Goodbye for Now (22 page)

It was hard too for Sam and Dash and especially Meredith. Though users had a need she could address, that need was bottomless. They were often weepy all through the sign-up process, the start-up how-to lecture, paying their fees, signing the forms, releasing the info, but when they came in finally to begin, they’d be totally wrecked. Often it took days of coming in every morning, sitting down at the computers, leaving again before they could begin. Meredith would hold their hands, hug them while they cried in her arms, sit and listen to them reminisce for hours. Feed them tissues. Assure them everyone had trouble the first time. Assure them they could try again tomorrow. Assure them the first one was the hardest one. It made her sad and wrecked and weepy too.

“This isn’t your job,” Sam worried.

“Of course it is,” she said.

In contrast, Sam’s approach was to demystify. No need to be freaked out and upset. Just a computer program. A bunch of electrons. These ghosts were no more real than the ones in Ms. Pac-Man. Make-believe. Really, really impressive make-believe.

Dash, as ever, played the field. He sized people up and gave them what they needed. If they needed holding, he held. If they needed to minimize it, he minimized. Avery brought in a box of Clive’s fancy dress shirts, and Dash wore one every day for a month, never mind his insistence that clothes didn’t matter in Seattle. Edith ran out of nasty names to call her husband, and Dash came up with “gubbertush,” which meant bucktoothed but with the added bonus connotations of both “goober” and “tush.” Mr. Benson got a text from Maggie that confessed, “Wrecked car. But I’m fine. Am also accidentally in Idaho so might miss curfew. Sorry!”

“What do I do with that?” asked Mr. Benson helplessly.

“What did you do the first time?” said Dash.

“Drove out to Idaho and picked her up.”

“What did you want to do?”

“Drink heavily. And ground her until September 2035.”

“Do that now.”

“Can I?”

“Sure. Might be cathartic.”

“I never thought I’d be nostalgic for a fight with my teenager.”

“Ground her and I’ll take you out for the first part,” said Dash.

“The first part?”

“Drinking heavily.”

It was hard to watch users, hard to be with them, hard to help, but it was also gratifying. Watching people’s faces light up, watching their smiles triumph through their tears, watching people catch their breath and hold their heart and whisper oh thank God thank God. You could see their relief. You could watch them let go. And often, very often, Sam found them back in his arms afterward. Thank you so much. You have given me the greatest gift. It was even better than I’d imagined. I feel so much better now. You let me let go. You let me say goodbye.

People signed up to say goodbye. But then they got addicted and couldn’t. That was another thing Meredith was right about: death is for life.

ALBERT

T
hat they had any warning at all, that they didn’t just offer to send her in blindly as they did everyone else, was something of a fluke. A few weeks after they’d more or less adopted Penny, Meredith thought she was ready to RePose.

“She’s too old,” Dash argued. He’d spent the afternoon at Penny’s helping her organize her kitchen and had just gotten back from taking her out for pizza and ice cream.

“She’s not too old. She’s Grandma’s age,” said Meredith.

“Grandma was too old to RePose too.”

“She uses it all the time.”

“No, Merde,” said Sam. “You use it all the time. Livvie doesn’t.”

“Well. She would.”

“She was pretty tech-savvy for an old lady,” said Dash. “But I don’t mean that Penny couldn’t do the tech. I mean I’m not sure she could get her head around the concept. Young people are used to having virtual relationships, to watching great big pieces of their lives unfold on-screen, online. I think it’d be too much for her.”

“Was she acting weird?” said Meredith. “Did she seem out of it again?”

“No, she was fine. But I think we’d all like to keep it that way.”

“She misses Albert,” said Meredith. “It breaks my heart. Maybe it won’t even work. She said he didn’t use the computer much. But I think we should run it and see.”

“I think it’s a mistake,” said Dash.

“Vote?” She’d taken to proposing this when she and Dash disagreed because Sam always sided with her.

