The Summer Remains (32 page)

Out of the silence, it rises up

That voice, reminding me that this life will never be enough

So I grab my phone and stare at the stars

But these distractions, they never get me very far

So say anything, kid, take me anywhere

Just get these monsters outta my hair

And say anything, just take me anywhere

I’m slowly gettin’ killed by all this dead air

If I was in those hills of Beverly, it wouldn’t be like this

Fame, sex, white lines, glamorous misery, give me all of it

Stuck in a life I never planned for, with problems I don’t even care about enough to fix

This set of bones I’ve been given, I could do without – I just wasn’t born for this

(So say anything)

(Take me anywhere)

That’s when I got a call from Aunt Susan. It seemed that Shelly, in a fit of angry grief, had torn apart Summer’s room looking for a goodbye note, a diary, some kind of last words to give her some sense of closure, but had found nothing of the sort. (It did strike me as odd that someone so analytical and obsessed with little details as Summer would not have left something behind, but I tried not to dwell on it.) Shelly did, however, find Summer’s secret chest, that corner of every human’s bedroom where they hide from the world the things that revealed their most quietly desperate desires. Susan wanted me to know that in the chest was a specials menu from Joe’s Crab Shack dated March 25
th
.

I said thank you as everything in me broke apart again, and then I asked if she could tell me anything else about the stash. The only other thing of substance she’d found was a photo ripped from an Intresia pamphlet that had said
I DON’T CARE ABOUT SOCIETY’S APPROVAL, BUT I
WILL
GET ITS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
, which I found very interesting. Then I asked if there was anything else in the chest, anything at all that she remembered seeing, no matter how insignificant.

The only other thing Susan remembered noticing before ushering Shelly out of the room and into a hot bath was a stack of wedding magazines.

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:
[email protected]

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.