The Summer Remains (36 page)

“Gotta kiss the bride, right?” I sort of laughed through my tears as I leaned down and gave Summer one last kiss. “Thank you for giving me something to believe in,” I whispered. Then I slipped in the vial of glowing seawater from our pier that I’d collected that morning, my own little version of an eternal flame for my wife. As it jostled against the satin wall of the coffin, the bioluminescence flickered a little and then extinguished for eternity – but that was fine. Summer glowed enough on her own. Then I took out her last eternal memento, the photo of us under the Kissing Tree, along with a quote of my own – no more Saviour quotes – that I’d written on the back of the picture in my awful handwriting:

Life is brief but love is long
.
Somewhere between anger and love is an ocean of eternal tranquility. It is there that I will see you again.

I didn’t need the picture anymore, because the old man and his legend had been dead wrong about the two trees dying at extrication – even though we’d been separated, that didn’t mean I needed to die, too. Quite the contrary. I couldn’t wait to see Summer again one day, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t fine for a while. I had quite a bit to do now that she’d changed my path a little. She’d
created
my path, actually – if she was Jesus, I was Lazarus by the sea.

“Forever,” I whispered as I gave her the photo. “I’m gonna love you forever. I promise. You can be angry at a person’s choices and still love them – you should know that better than anyone. I don’t care if you were sick or broken or damaged – you deserved love. You deserved love because you were a human, and that’s what humans do: we love.” I let out a funny little chuckle. “I mean, hell, if we’re stuck on this little blue ball spinning in the dark and we can’t reach out and feel another beating heart, fall into another soul and claim it as our own, then what in the hell is the point of it all? The love you left behind is so much greater than the regrets your departure created. You were more than worth the trouble. I pray I was too.”

I took a breath and then reached up to close the casket and close the book on us. Our story had been written this summer under the oaks, and there was nothing else for us to do. It was over.

I rested my hand on the lip of the smooth mahogany casket and took one long look at my wife, knowing it would be the last time I would ever lay eyes on her. I leaned down and placed one final kiss on her eyelashes, but this wasn’t the fairy tales she had never believed in, and a Snow White kiss would never wake her. She had been frozen by fate, twenty-four and beautiful forever. As my tears and my love spilled onto her wedding dress I smiled at her and saw a roaring montage of our Jax Beach summer together: I saw us jumping off the pier into the waves as the ocean lit up; arguing in my dim garage under the harsh glare of my ceiling lights; kissing under oak trees, the canopy of leaves protecting us from the brutality of this cruel world; wheeling through the streets of St. Augustine, happy and broken and free at last. Those moments were gone, washed away by the seas of time, but the memories remained. The summer remained.

I stared at her and took a deep breath. “I love you, Summer, and I am about to do everything in my power to make this world deserve you. See you in the stars – I hope. Float on, Sum. Float on.”

I closed the box and turned to the crying crowd. As I stepped away, however, I glanced down and noticed
Eighty Eight
and
This Is Not A Cancer Book
hanging from my coat pocket. In all my emotion I’d totally forgotten about them. Autumn caught my eye and, seeing my hesitation, reached for the books with a look of longing in her eyes like I’d seen before. I knew she’d want to read the story of the last few months when Summer and I had loved and wrecked each other by the sea; when she’d found a broken boy and loved him back together. Lots of people would, probably. I thought of my mom’s suggestion to turn it into an eBook, and for a fleeting moment I saw myself sitting at some author’s convention signing copies for mournful readers who’d read the story of my summer on the beach with Summer, and how it’d changed me forever, and bla fucking bla. I’d put it out online, it’d get posted and re-posted on social media as the latest summer read, and my dream of becoming an obnoxious bestselling author would finally be fulfilled. Summer would remain, and I’d be on the right path again, my road to adulthood finally secure.

I smiled a funny little smile, slipped our books into the casket with my bride where they would be our little secrets forever, and walked away. I would find my own way in this world without Summer, and write my own books, about the life I would live after her. But some things, I decided, were just better left unshared.

