Until the Day I Die

by Carpenter, Emily

  I sit in Ben’s truck in the broiling parking lot of Shorie’s dorm with my eyes closed. The left side of my head throbs. After all the emotional conflict with Shorie, now I just feel wrung out and only just slightly pissed.

  What the hell is taking Ben so long? Are he and Shorie discussing how to handle me? How to get me away from Jax before I make a huge mistake, blow it up, and ruin all their lives? There have been other behind-my-back conversations, I’m fairly certain. Meetings where I was the subject at hand. Maybe because I’ve been less than on top of things. But more likely because of my recent announcement that I wanted the partners to sell Jax.

  I dropped the bomb in June. Gigi and Arch, Ben and Sabine, and Shorie and I were all gathered for a Father’s Day brunch at a funky downtown bistro called Red Mountain Grill. When dessert came, I told everybody that after Perry’s death, I’d tried to keep up with my duties, but I’d not been able to. Without him there, I was overwhelmed. And the company had become an albatross, weighing me down in ways I hadn’t expected and couldn’t fully articulate, even to myself.

  The bottom line: I was ready to invoke our pact. Perry was gone, and even though that wasn’t what he’d meant when he originally suggested it, continuing on without him felt wrong. I wanted to sell.

  We would need to hire an outside firm eventually, but for now Layton, our in-house lawyer, could handle the prep. The payout wouldn’t be as big, not after only three years and with only a fraction of the users we could amass if we had two more years. And when some other firm bought us, there was no doubt we’d be forced out as shareholders. My partners might be disappointed we hadn’t achieved the ultimate dream—a $100-million-dollar buyout by a Facebook-size company—but our prospects weren’t exactly shabby. We could possibly get $10 million—$2.5 million for Ben and for Sabine, $5 million for me—and that wasn’t bad. But my bottom line was the same no matter how much we made. I was finished with Jax.

  They were all stunned, naturally, but said they understood. With the exception of Gigi. On our way out of the restaurant, she pulled me aside and informed me that she and Arch had been hoping to purchase some stock in the company now, before we sold in a couple of years. Arch had lost so many tenants recently, he’d had to turn over two of his shopping centers to the bank. The one in Houston that he still owned was doing well for now, but who knew what would happen? I had apparently ruined their retirement plan and was being horribly selfish for not safeguarding their future. Like my son would’ve wanted, she said, her pupils expanded to large black pools of hatred.

  I realized the real estate crash must’ve had an effect on Arch’s shopping centers, but he’d never mentioned it. To me, the whole thing smelled suspicious. My mother-in-law was notorious for not knowing the nitty-gritty of her personal finances. I wasn’t about to get roped into changing my mind on something this important based on her tenuous grasp of her husband’s business.

  I removed my arm from her grip and spoke calmly. Perry left me everything he had, including his shares of Jax. He trusted me to do what was right for our family.

  We’re family too, she said, with a look that was anything but familial.

  Back in the parking lot of the dorm, the driver’s side door opens and I’m jolted back to the present. Ben slides in, angles his body toward me, and smiles sympathetically.

  “Does she hate me?” I say.

  “She does not hate you. And she would rather throw herself off a cliff than admit this, but I think she’s excited.”

  Throw herself off a cliff. Interesting choice of words.

  “It’s called the ‘dizziness of freedom,’ you know.” I stretch my neck, but my head’s still pounding relentlessly. “That impulse you get when you’re standing on a cliff, to throw yourself off.”

  Our eyes meet, but I look away.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Not exactly the way I envisioned the day I dropped my daughter off at college going down.” I force a laugh, and we both check our phones at the same time. Layton’s texted me.

  How’s the move in going? Is Shorie okay? Are YOU okay?

  “Sabine’s grabbing dinner with Layton.” Ben taps his phone. “She says no reason to rush back.”

  I text Layton. I don’t know. I hope so. I add a grimacing emoji.

