Goodbye for Now

by Laurie Frankel

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s why,” said Penny. “My kids e-mail. They call. It looks clean right behind the camera. I tell them all is well. I look well … I don’t want them to worry. They don’t want to worry.…” She trailed off.

  “How many kids and where?” asked Meredith. Her grandmother had always said Penny had a horde, but she’d never had clear details.

  “Katie’s in San Francisco. Kent is in New Jersey. Kaleb’s in Chicago. Kendra’s in Vermont. And Kyra’s outside Atlanta. I don’t know. Maybe if we hadn’t named them all Ks, they’d have stayed closer.” She smiled to show them she was joking, not delusional.

  “I’ll call them,” said Meredith. “Or e-mail them if you prefer. Just a gentle heads-up. Nothing alarming, but your kids would want to know what’s going on, I think.”

  “Did Albert use the computer too?” asked Sam. Meredith shot him too-soon daggers from her eyeballs.

  “Not really. Not as much as me. But a little.” Penny thought. “Why?”

  “Just wondering,” said Sam. “Can I see?”

  She got a key and opened up the second bedroom. The contrast was breathtaking—Meredith actually gasped. Blinds wide-open to the sound. Bookshelves of rich, bright wood polished to a shine, full to overflowing but carefully organized with spines all aligned. Pristine white walls and cedar floors. Antique binoculars on a string hanging from a hook near the bookshelves. And a gorgeous, gleaming desk entirely empty on its surface but for the promised computer. In one corner was a love seat with a small table and a reading lamp. “Albert was a bit of a neat freak”—Penny smiled sheepishly—“and he was in charge of this room. He liked to read in here. I’d come in to use the computer, and he’d sit and read, and then I’d come over to snuggle with him. It’s why we traded the recliner for a love seat. We spent a lot of lovely, quiet hours together in here.”

  “Why do you keep it locked?” Meredith asked.

  “So it would stay clean.” Penny shrugged. “So it would stay, I don’t know, his.”

  ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE

  Penny made Sam feel claustrophobic. He was used to spending months on a project, weeks on a single problem, days indoors, hours and hours on end in a chair and never feeling antsy or even like he needed to get up and stretch. But Penny made him want to move to Wyoming or Colorado or somewhere with wide-open spaces and lots of sunlight.

  “Let’s go to Wyoming for the weekend,” said Sam.

  “What’s in Wyoming?” said Meredith.

  “Big skies.”

  “That’s Montana.”

  “Apartments free of piles of crap. Brains free of piles of dust.”

  “We have that here.”

  “No Merde, let’s go away. For the weekend. You know, like a couple.”

  She sat up to look at him. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Don’t screw with me, Sam.”

  “I’m saying let’s go away.”

  “What about ‘butt plus chair’? What about ‘our entire livelihood’? What about the bugs?”

  “They’ll wait.”

  “They will?”

  “Bugs are very patient.”

  “They are?”

  “Well, no, bugs are inanimate. We only call them that to … Never mind, point is, they can wait.”

  “If they can wait, why do we spend so much time in this damn apartment?”

  “Merde, do you want to go away or not?”

  “Paris?”

  “For the weekend? We’d spend the whole time getting there. Too far.”

  “London?”

  “Oh yes, London’s much closer.”

  “Skiing!”

  “It’s April.”

  “Not in Canada.”

  “Even in Canada, Merde, I think it’s April.”

  “No, I mean the ski resorts are still open in Canada.”

  “I don’t ski,” said Sam.

  “You don’t ski?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Never learned.”

  “Why not?”

  “Grew up in Baltimore.” Sam shrugged. “Not a lot of snow. Not a lot of mountains.”

  “I grew up on an island,” said Meredith.

  “But not in the South Pacific.”

  “I am going to teach you how to ski. This weekend. In Canada.”

  “Have you ever taught someone to ski before?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “To ski?”

  “To teach someone to ski?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re confident.”

  “What’s the worst that can happen?”

