The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  I read all the comments as they come in, and some of them are really moving. A woman in Northern California talks about finding her faith in the stained glass windows of an old church after a wildfire destroyed her home, and “Mia” definitely writes back about that. People post their own stained glass photos and tag me—tag Mia, that is—and they are spectacular.

  I like this back-and-forth interaction so much and am so bored waiting for Jessica’s nurse to call that I post again. This time it’s a few pictures from inside the inn, tagged #InnEvergreen. After all, it’s so pretty here, and it might be good for Cary, who has been so nice to me. More likes flood in. My phone notifies me nonstop. I sit at “my” table in the inn’s kitchen, eating two rich molasses cookies while listening happily to Cary marveling at his sudden influx of off-season reservations. And griping about how many of them are asking for dietary modifications.

  Then someone bitchily posts about how it looks like Mia hasn’t been outside in a week. I generally do not care for going outside, beyond my commute to work and back, but I will have to do it here in Colorado, because I’ve got no microwave and not enough books. First thing the next morning I walk to a bookstore and take a picture of it from the outside of the store, and then I go in, avoid the salesperson, buy a cozy mystery based on a staff-recommendation sticker, and leave without saying a single word to anyone except “No bag, please.”

  When I post that little adventure on the feed, the store almost immediately reposts it. They tag me, and again, by me I mean Mia, and the level of excitement they express at having “us” in the store is absolutely bananas. They DM me a coupon for a free book the next time I’m in, along with a sincere note of appreciation for the mention, saying they’ve done more online business today than in the previous month put together.

  More business in one day than in an entire month. Because I walked into their store and picked out a book! After a lifetime of buying everything—books, food, tampons, houseplants—online, I wander into one store because of one snarky online comment about being a shut-in, and I change the course of a business’s fiscal month.

  I can’t use the coupon, obviously, even though after three chapters I already want another book in the series. If someone looking like me came in with Mia’s coupon, there would be questions to be answered. Anyway, free stuff is not the point, as Mia Bell has missed so completely. The point is, independent bookstore owners seem like very nice people, and I—Mia—just apparently made a small businessperson’s burden a tiny bit lighter.

  I kind of want to do it again.

  There is no sugarcoating it: at this point I get a bit delirious with power. Mark it—11:30 a.m. one June morning in Copperidge, Colorado, Paige Miller, erstwhile hater of influencer culture and internet celebrity, is corrupted. Absolutely.

  MIA

  Have you seen lots of sitcoms where bumbling idiots go camping, can’t set up the tent, get caught in a rainstorm, and are forced to eat ice-cold hot dogs? My mom is no bumbling idiot. An hour after arrival at a remote site about two hundred yards from any service access, she’s taught Azalea how to pitch the tent and set up a cook station at the edge of the picnic table under a rain sail. A waterproof, bear-proof bag is hanging from a tree limb with our food in it. A Jetboil has been produced, along with three travel mugs, and we’re having hot beverages—Mom and I tea with a tipple, and Azalea, who my mom has taken to calling Izzy, a mug of hot cocoa. It’s about sixty degrees up here, which is winter-coat weather in LA. But with tea and whiskey and the assortment of fleece sweater jackets my mom has produced, I am snug. We are at around ten thousand feet, and a two-mile, steep out-and-back hike tires us all, and when we return to the site, it is time to build a fire.

  It is then that I realize that it is the golden hour.

  The golden hour is the time just before true dusk when everything photographs well. The light is diffuse; the clouds reflect color. The last six months of my life, since Tucker and I got very serious very quickly, have been all about running around madly during the golden hour. On days when our schedule allows, I take a collapsible crate I keep in my car at all times and load it with sponsored items and props in the right colors and mixes of textures, from a collection that takes up the entire coat closet in my apartment. I pack two or three outfits as well, to be wriggled into in the back of my car as needed. Tucker shows up from wherever he’s been—family portraits, pet sessions, just a happy hour with the guys—and we jump in the car and drive somewhere in time to spend the hour taking photos for my feed. He is obsessed with the golden hour and has an app that will predict its arrival on any given day. We can end up with twenty really gorgeous photos from each golden hour we catch. Or we could, I should say.

