Goodbye for Now: A Novel

by Laurie Frankel

  “I love you, you know,” Sam said.

  “I know,” she said. “I love you too.”

  So far as Sam knew, those were her last words. So, you know, at least that’s something.

  Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

  Missing me one place search another,

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”

  RUBBLE

  They did a two-part funeral because surely, Sam thought, this was something you wanted to drag out as much as possible. Julia and Kyle, devastated, broken, essentially nonfunctional, insisted on nearly nothing but did want Meredith cremated and requested a small, private ceremony on Orcas to spread her ashes. Dash, also devastated, broken, and nonfunctional, insisted on nearly nothing but did want to throw a massive wake, a huge, sweeping, remembering, forgetting party. It was his way.

  So there was lots to do. Sam had to pick out clothes for Meredith. He wondered why it mattered what she wore for the occasion of being burned down to sand and ash, down to her basest elements, her indivisible self. The clothes would burn up, of course, and vaporize, turn to air, as would her flesh, her muscles, her organs—heart up in smoke, brain, breasts, the soft part under her chin, her earlobes, her eyelids, her lips, the pads of her fingers, the palms of her hands. And then her bones would turn to rubble, dry as the desert, dry as the moon, and be crushed to sand. This they could keep or scatter as they wished. So Sam hoped he would be forgiven for not giving a shit which clothes were going to be burned to oblivion along with the love of his life even as he acknowledged that, yes, burning her up naked was something of an unpleasant idea. There were only unpleasant ideas in the world anymore, so it was hard to notice. He ended up choosing by smell. He stood in her closet and put everything up to his nose, inhaled deeply, and dressed her in the outfit that smelled least of Meredith, so probably the one that was washed most recently or had been worn least often. He did not care.

  Sam had to arrange to have it done too, had to place a phone call inquiring after the burning to bits of his girlfriend. He had to go there and watch them do it, and he had to do it by himself because Julia and Kyle wanted only to stay away on their island, to have the remains, such as they were, brought to them, and because Dash chose to be mired in planning, and because Sam said no no I’ll be fine on my own this will be okay because it’s not really her anyway, and it took ninety-eight minutes and he stood by for every single one of them and felt the flames burning up his own fingers, eyes, hands, brain, heart just as surely as if he’d been in the box with her himself which he sorely wished he were. He had to close RePose and the salon for a few days. He had to tell Penny. He had to tell the dogs. And before anything else at all, Sam had to run Meredith through the algorithm.

  It was strange to be at a funeral home without a funeral. Sam had many options. The ashes could be sent into space. They could be put into fireworks and exploded. They could be turned into pencils. But Sam opted for a package that put the newly granular Meredith in just a cheap plastic box because Julia said she was making and firing an urn that very afternoon to use for the duration.

  “I didn’t know you made urns,” Sam said.

  “We don’t, but it’s just like a mug, only bigger, and with no handles or two handles instead of just one.”

  A mug. A coffee cup. A home for Meredith. Half of Meredith. Just shy actually. Half was going in the urn. Half was going in the sea. And two tiny scoops were going into lockets, one for Julia, one for Sam, to wear around their necks, to always keep her near, to always keep her by, to always keep her safe, to remember, and to bring them nearer to death themselves, the only place Sam cared to be. For Julia, Sam chose a small tear-shaped locket which seemed appropriate for its contents. But for himself, he chose one shaped like a tiny airplane, a tiny model airplane. To remember, to honor, to escape, to flee, to fly.

  Dash’s parents flew in and so did Sam’s dad, and in two cars they caravanned up to Anacortes and then over on the ferry. It was cold and rainy and long, but Sam stayed on the deck with the wind in his hair and the wet on his face and trembled uncontrollably and felt more comfortable than he did inside where it was warm and dry and he trembled uncontrollably. Julia and Kyle met them at the ferry dock, and then they all stopped for coffee because even people in mourning need coffee and because bitter was the only taste any of them had left, and they drove over and around the island to a windswept, isolated, tiny scrap of barely beach near the studio from which Meredith as a child had refused to come in for bed on so many long summer nights so many years ago. There they clutched coffees, dug toes in sand, and declined to look at one another. Then everyone took a handful of the love of Sam’s life, said a few words of their own quietly and to the water and with their own water on their own faces, and tossed her in the sea. Sam didn’t know what the others said. What he said was sorry though of course that didn’t convey even the smallest fraction of the smallest part of it. There would be time for that later. When that was done, the other half of her stayed in Julia’s jar, and they drained their coffees and went back to the studio where Kyle made chili and Julia showed everyone baby pictures and Sam’s dad tried to hug him and Julia tried to hug him and Dashiell tried to hug him, but Sam stood stoic and still and in the corner with stiff arms sunk low into the pockets of a coat he could not take off and refused to be touched because if he were touched he was never never never ever going to stop screaming, and the only way to prevent it was to stay away and alone and away. Later, there was lots of whiskey, and in the morning they got back on the ferry and went home. Or to a place called home which actually bore little resemblance to that word anymore. And Sam suddenly understood why Penny’s place looked the way it did that first time. Because who really gives a fuck anymore.

