18
Over the centuries St. Augustine, Florida has been the home of Spanish conquistadors, Caribbean pirates, Minorcan religious refugees, Civil War soldiers, the richest industrialist in America, and Cooper Nichols. It was an oddity, an anomaly, as if God himself had picked up a little European town, cobblestone streets and all, and dropped it onto the marshy coasts of northern Florida. It was maybe a little kitschy, sure, but I loved it to death anyway. (Side note: taking recent events into consideration, I really needed to start finding new sayings that didn’t involve the word “death.” Oops.) An oak-filled square ringed by museums and cathedrals sat at the heart of it, and that connected to a long main street called St. George lined with little touristy boutiques and ice cream shops. I guess some of the buildings in St. Augustine weren’t even that old, actually, and you could see the plastic underneath the plaster, but all that just made everything even more charming in a weird little way. The focal point of town was a rambling colonial Spanish fort (actually old) at the top of a windswept hill that looked out over a cute little harbor that filled with sailboats and yachts and dolphins in the summer. This town held more memories of my childhood than anywhere, and on weekends when I wasn’t in the hospital and the weather was palatable, my parents and I would drive down and walk around town all day, window shopping and going to museums and eating strawberry ice cream. (Okay, my mom would eat the ice cream while I watched her. Same thing.) It was perfect for my current situation, I guess, since it was beautiful and had lots of stuff to do, but it wasn’t so far away that I’d be out of reach of the hospital if anything went wrong. Cooper was thrilled to get away from that awful place and show me his hometown, and I was kind of weirdly intrigued at the prospect of seeing it through his eyes, too, and so I finally let myself get excited about the trip.
As we left the hospital in my mom’s green minivan on Friday morning, though, something bad happened – like cringe-worthy bad. Shelly leaned into the car, over Cooper’s chest, and said: “Have fun, Summer. Looking back on it, I’m so glad you disobeyed Steinberg’s orders and found someone.”
I got away from her as quickly as I could, but Cooper had still heard, and he pulled away from the hospital with a clenched jaw. He’d known I’d kept the surgery from him, sure, but knowing that I’d actually gone against my doctor’s explicit orders to find him? That was on a new level of low that made his eyes shut down and his lips fold into his mouth. I had no idea how to move forward.
On the drive to St. Augustine we passed a few little burnt-out beach towns still reeling from the migration of tourists to fancier resorts in south Florida. The abandoned aqua-hued motels were almost cinematic in their faded seaside glamour, mirroring the broken-down feeling within me. For some reason Cooper kept playing one Saviour song in particular on repeat called Chasing Glory as we drifted southward, mouthing all the words as he drove, looking distracted and detached as he stared out at the road:
I can tell that you’re lonely
I’m the daughter of a bad man, you can’t hide those scars from me
You’re smilin’ big in that American flag tee
But the ghosts show their teeth from underneath
(So come with me)
You know who my flames burn for
I can’t hide that either anymore
You say you don’t know
That you’re the one I’d lay it all down for
(So come with me)
Don’t got no money, no plans
Just dreams to chase and this pen in my hand
So come hop in this faded van
Let’s go win some glory, baby, make one last stand
(So come with me)
They say we’re the new lost generation
And with my burned-out eyes, I can’t deny that
So let’s drive and drink and play the Replacements
‘Til the future we’re running from doesn’t look so black
(Just come with me)
I must’ve heard the song ten times by the time Cooper pulled off A1A and headed towards the bridge to St. Augustine. He was still acting weird and tense, and when he stopped at the gas station by the marsh and hopped out to get gas, I saw him scowling in the rearview mirror.
“Do you want anything?” he asked as he stopped by my window after pumping, the earnest boy from the bedside speech nowhere to be found. “You said you liked Strawberry Mentos once, or was that a lie, too, just like the rest of them?”
“…I’m fine,” I breathed. With angry regret in his eyes, he turned and stomped into the gas station, leaving me alone and reeling in the car.
