25
Two days without Summer turned into three. I grew mad at time for daring to distance me from her, because every day that came was another day further from when she’d been here; every sunrise just threw her deeper into my past. And the hangover just compounded my misery and confusion.
After the blunt force trauma of the initial days, I found that the hardest part was missing her. Just the simple, devastating sensation of wanting to hang out with her and not being able to do so. I missed her golden hair and her hazel eyes that always looked like they knew something the world didn’t and the adorably awkward way she always fidgeted with her hands. I missed it all. I wanted to reach into my medicine cabinet more than ever, but I shut myself in my room and somehow forced myself to abstain.
Here on the edge of sanity, I could see it all: I was haunted by the summer. Every moment I hadn’t spent with her over these last few months struck out at me like a viper; every opportunity I’d had to give her love and failed jumped out at me from the quiet. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the wedding thing. I pictured how longingly I’d seen her looking at other couples’ photos, the bitter edge that would come to her voice when discussing their Facebook posts. And I knew that deep down, all she’d wanted was to shine for the world like they had. Sure, we’d known each other for way too short a time to get married, but still: why hadn’t I just fucking gotten over myself and let her load some fucking selfies of us? Why hadn’t I at least hinted that I wanted marriage down the line, since that was all she wanted in the world? What was wrong with me? The invisibility and futility of it all made it even more devastating. Oh, and what made me even more miserable was the fact that the only copy of Eighty Eight was gone. I’d somehow lost the book during my blackout at the hospital, and after thirty calls from my mom, they’d finally admitted that it had probably been thrown away by a janitor. The Word file containing the book was on a computer that had burned up weeks before, and the book that Summer had made me, my only shot at a future, was now rotting in a landfill somewhere. The thought was unendurable.
One of the most pathetic things was how friendless I suddenly was. Before, every little thing that happened, I’d store it away in my brain and tell Summer later that night. Now, whenever I saw a cute dog or a funny commercial or whatever, I had no one to tell. It was so sad, let me tell you. And the only person I wanted to vent to was her. Sometimes I even found myself having long conversations with her in my head – or at least the version of her that was stored away in there somewhere. Once I jolted upright in bed at midnight and realize I’d been stuck in twilight sleep for an hour, having a completely one-sided talk with her about how much I hated my annoying neighbor Mr. Richards. Was I cracking up?
It was also surprising to me that I still loved her just as much as when she was alive. I was in love with a memory. Nothing had faded in the slightest, and I hoped it never would. When I envisioned my biggest, most golden moments with her, I still got zapped by the electricity that came with her touch, felt the goodness of her smile, saw the light in her eyes. I missed those moments so much it made my chest feel like a sinkhole again. Whenever I thought of her laugh, so goofy and silly, my hair still stood on end and my stomach collapsed into a nervous mess on the floor of me. I guess it spoke to the power of our love that she held that sway over me even in death. Did she know the effect she had on me when she was alive? I hoped to God she had.
~
Because of allegiance to Summer at the hospital, details of the surgery started leaking quickly. In fact, only two days post-Summer, a nurse pulled aside Summer’s aunt’s friend at a grocery store and confided that people were furious behind the scenes. A wrong slide had been put up in the operating room, and Dr. Dill – I couldn’t even think of the name because I would literally drive to his house and kill him if I let myself – had gone into her body on false information. When her vitals started plummeting and it became clear something had gone wrong, the nurses begged him to stabilize her and life-flight her somewhere else with a more equipped operating room, but he refused out of arrogance and kept trying. I could sense it the moment he’d walked into that chapel, so nonchalant and casual: he had done this. Rumors were swirling between nurses that he was already hiding documents and covering his tracks, and because the world is slanted towards rich white men with nobody to answer to, a future lawsuit was looking more impossible by the day. Nobody was even thinking about that yet, but still: someone, somewhere down the line needed to pay for this, deserved to pay for this, if only to give the Johnsons closure, and I was already getting the unspeakably awful feeling that they never would.
The mountain of anger in front of me stretched to the heavens, but in this story, there was no clear-cut villain. Summer had been killed by a chain of accidents and negligence and unchecked ego, not a masked criminal with a gun in the middle of the night. There was no villain. Life was the villain. She was just gone. It was absolutely infuriating that something so accidental had led to something so final. It just didn’t make sense, and that made nothing in my life make sense. The monsters in this nightmare story weren’t evil men with guns or ghouls and goblins lurking in the night, but tenuous, intangible things like numbers and odds and percentages and careless hospital employees. In the end, the girl who was obsessed with odds had been taken from this Earth because of a silly, easily avoidable fuck-up. The most elegant and articulate and profound voice in the world had been silenced for nothing. The love of my life was dead because of a simple doctor’s mistake.
Summer had been dead for two hours before they’d even come out to say anything to the family.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that day, and what she’d known during the surgery and her death, if she’d known anything at all, God forbid. I’d like to imagine that she sank into a peaceful sleep, and that was it. But I wasn’t so sure. She was so strong for her size, and I knew the sedatives probably wouldn’t have worked as well on her as some others. Oh, God…just the thought of her being aware of her own death ripped me in half. And little things about the surgery haunted me endlessly; dark little remarks she’d made about her own mortality that had come off as gallows humor at the time but seemed like eerie premonitions in the rearview. How did she know she was going to die? She must’ve known, right? Why didn’t she say anything? Why would she have willingly gone to her death? I knew I’d have to give up on most of these questions eventually, because they were unanswerable, and this fight was unwinnable. But still, I wanted to be mad. I savored the madness. I deserved to wallow in this misery, because I should’ve been there to save her. I should’ve done something, anything at all. But I didn’t.
And now it was useless.
When a little boy in my hometown disappeared near a train station and was found rotting in a ditch a week or two later, my town quickly filled with hot, yellow outrage. The killer was tracked down within days, though, and sympathy for the family and devastation for the victim filtered in where the anger had been. Ribbons were tied to lampposts and group prayer meetings were held in coffee-stained cafes and whispery memorial vigils were held two weekend sunsets in a row, paper cup candles flickering in the Florida wind for Little Boy Lost. Summer had been killed just as thoroughly and as concretely as that boy, and yet I knew that none of that would ever happen for her. Nobody would ever sing a hymn for her beside a marsh while the crickets welcomed the night, and her killer would never be captured beside a quiet gas station at the break of dawn and then have to stare down the lights at a big front-page trial before roasting on an electric chair after the verdict came in. This crime was suspect-less, this story villain-less. The tragedy of it all was as big and as open-ended as the sky.
~
I had not known true horror until now. To distract myself from the fury whirling within me, I took out my phone and pulled up the only photo Summer had ever taken of me. That day under the pier with Kevin she’d taken a Snapchat of my back as I’d reeled in what had turned out to be a gigantic catfish, the waves stretching out beyond me as my puny back muscles strained in the sun. At the time I’d been so struck by her caption – “FIGHT” – that I’d taken a screen shot and saved it.
Fight. That word suddenly struck me like a swordfish and started spinning around and rhyming in my head.
Fight…
fight…
write.
And then it hit me.