  “You want to get a drink? Debrief?” Ben asks.

  “Oh, hell, yes.”

  “And if Shorie’s having a rough time or needs you, you’ll be close by. That’s what the bag you left in the back seat is for, right? Because you were thinking you might spend the night?”

  “I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? Every mom cliché rolled into one giant human helicopter.”

  “Erin. This is a big deal, to leave your only kid at college.” He doesn’t say without her father, but I know he knows. That’s the hardest part of all this.

  “It is a big deal, isn’t it?” I ask.

  “It is.”

  “Okay, then . . . what would you think about us getting a couple of rooms at the Conference Center? Just to make sure everything’s okay with her?”

  “I think it’s a good idea.” He maneuvers the truck around the line of minivans and pickups and U-Haul trailers. “I’ll let Sabine know.”

  9

  SHORIE

  For a moment, I let my finger hover over the unread Jax message that Dad sent me. He sent it in mid-March, right after the STEM scholarship was finalized and he’d set up my budget for college. The day before he died. It starts Shorie, my sweet, just like all his messages to me. But I’m not ready to open it and read the whole thing. I may never be.

  I close my eyes.

  It’s hard to explain why I don’t want to open it. I guess it’s like a wrapped present under the Christmas tree, shiny and beautiful and full of promise, and once I unwrap it, the anticipation will all be over. It will be the last communication—letter, phone call, text—I ever get from my father.

  In my rational mind, I know reading it won’t make me feel any less miserable. In fact, the opposite seems true. I have the distinct sense that I’ll feel even worse if I do read it. It’s the law of energy conservation. When energy flows from one place to another, it may change forms, but it’s never destroyed. It’s the same with sadness, I’ve discovered. You can’t get rid of it.

  I swipe back to my home page, and my allocations pop up, neat little bubbles all over the screen. Food, household, medical, personal, transportation, gifts, fun, savings. In addition to covering tuition, a meal plan, and books, the scholarship I’ve been awarded also gives me a little bit of living expense money. The school deposits that cash directly into my local bank account, which Dad connected to my Jax. Along with the extra money Mom’s put in, I should have no problem hitting my budget goal every month.

  So here’s Jax in a snapshot: It’s a comprehensive personal budgeting app that captures all your purchases, and it sorts and automatically files them into categories for you using your bank’s bill-pay platform, the app’s proprietary digital wallet feature, and your phone’s GPS. It compiles authorized data from our retail and bank partnerships, scrapes a bunch of random public data plus our merchant partners’ information, and then, using a bunch of algorithms, tells you how much money you can spend on a given day at a given location.

  If you choose, your transactions can be shared with some or all of your connections, making them, in effect, public. Most people opt out of that feature; it’s really there for parents keeping tabs on their kids or companies monitoring their employees’ work-related expenditures.

  The best part is, when tax time rolls around, Jax connects to your particular filing platform. Then all you have to do is electronically sign in a couple of spots and voilà, your taxes are done. After that it automatically adjusts your budget for the next year, helps you keep up with your spending, and gives you updated suggestions on how to manage future expenses.

  I know. Genius.

  Just then, a banner drops down on my phone with a text from Gigi.
/>   shorie darlin have you spent your cash yet love gigi it is a thousand

  I laugh. Funny how, in spite of the fact that her son created the world’s first automatic budgeting app, my grandmother insists on using cash. Mom has always bitched about it, the fact that Gigi doesn’t use Jax, but she and Mom rarely see eye to eye on anything. When it comes to me, though, Gigi’s always been a big squishy cupcake. A cupcake that gives me lots of cash gifts and sends me all these hilariously unpunctuated, improperly capitalized run-on texts, all sent from a 2003 BlackBerry.

  The air conditioner kicks in, and I straighten, letting the lukewarm stream of air wash over me. My grandmother slipped me ten one-hundred-dollar bills the other night at my going-away dinner. She asked if I wanted more, and I told her I’d let her know if anything came up. Mom would be pissed, but whatever. Gigi thinks Mom doesn’t spend enough on stuff like nice clothes and fancy meals.