So, side note: when I was in Sunday School, my teacher talked a lot about original sin. She said humans were constantly trying to go around and look for salvation because in the end everything went back to one simple fact: we had been born sick. She likened it to doing something really bad and breaking our parents’ trust: once you crossed that line, you could never go back, and every fight you might have with them afterward would really be about the original sin of your first transgression. And this is what I thought of as the minivan climbed the steep, tall bridge to St. Augustine, a spongy marsh stretching out under us, a coffee-brown river ribboning out to the horizon in the midst of the sawgrass. The original sin of our relationship was that I’d told the biggest lie of all: I was healthy. Maybe everything would always go back to that, no matter what happened in the present. No matter how forgiving Cooper claimed to be, perhaps I would still never be able to scrub that sin off my skin.
“Cooper,” I finally said as we got into town, “listen.” I was addicted to his magic, even when it stung, and I wanted to make this right again. “I’m really glad I came here with you, and I’m excited, but still, I can’t be punished for lying to you forever. I’m trying to enjoy my time before the surgery, and rude little comments like that aren’t going to help. Trust me, all I want is for us to drift back into summer world and have it be like it was before the hospital. Please help us get there.”
Finally we rounded a corner and pulled up to our hotel, the Casa Monica. The fanciest place in town, it looked like an old Spanish fortress and had multiple turrets and towers jutting up into the blue Florida sky.
Cooper turned to me. “You’re right,” he said with an expression like he’d just swallowed half a lemon and was trying to pretend it wasn’t sour. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. I want to get back to how it was the last few months, too.” He sighed. “Let’s just try to forget about the surgery, forget about your issues, forget about everything and just have a beautiful weekend under the oaks. Can you forgive me for being such a massive anus head? Is that feasible?”
I smiled. “It’s more than feasible. You have a deal, sir.”
“Have you stayed here before?” the concierge guy, Frank, asked as he waited for our keys to print in the lobby.
“Not really, but I’ve been to the bar a bunch,” Cooper said as he looked around at the Moorish Revival space (I’d taken an interior design course during one particularly misguided semester of college and had retained a bit of information). His eyes were huge and filled with this weird, boyish excitement, and it was pretty adorable.
“Nice!” Frank said. “We’ve got a lot of history here. At different times this building has been the fanciest Gilded Age hotel in Florida, an infamous courthouse, and then finally the remodeled hotel you see today, which is famous as a honeymoon retreat because of its romantic suites overlooking the town square. They say people either come here to face death, or fall in love.”
“What about both, at the same time?” I asked before I could stop myself. Cooper looked over at me, looking equal parts heartbroken and admonishing. It was the heartbroken half that shut me up.
“Uh,” Frank said after throwing us a weird glance, “yeah, anyway, let’s go check out that suite.”
“But we don’t have a suite,” I told him. “Last Great Hope arranged for a standard room with a pool view, or whatever?”
Frank took the keys and turned to me with a tight smile. “That has been changed at the request of Dr. Michael Steinberg. Shall we?”
Our room was beyond beautiful, of course. Actually, I don’t even know if I can call it a room, because it was more like a palatial New York apartment, a three-story situation on the corner of the hotel in one of the towers. The first floor was a plush lounge area with a little bar and a few antique couches, and after climbing a steep staircase we reached the middle bedroom level, with a giant bed with a red velvet headboard that looked out over the town square. Up another stairway was another bedroom, this one with two large beds that you could jump across. And we did just that, or at least Cooper did, jumping from bed to bed while I took iPhone pictures from the edge of one of them. Finally he fell next to me and sort of nuzzled me with his leg to test my mood, and after I looked at him to assure him I wasn’t mad anymore, we started making out like teenagers drunk on love and Natty Lite. I knew my breath probably smelled like hot garbage after being in the hospital for so long with barely any sink access, but what could I do?
Before we could get very far, though, he pulled away. I noticed how alive my body still felt at his touch, and wondered if that feeling would ever go away.
“Gah,” he said, “we’ve got all weekend for that! You’re so distracting. Let’s get ready for me to show you around. I can’t wait to be your cheesy tour guide.”
He got up and started rustling through his bags. Of course he did. I reminded myself that I now looked like more of a Hospital Patient than ever, and that hooking up with me would’ve been more of a chore than anything else. I had to give him time to adjust to my quickly-eroding looks before jumping his bones.
