The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  But in fact, the truer motivations for my lies were that I was afraid of showing my imperfections and failings, and I wanted to honor contracts for sponsorships I couldn’t afford to cancel. And I suppose I wanted to continue to live in my make-believe world a little longer, rather than face the difficult turn my life had taken.

  As you may know, I lost my brother about six years ago in a car accident. As a way of coping with the grief, I adopted a dog named Mike and started posting his picture on Pictey on a regular basis. He and I enjoyed the experience enormously, and we grew to love our audience of distant viewers. Posting and sharing with you became my second-favorite thing, after doing yoga with Mike. The feed grew and grew, and in time became my main source of income. Sadly, it also became my main source of socialization, interaction, and human contact.

  After Mike passed on last year, the joy of posting disappeared. But I was utterly dependent on my audience to prop me up. You supported me and empathized, and in time I started to feel as though the people on-screen were all the people I needed in the world. I also felt you needed me, and I had a responsibility to paint a picture of my life that was perfect, cheerful, and happy 100 percent of the time. That was the Mia Bell brand.

  But that was not the Mia Bell reality. The reality was, I met a good-enough guy and rushed into things in order to fill the void that Mike had left, not just in my heart but also on my feed. I threw myself into wedding planning headlong, ignoring the reality of my actual relationship with my potential husband. When Tucker had the good sense to break up with me, I faked the entire wedding online rather than openly admit my disappointment and embarrassment. For that I am very sorry.

  For the record, I am not married, nor am I dating anyone. I do not like lying and I didn’t want to keep doing it, but also didn’t quite know how to make things right. So I didn’t try. Instead, a few days after my fake wedding, with the support of my family, I threw my phone off the side of a mountain and quit my digital addiction cold turkey. While I was offline, a new friend took over posting for me as a favor. A very weird favor.

  Those of you who have recently rushed to my defense and said that the upsetting post about social media did not sound like me are correct. That post was not me, and I regret that it went up on my feed. But, upon reflection, I do feel that the poster has a point. My relationship with social media was way, way out of whack, and I will take the advice given from here on out.

  The short time I lived without my phone was the most real and rewarding time of my life. I wish each of you the same happiness and freedom, even though I know it will end my career as an internet influencer. I’ll miss you, but that’s all I’ll miss.

  I wish you:

  Long quiet walks where the wind is your podcast.

  Lost wanderings where your instincts are your GPS.

  Peaceful early mornings where you have your nose in a cup of coffee instead of an email inbox.

  Yoga with a friend, not an app.

  Family time with no “shares” and lots of sharing.

  Mental selfies in the flat, calm reflection of a mountain lake.

  Sponsorships of children and animals.

  Quiet summer evenings where the stars are your backlight.

  A phone that’s used for calling someone you love.

  Friends, I wish you joy. I wish you airplane mode.

  Gratefully yours,

  Mia

  A special PS to Dewey and Azalea: If you’re reading this, I’m sorry. If you want to try again, only for real this time, you know how to reach me. My mom’s number is on your fridge.

  PAIGE

  In the end, the number of dogs we adopt is four.

  One for Jessica, of course, the wee houndish thing who she names Ophelia, because she has a surprisingly dark sense of humor. Ophie has already made herself comfortable in Cary’s kitchen at Jessica’s feet, and though Cary is vowing he will bill us if he gets a health-code violation, he is also putting bacon fat on her kibble every morning when he thinks no one notices.

  One for Mia’s mother, Marla, who gets a big yippy three-month-old puppy, the kind of dog who will be a great deal of work and annoyance. I point this out to Marla when she comes to the Inn Evergreen to check on me and Jessica and partake in Cary’s cooking. After the dog finishes his shots and comes home, she’ll need to house-train it and walk it at least once, maybe twice each day. It will wake her up in the night to pee and never leave her alone during the day. She laughs at my protests and says, “Paige, honey. That’s kind of the whole point.”

