27
After the death of a loved one, only two things can be absolutely counted upon: misery and casserole. I had finally regained a bit of my appetite and was picking at a green bean variety of the dish that had been dropped off by a neighbor when I decided to write down the inscription for my girlfriend’s headstone, which was actually a reworking of a eulogy Ernest Hemingway had written for a friend. It had popped into my head a few days before, but since Summer’s book was quickly and miraculously nearing completion at forty-five thousand words, I hadn’t had a chance to actually write it down just yet.
It went like this:
SUMMER MARTIN JOHNSON
Die in Love and Live Forever
“And most of all she loved the sea
Those golden sands beneath her feet
That water blue, that salty breeze
Now she will swim in it
Forever”
WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH, SUM
YOUNG FOREVER
I typed up the final poem, attached it to an email to Shelly, and added a short message in the body:
Hey, here’s the inscription for the stone. Sorry I’m late, I haven’t really been up to writing this, as you can probably understand. Hope you’re doing better than you were. And please remember to reserve the plot next to Summer in the cemetery like we talked about. I don’t care how much it costs – I wanna lie next to your daughter forever.
When I stopped crying, I punched a spot into the mess on my bed and got ready to fall asleep and wake up alone. That was another worst part, waking up every morning and remembering what had happened all over again. In my dreams I’d imagine taking a shower and then walking into Summer’s house and seeing her sitting in that wheelchair and being shocked by how much I loved her, blown away that I even had that much love in me at all after my disastrous childhood, and then I’d take her hand and lead her away. But then I’d rise out of the oblivion of sleep, all groggy and confused and sort of excited to face the day and see her, and suddenly I’d remember that she was dead, gone, not coming back, and then the weight of it all would just fall on me and smother me, and every time it was as bad as the day it had first happened. It was just the worst. It was all the worst.
And I felt so guilty to admit that her face was already becoming harder to picture in my mind. The parts were there, but sometimes they just wouldn’t add up to a whole, and sometimes all I could conjure was a fuzzy image of her basic essence. She existed now only in my memory, a silvery phantom of dissolving love, gorgeous and ghostly and gone, drifting away into the dreamland of my fantasies more and more every day. It was so hard not to follow her there, too. Sometimes it was so difficult not to sink into the horror within me and go back to that special place we’d shared when Summer was alive, even though it was now cloaked in darkness and despair and misery. I had to stay, and not just mentally speaking: I had to be there for my mom and Shelly and all the other people who needed me out here in the light. That’s what had kept me writing the past few days, against all odds: Summer’s reminder to fight. I wasn’t going to give up just yet.
Just as I slipped into sleep, though, my phone pinged. I rubbed my eyes and reached blindly for the glow. It was an email from an app called TimeSure, a service that let you pre-write a message and set it to send whenever you wanted, be it in one day or one year. Everything in me jumped when I saw the sender.
It was from Summer.
My surroundings bled together as I sat up, crossed my legs, and hunched over. The timestamp said she’d written the email the night before the surgery, and picturing her sitting on her bed and leaning over her laptop, just like this, made me want to not exist anymore. She must’ve known she was going to die – oh, God, she must’ve known.
As my heart thundered inside me, I pushed aside the pain and prepared to read this digital fossil of a human life.
From:
July 10, 11:52 PM
My darling Cooper:
So: I am a marriage-desperate psycho. Let’s just get that out of the way. I realized it the other day under that oak tree: I have officially flown the coop and joined the crazy club, and I can’t hide it anymore. I have become the people I used to make fun of, and I am completely embarrassed about it. But if you are reading this, it means that I wasn’t there to stop this message from being sent, and that I am gone, and that my dream wedding is no longer in the cards for me, and that you probably hate me for all the pain I have caused you, and will continue to cause you. But if I’ve learned anything about this endless ocean called life, it’s that if we don’t forgive, we’re as fucked as a boat without a propeller. So whether I am looking down on you right now, looking up at you, or if I am nothing and nowhere, I want you to know that I am sorry for all this, Cooper, and that I want you to move on. In a perfect world I will wake up in the clouds when this is all over and walk through my front door and see some dream-version of you laughing at that little yellow table with my mom and Chase and Autumn, and then you and I will wander down the street under the oaks hand-in-hand and have an endless summer on the shores of Jacksonville Beach together. I do not know if that will happen, though I can pray.
