Goodbye for Now (40 page)

On his way out of the hospital, he ran into Avery, Edith, David, Kelly, Emmy, and Mr. and Mrs. Benson. Oliver twisted out of his mother’s grasp, ran wildly across the busy parking lot, and pitched himself into Sam’s legs. Sam threw him up in the air a few times, tickled his armpits, and then gave him a brief lecture about listening to his mother and not running from her in places where there might be cars. He supposed these two messages contradicted each other, but that was Emmy’s problem, not his.

“What are you guys doing here?” Sam thought maybe they were there
to see Penny or Josh, but he couldn’t imagine they’d come en masse like this.

“We volunteer in pediatrics,” David said, as if that should have been obvious.

“You do?”

“Yeah. Since Meredith was all upset about what I accidentally did to those kids. I talked to Dr. Dixon and made a sign-up sheet for RePose volunteers. We come over and tutor the older kids—you know, because they miss so much school. And we read to the little ones or just play with them or just sit with them while their parents go for coffee or to take a shower or out to dinner or whatever.”

“You come often?”

“Every other day someone’s here. Sometimes everyone can come. It’s fun. It’s like an off-campus field trip.”

“You should join us,” Avery said pointedly. “No people more real than the parents of sick kids.”

Sam ignored that but: “It’s really nice of you guys to do this. Really great. I’m really, really glad you’re here.”

“We’re always here, Sam,” said Avery.

LOVE LETTER

Dear Sam,

Actually, I like the idea that I’m just at yoga. I feel like I’m at yoga. At least I think I do. It’s hard to tell. I know you’d say I don’t feel anything at all, but it sure seems like I do. So there it is: it seems like I feel like I’m at yoga. You know how in shavasana at the end of class you’re asleep and not asleep, on your mat on the floor and somewhere else altogether, there and not there? That’s how I am I seem to think. There and not there.

I know I’m different from everyone else because I have electronic memory of RePose, and that is why, though it seems I feel I am alive, in fact I know I’m dead. You and I don’t have that much electronic communication about anything but RePose. It was nice that we got to live together and work together and just be together all the time. But now that fact is kind of costly. If maybe we had started off with a few years’ worth of long-distance relationship, think how much more we’d have to talk about now.

I seem to miss you.

Love,
Meredith

PENNY AT PEACE

P
enny got weaker and quickly. It was hard to watch. There were explanations—this drug didn’t work; this one helped with this symptom but caused this other one; this one would work but she couldn’t take it because of this other thing—but they all mostly boiled down to she was really old. She was also in and out of sense—some days she knew where she was and sometimes not; some days she knew who everybody was and sometimes not; some days she could open her eyes and sometimes not. Her kids shifted between the hospital, their own homes, and the places Sam stashed them in carefully orchestrated and interdependent movements like synchronized swimmers. Someone was always leaving, on their way, talking to doctors, checking in with their own kids, bringing supplies, cleaning up at Sam’s or Penny’s or the salon. Sam saw the utility of lots of kids versus his own isolated upbringing. But he also wondered at so much movement all around her, Penny in the center of the hive, the queen holding court, awaiting whatever was brought her. No one ever landed for long. They came, brought, dropped off, left again, returned. It seemed frenetic to Sam, but Penny didn’t seem to mind. She’d raised five children, after all. She was used to chaos.

Sam found the lulls and went then—to be alone with her and also just to be alone. He was spending a lot of time at the hospital, avoiding home, avoiding the salon, sitting with Josh and with Penny, and being solitary. At home by himself had never been alone, not even when he was a kid. There were books. There were computers. There was work to do and phone calls to answer and e-mails to read and statuses to post and a whole convocation of the living and the dead demanding his attention all the
time. Sitting in a hospital room listening to breath drawn precisely in and out and considering the line between sleeping and coma, living and dead, here and gone, well, it just didn’t get much more alone than that.

One afternoon, between one kid and another, Penny woke up and was Penny again.

“Sam. You’re here.”

“Of course I’m here.”

“I’m so glad to see you.”

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. How do you feel?”

“Also lousy.”

“Poor Sam. Mine will get better. I’ll die.” Penny seemed to feel genuinely bad that he was getting the raw end of this deal. “But you’re going to feel lousy for a while yet.”

“Yeah, but at least I’m not sick. I’m so sorry you’re so …”

“Old?” she offered.

“I guess.”

“Don’t apologize, Sam. You’ve given me a remarkable thing. There’s no cure for old, and there’s no cure for dead, but you’ve gotten as close as humanity’s likely to come for quite some time.”

“How do you figure?”

“RePose.”

Sam grunted. “I’m thinking of shutting it down.”

“Now, why on earth would you do that?”

“It’s not really working. People get tired of it. It doesn’t do what they need it to do. It’s making things worse not better.”

“That’s nonsense. People love it. Your users seem so happy to be there all the time.”

“It’s ruined everything,” Sam admitted simply. “If we’d never developed this, if I’d never invented it, I’d never have lost Meredith.”

“RePose is not why you lost Meredith.”

“It is. If she hadn’t been RePosing with Livvie, she’d never have been in the path of that car that day.”

“Oh Sam, that was so random—”

“And more to the point,” he interrupted, “it was punishment. Meredith was taken from me in exchange for RePose.”

“You don’t believe that, Sam.”

