Invincible Summer(56)

“Claude—” No.

She holds up her finger and opens the book. “‘But this cannot be shared,’” she reads. “‘One has to have lived it.’”

No. I pull my legs up on the bed and shake.

“‘So much solitude and nobility gives these places an unforgettable aspect,’” she says. “‘In the warm moment before daybreak, after confronting the first bitter, black waves, a new creature breasts night’s heavy, enveloping water. The memory of these days does not make me regret them, and thus I realize that they were good.’” I’m shaking.

“‘After so many years they still last, somewhere in this heart which finds unswerving loyalty so difficult. And I know that today, if I were to go to the deserted dune, the same sky would pour down on me its cargo of breezes and stars. These are lands of innocence.’”

I want to climb between the pages and pull the covers

over me and never have to look at her again.

She closes the book. “Yeah, it’s awful that he died, Chase, and, God, it’s awful that it happened here. And we’ve all had a really shitty year, but you have to go out there. You have to see the beach. This was your childhood. You can’t let that disappear because of a really, really shitty year.”

I want to say I watched my childhood drown, but the bottom line is that nobody got to watch it happen. We just splashed around after the fact.

“It’s the same sky you lay under for eighteen years,” she tells me. “Same ocean.”

“Yeah!” I say. “Yeah, Claudia, I goddamn know it was the same ocean! The same ocean out there right now is the same one I played around in and dunked Shannon and played chicken with Noah and the same one that took my little brother on my seventeenth birthday. And I regret it! I regret all of it!” She crosses her arms.

“Uncross your arms and put down the f*cking Camus!

This is our life! This is our life and it sucks, Claudia, and it will always suck from here on out and f*cking here on backward but we didn’t know it and I will always, always regret it.”

She says, “Grow up, Chase,” and closes the door.

I lay there by myself and sign forgive you forgive you forgive you. t w e n t y

W e make a big deal out of calling it “Lucy’s birthday.” Not “Chase’s birthday.” Not “The day Gideon died.” Just Lucy’s birthday.

I’m eighteen now. I should be buying porn or going to a strip club with Noah or . . . what do adults do?

Instead I go for a run down the boardwalk. One of those runs where you don’t save enough energy for the way back.

I deplete.

I’m so sorry that it hurts every bit of my body. I’m sorry I was terrible to Bella and wouldn’t look at Shannon. I’m sorry I ever slept with Melinda. I’m sorry I blew Claudia off and have ignored Lucy and didn’t hug Noah back and I will always, always be sorry, Gideon. I’ll always be so sorry.

I keep running.

Camus and Melinda taught me that not loving was the

true misfortune, and I get why now. It’s not seeing this inability in yourself that’s the problem. It’s when you love someone who has disappeared and is no longer able to love anyone, least of all you.

It is so much more awful when you think of just how

many people there are in this whole world that Gideon can’t love.

I run so fast that my lungs hurt.

There are so many things I did wrong, Gideon, and so many of them were my fault and so many of them weren’t.

I should have learned to sign better. I should have lived with him for the last year of his life. I should have stopped looking at Noah or Claudia or Lucy to link us back together and been the one in our family who could stop hiding behind quotes and signs and actually speak, instead of the one who draped their names in a guitar strap around his shoulder and called that his support.

It’s been a year, and it’s been a really shitty year. Another thing the therapist didn’t teach me: When you’re grieving, the times you’re happy are so much more tragic than the times that you aren’t. Because being happy feels fake and it feels temporary and it feels meaningless. And hating being happy is a shitty way to live. And I don’t feel happy now. I don’t think I’ll ever feel happy the way I did before he died, but I never want to feel happy the way I have after he died either. A shadow of the real. That’s Plato, not Camus. I want Camus. But I want to feel happy like me. Not like Camus. I want to feel like me despite the people who are here and shouldn’t be and the ones who aren’t but I can’t figure out why.

I want to be Chase who ate a snowball and Chase who

hugged Gideon and Chase who f*cked Melinda and Chase

who everything in the whole world. I have to be more than just who I am in this second. I have to be, because right now I’m not . . .

I’m not anything.

I stop to breathe. I’m at the end of the boardwalk.

The thing I neglected to take into account about the boardwalk is that it ends at the ocean.

And here it is. A mile or so and three hundred and sixty-five days from where Gideon died, but it’s the same ocean.

Goddamn it, the sun’s out and there are children playing and it is beautiful. It’s sparkling and it’s gorgeous. And it killed my brother. And this indifferent, silent universe, it sucks for making Gideon deaf, it sucks harder for taking him away and hardest for doing it on my birthday, but it gave me Gideon in the first place. It gave me Noah and made him run and gave me Mom and Dad and made them break up and gave me Claudia and Lucy and Melinda and Shannon and Bella, for a little while.