The Summer Remains (13 page)

So I sort of explained what I could to Cooper, minus a few of the more intense details, and when I finished, he stepped forward and grabbed my face. My entire body went tingly at his touch, just like they talked about in the books.

“Summer Martin Johnson,” he said as he planted a kiss on my forehead, “I would like nothing more than to spend my Thursday night listening to people complain about their problems with you.”

“You would?” I asked as I got the succinct feeling that my skin had melted. He hadn’t kissed me like that since a walk to Dairy Queen a few days before, and I was starting to miss his touch, and want more of it, in different ways.

“’Course,” he said. “Something tells me I’d do almost anything if it involved you.”

I didn’t need any more convincing. I grabbed a sweater and told him to get in my car.

After a jittery drive to the converted fire station that served as our community center, I stocked a flimsy card table with some pretzels and Diet Coke and then put up a sign saying
SUMMER’S ANTI-SUPPORT GROUP: POSITIVITY FREE ZONE, BITCHING WELCOME
on the front door and waited. Someone barged in looking for a gardening club meeting and then saw me and politely said “Oh, sorry, this is the room for that cancer group,” and left the way he’d come. I glared after him, because this fed into another issue I had with my issues. Don’t get me wrong – cancer sucks, and watching my great aunt Tess slowly die of breast cancer was one of the worst things ever.
Ever
. But, like, people
understand
cancer, right? People
grasp
cancer. People have heard of cancer. You hear the phrase “cancer patient” and you immediately get this image of a bald-headed warrior sitting in a chemo clinic Fighting the Good Fight, Not Giving Up, etcetera. Like, it’s terrible and random and it strikes anyone, but people
expect
that cancer can unexpectedly come at any second, you know?

But there is no gallows glamour in somebody’s body not working correctly. It seems like every few months there’s a sweetly melancholy movie about some dude finding out he has eight months to live before a brain tumor makes him bite the dust, and then he sets off on a sweetly irreverent journey where he Chases His Dreams, Checks Off His Bucket List, parasailing on that beach in Australia like he’d dreamed of as a snot-nosed kid, etcetera. Either that, or the tried-and-true tale of adorable cancer-stricken teens finding love. But there are no darkly funny stories about a girl with no throat and a death sentence just trying to live her life. There are no books entitled
Esophageal Intresia And Me: Living a Full Life with Half a Throat and Three Months to Live (And You Can, Too!).
When people broach the subject of People Who Are Not Entirely Well, they want a story they’ve heard of, something they can understand, something they can wrap up in a cute little Ribbon of Disease and keep on their shelf for a rainy day.
Cute White Kids With Cancer Fall Into Doomed Love in the Suburbs
is the title of the story they all want. When family members of other sick people look over at me in waiting rooms and ask me about My Story, they sort of perk up, half-expecting to hear some tale about a heroic battle against an evil tumor in my heroic sinuses or something, but as soon as I explain that no, I’m not Fighting the Good Fight, and yes, this is my real hair and not some chemo wig, it’s just that my body just sort of doesn’t work correctly, I watch their eyes glaze over immediately. There was no drama in being born incomplete, with parts that didn’t work, pieces that didn’t add up to a whole. Even the phrase “birth defect” struck me as almost unbelievably callous – like, I’m a human, and you’re calling me “
defected
,” like some flawed model to be sent back to the factory to be fixed or something? Guess what: there was no factory. It was like the hero of an action movie dying in the middle of the film from a stray bullet: so senseless, it was just boring. Every sad story had to have rhyme or reason. Mine had neither, it just
was
. And sometimes that made me feel more broken than anything. Once I was even exiting my doctor’s office with an Intresia pamphlet in my hand when a girl and her father commented that it “must be one of those cancer books.” I wanted to turn and tell them that fuck no, it wasn’t a cancer book, that there were other maladies in the world besides cancer, and that my condition had nothing at all to do with cancer, but I turned and left like the coward I was. But still, deep down, I kind of wanted my boring story to matter. I wanted people to care that I had something other than Cancer with a capital C. I just didn’t know how.

