Summer Days and Summer Nights (28 page)

He had thanked us all for coming, distractedly. His mother had wandered around the whole time with tears in her eyes, like she had forgotten where she was and what she was supposed to do there.

Matt and I got in the car, soaking my seats with rainwater. In the cup holder were two cups: one with a cherry slushie (mine) and the other with a strawberry milk shake (for him). I didn't mention them, and he didn't ask before he started drinking.

I felt struck, looking back on the memory, by how easy it was to sit in the silence, listening to the pounding rain and the
whoosh-whoosh
of the windshield wipers, without talking about where we were heading or what was going on with either of us. That kind of silence between two people was even rarer than easy conversation. I didn't have it with anyone else.

I navigated the soaked roads slowly, guiding us to the parking lot next to the beach, then I parked. The sky was getting darker, not from the waning of the day but from the worsening storm. I undid my seat belt.

“Claire, I—”

“We don't need to talk,” I said, interrupting. “If all you want to do is sit here and finish your milk shake and then go home, that's fine.”

He looked down at his lap.

“Okay,” he said.

He unbuckled his seat belt, too, and picked up his milk shake. We stared at the water, the waves raging with the storm. Lightning lit up the sky, and I felt the thunder in my chest and vibrating in my seat. I drained the sugar syrup from the slushie, my mouth stained cherry bright.

Lightning struck the water ahead of us, a long bright line from cloud to horizon, and I smiled a little.

Matt's hand crept across the center console, reaching for me, and I grabbed it. I felt a jolt as his skin met mine, and I wasn't sure if I had felt it then, in the memory, or if I was just feeling it now. Wouldn't I have noticed something like that at the time?

His hand trembled as he cried, and I blinked tears from my eyes, too, but I didn't let go. I held him, firm, even as our hands got sweaty, even as the milk shake melted in his lap.

After a while, it occurred to me that this was where the moment had ended—Matt had let go of me, and I had driven him back home. But in the visitation, Matt was holding us here, hands clutched together, warm and strong. I didn't pull away.

He set the milk shake down at his feet and wiped his cheeks with his palm.

“
This
is your favorite memory?” I said, quietly.

“You knew exactly what to do,” he said, just as quietly. “Everyone else wanted something from me—some kind of reassurance that I was okay, even though I
wasn't
okay. Or they wanted to make it easier for me, like losing your father is supposed to be easy.” He shook his head. “But you just wanted me to know you were there.”

“Well,” I said, “I didn't know what to say.”

It was more than that, of course. I hated it when I was upset and people tried to reassure me, like they were stuffing my pain into a little box and handing it back to me like,
See? It's actually not that big a deal.
I hadn't wanted to do that to Matt.

“No one knows what to say,” he said. “But they sure are determined to try, aren't they? Goddamn.”

Everyone saw Matt a particular way: the guy who gave a drumroll for jokes that weren't jokes, the guy who teased and poked and prodded until you wanted to throttle him. Always smiling. But I knew a different person. The one who made breakfast for his mother every Saturday, who bickered with me about art and music and meaning. The only person I trusted to tell me when I was being pretentious or naive. I wondered if I was the only one who got to access this part of him. Who got to access the whole of him.

“Now, looking back, this is also one of my least favorite memories.” He pulled his hand away, his eyes averted. “Not because it's painful, but because it just reminds me that when I was in pain, you knew how to be there for me … but when you were in pain, I abandoned you.”

I winced at the brutality of the phrase, like he had smacked me.

“You didn't…” I started. “I didn't make it easy. I know that.”

We fell back into silence. The rain continued to pound, relentless, against the roof of my car. I watched it bounce off the windshield, which had smeared the ocean into an abstract painting, a blur of color.

“I was worried about you,” he said. “Instead of getting angry, I should have just told you that.”

I tried to say the words I wanted to say:
Don't worry about me. I'm fine.
I wanted to smile through them and touch his arm and make a joke. After all, this was his Last Visitation. It was about him, not about me; about the last moments that we would likely share with each other, given that he was about to die.

“I'm still worried about you,” he said, when I didn't answer.

*   *   *

I didn't carry him to this memory;
the
memory. It was weird how much intention mattered with the Visitation tech, in this strange space between our two consciousnesses. I had to summon a memory, like pulling up a fishing line, in order to bring us both to it. Otherwise I was alone in my mind, for instants that felt much longer, little half-lifetimes.

After Matt's dad died, there was a wake and a funeral. There were people from Matt's church and from his mother's work who brought over meals; there were group attempts to get him out of his house, involving me and Lacey and Jack and a water gun aimed at his living room window. The long, slow process of sorting through his father's possessions and deciding which ones to keep and which ones to give away—I had been at his house for that, as his mother wept into the piles of clothing and Matt and I pretended not to notice. Over time, the pain seemed to dull, and his mother smiled more, and Matt returned to the world, not quite the same as he had been before but steady nonetheless.

And then my mother came back.

I had two mothers: the one who had raised me from childhood, and the one who had left my father without warning when I was five, packing a bag of her things and disappearing with the old Toyota. She had returned when I was fourteen, pudgier and older than she had been when my father last saw her, but otherwise the same.

Dad had insisted that I spend time with her, and she had brought me to her darkroom, an hour from where we lived, to show me photographs she had taken. Mostly they had been of people caught in the middle of expressions or in moments when they didn't think anyone was watching. Sometimes out of focus, but always interesting. She touched their corners in the red-lit room as she told me about each one, her favorites and her least favorites.

I hated myself for liking those photographs. I hated seeing myself in that darkroom, picking the same favorites as her, speaking to her in that secret language of art. But I could not help but love her, like shared genes also meant shared hearts, no point in fighting it.