But this is not about me. It’s about you, the boy who lived. Dying is easy – anyone can die. (And I would know, since I’m supposedly dead and all, LOL.) But living is the grandest and most challenging adventure of all. So because it is now up to me to guide you on the path of life that I have complicated so much for you by dying, and because like many people in our generation I am immensely awkward in person due to the majority of my correspondence taking place via iMessage, here are my last words to you, in an email. (God knows I’ll probably fuck all this up in the morning when I say goodbye before surgery, so I won’t even try. My thoughts are pretty but won’t translate into the spoken word, so I’ll speak to my laptop instead.) So, anyway, since I am a crazy desperate bitch, like I said before, here are my last words in the form of a long and meandering speech I would give at the wedding we will never have, that you never even AGREED to have, because I am crazy:
My name is Summer Johnson, and I did nothing particularly heroic during my lifetime. My name will not be inscribed in any history books to be skimmed through and then discarded by the middle schoolers of the future, I probably will not be remembered beyond a few immediate family members and that great aunt in North Carolina whom I really should call more often, and I cannot even successfully balance my own debit account without getting my card turned down at Starbucks twice a week. But I love Cooper Nichols with everything within my broken body, and for that, I know my life will not have been in vain. I still love him, even after all this. I love all of him, with all of me, all one hundred and six pounds of me, right down to the large scar running up the right side of my face, that he healed. (And no, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not a cancer scar. It’s a Life Scar. ‘Twas life that killed this girl, not cancer.)
Our story wasn’t like some cheesy romantic comedy that you’d hate-watch on TBS on a Sunday night. I didn’t trip over a leaf and fall into his buff arms, and we didn’t go back to my improbably large loft apartment in New York City and post selfies of our beautiful love together. At one time I very stupidly wished for someone to love me like that, but Cooper loved me better. Our road was tough and frustrating and filled with obstacles and twists and all the other annoying bullshit that makes up life, but he loved me through all that. So I guess I just want you to know that there was a boy named Cooper, and that he loved a girl who wasn’t beautiful until she felt like she was.
We come from a generation that measures itself against the world. Every Facebook status and Instagram photo and Twitter post digs under our skin and tells us we’re not living and loving grandly enough. If you’re not seen or heard, you’re nothing. But for every epic love tale splashed out in lights for the world to see, there were ten million more couples that loved each other in the dark just as beautifully. Maybe no one will ever know the story of Summer and Cooper. Maybe no one will ever know that on the shores of a town just like many other towns, on a beach just like many other beaches, during a summer just like many other summers, a boy named Cooper Nichols loved a girl named Summer Johnson in every way that a person can be loved until she floated up and joined the sun. But that doesn’t mean he loved me any less deeply, or that our love was any less magnificent than those couples who throw their names under lights. And at least I know. No matter what happens, at least one human being – one Me – knows our story. I think I like those odds.
And I know what people might say. “It was just a few months – why are you both so changed by a couple of months?” But a lot of things happen in a matter of months. You should know that better than anyone, Cooper, you master of useless facts. And thanks to Wikipedia, here are a few examples. The Spanish-American War: three and a half months. The construction of the Empire State Building: fourteen months. The creation of a human life: nine months. One summer when Cooper Nichols gave a dying girl a hot breath of eternal love that she will take with her forever: three months and a few weeks, give or take.
You know, being human is weird. Our lives are endless stretches of forgotten days broken up by only a few moments of burning clarity that stick out to us. Chances are I will probably forget everything I did on any given day, and all will be swept into the vast ocean of nothingness broken up by the few islands in the stream of time that we will actually remember. But the memories of these three months will stick with me for the long haul, Cooper. Remember those Neptune Beach nights, the hipster girls dancing with the feathers in their hair? Those lazy afternoon walks down Cedar Street to the sea, those golden days when the mess was made? I am so grateful for that mess. You gave me a roaring July in the winter of my life, and I’m thankful.
