The Perfect Stranger (3 page)

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 bloggers have had an ongoing discussion about getting together in person sometime. Recently, someone suggested organizing a meeting to coincide with breast cancer awareness month in October, or joining forces for one of the Making Strides walks around the country, or for a march in Washington, D.C.

Kay isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that it’s never managed to get beyond the wishful thinking stage.

In real life relationships, there’s always pressure.

If her online friends met her in person, they might expect her to be something she isn’t. Or they might turn out to be something she doesn’t want them to be.

Then I’d lose everything.

That can’t happen. It’s too special—sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. She loves these people and she needs them, now more than ever . . .

She pushes back her chair, stands, and gets halfway across the room before pausing to straighten a framed photo that doesn’t really need straightening.

It’s an old black and white portrait showing her parents on their wedding day, circa 1962. They were together two decades before Kay was born, then separated before her first birthday.

Her mother never forgave her for that; or for being born—which was, after all, the reason he left.

Mother never came right out and said her conception had been an accident, or that they hadn’t wanted children, or that it was Kay’s fault the love of her life had walked out, leaving her a struggling single mother.

She didn’t have to say it.

It was obvious from the way her mother looked at her, the way she treated her, the way she cried over old photos of him . . .

Especially this one.

In it, her parents are standing on the steps of a church that used to sit a few miles from this house where Kay has lived all her life, in the western suburbs of Indianapolis. She remembers when the church was torn down, about ten years ago, maybe fifteen, to make way for a now-defunct shopping plaza. Yes, at least fifteen years ago, because Mother was still alive, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the
Indianapolis News
was still the evening paper, and business was still booming in this neighborhood.

Mother tore out the short article with its side-by-side black and white photos—before and after, from brick church to pile of rubble—and showed it to Kay.

“This is where Daddy and I were married,” she said, as if Kay didn’t know; as if that man had actually been a “daddy” to her.

As old age and illness got the best of her, Mother was increasingly delusional.

“I always thought I’d have my funeral there,” she said wistfully. “Now where will it be?”

“Please don’t talk about that, Mother.”

“I have to talk about it. It’s not that far off, you know.”

Yes. Kay knew.

She stares at the picture of her parents on their wedding day over fifty years ago, looking into each other’s eyes with blatant adoration. Her mother, in dark lipstick and a puffy veil, and her father, in a dark suit with a skinny tie, are obviously madly in love.

The photo sat upstairs, framed on her mother’s bedside table, until the day she died.

All her life, Kay had hated looking at it. Yet when the time came, she couldn’t bear to throw it away.

Maybe it was better to hang onto it, she decided, as a reminder never to get too close to any man. You’d only end up alone and brokenhearted.

“The old saying is wrong. It’s not better to have loved and lost,” her mother used to rasp in her cigarette voice. “Believe me. If you don’t love, you can’t lose.”

Kay took those words to heart. In her formative years, she had casual friendships, even a date here and there . . . but managed to avoid the risks that come with real relationships. Now, when she wants companionship, she finds it online, and when she needs a creative outlet, she posts entries on her blog.

That’s how she met Meredith and BamaBelle and the others—how many years has it been now?

She used to be able to keep track of things like that. But a lot of details about the past have become fuzzy lately.

Too bad she can’t choose which memories to keep and which to let go. There are a few that persist in haunting her waking hours and dreams, and she’d give anything to banish them forever.

You left me! Why did you leave me?

I didn’t leave you, Mother! I’ve been right here by your bed!

Kay turns away from the photo and leaves the room.

Even with the windows closed, there’s a depressing chill in the air this morning, just as there was on the gloomy spring morning her mother died. Now, as then, the house is filled with rainy day shadows.

Kay forces herself to turn on lights to brighten the rooms as she goes downstairs. Meredith, a true believer in the physical healing benefits of an optimistic attitude, frequently wrote about surrounding yourself with positive energy.

In the dining room, Kay stops and turns on the old tabletop radio, tuned to the upbeat oldies station. Meredith wouldn’t want her to wallow in the gloom.

After flooding the kitchen with overhead light, she dumps her cold tea into the sink and turns on the flame to heat water for a fresh cup.

Waiting for it to boil, she reaches for the orange prescription bottle on the windowsill and shakes out the pill she takes daily to keep cancer at bay.

Meredith, whose cancer, like Kay’s, was hormone fed, was on the same chemical regimen. They used to compare notes. She never dreamed the drug had stopped working for her friend until Meredith shared the news with her privately not long ago. Her cancer was back, Meredith told her, and spreading. Her days were numbered.

Kay was stunned. She knew her upbeat friend had her share of problems. Meredith had written blog entries about her husband’s job loss, about never having enough money, that sort of thing. She always made light of her troubles. But this, she’d kept to herself.

Please don’t tell the others,
Meredith wrote to her.
I’m going to reach out to them one by one, here and there . . . but I’m not comfortable sharing with everyone just yet.

I won’t say anything. I promise.

Kay kept her word. She didn’t tell, and she won’t tell, not even now that Meredith is gone. Not even if it means lying, the way she did just now when she was messaging with BamaBelle.

She turns on the faucet and lets the water run, a lifelong habit.

“You never know what’s lying around in these old pipes,” Mother used to say when she was a little girl. “Don’t take a drink from the tap until you’ve washed it all away.”

“Washed all what away?”

“You know. The toxins.”

Kay wrote a blog about that once. About Mother, perpetually veiled in a cloud of cigarette smoke, wasting time worrying about negligible issues, devoting not nearly enough energy tending to the things that were actually within her control.

That post generated more comments than most; her online friends related to the irony.

Kay grabs a tall glass from the cupboard above the sink. She fills it, turns off the tap, and swallows the pill, along with a couple of ibuprofen.

She has a headache again. It happens a lot lately. In her levelheaded moments she assumes it’s probably just middle-aged eye strain, spending too much time on the computer. Maybe she needs a stronger prescription for her reading glasses.

But other times, paranoia and pessimism get the best of her and she’s sure it’s the cancer—that it’s back, spreading tumors into her brain.

After all, the preventative medication didn’t prevent cancer’s death march through Meredith’s body. It didn’t work for Mother, either, during her own brief remission, or for Whoa Nellie or countless other bloggers who had lost their battles.

Why should it be any different for her?

But if the cancer ever does return, it’s not going to ravage her until she draws her last anguished breath. No, she’ll put an end to it before that can ever happen. She has the means, tucked away upstairs in her nightstand drawer. It could all be over in a flash.

Please, please, let it have been that way for Meredith . . .

With a trembling hand, Kay sets the glass into the sink and goes back to glumly waiting for the teakettle to whistle.