“But I’ve been to this town a million times,” I told him, trying not to sound too crestfallen. “What can we do what we both haven’t done before? And hey – what’s in that box?”
A small, rectangular velvet box fell from his backpack – a definite jewelry box. Panicked, he bent down, retrieved it, and stuffed it back in.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “We’re just here to hangout, okay? You’ve never been here with a native St. Augustinian. Let’s just go get ice cream before dinner, and then come up here and use the beds for trampolines until we get sleepy. Then I’ll push them together and make one giant bed for us.”
“Okay,” I said, shivering a little for some reason. I was getting very thin, sure, but something told me nerves had nothing to do with my sudden chill. What was going on? Was that box the reason for this trip?
And suddenly my doubts jumped out at me. Was actually Cooper still furious with me, and had my mother simply guilted him into making up with me and taking his Sick Little Wheelchair Girlfriend on one last trip where he’d give me some cheesy proposal in the Spanish district or something? Was that why he was so angry? Is that what everyone thought I wanted? To force him down the aisle before I bit the dust?
I told myself I was acting psycho and tried to calm down. Cooper and Shelly could’ve been talking about anything the other day over that Subway sandwich. Once again I was being the Queen of Self-Doubt and needed to tell my brain to shut the hell up.
“Ice cream and jumping on beds,” I said as I looked up at him again. “Sounds great. You know, I’m so glad I never grew up.”
“And I’m so glad I found someone to stay a kid with,” he said as he kissed me on the forehead with chapped hospital lips and then headed for the bathroom.
To kill time, I pulled out my phone and scanned the latest Facebook engagements. Spoiler alert: it was the height of summer, and there were four.
As afternoon fell into early evening, busting a hole in the oppressive heat blanketing the city, Cooper walked me across the square to the head of St. George Street. We weaved our way down the cobblestone path through the tourists and sightseers, stopping here and there to check out a boutique or little tchotchke shop or candy store or whatever. I wasn’t really embarrassed to be in the wheelchair in public, but I still felt like a total burden, and I was embarrassed on Cooper’s behalf that everyone was staring at us. Because that was the nature of humans, to stare at what didn’t make sense to them – and this tall, strong boy pushing around this frail girl who no longer looked young nor beautiful definitely did not make sense. He didn’t seem to mind, though, and that kind of just made me sink deeper into love with him than before.
“You’re sure you’re fine with the wheelchair thing?” I asked him for the tenth time after sweat started to show on his forehead. “I think I can rent a little motorized scooter thing from the visitors’ center if we need to.”
“Sum,” he said, “I played football for a year in high school. I was a defensive end, which meant I spent my afternoons pushing against three-hundred-pound lineman at scrimmages. You are a feather compared to them.”
“Point taken.”
As Cooper pushed me I tried to notice everything in the world, but mostly I just wanted to notice him. I liked noticing him. There was so much to notice, after all. The hint of swagger in his walk, his broad shoulders, the tendons and muscles in his forearms that flexed as he moved, his dark hair, and the way it shined gold in the sun. And as I sat there I said a silent little prayer that I would get to notice him for a lot longer.
As we walked (or wheeled, in my case), Cooper pointed out all these things I’d never known about the city, and his enthusiasm was adorable. “Oh, see that dormer window up there?” he asked, pointing at the slanted roof of an old wooden building. “They say the ghost of an old woman waits there every night, waiting for her soldier husband to come back from the Civil War. Needless to say, it’s been awhile.” He pointed down the street. “Oh, and see that Minorcan flag over on that porch? One of the original groups of settlers here were from a Mediterranean island called Minorca. I’m actually partly descended from them – that’s why I get so tan in the summer. And that old building at the end of the street down there? Most people call it the oldest school in America, but it’s actually only the oldest wooden school in America. Disappointing, eh?”
“I’m crushed, really. So unimpressive. Get me out of this dump.”
I tried to pay attention, but soon it became clear that my body wasn’t going to cooperate. I was cold even though the summer air was warm and wet, and I was getting so bony, it hurt to go over every little bump in the road.
“What’s wrong?” he asked half an hour into our journey, turning into an ice cream place called YE OLDE ICE CREAM SHOP. Where the plaster was chipping off the faux-aged walls, you could see Styrofoam underneath. “Getting warm?”
