“Is everybody happy?”
The little boy’s voice called out, waking Nev from wherever she existed between conscious intervals. Her eyes sprang open, staring blindly in front of her as Donny and Jimmy Osmond’s warbling voices burst into the familiar refrain of ‘Me and My Shadow’…
Nev grabbed her viz and threw it at the floor. The music stopped. She wasn’t sure if she had broken the headset, and in that moment she really didn’t fucking care. After all, it would be magically returned to its former unbroken state the next morning.
It was no use. The alarm stopped but the Osmonds continued singing away mercilessly in Nev’s sonic memory. She had told her troubles to some soul, and it had been like pulling the cork loose from a bottle. Memories of Faith had come pouring out, taking over her mind—and apparently, somehow, her viz alarm as well.
She and Faith used to sing the song as a duet at the family piano. The Osmonds were one of the few pop music acts that Christina Bourne allowed her daughters to listen to. She and Nev’s father had seen Donny and Marie perform in Las Vegas on their honeymoon, making a special trip to sin city for the show, back when Christina was still willing to bend a little. There was no more bending by the time Faith was born, but the Osmonds were still permitted. At age fourteen, Nev would rather have pierced her eardrums than listen to their saccharine bubblegum pop. But for the sake of Faith, who listened to the Osmonds without complaint, like she followed all their mother’s dictates, Nev was willing to make a sacrifice. She would do anything to make her sister happy, even subject herself to voluntary musical torture. In the years since she’d lost Faith, she couldn’t hear the Osmonds without collapsing into tears, but thankfully that wasn’t that much of a problem, because no one but her mother listened to them anymore.
Nev wondered if her mother still did, or if even she had stopped playing the Osmonds by this point. Nev wouldn’t know. She had run away from home after Faith’s funeral, sleeping in the bushes by the river that ran through town before Grandma was brave enough to take her in, against her daughter’s express wishes. For the first time, Nev had gone to public school, busing to Pullman High in the nearest big town. She got an after school job in Pullman too, working the front desk at the Holiday Inn Express, which was slow enough that she had plenty of time to study and make up for lost years. Her hard work paid off. She got a full scholarship to Stanford, and left Washington behind her, literally never looking back. Christina would have said something about Lot’s Wife, but then again, from her perspective, Nev had run towards Sodom, not away from it.
Ever since the Glitch, though, Nev seemed to be looking back more and more. It was hard not to, when, despite all her and Airin’s hard work, she was hurtling towards the past with seemingly unstoppable velocity. If the hack didn’t work, she’d be seeing Mama soon enough whether she wanted to or not. One day, a little more than two weeks from now, she’d wake up in Albion again, on the morning of Grandma’s funeral.
A rattling sound drifted up from the floor. Nev leaned over the edge of the bed and grabbed her viz, clicking the vibrating device into place above her ear. An avatar of her mother’s face flashed. Weird. She’d never programmed her mother into the contacts. More hackery? Nev thought about rejecting the call. Then she thought about her sister. Her little shadow. Nev knew what Faith would want her to do. Besides, if she was going to come face-to-face with Christina again, the more prepared she was, the better. Based on those recent messages, it seemed like maybe she’d be able to make some headway in bridging the Great Divide.
“Hello? Mama?”
“Sunday blessings, Nevaeh. Your father and I are just calling to see how things are going.” What the ever-loving fuck? “We thought you might appreciate some kindness and inspiration.”
Christina’s icon blinked, and was replaced by a live video window of Nev’s parents at their kitchen table, clearly crowding around the same old tablet they’d kept there for the past 20 years. How was that thing even running, Nev wondered. The OS had to be at least a decade old. She stared at her parents through a film of evaporated cooking grease, which created kind of an old-school Hollywood halo effect around them.
At her grandmother’s funeral, Nev had been surprised by how kind the years had been to Christina, and how cruel they’d been to Matthew. Her father looked like a bona-fide old man now, kind of like that Black actor who played the president in those action films when she was at Stanford—Jeffrey Winters? Jeffrey Wright? For a second, she’d felt her old curiosity bubbling up again. She was almost tempted to ask her father point blank, not let him get away with deflections this time. But she’d missed her chance. It didn’t matter anyway. She knew all she ever wanted to know about her family, thank you very much.
But they really didn’t know her. She hadn’t given them the opportunity.
“I’m not doing so good. To be honest.”
“What’s troubling you?”
Where to begin, Nev thought.
“I’ve been thinking a lot recently… about Faith,” Nev said, reluctant to speak her sister’s name in her mother’s hearing. However raw her own grief still was, however angry she was at the choices they had made, some part of her could not ignore that her parents’ grief must be like an ocean to her puddle. Well, maybe more like an ocean to her sea.
“I pray to her every day. I know she’s watching us from Heaven. All of us. One day soon we’ll all be together again.”
It was amazing to Nev that her mom could be so wrong, and yet at the same time, so right. What if she was onto something, though, in her own over-the-top, doctrinaire way? Maybe the Glitch was just a foretaste of the Afterlife. What if we all spend eternity reliving our tiny, finite lives, viewing them from every angle, at every scale? Maybe heaven is in our finest moments, and hell is all the things we wish we could have fixed, but didn’t. If that’s the case, Nev reflected, she was getting a rare chance to reclaim pieces of her own life, to turn them into something worth savoring forever.
“That would be nice, Mama. I’d love to see Faith again. And Grandma. And you and Daddy, too. Maybe I’ll get a chance to visit you soon.”
“I would like that, Peaches.” Matthew’s voice sounded gravelly, like he hadn’t used it very much recently.
“You are always welcome in our home, my daughter. Your father and I have been very concerned about you since our call last Sunday. Are you still having trouble? Is there anyone there who can help you? Or are you still a stranger in that strange land?”
‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ had been a massive algo hit about five years ago—a fact about which Christina was probably blissfully unaware—and now, Nev couldn’t help but hear its earwormy bass line looping in her mind. She’d have to listen to it on her viz en route to Airin’s this morning, just to get the damn thing out of her head. She smiled in spite of herself, and was shocked to see her parents smile back at her.
“Actually, Mama, I’m not such a stranger these days. I have a… a new friend, and, um, they’re helping me get through my troubles.”
“Oh, how wonderful. I’ve always told you, Nev, you can’t make it alone. Nobody can. Not in this world. Certainly not in San Francisco. The Lord watches over the lonely and afflicted, but it’s also important to have someone you can count on, here on this Earth.”
Maybe Nev really was going crazy, after all. Either that, or her mother was making a lot more sense than usual.
“Yeah, that’s true, Mama. I’ve been pretty lonely since.... Well, for a long time, really. And it’s nice to have someone I can turn to. Someone I can count on.”
“Well, that young man is very lucky, Nevaeh. And so are you, by the sound of it. I don’t know how much my advice means to you these days, but I counsel you to keep him dear. When you find someone who’s willing to be a true friend in your darkest hour, you can expect to reap much joy when the daylight returns.”
If the daylight returns. Still, despite Christina’s weird scripturey tone, and the sing-songy voice she always slipped into when doling out life advice, Nev had to admit she was right again.
“Thanks, Mama. Actually, I need to go now, they’re waiting for me.”
“Well, don’t let us get in the way of True Love. We have to go down to services, anyway. We love you, Nevaeh.”
“Love you, Peaches.”
“Love you too.” The video window closed, leaving Christina’s icon in its wake. Nev considered adding it to her favorites’ list, then realized it wouldn’t make a difference, and started getting ready to head to Airin’s.