“No. She called me. Well, you. All I did was answer.”
“She called me?”
“Yup.”
“Did you know she could do that?”
“Nope.”
“Who the hell did she think you were? You must have scared the shit out of her.”
“Nope, she knew me right off.”
“How?”
“She guessed. Who else would be home with you answering your video chat?”
“But she never met you.”
“She’s—it’s—learned. You’ve told it you met someone. It adds that to what it knows about you. It—she—reacts as she would have. Your grandmother would have been delighted to meet your new boyfriend, to see and talk to him—me. She’d have been sweet and excited and genuinely glad to lay eyes on this guy finally. So that’s what she was.”
Meredith shook her head, astonished. Slightly traumatized too. “This could have gone so badly. I might have lost her again forever.”
“Why?”
“She doesn’t know you. I didn’t even realize she could talk to anyone but me.”
“I was careful.”
“Why’d she suddenly realize we were at her place, not mine? We’ve been here all along.”
“Who knows?” Sam shrugged. “She just noticed. She’s had that information all along, but she has loads more data than she can use at any given moment. She metes it out. Like my dad.”
“What will I tell her next month and next year and in a decade? That my place is still being painted?”
“I’m not sure how time’s going to pass. For her,” he added, and this was true though what he was really unsure of, and far more worried about, was how time was going to pass for Meredith. If time didn’t pass for the computer projection of Livvie, it didn’t really matter. If time didn’t pass for real-life Meredith, that was a far, far bigger issue and much harder to solve.
Just before Thanksgiving, Meredith got an e-mail from her grandmother idly complaining about her mom. Not mean, not really angry, not even bitchy—true to character, the only option available to her, Livvie went the passive-aggressive guilt-trip route. “How’s Mommy?” Livvie asked. “I feel like I haven’t heard from her in ages. She must be really busy, but when you speak to her, ask her if she has a moment to check in with me. Her old mom misses her.”
“You can’t tell your mom,” said Sam.
“I know.”
“You can’t.”
“I know.”
“Seriously, Merde. No one can know.”
“I know.”
It wasn’t out of the realm that Livvie wouldn’t have heard from her daughter in a while—it was entirely in character which was the only reason she had been able to comment on it. Kyle and Julia had cell phones and TV and an internet connection just like everybody else. But unlike everybody else, they ignored all of it for weeks and weeks at a time. Meredith hadn’t seen them in a few months, not since the funeral, but they were coming for Thanksgiving, for the whole weekend in fact, and though Meredith was looking forward to seeing them, she was a little anxious about the four days it meant she had to be out of touch with her grandmother.
Julia had lost some weight, but otherwise she seemed well. Kyle looked as he always did in “The Big City”—game, glad to see his kid, and oddly out of place somehow. They arrived late Thursday morning bearing island cheeses and yams and pies. Meredith was making soup, turkey, salad, beets, and a valiant attempt at steering the conversation away from what Sam was up to these days. It wasn’t easy.
“So, Sam, what are you up to these days?” Kyle asked genially.
“Don’t ask him that.” Julia swatted Kyle’s butt with a dish towel and then added sotto voce, but not quite sotto enough that Sam missed it, “He’s unemployed.”
Sam was not offended though he could hardly answer the question. “I’ve been running a lot in the mornings. Down along the waterfront. Sometimes in the Arboretum. It’s beautiful out there. I’ve been learning to cook, making a lot of meals. Getting settled in here. Getting caught up. I’ve also been doing some … projects. For a friend.” He added this last so as to suggest freelance work and the ability to financially support Kyle’s daughter—who shot him a warning glance—but he worried her parents might have follow-up questions he couldn’t answer.
“Looking for real work too?” Kyle wondered.
“Stop it!” Julia swatted him again. “Remember the Thanksgiving my dad asked when you were going to quit screwing around with Play-Doh and get a real job?”
Kyle laughed then made his voice extra deep. “ ‘Calluses aren’t manly if you got them playing with clay.’ ”
Julia dropped her voice to match. “ ‘Being an artist is fine for a girl—we never expected you to need a job, honey—but Kyle has to learn it’s time to be a man.’ ”
They seemed to have forgotten Sam was there. Meredith rolled her eyes at him as she skittered around the kitchen. She’d seen this act before. But Sam, new to it all, found it charming, these carefully loving parents with choreographed conversations, curiosity about Sam tangled with concern for their daughter intertwined in their own memories and provenance. He lacked for parents, having had only a dad—somehow a dad on his own didn’t seem like a parent—and the overlap of adulthood and parenthood was new territory for him.
