The Summer Remains (14 page)

He was a tad better now, and had been weaned off some treatments, but I still cursed the world every time I saw him and thought of everything he had to deal with. He would be lucky to grow old enough to one day be legally allowed to drink in a bar.

“I’m doing, like, okay, but the thing I hate more than anything is the guilt,” he said, and a few people nodded. “It feels like all I am is a problem or something. My dad can barely be around my mom because she cries so much about me, and my friends are pulling away from me to save themselves from my death. I just feel like, I don’t know. Like I’m not worth the trouble.”

“Have you ever had a dog that died?” Cooper suddenly asked. I looked over at him, confused, but he nodded ever-so-slightly to signal that it was okay.

“Um. Yeah, I think?” Ethan said. “My family poodle, Pork Chop. When I was, like, twelve or something.”

“And did you love him?” Cooper asked.

“I mean, yeah?”

“And when Pork Chop died, were you furious at him for dying? Did you punch the dirt at his grave and curse him for daring to grow old and leave you? Or were you grateful for every second you got with that little dog?”

For a moment Ethan just stared and blinked.

“I…I get it now,” he finally said, his blue eyes large. “I get it now. Thanks.”

Soon Autumn started to complain about destiny again, and patience was wearing thin. I was feeling weirdly barf-y, too, so that wasn’t helping me pay attention, either. Why was boob cancer Autumn’s destiny, she wondered aloud, while every other girl’s destiny was to prance down an aisle at twenty-three? “And I’m starting to think that I’m just like,
doomed
,” she ranted, “and I don’t even know how to-”

“Or you can just accept that that there’s no sense in anything,” Cooper interrupted. Everyone looked over at him again, myself included.

“Care to explain?” I asked.

“Okay, well, my health is fine,” he said, “and I don’t want to feel like I’m, like, speaking to your situation or whatever, but I’ve been re-forming some of my opinions lately due to some new insight from the smartest person I know-” he winked at me- “and for me, things started to feel a lot less terrifying when I accepted that life is a happy little accident. Optimistic nihilism, I call it.” Another wink.

“Go on,” I told him, trying not to blush.

“Well. Like. We are not the descendants of two naked creatures created in a garden for the amusement of some bearded man in the sky,” he began. “I’m pretty sure of that now. We are one cell that evolved into another cell that evolved into a creature that learned to live in water and then crawled out of a pond and then started walking and then turned into lizards and other animals that adapted into monkeys and then those monkeys happened to leave home and evolve into humans, and now here we are. All of those coincidences and accidents and random occurrences led to us sitting here, in this fire station, young and beautiful and damaged, trying to rise up into a sunken world, and so we’d might as well stop trying to find any sense in the chaos and just deal with the particular set of accidents we’ve ended up with. That’s my advice, at least.”

Silence fell upon the room. That is, until Autumn cleared her throat and raised her hand a little.

“So, um…are you
sure
you’re not single?”

The drive home was tense. I could feel my feelings for Cooper, like,
deepening
in a really weird way, putting down roots. And it terrified me, to be honest.

He reached over and absently ran his fingers up and down my arm, making me wince and pull away. He looked over at me.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m just not used to that. Here, do it again.”

I returned my arm to where it was, and he got right back to it.

“And I’m sorry about Autumn,” I said to break the quiet. “She’s the only person I know who would go to an illness support group to pick up guys. Sorry.”

“Ha,” he said. I could tell he wasn’t really listening.

“Where are you right now, Cooper?”

“Listen,” he said suddenly, throwing me the most nervous glance I’d ever seen. “I want you to tell me the truth about something.”

Oh no. He’s dumping me. He snapped out of this trance where he finds me attractive, and he’s done with me.

“Yeah?” I asked, as he fidgeted with his shoulder.

“Well, the thing is…if you hated it, I just want to know, so I can…so I can throw it away, and just forget about it, and…yeah.”

“
What
?”

What did that mean? Was he trying to push me away so he could shake the blame from himself? Was this leading to this classic
it’s not you, it’s me
bullshit conversation?

“The book,” he said, looking like he hated himself. “If you hated it, I just want to know. Just lay it out there, please.”

I felt like my body had melted into my seat with relief. We hadn’t discussed
Eighty Eight
yet, or even mentioned it, really – I got the sense that he felt too awkward to talk about in person.

“No, Cooper,” I said. “Nooooo. No no no. It was amazing. I mean, like…yeah. I cried like a baby. It was good. Really good.”

“You think so?” he finally asked, stupefied. How could he be so oblivious?

“Yes. It’s amazing. Trust me, I read hundreds of books a year. It’s like you painted a portrait with words instead of paint. Why aren’t you pursuing this?”

He said nothing. When he did speak, his voice was shy and quiet, his head turned down, towards the floorboard. “Because I just, I already tried once, at the newspaper, and I blew it, and I don’t think…I don’t think anyone would want to read a book by a loser, or whatever. I already put my thoughts and fears and desires out there once, and I failed and got fired. Why do it again?”

My chest shattered for him. I wanted to reach out and take his hand, but I couldn’t. I was still too locked up within myself. “Cooper,” I said. “This story is as good as, or better than, ninety percent of the stuff I come across. You have a gift. Use it. Live your purpose. Don’t let one failure stop you. And of course people would want to read something by you. You’re…you. Humans try things, and we fail sometimes, and then we get back up and try again, and then we win, hopefully. That’s what we do.”

“So you
really
think it’s good?”

I shook my head. “Ugh. Are you
serious
right now? I’m not a good liar. You should see when my little brother shows me his watercolors. I try to be nice, but my reaction is…yeah. Slightly less supportive, you could say. Seriously, though, how do you not know how good you are?”

He angled himself away, a
V
between his brows, and my insides caved in for him. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” he said. “I was wondering something else, too. Something I noticed.”