THE END

~

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is dedicated to my brother Martin, who remains in his son, Island

July 11, 1981 – May 31, 2012

“An honest man from where the palm trees grow”

My Summer

*Note to readers: I can’t write about Martin. Just thinking about him right now makes me want to cry. I will die with my brother’s story locked safely away in my soul. Maybe I’ll see him surfing on the edge of the world when I leave this one, maybe I won’t. This book isn’t about him – it’s just inspired by him. As a special thank-you to readers, though, I
would
like to share the Facebook post that inspired this book, ironically enough. In the spring of 2014 I wrote a short note to friends to mark the two-year anniversary of his death (and to preemptively address what I knew everyone would be awkwardly asking me about anyway), and posted it along with the above photo. The book quickly exploded out of that idea in my mind, spinning sorrow into something real. Here it is:

Today marks the two-year anniversary of my brother Martin’s death during a botched surgery at age thirty. His demise was sudden and awful and senseless and final, but in my dreams he still looks like this, frozen in his prime like an insect suspended in amber for the ages, with sun on his shoulders and sand under his feet and a breeze at his back, young and brave and free forever. And though he left us far too early, it is an injustice to human life to measure it solely by the years we spend on this Earth. Years are one yardstick, but so are the souls we sink into, the smiles we create, the people whose lives we alter. Time is relative but impact is not, and by that standard Martin fit a little eternity into those three decades. He was the best man I ever knew, good and honest and true, and he changed me. His death turned my life upside down and remapped the road of it forever, but I am unafraid, because with the lessons he left me I am confident in every step of this new course. It breaks my family anew every day to watch his three small children grow up without him, but with the fortitude he instilled within us we will see them through and make sure they know just who brought them into this world. Because he deserves it. He was Martin. His life was so short on time, and yet so incalculably grand on impact. I am so grateful for those thirty years.

If time is the ocean in this photo, most footprints left on the sands of it are temporary, washed away soon after they are cast. Many people leave damage or heartbreak in their wakes when they leave this Earth, or even worse, nothing at all. But Martin’s strength and power and resilience were the amber that cast his footprints into stone.

He left me a road map. I will follow in his steps forever.

This book is the first step on that journey, Martin. These words alone cannot do you justice, but love can try. You will never know about this book, just like you never knew about your surprise daughter who was born eight months after you died, in whose eyes and smile and spirit you remain, reincarnated in love. When your wife approached me with a positive pregnancy test a few days after your funeral, I smiled and cried simultaneously as the oldest feeling in the world rose up within me:
life goes on
. And when we brought the baby to your beloved grandfather, Dondaddy, who had been so shattered by your death, he put a hand on her little arm, nodded, and died twelve hours later.

Neither fate nor circumstance nor the scalpel of a careless doctor could stop the timeless and relentless cycle of love being born into love, dust to bone to love to dust again, and this book is the fruition of that truth. I hope I haven’t let you down. It would’ve been so easy to sink down deep after your death, where things were safe and dark and simple, but thank you for leaving behind a legacy of human survival so powerful, I was inspired to pick up my arms and start swimming.

Your children are so beautiful, and every time I hug them, I can feel your heart beat. I promise I will move heaven and Earth to help give them the futures they deserve. We miss you so much down here, but we are not alone: we have each other. So sleep well – I’ve got this. Please give Dondaddy a hug for me, though. A full, hard, honest hug. A Cooper hug.

And to whoever is reading this: the topics of physical and intellectual disabilities were very close to my brother’s heart, and are now very close to mine. The disabled aren’t sainted caricatures, they’re real people – they’re Summer. They’re you. They’re me. They like Funfetti cake and trashy reality shows and sometimes they get mad and shout curse words. So next time you encounter someone who was born differently than you, I hereby challenge you not to smile vaguely and look away, but to nod, say hello, mention how great the weather is, do something, ANYTHING to let them know you’re listening. Their issues don’t make them any different from anyone else on the inside, but still, you never know who could be aching for love; you never know who could be a Summer just waiting for her chance to be heard. So go hug somebody. Go talk to somebody. Go love somebody. I dare you. What’s the worst that could happen?

I wish you love, and I hope you hope.

Float on forever,

Sethy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Seth King is a twenty-five-year-old American author and former journalist. He can be found at sethkingbooks.tumblr.com.