  I jump off the bed and pluck the huge gangster roll of graduation money from the back of the closet shelf. I peel off a hundred-dollar bill and drop it into my purse, just in case there’s something I want to buy that I don’t want Mom to know about. Which reminds me. I haven’t checked Jax’s daily server report. Which should cheer me up. Definitely get my mind off being stuck here at school.

  I settle back on the bed and move my laptop closer, already feeling a little bump in my mood. The daily server report is essentially a health check, a dashboard with data on the system processes, the drives, the memory, and any errors that might’ve cropped up over the last twenty-four hours. There are also log files attached to the email, in case you need to access more info.

  The dashboard itself is really cool, a typical Dad design. It’s an elegantly constructed, colorful one-sheet with columns and pie charts and graphs. Just looking at it makes me think of Dad and feel happy. Not many things make me do that these days.

  I scan the report, and an error message catches my eye.

  A database error occurred.

  Source: Microsoft SQL Server 2016

  Code: 0984 occurred 1 time(s)

  Description: Transaction (Process ID 3168) deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction.

  Context: Application ‘serve..search..queries..over..help..content’

  Huh. Interesting.

  I look over it again, nibbling at my thumbnail. The truth is, I could dig into this, but I’m not supposed to be messing with the servers. In fact, if Mom got wind of me poking around in Jax, she’d be pissed. Also, the server admin, Scotty, gets these reports, and he could already be on the case. But still . . .

  I open one of the logs. Nothing looks out of the ordinary in the long columns. Not that I know what I’m looking for exactly, but sometimes things jump out at you. Time stamps, frequency, etc. I just can’t get over the fact that, since I’ve been checking these reports, I’ve never seen an error message like this.

  It could just be a glitch, some weird anomaly that will never happen again. There’s also a chance it’s a bug. Which is not that big of a deal; it just means somebody has to fix it.

  But there is a third option. A remote one, but an option nonetheless. The glitch could indicate that there’s a process running in Jax that wasn’t set up by Dad and is conflicting somehow with the basic software. Which is concerning.

  I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t help myself. The thought of somebody screwing around inside Jax’s processes bothers me, but it excites me too. And the thrill of solving a problem could definitely take my mind off all the things that suck. So, before I can reason myself out of it, I shoot off a quick email to Scotty, asking him if he saw the error report and what he thinks it might mean.

  Please don’t mention I said anything to Mom or Ben, I write at the end, then hit “Send.”

  Dad would want me to do this, I tell myself.

  10

  ERIN

  Something is happening. Whether it’s happening for real or in a dream is hard to say.

  Outside the car window yellow and red and green streak past in smeary underwater slow motion. Sound is low and garbled too. That Dolly Parton song “Here You Come Again” is a tinny earworm playing somewhere just above the water’s surface. Soundtrack to my quest.

  It’s night now, but I’ve forgotten what came before this point. A lot of things seem tangled right now. Too difficult to tease out. I know I can’t possibly be underwater because I’m driving a car. No, not a car, a truck. Ben’s truck. I can smell him on the seats and in the air conditioning streaming over me.

  Someone called me earlier. It was a woman, a girl, I think. She said Shorie needed me. That’s all I needed to hear. I am going to my daughter.

  All of a sudden, there’s a loud chunk. I’m thrown against the wheel, then back onto the seat, and everything is still. I close my eyes, just for a second, just to rest a minute. My breath sounds like a roar. This is how Perry died, in a car accident. But I’m not dead. I’m not even hurt.

  I stagger out of the truck and see that I’ve only just barely tapped one of those low poles. But also that I’ve arrived at my intended destination. Or close to it. I’m in a parking lot next to a brick-and-columned house with elegant landscaping lights and Greek letters over the door. Where Shorie is.