So here we are, Cooper. The end of me, and the beginning of you. I wish you an adventurous heart. I hope you never lose the ability to marvel at the world. I hope you look down at the tops of the clouds from between two roaring engines, and I hope you have quiet moments at home with the ones you love most. I wish you forgiveness and empathy and understanding, because you’re going to need them, and when you love someone again, I want you to love them with all of you. I hope you find someone who looks at you the way you looked at me. (BTW, just make sure she’s not one of my friends, or I will haunt the fuck out of you guys.) I wish you bruises and triumphs and glory and disaster, and I hope you laugh and cry and win and lose and dream and love, all those things that make up a great big adventurous life, and when faced with the choice between jumping and staying put, I hope you jump with everything in you, every time. You are either busy being alive or busy getting dead – pick one before death picks you. The last thing anyone ever wants to say on a deathbed is “it could have been” – fight the world like hell and do everything in your power to never have to say that sentence.
And if you ever do find yourself living a life you’re not proud of, Cooper, I pray you have the bravery to walk away and become whoever the hell you want to be. I believe in you like I believe in sunsets and sweet tea and the country America used to be. Even though I may never get that big white ceremony in front of my family and my friends that I could rub in the virtual noses of a thousand of my closest Facebook frenemies, I want you to know that this was enough for me, these last few months when we loved and wrecked each other by the sea. You were enough for me. Thank you for being my island in the stream. Wherever the odds lead me now, this is my vow: I will take this summer with me forever.
And if you ever feel yourself losing your way again, Cooper, and find that you just can’t get your shit together, just reach out and love someone. Love is the most adult action anyone could ever carry out in this emotionally stunted world, and once you love, the rest will fall into place. It has to.
(Just make sure the person you choose to love listens to Saviour and posts to Facebook as sporadically as possible – you’d better believe I’ll be judging you from heaven.)
Your girl always,
and please forgive me for how goddamned cheesy this was,
Summer
PS: I made this email address when I was seventeen, don’t judge me for it.
And PPS:
I know you never asked me this, and I have no idea if you were ever even going to ask me this, but just in case you were wondering:
I do.
I broke all over again as I read, falling across my bed with great, heaving, retching sobs. A fissure opened up somewhere deep within me and pushed me apart as it exploded upwards, leaving me in pieces as I erupted.
Oh, Summer.
Her forever had lasted five minutes. She knew – she’d known she was going to die. How unspeakably terrible. Seeing her words, her humor, her personality, made me miss her so much I couldn’t breathe. And I remembered then just how much I had loved her: with every organ in me; that hall-of-fame type love. She was so important. She was so special. She was so remembered. And the fact that she’d left this Earth feeling like some kind of forgotten failure or something was just…well, the new worst thing.
I wished so many things. I wished she hadn’t loved so perfectly and died so young. I wished she’d known that she was beautiful, truly beautiful. I wished she’d known the way the world lit up when she laughed. I wished she’d known the way the air crackled and popped and sizzled around her when she entered a room. I wished she’d known she was vital and important and precious. I wished she’d loved herself like I had loved her. But she’d never gotten the chance to, and that absolutely wrecked me.
I tossed my phone deep into the abyss that was my comforter, took some melatonin my mom had given me, and prayed for sleep.
~
The night dripped by, and soon morning broke over the ocean, warm and cruel. The viewing and funeral were both being held in a tacky brown funeral home off Third Street on a cloudy, humid Saturday morning just like any other. A queen was being honored in a dump. So it goes.
I woke slowly, filled all the way up with a dark, solid, heavy dread. This was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, go sit in a hall full of strangers and listen to them air out their grief for their own selfish purposes, but I knew I had to rise to the occasion. Summer was daring me to be okay. Even her sentence, “everything will turn out okay – it has to,” was practically goading me to be alright, and so I decided to get out of bed and go through the motions, if only for today.
