Authors: Laurie Frankel
It was after they’d dried off and warmed up, after two games of Scrabble, after several pots of tea and more leftover pie than anyone felt comfortable with, that Meredith’s accidentally left-open laptop started ringing.
It was sitting on the end table next to Kyle. He glanced at it, half chuckled uncomfortably, then called to Sam and Meredith in the kitchen, “It says Grandma’s calling you. You don’t video chat with Nana Edie, do you?”
Meredith tried to decide whether video chatting with Nana Edie, her ninety-eight-year-old, dementia-plagued, bedridden, entirely deaf, inveterately evil other grandmother was a more or less believable story than chatting with her dead one.
“Hit decline,” said Meredith and Sam together.
“It has a picture of Grandma,” said Julia.
“Just a weird glitch,” said Sam. “Hit decline, Kyle. Or just close the computer.”
Julia—incredulous, alarmed, overfull, creeped out, afraid she was being haunted, or perhaps simply confused by the technology—reached over her husband and clicked accept.
The window popped open. Sam and Meredith leapt across the room in front of the laptop.
“Hi, sweeties,” said Livvie. “How are you?”
It took Meredith a moment to find her voice and decide what to do with it. “Fine, Grandma,” she finally managed. “How are you?”
“Oh I’m fine, honey. You know me. Are you busy? Just thought I’d say hello before I head out to a movie in a bit with Charlotte and Marta.”
“I’m so glad you called,” said Meredith weakly. She and Sam exchanged panicked looks. How best to proceed? They couldn’t bring themselves even to turn around and look at Kyle and Julia. But they also knew there was only one way to explain this. “Look who’s here,” said Meredith, and she and Sam stepped slowly, terrified, away from the camera.
Julia stared, pale as her plaster, speechless, thunderstruck, at her mother before her.
“Jules!” said her mother, the only person in the world who called her that.
Julia said nothing.
“I’m so glad to see you, baby. I miss you so—Oh, Kyle’s there too. The whole gang! I forgot Meredith told me you were coming in this weekend. I’m sorry I’m missing it.”
Julia said nothing.
“Honey, did Meredith tell you I needed to chat with you? No big deal. I just wanted to touch base about a couple things. Would you give me a call sometime next week?”
Julia said nothing.
“Have I told you about Peter the Potter?” She had, of course, many times. “He sells ceramics at our farmers’ market down here. He’s not half as good as you two are.”
Julia said nothing.
“You know, he does mugs, bowls, vases, the usual. He also does spoon rests, bird feeders, breadbaskets, platters. He even does some jewelry, and everyone loves his garden gnomes. But none of it’s as nice as yours.”
Julia said nothing but sank to her knees on the living room floor.
“He does do custom orders though. Do you do custom orders? Maybe you should look into it because he does good business. He also has a website. Do you have a website? Maybe you should look into that too because I think a lot of people do all their shopping online these days. I’ll try to remember to bring you a flyer when I come home or—”
“Make it stop,” Julia begged, barely a whisper, through clenched teeth.
Sam reached over and closed the laptop. No one said anything for a minute. Finally, shaking a little himself, Sam settled on the most straightforward explanation he could muster. It seemed his only option for the moment. “We—I—rigged up a script, a little program, on the computer. It sends e-mails from Livvie’s account. In her voice. As she would herself. And it replicates her video chats the same way.” Said out loud like this, it didn’t seem so much unreal as childish, even silly.
“You broke into her account?” said Kyle.
“Not exactly.”
“And sent e-mails pretending to be her?”
“No, I didn’t send anything—”
“Is this supposed to be funny?” Kyle’s voice was starting to rise.
“It’s not a joke,” Meredith insisted. “And it’s not Sam. It’s an algorithm, a program. The computer reads all Grandma’s e-mails to me and my replies, looks at our chats, knows how she writes and thinks, sounds and talks, and compiles e-mails from her.”
“I can’t hear this,” Julia said to her lap.
“It’s hard to get your head around at first,” said Meredith.
“Hard to … Are you two insane? Why would you do this?” Kyle was almost shouting.
“It’s not real,” Sam said. “It’s not really her—”
“Well no,” said Kyle. “Because she died.”
