Goodbye for Now: A Novel

by Laurie Frankel

  “Among other things,” said Sam. “Many other things. Also your folks were coming for the weekend, remember? You were buying food, I think.”

  “Ugh. How are my parents taking it?”

  “Not well.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I know you can,” Sam whispered.

  “Oh Sam, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Oh no, Merde, I’m sorry. I’m …” He couldn’t find words big enough. “I’m so sorry.”

  She paused. “For what?”

  “So much. For everything. RePose. Everything.”

  “Thank God for RePose.” Meredith waved pointedly around her box on his screen. “How are you doing?”

  “Not well.”

  “I can imagine,” she said again. And that was right. She could imagine.

  “Not well at all. Better now though.” He looked up at her weakly, almost shyly. He felt something akin to relief. He felt the very edge come off. “It’s so good to hear your voice. See your face. You can’t … know.”

  She put her fingers over her heart, then to her lips, then up against the camera. Sam did the same.

  “I miss you so much,” he choked out through tears.

  “God, you must,” she sympathized, not, however, missing Sam herself. Her electronic memory had never missed him like this. It understood that it would. But it had never felt that for him itself.

  They sat together and said nothing for a long time, one infinitely patient, the other lacking the will to do much of anything at all.

  “Listen, I think I’d better go,” said Sam. “This is kind of intense, and we should let this news sink in for you, and I have to go apologize to Penny before she goes to bed.”

  “Uh-oh. What’d you do?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” It would have been impossible, he knew. She had only her grandmother’s mentions of Penny to go on. Sam had never e-mailed with her about Albert’s infidelities or Penny’s bouts of dementia or the care they’d been taking of her. Why would he when they could talk about it in person? “I’ll call you later. Probably later tonight,” said Sam. Then he added, “I love you, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “I love you too.” An echo. And then, “Sam? I’m so sorry you’re there all alone.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Is it?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s not okay at all.”

  NOT OKAY AT ALL

  When he went down the next day to apologize to Penny, she was gone. In her stead was the Penny whose apartment he had visited the first time when Meredith called and told him to come immediately. The good news was that she didn’t remember the terrible thing he’d said to her the day before. The bad news was that she didn’t remember who he was either. She remembered that he was staying at Livvie’s though and kept asking when she’d be home from Florida. “She’s dead,” Sam reminded her over and over, as gently as it was possible for a human to say. Late in the day, her brain threw free Meredith’s name, and her face lit up with the relief of having finally located herself in time and space. Sam couldn’t bring himself to break that news again—to re-utter those words aloud—so he went to the kitchen and started defrosting his dad’s soup in silence. They ate it together in the dark. He told her he was sorry, which she didn’t understand, and put her to bed.

  What else could he do? Work. Only work. For the rest of eternity, this was his plan. For one, it was distracting. For another, it was time-consuming. But mostly, Sam was motivated. RePose having already ruined his life, now he had reason to make it the best it could be, to work out all the kinks, to move beyond “pretty damn miraculous” to “no discernible difference from real.” Also he was in the mourner’s penalty box, where he had every intention of staying for the rest of his life, and that box was located right downstairs from his apartment. His users understood what no one else did which was that he had no desire to get over it, no desire to move on from it, no desire to heal or reconcile or achieve grace or peace or forgiveness or hope for the future. He desired to achieve perfect Platonic misery. And he was not that far off.

  Plus his job, besides all of that, was exquisitely painful, and that thrilled him. The first afternoon Kylie was back with her newly wiped boyfriend, he proposed. Well, not quite—he hadn’t gotten around to it in life, and so his projection couldn’t quite do it in death. But she triggered something that unleashed a flow of talk about diamonds and ring size and cut and clarity, about where and how he might ask her, about what they’d do to celebrate, about when they should get married. She couldn’t understand what was going on. Sam went back through the input data and determined that Tim had been ring shopping, had been getting help from two of his sisters, going out looking then sending them pics from his phone of ones he especially liked, considering their advice. He’d been talking to his brother about borrowing his cabin in Lake Chelan to propose. He’d been planning to take Kylie there after the concert. The last e-mail he’d written to his mother before he died was, “Tonight’s the night!”