  Sam had some ideas. They flashed montage-style through his brain and involved a lot of impaling.

  “You’ll love it,” Meredith promised. “They have very big skies in Canada.”

  They drove up through the tulip farms, over the border and around Vancouver, all along a winding road with sweeping vistas of the water giving way to winking glimpses of it, and the promise of mountains giving way to the real thing, soaring and snowy and grand. Whistler was beautiful with large skies indeed, but the sport itself seemed to Sam to involve a lot of apparatus. Meredith opened a duffel bag and pulled out vests, sweaters, parkas, hats, leggings, goggles, ski pants, helmets, gloves, socks, neck muffs, foot warmers, lip balms, and minipacks of tissues. Then she went to a rental counter and procured skis, poles, and boots that defied the laws of nature.

  “My legs don’t bend that way,” said Sam.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “They bend the other way.” He raised a pant leg to demonstrate.

  “Put your pants down, Sam. You’ll be fine.”

  An hour later, he was almost, but not quite, dressed.

  “Okay, now we get on the lift.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll show you when we get there.”

  “No, I mean how do we get to the lift?”

  She laughed and clomped off, and he had no choice but to follow her, and fifteen minutes later, by some miracle, he found himself balanced precariously next to her on a bench that was soaring into the sky, that rose up over snow-covered firs into air so crisp and clean and cold he felt guilt about exhaling, over valleys and mountains that went on as far as he could see no matter how high they climbed. It was terrifying.

  “My feet are heavier than the rest of me,” said Sam.

  “No they aren’t.”

  “They’re going to drag me to my death.”

  “No they won’t.”

  “And my sweat has formed a thin layer of frost inside my shirt.”

  “It’s freezing out here, Sam. Why are you sweating?”

  “Terror. Plus, for an hour in an overheated lodge, I wrestled myself into boots that bend backward while you stacked every layer ever sewn into a pile on my person. Also I’m growing increasingly concerned about what happens at the end of this lift. And so you have to wonder why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why I am happier right now than I have ever been in my life.”

  “Cerebral edema?” Meredith guessed.

  “I’ve always hated it when people say, ‘She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.’ A person isn’t an event—people don’t ‘happen.’ You aren’t the best thing to happen to me. You are the best thing to happen in this universe. You are the best thing there is or has ever been. I didn’t even know there was happy like this.”

  She shifted toward him across the chairlift, and the whole thing swung wildly.

  “Are you crazy?” he shrieked. “Just because I could die happy doesn’t mean I’m ready to.”

  “It’s fine. They’re built to withstand people suddenly deciding to make out on the way up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am very sure.”

  He bit the ring finger of his right glove to pull it off and touched her face softly. He worried about how he’d type with frostbitten digits, but he couldn’t not. The
n he leaned very, very gingerly forward, just far enough to kiss her, and did so while trying also to breathe and also to balance and also not to fall to his death. It was both hard and transcendent. He kissed her until he felt tears on his cheeks—hers—and pulled back to look at her questioningly.

  “I just feel very happy too,” she said.

  He held her cheek and pressed his forehead to hers. “Don’t cry, Merde. Our faces will freeze this way.”

  “I can live with that,” she said. Then his glove slid off his lap and onto the mountain far, far below.

  “Shit. Now what?” said Sam.

  “We go get it.”

  “How?”

  “Easy.” She grinned. “It’s all downhill from here.”

  THINGS SAM NEVER EXPECTED

  The more users signed up, the more Sam realized the limits of his imagination. Computer geek though he was, he knew what people wanted in a mate. All of them. Every one. So far as Sam could tell, they may have found it in the damnedest places, but everyone wanted the same things in a partner—kind, funny, hot, fun, smart, and totally in love. That one person defined smart as an applied mathematics PhD whereas another defined it as able to repair a toilet, that one person fancied morning coats or ball gowns (or both) whereas another went for jeans and a T-shirt, that one dater was amused by sarcasm whereas another cracked up at puns only made Sam’s old job easier. It meant there were mates enough for all if you knew where (and how) to look, but everyone wanted the same thing.

