by Paul Mosier
“I love it!”
I stand and join her in the bathroom, and look over her shoulder at her reflection.
“I’m sad,” she says to her mirrored self.
“It’s just makeup.”
“My life is a tragedy.”
“It comes off with makeup remover.”
“Zombies are coming to slurp my eye sockets dry!” She puts on an expression of grief, then looks at me in the reflection with a smile that doesn’t seem real, and doesn’t seem hers. “Now you!”
I look at my face, which looks terribly uninteresting by comparison. “I can’t be you.”
“Of course you can! You’ve already got darker skin than the day you arrived. Kinda like you’re blushing. And we can mess up your hair and then spray it with hairspray so it looks like it’s stiff with salt water. Then you can wear a bathing suit and I can wear your clothes.” Her eyes get big. “I wanna wear your DEATH T-shirt!”
We mess up my hair with four hands, then use hairspray found in the cupboard to get it all stiff like a day in the ocean does. She dresses as me in my black DEATH tee, ripped jeans, and black Converse high-tops with the skulls and crossbones painted on the sides. Of course Summer looks much better as me than I ever did.
I dress as her, but in my own two-piece swimsuit. After a couple of weeks in the sun, my feet no longer look like they belong to a dead person. After all the swimming and boogie boarding, my limbs look almost like they belong to an athlete. But I’m no Summer.
“Let’s go out and show the world!” Summer says.
Out the door, around the hedge, down the hill we go. She stops short when we get to Third Street.
“I can’t cross this street!” she says dramatically.
I frown. “Are you making fun of me?”
She shakes her head. “Please walk me across while I close my eyes!”
I do.
We continue down the hill, then cross Main Street. Everyone we pass stares at Summer, because she’s a stunning punk-rock corpse doll. They stare at her like maybe they recognize her, but can’t remember where from.
Two more blocks and we’re crossing the park, then into the sand.
“I’m afraid of the seagulls!” she shouts. “And the water, and tsunamis and salt and seaweed and mermaids!” She looks at me expectantly, like I’m supposed to respond.
“It’ll be okay,” I say dejectedly. “You can hold my hand.”
We walk to the water, hands joined. Instead of stopping at the edge, she keeps walking into the noisy surf. She pulls me until she’s wearing my jeans and shoes in waist-deep water.
“This is weird,” I say. “This isn’t fun.”
She pushes on, heading deeper. I fight to hold her back.
“Why are you doing this?” I try to dig in my heels, but she’s stronger than me.
“My turn, Juillet! My turn to be sad!”
“Summer! You’re scaring me!”
“Don’t call me Summer! I’m tired of being Summer!”
She’s wild-eyed, crazed. Dark clouds sweep in from the ocean, stranger in July than a bluebird wave. Summer looks like a witch from the depths, conjuring them.
I drop her hand and take a step away from her. “Please stop it!”
The black ocean roils. Whitecaps burst from sharp-peaked waves.
“It won’t stop!” she shouts.
I’m genuinely terrified of her. She’s like a girl from one of the books I’ve been reading, suddenly demonic from the bite of a zombie.
Then she breaks down crying. Her face shows agony, she doubles over, her hair dipping into the ocean. Her body is wracked with sobs as the waves crash against her.
Finally she unbends, and slogs through the water, away from the deep, until she hits the beach. She drops to the sand on her knees, her back to the sea.
I get on my knees beside Summer. I listen while her sobs calm and her breathing quiets, until the only sound is the ocean’s roar.
I put my hand on her back. “What’s wrong?” I feel clumsy trying to console her.
Summer finally raises her head, wipes snot away from her nose. The black makeup is smeared from the surf, like the biggest cry ever.
“I have to show you something.” She rises to her feet, and begins trudging across the dry sand, facedown.
I follow alongside as we cross the beach, my mind racing, wondering what she’s going to show me. A million questions race through my head, but I can’t voice them. And Summer is silent as we leave the sand, walking the first blocks and across Main Street. The only sound is the squish of her wet shoes and jeans—my wet shoes and jeans—that she’s wearing.