Guests slowly started to trickle in, but the turnout wasn’t great. I guessed people were busy with summer, or just busy getting dead, either one. So I got going. Although we didn’t have any new people, we always started the meetings by going around the circle to tell our stories and share anything new about our conditions, and so at 7:10 I welcomed everyone, mentioned that Cooper was just a curious friend tagging along (the intensity of the stares coming from the girls in the group warranted an explanation) and asked the member closest to me how he was doing.

“Alright, I guess,” said Victor, who’d been paralyzed in a car crash when he was just a kid.

“That face you just gave me doesn’t look alright,” I said. He swallowed.

“Well, it’s…it’s my girlfriend. It was fine at first, and it seemed like she didn’t really care that I was immobile, but I can tell she’s sick of reaching for things and getting my TV remote for me and stuff. She’s sort of pulling away.”

I nodded. “Yeah. That sucks. And I hate to say this, but there’s a chance she might dump you.”

His mouth fell open.

“Victor, sorry, but being broken makes us different,” I told him, throwing an uneasy glance at Cooper. “You know that. That’s just how it is. Whenever we walk into a room – or roll into one, in your case, sorry – people glance. It’s their nature to glance, just like it’s our nature to slow down when we see a really bad car wreck. We are the car wreck, and we just have to accept that, or else we’ll never get anywhere in this world. Do you get that?”

He just sort of nodded. “Yeah, I get it. It just sucks.”

“Welcome to life,” I said. “It sucks. And by the way, this girl sounds like a total bitch, so she wouldn’t be much of a loss anyway.”

A few people laughed, Cooper included. I didn’t even want to wonder what he thought of all this, so I kept going.

“Who wants to complain next?” I asked, and Scotty raised his hand. He was around my age, had “beaten” leukemia at around fourteen, and came to the meetings to help others who hadn’t yet healed and were still stuck in their problems.

“Not a problem, just a contribution,” he said. “People suck. Get used to it.”

“Why thank you for that uplifting comment,” I said, and he sort of bowed in his seat. I looked to his left. “Hey, Kim.”

“Hi,” she said, typically shy. Because of her spina bifida, she was in a wheelchair, too, and couldn’t do much.

“You doing okay?” I asked.

“I mean, yeah, I guess.”

“What’s the ‘I guess’ for?”

“I don’t know. There is one thing. Feeling pretty is a struggle every day.”

“Well that’s stupid,” I told her. “You’re gorgeous.”

“Agreed,” Cooper smiled, and I looked over at him. “Your hair is beautiful, by the way. Are those highlights?”

Kim blushed, reached up, and patted at her dishwater blonde hair. No hairstylist in the world would’ve given someone that color, and he knew it.

“No, this is all natural, I swear.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Cooper told her casually. “Looks professional. Where’d you get it done, anyway? Can I have the stylist’s number? My hair’s been looking a bit shaggy lately, and my mom teases me relentlessly about it.”

Kim laughed, and they went on and on. And the thing was, his interest in her didn’t come off as condescending or patronizing in any way at all – he was just talking to her, in the same way any human talked to any other human. It’s just that Kim was never spoken to like a human – in the eyes of most people, she was a pile of pity in a wheelchair.
Compliment her, do your good deed of the day, and then move on and forget she’s an actual human who wants to talk about anything other than her issues
– that is what most people thought when they looked at Kim.

But not Cooper.

A lull finally came in their conversation. Before I could tear up, I turned to the guy next to her.

“Anyway, Hank! Hi.”

“
Hiiii
,” Hank groaned. Hank was a dead-eyed soldier a few years back from Afghanistan with a missing arm and a major hole in his psyche to show for it. He had a dark, vaguely irritable demeanor, like a dog that had been rescued from a bad owner. I grew up around the corner from a nasty dive bar called Ginger’s and I knew Hank because I grew up watching its patrons come and go whenever I got bored. They were all just like him: broken, carved-out people who sat around looking to the past because they were haunted by their present and resigned at best about their futures.

