Elena’s computer, on the carrel by the window, sounds another alert. Darn. Someone is trying to instant-message her. That’s not unusual—just distracting. She usually keeps the volume muted while she’s teaching, but she turned it on this morning before the students arrived and forgot to turn it off again. Her friend had sent her one of those funny YouTube videos in an e-mail—one that was totally inappropriate to watch in an elementary school classroom, with or without the kids present—but it’s June. Everyone at Northmeadow Elementary School is slacking off. Even the teachers.
“Ms. Ferreira! Your computer just—”
“Thank you, Michael. Right now we are not worrying about my computer. We are worrying about the stegosaurus. Or are we? Does anyone know whether the stegosaurus would want to eat us if we ran into one? Would we have to worry about that? Raise your hand if you know.”
“We can’t run into one,” Michael blurts as several others raise their hands, “because humans and dinosaurs can’t be alive at the same time! Dinosaurs have been dead for sixty-five million years!”
The kid is smart as a whip. If he weren’t so darned disruptive, she’d be more willing to appreciate his intelligence.
With a sigh, she agrees that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist. “But if they did,” she adds patiently, “humans would have nothing to fear from stegosauruses because they’re herbivores. Raise your hands, please . . . who knows what an herbivore is?”
Naturally, Michael does. After defining herbivore—without raising his hand—he asks if she’s going to check her computer.
“Not right now,” Elena tells him, the patient smile straining her cheek muscles.
Just six hours and forty-four minutes . . .
And then just seven more days . . .
The moment Kay Collier sees the message pop up on her computer screen, she knows what it must be about.
Meredith.
She’s been sitting here thinking about Meredith in her small home office off the kitchen ever since she got back from her rainy morning walk a little while ago. That’s when she got online and spotted the blog entry written by Meredith’s daughter.
A china teacup filled with jasmine tea has long since grown cold beside her keyboard as she struggled with how—and whether—to post a comment in response. No words of comfort she’s conjured so far seem even remotely appropriate for such an overwhelming tragedy.
But BamaBelle’s brief query demands nothing more than a simple, Yes, I’m here.
After Kay types the three words and hits Send, there’s a long pause, as if Bama is trying to figure out how to word the tragic message she needs to deliver.
Sparing her the ordeal, Kay writes, Terrible news. You saw?
This time, the answer is instantaneous. Yes. So upset.
Me too. What the hell happened?
Then, realizing she might have just offended BamaBelle, one of the more ladylike members of the blogger network, she adds, Sorry. Pardon my French. I just—
Bama’s response pops up before she can finish. I didn’t know she was sick again. Did you?
No clue. Guess she didn’t want anyone to know.
Feel so helpless.
Me too. Have you talked to anyone else?
No. You?
No.
Kay stares glumly into space, trying to think of something else to say.
Grandmotherly Meredith was everybody’s friend, the heart and soul of their online group. She was always there when you needed her, the first to pop up with a comforting word or a virtual hug—indicated by multiple parentheses around a person’s name.
((((((((((((Kay))))))))))))) was the last thing Meredith ever wrote to her, in final response to a heartfelt private message exchange just last week.
She sounded normal in the post she wrote Saturday about gardening, she writes now to BamaBelle. Did you read that?
Yes. That’s why I’m so freaked out.
Me too.
Kay pauses. Waits.
BamaBelle, too, seems to have run out of things to say.
Kay types, GTG.
Shorthand for got to go.
NP is the response; shorthand for no problem.
That’s the nice thing about these online friendships. You pop in and out of each other’s lives with much less ado than in real life. There’s no obligation to provide detailed explanations about why you’re coming and going.
IM me if you find out anything, Bama writes. Or call if you want to talk. I’ll give you my number.
Kay responds to Bama’s offering with her own cell number, but she’s not sure how she feels about that, because . . . because . . .
Because the walls are coming down.
Until now she’s felt so safe with these Internet friendships. When you’re shy and accustomed to maintaining your privacy, there’s a certain comfort to keeping people at arm’s length—in real life, anyway.
Now that her mother is gone and her old schoolmates and neighbors have moved away or moved on, caught up in lives of their own, there are no real life friends. There are no longer even colleagues: she was laid off from her job as a guard at the federal prison in Terre Haute a few years ago, thanks to budget cuts.
Kay spends most of her time alone, unless you count people she’s never even met in person.
Her online friends are her family. The only people in the world she cares about; the only ones who care about her.
A final message pops onto her screen from Bama: I wish we all lived in the same town so that we could help each other through this.
Me too, Kay replies automatically, though she doesn’t really wish that . . . does she?
The bloggers have had an ongoing discussion about getting together in person sometime. Recently, someone suggested organizing a meeting to coincide with breast cancer awareness month in October, or joining forces for one of the Making Strides walks around the country, or for a march in Washington, D.C.
Kay isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved that it’s never managed to get beyond the wishful thinking stage.
In real life relationships, there’s always pressure.
If her online friends met her in person, they might expect her to be something she isn’t. Or they might turn out to be something she doesn’t want them to be.
Then I’d lose everything.
That can’t happen. It’s too special—sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her going. She loves these people and she needs them, now more than ever . . .
She pushes back her chair, stands, and gets halfway across the room before pausing to straighten a framed photo that doesn’t really need straightening.
It’s an old black and white portrait showing her parents on their wedding day, circa 1962. They were together two decades before Kay was born, then separated before her first birthday.
Her mother never forgave her for that; or for being born—which was, after all, the reason he left.
Mother never came right out and said her conception had been an accident, or that they hadn’t wanted children, or that it was Kay’s fault the love of her life had walked out, leaving her a struggling single mother.
She didn’t have to say it.
It was obvious from the way her mother looked at her, the way she treated her, the way she cried over old photos of him . . .
Especially this one.
In it, her parents are standing on the steps of a church that used to sit a few miles from this house where Kay has lived all her life, in the western suburbs of Indianapolis. She remembers when the church was torn down, about ten years ago, maybe fifteen, to make way for a now-defunct shopping plaza. Yes, at least fifteen years ago, because Mother was still alive, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer, the Indianapolis News was still the evening paper, and business was still booming in this neighborhood.