22
Cooper Nichols
I spent the morning pacing in a freezing hallway by the waiting area, too nervous to sit down, too nervous to eat, too nervous to do anything, really, other than pray to a God I didn’t believe in and bite the inside of my cheeks. Why did hospitals have to be so cold, anyway?
For some reason I kept thinking of that moment on the pier the other night, and of how badly I wanted Summer to believe what I was saying, that she glowed. She was glowing. My girl glowed.
I sank onto an awkward padded blue chair and went back, back, back, in my mind, back before the days by the sea and the quiet evenings at Shelly’s had transitioned to long afternoons spent staring at televisions in this very hospital, and suddenly it was almost like I was back at Joe’s Crab Shack again. (I’d only just started thinking vividly and dreaming in color again for the first time since my teens, and Summer was to blame.) I’d been so pathetically lonely on my birthday back in March, friendless and depressed, and on a whim I’d downloaded the app and matched with her. The first thing I’d noticed was how funny she seemed. Her sense of humor was this fascinating mix of hard and soft, strong and vulnerable, and so I’d messaged her straightaway.
As I shuffled my legs on that uncomfortable chair in that cold room I could almost smell the salty ocean air again, hear the children screaming on the restaurant’s playground, see her walking up to me. She’d been so nervous about her looks, but I hadn’t even noticed her scar until she’d pointed it out to me – compared to my mom’s situation, it was nothing. Instead, I’d noticed her black dress, her golden hair, her hazel eyes burning amber in the sun, the way she kept laughing and looking down at the sidewalk. The gentle curve of her cheekbones, the elegant way her eyelashes seemed to watch guard over her eyes, so sunken into her head. And God, that smile, the one that played my soul like a violin. Her presence was indescribably soothing, and for the first time in a very long time, I’d felt like I was home in some weird way – or at least somewhere very near home. I could see it all so clearly, it was like the sun had never set on that evening. After all, there were only a few moments in a human’s life that came along and changed everything, little fireworks that popped in your skies and shifted the winds in your sails and put you on a new course and pushed you to new heights and horizons you’d never even dreamed of before. Mine was at six in the evening, the twenty-fifth of March. Humid breeze, golden sunset. The moment I’d met Summer.
Right away, I could tell that this Spark girl was something. A leading lady, not a supporting character. I didn’t know what, exactly, and I didn’t know how big she’d become, but immediately I sensed that this small brave beautiful girl would loom large on the landscape of my life. If only I’d known just how large.
I stared at a bulletin board on the wall and tried to look past it, to see where she was, exactly, within the maze of this place, and guess what was happening to her. I didn’t necessarily have a bad feeling, I just had no feeling at all. Where were all the Feels? So to pass the time I took out my phone and started playing Scrabble, thinking about odds all the while. I looked at my game with Summer. The day before, I’d spelled STAR for thirty-three points, and now it was her turn to make a move. In her absence, I pulled up my game with Kevin and saw that all I had to choose from were useless vowels. To free up some space and get some consonants, I used some E’s and O’s to connect two preexisting letters and spell GEODE, and then I sat back and waited for luck to strike and give me some all-powerful consonants.
My phone pinged and refreshed. Five E’s stared up at me.
At around eleven I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked back and saw Summer’s mom standing behind me.
“They said no news will be good news, so I’m assuming things are going fine,” she said in her vague Southern accent. “Why don’t you go out and get lunch or something? Drive around?”
“Thanks, but I’m not leaving. I’m fine. I’m just steeling myself for later.”
“You brought the diary?” she asked, and I nodded and patted the lump in my pocket. “Now there’s a surprise she’ll like. Your first real book!”
I smiled a smile that went down deeper than deep. As soon as I’d seen that copy of Eighty Eight sitting in my garage that night, I was inspired to write, and I knew just what I’d write: her. And that’s what I’d done. Sure, all I’d done was chronicle our time together to the best of my recollection, but still, I thought she’d like to see herself, and this summer, through my eyes. My diary had reached the length of an extremely short book, and after getting it bound at Office Max I’d hatched a plan to present it to her in the recovery room after surgery. I couldn’t believe I’d managed to keep it under wraps for this long, and I couldn’t wait see her face light up and show her how her influence had brought me back to life and made me dust off my dreams and bring them out to play again. I’d never been so excited about anything, actually. Hopefully this would finally erase her doubts about this summer and make her realize just how grateful I was, despite everything.
Shelly looked over at me. We’d gotten over all the awkwardness of the beginning of the summer, and now she was sort of like a goofy, highly emotional, and slightly immature second mom to me. But when I noticed the tears in her big brown eyes, I groaned inwardly and wondered if I had the stomach to deal with the Shelly Show while I was already so worried.
“Cooper,” she sniffled, “I have to tell you something.”
“Please, Ms. Johnson, it’s okay. You don’t have to go there, it’s-”
“It’s not okay,” she said. “You need to hear this.”
“Okay?”
She took a long, deep breath. “At the beginning of the summer, when Summer told us she wanted to fall in love, everyone laughed at her and acted like she was crazy. Everyone. Even me, as much as it hurts to admit. We were being so cynical. I thought she’d fallen off her rocker, let me tell you. And it wasn’t just the surgery. You know, the thing about the…you know, her scar, and her issues and everything, I just wondered if she would ever find...”
She trailed off and stared at nothing, and I could see years of bottled-up motherly concern in her eyes. Finally she looked back at me. “All I can say is that I am so grateful that you came along, Cooper. I’m sorry you weren’t filled in on certain things, but still, I’m thankful. You were sent from heaven above, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said, patting her shoulder. “This summer has been a privilege. I promise.”
