Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 3



Gretchen sent me an e-mail two weeks before she died. Unfortunately, I didn’t answer it.



Hey Jamie,



How’s it going? How have you been feeling? Better, I hope. Do you think we could talk soon?

Lately, I’ve been thinking of something you said once, back at Forrester. I think we were sophomores. You said you’ve never been able to let go of anyone, not really. That’s why you had so many pen pals, etc. Do you remember that? Do you think it’s still true? Because now, working on this second book, I’m wondering if it’s true of me, too. I miss those talks we used to have. Remember how smart we thought we were?



Yours,

Gretchen

P.S. Also, in your days as a reporter, did you start to develop any skill for telling who is lying to you?

This was Gretchen’s version of a drunk dial: a garbled e-mail full of cryptic, vaguely sentimental insights without much context. (And with a little practical bit at the end, to make it all seem casual.) I imagined her typing this up in a sleepy after-dinner haze, probably after one too many of her favorite eighties songs, and at least a couple of glasses of wine. Yes, this was the old Gretchen—who’d always make it clear she was laying her heart at your feet, but in a box so layered in wrappings and tightly knotted strings that you were never sure if opening it was worth the effort she demanded.

I’d truly missed that Gretchen. We’d lost contact for a few months. And that night, I was too tired to try to untangle Gretchen’s message. I thought of calling her, but put it off. I even thought of suggesting she come visit, but I couldn’t figure on when I’d feel up to scrubbing the house to overnight-guest-quality cleanliness in the future. And you know how e-mail is—if you don’t answer it the day you get it, the chances you’ll get to it promptly go down significantly.

I’m sure I would have answered it eventually—because I always do. Before I’d had a chance, I got the call from Gretchen’s younger brother.

Gretchen passed away yesterday, he told me quietly. My mother has asked me to contact her friends.

And it seemed in the first thirty seconds that it was a wrong number—this polite young man I hadn’t seen since Gretchen’s wedding, calling and telling me someone had passed away. Did he mean some Great-Aunt Gretchen who’d slipped away in the night, or in a hospital bed? Because women in their early thirties did not simply pass away.

There’s been an accident, he’d continued, and then I knew it was real—it was Gretchen.



That night, still in shock from the news, I’d opened her e-mail and stared at it for an hour. It hurt physically to read it, but I did so over and over again, to punish myself for not having answered it. I could remember the conversation to which she referred, but preferred not to think of it—not that night.

I thought of writing a response—just sending a note to Gretchen into the Internet ether, for what it was worth.

Then I thought about Gretchen’s e-mail box receiving the message. What happens to the e-mail accounts of the deceased? I wondered. Do they sit around in the air, forever collecting spam? If an e-mail account is never closed but never opened again, does it still really exist? It was a tree-falls-in-the-forest sort of question, of the morbidly silly sort that Gretchen would have asked.

I pictured Gretchen standing with me on an early March day of our senior year at Forrester College. We were huddled together outside, taking a break from a long study session in the library because I’d wanted a cigarette. Neither of us had majors that required a senior thesis. But both of us had ambitiously taken one on in hopes of graduating with the highest possible honors. It was still freezing cold, but Gretchen was inappropriately dressed—a jersey dress, panty hose, and a plaid flannel shirt, with no coat. She shivered madly and gripped her paper coffee cup for warmth. We were huddled by the iron-gated grave of the college’s founder, Anne Townsend Winthrop.

I think that guy Adam has a little crush on you, I’d said. He was asking about you again.

Hmm. I’m not sure about him, she’d replied. He enunciates his swear words too much.

I shrugged and let the subject drop. I imagine we complained for the remaining duration of my smoke, although none of the details was memorable to me later. What I do remember is that as I took my final puff, Gretchen uncapped her paper cup and tossed the remains of her cold coffee sideways into Winthrop’s grave site.

She caught my look of surprise, and my immediate, self-conscious glance around us for witnesses. As jaded as I was about Forrester College, I’d never have thought of taking it out on the memorial of an illustrious nineteenth-century feminist.

In some cultures, Gretchen had informed me, they put bottles of water or even soda on a person’s grave. For the long journey ahead. It’s a common thing, giving the dead something to drink.

I’d squinted at Gretchen. Not this culture, though.

What is this culture, Jamie? Anyways, if she’s gotta be caged up here for eternity, listening to us all whine and deconstruct and dichotomize all day—if that’s what her life’s work has come to here, then pouring mochachino on her grave is about as honest a tribute as she’ll ever get.

The words were grasping and snide, but the most memorable of them now was anyways. The s at the end made it a word a little girl would use. Words like that slipped into her speech when we were alone together—when she wasn’t in the presence of professors or the more intellectually competitive of our classmates.

Now the memory of that girlish anyways unfroze a tiny hole in my shock, and I sobbed till Sam came upstairs.

“What’s going on?” He put his arms around me and folded his hands on my big belly. “Oh my God. It seems bigger than yesterday.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, snuffling. “I had three peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches yesterday, so you’re probably right about that.”

“I’ve been wondering about those sandwiches of yours. Isn’t that what Elvis liked to eat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figure if I eat enough of them, the kid might just come out singing ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”

Sam was deadpan. “Do we want that, though?”

I giggled and almost answered, but then teared up again, angry at myself for forgetting Gretchen for a moment. Sam wiped my cheeks and came away with black thumbs. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t washed my makeup off yet.

“What’ve you been doing up here?” Sam asked.

“Thinking about Gretchen. What else would I be doing? Reading her old e-mails.”

“Oh.” Sam nodded solemnly.

“What’ve you been up to?” I mopped my eyes with the sleeve of my sweater.

“Just watching the game,” Sam said. “I’m sorry. I should have been up here with you.”

“It’s okay. It wouldn’t have made much difference.”

It was kind of a mean thing to say, but I’d found it easy to say mean things to Sam lately. He hadn’t shot back in months. It was starting to feel like an experiment, to see when he’d break. I was beginning to wish he would.

“I mean, just, under the circumstances,” I backpedaled. “I probably needed to be by myself and just let the shock wear off.”

Sam didn’t reply. He took my hands in his, pulled me out of my office chair, and put me to bed.