. I had no idea I’d said it out loud.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I just…I thought…I figured you’d be my little boy forever.”
I sighed. “I am, Mom. But sometimes…things happen.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I love Summer,” I said after a pause. “I love her, Mom.”
Tears were slipping down my face. Hers too. My mother’s only savior was drifting away from her. I left the room before anything could be said. The next few weeks were going to be difficult. I could sense it everywhere.
That night, I cried alone in my bed. Something was going wrong, and I didn’t know what it was. It was like a sickness you can’t pinpoint, a dull ache, a mysterious pain. So I got out my iPad and tapped out the following message:
I hear violins when I look at you
that heavenly reverie
but soon devils ride in on those chords
your majesty just reminds me that you’re better than me
you come from another world
one I just can’t crack
you speak a language I will never grasp
and baby, I am drowning in that gap
so reach out, darling, take my hand
sink into me, say anything, take me anywhere
‘cause all I know now
is that I’m slowly getting killed
by all your beautiful dead air