Goodbye for Now
Page 9
Sam watched from the living room. Meredith was staring at her shoes, arms crossed tightly around her chest, shoulders slumped. He had a sudden, tender flash of what it must have been like to ground her as a teenager. But then she rallied.
“This is how you screwed me up, Mom. Screw me up. Every way that isn’t your way is wrong. Everyone who disagrees with you is morally deficient. I like living in a city instead of on an island. I like this big old apartment building you couldn’t wait to get out of and all the people shopping downtown you disdain because they’re buying things not made by hand. I spent years feeling guilty for all of that until I realized that what you thought wasn’t right. It was just your opinion, your judgmental, opinionated opinion, and I was entitled to mine too.”
“This isn’t my opinion, Meredith. If that thing in there were okay, you wouldn’t have kept it a secret. I don’t want to be with you when you’re like this. I love you, but I want to go home.”
Meredith sighed. “You always want to go home, Mom.”
“It’s just wrong, Meredith. I don’t want to be a part of it, and I don’t want to watch you be a part of it either.”
Julia went back inside and started packing. She wouldn’t even look at Sam. She told Kyle to say goodbye and she’d be waiting in the car. She took two underwater-blue mugs out of her bag, placed them on top of the closed laptop, kissed her daughter on the top of her bowed head, and closed the door behind her without another word.
“Dad—” Meredith began.
“Just stop,” he told her.
“Stop what?”
He didn’t say. “She was up late Tuesday night firing those.” He nodded toward the mugs. “New glaze we’re trying. Pretty, right?”
“They’re … gorgeous,” Meredith managed, a new subject the only option for conversation, evidently.
“We’re going home,” said her father. “But we’ll call soon when things … when she calms down. Or, hell, maybe you don’t need us to talk to us anyway. Maybe we’re just slowing down the process.” He kissed Meredith and followed his wife out the door.
Meredith sat with her head in her hands for half an hour. Sam made coffee and filled their new mugs.
“That did not go well,” said Meredith.
“It did not,” agreed Sam.
“We should have just shut the computer when my grandmother first said hello. They wouldn’t have caught on. They’d never have guessed.”
“No.”
“We could have explained everything to Grandma later. She’d have understood.”
“No Merde, she wouldn’t understand at all. But that’s okay. Because it’s not really her. The only her to understand or not understand is gone.”
Meredith thought about that for a while. “You know what we did wrong? We sprang it on them accidentally.”
“I don’t think that’s quite it.”
“It might have gone better if we’d prepared them for it. Led them in gently.”
“Gently how?”
“We have to cut them some slack,” she said. “They’re not used to the technology. They’re not one hundred percent comfortable with regular e-mail, never mind dead e-mail. They’ve never liked video chat. Maybe they’ll come around though.”
“They won’t. They shouldn’t. It’s not for them. It was only ever for you.”
Meredith wasn’t listening. “They aren’t the right people for this. They aren’t a good test case.”
“Test case?”
“I’m an idiot. You know who we should call? Dashiell! Of course, Dashiell. Obviously! How did I not think of this before?”
Sam didn’t answer. He wasn’t entirely clear on what she was thinking, but he was still pretty sure that last bit was rhetorical.
COUSIN DASH
Dashiell was the sort of cousin (with the sort of money) you could call around two thirty the day after Thanksgiving when your parents stormed out after brunch, and he’d be there in time for a late dinner bearing the best wine you’d had since the last time you saw him and chocolate cake from Hellner’s, the place down the street from his loft that made the best chocolate cake in the known universe. Sam hoped maybe the point here was that Meredith wanted to be with family rather than that Meredith was going off the deep end. It was hard for him to tell because his own family and sense of family were so small. It had only ever been him and his dad, him and his dad, for as long as he could remember. He hoped maybe there was more going on here than Meredith’s sudden and ill-advised desperation to share Livvie. It was Thanksgiving, and she’d lost her grandmother, and now her parents were angry at her, even more distant than usual. Her family was dwindling. She had to call in the reserves. Sam thought that Dash, with all his L.A. chic and Hollywood cool and connections and hangers-on, was the wrong guy for the job, but that was because Sam didn’t really know him. Dash listened in sympathetic horror when Meredith told him her parents were mad at her (though not why; she was saving that for later), sharing in the family drama, in agreement that there was not a much worse feeling in the world than disappointing your mom and dad. He dropped everything and came right away.
First, they all got drunk. Meredith had learned from Julia and Kyle that sober was no way to hear this news. There was no way to ease in (“So, what do you hear from Livvie lately?”), so they tried to slur in, stumble and tumble in instead. But in the end, as with her folks, it just seemed easier to show him than to tell him. They could call Livvie in the middle of the night after all. She wasn’t really sleeping.
“I’ve got someone I want you to video chat with,” said Meredith.
“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, baby,” said Dash. “You know that.”
The fake phone ringing, the connection, for a moment they could see only themselves gazing expectantly into nothing, and then a window opened, and there was Livvie. She was glad to see Meredith, but she gasped with delight to see Dashiell there too. She’d chatted regularly with each of them, but seeing everyone together was a special treat.