They voted. Dash lost. So Sam ran it and saw. When it didn’t work, he investigated further. Ordinarily, of course, he didn’t read dead loved ones’ communications—his algorithm did. He respected everyone’s privacy. And, truthfully, he didn’t really care about people’s secrets and lies and hopes and dreams. Ordinarily, he never actually saw any of that stuff. But Albert needed troubleshooting. Not surprisingly, Albert didn’t have a Facebook page. He didn’t have a blog. He didn’t video chat or post YouTube videos. He didn’t have a photo account because he didn’t have a digital camera. He didn’t send text messages because he didn’t have a cell phone. He didn’t even have anything he read regularly online. What Albert did have was a torrid, consuming, enduring, and fairly well-documented affair.

Albert had a few start-up messages from when he opened his secret e-mail account. He got confirmation of a few things he bought online. He got his fair share of spam. But other than that, Albert e-mailed exclusively and obsessively and sometimes alarmingly graphically with one Agnes Grayson. Sam couldn’t believe it. He tried to tell himself that what was gross and wrong here was the betrayal of a woman he was gradually coming to think of as family. But really it was the horror that you could know someone that well and love someone that much and still be totally wrong. That and they were old people, and old people should not, so far as Sam was concerned, be doing the things Albert was describing, especially upside down.

Meredith and Dash came home from their hard day at the office.

“Three new sign-ups today,” she reported.

“David had a new song for his mom,” added Dash. “I’m thinking of introducing him to my friend Bradley who does music for a studio in L.A. He’s really good.”

“Oh, and Maggie told Mr. Benson he was a good dad today. She was still pissed off that he grounded her, but she said she knew why he did it. He was over the moon. So nice going.”

“Thanks.” Sam looked like
he’d
been grounded.

“What’s wrong?”

“I ran the algorithm on Albert.…”

“Not enough to go on?”

“Enough to e-mail but—”

“That’s probably enough, you know?” said Meredith. “Dash is right. Video might be weird for her. Video chat with her dead husband would probably give her a heart attack.”

“He’s not going to be able to e-mail her.”

“Why not?”

“His e-mails all center on one thing only.”

“Really? What?”

“Out-of-the-way restaurants no one knows about. A series of motels cheap enough to be regularly afforded but clean enough to truly use the bed. Occasionally a B-and-B on the peninsula. Once even a campsite.”

“Shut up,” Meredith and Dash said at the same time. He was incredulous but a little impressed. She paled like she was the one being cheated on.

“He was having an affair,” said Sam.

“With who?” Meredith demanded.

“Please let it be a guy, please let it be a guy.” Dash crossed his fingers.

“ ’Fraid not,” said Sam.

“Would that make it better?” said Meredith.

“Old high school flame, evidently. Female. First there’s reconnecting; then there’s flirting; then there are lunch dates just to catch up.”

“Oh God,” said Meredith.

“Then there’s a lot of the ‘which hotel and what time’ kind of e-mails.”

“Men are pigs,” Dash smiled. “I should know. I am one.”

“Then there’s a lot of the ‘I’m going to touch you here, bend you this way, whisper this, make you scream that, then try it upside down and backward twice’ kind of e-mails.”

“My God,” Dash whistled and Meredith whispered at the same time.

“It’s okay,” Sam said. “We haven’t told her anything about RePose. She probably wouldn’t understand even if we did. She’ll have to mourn the old-fashioned way.”

“It’s not okay,” said Meredith angrily.

“Why not?”

“Because her whole life was a lie. Because the man she loved didn’t love her. Because we found her living in squalor, mourning a man who never was worth it.”

“Girl, you don’t know that,” said Dash.

“Sam read the e-mails,” said Meredith.

“No, I mean okay, he was having an affair, but you don’t know what was really going on. Maybe he loved them both. Maybe he didn’t love this Agnes chick at all but needed something he wasn’t getting from Penny. Hell, maybe she knew and okayed it. Grandma would say, ‘You never know what goes on in other people’s houses.’ Don’t get all uppity about it.”

