The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(7)

There’s always a prompt outpouring of support, prayers, hollow optimism, and talk of miracles. Eventually—too often overnight—the blogger’s posts will begin to detail alarming symptoms, hospital visits, hospice arrangements. Attempts at breezy humor fall flat; entries become increasingly graphic and sporadic, infused with sadness, weariness, fear.

Then come the final posts written by someone else—a daughter, a husband, a friend—sometimes chronicling the blogger’s final days or hours, often reporting that the patient wants her Internet friends to know she’s thinking of them; that their comments are being shared with her in her lucid moments. Once in a while the blogger’s own last entry—sometimes intended as a farewell, but often not—is followed by just one other: a loved one’s terse report of the death and funeral arrangements.

With Meredith, there’s been none of that. Her daughter’s post had struck out of the blue.

Bewildered, Landry scrolls up to the previous blog entry. Bearing Saturday’s date, it was written by Meredith herself.

Having read it when it first appeared, Landry is already familiar with the buoyant account of Meredith’s weekend morning spent planting a vegetable garden in her Ohio backyard.

Her husband was still away, she wrote, so she had to dig and lug heavy bags of fertilizer herself. But it would all be worthwhile, she said in closing, a few months from now when she got to enjoy my favorite treat in the whole wild world: home-grown tomatoes, heavy with sugar and juice, eaten straight off the vine, sprinkled with salt and still warm from the sun.

The woman who wrote those words seemed to be looking ahead to August without reservation. Was she deluding herself, or trying to fool everyone else, writing about arduous physical labor when she was in fact confined to a hospital bed in the final stages of her disease?

This is crazy. It can’t be real.

Maybe it’s some kind of practical joke, or . . .

Maybe Meredith’s blogger account was hacked, or . . .

Maybe it’s real and she just didn’t want us to know.

Feeling vaguely betrayed, Landry opens a search window, types in the name Meredith, and stops to think for a moment.

She knows her friend’s last name is Haywood—or is it Heywood? Heyworth? Something like that. And she lives in a Cincinnati suburb . . . but which one?

Funny how you can know someone intimately without having that basic information; without ever having come face-to-face in the real world.

She types Haywood into the Google box and presses Enter.

There are a number of hits for Meredith Haywood— none that fit.

But when she replaces Haywood with Heywood, she finds herself looking at a death notice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, accompanied by a familiar photo: the head shot Meredith uses on her blog.

It’s real.

A lump rises in Landry’s throat, but she pushes it back and reads on, dry-eyed.

There was a time when she cried over Hallmark Christmas commercials. She wrote about that on her blog last December. Turned out that a surprising number of her followers did the same sappy thing.

These days it takes a hell of a lot more than a sentimental advertisement to bring tears to her eyes. She got used to holding them back in the wake of her diagnosis, not wanting to frighten her children, or depress her husband, or feel sorry for herself. Perhaps, most of all, she was afraid that if she allowed herself to start crying, she’d never stop.

But this is no Hallmark ad. It’s a death notice—albeit a brief one, not a full-blown obituary. Details are sparse, funeral arrangements incomplete.

Shaken, Landry closes the laptop and stands. Resting her elbows on the wooden railing, chin cupped heavily in her hands, she gazes out over the water.

Just beyond the boardwalk, in the shallows close to shore, a pair of kayakers glide in parallel symmetry. Farther out: the usual array of fishing boats, plus a cluster of sailors taking advantage of the morning breeze. Not a cloud in the sky; the forecast calls for a beautiful day.

Again, Landry is struck by disbelief.

I need to talk to someone. I should call someone.

But not her husband.

Rob left for the office less than ten minutes ago, kissing her good-bye as she poured her coffee and reminding her that it’s Wednesday, golf day, and he’ll be home late. Right now he’s driving, somewhere on the road between here and his law office in Mobile.

Anyway, he doesn’t know Meredith—though he knows about her, of course, along with the other bloggers Landry counts among her closest confidantes. Bound by a common diagnosis, they found their way into each other’s virtual worlds by chance and settled in with the camaraderie of old pals. She shares things with her online friends that she would never dream of telling anyone she knows in real life, other than Rob.

Oh, who is she kidding? There are some things Landry can’t even bring herself to tell Rob, yet somehow she’s comfortable putting it all out there on the Internet—hiding behind a screen name, of course.

Some bloggers just go by their first names, but her own is much too distinctive to ensure anonymity. She devoted nearly as much time to choosing a screen name as she had to baby names when she was pregnant with her children, ultimately deciding to go by BamaBelle.

“BamaBelle?” Rob echoed when she first shared it with him. “Bama as in Alabama?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know . . . Obama?”