The Summer Remains (35 page)

I swiveled a little until I faced her casket. Seeing her like that brought up the anger again, but I did my best to swallow it.

“Hi, Sum,” I said. “I hope it’s nice where you are. Weather’s fine here, maybe a little muggy. I suspect you may be somewhere, based on something you once told me. You know, that little thing about how people create their own heaven and their own hell by the way they live their lives? I know you’d be somewhere beautiful, because
you’re
beautiful. So beautiful. You were an Earthly paradise. You were good and honest and lovely and sweet and empathetic and you transcended your humanity and rose to the highest level of being by loving unconditionally and, oh God, it sucks so much that you’re gone. But you’re not nowhere. I know that. And I know what
my
heaven looks like, actually. You’re there. So is beer and my dog and the sea. I hope to see you all there one day.”

I choked down an angry sob. It was so hard not to be mad, but I was trying. By this point I was totally crying, the tears mixing in with the snot draining from my nose, soaking my white Oxford and the lapels of the black tuxedo jacket I’d just changed into.

“I don’t know why I’m here, Summer,” I said once I’d regained myself. “I don’t know why I’m so lost or why I can’t grow up or why everyone is so awful or why I can’t find anywhere that feels like home or why this place is falling apart or why I even try anymore sometimes. But I do know you were the first thing I thought of when I woke up every morning into this burned-out world, and that you were beautiful, and that as long as I had you by my side, I didn’t care that I was lost. I would’ve wandered with you anywhere.”

I breathed.

“Don’t ever be mad about what happened, Summer. Let it go, baby. We’re fucked without you, I can’t lie – please excuse my language, children and Jesus – but eventually we are gonna be okay. We’re okay down here, you hear that, Summer? I forgive you.
I forgive you.
I’m gonna take good care of your mom, whether she wants me to or not, and even though I’ve only met your brother a few times, I can already tell he’s gonna be a better man than me. I’m gonna make sure of it. I hope I can teach him about you, and how perfect you were, and the summer we spent together, and how you lit up Jax Beach with your grace.”

I found Chase in the front row, chubby and shy and broken in his collared shirt, desperately in need of a father figure, and an idea came to me.

“By the way, Chase, that room you liked at my house when you came by that one time, that storage room overlooking the pier? We cleared it out for you, and it’s yours, whenever you wanna come over and have a weekend with your new big brother. Got it?”

Chase gave me the biggest smile I had seen since before Summer’s death. Smiles – I missed those.

I paused to look up at the damp ceiling tiles.

“You know, I’m pissed, Summer, and I want to punch a lot of people in the face right now. But it’s also a time to be happy, because you won at life. You won at life, you hear me? You
won
. You were good and beautiful and pure and I am standing in a room full of people who loved you, and in the end there is no greater testament to a life than that.” It was getting hard to speak, but I shoved down the tears. “I know you died young and unnecessarily and that it’s the most unfair thing I’ve ever known, but don’t ever think your life didn’t change things, Summer. You left love behind – that’s all anyone can ask for. And
I
love you, and you made
me
happy, and if a human makes even one other human happy and leaves love behind, their life was a success.”

I cleared my gravelly throat. I knew I was totally rambling now, but I didn’t care – this was my last chance to get all this out, and I wasn’t going to let Summer down now.

I gestured towards the casket proudly. How could I
not
be proud of that girl, and want to show her off? She was mine.

“I wrote my first book about that girl, you know,” I sort of smiled. “Because people like Summer deserve to have books written about them. She was a hero in every sense of the word, but she wasn’t like the rest of them, nope. Most heroes throw their good deeds under lights and expect praise to be lavished upon their glories, but Summer was different. She loved people in the dark and rescued them in the silence, never asking for recognition, never even
telling
anyone of her deeds, and in the end, there is no greater act of heroism than that. Oh, God, I’m gonna miss her.”

I wiped the snot off my lip, an angry lump rising into my throat as I thought of her scar. “You know, I’m sure you’ve all seen someone like Summer,” I said, a new idea in my mind. “You pass them every day: they’ve got a scar, maybe a touch of disease, a cleft lip, a hint of a limp. Something is just
different
, and what do you do? You veer away, because that’s another thing humans do, a shitty thing – we run from what is different. We are all middle schoolers walking down a hallway and nervously laughing while the weird kid with the funny voice gets made fun of by the class bully for having a rolling backpack. We join in and laugh because the backpack kid is Different, and making fun of him makes us Just Like Everyone Else, and God, the worst thing in the world would be being left out of the pack, right? So we cut our eyes and close ourselves up to the plight of the underdog. I know that, because I used to do the same thing – until my mom, bless her heart, became paralyzed and taught me that skin was nothing but a flaccid membrane encasing a human soul. Summer was the most remarkable surprise of my life, that is true, but she was a surprise I would’ve overlooked had I not learned that lesson. After this loss I will make doubly sure to never again avoid the eyes of someone whose body was born different from mine, even though God knows I will
never
find another Summer again. Which brings me to this.”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek as the energy in the room shifted and deepened somehow. “You know, like Shelly said, accidents and anomalies and mess-ups can strike whenever they want, but love is not conditional. The fact that Summer is lying in a casket does not change a thing. I have screamed at the heavens and cursed the ground I stood on and shouted at the gods, if they exist at all. But I do not, nor will I ever, regret the summer I spent with Summer Martin Johnson. And to prove that to her, in front of her family and friends and maybe God himself, I’m gonna do this. If everyone will excuse me, I’ve got a wedding to attend.”

I grabbed my book and stepped away from the microphone as a stunned silence fell over the room. I watched as Summer’s group, Kim included, left their seats and arranged themselves in a semicircle around me and the casket just as I had instructed in a text on the way here, forming one last meeting of Summer’s Anti-Support Group, creating a barrier between us and everyone else in the room – except this time, the freaks would be on the other side.