Meredith ran out of butter after the twice-baked potatoes had been baked only once and sent him to the open-till-three grocery store for more. The rain had cleared briefly, and walking through soggy orange leaves and horizon-level low sunshine, Sam finally felt fall and family for real. It was good to be out in the fresh air, good to be out of a kitchen too crowded with cooks, good to be out of an apartment too small for four adults and two dogs and food enough to feed the whole building, but he was also overwhelmed with nostalgia and missing them almost immediately. It felt great. He texted Meredith, “Your parents are sweet. They must get this from you.”
“I am rolling my eyes,” she replied.
“They love you so much. And they love each other so much. It’s nice to watch.”
“It’s gross,” she replied.
“It’s not!”
“It’s foreplay,” she replied.
“It’s gross!” Sam agreed.
The next morning, Meredith and her father made brunch with the leftovers—cheesy, yammy, beety turkey-egg-potato scramble. Apparently this was tradition, but Sam fed most of his to the dogs under the table (even they seemed skeptical). After brunch, they went for a walk in the Arboretum. Downtown was crowded with shoppers. The apartment building was abuzz with relatives. But along the lake it was quiet, empty. It was raining steadily and cold, but Kyle and Julia had raised Meredith on an island, and they were all used to damp. Sam was chilled to the bone. Kyle and Julia walked with their hands in each other’s back pockets. Sam walked with his hands in his armpits. Meredith was trying to corral the dogs when Julia stopped suddenly, turned to Meredith, and demanded, “How are we screwing you up?”
“What?”
“How are we screwing you up? As a person? Tell us. We can take it.”
“This conversation isn’t helping much.”
“I mean it,” said Julia, looking like she did even though she wasn’t making much sense. “I can tell you exactly how my parents screwed me up. Grandpa never did think what I did for a living was respectable, and he certainly never thought it was art. He never forgave Kyle and me for living the way we do, for raising you ‘in the wild,’ as he put it, like we’d handed you over to wolves or something. And Grandma, well, you know we were close, but look at it out here.” She waved at the dripping trees, the mud, the gray lake flowing into gray sky, autumn leaves mashed into paste.
“What am I looking at?” said Meredith.
“It’s gorgeous. All this nature. Smell the air.” Sam did. Something was rotting. But he took her point. For rainy and gray and cold, it was gorgeous. The memory of the mountains under all that fog, even if they wouldn’t see them again for mon
ths, sustained him on long runs. A heron raised one leg, tai chi slow, and brought it down with infinite care a foot in front of the log it was straddling, then froze statue-still to make absolutely certain all was well before unbending the other telescoped limb and doing the same. Julia was right. It was beautiful.
“This is Grandma’s fault how?” asked Meredith.
“Three miles from home and she never took me here once in all the time I was growing up,” said Julia. “If my high school art teacher hadn’t brought us here to draw leaves and grass and dirt, to sit and breathe and just be, I’d never even have known about it. If my parents had their way, I’d never have become an artist. I’d never have left the city. I’d have moved down the hall and married an accountant. So I’m asking you, how are we screwing you up?”
“Well, I’d have liked to live down the hall from Grandma,” Meredith tried. “With my rich accountant father. No offense, Dad.”
“None taken, sweetheart.” Kyle had the same complicated look on his face Sam could feel on his own—bemused but intrigued and suppressing all of it so as not to get in trouble.
“Plus, you’re about to freeze my boyfriend to death,” Meredith added. “Let’s go back to the car.”
“All parents screw up their kids somehow. I just want to know how,” Julia said quietly.
“What brought this up?” Meredith asked.
Julia shrugged. “First Thanksgiving after Grandma died, I guess. I miss her so much. Maybe I’ve been trying to list reasons why I shouldn’t. You know, like if I could be mad at her, I wouldn’t be so sad she was gone.”
“How’s that working out?” said Meredith.
“Not that well. But better than anything else I’ve tried.”
“What else have you tried?”
“Wallowing.”
“It’s really cold, Mom. We’re soaked. Let’s go home and play Scrabble or something. We can think of ways you screwed me up on the way.”
“Thanks, baby,” said Julia, putting her arm around Meredith and walking back the way they came. “You’re a good daughter.”
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.” Jul
ia 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.”
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