Before I left, though, I grabbed Summer’s book, printed out her letter, and slid it into the beginning, as an introduction. Nobody was fit to introduce Summer but Summer. Then I hand-wrote and inserted a short note in front of the letter:
When you grow older, your heart dies. This was true in The Breakfast Club and it is true now. Your bones get bigger and your toys lose themselves in closets and trunks and cardboard boxes and your dreams become buried under more pressing matters like exams and bills and engagement parties and life insurance policies and before you know it you’ve let go of your desires completely, your soul collapsed, your dreams burned out like the embers of a day-old campfire, and you become content with mediocrity. But for the first time since my bones got big, you made me feel small and new and excited to get out of bed in the morning, Summer. You made me dream again, and I will never be able to repay you for that. This book is at least one small initial step in that direction, though.
So, to whoever is reading this: this is the story of Summer Martin Johnson and the eternal summer she spent with Cooper Nichols on the shores of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, soon after the dawn of a new century. No one has ever been more grateful for three months. Words alone cannot do her justice, but love can try.
All my love,
C
Then I closed the book, took out my laptop again, and typed up a new book cover inspired by Saviour’s last album. I smiled to myself as the printer roared to life and spit out my new cover:
~
On the way to the funeral parlor, my mom looked over at me from the driver’s seat with the same worried frown she’d had on her weathered face for a week. She could drive with the help of these special hand pedals that attached to the steering wheel, but she’d never quite gotten the hang of it, and this was the first time I’d let her take me anywhere in years.
“Cooper, you know I-”
“Don’t ask again,” I said as she jolted to a stop at a red light. “I don’t want any wine before the funeral. You know that drinking is a slippery slope that leads me straight to pills. I’m fine.”
My mother drank often and even dared me to join her sometimes. This shocked people, as they wanted to believe that the disabled were faultless saints who sat there smiling all day, thinking about angels and babies and kittens, when in reality they were normal people who maintained their own faults and habits and neuroses and monsters just like everyone else in the transition from Well to Unwell. And sometimes their bad habits became even worse when thrown through the prism of disability, actually, because what else could harden a human more swiftly and thoroughly than being erased from the eyes of ninety percent of the world? My mother saw the world, but it didn’t see her back, and sometimes that just made her wheel towards her liquor drawer even faster. She broke my heart every day, but I wouldn’t have lived with anyone else in the world. Well, besides Summer, obviously.
“I’m not asking if you want wine,” she said after a moment. “What are you going to do with that book you wrote?”
I fidgeted a little. My mom was always trying to do this; make me envision and prepare for the day when she would no longer be here. That time would come, obviously, and I’d eventually have to deal with being set out on my own, but right now I was trying to deal with one crushing heartbreak at a time. I was a kid in a man’s body, maybe forever.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Why?”
She rearranged her shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with her condition. “Well, don’t be mad at me, but I read some of the book when you were in the shower this morning, and it was gorgeous. Absolutely beautiful. I cried on the first page, actually. Your teachers were right – you really are a genius.”
I shifted a little. “Oh, um, thanks, but that wasn’t my – I wasn’t trying to make people cry, Mom.”
She shrugged. “Life makes people cry. The truth makes people cry. Reality makes people cry. It happens.” She threw a glance at me, testing me. “You know, you could always turn it into an Amazon book and use it to start your career as an author. I’m sure Summer wouldn’t mind. It could be like one of those popular cancer books or something, and-”
“Esophageal Intresia!” I shouted so loud, she slowed down and looked over at me. “Oh, uh, sorry,” I said. Another long moment passed, and she cleared her throat.
“I want to know something else about her, too.”
“Yes? What?”
“Are you angry?” she asked, searching me with her brown eyes. “With her, I mean? You know I loved her, but this is all so…complicated. I know she never told you about the surgery – I could see it in your eyes, that day you found out. She knew what was happening when she signed on to date you, and yet she said nothing. She knew where the cards were going to fall. She had to.”
My stomach turned over as I looked out of the window again. I’d thought about this, obviously, as I’d known everyone and their moms would be wondering about it, but I was still forming a response that conveyed everything I felt.
“I could never be angry at a dead person,” I began. “Summer deserved love, just like anyone else, and she tried to find it in the only way she knew how. I’m just sorry that she felt like she had to resort to lying, and that she thought it was the only way. I would’ve loved that girl healthy or sick, broken or whole. I just wish she would’ve known that.”
