That’s what she wrote, anyway, in one of her typically cheerful blog entries.
Was it a lie? Was she shielding them all from the grim fact that her cancer had spread; that she was dying? Was she trying to avoid the familiar shift in interaction they had all witnessed on other cancer blogs?
Landry considers the inevitable scenario that commences whenever a fellow blogger reports, in a post laced with incredulity, bravado, false cheer—or all of the above—that her doctors have run out of treatment options.
There’s always a prompt outpouring of support, prayers, hollow optimism, and talk of miracles. Eventually—too often overnight—the blogger’s posts will begin to detail alarming symptoms, hospital visits, hospice arrangements. Attempts at breezy humor fall flat; entries become increasingly graphic and sporadic, infused with sadness, weariness, fear.
Then come the final posts written by someone else—a daughter, a husband, a friend—sometimes chronicling the blogger’s final days or hours, often reporting that the patient wants her Internet friends to know she’s thinking of them; that their comments are being shared with her in her lucid moments. Once in a while the blogger’s own last entry—sometimes intended as a farewell, but often not—is followed by just one other: a loved one’s terse report of the death and funeral arrangements.
With Meredith, there’s been none of that. Her daughter’s post had struck out of the blue.
Bewildered, Landry scrolls up to the previous blog entry. Bearing Saturday’s date, it was written by Meredith herself.
Having read it when it first appeared, Landry is already familiar with the buoyant account of Meredith’s weekend morning spent planting a vegetable garden in her Ohio backyard.
Her husband was still away, she wrote, so she had to dig and lug heavy bags of fertilizer herself. But it would all be worthwhile, she said in closing, a few months from now when she got to enjoy my favorite treat in the whole wild world: home-grown tomatoes, heavy with sugar and juice, eaten straight off the vine, sprinkled with salt and still warm from the sun.
The woman who wrote those words seemed to be looking ahead to August without reservation. Was she deluding herself, or trying to fool everyone else, writing about arduous physical labor when she was in fact confined to a hospital bed in the final stages of her disease?
This is crazy. It can’t be real.
Maybe it’s some kind of practical joke, or . . .
Maybe Meredith’s blogger account was hacked, or . . .
Maybe it’s real and she just didn’t want us to know.
Feeling vaguely betrayed, Landry opens a search window, types in the name Meredith, and stops to think for a moment.
She knows her friend’s last name is Haywood—or is it Heywood? Heyworth? Something like that. And she lives in a Cincinnati suburb . . . but which one?
Funny how you can know someone intimately without having that basic information; without ever having come face-to-face in the real world.
She types Haywood into the Google box and presses Enter.
There are a number of hits for Meredith Haywood— none that fit.
But when she replaces Haywood with Heywood, she finds herself looking at a death notice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, accompanied by a familiar photo: the head shot Meredith uses on her blog.
It’s real.
A lump rises in Landry’s throat, but she pushes it back and reads on, dry-eyed.
There was a time when she cried over Hallmark Christmas commercials. She wrote about that on her blog last December. Turned out that a surprising number of her followers did the same sappy thing.
These days it takes a hell of a lot more than a sentimental advertisement to bring tears to her eyes. She got used to holding them back in the wake of her diagnosis, not wanting to frighten her children, or depress her husband, or feel sorry for herself. Perhaps, most of all, she was afraid that if she allowed herself to start crying, she’d never stop.
But this is no Hallmark ad. It’s a death notice—albeit a brief one, not a full-blown obituary. Details are sparse, funeral arrangements incomplete.
Shaken, Landry closes the laptop and stands. Resting her elbows on the wooden railing, chin cupped heavily in her hands, she gazes out over the water.
Just beyond the boardwalk, in the shallows close to shore, a pair of kayakers glide in parallel symmetry. Farther out: the usual array of fishing boats, plus a cluster of sailors taking advantage of the morning breeze. Not a cloud in the sky; the forecast calls for a beautiful day.
Again, Landry is struck by disbelief.
I need to talk to someone. I should call someone.
But not her husband.
Rob left for the office less than ten minutes ago, kissing her good-bye as she poured her coffee and reminding her that it’s Wednesday, golf day, and he’ll be home late. Right now he’s driving, somewhere on the road between here and his law office in Mobile.
Anyway, he doesn’t know Meredith—though he knows about her, of course, along with the other bloggers Landry counts among her closest confidantes. Bound by a common diagnosis, they found their way into each other’s virtual worlds by chance and settled in with the camaraderie of old pals. She shares things with her online friends that she would never dream of telling anyone she knows in real life, other than Rob.
Oh, who is she kidding? There are some things Landry can’t even bring herself to tell Rob, yet somehow she’s comfortable putting it all out there on the Internet—hiding behind a screen name, of course.
Some bloggers just go by their first names, but her own is much too distinctive to ensure anonymity. She devoted nearly as much time to choosing a screen name as she had to baby names when she was pregnant with her children, ultimately deciding to go by BamaBelle.