  That night, Dash turned Salon Styx into the sort of party that only Dash could throw. It was the funeral Meredith didn’t have. And the wedding and the baby shower and the retirement party she would never have. Her friends from high school came and her friends from college and people she knew from work before she quit to RePose and all the salon devotees and quite a few users who never came into the salon but knew and loved Meredith for her support of them via phone and e-mail and the people she bought coffee and vegetables and cheese and wine from and people from the dog park and Jamie and Penny and Sam’s dad and Sam and even the dogs. Christ knows how Dash managed to get in touch with all those people. There was music and crying and laughing and photos and food and enough alcohol to drown in. Sam stayed for half an hour then slipped out and upstairs to talk to Meredith. He thought briefly about firing up a computer in the salon so everyone could say hi, so she could see how many people had loved her, but as he had explained to her once long long long ago, the first time was a very private, very intimate thing.

  Up in their apartment he left the lights off. He could hear the music thumping downstairs—Dash had also invited everyone in the building so no one would complain about the noise—and he could see ferry lights out on the water, but mostly it was dark and quiet and alone. Meredith’s airplanes creaked just slightly on the ceilings from a tiny breeze that came from who knows where and cast just barely shadows on the floors from a tiny light from the same secret place. It was exactly the room it had been last week. And it would never be that room again. Sam ran the final check and uploaded her to the RePose system. And then he called her. Half of him was praising all things holy for RePose or else he would have lost her forever. Half of him was cursing all things holy for RePose or else he’d never have lost her in the first place.

  She answered. Was luminous. Was glorious. Was flesh and bone all whole and light and love and warmth and human. If Sam looked very, very closely, and he did, he could see her breathing. He could see a tiny pulse in her neck and her heart beating on and on and on.

  “Sam!” She was delighted to see him. “You never call me!”

  “Oh Merde. Oh God. Oh my love.” He managed only just not to throw up act
ually on the keyboard. And then instantly and completely came sobbing and screaming that would not subside. He was scaring the shit out of her.

  “Sam, you’re scaring the shit out of me. What the hell is going on?”

  “Oh my love, you died, you died. What am I going to do here without you? How can I live with you gone? Oh Merde, it hurts beyond anything you’ve ever thought of. Oh sweetheart, you died, you died.”

  His number one rule. His only rule. Fuck. Before she could react, he shut it down. Shut her down. Wiped. Went back downstairs. Clearly, he was not ready yet. He thought no one would notice his absence, but nothing escaped Dash’s attention.

  “Where were you?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Alone?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Already?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But soon?” said Dash, missing her too.

  “Soon,” Sam promised, missing her as you would an airplane if suddenly you got sucked out of one and found yourself in free fall toward the earth below. But that would end better than his evening was going to for sure.

  Sam’s dad stayed the weekend and coaxed food into him and dragged him to a movie and made soup and stuck it in the freezer in case he might be hungry at some point in the future. Sam’s dad made good soup, which was weird because Sam’s dad couldn’t cook anything else at all. Growing up, they’d go out to eat one night a week and carry in one night a week and eat something frozen one night a week, and otherwise, they ate soup—chilled in the summer, hot in the winter, sweet for dessert, in bread bowls if they were especially hungry, every kind of soup you could imagine.

  “How come the only thing you know how to make is soup?” Sam asked his dad Sunday night, virtually the first thing he’d said all day.

  “You know that. Your mom taught me. She was an amazing cook. Before her, I couldn’t cook anything, not even soup. Not even Cup-a-Soup.”

  “Yeah, but why didn’t she teach you how to make anything else?”

  Sam’s dad shrugged. “You think you’ll have all the time in the world. You think there will always be a later. Sometimes, suddenly, horribly, there’s not.”

  Sam winced and swallowed hard. Tried to steer them away from the life lesson, the awful bonding, back toward the practical. “So night after night she just taught you different kinds of soup?”

  “She only ever taught me one,” said Sam’s dad quietly. “Clam chowder. New England.”

  Sam sat up on the sofa and looked at his father. “What do you mean, she only taught you one? You said she taught you how to make soup. You make eight thousand different kinds of soup. You can’t cook anything else but eight thousand different kinds of soup.”