  Next step: Find my girl. Tell her how sorry I am. Tell her I love her. Make everything right again. Somehow.

  It’s not Dolly anymore. Now it’s relentless reggae that’s so excruciatingly loud, I feel like my brain is melting.

  There are so many kids in this place too. They’re jammed in the hallway and up the stairs, spilling out of rooms and windows. It’s insane that they choose to gather in these tiny spaces. Can’t they just find someplace to spread out? Don’t they believe in personal space?

  I squeeze between the kids, but they take up so much space with their yelling and dancing and drinking, it takes every ounce of strength I have. I feel like I’m swimming again, doing those water aerobics Perry and I got roped into once on that budget vacation we took when we were first married. My tongue is thick, and I can feel myself wanting to find a horizontal surface to lie down on, but I don’t. I’ve become one of those cadaver dogs, nose to the ground, hard on the scent. Shorie, Shorie, Shorie.

  I ask a few kids if they’ve seen her—but they just stare at me with their blank faces and mascara-fringed eyes. They are all so young and dewy and beautiful, I want to stop and touch them. Stroke their long, impossibly shiny hair. Press my palms against their tight, unlined cheeks and tell them to enjoy this moment. They have no idea of all the things to come.

  Next thing I know, I’m being propelled down the hall, through a swinging door, and into a grimy-looking kitchen, and miraculously there she is. At the sink, pouring something out of her cup. She glances over her shoulder, and her mouth turns into a frown.

  “Mom!” she shrieks.

  “You called me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Somebody called me. Dele, I think?”

  “You’re in your pajamas.”

  I look down at my pink flamingo–clad legs. “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  I blank for a second. Why am I here? Why was I driving Ben’s truck again, past all the smeary lights to the tune of Dolly’s lament? What is it that I want?

  What do I want?

  I want my husband back.

  I want my daughter to be a little girl again.

  I want us all in our house around the kitchen table, laughing and eating Thai takeout.

  “I can’t go home,” I say, because I’m finding it impossible to translate my thoughts into words.

  Shorie grabs me by the arms and shakes me. “You have to leave,” she hisses. “Where is Ben?”

  “He’s back at the hotel.” I push my hair out of my eyes.

  She grimaces. “The hotel?”

  I know what the look on her face means. Before I can explain that she’s misunderstan
ding the situation, she pulls me out the back door, across a rickety porch, and down some concrete steps. I stumble over a garden hose. It’s the first time I realize that I’m barefoot.

  “I came to Auburn for you,” she growls. “Because you forced me to, because you said it was what Dad would’ve wanted. And now you’re telling me you can’t go home?” She squints. “What’s wrong with you? Are you drunk?”

  “No,” I say. But I don’t think it’s true. I actually do feel drunk or something very close to it. I’m those words the kids always use—smashed, hammered, wasted. The question is, How did I get this way?

  “I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say . . . that I only want what’s best for you . . .” My voice trails. My brain has meandered off into another plane. I have no idea what I mean to say next.

  Her face is so open and vulnerable, it makes me think of five-year-old Shorie, asking me if we can go pet the kittens at the Humane Society. It stops me cold for a second, and I can’t seem to find my bearings. My baby, my girl . . .

  I try again. “I wanted to talk to you, Shorie. I wanted to make sure you weren’t mad at me.”

  “Oh my God. Yes, Mom, I am mad at you. I am very, very fucking angry. I can’t even believe you would . . .”

  She’s talking now, words piling up on words, sentences into paragraphs, and I know it’s important—crucial, even—that I listen, but I can’t seem to home in on the waves of sound bending the air. And even if I could hear, I don’t think I could grasp the words’ meaning. My head feels squeezed, front and back. Reeling, I think. This is what they call reeling.

  Reeling with grief.

  Reeling with confusion.

  Reeling with some sinister substance I’ve never felt in my body before. It makes me feel light and heavy all at the same time. It makes the real unreal.