“Dash! I didn’t know you were visiting.”
Dashiell’s mouth opened right away—habit or maybe shock—but for the only time Meredith could remember, nothing came out.
“Very spontaneous visit,” Meredith put in. “But we thought we’d say hi.”
“I’m delighted,” said Livvie.
Dashiell said nothing.
“Oh, I wish I were there with you. How are you, Dash?”
A pause while Dashiell’s brain whirred. “I’m … fine?” he asked.
“Oh, you look just great,” Livvie enthused. “How’s L.A.?”
“It’s … fine?” Dash guessed.
“How’s work, honey? What about that deal with the guy from the movie about the aardvarks? How’d that work out?”
Dash looked even more stunned which hadn’t seemed possible the moment before. “It was … It went fine. Well. It went great.”
“Oh honey, I’m so proud of you. I’ve got such smart grandbabies. You’re having a party?”
“Mom and Dad went home this afternoon,” said Meredith. Dash looked like he might fall over.
“Poo on them. You’ll have more fun without them anyway. What are you kids doing on your visit?”
“Oh, you know, the usual,” said Meredith. “Wine, cake, running our mouths.”
“Well, don’t stay up too late,” Livvie warned. “I know you two. You’ll be up gabbing all night, and then you’ll both be grouchy and grumpy all day tomorrow.”
“What I feel is neither grouchy nor grumpy,” Dash managed.
“You say that now. But we’ll see about tomorrow. Listen, sweeties, I gotta run. We’re having piña coladas over at Marta’s”—Meredith and Sam exchanged a glance. That was why she had to go that first time. Glitch in the system? Finite response loop? Coincidence? Sale on coconut milk?—“but I’ll call you in the morning. Love you all. Kisses!” And she was gone.
“Holy. Fuck,” said Dash.
“Right?” said Meredith.
“How drunk am I?”
“Very,” said Meredith.
“That wasn’t … How did you …? That wasn’t an old chat.”
“No.”
“That was new.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t cobbled from old … That aardvark thing was the last conversation I had with her.”
“Yes.”
“Before she died.”
“Yes.”
“You called me. You found her in her apartment. Here. Dead.”
“Yes.”
“And I was at the funeral. I saw her in the coffin. I carried the coffin to the hole. I put the coffin in the ground.”
“I remember,” said Meredith.
“Did you resurrect her from the dead? If you did, you can tell me, you know. I’ve worked my share of zombie movies, vampire flicks, ghost stories. I know the drill.”
“No,” said Meredith sadly. “She’s still dead.”
Dash considered this for a while then poured himself another glass of wine and narrowed his eyes at Sam. Finally he turned to Meredith. “This is what Grandma was worried about, you know.”
“Me eating a whole chocolate cake practically all by myself in a single sitting?”
“You falling in love with a computer geek. Sure, they have good stock options and smokin’ hot bods, but what about that dark side of genius that reanimates the dead?”
“Okay, start slow. From the beginning. Tell me how it works,” Dash began the next morning over hair of the dog (Bloody Marys), stimulant to overcome it (Americanos), and all the carbs they had lying around to absorb it all (bagels, leftover Thanksgiving pie, and some suspect freezer waffles). “Actually, no, start with why it works.”
“Well, it works because most human interaction is predictable. Especially between people who know each other well,” explained Sam.
“Nothing about me is predictable,” said Dash. “I am a constant, delightful surprise. Like that thing about the aardvarks. No one saw that coming.”
“Well that’s easy,” said Sam. “You’re alive.”
“So?”
“So you can vary what you say, but the response stays about the same. Whatever business you’re doing, whatever deal’s in the works, whatever movie’s in production, she’s always going to say, ‘How exciting!’ and she’s so proud of you. You’re never going to have an in-depth pro/con debate with her on the relative merits of one investment versus another. You give her the overview. She gives you generic praise. Tells you about the beach and the weather. That’s it.”
“So you’re saying I ama constant, delightful surprise, but my grandmother—beloved matriarch and giver of genes to your girlfriend here—was tiresome and boring?”
“No, I’m saying that because you had such similar conversations over and over, small deviations don’t mess up the overriding pattern which you don’t even see, but the computer does. You close the deal with the aardvark guy, and she’s proud of you. Change the aardvarks to guinea pigs or balloons or cheese, change closing a deal to making a meal or keeping it real, and the computer knows she’ll still be proud of you.”
“What about copping a feel?” Dash asked.
“Very tasteful,” said Sam.
“No, I mean it. What if I did something totally out of character? Would she be proud of me if I copped a feel or killed a seal?”
“I don’t know,” Sam admitted. “That’s a good question. But Meredith won’t let me screw with it.”
“With her,” Meredith said. “I won’t let you screw with her. My dead grandmother. I am such a bitch.”
“But there is no her really, right?” Dash clarified. “You haven’t endowed the computer with her consciousness, have you?”
“Don’t ruin the illusion,” said Meredith.