“But you’d have to know that,” Sam continued.
“So, what, it fakes her?” he spat.
“More like it guesses on her behalf. It guesses really well what she’d say,” said Sam.
“So it’s like she’s still alive, still in Florida, still with us,” Meredith added desperately. “Because there’s no difference between what she’d e-mail if she were still alive and what she e-mails now that she … isn’t anymore. Because you can still see her face and hear her voice and have a conversation with her. Mom?”
But Julia shook her head hard and did not look up from her lap. “Why would I … fuck with my dead mother this way?” Sam could see her whole body trembling.
“You’re not fucking with her,” said Sam as gently as he could, “because it’s not really her.”
“Why would I fuck with her memory—with my memories—with this … this stupid trick, this toy?”
“You could write to her, Mom,” Meredith explained meekly, “and she’d write back. You could call her. And she’d answer. And she’d talk to you.”
“No, she wouldn’t.” Julia was angry but very quiet. “Because she’s gone. She died.” Julia raised herself from her knees then. She went out to the balcony and clenched the railing there with both hands like she was thinking of jumping over it. Or tearing it apart. Meredith started to follow her outside, and Kyle stood up to stop her, to tell her to give her mother some space and time to recover, but his daughter wasn’t done making her case.
“We didn’t want you to find out this way,” Meredith said to her mother, as if how she found out were Julia’s main objection.
“You didn’t want me to find out at all. You were never going to tell me.”
“I was. I wanted to. Because … she’s been asking for you.”
“Stop saying ‘she.’ I don’t know what Sam’s doctored up in there, but it’s not a she, and it’s definitely not her.”
“It,” Meredith consented. “It’s been asking for you. It wonders why you haven’t called.”
“
Because she’s dead
. Jesus, Meredith, do you hear yourself?”
“But that’s the point. It’s not real. I know that. But I still get to talk to Grandma, still get to see her. Wouldn’t you give anything to see her again?”
“Yes. I would.”
“That’s what this is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It’s not hurting anyone.”
“It’s hurting me.”
“Why?”
“It’s wrong to remember her that way.”
“What’s the right way to remember her, Mom?”
“You look at pictures, Meredith. You tell stories. Hell, you’re living in her apartment. How is that not …”
“Enough?” Meredith supplied.
Julia stopped. “It’s never enough, I know. But that in there—it is just wrong.”
“Why?” Meredith pressed.
“Because it’s not her. All I have left of her is my memories and—”
“And we’re using them. That’s what we’re using. Your memories. But hers too. Isn’t it nice they aren’t just lost?”
Julia looked at her daughter through tears that were streaming over her cheeks and into the collar of her turtleneck. She pulled her daughter against her and stroked her hair, held her quietly for a few confused minutes, and then whispered, “Meredith. I love you. More than anyone. That will always be true. And you’re a big girl now—smart, open, a good person. But I don’t know what you’re doing here. I don’t know if
you
know what you’re doing here. It’s wrong. It’s cruel. It’s selfish. And mostly, it’s not what your grandmother would have wanted.”
Sam watched from the living room. Meredith was staring at her shoes, arms crossed tightly around her chest, shoulders slumped. He had a sudden, tender flash of what it must have been like to ground her as a teenager. But then she rallied.
“This is how you screwed me up, Mom. Screw me up. Every way that isn’t your way is wrong. Everyone who disagrees with you is morally deficient. I like living in a city instead of on an island. I like this big old apartment building you couldn’t wait to get out of and all the people shopping downtown you disdain because they’re buying things not made by hand.
I spent years feeling guilty for all of that until I realized that what you thought wasn’t right. It was just your opinion, your judgmental, opinionated opinion, and I was entitled to mine too.”
“This isn’t my opinion, Meredith. If that thing in there were okay, you wouldn’t have kept it a secret. I don’t want to be with you when you’re like this. I love you, but I want to go home.”
Meredith sighed. “You always want to go home, Mom.”
“It’s just wrong, Meredith. I don’t want to be a part of it, and I don’t want to watch you be a part of it either.”
Julia went back inside and started packing. She wouldn’t even look at Sam. She told Kyle to say goodbye and she’d be waiting in the car. She took two underwater-blue mugs out of her bag, placed them on top of the closed laptop, kissed her daughter on the top of her bowed head, and closed the door behind her without another word.