  But somehow, in all that, I have never noticed what the golden hour actually looks like.

  Tucker told me that the one downside with getting married in the Rockies is that the mountains ruin the golden hour. But I am looking at the golden hour right now, and there is nothing ruined about it. Sure, I vaguely understand that even at this elevation I’m not seeing the purples and oranges of the sunset, but for the first time I get where the word golden comes from. The mountains are reflecting the light from the waning sun on everything, bouncing it around, so that it looks like there is a fine rose gold dusting on every rock face. The clouds are high and threadlike, and they are the sweet brights of a sorbet case, mango, kumquat, passionfruit. And the snow on the caps is turning, slowly, from the palest peach to pink to violet and now, as the night grows closer, the faint periwinkle from the gown of a fairy-tale princess.

  I observe all this slowly, in some kind of relaxed stupor. My mom is teaching Azalea and me how to build a fire in her even, repetitive way. She has Izzy making tipis out of twigs and log houses out of logs and bending and stooping and blowing and waving her arms. I am in a crouch just behind this, thinking of the fire, thinking of the mountains, marveling at the colors, gaping. I think of Tucker’s declarations, about the golden hour, about me. I think of the way Dewey made me laugh last night, doing the voice-overs for all the dogs on the patio. There must have been twenty. I remember the color of the microbrew he ordered, how he let me have the second half of it when I realized how badly I wished I had gotten beer myself, how he, without being asked to, swapped me for my low-calorie vodka soda, took a drink of it, twisted up his face, and said, “This is what I order all the time.” And then burst out laughing.

  That laugh was a funny “ha ha ha” laugh, and unbidden, a vision comes to me of my lying on his stomach while he laughs. I think of how my head would bobble. It’s a strange thought. I imagine Mike, now, on this imaginary couch with us. I know with some weird certainty that he would sit on Dewey’s side, because Dewey is one of those guys who are always warm.

  Then I feel a pressure on the front of my deltoid, and I am off balance. I startle to alertness as my mom pushes me off my haunches backward, and I roll onto my butt. “I’m revoking your merit badge, space case,” she says.

  “You were right,” I say. “Life without my phone is overwhelming.”

  She and Azalea extend arms to help me up to standing. I am surprised to see the fire is roaring. The sky is almost dark, and stars are starting to come out. My private plan to sleep in the car with Azalea seems absurd now that I realize what beauty I stand to miss. I need to stay out here, stare into the flames for a few hours, and eat marshmallows.

  “My daughter,” she says fondly. “When will you realize? I’m always right. About everything.”

  I sigh, because she truly believes this, and I will probably be called to her deathbed to pronounce it if I don’t just get it over with now. “You’re always right, Mom,” I say. “But never humble.”

  Azalea stands from the firepit and dusts off her leggings. She is watching me and Mom carefully. Maybe she is not sure if this is a friendly transaction or some long-standing fight—my tone is always a bit flat with my mother, even the truest sentiments spoken grudgingly. Sometimes, when she came to visit me in LA,
Tucker would tell me I was too hard on Mom. But I knew that was because she liked to impersonate a frail old person around him, when in fact she is not one, despite her age. In fact, the older I get, the less she seems to age. Why is that?

  I smile, first at Azalea, then at my mom, to try to put them both at ease. “How do you like camping so far, Azalea?” I ask.

  “I like it!” she says. “Marla, thanks for bringing me.”

  “Anytime, sweetheart. It’s no trouble for me. Now, when this one was little, she and her brother would give me such grief. Every time I turned around, they’d be gone, Andy ten feet up in some tree and Mia hollering at him to show her how to get up too.”

  Azalea looks at me. “You have a brother? I want a brother.”

  Mom looks at me. “You didn’t tell her?”