  One dog is for Mia herself. Since that horrible day when I almost lost Jessica, Mia has given me more kindness than I deserve and made me realize how vastly I misjudged her. She drove me to the ER to get my brain checked out despite what I did, and while I was held overnight, she and her mom hosted Jessica and kept her under close supervision. I realize there is nothing I can do to make what I did to Mia’s Pictey account right, but that won’t stop me from trying to ameliorate the situation. As a small step in that direction, I insisted on funding her adoption of a new pet, as she’s a bit cash poor at the moment.

  There is no replacing Mike, she says, so she didn’t even try for a similar breed. Instead she looked around at seven different rescues and eventually got a toy-size mutt. It’s some unhappy mix of Chihuahua and long-haired dachshund, and the mating process must have been truly something to see. It’s missing an ear and is eight years old. I ask her if she knows what a dog’s average life span is and understands what she’s setting herself up for by adopting an older dog. She tells us, “In the course of our lives we are going to have to learn how to outlive several dogs. I will, hopefully, outlive this one by some fifty years. But he still needs a home for the next six or seven.” She shrugs. “I will survive it somehow. Besides, this dog is smaller than a chicken, and that was my number one requirement.”

  Mia has told us, in what has become a regular breakfast meetup in Cary’s kitchen since I was discharged after my panic attack, that she plans to stay here in the mountains and impose on her mother for a little longer. “I’m interested in a guy,” she says. “And I’m going to have to chase him down, because he thinks I’m a liar and a fake.”

  “You are,” I point out. Jessica chokes on her coffee, and I color. My prostrating skills need quick work if I hope to ever even the score.

  “But only in certain situations,” says Mia, just laughing at me. “None of which do I plan to be in again.”

  She has seen to that. Her follower number is down by two-thirds. She has gone from the top-twenty-influencers list on Pictey to the low thousands. Much of the loss was from a combination of our two posts—mine lambasting her followers, and hers blessing them and sending them on their way. But she’s still losing people, because she’s posting just once each day now, and for some of her oldest fans that’s just a bridge too far. (Failed air force initiative of 1944. Great story for another day.)

  The followers she has left, she says, are her people. So much so that she has deputized ten of them by providing them with the direct line of Consie, the Safety and Standards screener who saved my sister’s life. She was all too happy to be their point of contact in case of another emergency like Jessica’s. I just wish every Pictey user had a Consie.

  Maybe someday.

  I will not be a Consie. I finally have had to admit that as a sufferer of debilitating panic attacks, I may not be the right person to be dealing with a constant onslaught of psychological triggers for eight hours a day.

  “What will you be doing instead?” Jessica asks Mia. “If you’re not going to be @Mia&Mike anymore?”

  “I’m just going to be Mia,” she says. “I’m going to hang out with my mom and try to teach her how to have a verbal filter.” Her mom shoves her, but she smiles and goes on. “I’m going to win Dewey back as a friend and then seduce him when his guard is down with sexy chicken talk and a steamy night in a hammock. I’m going to buy a yoga studio—maybe that studio I was supposed to teach in the night
we all met. That owner seemed particularly vulnerable to the temptation of a financial windfall.”

  “Who is Dewey?” I ask. “And how could a hammock be seductive?”

  “Dewey is the guy,” she tells me. “The guy. The reason I got Renaldo instead of a normal-size dog.”

  Marla coughs. “Renaldo?”

  “Look at him. He’s such a romancer,” she says. Renaldo is in her purse. Cary is pretending not to notice yet another beast in his kitchen but has also brought out a stack of paper towels and a lint roller and not subtly set them in the middle of the kitchen table.

  “Your dog is not what comes to mind when one thinks of romance,” I point out. “He’s physically deformed and also lacking in some of the scientifically proven attributes that most humans find physically appealing. His face is crooked, and his eyes are beady.”

  “Don’t listen to her, Renaldo,” says Mia.

  “Your dog can’t understand me,” I say. Jessica snorts.

  “So Renaldo is another bid for Dewey, then,” says her mom.