“No, I’m fine. Maybe just hungry. Could you push me to the bathroom, please?”
We squeezed by a group of women waiting in line to pay for their ice cream, and they apologized profusely for blocking the way to the bathroom while simultaneously not moving because they didn’t want to give up their spots, and soon the whole thing turned into a mini-spectacle. That’s the thing with wheelchairs: people go so out of their way to not turn your condition into a “thing,” they turn it into an even bigger “thing” than it was before. In the end, Cooper and I sort of got pushed into the bathroom together. I tried to reach down and grab a carton of Instamilk, but it hurt something in my abdomen, and I winced.
“I’ve got it,” Cooper said as he grabbed the milk. I reached up and tried to protest. “I’ve got it,” he said again. “Just relax.”
He filled the syringe with milk and then brought it over to my tube and started pumping it into me. I guessed he’d seen me do it enough times to know the basics. I was humiliated, but I let him continue. As he pumped, he brushed a strand of my thinning hair from my face and smiled down at me.
“You look great,” he said with a forced smile.
“So do you,” I said, doing my best to return it.
“Shall we?” he asked when the syringe was empty, echoing what he’d said to me that first night back at Joe’s Crab Shack, back when I was healthy and our future seemed brighter than this.
I smiled anyway. “We shall.”
We window shopped into the evening and then headed back to the hotel. We were scheduled to have dinner at some fancy Spanish restaurant called Columbia with absolutely legendary sangria, and so I put on my best dress and let Cooper push me all the way there, since he’d insisted. When we got to the big white restaurant with the blue tile roof right on St. George Street, however, we bypassed the main dining room and went down a side hallway.
“Where are we going?” I asked, but he kept pushing. He turned us into a dark, private room with oak-paneled walls, a rustic chandelier, and a single table with three chairs. Upon closer inspection, I saw that sand had been laid out under the table atop plastic sheeting, and little umbrellas decorated the tropically-hued drinks already adorning the table. Since we couldn’t go to the beach anymore, I guess he’d brought the beach to me. All this made that strange feeling rise up in me again, like I’d do anything in the world for him.
“This is amazing, but three plates?” I asked. “Who-”
That’s when Autumn came busting out of the shadows and wrapped me in the biggest hug ever.
“You little rats!” I said as Autumn pulled away and smiled down at me. “Awkward” wasn’t the word for what I felt around her for nearly wrecking my relationship with Cooper, but wine could fix that. “You know I can’t handle surprises.”
“Well get ready to handle more,” Cooper said, and then he pointed at the corner, where a girl with long brown hair sat on a wooden stool holding a guitar. He nodded at her, and she nodded back and started playing one of my favorite Saviour songs, The Fall.
“Obviously, Last Great Hope couldn’t afford Saviour,” Cooper said as her soft voice filled the room. What’s done is done/you’ve fallen into me, I’ve come undone/two hearts now beat as one. “I looked into it. Apparently she charges a quarter of a million just to leave her country, but they could afford a wonderful local cover artist to come in her place and play some of her songs while we ate, so…yeah. Compromise. Say hello to Fake Saviour!”
I almost cried like a bitch, but I stopped myself. “That is so cool, Cooper. And how did you get this loser to come?” I asked as I slapped Autumn on the leg a little too hard. “Besides with the promise of free food, I mean?”
“He called me,” she said as she darted away. “Turns out he can be very persuasive. Not that I needed persuading.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, trying not to focus on how obsessed with him she was, and together we all went to the table to eat. Or not eat, in my case.
