The Journey Prize Stories 28 (4 page)

When she starts to think about returning to Facebook, Laura isn't surprised to get unsolicited advice from Greg. Over the past three months, he's called her up a few times a week from Halifax, making his two older kids warble pitchy hellos to Laura over the phone. In the summers during his undergrad in public health he'd worked as a tree planter on Vancouver Island. He's always had an effortless builder's body. Laura dreads telling him about her weightlifting—doesn't want to weather his enthusiasm. An outlet, he will say.
I'm so glad you've found an outlet
. Like she's an electrical plug. These
days Greg works part-time from home as a graphic designer. In his spare time he makes prints of his photos of trees. He gave Laura and Mallory a triptych of wind-bent arbutus trees for their third anniversary—trunks entwined, sinewy, red and gold. His wife's father owns an American hotel chain. When they'd married Laura sat in the first row, beamed politely, and thought,
you will never struggle
.

“Just post something,” he tells her. “Then it's done with.”

“What'll I do about the comments?”

“You just have to post something if you go back on. Otherwise it will be just—It'll be weird. Everybody knows you split up. I mean, Mallory has like three thousand friends. You know?”

“What? What do you mean? Did she post something? What did she post?” Laura, who'd never been very into Facebook, had put an embargo on it since Mallory packed her things and left.

“Okay, okay never mind. Just give me your password. I'll do it.”

His youngest, just eight months, screams in the background and the older children sing, “PHONE HE'S ON THE PHONE QUIET QUIET QUIET HE'S ON THE PHONE PHONE PHONE,” followed by maniacal pack laughter. Mallory had always said that they should live in the same city. She loved the kids, their insatiable love, how they shoved their fingers into her mouth, tried to unravel her tight curls. After their week-long visits, Laura always spent an evening on the couch, watching music videos or a movie on her laptop, slowly recharging. Mallory had laughed at her:
you're like an old lady
. Mallory, an only child, had lovingly followed
and viciously mocked Greg's novelistic Facebook albums of his family. Cherub-faced kid beside a potted rare kind of fern on his cedar deck. “Greg is one step away from Gerber babies,” she'd say solemnly. “You need to stop him.”

“Won't I have to respond to what people say?” Laura says now.

“You don't have to log in if you don't want to.”

But of course she would. She wouldn't be able to resist inputting her name and password, an anagram of Mallory's name and 0703, the anniversary of their first date, coffee and a documentary about penguin migration, which had made Mallory cry on the walk to Laura's car afterwards—“I can't believe how many of them die”—and Laura had kept walking, uncomfortable, thinking that she would not call Mallory again, that this woman was just too much for her, too much. So she hadn't answered the first two voicemails Mallory left after that date, both of them five times longer than any message a normal person would leave, Laura had thought, calmly, rationally, pressing Delete.

Username and password, muscle memory.
Raymorl0703
. She is a hacker's dream, these numbers embedded in all of her passwords. Banking, cellphone account, debit and credit PINs, passwords to dating websites she'd secretly cruised for the last few months of their six years together, not out of serious interest but for passive entertainment.
Lots of people must do this
, she'd thought.
It's innocent
. She'd aimlessly browsed the profiles of hopeful women, their open-ended self-descriptions and whimsical profile images. Rosie the Riveter; a panda holding a plate of brownies; a smirking Tina Fey. Half the profiles of people in their twenties used that actress from the TV vampire
series Laura can't watch because of the blood—a wan, pastel cheekbone of a woman who isn't even very attractive, her vampire boyfriend cropped out. One woman wrote to her:
We have so much in common, it's like we're meant to be, can I see a photograph?
Laura had deleted the message in a panic, the sounds of Mallory showering after her ride home coming from the bathroom. Mallory had loved her cycle commute across two bridges and along the river. Now driving those bridges Laura looks straight ahead, the bike lane a hard margin against her eyes. The yellow backs with silver stripes. Each one is Mallory.

“Why do I have to say anything?”

Her little brother is silent on the other end of the line.

“If you say nothing,” he says finally, “you'll feel worse.”

“God, we're all such robots,” she breathes heavily.

“If spending time on that thing makes you feel like shit, just don't log in. It's a piece of shit anyway,” he adds encouragingly. “Lots of people don't use it. It doesn't matter anyway,” he lies. She says goodbye and logs in.

The blue and white blocks, the faces in yearbook arrays. It's all suddenly so incredibly small, the quips and posts, tickets printed with script and hurled to the wind.

Click
. Her profile.
Click
.