“It’s not really an illusion,” said Sam. “It’s not putting Livvie’s consciousness into a computer. But it is real.”
“I hate to sound like a stoned high school poet,” said Dash, making his voice sound like a stoned high school poet, “but what’s real, man?”
“The computer makes a compilation then a projection. It looks at her whole electronic archive and—”
“Isn’t that invading her privacy?”
“Yeah, but she’s dead and she’s family, so I’m okay with it. And also it is her, her public self, the self she gave you, has already given you. It doesn’t know anything she was keeping private. The program only re-creates the version of Livvie she was being for you anyway. And then it just becomes a question of patterns. What are the odds she’s going to mention the beach and the weather when you talk? About ninety-nine-point-nine percent. What are the odds you’re only going to tell her about the kind and gentle parts of your job?”
“That’s the only kind there are, baby,” said Dash.
“And then what are the odds she’ll say she’s proud of you? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent. Easy.”
ON THE BEACH
Dashiell went back to L.A., and Meredith continued to e-mail her grandmother and have quickie five-minute video chats with her every other day or so, but that was it. She wasn’t obsessed. She wasn’t sullen. She wasn’t missing her overly. Or underly. She was back, so far as Sam could tell, to her old self. Theirs had been an odd courtship. Without that trip to London at just the moment their eyes were starriest, without the attendant desperation of that separation, the insanity caused by that absence, they might have stayed longer in the dating phase, the getting-to-know-you, playing-hard-to-get, acting-a-little-bit-coy phase. They might even have gone back to it had he not returned to tragedy and the implicit demand that he either step up like a long-term boyfriend or get out forever. He was happy to step up, of course. It had been like a relationship shortcut, a secret ladder to meeting the family, the good times and bad, the part where he got to prove himself in for the long haul. And even after that, they might have dialed it back a notch or several, but here was this apartment and Meredith desperate to live in it and desperate not to do it alone. He wasn’t complaining, not by any stretch, but it was weird.
That she’d sort of disappeared for a bit there, obsessed, morosed, closed up and moped seemed fair enough. But now things were settling down. She was settling in. They were catching up with their own relationship, coming to think of it as their place rather than Livvie’s, finding a rhythm to their days and weeks. Sam started to think about finding a job. Meredith started to think maybe they should go away somewhere together, not Florida, of course, but somewhere warm. They nested—spent nights in with carryout by the fire and had Jamie over for dinner and picked out shower curtains and bath towels. One night after dinner, curled up on the couch, Meredith looked up from tea and a book to say, “Thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For helping me say goodbye to my grandma.”
“You’re welcome,” Sam said.
“As it turns out, I love you, you know,” she said.
“I do,” he said, and he did, but he still thought her saying so was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “I love you too.”
For helping her say goodbye to her grandma. Not for helping her keep in touch with her grandma. Not for giving her back her grandma. Not for making the dead live again. For helping her say goodbye to. This was a good thing, Sam decided. A kind thing. A blessing even. Not creepy. Not unhealthy. Not wrong or exploitative. A kind, generous, good thing.
It seemed like a sweet moment, but looking back later, Sam could see that this was why, when Dash called to video chat about his hypothetical, Sam did not say, “Dash, you’re a lunatic. This is a terrible idea. Get away from me,” or, “Dash, you’re delusional. This will never work. Get away from me,” or, “Dash, you’re sick. This should never be. Get away from me.” Instead Sam said, “Hmm, I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting question.”
“Can we think about it?”
“Sure.”
“In person?”
“Sure. Come up this weekend.”
“A beach party? Are you shitting me?” Sam was an East Coaster at heart and took the weather in Seattle—where it was in the low forties and vacillating between rain, freezing rain, sleet, and snow showers—personally.
“Do you have any beach parties up there?” Dash asked innocently.
“We’ll see you at LAX baggage claim in the morning,” said Sam.
The party was like one of those TV shows with high school kids in beach towns—lots of food and alcohol and music and beautiful people, clear skies, bonfires making revelers cool and hot at the same time, everyone in sweaters and flip-flops. Dash mingled expertly, and Sam and Meredith lingered behind him, watching a little awed and a little awkward, waiting to be introduced as Dash hugged everyone in turn or kissed on both cheeks or squeezed someone’s hand warmly. For Sam, whose social skills had always been tottery at best, it was an impressive display.
“Meredith, honey, this is the dear friend I was telling you about who makes the world’s most perfect apple cookies,” said Dash, one hand on the shoulder of a guy in bare feet, a business suit, and a cowboy hat, and the other on the shoulder of Meredith, who had no idea what he was talking about. Dash had never mentioned apple cookies or a dear friend who made them, but the guy beamed and hugged Dash and promised to deliver a fresh batch in the morning. Sam admired the ability to pull off a suit with bare feet, and a cowboy hat with anything, but not as much as he admired Dash’s ability to talk to everyone and make them all feel warm and special.
“I want you guys to meet the incomparable LL,” Dash was saying of the next person they ran into.
“Mitch Carmine,” said LL, shaking Sam’s hand. “Pleasure.”