  Dash was back by then and inclined not to tell her. That was what Tim’s family and friends had evidently concluded was the best thing. They knew her and they knew him, and he and Sam did not. They should defer to the DLO’s family’s judgment. But Sam was all about crushing honesty and searing pain. The more the better, he thought. If one led naturally to the other, well then that was just about perfect.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began when Kylie walked in the next morning.

  “Then don’t,” said Dash.

  “But indeed, Tim was about to propose.”

  “Here we go,” mumbled Dash.

  Kylie’s face drained. Dash brought her a chair.

  “About to?” she echoed.

  Dash looked pleadingly at Sam. Spare her, he mouthed.

  “He probably had the ring on him. Maybe it was incinerated when he got hit. Anyway, he was taking you to his brother’s house in Lake Chelan that night to pop the question.”

  “Oh my God,” Kylie said.

  “His family was all super excited,” added Sam, “especially his mom.”

  “Why didn’t she … why didn’t they … say anything?”

  “They were trying to spare you the pain,” Dash said without looking in Sam’s direction.

  “But there was no point. I am already full up on pain.”

  Sam threw his hands out like, Ta-da! What did I tell you?

  Dash ignored him. “It’s hard to talk about beginnings when things are ending,” he told Kylie.

  “Things weren’t ending. Nothing ends,” she said. Sam was nodding right along with her. “Can you show me the pictures? Of the rings?” she asked him. “Do you know which one he settled on?”

  “I’ll pull them up,” Sam promised. “Come back tomorrow and I’ll show you.”

  But the next day she came in with a perfect-fit engagement ring on her left fourth finger. It suited her brilliantly. She held it out for Sam and Dash to admire. “I found it in his overnight bag. I never bothered to unpack it. I couldn’t. It’s been sitting in the trunk of the car all this time.”

  “Do you love it?” asked Sam.

  “So much,” she choked. “I wasn’t sure … I knew he loved me, but I wasn’t sure he’d ever want to get married. I didn’t know if he’d … I’m so relieved to know. You know?”

  Sam nodded. “It’s beautiful on you. The setting’s new, but the diamonds are his grandmother’s. His mom thought it was really beautiful.”

  “I should call her,” Kylie said tearfully.

  “You should call Tim too,” said Sam. “I can’t swear to it, but I bet he’d understand if he saw it on your finger. I bet he’d like to see. I bet he’d think you looked very, very beautiful in his grandmother’s diamonds and with his ring on your finger.”

  Later, he and Dash had it out.

  “You were not helping that poor girl. She didn’t need to know all that.”

  “Who are yo
u to decide what information she has access to and what information is there but she never gets to know it? Who are you to decide anything for her?”

  “I’m co-owner and cofounder of this operation and the only one left with a level head.”

  “You aren’t the brains here,” said Sam. “I am. And you don’t decide to deprive people of information. No one decides that but the projections.”

  “But the projection didn’t tell her. You did.”

  “The projection did tell her. I just clarified.”

  “That’s not your job, Sam.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “And you’re not in the place right now to be able to tell.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you’re bringing everyone down to where you are. I miss her too but—”

  “You don’t miss her like I do. Compared to me, you don’t miss her at all.”

  Dash ignored that and instead tried gently, “You think because you’re miserable, everyone should be.”

  “It’s Salon Styx, Dashiell. It’s Dead Mail. These people are already miserable. I’m not the one bringing them down.”

  “You are though, sweetie. Kylie was healing. Lots of people are healing. They’re sad but they’re okay. You aren’t okay. You set out to devastate that girl, and it’s not right.”