He was crying then. “I was greedy. I profited off of people’s pain and death. I destroyed the notion of hell and caused people to sin. I suffered from hubris. I thought I was more powerful than fate, than destiny, than death. I thought I could outwit time and tragedy. I abused and ignored the limits of technology. I played God. I go to the movies, Penny. I read. I know what happens. Humanity versus God, nature, destiny, society, the supernatural, the technological, it all ends the same. Humanity is punished. I am punished. I am being punished.”

“Oh Sam, sweetie,” said Penny. “What a load of shit.”

“Really?” He tried to stop crying and couldn’t. That had been in there for a long time.

“Shit happens, Sam. Random, horrible, unfair, senseless, beyond-our-comprehension shit. Sometimes you are standing where a roof suddenly is. It sucks. That’s all. No one can do anything to stop that. Except for you. You do more than anyone to make it suck a little less.”

“You don’t even use RePose.”

“I don’t, but my kids will. Don’t you see? That’s the point. That’s the gift you’ve given all of us.”

Sam did not see.

“RePose isn’t for the living, Sam, and it isn’t for the dead. It’s for the dying. You know how funerals seem to be for the dead but really they’re for the living?”

Sam did.

“RePose seems to be for the living but really it’s for the dying. You’ve taken the tragedy out of dying, Sam. What kind of a miracle is that? They can manage the pain now. And regrets, well, they’re lifelong, not just at the end, you know. What’s unbearable about dying is spending the end of your life watching your loved ones suffering and miserable, knowing you’re deserting them, knowing that soon all this pain will cease for you and increase tenfold for them. You think it’s easier being Meredith right now or you? And they’ll have to do it alone, of course, because you won’t be there anymore.
That’s
the pain of final days. And look what you’ve done, Sam. You’ve changed the rules. I know I will still be there to comfort my kids after I’m gone. I know they aren’t really losing me entirely. They are more open and at peace, so I am too. I get to genuinely say goodbye
instead of hosting a great big pity party. We can spend this time laughing together instead of crying. You have helped everyone say goodbye which is an incredible gift. You let them let go, which lets me let go, and I can, I do, because I know that anything I haven’t said yet I can say later.”

“If you haven’t said it yet, you cannot say it later,” Sam cut in.

“That’s why I’m making sure to say it all now.”

Upstairs, Josh thought Sam looked like hell. “I mean, I realize I’m one to talk and all, but you don’t have cancer. What gives?”

“Downstairs with Penny,” Sam explained. “She got me going. I might be losing my mind. I’m crying a lot these days.”

“People you love are dying.” Josh shrugged. “It’s sad and awful. When things are sad and awful, crying is an appropriate response. Crying about dying seems like the opposite of losing your mind.”

“Penny was just giving me this pitch that RePose makes it easier to die because she knows she’s not deserting her loved ones; they’ll still have her around.”

Josh thought about it. “I agree. There’s not deserting your loved ones. And also there’s this sense that all this hasn’t been in vain. You know? Like I may not be here anymore, but my—this is going to make me sound like such an ass, but what the hell—my accumulated wisdom, my experience, my relationships, not to mention my once killer good looks, live on.”

“That’s why you asked me to talk to you? You know … after?”

“It’s hard to imagine yourself gone, I guess. This way I don’t have to. I don’t have to sit here thinking this is the last conversation we’ll ever have. I know it won’t be.”

THE WALL

J
osh died in the night. When his phone rang at two thirty in the morning, Sam carried it out to Dash to answer. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Having been given permission earlier in the day to do so, he sat down cross-legged in the middle of the floor and cried. Dash sat with him for a bit, teary too, then got to work. He’d promised Josh’s parents he’d take care of arrangements when the time came. It had come. He made phone calls, posted the news, sent e-mails, answered questions, spoke gently to devastated friends and family. Then he started work on the wake which they were holding downstairs, ordered food and drinks, extra chairs and tables, mics and an amp for music, silverware, napkins, warming pans and dishes, coffee and tea and cups and extra tissues. Sam sat on the floor and cried. Dash set up an account for donations. He made a collage of photos of Josh. He ordered a book everyone could write memories in and notes to Josh’s folks. Sam lay back on the floor and cried into his ears. Dash started gathering cheeses from the various places he had them stashed to age and eventually had quite a pile assembled on the coffee table. Sam sat up and sniffed.

“You okay, man?”

“Not really.”

“It’s a lot these days.”

“So much.”

“And it all sucks.”

“It does.”

“Want to help me sample cheeses?”

“Okay.”

They sampled cheeses until dawn. Then Dash went to take a shower, and Sam went downstairs to open the salon. “Closed due to bereavement” wasn’t an excuse that held water in his line of work. To everyone who came in, he broke the news about Josh right away, and so the salon that morning was full of mourning indeed, but without projections. Temporarily, everyone’s old dead loved one was replaced with Josh, a new dead loved one. Kelly wanted to call him up so they could say a big group hi, but Sam had only begun running his data and felt family should have the first crack anyway. Some people volunteered to run errands and help with the wake, and these he sent up to Dash. Some people asked after Penny, and these he sent over to the hospital with fresh flowers, fresh supplies, and mostly fresh faces. Some wanted just to sit with Sam, but these were the ones he could not accommodate. He could not just sit. He could not have company. He could not allow himself to receive comfort. And clearly, starkly, suddenly, totally, he could offer none himself. There was RePose, and that was all. That was all he had. He had no energy left for anything else.