Goodbye for Now (26 page)

“Does yelling at him make it better?” Meredith asked.

“It does. It’s good to feel the words come out of my mouth after so many years of scripting them in my head. He can’t really understand me. Sam said it’s because I never did it before. No one ever yelled at Bob in life, so he can’t understand it in death.”

“That must be so frustrating,” said Avery.

“I’m used to it, actually,” said Edith. “He never listened to me in life either. I’d say something; he’d be thinking about something else. Maybe I could have tried this when he was alive after all. It seemed like such an impossibly scary thing, but the projection is right—he’d never have understood being yelled at because no one ever contradicted him.”

“Maybe you’re lucky too,” said Avery. “RePose works for you. For me, it’s just sad and makes me miss him more. It’s an awful lot better than nothing. But it falls pretty far short of … enough.”

“Whereas for me, this Bob is so much easier. I miss him, but also, to be perfectly honest, in some ways I’m happier now that he’s … Oh but honey, you and Sam won’t be like that,” Edith said, turning to Meredith. “Don’t let me sour you on marriage. It’s a different era. And look at Avery. She’s a much better model than I am.”

“It’s true.” Avery smiled weakly. “Just don’t let him die.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t know you two were together. I’m usually better at sensing these things,” Edith said.

“You couldn’t invent something as incredible as RePose unless it was for someone you really loved,” said Avery. “That level of brain spark is kindled by only one thing.”

Dash was entertaining everyone—his strong suit—but especially Penny. There’d been a debate over that one. Sam thought she could use a night out but not too far out—a chance to get dressed up and eat good food and
meet new people but only a one-floor elevator ride away from home if she felt ill or ill at ease. Meredith worried about how they could explain the salon without explaining RePose, and if they told her about RePose she’d want to use it, and if she wanted to use it, they’d have to come up with some reason why she couldn’t without revealing what they knew about Albert. Finally, on a trip to the grocery store the week before the party, Dash told her about the business they ran on the floor right above hers connecting people via electronic communication with projections of their loved ones who had passed on.

“You mean like you can e-mail dead people?” Penny said with wonder.

“Yes. Or video chat or any other form of electronic communiqué.” He braced himself for whatever might come next.

“Oh you young people,” Penny laughed. “What will you think of next?” She had not the slightest inclination to RePose evidently, but she was delighted to be invited to a party. She wore an elegant, floor-length black dress and ivory gloves up to her elbows and went around on Dash’s arm getting introduced to everyone. She greeted them all warmly, took their hands, listened generously to their stories, answered patiently the questions shouted overloud in her direction as if, just because she was small and old and a little bit stooped, she were also hard of hearing which she was not. Edith said wasn’t she sweet to take care of Meredith in Livvie’s absence, but Penny insisted Meredith took care of her. Celia Montrose said didn’t she look nice in her dress and gloves, but Penny said, “Oh, I’ve had this dress forever. Finally, it’s back in style again.” Avery said how hard it must be for her to live alone after so many years with her dear husband, and Penny, recognizing a kindred spirit when she saw one, patted her hand and said, “Yes, honey, oh yes. You too.”

At some point, Dash went upstairs and fished an ancient dartboard out of the back of his grandmother’s hall closet and spent the rest of the evening tutoring George Lenore. Mr. and Mrs. Benson spent a lot of time talking to Kelly Montrose about colleges. David Elliot spent a lot of time talking to Kelly Montrose about no one was sure what, occurring as it did very low in her ear and amid much giggling from the both of them.

“Thank you, Sam,” said Meredith with wet eyes when they were getting ready for bed later. “I needed that. I needed to see that they were happy.”

“Me too, actually,” he said. “I hadn’t realized it, but it was such a relief.”

“You are smart. But you are better.”

“Better than what?”

“Better than you are smart. You are very, very intelligent Sam, but you are an even better person. Your genius is up in the nine-point-fives, but your heart is off the charts.”

“Yours, too,” he said. “We make a good couple. We should date.”

She laughed. “And I love you, you know.”

“I do,” said Sam, who did. “I love you too.”

ST. GILES

T
hat held them for a while. The press backed off a bit, and Meredith got better at managing it. The tech settled down a bit, and users got better at using it. Meredith felt better, and Livvie did a better job of chatting with a cheerful Meredith than an unhappy one which was a circular proposition: Livvie had trouble with a troubled Meredith which made her more troubled; Livvie did better with a happy Meredith which made her more happy. Then one Saturday afternoon at the end of August they got a call from a Dr. Dixon at St. Giles Hospital. “I think you need to get over here and see what’s happening,” he told Meredith. They were at Lincoln Park, reading books on the beach and watching the ferry come and go and looking out over sound and mountains—sunshine, wind, and water—a blissful afternoon. They packed up right away to head over. They didn’t know what they’d find there, but they suspected it would be far from blissful.

Dr. Dixon brought them to a cheery-looking bright yellow ward on the third floor of the east wing with lots of toys and big windows and fresh air and a fake forest with cute animals painted on the walls. It was the most miserable place Sam had ever been in his life. Dr. Dixon gave them this heartbreaking speech on the way over: “There are three kinds of kids here: the kind who are going to recover and be fine or at least functional, the kind who are going to die blessedly quickly, and the hard kind, the kind who are going to linger and get worse then get better then get worse again then get hope then get a little better then get a little more hope then get a little worse then much worse then a little better. Then they die. They live their tiny lives here, and then they die here. Their parents live
their tiny lives here too. And they also die here. They are the hard part of this job. You are making it worse. I thought you should see.”