“You think Penny knew and was okay with it? Really? That sweet old lady? That’s the defense you can muster?”

“I don’t have to muster a defense at all. And neither did Albert.”

“He did a terrible, terrible thing to the woman he was supposed to love.”

“In fact, I think he did her a huge favor.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Seems like he made sure she never knew. Took this to his grave. Set up a secret e-mail account. Used it when Penny wasn’t around. Made sure to meet his girlfriend only where no one would recognize them.”

“Yeah, so he wouldn’t get busted. If it were okay with her, he wouldn’t have had to sneak around.”

“Look, I’m not saying this was admirable,” said Dash. “I’m saying we don’t know the story. She feels like she was loved, so she was.”

“That’s not true.”

“That is true,” said Sam, siding with Dash for the first time all month. “That’s the whole premise here. That’s what powers RePose. That’s what makes it work. Feeling loved equals being loved. That’s all.”

“True in real life too,” said Dash.

“We should tell her,” said Meredith. “Maybe it will help her get over him. She’ll realize he wasn’t the man she thought he was.”

“Oh, Merde, no. Don’t tell her. She doesn’t want to know. Dash is right—we don’t know what was really going on. We only have e-mails to go on.”

“Isn’t that the whole point? E-mails don’t lie. They may be lies, but they don’t lie. We can reconstruct an entire human with them. This whole thing is based on e-mails being plenty to go on,” said Meredith. And then, “He lied to her. And we know it.”

“Well then we’d better keep it to ourselves,” said Dash.

He left to go get more rennet for his goat cheese, and Sam made dinner, and Meredith started working on an Allied World War I Spad (it looked like a biplane to Sam). Mostly, she just slammed supplies around. Then she called her grandmother.

“Hey baby,” Livvie said when she answered, “I was just thinking about you.” The wonder of it, of his own dead loved one, never failed to take Sam’s breath away. Ditto a computer program with the impression that it had been thinking of you.

“Hi Grandma,” said Meredith miserably.

“You seem in such a funk all the time these days. What’s wrong, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

“Just … crap at work.”

“You work too hard. You and Sam should take a vacation and come visit me.”

“If someone knew a terrible secret about you and at first it would make you more unhappy, but in the long run maybe it would make you less unhappy, would you want to know?”

Livvie wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I don’t understand.” And then, “It’s so sunny here. You would love it.”

“Is this wrong? Is what we’re doing wrong?” Meredith asked her grandmother.

“My baby?” Livvie didn’t understand the question, but she knew the right answer anyway. “She never does anything wrong.”

NOT ANYMORE

A
nd that was just the beginning. As the first handful of users turned into dozens then hundreds, and as Sam’s two hours of sleep each night turned into four then five then eight, and as the dogs started getting better walks, and as Meredith seemed to relax into things a bit more, and as Dash started to stay down in L.A. more often, and as bringing dinner or a new book or a pot of flowers down to Penny got folded into their schedule, they all found a little bit of a rhythm.

Sam was finding time to run most mornings. He ran through the Arboretum or in Seward Park or along the waterfront downtown. One chilly, rainy morning at the end of April, he went all the way out to Discovery Park and ran along the bluff, down to the lighthouse, and back up again. He drove home, drenched in rain and sweat, with the windows open.

There he found his apartment heated to approximately three hundred degrees and Meredith in the middle of the living room doing yoga in a soaked tank top and very short shorts. Opening the front door was like walking into a wall. The dogs raised pitiful heads from the couch and wagged tails once apiece but could muster the energy for nothing further.

“Holy hell, Merde, what is going on? It’s like a rain forest in here.”

She was breathing hard in downward dog and gazed up at him from between her legs. “My hot yoga studio’s closed,” she said. “It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day.”