“BamaBelle?” Rob echoed when she first shared it with him. “Bama as in Alabama?”
“What else?”
“I don’t know . . . Obama?”
“No. Baaaaama. Not Bahhhma.”
She wanted him to congratulate her on her cleverness, not critique it—but he was Rob. He wasn’t just nitpicking—he was protecting her, being cautious.
“I don’t think you should share anything specific online about where you are, Landry.”
“That’s not specific. This is a huge state, and it’s not like anyone’s going to figure out exactly where I am. Or care.”
“How about just ‘Southern Belle’?”
“Too cliché. Rob, it’s BamaBelle. Too late to change it. It’s already out there.”
He scowled, unaccustomed—back then, anyway—to her being short with him.
These days, thanks to the residual pressures of her illness, along with his job stress, and raising temperamental teenagers, they’re much more prone to snapping at each other, or bickering—usually about little things.
For the most part, though, they get along. He’s Landry’s best friend and soul mate. He loves her and has her best interests at heart.
But he’s not the person she needs for comfort right now, when she’s reeling from the news of Meredith’s death.
No. I need . . .
She gazes at the monarch butterfly below, still perched on the rose petals. It flutters its wings as if contemplating liftoff.
I need to talk to someone else who knew Meredith. Someone who will share my grief; someone who might know what happened.
Unfortunately, she can’t just pick up the phone and call one of her blogger friends. Nor can she even text. She doesn’t have their phone numbers. The only way to get in touch with them is online.
Returning to her laptop, she opens an instant message window, then sits with her fingers resting over the keyboard, once again staring into space, wondering whose screen name she should type.
Ordinarily she’d reach out first to Meredith, the un
official matriarch of the group, but . . .
Something flutters in the air just beyond the balcony rail. The monarch butterfly. She watches it flit away, backlit by the sun against a brilliant blue morning sky.
Landry swallows hard, shaking her head, and types the first name to come to mind.
Awakened by the tone indicating that an instant message just popped up on her laptop across the hotel room, Jaycee opens her eyes to darkness.
Certain it’s the middle of the night, she glances at the digital clock on the bedside table and sees that it’s a little after 5:00 A.M.—an hour that may not technically be the middle of the night, but doesn’t necessarily qualify as morning when you crawled into bed at three after a long flight, a late dinner, and too much champagne in a suite down the road at Chateau Marmont. It was almost like the good old days for a little while there, before her life derailed. She could almost forget . . .
Almost. But not entirely. She’ll never forget. They won’t let her.
Whoever is trying to reach her—probably Cory, oblivious to the time difference—will just have to wait until a decent hour.
With a groan, Jaycee rolls onto her other side—and gasps, seeing the silhouette of a woman across the room.
Dear God, she’s back!
Terror sweeps through her even as common sense attempts to remind her that it’s impossible. She can’t come back, because—
With a burst of clarity, Jaycee realizes it’s just the silhouette of her long blond wig sitting atop the tall bureau across the room, draped over its wig form.
Of course it is.
And of course she can’t come back, because she’s dead, because . . .
Because I killed her.
With a shudder, Jaycee pulls the pillow over her head, desperate to escape into a deep, blessed sleep, where the nightmare—the one that continues to haunt her waking hours—can’t reach her.
Standing in front of her classroom filled with first graders, Elena writes the name of today’s dinosaur on the board, sounding out the syllables as she goes.
“Steg . . .”
“Steg,” her students echo.
“O . . .”
“O.”
“Saur . . .”
“Saur,” they say—well, eighteen of them do.
The nineteenth, Michael Patterson, shouts, “Ms. Ferreira! Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just dinged!”
“Thank you, Michael. Come on, people. Saur . . .”
“Saur . . .”
“We already said that one!” Michael protests.
Elena clenches the whiteboard marker in her hand. “You didn’t say it. Join us, Michael. Saur . . .”
“Saur . . .”
“Us.”
“Us.”
“Stegosaurus! That is our dinosaur of the day, boys and girls. Can anyone tell me—”
“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer! It’s dinging again!”
God, give me strength, she prays silently, to deal with this kid for another . . .
She glances at the big black and white wall clock. It’s only a quarter after eight. The school day has barely begun.
Okay, God. I need strength for another six hours and forty-five minutes.
Wait a minute—today isn’t an ordinary day. There’s a staff meeting after school, followed by Activities night, when her first graders return with their parents to tour the classroom display of their culminating projects and present a musical skit. She won’t be free to make the half-hour drive home until well after nine o’clock.
And after that she’ll still have to get through seven more days before summer vacation begins.
Well—two more full ones after this. Beginning on Monday, they have a week of half days before the school year trudges to an end at last.