  Mia nods. “In part. Renaldo is too small to be a danger to chickens. The chickens may be a danger to him.”

  “Is Dewey some kind of chicken aficionado?” I ask.

  “You can say that,” she says.

  “If so, I recommend you avail yourself of the book The Dinosaurs We Eat: On the Physiology and Phylogeny of Chickens as It Relates to the Saurischians of the Lower Jurassic. It’s quiet at times, but the last five hundred pages are riveting.” Jessica laughs again. What she finds so funny, I’ll never know. And as long as she doesn’t ever stop laughing, I don’t really care.

  “Hm. Until things get truly desperate, I’m going to go a slightly more organic route,” says Mia. “Like wearing cute tops and spending lots of quality time doing things we both enjoy.”

  I pause for a second. “I can also see the value of your plan.”

  “Jessica, do you have a plan?” asks Marla. “For after the clinic?”

  Tomorrow a bed will be open in the psychiatric care center, and my sister will be able to get some time to heal—really heal, with experts and treatment. I understand that goes well beyond the traditional use of the word healing—in fact, her actual wounds are fading into shiny scars. She will also be getting progressive therapies and pharmacological support. And based on the brochures, she’ll be painting en plein air and doing nature walks.

  Whatever works.

  Jessica bites her lip. “Paige and I were up late last night. We’re going to work together to encourage our mom to get involved in my family therapy at the clinic. It’s a long shot. But whether she does or not, I’m going to stay with Paige this summer, take a year away from school and work, and then try to be reinstated to finish my last few credits at Boulder.”

  “It would behoove her to have her college degree,” I say. “In her future endeavors.”

  Jessica nods. “I wish to be behooved,” she says. Last night I asked Jessica if she wanted me to hop into the records department at CU and do a little cleanup of her recent gaffe. She said no, and I was relieved. After this whole affair with Mia, I’m interested in avoiding such gray areas of technology use in the future. “And Paige will have her dog by then. So there is some hope for her too.”

  It’s true. The fourth dog is for me.

  I have time to have a dog now, because I’m not going back to Pictey. Or rather, I am, but in a new role and working remotely. With Karrin’s blessing, I’ll have a team of six offshore programmers and one local suicide specialist who are helping me code a new ideation recognition and aversion program for the US. The project is called IRA. Like Ira Flatow from public radio’s Science Friday, my celebrity crush.

  Though I do not enjoy change, the benefits of this one are many. I no longer have to go into an office, I no longer have to live in the valley, and I no longer have to lie on an anxiety self-report once a day. I also will be doing the bulk of my work in the evening when my offshore programming team gets to their desks, so I’ll be able to be there for Jessica’s sessions at the clinic and then drive her to appointments later, until she feels safe around a car again. And I’ll have plenty of time to research best practices of canine ownership and care. I am on the waiting list for a very special sort of dog, and I take the responsibility very seriously.

  My dog will be a service dog. The specialists at the hospital I was taken to have connected me to a reputable breeder and expert trainer. We will work together to raise a dog who can detect breathing abnormalities, signal for help, and even save my life in the event of a dangerous panic attack. And once I have that support in place, I won’t have to spend every waking moment avoiding anything that could cause a panic attack. Anything like feelings.

  “What will you name the dog?” asks Marla.

  I think on this for a moment. “I suppose I could wait to see what sex I get, but as my dog will be fixed, he or she will probably not be strongly gender identifying. So,” I go on. I have given this a lot of thought. “With Mia’s permission, of course . . .”

  She nods. A smile and a teardrop mingle on her face. “Mike,” she says.

  “Mike Two.” I feel my chest tighten, but not in that scary airless way. This is something different. This is more like hope.

  “I didn’t mean to steal your life, Mia,” I say carefully.

  “I know that now,” she says.

  “But when I did, it was much harder than I thought it would be,” I admit.

  Marla puts her arm around her daughter. “Not everything hard is worthwhile,” she says, and there is a smile in her voice.