I saw her a few times, and then one day she was gone again. Again with no warning, again with no good-byes, no forwarding address, no explanations. The darkroom empty, the house rented out to new people. No proof she had ever been there at all.

I had never really had her, so it wasn't fair to think that I had lost her. And my stepmother, who was my
real
mother in all the ways that mattered, was still there, a little aloof, but still she loved me. I had no right to feel anything, I told myself, and moreover, I didn't want to.

But still, I retreated deep inside myself, like an animal burrowing underground and curling up for warmth. I started falling asleep in class, falling asleep on top of my homework. Waking in the middle of the night to a gnawing stomach and an irrepressible sob. I stopped going out on Friday nights, and then Saturdays, and then weekdays. The desk I kept reserved strictly for art projects went unused. My mother—stepmother, whatever she was—took me to specialists in chronic fatigue; she had me tested for anemia; she spent hours researching conditions on the Internet, until one doctor finally suggested depression. I left the office with a prescription that was supposed to fix everything. But I never filled it.

It was at school, of all places, that Matt and I found our ending. Three months ago. It was just him and me in fifth period lunch, in April, when the air-conditioning was on full blast inside so we sat under an apple tree on the front lawn. I had been going to the library to sleep during our lunch hour for the past few weeks, claiming that I had homework to do, but today he had insisted that I eat with him.

He tried to speak to me, but I had trouble focusing on what he was saying, so mostly I just chewed. At one point I dropped my orange and it tumbled away from me, settling in the tree roots a few feet away. I reached for it, and my sleeve pulled back, revealing a healing wound, sealed but unmistakable. I had dug into myself with a blade to make myself feel
full
of something instead of empty—the rush of adrenaline, of pain, was better than the hollowness. I had looked it up beforehand to figure out how to sterilize the edge, to know how far to go so I wouldn't puncture something essential. I wanted to know, to have my body
tell
me, that I was still alive.

I didn't bother to explain it away. Matt wasn't an idiot. He wouldn't buy that I had slipped while shaving or something. As if I shaved my arm hair.

“Did you go off the meds?” he said, his tone grave.

“What are you, my dad?” I pulled my sleeve down and cradled the orange in my lap. “Lay off, Matt.”

“Well, did you?”

“No. I didn't go off them. Because I never started taking them.”

“What?” He scowled at me. “You have a doctor who tells you that you have a problem, and you don't even try the solution?”

“The doctor wants me to be like everybody else.
I
am not a problem.”

“No, you're a kid refusing to take her vitamins,” he said, incredulous.

“I don't need to be drugged just because I don't act the way other people want me to!”

“People like me?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, so you're saying you feeling like shit all the time is a
choice
.” His face was red. “Forgive me, I didn't realize.”

“You think I want to pump my body full of chemicals just so I can feel flat all the time?” I snapped. “How am I supposed to be myself when something is altering the chemistry of my brain? How can I make anything, say anything, do anything worthwhile when I'm practically lobotomized?”

“That isn't what—”

“Stop arguing with me like you know something about this. Just because you have this emotional trump card in your back pocket doesn't mean you get to decide everyone else's mental state.”

“Emotional
trump card
?” he repeated, eyebrows raised.

“Yeah!” I exclaimed. “How can I possibly have a legitimate problem when I'm talking to Matt ‘my dad died' Hernandez?”

It had just …
come out
. I hadn't thought about it.

I knew that Matt's father's death wasn't a tool he used to control other people. I had just wanted to hurt him. It had been a year, but he was still raw with grief, right under the surface, and embarrassed by it. I knew that, too. Between us was the memory of him sobbing in the car while he held tight to my hand.

After weeks of ignoring his texts, and lying to him about why I couldn't come hang out, and snapping at every little thing, I guess me using his dad's death against him was the last straw. Even then, I hadn't blamed him. It was practically a reflex to blame myself anyway.

“Matt,” I started to say.

“You know what?” he said, getting to his feet. “Do whatever you want. I'm done here.”

*   *   *

“I made a mistake,” Matt said, and his mouth was the first thing to materialize in the new memory—the lower lip bigger than the top one, even his speech a little lopsided, favoring the dimpled side. “I should have started the story here.”

We were in the art room. It was bright white and always smelled like paint and crayons. There were racks along the back wall, where people put their projects to dry at the end of each class period. Before I had started failing art because I didn't turn in two of my projects, I had come here after school every other day to work. I liked the hum of the lights, the peace of the place. Peace wasn't something that came easily to me.

My classmates were in a half circle in front of me. I was sitting in a chair, a desk to my right, and there were wires stretching from electrodes on my head to a machine beside me. The screen faced my classmates. Even without the electrodes, I knew how old I was by the color of my fingernails—my freshman year of high school, I had been obsessed with painting my nails in increasingly garish and ugly colors, lime green and sparkly purple, glow-in-the-dark blue and burnt orange. I liked to take something that was supposed to be pretty and make it ugly instead. Or interesting. Sometimes I couldn't tell the difference between the two.

This was the second major art project of my freshman year, after the photographs of the love rocks. I had become fascinated by the inside of the brain, like it would give me explanations for everything that had happened to me and everything happening inside me. A strange stroke of inspiration, and I had applied for a young artists' grant to purchase this portable equipment, at the forefront of medical advances in neuroscience. A doctor had taught me how to use it, spending several hours with me after school one day, and I had wheeled it into my art class soon afterward.

I didn't say anything to explain it, just hooked myself up to the machine and showed the class my brain waves and how I could alter them. I did a relaxation exercise first, showing my brain on meditation; then I did math problems. I listened to one of my favorite comedians. I recounted my most embarrassing memory: sneezing and getting snot all over my face during a school presentation in sixth grade. My brain waves shifted and changed depending on what I was doing.