Having Autumn around went surprisingly well, I guess because her presence gave us a break from all the death-pondering intensity of the past few days. The cover singer was actually very good, too, even if her voice lacked the same strange, slightly childlike quality that made Saviour so unique. But I was in heaven anyway. Autumn talked, mostly, regaling us with tales from the frontlines of her disastrous love life. I didn’t eat much, obviously, just swallowed bits of Sangria, but I enjoyed the company. By dessert, I was a little drunk. I just couldn’t believe I was sitting with Cooper, my best friend in the world, and a Saviour lookalike all in the same room. Cooper tried to pay attention, but I saw him drift off a few times. He had every right to be exhausted, though. Whenever he’d notice me watching he’d snap out of it, smile, and reach over to squeeze my knee under the table. At the end of dinner the cover artist played one of my very favorite Saviour songs, Flower Crown Ruins:
Got flowers in my hair and ruins on my mind
Wondering what’d be left of me if you left to find
Someone new, someone who isn’t me
Since they all say you’re trouble, you’re bad news, you’ll set me free
(But fuck that)
The best souls I know are a little crazy
Something in their eyes a little hazy
So fuck all those normal ones, they scare me
Give me broken, God, give me crazy
In the end the only kids having any fun are the lost ones
Those fools out there in the real world, they slave away at the cost of their souls
So grab a PBR, boy, and pull up a stool
And tell me about your dreams and your monsters, you beautiful little fool
“Selfie time,” Autumn said, crouching behind us and whipping out her Android.
“No!” Cooper and I both cried at the same time, turning away and hiding our faces.
“What is wrong with you guys?” Autumn asked, gaping from me to him. “What’s wrong with a little selfie action? And by the way, you’re not even FBO. When is that going to change?”
“FBO?” Cooper asked.
“Facebook Official,” she said. “Summer’s profile is as barren of activity as it ever was. If I found a guy like you, I’d be shouting it so loud, they’d chop off my tongue.”
“And you haven’t seen what I can do with my tongue,” Cooper said, and I shoved him in the shoulder as Autumn got an expression like Jesus himself had descended from heaven.
“And thanks for the suggestion, but tonight was just between us three,” he continued, meeting my eye and smirking.
“I agree,” I said.
“But isn’t that why you wanted someone in the first place?” she asked me, and I raised my eyebrow to tell her to shut up and stop embarrassing me. “To show up the Facebook girls screaming about their stupid weddings, and whatever?”
I glanced over at Cooper, mystified. “I mean, yeah, maybe in the beginning I kind of did, but suddenly I don’t really care about all that anymore.” I winked at him. “Maybe some things are just better left unshared.”
We left Columbia and headed out for a nightcap. On the sidewalk along the bay, we passed some drunk-looking bar hoppers stumbling from one place to another, and I instantly smelled trouble along with whiskey. They gave us funny looks as they passed, and when they thought they were out of earshot they decided to share their brilliant analysis with one another.
“Hey, what was up with that hot dude pushing the wheelchair chick?” one of them laughed. Cooper stopped immediately.
“Yeah, that was totally weird,” the other one slurred. “Maybe I should become paralyzed, too, so I can get a boy that hot.”
I reached up and put my hand on his tense arm. I was somewhat familiar with wheelchairs, and I knew they were an even more visible form of disability than just my scar – people literally veered out of the way when they saw me now. If my scar was a barrier, the wheelchair was a force field, and ninety-nine percent of people were just too uncomfortable to pierce that force field and get to know the person behind it, for whatever reason. But rarely were they as outright rude as these bitches were being. And suddenly I wondered who was freer: me, wizened from the inside of the barrier, or them, ignorant on the outside of it. Everything to me was ugly and illuminating; everything to them was beautiful and empty. Maybe I didn’t have it so bad.
“Let it go, Cooper,” I said. “They’re stupid and drunk.”
“And they smelled like cheap Kmart body spray, so their opinions are invalid anyway,” Autumn added.
Cooper opened his mouth as he looked back at them, ready to rip them to shreds, but then he stuttered and closed it again. Finally he sighed and dropped his shoulders. “You know, ill-mannered young ladies like you two are exactly the reason I think spanking should’ve never been outlawed by America’s court system!” he called after them, loudly but politely. “A belt would’ve really done you two foul-mouthed troublemakers some good as children, in my humble opinion!”
They glanced back and kept laughing.
“And for the record,” he continued, “you should know that Summer Johnson is the sexiest ‘wheelchair chick’ to have ever traveled via wheelchair! Period!”
The girls laughed at each other again and stumbled across the street to a bar, totally ignoring the words coming out of my wonderful boyfriend’s mouth.
“Come on,” Autumn said in my ear as she grabbed my chair and started pushing me away. “If we don’t get out of here now, I’m gonna rape him myself.”