  “She’s only nine, Mom,” I say. “It didn’t come up.”

  “Tell me what?” Azalea asks.

  “It never comes up with you, Mia. Sometimes I worry that you’d prefer to pretend he never existed.”

  That’s not remotely true. I prefer to pretend that he never died, that he’s just somewhere offstage, and if I needed him, he could come running. But I can’t say that to my mom. It would just strengthen her case that I live in a fantasy world of my own creation.

  Instead I say, “It’s been six years, Azalea, but Andy passed away.”

  “Oh,” she says. “My mom died around then too. Was it cancer?”

  Mom shakes her head. “A car accident. Just one of those sad things.” I can hear the emotion rising in her voice, and it hurts my heart. I miss Andy terribly; I really do. But it is my mom who has come to own this grief. She was his mother. He was her only son. When her voice cracks and she pushes her lips together to stanch tears, I put my arm around her and pull her in. I wonder, What is the “appropriate” amount of time to grieve a brother? A dog? An engagement? A son? Why does it seem as though not a day has gone by in her life since Andy was here, whereas for me it’s been the longest six years of my life?

  “Mom,” I say, and I try to turn my conversation to something gentler, to save her from tears. “I think I want the recipe for your chicken feet. Your skin really is amazing.”

  She smiles, even laughs a bit. Little lines appear, as if to reassure me I’m not going mad; my mom isn’t reverse aging. But when they do, I realize what is making me feel old and world weary while she stays young: she is on her own timetable, unapologetically.

  Of course. Speaking metaphorically, if you never download the program that everyone else is using, you never have to run updates.

  I watch her work capably by the fire, her eyes glazed over, thinking no doubt of camping trips long past. My mom can do this: she can grieve, she can take as long as she needs. She never feels that push, push, push to move on.

  And it’s just the same with the tech. She doesn’t need to know about Pictey because she didn’t need to know about Instagram because she didn’t need to know about Facebook or Myspace or Friendster or Napster. All that bandwidth is still free for camping, planting turnips, reading mysteries, loving her children. These are things she could carry on with if the cell towers collapsed and all the silicon in the world turned to dust.

  That’s her secret: if you are unwilling to reshape yourself every time the times change, you are, effectively, timeless.

  PAIGE

  In absolute love with this #knitting store in the mountains. Look at all the pretty piles of softness and color! Did you know you don’t have to visit the Rockies to shop the store? Their online presence is utterly #nailedit and the shop is full of #fiberwork pros ready to help you start in on the meditative path of making something from a ball of yarn and a good idea. Let me know what craft unravels your stress in the comments. xo Mia @DarnyarnbarnCO

  It turns out that Mia is a knitter. Scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, I learn that she started out making sweaters for Mike but hasn’t posted a final product since the dog passed away. She does, however, still post pictures of yarn. Yarn and books, I can see, are both highly photogenic, as inanimate objects go.

  Cary tells me there’s a yarn shop in town, an independent small business that I look up online and read about. The owner had breast cancer and knitted her own cashmere bra inserts while she was waiting to be well enough for reconstruction surgery. After that she decided life was too short to work at the tax return farm where she’d been for the previous twenty-five years and opened up the Darn Yarn Barn with her best friend. Ten minutes after hearing that story, I’m dressed and out the door. I ask for a learn-to-knit kit and also buy some of the most luxe pretty woolly stuff I’ve ever seen, yarn the color of rain clouds with the consistency of a good fluffy cat. It’s thick yarn, and I’m told it matches up with some fat wooden needles made out of gorgeous acacia wood. I buy it all—kit, needles, enough yarn for a scarf—to the tune of $170 and try not to gasp at the register. When I get home, I take a picture of it, as artfully as possible, and post it on Mia’s feed. It gets eighty thousand likes in forty minutes.

  I feel drunk, or perhaps this is that feeling from junior high debate club, the one I remember so clearly. The feeling . . . it has a name . . . I look in the reaches of my mind and find it: giddy. I want to run through the resort towns of the immediate area, taking photos and tagging small businesses and responding to comments until my thumbs fall off.