  “She was glad to have the ring. She was glad to know he was about to propose.”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t about to propose. He’s dead. And instead of helping her say goodbye, you just set back the course of her progress months, maybe years. Now she’s engaged to a dead guy. Now she’s lost her fiancé in addition to her boyfriend and her wedding in addition to all her other plans for the future. And that’s on you, Sam.”

  “We don’t know why people sign up for RePose. Some want to say goodbye, but some want something else. You sound like Meredith,” said Sam.

  “Someone has to,” said Dash.

  Kylie stopped in the next morning to say goodbye. She didn’t think she needed RePose anymore. The ring was all she needed. Sam spent the day stewing about this. How could she not want to see Tim’s face again, talk to him, send and receive love letters, especially now that they were engaged?

  “Dash is right. They’re not engaged,” Avery Fitzgerald told him gently. “Maybe she’s engaged, but he’s not.”

  “She’s not either really,” Celia Montrose put in. She was hanging around while Kelly chatted with her dad. “Engaged means planning to get married. You can’t marry someone dead.”

  “She’ll be back,” said Edith Casperson. “They always come back.”

  “Who do?” asked Sam.

  “People in love,” said Edith sagely. “Stupid, foolish people in love.” Avery rolled her eyes and smiled knowingly at Celia. The three of them were becoming a little club. RePosing Widows—Dash wanted to have T-shirts made—each with her own role: Avery the marriage cheerleader, Edith the marriage dissuader, and Celia the marriage avoider.

  “I’m not for avoiding marriage,” said Celia. “I just don’t want to talk to my husband now that he’s dead. I liked him in life. I’m just avoiding him now. Anyhow Sam, come have drinks with us. We’re going to the café in the art museum. It’s got your name on it.”

  It did, in fact. Seattle Art Museum. It said SAM in big letters all over the building. Sam gave her a little smile but declined.

  “I understand, honey,” said Avery, squeezing his arm, and he suspected she did, at least a little, “but you’ve got to get out. You can’t just work all the time.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not good for you.”

  “Why not?”

  Avery looked at him with so much tenderness it actually hurt him. “We’ll be gentle, honey. You know we will. We won’t have too much fun. We won’t make you laugh if you don’t want to. We won’t make you talk about her. Or we’ll let you talk about her. Or we’ll let you not talk at all. They have good french fries and strong drinks and tomato soup with grilled cheese. It’s an easy night. Come out with us.”

  Sam’s eyes filled because she looked so much like his mother. Not his actual mother—what she might look like with a hairstyle and clothes that weren’t hopelessly out-of-date, with laugh lines and gray hair and reading glasses on a string around her neck, defied Sam’s exhausted imagination—but she looked at him the way Sam imagined his mother would look at him if she were here: pained he was in such pain, almost as sorry as he was about what happened, full of love, full of concern, and desperate to help.

  She came over and put her hand against his cheek, and Sam felt like someone’s little boy again. “Come out with us, sweetheart.” And he almost could except then she added, “Get some fresh air and the company of real people.”

  “She’s real,” said Sam darkly, pulling away.

  “You know what I mean,” said Avery.

  “You know what I mean,” said Sam.

  LOVE LETTER

  Dear Meredith,

  This is where we came in. Right? To have somewhere to send it? Everyone has this impulse, I think—it’s awfully human I guess—to write to people they love after they’ve passed away. You may be dead, but that doesn’t mean I love you any less than I did a month ago when you were alive. Before we did what we did, before I did what I did, back when dead meant you couldn’t have a conversation anymore, back when dead meant you’d never see her face again, there was this impulse to write it down, to send a letter.

  Maybe it comes from our sense that the dead go someplace, an actual place—heaven or an underworld or a land of the dead or a great beyond or a cloud with angels or a waiting room, but always it’s somewhere, a place. And places are places you can send a letter. Or maybe the reverse is true. Way back before anything else, there was this desire to write letters to the dead, so early humans had to imagine someplace for the dead to be. And then they had to invent language.