~
The next morning we woke to a brilliant blue sky. It was weirdly cool and breezy for July, and after Cooper got some coffee from the Starbucks in the lobby we decided to go antiquing. Getting ready had been quite the ordeal, and even though I’d felt super tired for some reason, I’d refused Cooper’s help in taking a shower. I was so weak that it took me almost an hour, but he’d waited in the room the whole time, playing on his iPad and trying to act like he wasn’t annoyed when clearly he was. And I didn’t blame him. He’d been dealing with a lot lately, mostly me and my problems.
We’d stayed out until about one the night before, and Autumn had rebuffed our repeated offers to stay in our extra room, choosing to drive back to Jax Beach instead. It was okay, though – I needed sleep, and I was gone from the moment Cooper transferred me from the wheelchair into bed. And sure, a hookup had been in the back of my mind, but what could I do? I wouldn’t want me, either, in this condition.
Cooper pushed me into the quieter part of town, where all the antique shops were. Old Victorian mansions stood on every block, their columns smothered in faded green ivy leaves, their front yards fat with rosebushes and hydrangea. We talked and shopped for a few hours, and soon I had a red scarf, some pretty cool old picture frames that would’ve made my hipster friends twitch their beards with jealousy, and this battered book from 1897 that was going to look pretty cool on my shelf back home. As the early afternoon heat started to creep up on us, we left one shop called Miss Jan’s Junk and crossed to the side of the road that was covered in shade from the oaks. I wrapped my giant grey sweater tight, suddenly freezing, and in the reflection of a parked car we passed, I saw him run his hand through his hair rather deliciously.
“Ugh. Stop making my heart beat like that,” I said. “I’m not supposed to get worked up, remember?”
“Deal,” he laughed. Just then we passed a bridal shop, and inside I saw a pack of bridesmaids around my age fawning over a bride-to-be as she marched out into the showroom in a totally over-the-top dress, her mom tearfully snapping photos with her iPhone from a chair in the back. As I watched them I couldn’t help but think of everything I was missing, and all the things I’d maybe never get to experience, and all the acres of organza I’d probably never get to feel on my skin, and suddenly my eyes glassed up. Then they locked with Cooper’s in his reflection in the window, and I noticed that he seemed to be deliberating something again. But what?
Once again, he snapped out of some trance. He shook his head, appeared to make up his mind about something, and turned abruptly.
“Hey, where are we going?” I asked as we hit a curb a little too forcefully, and I was sent flying up three inches into the air.
“You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. “And sorry about that.”
“It’s fine,” I winced. “Hey, what was it like growing up here?” I asked to change the subject.
“It was…boring, I guess. Trust me, St. Augustine is much better to visit than it is to grow up in. It’s mostly retirees from, like, Connecticut, and older artists and stuff. I mean, it’s pretty, but pretty doesn’t keep you company after school when you wanna play baseball and there are two kids living in a ten block radius.”
“That sucks,” I said. “Does being back here, like, I don’t know…inspire you? You know, to write?”
His shadow fidgeted on the sidewalk. “I don’t know about that.”
“Okay. And, speaking of your past, um…can I ask you about the whole pill thing?”
“I guess?”
“Okay. Well, why did you start?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Why does anyone start a bad habit? I already had addiction in my genes, and things just got out of control. As soon as my dad left my family, it was just me and my mom, and we were dirt poor. She got worse every year, and I would never call her a burden, but – you know. It was difficult. Anyway, after high school I got hired by the Jacksonville newspaper straightaway as a writer for some reason-”
“Because you’re a genius,” I interrupted, and the shadow of him shook its head.
“Whatever. They saw some of my work in a local contest and hired me as a columnist who could hopefully reach out to younger readers. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t afford college and I knew I couldn’t leave my mom, so I said yes. But working and caring for her at the same time became too much, and taking half a Xanax every night to help myself sleep and drown out my mom’s crying and moaning turned into a lot more than that, and…yeah. I just sort of cracked. I got myself together, though, and ever since then I’ve just been sort of drifting from freelance gig to freelance gig while helping Colleen. I have no idea what I’m going to do in this job climate without a degree, and I’m terrified of what’s going to happen when my mom isn’t around anymore and I have nobody to distract me from the fact that I’m lost, but…yeah. We’ll see.”