  Not so dead communications. Users wanted an infinite number of things Sam couldn’t anticipate. User number three, Eben Westfeldt, went through the whole sign-up process, the money, the tutorials, the prep sessions and lectures, the waiting period, the whole bit, only to open a window with his late wife and confess his repeated infidelities. He’d written them out longhand on a yellow legal pad, an impressive list, and read them off to her, including partners, dates, locations, where she was at the time, and what he’d told her he’d been doing. She wasn’t angry, having no inkling of it before and thus no electronic memory as basis for it. The closest she could muster came from e-mails to an old friend who’d had a one-night stand with a man who picked her up in a bar while her husband was at a conference in Austin, but Mrs. Westfeldt’s reaction in that case had been one of you-go-girl support as the marriage was long dead and the husband known to be philandering. When Eben was done with his confessions, he closed the window, came up to Meredith and Sam at the front counter, and told them to shut it down.

  “Shut it down?” said Meredith. “But you’ve only had one session.”

  “That was plenty,” said Eben. “What a relief to get that off my chest.”

  “You know that reaction wasn’t real,” Sam felt compelled to tell him in the interest of honesty. “You didn’t actually confess. It wasn’t really her. And she couldn’t really understand because you were such a good and thorough liar while she was alive.”

  Meredith jumped in to try to cover, but it wasn’t necessary. “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Eben waved him off. “I confessed, and that’s what matters. Phew. Man, I feel so much better. You all are geniuses. Geniuses. This is one fuck of a good service.”

  Sam hadn’t counted on Eben. He hadn’t counted on Maria Gardner who wanted to e-mail with her cat who’d passed away the month before. (“Did she e-mail much?” Dash asked her dryly. “Did she forward funny pictures of herself to everyone in her inbox?”) He didn’t count on people coming in to RePose with Kurt Cobain. He didn’t count on would-be users who wanted to talk to their exes who weren’t so much dead as dumped. He didn’t count on George Lenore who went through the whole process just so he could ask his late wife where she kept the key to the shed and if she knew where the manual for the dishwasher was and whether he had to call for the monthly cleaning service or they would just come and which pharmacy carried that aloe gel he liked and how many minutes to microwave a potato. She was able, in fact, to answer a surprising number of his questions.

  Edith Casperson seemed like the sort of user Sam expected—sixty-something wife in mourning missing newly passed husband—but the day after Sam set her up, he found her in the salon calmly telling the computer screen in front of her to go fuck itself. “You were such an asshole, Bob. Such a fucking asshole. I loved you. I still do. But that doesn’t mean you weren’t an asshole. You think I liked sitting at home all those years making your dinner and washing your socks and pressing your shirts and smelling your bad breath? You think I gave a shit what Marty in PR thought about Judy’s presentation or how it affected sales in Bangladesh? Nope to all of the above which you might have known if you ever let me talk. I’m your wife, you shithead. That doesn’t mean you take me for granted. That means you don’t take me for granted. What if I had left you? You couldn’t take care of yourself. You’d have been dead within the week. Of course, you died anyway, but at least it wasn’t from being left by your beleaguered wife, Bob. That’s an embarrassing way to go.” She was so exhilarated that she wiped at the end of the session then came back and did it again twice a week for a month—set up, bitch out, wipe, begin again. Sam hadn’t expected raging widows, but when Edith explained sheepishly that she’d simply never had the nerve to do it while Bob was alive, Sam had to admit that made a lot of sense.

  David Elliot, seventeen, brought in his guitar and played original songs occasioned by the death of his mother, to his mother, every day for a month. Sam hadn’t counted on that. Sam thought he might be disturbing other users, but in fact everyone else would pause in their chats and their e-mails and their posts to listen to David then applaud for him quietly. Edith leaned in to the camera one rainy afternoon and said, “Mrs. Elliot, you should be so proud of your boy. He’s so talented. He brightens everyone’s day here.” Sam hadn’t counted on that either.