“Yeah?”

He bit his lip. “What makes you angry, Summer?”

“Um, I don’t – what do you mean?”

“Your anger,” he said. “That thing that bubbles up sometimes. Like back there, when you were talking to that one kid. You got kind of…rude, to be honest.”

I thought hard. Honestly, being happy for me wasn’t that easy most of the time. In my eyes, empathy was the ultimate double-edged sword: I was blessed with the ability to care deeply for people, and cursed with the knowledge that they would nearly always choose the worst for themselves. 

“So much makes me mad,” I said. “Everything. Mostly suffering. And the knowledge that the world is unfair. The fact that somewhere out there some kid is crying in the rain with no family and no hope. The fact that the world contains hatred and bigotry and injustice and hunger and Justin Bieber. All of it. I literally sit there being angry at the planet sometimes, just because of how unfair it all is. That’s probably why I started the group. And I’m not saying I did it out of some obnoxious, self-serving Mother Teresa-type quest to be better than everyone, either, I just – I don’t know. I wanted to do
something
, you know?
Anything
.”

“I can see that,” he said, and then he let out a long and lazy sigh. “You are a remarkable person, Summer Johnson. Better than me, that’s for sure. Honestly, what I saw back there was the most amazing thing I’ve ever witnessed. You were wonderful.”

“I was?”

He ignored me. Instead of responding, he picked up my hand and kissed the back of it. “Did you know there are about 7.94 million seconds in a summer, Summer?”

“No,” I breathed.

“Well there are. But the thing is, you don’t get to spend
all
those seconds actually enjoying yourself. So, take out a couple million seconds to sleep, maybe a few hundred thousand to eat, and subtract another couple hundred thousand for running errands and whatnot, and a few thousand in August so you can watch
Shark Week
, which I never miss, and then that leaves me with…still not enough seconds to spend with you.” I froze and looked over at him. “You’ve lit up my summer, Summer, as horrifically cheesy as that sounds. I was just…
dark
before you came along.”

The panic was rising up, threating to blow me open, but I swallowed it. Instead I pulled into my driveway and opened my door to make the interior lights come on, lighting up the car. “Now you know how I feel,” was my only response.

He kissed me on the cheek and walked to his car. I hurried to my bedroom and slammed the door, too dazed to think anything other than
Cooper Cooper Cooper Unclimbable Cooper
. In my haste to get ready for bed – or at least several hours of lying in my bed, swimming in my thoughts – I shifted my portable speaker looking for my phone charger and knocked Saviour’s book to the floor, which Cooper had leant me after I’d lost my copy in the depthless pit of doom that was my car. When I cursed and bent to pick it up, my eyes fell on a single sheet of paper on the floor, which I guess had fallen out of the book. I grabbed it and crawled into bed, noticing once again how awful Cooper’s handwriting was. It was obviously something he’d only meant for himself to see, and so like the terrible beast I am, I read it immediately:

So. The world kinda sucks, and sometimes it’s important to remind yourself of stuff that makes your soul feel young and alive, because when you hit about twenty, The Feels start to die and your heart goes numb and you sort of forget what you’re breathing for. And in my opinion, it’s important to seek out ways to resurrect those Feels from time to time just so you don’t become depressed and end up, like, killing a bunch of people in a mall or whatever. So, in no particular order, here are the REASONS FOR COOPER NICHOLS TO BE HAPPY AND FEEL STUFF AND NOT MURDER HIMSELF AND/OR OTHERS:

• Nutella
  
• Pancakes
  
• Nutella pancakes
  
• July
  
• Florida
  
• July in Florida
  
• Country ham
  
• Good music + good beer + good people
  
• Netflix and a couch while the late afternoon rain rolls in
  
• The way I can still perfectly remember the theme song from Zelda, my favorite childhood video game, even though I haven’t heard it in years
  
• The fact that I know enough about life to know how important it is to hold onto that memory with everything in me
  
• That thrill you get the night before leaving for a big trip
  
• A day of fishing under the pier with nothing to do but a bait bucket to empty and a sunset to wait for
  
• The unpopped kernels at the bottom of the popcorn bag
  
• The fact that I’m gonna be a dad one day, and have a doctor hand me a baby and tell me it’s all mine
  
• My mom, and the way I feel when I’m around her. Like I’ll always have a place there
  
• My sweet Hadley
  
• Sweet tea, and grits, and driving through long country roads surrounded by open fields on a Sunday morning, and the South in general
  
• That thing that happens when you think you’ve forgotten how to feel, and then the feeling comes back
  
• The thing that makes the feeling come back
  

And then, at the bottom of the page, an additional few lines had been added in a different-colored ink:

Post-Summer Addendum:

• Her
  
• Her doe eyes
  
• The way she looks at me
  
• The way I feel when her doe eyes look at me
  
• The fact that she’s making the feeling come back
  

As a growing buzz roared in my ears I looked out of my window and stared at the pale pink roses blooming in my front yard, their petals glowing rose gold in the burning sunset, and that’s when I realized I couldn’t run from it any longer. The impossible had happened.

There comes a time in every relationship when you look over at the other person and suddenly realize:
this could break me
. You look into their eyes and feel the ancient lonely bones within yourself start to rearrange and shift into something new and golden and thrilling and good, and you know that this person has sunken into you, perhaps irrevocably, and that their happiness is now intertwined with your happiness, possibly forever. And right then you realize there will be no turning back from this, whatever “this” is, because to send them off into the night now would wreck you. And tonight, sitting in the car in front of my house, I felt myself reach that moment – and it scared the living shit out of me. Because the Me he knew, the Me I felt him falling for more and more every day, was a lie. Quite simply, she did not exist. And I had no Earthly idea what to do about it.