  Mostly, almost always, I regret what we’ve done. But look at all the human invention that came before us: symbols that mean things, words, a way to say them aloud, a way to write them down, something to write them down on, something to write them down with, ways to transport them from one person to another, ways to read them and reply. By rock, by parchment, by paper, by electron, via horse, car, plane, air, cloud. So much of human innovation and progress is about communication, connection, somehow spanning that unbridgeable divide between human hearts that feels like it will kill us if we cannot get across. Once upon a time, understanding your neighbor, having your neighbor understand you, these seemed like impossibilities. So perhaps communicating with the dead was only a matter of time and evolution. It was a human inevitability. It was born of love. Then maybe everything that came next had to happen to somebody. It’s only a shame that it had to happen to us.

  In all of human history, Merde, from that first person who lost a dear one until now, there is no one I could love as much as you.

  Love,

  Sam

  HOMECOMING

  Kelly Montrose was taking David Elliot to homecoming, but their first stop of the evening was the salon. She wanted her dad to meet him, and she wanted her dad to see her in her dress. Edith had made it special for her, so she could be absolutely certain that no one else would be wearing what she was wearing. Dash madly shot video and called out notes like the B-list Hollywood director he’d just started dating. Sam stood by and tried not to cry. Though Celia had been adamant all along about not wanting to chat with her husband, this night she couldn’t resist. She wanted to stand next to him with tears in her eyes and her head on his shoulder as they watched their baby, looking suddenly like a young woman, go off to her first big dance. She had to settle for Avery’s shoulder, but at least she got to see Ben’s face. Benjamin Montrose had trouble accommodating either his daughter or his wife though. Kelly had never had a boyfriend before, so he had no electronic memory of responding to one. His pictures of her were all of a daughter who really did still look like a little girl. He faked his way through
okay—vague affirmations and generalized enthusiasm and support—but it didn’t quite satisfy Kelly or her mom. Sam, however, practically filled the dad role himself, smiling, choked up, and proud, with a nagging desire to pull David aside, ask his intentions, and define the consequences of a broken curfew in no uncertain terms.

  This was maybe why, when his own father called to chat later that night, Sam was so confused. He answered, ashen and speechless, like he’d seen a ghost. Like he was seeing a ghost.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” his dad said right away.

  “What happened?” Sam managed.

  “Nothing happened. I’m just checking in.”

  “Why hasn’t someone called me?” Sam panicked.

  “I’m calling you now.”

  “We talked two days ago, and you were fine.”

  “Jesus, Sam, I’m not dead.” His dad was suddenly hysterical, somewhere between amusement and alarm. Sense flooded Sam’s brain so fast he thought he might pass out. “Someone would have let you know, I think. Plus, who’d have run the algorithm if not you?”

  “God, Dad, you scared the shit out of me.” Sam tried to catch his breath.

  “Sam, are you okay?”

  “Just habit, I guess.” Sam ignored the question. “Everyone who calls me is dead.”

  “I’m not sure that’s healthy.”

  “Occupational hazard.”

  “You need to work less. You need to get out of the house more. See some friends. Spend time with the living.”

  “I know, Dad. I know.”

  “I know you know. But somehow you’re not doing it anyway.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You could.”

  “I can’t.”

  Sam’s dad sighed. “I called to tell you a story.”

  “Of course you did,” said Sam.

  “This one isn’t about your mother.” Sam didn’t know his dad had any stories not about his mother. “This one is about you. But you won’t remember. The summer after you turned three, Aunt Nadene lent us the beach house for a week. This was before the one in Rehobeth. It was in Ocean City, and it was really only half a house—it was a duplex—and half a crappy house at that. The place looked very romantic from the outside—weather-beaten and sand-worn—but it was leaky and moldy and damp inside, and it smelled bad, and there was no AC. You were cranky all week because you were uncomfortable, and I was cranky all week because you were cranky all week and because the last time I’d been there was right after your mother and I got engaged.