  Celia Montrose brought in her despondent daughter Kelly to chat with her dad. Celia could not bring herself to communicate with her late husband herself. “I want to remember him the way I remember him,” she said. “I want to start grieving so I can stop someday.” But Kelly felt she wanted her father this way, and Celia wanted to do whatever she could to help her daughter. Sam had counted on that, perhaps. What he had not expected was what Kelly actually did during chats with her father—got him to help her study for the PSATs. They’d sit and do math for hours and never talk about another thing. After one particularly intense session, they found her in the bathroom in tears. “It’s okay.” Meredith hugged her. “It’s hard when we miss them so much.”

  “It’s not that,” Kelly sniffed. “He just knows everything. This stuff is so hard for me and so easy for him.”

  “Don’t forget,” Sam told her, “he has a whole CPU behind him. It’s not like he’s running those numbers himself.”

  “He must think I’m such an idiot,” Kelly sobbed. Sam called his dad and got him to insert the fake math software he’d made for seven-year-old Sam into Benjamin Montrose’s projection. The next time Kelly came in, her dad kept insisting that all the angles of a triangle added up to 6,104 degrees, that the value of x was always eleven no matter what, and that pi are round not squared. Kelly giggled until she fell off her chair. Celia thanked Sam for making her daughter laugh for the first time in months. Celia warned Sam that if Kelly couldn’t get into a good college, she was blaming him. One afternoon, Meredith found Kelly on the sofa in the corner getting algebra tutoring from David Elliot, neither of them anywhere near a computer.

  Mr. and Mrs. Benson were the first of their kind, the first of many, unfortunately. Sam was expecting them, but that didn’t mean he was prepared. Mr. and Mrs. Benson had lost their teenage daughter Maggie when she fell onto her head out of the window of her dorm room her first semester away at college. They bought the whole package, but mostly they wanted text messaging, Maggie’s heretofore chosen mode of communiqué. Mr. Benson also liked to video chat with Maggie though Mrs. Benson couldn’t take it. Mrs. Benson liked to e-mail with her daughter which Mr. Benson felt he could
take or leave. But they both loved getting texts from and sending them to her even though they had begged her in life just to “put the freaking phone to your ear and call I mean my God it takes forever to send a text and they’re too small to read and impossible to understand and I mean clearly you have your phone right there just call us on it!”

  Maggie Benson taught Sam about teenage girls. He had never been able to understand them when he was a teenager himself. They said things, but they weren’t things they meant, so what they did mean remained a mystery so far as Sam could tell. He’d been glad to leave them behind when he turned twenty. Teenage girls didn’t use online dating services. And teenage girls didn’t die. So Sam had figured he had another … well, at least fourteen years before he’d have to worry again about what teenage girls meant.

  But sometimes teenage girls did die. No doubt Maggie Benson had loved her parents. But her e-mails and her Facebook posts and her blog and her texts and her video chats didn’t know that because she didn’t text her best friend to say, “You know what? I love my parents,” and she didn’t blog, “Today I realized just how much my parents have done for me over the years,” and she didn’t e-mail her boyfriend, “I can’t come over tonight because my parents won’t let me which I totally understand because they’re afraid we’re going to go all the way and that we’re too young and I’ll get hurt, and besides, it’s perfectly reasonable that they’d be alarmed about their little girl getting physical.” Instead she e-mailed him to say, “My parents are such douches. They never let me do anything!!!!!” and she texted her best friend, “I hate my parents!!!!!! They never let me do anything!!!!!!” and she blogged, “Today I realized how excited I am to go to college and finally have some freedom. My parents never let me do anything!!!!!” Etc.

  “I need a translator,” said Sam.

  “For what?” said Meredith.

  “Teenage girls.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t say what they mean.”

  “No one says what they mean.”

  “No one says what they mean all the time. Most people say what they mean sometimes. Usually.”