  And I absolutely can.

  When was the last time I ate dinner out in a restaurant? When was the last time I went shopping outside my computer? When was the last time I spoke to three different people in one day, much less eighty thousand? These are all, aside from the eighty-thousand-likes thing, what most people do all the time, on a regular basis. And while I realize I am not most people, I am starting to wonder exactly what I’ve been missing out on. And why.

  My musings are shut down by a call from my mother. I don’t pick up—that would be absolute insanity. Instead I let her go to voice mail, and because she is from another generation, she leaves a long and detailed message that it takes my phone a long time to transcribe. When it is finally ready, I read:

  Paige, honey, I had no idea you were in the area! Jessi says you’re volunteering to host her while she rests up from that nasty accident. Poor thing, what a terrible stroke of luck to fall into that glass door! Jeezaloo!

  I stop reading to reflect on how I would have reacted to that bald-faced lie if I had actually picked up the call. Not well, I suspect.

  Her dad and I are just so grateful. You know we’re never home with work and travel, and Jessi says you’re on vacation? Without you we would have had to hire a nurse, though she was covered to stay in the hospital, so that would have been fine, really. Maybe better, but did you sort of tell Jessi that she’d be happier outside the hospital? That seems like a stretch, honey. Wherever you go, there you are! And may I also add, I can’t believe you vacationed an hour away from us and didn’t say a word! What on earth! It’s like you’re avoiding me, but I’m sure it’s nothing like that.

  It’s exactly like that.

  A few ground rules for Jessi’s visit: Make sure you watch what she eats. She does love to indulge her sweet tooth. We don’t want her getting our metabolism the second she turns thirty, do we? And speaking of genetics, she’s got a few meds to take—I’ll let her talk to you about those, if she likes—no big deal, but I think one or two of them a day, and would you just see that she does take them? Oh, and call me back if you’re staying in a place with an outfitted kitchen. No big deal, just some precautions with sharps we should take while she’s getting back on her feet.

  How has my mother talked so long about my depressed sister without admitting she is depressed, I wonder?

  Right, so that’s it. No kitchen access, at least not alone, and make her take her meds, and not too much dessert, and if you need anything, call me, or call her dad, though we are both so busy. We’re never home! Tell her we love her!

  Then my phone rings again, and it’s the hospital number. I pick it
up, and it’s time: Jessica is finally ready to be discharged. I delete my mom’s message and let it slide right out of my memory. Why bother with her nonsense? In fact, my job to help Jessica means I need to keep Mom’s nonsense as far away as possible.

  I grab my charger and my wallet and head to my car with a spring in my step. It’s all coming together. I was sent on leave to be with my family. I came to Colorado to make some kind of amends to Jessica. I went to the hospital to try to alleviate her burden. Now, by giving her a safe place to go outside of the hospital, I’ve done exactly that.

  And further, Jessica will be an excellent addition to my little side project.

  I remind myself gently: I am not a hired ghost poster, an assistant, a stand-in, an influencer. I am not @Mia&Mike, not really.

  And then, with a wicked smile, I say aloud into the empty car, “But then, at the moment, neither is anyone else. So why not me?”

  MIA

  That night, as my mom snores in the tent and Azalea sleeps soundly in the reclined passenger seat of my mom’s car, I tend the dying fire. I’ve never tended a fire before, and I’m not much good at it, but neither can I seem to let it go. The picnic table has been pulled close enough that I can sit on the bench and face outward, lean toward the pile of logs and shift them with a hot dog fork. I’ve unzipped my old childhood sleeping bag and made it into a blanket to wrap myself up in, and I have a few inches of Fat Tire left in the can I had with dinner. Without my trying, a caption springs to mind. I’d post a 180-degree view, with the campfire in the center, and talk about doing a one-eighty in my life. I’d explain that without my tech addiction driving my every move, everything I do and feel has come into focus.