Her profile photo is a ferry deck shot taken by Mallory—gull origami nighttime flight, wind-slapped cheeks, Laura's hair exploded in a dark swarm. Her stomach twists at how post-coital the photo looks, as if they'd just fucked on the ferry deck against the Pacific-chilled white steel.

Mallory had bellowed over the rushing wind while taking the photo: “Put your arms out. Wider. Wider.” Laughter. “Wider.”

That smile, no idea what's coming.
You idiot
.

She deletes the photo, fingers popping wild across the keys. Heart absently hammering. Her drink slops onto her leg, just missing her keyboard. The smell of rum spreading down her thigh.

A powder-blue avatar pops up.

A no-her. Statuesque graphic. She can't even erase herself—there will always be another digital stand-in.

She scrolls through her newsfeed. Mallory's endless number of acquaintances, Laura's co-workers whom she sees every day, Mallory's friends from veterinary school, Mallory's friends from her bike racing squad. A few friends from Laura's undergrad, from over a decade ago. But mostly these are Mallory's people. Profiles attached to her by the tentacles of her dead relationship. Where are
her
people?

Laura types into the blue-bordered status box,
Moving on is hard but

Delete delete delete.

Well they say that

Delete.

The sun will come out tomorrow so smile smile smile

Delete.

Starting a new time in my life, looking forward to the next chapter
.

Delete.

You are all going to die alone kids. HAHAHAHAHA!

Delete.

Settings.

Deactivate profile.

Are you sure you want to deactivate your profile?

And then the social networking system taunts her with loneliness, displays photos of her acquaintances, with a repeated message under each face:

Stacey will miss you
,

David will miss you
,

Leslie will miss you
,

Max will miss you
,

Matthew will miss you
,

Janice will miss you
,

Pat will miss you
,

Ray will miss you
.

Delete.

Click.

No one really watches the TVs in the gym—five flatscreens set on mute. Laura's weight routine (eight machines, then free weights) overlaps with the daily evening string of game shows.

The subtitles roll past:

The host's face twitches. The camera sweeps the audience.

The contestant is in her mid-fifties. She perches in a black blazer with orange piping. She's wearing a taupe headband.
Who wears headbands?

The lights dim to a smoky blue, then dissolve into a white dome.

The woman spreading backward, legs out, blocky gums and teeth in a close-up.

Laura presses slightly upward. This week, she increased the weights to ninety pounds to see how it would feel. Her muscles climb and ache. The way her lungs feel when she spends slightly too long under water. She holds the weights there, in that place of almost too much.

Laura can't catch her breath. Mallory loved these shows as much as Laura hated them. “I can't resist the pageantry,” Mallory had said. “I love it for the same reason I love Harry Potter!” Laura would leave the room, stand in the kitchen, washing dishes until Mallory came into the kitchen and put her arms around her from behind, whispered into her neck, “Don't hate me because I love the things you hate.” She said this about lots of things: Chicken McNuggets meals, documentaries about the British Royal family, malls, dried seaweed, SPCA commercials, cargo shorts, long distance biking. She used to go on daylong rides to Tsawwassen, the town by the ferry terminal, and come back and lie on the dog bed and moan. Laura never understood, watched her, mystified—this exuberant human with whom she happened to split life.

Laura holds the weights away from her body until the sensation shreds through her bared teeth. She could hold it here forever. She lets it back in. Slowly. Draws it back to her chest, lets it bear in hard, lets it press there. Back and ass rooted to the seat of the machine. Opens her legs wide. A feeling glows in her, a hand at the base of her spine. Mallory's voice in her ear:
do you feel that? that's your pelvic floor
. A shudder tumbles through her.

In what bedroom, where had she said this. How many more times, these summonings in her body. Mallory's hand cupping the base of her spine.

She lets the weights go.

They slam down on either side of her ears.

She heaves, staring at the screens. Were there this many competition shows before the economy collapsed? Recession porn. The shows are far-ranging. High school math teachers performing Broadway musical numbers; B-list movie stars paired off and hacking out tangos; a show about a Christian family with twenty children, crewcuts and braids and checkered shirts.
Why are these people inflicting this on themselves?
Laura thinks. Mallory loved this crap. Especially the Christians, their colonies of offspring, their plans to renovate the double garage to raise more alpacas.
It's a family project! Everybody pitches in!
They are, Laura thinks spitefully, like a Revivalist Chuckie Cheese.

A girl, eleven or twelve, tells the talent show audience that she shares a bed with her single mother, that her father was an alcoholic who beat them. The judges prompt her performance of an old Etta James number.