“Anything you wanna bitch about?”

He shrugged, as usual, so I turned to Autumn. “Okay then. Hey, Autumn. How’s it going?” (For the sake of inclusiveness, Autumn and I tried not to be too buddy-buddy at meetings. I knew she was confused as hell about Cooper’s presence and would be cornering me about him as soon as she could, but I tried not to think about it just yet.)

“Shitty,” she said, deadpan. “Like, shittier than a Mormon who accidentally walked into a porn convention.
That
shitty.”

“Explain.”

“It’s just so fucking unfair,
all
of it,” she began. She usually saved her biggest rants for these meetings, so I settled into my chair and braced myself. “Like, I’m twenty-four years old, and all my friends are looking forward in life, buying rings and wedding dresses and baby cribs and starter houses, while I’m having consultations with plastic surgeons about potentially having my breasts removed. Give me hot guys, give me a wedding, give me Key West – give me
something
. Shit, I’ll even take an unwanted pregnancy at this point. I just feel like I’m…stuck, you know? I’m sure
you
know.” She looked right at me as she said it. I bristled, feeling Cooper’s eyes on me.

“Um…yeah. I know.” The conversation was hitting too close to home, so I moved onto someone else. “So, hey, Ethan, let’s talk about-”

“Like, seriously,” Autumn said, refusing to let me drop it. “Why me? Why now? I’m sick of being the heroic cancer fighter. This has really been bugging me lately, especially now that literally
everyone
in my life is coupled up. Or so it seems.” She threw me a mean glance, and I looked away. “Like, if my family had stayed in Sri Lanka, I’d still have cancer, but at least I wouldn’t be getting bombarded by engagement stories every week, since they’re so conservative about marriage or whatever. But still – I’m jealous. Like, I really want the chance to buy a fucking overpriced wedding dress and select ugly centerpieces and get into passive-aggressive email fights with my bridesmaids, you know? Why can’t I at least get the
chance
?”

My lips curled into my mouth. I felt vaguely dizzy but I pushed it down. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “None of us knows. But that’s why we’re here. To find some sense in a totally effing senseless situation.”

“Oh boo hoo,” Hank suddenly said. Because he barely ever said
anything
, everyone looked at him.

“Go on,” I said.

“You’re sitting here moaning about not having a boyfriend?” he asked in Autumn’s direction. “Well, get over it. I know you have cancer, and it sucks. But at least you’re alive, unlike some previous members of this group, and at least you have two arms.”

“
Excuse
me
?” Autumn asked after a brief, and very shocked, silence. “Um, I’m complaining about a
lot
more than being single. There are new wedding albums being posted every weekend. This is a major problem! And for your information, I’m not even totally single. I’m talking to someone!”

“Is this like the last guy you tried to date, who barely knew your name?” he asked. “Just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention.”

“‘
Tried to date
?’” Autumn asked in disbelief. “We spoke! In person! Twice! And he even gave me his Snapchat username! He didn’t exactly add me back when I friended him, but I’m optimistically waiting!”

“I rest my case,” Hank said.

“And…so do I!” Autumn cried. “I forgot what my case is, but I rest it! It is very well rested, trust me!”

“Whatever.”

Autumn crossed her arms and looked away. Hank tried to do the same, remembered he only had one arm to cross, and then sort of awkwardly hugged his shoulder while everyone else stared at the walls.

“Well,” I said. “So! Moving on. Um, Ethan, how about you? Anything new in Ethan Land worth complaining about?”

Ethan was seventeen and fighting a rare blood cancer that was famous for the almost unendurable pain it inflicted upon its sufferers. He broke my heart to pieces every time I looked at him. I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me when we met a few years back, after his parents had heard about the group and asked me to go visit him in the hospital to talk some fight into him. After I walked into the darkened room where he was being partially subdued by straps to keep him from dis-attaching himself from the torture machines keeping him alive, he politely greeted me, pulled me down to his eye level, and asked me in the softest, most angelic voice I had ever heard if I would please kill him.