Our Sunlit Bay

Part of Him

I didn't know why my doctor had to go on her usual rant about safe sex. My boyfriend was dead. I was depressed, and it was quite obvious that I wasn't getting any. August had nearly faded. It was the twenty-fourth and I hated my mother because she told me that I needed to stop eating so much. That was the kind of thing that put me over the edge these days. I was a teenager who spent more time buried beneath her comforter than I did communicating with any human being.

So my sole parent sat huffing in the corner of the overly-clean office and glaring at me whenever she heard the word "sex." The difference about this lecture was it wasn't just contraception, but taking care of my body and respecting myself. Then came the "do you feel safe at home?" she always asks. As if I'm going to say, in front of my childish mother, that home is not a secure environment for me. 

Colbie was pressed against me, his shirt absent and mine hanging from a bench in the park. It was three-thirty-something and my fingertips were cold. Colbie's pants bulged and I felt an uncomfortable shiver crawl up my spine. I thought back to middle-school where kids in my grade would say "boner" and giggle as if it were something forbidden. I didn't want this to be forbidden, I wanted to feel the closeness to Colbie that I'd never experienced with another boy. We were both seventeen. 

"Is this our outbreak?" Our kiss broke as he spoke, still searching for air. 

"Share with me," I mumbled and devoured his lips with my own.

"How long has it been since you've engaged in intercourse?" It was almost miserable to hear something as intimate and beautiful as sex to be referred to as 'intercourse.'

"Do you mean how long has it been since my boyfriend died?" I said indignantly, a mock tone of pep. "Well," I forced a rotten smile, "let's see, it's been two and a half months. A little more actually. Would you like me to count the days?" I could hear Colbie frown and beg me silently to calm down. My mother took his role, however. 

"Summer Simpson, you have no right to speak to your doctor in such a manner!" She raised her voice and pretended she parented. 

"You have no right to come home with strange men, or completely wasted, or not come home at all!" I vented outwardly, "You have no right to tell me I'm worthless, or mock my appearance, or call up my dead-beat father and try to get him to take me!" I couldn't stop now, it was all coming up. Everything I felt about my mother was shooting out of my mouth with no possibility of stopping. I was blind to the one-person audience we had. I was crying. "You have NO RIGHT to blame your sadness and failures on me throughout my childhood, and then criticize me for mourning over the only person I've ever felt comfortable with and close to! I loved my boyfriend more than I will ever love you and you're just a jealous bitch with a disgusting past."  My mother got up, eyes watering and eyebrows creased, and left the room. 

Another nurse came into the room with a clipboard and left quickly. My doctor avoided eye contact and overlooked the papers, sighing to herself as she read. I crossed my arms, ready for her to lecture me. The stupid picture above the examining table was an eccentric and adorable lion. Below it, in bold letters, the caption read: I'm strong because I'm healthy! 

I scoffed and looked down, where my authority had been searching for my distant, emotional pupils. I blushed out of surprise, but then replaced my look of indifference and confidence. I wasn't going to allow her any of the emotion I hadn't already emitted. She didn't deserve it anyway. 

"Oh Summer," she said quietly. 

"I never said anything before this," I argued, "she had it coming." Tears once again, fell in small riverettes below my dirty-blonde lashes. 

"No, Summer, it's not that. You're pregnant." So now all the sex questions made sense.

So I did end up going to therapy. It was between that and a support group composed of other teens that have lost their lovers to the tragic hands of death. I started prenatal care, visited a midwife and GYN. My mom left the hospital and I walked four miles home, alone. Only I didn't go home, I went to the old bookstore just outside the bay. The clerk still had an old bin of free books outside of his shop, even though it had been months since I'd last visited. He spotted me as I emptied the old novels onto the lush grass of late August.

"I thought you might come back," he said, his voice quiet and rusty with age. He leaned against the entryway of his tiny store. Hardly anyone was out, and dusk was approaching.

"I can't believe you kept these books out here," a solid grin spread across my rosey cheeks. I lopked down, a bit embarrassed at my own happiness. A small, barely visible bulge sat snug on my tummy. My smile grew wider. 

"You've been through a lot, Summer, but you always come back here. I figured you just needed some time to, er, sort things out." His mustache was grayer than when we first met. He wore a collared shirt and his fingers were long and worn. 

"I did, and thanks." I maneuvered the old pages of a romance novel between my fingers. 

"Just keep your head up, Summer. The town needs more people like you." I walked down the bumpy hill and found a deserted bench to sit on. The bay made a sort of whoosh in the particularly strong winds of the day.

"I've never really wanted kids," I admitted. Colbie and I were standing on the ledge of our bay, sun reflected golden rays on its surface. Children giggled as they ran by us, chasing dogs and parents alike. Colbie seemed particularly fond of them, and often stopped to play himself. 

"I couldn't imagine life without children," he told me, putting his arms on either side of him, so as not to fall. Almost as if reading my thoughts, a little boy came by screaming his little lungs off and smacking every human-being in his path. Other parents glared in his direction. 

"Uh!" I made a sort of grunt and pointed, my eyes wide and slightly terrified.

"But Summer," He turned around, his gorgeous locks swept off his face. Maybe they weren't gorgeous, but they just seemed to be in that moment. "Think about it, a child is half of you, and half of whomever you procreate with. God blesses two people with a child made of them, and allows them to teach him or her the beauties of life. If we had children, Summer, they wouldn't scream and hit. You aren't like that, and you wouldn't allow it. No, they would be us - just in one person! And how lucky would I be to have a child that is half you." So I blushed and reconsidered. Maybe I would be okay with having Colbie's children. But that seemed ridiculous to decide so young. So I kept marching behind him on the stone wall. The wind swept at my hazy-purple sundress that just so happened to match Colbie's skinny jeans.

So the book I picked was awful from the beginning. But it was the sort of awful that used to make me laugh, and where Colbie would find some sort of good. My fingertips fell to my abdomen and I sighed. It made sense. The sickness, the moodiness, the lack of control - it was all a baby. And so while losing Colbie brought out a dark shadow of myself, it was an actual part of him residing within me that brought about the extremes. Maybe I would apologize to my mother, just to make her smile. I waited for the sun to shift over the bay and disappear over the horizon before I went home, feeling relieved and free and full. Colbie was with me after all.