Up Hill Street we go, and down Fourth. Walking the sidewalk, to the house with the driveway leading to the two-story garage behind. Instead of going past, we turn down the driveway made of pavers with grass growing between them in a geometric pattern. They feel good underfoot.
The garage isn’t a garage anymore—it’s two stories of house the color of the sky. Summer opens the door and leads me inside, revealing the world she’s been hiding from me.
Inside, the decor is cheery. I quickly note that there is an elevator, but I follow her up the stairs, holding the white-painted rail, to the second floor. Summer pauses on the landing and turns to me. She speaks quietly.
“These are the rules. No sadness. No crying. Expect the best outcomes. Don’t feel sorry. Be positive. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I heard the rules, but I have no idea what is about to happen. I feel my chest tightening as Summer knocks on the door to the right and peeks her head inside, speaking to someone within.
“Can I have a second with my brother?”
I don’t hear a response, but in a moment a middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform leaves the room. She looks Summer up and down, at her wet clothes and smeary Goth makeup, then eyes me critically as she passes.
Summer motions for me to follow her inside. “Hey, Shreddy Freddy!” she says, her tone suddenly cheerful. She moves her sunglasses from her eyes to her hair. “I want you to meet a friend. Betty, this is my big brother, Hank. Hank, this is my new friend, Betty.”
“Actually it’s Juillet,” I say. I say it even though it seems incredibly unimportant as I stand rooted to the wood floor in the doorway, staring at a withered young man in what looks like a hospital bed.
“Looks like Maria is giving you the silent treatment again.” Summer turns on a bedside radio to the classical station as Hank stares blankly across the room. “Come in,” she says to me. “He won’t bite. I wish he would bite, but he won’t. He gets all his meals through a feeding tube. Twice a day. Yumzers.”
She sits in a chair at his side and directs me into another. I step over the power cords that connect to the bed, and move in beside Summer.
“Hank is my favorite person in the whole world,” she says, moving his hair off his forehead. Hank doesn’t seem to notice. “He’s the best junior surfer in SoCal. And he’s itching to get back out there to shred.” Summer wipes her nose with the back of her arm. “We used to have some epic times together.” She leans in to pat him on the shoulder. “We still do.”
She seems to be speaking for his benefit and not mine, but his expression doesn’t change. He looks the way Summer would look if Summer were a boy who never ate, never saw the sun, never got out of bed.
“The doctors say he’s in a vegetative state, but I’ve been studying up on it, and I think it’s more like what’s called a minimally conscious state. Which has a much better prognosis. He doesn’t even need a respirator, ’cause he’s got such strong lungs. And when I read him something funny, sometimes out of the corner of my eye I see him smile. And he still likes stories and music, and being wheeled onto the balcony to watch the ocean. You can see it over the trees and rooftops. I would suggest we do that right now, but it looks like Maria of the Constant Sorrows is in the middle of giving him a sponge bath. Which means he’s already had his massage. Am I right?”
She’s aski
ng Hank, but he stares across the room, oblivious. I try not to stare at him. Instead my eyes take in the bowl and the sponges, the comb, the copy of The Old Man and the Sea beside the lamp on the table. The room is awash in an antiseptic smell. French doors open to a balcony with a view of the ocean, several impossibly distant blocks away.
“Anyway, Betty and I are gonna go have some kicks. I’ll be back to read to you later. Okay? Don’t let Maria turn off the music. I love you.”
She bends over him and kisses his cheek. He doesn’t notice.
“Betty loves you too,” she says. “She’s been dying to meet you.”
She’s telling him all kinds of lies that can’t make him feel better, ’cause I’m pretty sure he can’t hear them.
“Bye, Hank,” I say. “It was nice to meet you.”
I smile, for Hank or myself or Summer, and I follow her out of the room. She shuts the door behind us, then takes a deep breath, pauses, and lets it out. Then she nods. “Come on.”