“Dad—” Meredith began.
“Just stop,” he told her.
“Stop what?”
He didn’t say. “She was up late Tuesday night firing those.” He nodded toward the mugs. “New glaze we’re trying. Pretty, right?”
“They’re … gorgeous,” Meredith managed, a new subject the only option for conversation, evidently.
“We’re going home,” said her father. “But we’ll call soon when things … when she calms down. Or, hell, maybe you don’t need
us
to talk to us anyway. Maybe we’re just slowing down the process.” He kissed Meredith and followed his wife out the door.
Meredith sat with her head in her hands for half an hour. Sam made coffee and filled their new mugs.
“That did not go well,” said Meredith.
“It did not,” agreed Sam.
“We should have just shut the computer when my grandmother first said hello. They wouldn’t have caught on. They’d never have guessed.”
“No.”
“We could have explained everything to Grandma later. She’d have understood.”
“No Merde, she wouldn’t understand at all. But that’s okay. Because it’s not really her. The only her to understand or not understand is gone.”
Meredith thought about that for a while. “You know what we did wrong? We sprang it on them accidentally.”
“I don’t think that’s quite it.”
“It might have gone better if we’d prepared them for it. Led them in gently.”
“Gently how?”
“We have to cut them some slack,” she said. “They’re not used to the technology. They’re not one hundred percent comfortable with regular e-mail, never mind dead e-mail. They’ve never liked video chat. Maybe they’ll come around though.”
“They won’t. They shouldn’t. It’s not for them. It was only ever for you.”
Meredith wasn’t listening. “They aren’t the right people for this. They aren’t a good test case.”
“Test case?”
“I’m an idiot. You know who we should call? Dashiell! Of course, Dashiell. Obviously! How did I not think of this before?”
Sam didn’t answer. He wasn’t entirely clear on what she was thinking, but he was still pretty sure that last bit was rhetorical.
COUSIN DASH
D
ashiell was the sort of cousin (with the sort of money) you could call around two thirty the day after Thanksgiving when your parents stormed out after brunch, and he’d be there in time for a late dinner bearing the best wine you’d had since the last time you saw him and chocolate cake from Hellner’s, the place down the street from his loft that made the best chocolate cake in the known universe. Sam hoped maybe the point here was that Meredith wanted to be with family rather than that Meredith was going off the deep end. It was hard for him to tell because his own family and sense of family were so small. It had only ever been him and his dad, him and his dad, for as long as he could remember. He hoped maybe there was more going on here than Meredith’s sudden and ill-advised desperation to share Livvie. It was Thanksgiving, and she’d lost her grandmother, and now her parents were angry at her, even more distant than usual. Her family was dwindling. She had to call in the reserves. Sam thought that Dash, with all his L.A. chic and Hollywood cool and connections and hangers-on, was the wrong guy for the job, but that was because Sam didn’t really know him. Dash listened in sympathetic horror when Meredith told him her parents were mad at her (though not why; she was saving that for later), sharing in the family drama, in agreement that there was not a much worse feeling in the world than disappointing your mom and dad. He dropped everything and came right away.
First, they all got drunk. Meredith had learned from Julia and Kyle that sober was no way to hear this news. There was no way to ease in (“So, what do you hear from Livvie lately?”), so they tried to slur in, stumble and tumble in instead. But in the end, as with her folks, it just seemed
easier to show him than to tell him. They could call Livvie in the middle of the night after all. She wasn’t really sleeping.
“I’ve got someone I want you to video chat with,” said Meredith.
“Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, baby,” said Dash. “You know that.”
The fake phone ringing, the connection, for a moment they could see only themselves gazing expectantly into nothing, and then a window opened, and there was Livvie. She was glad to see Meredith, but she gasped with delight to see Dashiell there too. She’d chatted regularly with each of them, but seeing everyone together was a special treat.
“Dash! I didn’t know you were visiting.”
Dashiell’s mouth opened right away—habit or maybe shock—but for the only time Meredith could remember, nothing came out.
“Very spontaneous visit,” Meredith put in. “But we thought we’d say hi.”