Just like Shelly had said, everyone had laughed at Summer when she’d shared her spring wish of finding love by autumn.
Everyone
. And here it was, happening a few weeks early, in front of her family and her friends – Summer’s last wish, come true in a way Summer could have never imagined, but fate had ensured. And fate: what
was
fate, anyway? Who spoke the stories of our lives? Did the universe really smile on goodness, or was it all just a shot into the darkness of this doomed galaxy?

I looked at Autumn and thought that maybe some people were born to laugh and make jokes and spill secrets and puncture clouds of sadness. I saw my mother in the crowd and knew others were born to wheel around a kitchen and cook casseroles and smoke cigarettes on a porch and be mothers. Shelly’s face reminded me that some people were born to fret and fuss and smother you with comfortable love. Frank’s grimace reminded me that others were born to frown and complain and be there for people, quietly and relentlessly. And then I glanced back at Summer in her casket, the miracle I’d found in this probably-godless universe, and knew that some people were born to make people happy. Summer was born to love and be loved, and her death had not changed that.

So, to answer a question I’d asked Summer herself many times:
we
created our own destinies. Our actions did. Maybe you didn’t have to die Facebook famous to leave a legacy. Maybe we did that ourselves through the ways in which we lived and loved and died; writing our own inscriptions for our gravestones, leaving only the dirty work for the stonemason. But what was I going to write for
my
stone? What would people say at
my
funeral? Would I be frowned upon as a once-promising failure, or would I be admired as a normal man of normal heart who had gathered his strength and risen to the occasion?

I walked up to Autumn, who wiped her face and gave me a quietly devastated smile. She’d been holding hands with Hank when I approached, and it made my guts feel warm. “I got your message,” she said. “We’re all in wedding attire, just like you asked, or as close to it as we could find in twenty minutes’ notice, anyway. And also, the Funfetti cake we were planning for the wake at Shelly’s house is in the corner – we figured it’d be a nice wedding cake,” she said with tears on her cheeks and stars in her eyes as she motioned at the towering white cake in the corner. Then she reached over and patted my shoulder, and I could feel love in her touch. “Send our girl off in white, Coop.”

“You got it, kid.”

I turned and approached the wooden box that contained the love of my life. I stopped, squeezed my eyes shut, and then opened them and looked down at Summer in her long ivory dress. My unsinkable Summer, too young and too beautiful to have met this fate, sunken at last. She looked cold and still and stiff, and her face was different and hard to look at. It was impossible for my brain to comprehend that she was there, but not
there
. I didn’t get the sense that she was Watching, you know, in some big dramatic heavenly sense, but I told myself it would be nice to believe she was. They’d arranged her mouth into an unnatural smile and hidden her scar under way too much white powdery makeup, just as she had in life, but still, she was my Summer. She would always be my Summer.

“You are so beautiful,” I whispered as I leaned down and ran my finger along her scar to wipe off the makeup. “You still are. Please believe me this time.”

The crowd’s murmuring grew into a dull roar. I could see them craning their heads, trying to look past the Anti-Support Group in front of me, but I didn’t care that they couldn’t see me – the real measure of a human was what they did in the dark, when nobody was watching.

“I’m sorry, but I lied to you during our last night together,” I told Summer. “When I said I would be your boyfriend forever, I didn’t mean it. I want to be your husband.” I reached into my pocket. “This is for you – and no pulling away this time,” I said as I slid my grandmother’s heirloom wedding ring onto her left ring finger. She was stiff with rigor mortis and it took a little pushing, but it roughly fit. Then I took the bouquet of pale pink roses I’d just picked from the bushes in Summer’s front yard and placed them atop her clasped hands. “Please don’t be mad at me, but I just wanna make this thing official.” I straightened the bouquet and smoothed my bride’s golden blonde hair in her coffin, where she would lie for eternity in her bridal best. Death couldn’t take this from me. From us. This love was timeless.

“I know this isn’t your ideal wedding situation, but you look beautiful,” I told her. “And there is a bright side – no selfies will ever be posted of this ceremony.” Then I placed my hand, warm and living, atop hers, cold and dead. “I, Cooper Nichols, take you, Summer Johnson, in the presence of a God that may or may not exist, our family and our friends, to be mine. I offer you my solemn vow to love you unconditionally, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall…”

I couldn’t go on. But I knew it was enough, even though I was kneeling at a casket instead of an altar. Love was enough. It was all so clear to me now. Summer was in me, every bit of me, and as long as I remained, this boy she had put back together, so would she. And maybe these were the remains of the loved ones we lost – not the bodies their souls cast aside on the journey to the other side of things, but those wonderful little bits of them embedded into all of us like stardust floating in the Milky Way, every smile every laugh every tear every whisper every shout every bit of love they ever emitted, little slivers of them that sank into us and reminded us that they were here. They may have been gone, but as surely as the dead of winter gave way to the sun-soaked glory of spring every year, they were here once, and Goddamnit, they had lived.

Summer Johnson’s remains were Cooper Nichols. This union was just making it official. I would go on to win and lose and laugh and cry and die, and although I had no idea if I would succeed with my writing or find love or start taking pills again or even recover from this, I knew I’d have one hell of a time finding out. Summer was so right – dying was easy, but living was the grandest and most challenging adventure of all. And I was about to put that theory to the test like nobody in the world before. I’d lost my way over the years, sure, but Summer had made me find it again, an angel drifting elegantly through the chaos of the world, doling out ruinous and redeeming love, love that had blown me open and stitched me back up again. It was the “redeeming” part that I was going to focus on. It was time to swim.