It’s not that her current students are such a bad bunch of kids. For the most part they’ve been spirited, avid learners. Over her decade of teaching in this small Massachusetts town, Elena has only had one—maybe two—groups where the challenging kids outnumbered the pleasures. But the long Memorial Day weekend—a cruel teaser of a break, she has often thought—always marks the beginning of the end. Everyone is fidgety and no one feels like being in school for almost another month. Especially when the gray chill of New England spring gives way to warm, sunny days that create restlessness in the kids and a greenhouse effect in the un-air-conditioned classroom.
Elena’s computer, on the carrel by the window, sounds another alert. Darn. Someone is trying to instant-message her. That’s not unusual—just distracting. She usually keeps the volume muted while she’s teaching, but she turned it on this morning before the students arrived and forgot to turn it off again. Her friend had sent her one of those funny YouTube videos in an e-mail—one that was totally inappropriate to watch in an elementary school classroom, with or without the kids present—but it’s June. Everyone at Northmeadow Elementary School is slacking off. Even the teachers.
“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just—”
“Thank you, Michael. Right now we are not worrying about my computer. We are worrying about the stegosaurus. Or are we? Does anyone know whether the stegosaurus would want to eat us if we ran into one? Would we have to worry about that? Raise your hand if you know.”
“We can’t run into one,” Michael blurts as several others raise their hands, “because humans and dinosaurs can’t be alive at the same time! Dinosaurs have been dead for sixty-five million years!”
The kid is smart as a whip. If he weren’t so darned disruptive, she’d be more willing to appreciate his intelligence.
With a sigh, she agrees that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist. “But if they did,” she adds patiently, “humans would have nothing to fear from stegosauruses because they’re herbivores. Raise your hands, please . . . who knows what an herbivore is?”
Naturally, Michael does. After defining herbivore—without raising his hand—he asks if she’s going to check her computer.
“Not right now,” Elena tells him, the patient smile straining her cheek muscles.
Just six hours and forty-four minutes . . .
And then just seven more days . . .
The moment Kay Collier sees the message pop up on her computer screen, she knows what it must be about.
Meredith.
She’s been sitting here thinking about Meredith in her small home office off the kitchen ever since she got back from her rainy morning walk a little while ago. That’s when she got online and spotted the blog entry written by Meredith’s daughter.
A china teacup filled with jasmine tea has long since grown cold beside her keyboard as she struggled with how—and whether—to post a comment in response. No words of comfort she’s conjured so far seem even remotely appropriate for such an overwhelming tragedy.
But BamaBelle’s brief query demands nothing more than a simple, Yes, I’m here.
After Kay types the three words and hits Send, there’s a long pause, as if Bama is trying to figure out how to word the tragic message she needs to deliver.
Sparing her the ordeal, Kay writes, Terrible news. You saw?
This time, the answer is instantaneous. Yes. So upset.
Me too. What the hell happened?
Then, realizing she might have just offended BamaBelle, one of the more ladylike members of the blogger network, she adds, Sorry. Pardon my French. I just—
Bama’s response pops up before she can finish. I didn’t know she was sick again. Did you?
No clue. Guess she didn’t want anyone to know.
Feel so helpless.
Me too. Have you talked to anyone else?
No. You?
No.
Kay stares glumly into space, trying to think of something else to say.
Grandmotherly
Meredith was everybody’s friend, the heart and soul of their online group. She was always there when you needed her, the first to pop up with a comforting word or a virtual hug—indicated by multiple parentheses around a person’s name.
((((((((((((Kay))))))))))))) was the last thing Meredith ever wrote to her, in final response to a heartfelt private message exchange just last week.
She sounded normal in the post she wrote Saturday about gardening, she writes now to BamaBelle. Did you read that?
Yes. That’s why I’m so freaked out.
Me too.
Kay pauses. Waits.
BamaBelle, too, seems to have run out of things to say.
Kay types, GTG.
Shorthand for got to go.
NP is the response; shorthand for no problem.
That’s the nice thing about these online friendships. You pop in and out of each other’s lives with much less ado than in real life. There’s no obligation to provide detailed explanations about why you’re coming and going.
IM me if you find out anything, Bama writes. Or call if you want to talk. I’ll give you my number.
Kay responds to Bama’s offering with her own cell number, but she’s not sure how she feels about that, because . . . because . . .
Because the walls are coming down.
Until now she’s felt so safe with these Internet friendships. When you’re shy and accustomed to maintaining your privacy, there’s a certain comfort to keeping people at arm’s length—in real life, anyway.
Now that her mother is gone and her old schoolmates and neighbors have moved away or moved on, caught up in lives of their own, there are no real life friends. There are no longer even colleagues: she was laid off from her job as a guard at the federal prison in Terre Haute a few years ago, thanks to budget cuts.
Kay spends most of her time alone, unless you count people she’s never even met in person.
Her online friends are her family. The only people in the world she cares about; the only ones who care about her.
A final message pops onto her screen from Bama: I wish we all lived in the same town so that we could help each other through this.
Me too, Kay replies automatically, though she doesn’t really wish that . . . does she?
The Perfect Stranger Page 3
