DECEMBER 12
The day after seeing Kevin, I am enlisted to go back to the funeral home to get a final copy of the death certificate for the Johnsons. One thing I never expected was how hard it is to die. I mean, anyone could just keel over and go lights out, sure, but the process of actually being declared dead in the eyes of our wonderful government was an entirely different thing altogether, involving mounds of paperwork and driving here and there to all types of different government buildings and medical offices. When you move houses you have to jump through hoops to change addresses, and when your address changes from Earth to whatever is beyond Earth is an even worse nightmare. One of the most private and sacred acts of a human’s life is now busywork for the DMV: who knew it was so fucking expensive to die? But I forced myself to go through the motions and get the work done. For her.
And the thought of making my poor little mother do all this after my death made me shiver with guilt.
After that I stop by Summer’s house to drop off the file. I knew it was going to be awful, so I sucked it up and dealt with it, like vomiting to get over a hangover, or April Fifteenth.
Shelly opens the door and just sort of collapses into me, and I hold her on that front porch for a long time, just letting her cry onto me as we sway. I’d never been that close to her when Summer was alive, but now I know it’s my duty as her new son-in-law to comfort her. And all over again I am reminded of just how close it can bring two people, to miss and mourn and love the same person.
Finally she leads me inside, and I can’t lie – stepping into Summer’s house feels like being smothered by something large and hot and heavy, sort of like when the class bully, Desmond Hunt, sat on me in kindergarten and made me pass out. It feels even worse after reading my journal, and it kind of makes me panic, honestly. She should still be here, I keep thinking as I try not to look around. She should be searching through that refrigerator for spare milk boxes and using that cake mixer and burning things on that stove. She should still be here.
And oh, the relics of her life – the proof that she had lived in this very house – make it seem like she’d been here yesterday and been gone forever all at the same time. Her light blue sweater on a side table by the closet makes me want to throw up. A textbook she’d gotten before her surgery news, when she’d been considering going to grad school, enrages me all over again, and reminds me of how her future had been stolen from her by some stupid doctor. I want to leave immediately, but I stay.
We sit and talk for a while. Shelly tells me she and Chase are doing just fine. We both know she’s lying. She also says she isn’t angry, and is dealing with that part of everything just fine. I can tell this is a lie, too. The house has a stagnant, stale, cried-in air about it that just screams somebody is miserable here.
“It just doesn’t make any sense, or even feel real,” she says soon, her eyes a million miles away, as she starts to open up. “I keep going back to every moment leading up to the surgery, every little thing that happened in those last few weeks, looking for some sign, something I could’ve done to change things, or maybe prevent…”
“I know. Trust me, I know.”
We talk about Summer some more, and the family, and how much they all miss her. Then she asks me if I’m hungry, and I say no, and so she makes me a gigantic plate of food anyway. Then she puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Ugh, you little gem. You brave, brave kid.”
“Brave? I didn’t do anything. How am I brave?”
“By picking yourself up. I hear from your mother that you’re writing again?”
I shrug. “Just poems. Nothing big.”
Her eyes change. “Cooper, do you know how many boys your age would’ve been destroyed by all this? By her, well…you know…”
I look away. The fact that Summer lied to me about her impending death all along was not something I would ever be able to comfortably discuss with her own mother. “I don’t know about any of that,” I shrug. “I just miss her.”
Shelly sighs and coughs and cries all at the same time. “Oh, boy. Me too. We were so lucky to have loved her.”
“Love,” I say, the ghost of Summer’s floral scent haunting my nostrils. “We love her, not loved her.”
After a few more minutes of small talk – Shelly’s hydrangeas aren’t doing well in this weather, and raccoons are getting into the trash again – she walks me to the door after forcing me to take an entire chicken casserole home for my mom. I’d never been good at this stuff, because I’d never really had a mom in the first place. On tough days, I was the one holding Colleen, when it should’ve been the other way around. But that was okay, because now I had two moms, and I’d always been a fast learner.
“Us Johnson women know how to casserole,” she says as she slides the pan into a bag and pushes it at me, using the word “casserole” as a verb as only a Southern woman could. Then she gives me another big hug.
“Whoa,” I say as she holds me. “I’m just driving to my house five minutes away. I’m not moving to Saturn.”
“I know,” she smiles as she pulls away. “But I’ve been trying to get better at goodbyes lately. I have to. With how…sudden the Summer thing was, and everything…”
“I know what you mean.”
She looks around to make doubly sure Chase isn’t around, then leans into my ear. “Chase brought home a painting the other day. It was so sad. He wrote that he has a family of three – there were two kids in the picture beside me. He still hasn’t accepted it – it still hasn’t sunken in.”
“Oh, he wasn’t talking about Summer. He does have a sibling – me. And he always will. Summer’s…situation won’t change that at all.”
I manage to hold in my tears until I make it to the car. Because something else is in my soul, something making my bones shake and my teeth chatter: I think I saw Summer.
Something is brewing, I decide as I drive home. There she was, standing in the corner of her kitchen as I turned to leave, clear as day, as her mom prattled on. I glanced over and stared at her, and then in one blink, she was gone. I know grieving peoples’ eyes play tricks on them, and bla bla bla, but this didn’t feel like that. It felt…real. I don’t know what the hell it felt like, actually, but it felt like something.
And when I walk through my door, I pause, the air growing chilly, and look around the corner. I swear I can sense her. I will peer around every corner looking for that girl for the rest of my life, but still, this feels different. I can almost feel her here. It’s vaguely uncomfortable, like when you’re in an empty restaurant and a stranger sits right next to you for no reason. But that’s impossible, right? She’s dead. Right?
I feel the book pulling on me again, screaming at me from my bookshelf. And before long I can’t deny it anymore. I know it’s time to head back into the pages, even if it feels like peeling back my skin with a hot fork. But the second I touch the book, it zaps me – shocks me like when you grab a doorknob on a cold day.
I gulp and ignore it. I’ve got a summer to get through.