  “Just most things,” replies my sister, and I realize that she is the hope I feel. “Like surviving.”

  MIA

  JULY

  The phone rings at my mom’s house a couple weeks after Jessica goes to the clinic to get treatment. All three dogs lose their minds at the sound, as they’ve done over any number of other terrifying things like the blender, the mailman, and the sound it makes when I bump into the bed frame with my shin every night.

  Renaldo runs to me as the scary phone attacks our house, and I pick him up in one arm. To my great satisfaction, he stops barking right away, and his one floppy ear rotates back into the relaxed position. Ophie is jealous and now starts running around my legs, trying to trip me, her yap yap yap louder than the phone, making it hard for me to find the handset. Mom’s giant puppy, Bananas, hasn’t started barking yet, and we just taught her not to jump up, but the energy has to go somewhere, and now when she gets too excited, she pees herself a little. She is crated when we’re gone and very good in those situations, but she has to be contained in the kitchen when we’re home, because the carpet-cleaning machine we ordered out of desperation won’t arrive till next week, and if I have to try to soak out one more pee stain from the carpet while at the same time trying to keep the other two dogs from peeing two inches away from the first stain while they can still smell it, I’ll probably just start peeing on the carpet myself.

  So Ophie is yapping, Bananas is keeping four on the floor but having a little wee on the kitchen tile, and Renaldo is licking my face, and I think, What on earth have we done? but it is one of those happy thoughts, the same kind my mom expresses when both Bananas and Ophie want to sleep in her bed, the warm puppy at her feet and Jessica’s dog repeatedly trying to rest her face on my mom’s forehead before she falls asleep. As my mom says, “Don’t tell Ophelia this, but I secretly love it. Still, it would be so much sweeter if she didn’t drool quite so profusely.”

  The phone is still ringing, so I pick up Ophie too. She’s too big for this kind of coddling, but needs must. I put Renaldo on my shoulder and grab for the phone and put it on speaker, because whoever is calling me needs to understand what I’m dealing with over here.

  “Hello?” The moment I answer it, Bananas stops spazzing, and Ophie relaxes like nothing ever happened.

  “Hello,” says a young, high voice. “May I please speak to Mia Bell?”

  It’s Az
alea. Ever since I got honest on my new, improved, and much less popular Pictey feed, she’s been coming around with eggs and various other offerings, an unnecessary trade for puppy time. She strongly favors Bananas of all the dogs, but she’ll take them all to our newly fenced dog yard and try to teach them manners, one at a time. I think they’re the ones teaching her things, to be honest.

  “Lea, hon, I keep telling you, just come down whenever you like. I’m here unless I’m at the studio, and if we’re both gone, you can just let yourself in the back door and visit the dogs.”

  “Um, well,” she says. “Yeah. Thank you. But actually . . .” Her voice drifts off. “I’m calling to ask if my dad can come over.”

  My heart gives a tilt, but I try to play it ever-so-slightly cool. “You’re calling on behalf of your father?” I say. “Dewey? The grown man?”

  “Yes,” she says. “That one.”

  “Well, you tell him I said he can come down, but he should stop getting children to do his dirty work.”

  “Maybe could you tell him that?” she asks. “He’s probably almost to your porch by now.”

  I look at the receiver in confusion. “He’s here?” I look out the kitchen window. I see no one.

  “He told me to wait fifteen minutes after he left the house before I called.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” I laugh. “What if I’d said no?”

  “That’s what I said,” exclaims Azalea. “I said, ‘Dad, you are so embarrassing.’”

  “He really is,” I say, and then because Lea still can’t quite work sarcasm, I also add, “Actually, he’s a very nice guy. I bet he’s a great dad.”

  “Yeah, but he’s goofy,” she says.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spy him coming down the road approaching the house. There’s a bounce to his step that matches the one rising up in my mood. “He’s very goofy,” I agree, taking note of our open front window. “Goofy can be a good thing. Did he say why he was coming?”