I follow her down the stairs.
In the living room, Maria the caregiver rises from an easy chair as Summer points to the ceiling and leads me out the front door.
We walk in silence down the sidewalk toward Ocean Park Boulevard. I want to say things that will make her feel better, but I don’t know what those things are, or if they even exist. I want to ask questions, but I don’t know which questions, and I’m afraid that whatever she says to answer will only end with her feeling worse.
We walk down Ocean Park past Third Street, which seems just embarrassing now, that I was ever afraid to cross it. Then down to Main, over to Hollister, up to Second, across to Hill, and finally I notice we aren’t going anywhere. I’m afraid that she’s walking to lose me, that she wants me to disappear but she’s too nice to say it.
Finally she stops and turns to me. “Can we write postcards?”
“Sure.”
She walks quickly down to Main Street, like she’s angry, and I follow alongside. She dips inside a used-bookstore with a musty smell, and grabs a stack of postcards from a kiosk. There are about twenty, all of them with the same image of an ancient old lady in a bikini, who looks very much like Gladys from the Beachcombers garbage patrol.
“These,” she says, slapping them on the counter.
“Hey, Summer.” The old hippie behind the counter smiles at her. “That’s an interesting look you’re sporting today.” He raises his eyebrows at me, questioning. I shrug at him.
Summer pays, gets her change. Then we go next door to a vegan place and she drops into a chair at one of the tables on the sidewalk. I sit across from her.
“Pen!” She looks around, annoyed. “I need a pen!”
I get up and go inside. The place is empty, but the food smells good. Behind the counter is a girl with dreadlocks and a nose ring. She gives me a pen. I return to Summer, present it to her. She accepts it without thanks and begins scribbling hurriedly on one of the postcards. I look away, at the display window of the adjoining bookstore. It features old vinyl records from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, and tattered copies of books by Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac. I’ve never read them. Maybe I will one day.
“Here.” Summer holds a postcard to me. I take it from her, and she begins scribbling on the next postcard.
I look at the writing on the one she’s given me. It’s manic, messy.
Thank you for the pen. Sorry I am not happy at this moment.
I think about saying you’re welcome, and it’s okay, you don’t always have to be happy, but I don’t. She hands me another postcard, and when I take it, she continues writing on the next.
Hank got hurt the night of his eighth-grade graduation. He and some friends were horsing around on the promenade. On a fountain. Posing for a picture behind a sign that says stay off the fountain. He slipped and fell hard on his head, then practically drowned in knee-deep water.
I look up from the postcard, then take a breath. I watch Summer write, and I’m ready for it when she hands me the next one.
The best junior surfer in SoCal nearly drowned in a fountain. It wasn’t even something momentous, like the biggest wave ever. It was something stupid that wasn’t even very fun.
I feel tears welling up, but Summer looks angry. She hands me another postcard.
For the first day he seemed like he would be okay. He was in the hospital but he could talk. Then his brain swelled uncontrollably and he got worse and worse.
I imagine it, what she writes. I feel it all.
For a long time I couldn’t go to the promenade or pass by the fountain.
She has slowed down. She searches for words now, instead of spilling them. She slides one more postcard across the table to me.
We’ve had a rule that there’s no sadness allowed in Hank’s room. So all I can do is watch him waste away and pretend everything is going to be okay.
I look up from the postcard. She’s looking at me.
“Hank was supposed to be the Big Kahuna,” Summer says.
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes lower to the table in front of her. “The Big Kahuna is always the most important surfer on the beach. Every good beach has one. It has to be a surfer who makes it look easy, whose board is an extension of their body. And they need to be able to settle every argument just by showing up. Nobody cuts in the lineup when the Big Kahuna is on the water. And everyone knew that when the Big Kahuna faded into the sunset, it would be Hank’s turn.” She shakes her head. “This is bad for Ocean Park. This is bad for everyone.”
