Goodbye for Now (32 page)

Dash wanted to stay, but Sam sent him back to L.A. for a few days, begging him for space. The salon still needed opening each morning though, staffing all day, someone to do orientations and explanations, setups and intro lectures, hand-holding and tea pouring. Projection wiping. Comforting and reassuring. Sam’s first morning back, Kylie Shepherd, who’d made it through five video chats with her late boyfriend without breathing a word, suddenly found herself confessing everything to him in a rush—how they’d been at an outdoor rock concert when a bolt of lightning came out of the clear blue sky and clobbered him, how lost she was without him, how lonely, how insane. When she logged off, she came to Sam, head hung.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I need the wipe.”

“I think you set a record,” Sam said gently. “Five sessions is a long time.”

“I know you said it’s important not to tell. But you don’t know how hard it is.”

“I do,” said Sam. “I know and know.”

“I feel so much worse because I told,” she said, “but also a little bit better.”

They hugged for a long time. Then Sam wiped her boyfriend clean.
“See you tomorrow,” said Kylie Shepherd with a little wave and a half smile through her horrible tears and Sam’s horrible tears.

At eight, Sam closed the salon and headed up home and decided he was ready to try again.

“Sam!” She was delighted to see him. “You never call me!”

“Well, we live together,” Sam said weakly. “And work together.”

“And sleep together,” Meredith giggled. “All naked and everything. What’s up?”

“Not much. How are you?”

“Fine. Nothing new on my end. You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said unconvincingly.

She wasn’t buying it. “Seriously, Sam.” She eyed him closely. “What’s going on?”

Sam could think of only one thing to say because there was only one thing to say. “You died, Merde,” he said very, very quietly. “You died last week. I’m not calling. This is Dead Mail.”
Fuck
.

“Fuck,” she said. “Oh Sam, oh God.”

Unlike everyone else in the universe with the sole exceptions of Dash, Sam, and Sam’s dad, Meredith had electronic memory of the inner workings of RePose and thus a basis for understanding. That was why he told her. That and he couldn’t not. That and there was nothing else to say instead. That and there was only one reason in the world Sam would look and sound as wrecked as he did.

“How?” she breathed.

“Remember when you told your grandmother you’d get her olive oil and stuff?” Of course she did. It had happened online. “Some senile asshole lost control of his car and plowed into the market.”

“And ran me over?”

“No, actually. The roof of the market collapsed.”

She looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, love, I don’t understand.”

“No, of course you don’t.”

“Fuck!” said Meredith again. Then, “Wait, I actually went to buy olive oil? Why?”

“You were being …”

“Insane?”

“Nostalgic. She asked you to do it. You were honoring her memory.
You thought there was some tiny chance she might actually show up. You promised.”

“Do you mean to tell me that being indulgent and crazy got me killed?”

“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

W
hen 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 you 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.