I considered all that as he pushed me. We really were the same: just two lost souls drifting through an uncertain world, waiting for a future we were almost too afraid to even imagine for ourselves.
“What was your dad like?” I asked for the first time, taking advantage of this rare, open moment.
“Not fun,” he said.
“What do you mean? Am I prying?”
“No, it’s fine. Hmm – how can I explain this? The thing is, women don’t really understand father-son dynamics. There’s this weird layer of male competitiveness a lot of the time. Or there was on his side, at least. He was threatened by me by the time I was in the fifth grade – you know, the classic testosterone-fueled pissing contest. He drank a lot, and he was a failed artist himself, and every time I’d get a good grade on a paper, win a local contest, whatever, he’d get drunk, throw a fit, call me worthless, say I’d never make it, etcetera.”
“What?”
“Yeah. He never did anything, you know, physical or anything, but he was definitely abusive in other ways. I guess that’s my biggest fear – turning into him. That’s what drove me towards pills, that’s the nightmare that pops into my head once a week. That’s why I can’t leave my mom with some part-time nurse and go start my life, you know? I would die if I ever left my mother and became my father. Literally – I’d rather just roll over and die. I hate him. If I ever saw him today, I’d spit in his face. I will never be him. Never.”
As I stared ahead, lost in thought, he laughed a little. “God, listen to me, dragging you down on your special weekend.”
“No, you’re fine. I was the one who asked. You’ve never told me half this much about your past before.”
“Yeah, but I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, either. Hey, all these old houses on this road remind me of that Saviour song.”
“Oh, yeah, that one.”
“Ha, shut up – I’m talking about Gold. Do you know it?”
“Eh, maybe I heard it once or twice.”
I recited the lines in my head as he pushed me along the cracked sidewalks under the age-old oaks:
I was thinking back today, back to when our days were golden
Back to when we were young and free, so emboldened
Running those grimy streets of town, you were King and I was Queen
Nobody could fuck with those crowns of thorns, babe, royalty
But where did you go? Where are you now?
I’m still that girl, just older now
Just know that if you wanted me there
I’d run, run, run until I found you, I swear
Now all I see is this dying day, time flying by
Running out, flashing gold up in the sky
But will you love me in my December as you did in my July?
And would you still come to me now that I’m no longer flying high?
(Run, run, run, I swear)
“Here we are,” Cooper said as we stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “This is where I wanted to come. The Kissing Tree.”
“The what?”
“It’s, like, ‘a thing’ here,” he said as he leaned down, sounding nervous for some reason, as I looked up and saw a palm tree sticking out of the middle of a large oak. “It’s dumb, but I thought we’d stop by. For some reason a palm tree grew right out of the heart of an oak tree, and I guess they depend on each other now, since their roots and trunks are linked up and everything. If they’re ever separated both of them will die immediately, and so because of that, they say that if you kiss someone under the tree, your love will last eternally or whatever. I don’t know, it’s kinda cheesy, but still, I thought we could…I thought you’d want to…you know…take a picture, since all the girls our age are posting wedding selfies and everything, and…”
I cringed as I realized he’d seen straight into my brain back at the bridal shop. The sentiment was sweet, but still, he must’ve thought I was the biggest wedding-obsessed psycho in the world after all this.
“Cooper, it’s fine. I don’t care about-”
“No it’s not, Summer,” he interrupted. “I’m not stupid. I hear the way Autumn talks about marriage, and I see the way it makes you feel. I have eyes. And a heart. I just don’t want you to miss out. I want you to be able to make the annoying Facebook posts just like all those morons, and have all those rites of passage. I know how much this situation sucks – nobody knows what’s gonna happen, you know? I just feel bad that all these other girls are getting to do all this normal-girl stuff while you just sit here in a wheelchair, and I just wish I could fix it.”
“It’s okay, Cooper,” I said, melting into my wheelchair. “I’m fine. Really.”
He stared down at his feet, looking almost ashamed of himself. “It’s not fine. It’s not. I would do anything to make you happy, Summer, as pathetic as it is to admit that. Anything. But I’m just not ready for…for that right now, and, you know, it’s just that, we’re so young, and…”
He trailed off as my heart rate spiked. Omg. How could I possibly save this conversation before he decided I was a maniac bridezilla and ran for the hills?