“Oh, Cooper,” Colleen said, and for a minute she just stared at me while we waited at an intersection. But then she snapped back and cleared her throat again. “But, still: you bore the brunt of those decisions. Here you are, in pieces, on the way to her funeral. Who knows – maybe your father was correct in doing what he did to me, severing ties before they sank too deeply and-”
“Don’t bring up that man on a day as holy as this,” I said through clenched teeth, lifting a hand. “I’m not done yet.”
“Okay?”
“Am I angry at the situation?” I asked. “Am I angry at certain decisions Summer made? Am I angry that she didn’t share certain things with me? I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out in the years to come, in the way I deal with this.” I paused and bit my lip, something big and blubbery crawling into my throat. “But God, did I love that girl. I was so lucky to get wrecked by Summer Johnson, let me tell you.”
I didn’t know where that last part came from, I just sort of added it on. My mom couldn’t say anything anyway. She was crying too hard.
“I know she thought I was angry, though,” I said as she shakily wiped her nose. “That’s why she was always pushing me away. But at the same time she’d also wanted to leave something behind. She watched her friends post about their weddings and all their nonsense and she started to feel so small, like she’d be forgotten if she died. And that’s the worst thing. I just want to prove to her that she did leave an impression, that she was successful, and that my gratefulness outweighs my anger, by a million to one. A billion to one. She was a numbers girl – she should understand that.
“And you know, I’m so proud of her,” I said as a smile escaped to my face, my tear ducts pumping again. “She was so pretty and nice and sweet and smart, but not smart in some bullshit, smart-kid-in-the-corner-with-no-social-skills kind of way. Her intelligence was so real and concrete and useful – she could look right into any situation and cut through all the bullshit and see it for exactly what it was. I hope I can become more like that one day.”
My mom sort of shrugged in a sad, weird way as she cried – this was all way over her head – and focused on driving.
“Don’t worry about this, Coop,” she finally said. “You’ll find another girl one day, and get married, and-”
“I don’t want another girl,” I interrupted. “I just want Summer. I’m going to see that girl’s face in every crowd I get lost in for the rest of my life.”
She stared ahead and bit her lip.
“You are better than me,” she said next, shaking her head. “That’s all I know. You are better than me. If I died tomorrow, my life will have meant something, because I improved the world by bringing you into it. I tried to raise you to be good and kind and strong, but you have exceeded my expectations in every single way. I never even dreamed of having a son like you, because I didn’t even know it was possible. I am so proud of you, Cooper. I just…God. Wow.”
I didn’t really know what to say to that, as I’d never really been good at taking compliments. Some people considered me self-centered, but what they didn’t understand was that I was only “self-centered” in the sense that all my thoughts revolved around how inferior I was as a human. Still, I reached over and took my mom’s hand, and she smiled and let me.
“I thank the good Lord every day for you, kid.”
“Yeah,” I said. I had a God now, and she was a girl with a scar who wasn’t here anymore, but still, I squeezed my mom’s hand a little harder. Things like this had gotten easier since Summer’s death for some reason, and I hoped I would never go back to that cold boy I’d been before. Old Cooper would’ve maybe smiled in my mom’s direction and looked away, but New Cooper was all too aware of how careless Old Cooper had been with love, letting relationships fizzle out and loved ones drift away. I treasured love now, and I was not about to let something so precious slip away. So I leaned in and kissed my mother on her bony shoulder for the first time in years, making her smile down at me with every muscle in her beautiful and ravaged face.
And speaking of Summer: Saviour’s brand-new song called The Summer Remains came on the radio as we headed south on Third Street – a song Summer would never hear, I realized with a stifled sob that came out of nowhere. I stared out of the window again at my sepia-toned town as Saviour’s creepy voice pierced the silence:
Ankles in the emerald waves
Hand in hand, hip to hip, trynna be brave
But what we can’t say, we both know
Our love won’t make it past this horror show
Looking for heaven under these palms, finding hell instead
Getting closer to the fire with every fight, every sip, every breath
Got lost in your glow, thought it was a halo
Turns out that elixir was poison, and those devils, they gotcha on the down low
Now we’re side by side as the day breaks, ‘bout to face the sun
Golden hair, golden skin, the golden ones
Angels headed straight to hell and we both know it, here in these waves
‘Least I got you beside me while we face the flames
But hold up, babe, take my hand
Diamonds, platinum, wedding bands
What we had, it’s gonna stay
Even though this world, it’s headed for the grave
The summer remains
I bolted up straighter than a sunray at dusk. The song blew my brain open, and all sorts of words started flying out at me and revolving around in my head, including a few key phrases from Summer’s email…
Rings…
Remain…
Say our vows in front of our family and friends…
No one will ever know our story…
I may never get that white wedding…
And all at once, I knew exactly how to make Summer remain.