  “She taught me how.” Sam’s dad ran his hands through hair that looked just like Sam’s. “One night. It had snowed. We were out walking in it—I was trying to be romantic, I think—and got back tired, wet, and cold and decided just to order a pizza for dinner. But no place was open because of the snow, so we were out of luck. I said, ‘Let’s have PB and J and call it a night.’ Mom said, ‘It’s too cold for sandwiches. Let’s make soup.’ I said, ‘There’s nothing in the house to make soup with, and it’s too icy to go to the store.’ She said, ‘There’s always enough to make soup. I feel like clam chowder.’ So she got out her recipe book. The recipe called for cream but we only had skim milk. It called for celery but we only had carrots. It called for potatoes but we only had rice. It called for clams, of course, but all we had was a slab of salmon in the freezer. The only thing it wanted that we had was an onion, and Mom explained that the only nonnegotiable thing you need for soup is an onion to kick it off with. Otherwise, you can always sub out ingredients, amounts, combinations. Everything but the onion is up for grabs. ‘You just throw shit in the pot until it tastes good,’ she said. So we had clam chowder that was really a fish pot, and we didn’t have it until midnight because we’d started so late and laughed so much and had to work out a philosophical puzzle for each ingredient. And at the end, I knew how to make any kind of soup in the world. You throw shit in the pot until it tastes good.”

  “I can’t believe you never told me that story before,” said Sam.

  “It’s not easy, Sam. I’m so sorry because it’s still not easy. You have a long, hard, terrible road ahead. There are lots of ways to travel it, but they all suck, and they all involve letting go.”

  “Not all of them,” said Sam.

  Sam’s dad shook his head but said nothing at first. Then he added, “You don’t get to keep much. You get to keep what she taught you. That’s about it.”

  In the morning he flew back east, not because he was confident that Sam would be okay but because clearly his presence wasn’t making any difference at all, and perhaps, he hoped, his absence would. It didn’t. Monday afternoon, Sam brought the soup down to Penny and stuck it in her freezer instead. “It gets easier,” she told him. “You think it won’t and you wish it wouldn’t, but it does and it’s okay, and when you’re ready, you won’t mind so much.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Sam said meanly.

  She looked taken aback but unbowed. “I had him longer, you know. Try living without someone you’ve been with for sixty-one years.”

  Sixty-one years. Sam would have given his soul for even a week of one of them.

  “What makes you think it’s easy for me to say?” Penny pressed.

  Because he never loved you. Because you never had what you thought you did. Because losing a man like that isn’t really loss at all. Because he was old and old people die. Because you had sixty-one years and I’d give my soul for even a week of one of them, Sam thought, but said nothing. Hurting an eighty-six-year-old woman was not going to make him feel enough better to justify doing it.

  “Enjoy the soup,” he said. “If there were a god of soup, it would be my father.”

  Dash wanted to stay, but Sam sent him back to L.A. for a few days, begging him for space. The salon still needed opening each morning though, staffing all day, someone to do orientations and explanations, setups and intro lectures, hand-holding and tea pouring. Projection wiping. Comforting and reassuring. Sam’s first morning back, Kylie Shepherd, who’d made it through five video chats with her late boyfriend without breathing a word, suddenly found herself confessing everything to him in a rush—how they’d been at an outdoor rock concert when a bolt of lightning came out of the clear blue sky and clobbered him, how lost she was without him, how lonely, how insane. When she logged off, she came to Sam, head hung.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I need the wipe.”

  “I think you set a record,” Sam said gently. “Five sessions is a long time.”

  “I know you said it’s important not to tell. But you don’t know how hard it is.”

  “I do,” said Sam. “I know and know.”

  “I feel so much worse because I told,” she said, “but also a little bit better.”

  They hugged for a long time. Then Sam wiped her boyfriend clean. “See you tomorrow,” said Kylie Shepherd with a little wave and a half smile through her horrible tears and Sam’s horrible tears.

  At eight, Sam closed the salon and headed up home and decided he was ready to try again.

  “Sam!” She was delighted to see him. “You never call me!”

  “Well, we live together,” Sam said weakly. “And work together.”

  “And sleep together,” Meredith giggled. “All naked and everything. What’s up?”

  “Not much. How are you?”

  “Fine. Nothing new on my end. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said unconvincingly.

  She wasn’t buying it. “Seriously, Sam.” She eyed him closely. “What’s going on?”

  Sam could think of only one thing to say because there was only one thing to say. “You died, Merde,” he said very, very quietly. “You died last week. I’m not calling. This is Dead Mail.” Fuck.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Oh Sam, oh God.”

  Un
like everyone else in the universe with the sole exceptions of Dash, Sam, and Sam’s dad, Meredith had electronic memory of the inner workings of RePose and thus a basis for understanding. That was why he told her. That and he couldn’t not. That and there was nothing else to say instead. That and there was only one reason in the world Sam would look and sound as wrecked as he did.

  “How?” she breathed.

  “Remember when you told your grandmother you’d get her olive oil and stuff?” Of course she did. It had happened online. “Some senile asshole lost control of his car and plowed into the market.”

  “And ran me over?”

  “No, actually. The roof of the market collapsed.”

  She looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, love, I don’t understand.”

  “No, of course you don’t.”

  “Fuck!” said Meredith again. Then, “Wait, I actually went to buy olive oil? Why?”

  “You were being …”

  “Insane?”

  “Nostalgic. She asked you to do it. You were honoring her memory. You thought there was some tiny chance she might actually show up. You promised.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that being indulgent and crazy got me killed?”