I watch her stillness, her faraway eyes. I feel like she’s wishing for me to have a solution, or a different reality for her. Or maybe it’s me wishing I did.
“Wait.” She gets up from the table and goes inside. She speaks to the girl with the dreadlocks and the nose ring, who gives her a key attached to a plastic beach bucket. Summer uses it to open the bathroom door, and goes inside.
I leave the postcards on the table and hurry into the café.
Through the bathroom door I hear Summer crying. Loudly. She tells the universe how much she hates it. She also hates the promenade and the fountain.
The girl with the dreadlocks and the nose ring appears in front of me, then puts her hands together in the namaste pose and does a little bow. “Um, do you think she’s likely to harm any of our inanimate friends in there?”
“Do you mean break stuff?”
The girl nods, bows again.
“I’m not sure.” I look from the girl to the bathroom door. “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen her like this before.”
Through the door the wailing continues. It’s breaking my heart.
“Perhaps a delicious, fresh, organic juice would make her feel better?”
“Maybe. Sure.”
The girl hurries behind the counter, where I am dimly aware of her movements, busy with the juicing apparatus.
Summer keeps crying and wailing, at times incoherently. But as the volume of her grief diminishes, and the volume of the juicer rises, I hear her say the most heartbreaking thing.
Sea, swallow me.
“Summer?” There’s no response. There’s no more wailing. “Please come out.”
I wait.
Then, finally, “It sucks out there.”
I look around. The vegan café is charming enough, but she’s right.
“Yes it does,” I say. “But it’d be much better with you by my side.” I wait, listening. “I need you.”
After a moment the door lock clicks, the knob turns. Summer comes out, tear-streaked and disheveled.
“You look like you need a hug,” she says.
“So do you.”
I hold her against me. She holds me against her.
Then the girl with the dreadlocks and the nose ring appears, holding a glass of delicious-looking juice.
“Um, I hate to ask, but did you leave the bucket with the key inside the bathroom?”
Summer drinks the juice from a straw as we sit at the table outside. She
noisily slurps the remains sticking to the glass, then sighs a sigh of resolve. “I have just one more favor to ask.”
“You can ask as many favors as you need to.”
“I need to talk to Hank. I need to break all the rules of his room. And I need you to be with me for courage.”
“Okay.” She’s asking the wrong girl, I think. But I’ll do my best.
We walk back up the hill to Fourth Street, then back up the stairs, back to Hank’s room. The sun is lower, flooding the room with the light of late afternoon. Summer stands for a while in the doorway, watching him. Then she sits again in the chair closest to Hank’s bed, and I sit beside her.
“You never made me feel like a nuisance, like an uncool little sister. All my life, you always made me feel like a princess.”
She reaches to Hank and fidgets with the collar of his pajamas.
“You were so patient, teaching me to surf. Every day after school. Even dawn patrol on schooldays. And when I finally caught my first wave and rode it in, with you beside me, you looked so excited. Like it was your first wave.”
She strokes his cheek with the back of her hand.
“Then you and Otis carried me over your heads on my board like I was royalty, going down the beach, bragging to everyone we passed, talking like it was the sickest wave ever, the sickest ride ever.” She shakes her head, slowly. “I don’t think I’ll ever feel as happy as I did in that moment. Blowing kisses at everyone we passed like I was showering them with the magic I felt. And you were so proud of me.” She chokes back a sob. “I want you to always be proud of me. Like I am of you.”
I reach to Summer, put my hand on her shoulder. I want to say of course he’ll be proud of you, but instead I say nothing.
“I know you’re leaving,” she whispers in his ear, her voice catching. “And I’m gonna miss you so, so much.” Her face is almost unrecognizable in its sadness.
Then she crawls onto the bed beside him. Her head rests against Hank’s, her arm draped across his shallow chest. With her smeary Goth makeup, she looks like the dead visiting the dying.
I watch Summer lie at Hank’s side. I watch my hands, folded between my knees. I decide that when I get back to the cottage, I’m going to add another goal to the list.