In a small room at the end of one hall, a tiny boy sat propped up with pillows clutching a worn yellow rabbit and crying. He had tubes in his arms, in his nose, from his gut. He had no hair and no color and hardly any flesh covering his garishly on-display bones. He wasn’t crying because of the tubes or the tiny pale dying baldness of himself, however. He was crying because his father was sitting up next to him in bed with a laptop on the tray table, painstakingly trying to get his son to compose e-mails to him.

“What did you do today?” asked the dad gently.

“Played with Rabbit,” the kid whispered.

“Type that to me,” said the dad.

“Don’t wanna,” said the kid.

“What else did you do?”

“Shots,” said the kid.

“Type that to Daddy.”

“Don’t wanna,” cried the kid.

“Christ, he can’t be more than three or four,” said Sam.

“Actually, he’s seven and a half,” said Dr. Dixon. “Still a bit young for e-mailing though. Plus he’s missed a lot of school.”

Next door, an even littler girl in a pink nightgown was crying and crying in her bed with her arms stretched out toward her parents. “Up pees, up pees, uuuupppeeeese,” she was wailing over and over. Her parents sat two feet away at the end of the bed, also crying but immobile. Between them, facing the little girl, was an open laptop, an open video chat, an enabled camera. “Just a few more minutes today, baby,” her mother said through her own tears. “Just a few more minutes. Mommy and Daddy need this for later. Tell Mommy what’s your favorite book. Tell Mommy what a cow says.”

Meredith was paler than the little boy in the first room. She excused herself but didn’t make it quite as far as the bathroom before she threw up on the floor in the hallway.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Dixon,” she managed.

“Happens all the time,” he said.

“Not about that,” she said and went to find the ladies’ room.

“They’re trying to get enough electronic communication out of their kids?” Sam asked. Though he knew.

“Yes.”

“Before it’s too late?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s already too late.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Dixon. “And also no. It’s not late enough. These kids haven’t learned to read yet, to write, to use a computer. And they never will. All these parents are doing is wasting the time they have left.”

Sam nodded, looking at his shoes, cowed, but then he whispered, “Think of it from their point of view though. The kids are going to die anyway. The parents want something to remember them by.”

“It shouldn’t be this,” said Dr. Dixon.

Sam was having trouble finding his voice. “How do we know what will help these parents remember? What will help them feel better?”

“Helping the parents feel better isn’t my job. My patients are the kids. They have months, sometimes weeks, sometimes days left. They shouldn’t have to spend them inputting themselves into a computer.”

“You keep running tests,” Sam said quietly. “Administering shots and chemo and medications with horrible side effects. Waking them up in the night to take their blood or their temperature. Hooking them up to scary machines. Confining them to bed. Drugging them senseless. Is that any way to spend the time they have left?”

“The procedures are sometimes brutal, but often they extend the time these children have. I’m not justifying myself to you, and I’m not getting into a medical discussion with a computer programmer. I can’t bring cancer up to the ward to show it the misery it’s causing. But I can bring you up to show you the misery you’re causing. And I’m telling you to stop.”

“It won’t work for children,” said Sam. “It was never intended to. I’m happy to explain that to anyone you want me to or do anything else you think would help. I get that your priority is your patients and that hospitals treat patients. We’re only trying, humbly, to take care of who’s left.”

On the way out, they saw one of those flyers with the tear-off phone numbers in strips at the bottom. In big letters at the top it said, “New Life for Your Loved One.” And then smaller, lower down, “The time to prepare to RePose with your loved one is now. Do it before you lose them
forever. Learn how today!” There was only one phone number left hanging off the bottom of the poster. Meredith ripped the whole thing off the wall, balled it in her fist, and threw it in the street. Then she got in the car and cried, not gentle weeping but violent sobbing. Sam thought she might throw up again. Sam felt like he might throw up himself.

“What are we going to do?” she sobbed.

“I don’t know.” Sam was quiet, and that made her louder.

“We are killing those kids.”

“No, we’re not.”

“We are ruining their lives.”

“No, we’re not.”

“They’re already so godforsaken miserable, and we’re making them more miserable. We are.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“Jesus, Sam. Fuck the semantics. No, okay, we didn’t give them cancer, fine. But these kids have three horrible weeks to live when they’re owed another ten decades, and we’re making them spend those three weeks in front of a goddamn computer.”

“No. We’re not. We’re not, Merde. We are not making them do anything. We are not making their parents do anything.”

“We have made them an offer they can’t refuse.”

“No, we haven’t. RePose is not intended for children. It was never intended for children. It won’t work for these kids—”

“But they don’t know that. These people have no hope, so they have to cling to whatever they can find, no matter how small and pathetic it is.”

“It’s not our job to tell these parents, ‘You have three weeks with your kid. Go to a park. Go do something fun. Don’t waste time on your laptop.’ There are social workers. There are grief counselors—”

“We have made RePose available out in the world. The most desperate people, the most miserable, broken ones, those are the people who are going to grab on and not let go. They can’t say no.”

“That’s not on us,” said Sam. “Just because it can’t help everyone doesn’t mean it can’t help some people.”

“Just because it can help some people,” said Meredith, “doesn’t let us off the hook for hurting others.”

“They can’t have what they want.” Sam was quiet again. “They aren’t
getting kids who live to be a hundred. No one can give them that. I don’t know whose fault that is, but it isn’t ours.”

“We’re not helping.”

“We are. Maybe not these people because their kids are too young. But think of Mr. and Mrs. Benson. For people with older DLOs, we’re giving them the only thing we can: a chance to see their kid again.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It’s all we’ve got, Merde. It’s all anybody’s got.” And then, when she didn’t say anything, he added, “It made
you
feel better.”