“I should’ve known, though,” she said wistfully. “She’s always been so focused, so determined, so strong-willed. No matter what was going on in her life with her health issues, she’s always been able to rise above and set her sights on whatever she wanted and get it. And I guess she wanted you.”
I shifted in my chair. “Um, I know what you mean, but she didn’t ‘go after’ me,” I said after a moment. “It wasn’t like that. We just sort of…fell into each other. I don’t know. Loving your daughter is easy, Ms. Johnson.”
“Ugh, Cooper. I know it is. Trust me. And please, you know I’m Shelly.”
“Okay, then, Shelly.”
She slapped me on the knee, laughed, and returned to her magazine.
~
“Do you think it’s weird that nobody’s come out to give us an update yet?” Shelly asked about an hour later, looking up from an issue of Southern Living that I suspected she had not read a word of. I’d been thinking the same thing, actually, but I didn’t want to say it. Saying it out loud would make it real. But this definitely wasn’t going to plan. If the doctors had found that they weren’t able to fix her throat and stomach like they’d hoped, they were going to sew her up and tell us the next step. They weren’t supposed to just leave us out to dry like this.
Something was wrong. I could sense it everywhere. But I tried to stay calm. I was probably just overreacting, anyway, as usual.
“Nah,” I said, wiping my sweaty palms on my shorts, as I tried unsuccessfully to get lost in a shark fishing article in Void magazine. “They said no news was good news, remember?”
Hang on, Summer, I thought to myself as I got the sickening feeling that somewhere within these walls, she was in pain. I didn’t know if I was being dramatic or what, but I just wanted to hear myself think the thoughts in my head, just in case. Be strong. Get through this. You’ve got the light, remember? You glow.
“Yeah,” Shelly said, blinking down at her magazine as if it was the first time she was seeing it. “But I thought they said no news, not, like, no news.”
~
By two PM, worry was descending into vague panic. Passing nurses were completely avoiding us, spotting us and then crossing over to the other side of the hallway, an almost animalistic fear in their eyes. I didn’t even want to think about why this was happening, but it obviously wasn’t a good sign.
“Where are they?” Shelly called out from the corner of the waiting room, where family members were starting to congregate, as yet another nurse darted away. “Why haven’t they said anything?”
“It’s fine,” I assured her, as something deep within me boiled and rocked. “It’s fine. She’s fine.” I missed her already, and I wanted to hold her hand and have her melt away my worries, like she always did. But she wasn’t here.
Just then, one of the nurses finally acknowledged us. A tall, skinny girl with dark skin and braided hair almost down to her waist passed by in the hall and noticed us, clutching her notebook tighter as she walked up.
“You’re the Johnson family, right?” she asked, apparently unaware that we hadn’t been briefed yet, and several people jumped up and nodded. I will never forget what she said next:
“I’m gonna pray that they can start her heart again.”
~
They called us down a hallway about ten minutes later. I was pacing back and forth again, switching between getting lost in the waves of worry that were swamping me and absently playing my phone’s stupid Scrabble game to keep some semblance of sanity and normality, when a hospital administrator with light brown hair and an artificial smile waved us over. She turned and led us into some weird room off the waiting area containing a few rows of chairs and a podium, and the moment I looked up and saw a large plastic cross lording over us from behind the podium, my knees almost went out from under me.
We had been called into a chapel.
“Drs. Dill and Steinberg will be here to see you in a minute,” the lady said as everyone went dead quiet. “Please, sit. Would you like some water? Pepsi? Anything?”
Shelly shook her head vacantly and sunk onto a chair. She held out her hand. I took it and sat next to her.
We waited in silence. Nobody wanted to say out loud what this probably meant, but the realization was filling up the room like the floodwaters of a hurricane, the quiet slowly suffocating us.
Finally Dr. Steinberg and a man I did not know walked into the room. Steinberg was sobbing, and the other man was impassive. Instantly, I knew.
Oh my God, I knew.
I stared down at the cheap industrial carpet, trying not to drown in the waters, as he spoke.
“I am so sorry for the delay,” the strange man said, his words flat and hard like a stone at the bottom of a stream. “We ran into some unexpected complications during surgery. The thing is-”
“What happened?” Summer’s dad asked frantically. “Where is she? Did they fix her throat? Can she eat now? Is she being transferred to Gainesville? Where is she?”
Dr. Steinberg started crying harder and looked away, refusing to participate in the other guy’s bullshit. The man leaned forward and tried to appear serene and removed, but the muscles in his temple kept clenching and unclenching.
“Her throat is not exactly the issue today,” the man said. “There were…other things that happened. But the important thing to know is that she fought so, so hard. She was so sick for so long, and she knew she just couldn’t live like that anymore, and she was so brave, and she made the ultimate sacrifice, and eventually we had to let nature run its course, and-”
“Horse shit!” I shouted. “I ate a steak dinner with her last night! She was fine! This isn’t how it was supposed to happen! Where is she?”
A big black panic rose up within me, but I tried to push it down. This wasn’t happening. I’d perhaps expected a failed procedure and a decision to keep her throat as it was, but not this. Never this. It just wasn’t a possibility.
“Summer’s alive, right?” Aunt Susan sort of screamed, her voice a manic cackle, as Summer’s stepmom started wailing and then collapsed onto a side table, knocking over a lamp. Suddenly Shelly jumped to the floor and desperately grabbed both of the doctor’s arms, staring up at him with everything in her.
“IS MY BABY ALIVE?”
The doctor took a shallow breath and then looked down at her.
“No.”