I grabbed This Is Not A Cancer Book from my bag. “Turn around,” I told my mom, who snapped out of some dreamy state and stared over at me.
“What? But the service starts in-”
“Turn around!” I shouted, throwing up my hands again. “Do not disagree with your poor grieving son! Turn the damned car around!”
“Alright alright alright,” she said as she U-turned into a Krystal parking lot. “But where are we going?”
I set my jaw and willed myself to do what I had to. For Summer. For us.
“Home,” I said. “And then Summer’s house. And hurry – we don’t have much time.”
My mom gave me an uneasy look and then turned and bled back into traffic. We passed the pier, already crawling with people, and I just watched them. I’d been doing that more lately, too, just noticing things. I couldn’t help myself. A middle school soccer team was walking home from the practice fields on the sidewalk along the road, and an overweight girl hung back behind the other chattering girls, staring at the ground as she trudged along. I looked at her face and saw Summer – everyone had a little Summer in them, actually. Isolation, disappointment, the futile hope for a better future. This girl just had more Summer than usual, and so I leaned out of my window and called “Hey, you!”
The other, popular girls thought I was looking at them and started giggling, but I pointed at the one behind, the one they had cast from their group. When I got her attention, I yelled, “You’re beautiful. Truly beautiful. Just hope you know that. Never forget it, either.”
The girl in the back blushed furiously and started walking faster, a new spring in her step, and I returned to my seat. Now that I knew a loss this searing, never again would I take for granted a day I had been given under this burning star of ours. Never again would I fall prey to fear and insecurity and self-doubt and busyness and distraction and all the other things that kept us from loving the people in our lives in the way they deserved. Never again would I overlook outcast teens and widows and orphans and old men and next-door neighbors and the disabled and all the other people in this chronically unloved world who deserved to be noticed and appreciated. Because the best kind of love, even if it ends, pushes out the edges of your heart, expands the dimensions of it and leaves space to let more in later – and that’s what Summer had given me. I was full of her love, and I couldn’t fucking wait to start spreading it around.
As I watched all those varied Jacksonvillians by the pier I remarked to myself how fucked up it was that most of them would never know or care that Summer Johnson existed. She was anonymous to them as the waves that came one after the other, all day every day, eternally. But at the same time it was sort of beautiful to know that there was a big wide world out there, filled with cliffs and oceans and hills and bays and humans, all with their own dreams and agonies and hopes and vices and Summer Johnsons – or their own knockoff versions of her, at least.
But still, I didn’t like that they didn’t know of my girl. Not at all. Summer needed to be acknowledged. After all, she had said it herself – she didn’t care about getting the world’s approval, but she would get its acknowledgement. And why not acknowledge her in the way modern society had deemed most significant?
Summer Johnson was never incorrect about anything. She was smart and wise and impossibly self-contained and never made a misstep. But many times I’d heard her say that she would never get a wedding because of her circumstances, and therefore she would never be remembered. And for the first time, I wanted her to be wrong.
And maybe I was wrong, too. Maybe I wasn’t my father. Maybe I could still fix this.
“So why are we going home?” Colleen asked as she turned back onto my street. I took a breath.
“I have to stop by your safe. There’s a ring I want to grab.”
She looked over at me, her brow creased into a deep V, a trait I had inherited from her.
“You mean your Grandma Nash’s ring? But I thought you were saving it to give to your wife whenever you got married one day?”
“I was,” I said. “And I am.”
Her breath caught in her lungs as her eyes increased by ten sizes and her mouth fell open.
“Oh my God – Cooper.”