And wait: if this trip wasn’t some marriage/proposal/whatever scheme, then why in the hell were we here in the first place, anyway?
“Cooper, listen,” I began, grabbing him by the shorts. “That’s not…that’s not what I was crying about back there. I don’t want to get married right now. I swear. I just think it’s sort of hilarious and embarrassing how girls these days use Facebook as a forum to throw their supposed happiness in everyone’s faces and force everyone to bask in their Marriage Glow or whatever, and I wasn’t…I wasn’t really saying that I wanted to…you know…do that. I’m totally happy with the way things are with us. I’m grateful for every second of this, let me tell you.”
Cooper didn’t say anything. I looked up at his face. He was crying.
“What is it?” I whispered. “What’s wrong?”
An old man sitting on the porch of an antique shop across the street suddenly called over to us, shattering the moment.
“Ah, the kissing tree!” he cried as he stood up, his belly stretching against his plaid button-up. “If ever a couple kisses under it, their love shall last forever! Would the young couple like a Kissing Tree shot?”
I looked back at Cooper. Keeping his glassy eyes on the old man, he clenched his jaw, bent down, and then whispered this through his teeth:
“I just want you to know that I am so sorry about all this, and that even sick and skinny and stuck in a wheelchair, you still have more dignity in one strand of your hair than any woman I have ever known.”
“Really!” the man yelled, splitting my attention yet again. “Let me take a shot of you two!”
I swiveled in the chair and saw his smile twitching from under his bushy white beard. Finally, Cooper sniffled and blinked the tears from his eyes.
“Ugh. We can’t just turn the poor guy down, can we?” I shook my head. “Yeah, why not, then?” he told the man as he stood tall and wiped his face. “We’d love to!”
Cooper pushed me over to the sun-dappled driveway beneath the Kissing Tree as the old man followed. After handing him his phone and explaining how to snap a picture, he came over and sank onto one knee beside me, rendering holy ground this patch of oil-stained asphalt in sticky northern Florida. As Cooper wrapped his arm around the back of my wheelchair and gave the old man a proud, dazzling smile, I closed my eyes and suddenly became enveloped in a happiness I’d never felt before. I didn’t know exactly what the nurses had wanted me to accomplish on this trip, but I guessed this must’ve been a step in the right direction. I didn’t care if we weren’t at the beach, under the pier, summer-ing it up anymore – this was all I’d wanted. Just him.
And maybe I was just like this town. Maybe I was a mess underneath, being kept together by a coat of paint and a smile, and I was doomed in the end. But right then and there, under that weird tree, I prayed that even if I was destined to die, even if I’d never get a wedding and a baby and a minivan and the dozens of annoying Facebook statuses to go along with it all, I’d still be able to package this moment away and take it with me, wherever I was going, and keep it forever.
“Ready for your love to last forever?” the old man asked the sick girl and the healthy boy. I looked up at the branches of our very own Oak Tree of Love fanning out above us, blocking the midday sun, and realized I’d become someone from my nightmares – and had had an absolute dream of a time doing it.
“Ready,” I said, and as the old man grinned and pressed the screen, Cooper leaned in and whispered something else: “Fuck all them and their weddings. We don’t need an overpriced gown and a crying mom to make this thing last forever.”
Eyes wide open, I smiled and said another prayer: a foolish, somewhat desperate wish that the tree’s stupid powers would actually work this time.
~
On the way back to St. George Street we passed a sort of rat-faced boy in a pair of faded jeans and heard him whispering about “the cripple” to someone who looked like his brother. I held up my hand, but Cooper dismissed me and clenched his jaw: I could tell there would be no politeness this time.
“Hey, Farmer Joe,” he called, and both of them immediately looked over. “My girlfriend may be in a wheelchair, but she’s still way better looking than your fugly ass will ever be, so unless you want to come over here and let me beat you into the dirt you crawled out of, why don’t you keep your monosyllabic thoughts to yourself?”
They turned the color of the strawberry ice cream cones they were eating and quietly disappeared into a nearby candle store.