Dead Text

Beth glanced at her phone in a mindless automatic way, clearing out notifications of belated condolences from social networks, noting one missed call from Vonda, and a new text message. Her dead husband's face looked back at her, beaming. The text read: "The weather is bad. Like that time at the lake." A chill ran over her as thoughts collided in her mind. This must have been his last message. Why am I just getting it now? The lake. When lightning hit the generator and we were plunged into darkness and cold.

She fumbled the phone, her hands shaking, eyes blurred with tears. She wanted to thrust the phone back into her jeans pocket, but she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and looked at it again. She gripped the phone hard in her right hand, her thumb on the screen to keep that last text from fading out. Had lightning struck the plane? Investigators weren't saying yet what caused the crash. They were dredging the shallows for the black box. He didn't know. He couldn't know. If he had known the plane was going down he would've sent a different message. Didn't people say a final goodbye with "I love you", not a comment about the weather?

She didn't know how long she stood in the parking lot looking at her phone, but the ice cream was melted when she got home. She broke down and cried again, then poured it into the blender with some ice and drank it all down.

She caught herself looking for him on social networks; she couldn't bear to make his profiles inactive. Friends were still posting. Still tagging him in pictures. It was almost like Rance was still there, just out of town on business, except he wasn't there, he never responded, and the pictures were old. But those posts kept popping up in her feed, and she couldn't bring herself to hide them. She looked. She looked at every one of them. She clicked through and looked at his profile. At his profile picture. Which showed the two of them. It was an anniversary picture, their last anniversary, their last anniversary picture. She had almost the same picture as her profile pic; they'd taken simultaneous selfies with their cameras, so the two images were the same, but one angled in from the left and the other from the right. They were smiling. She couldn't imagine changing her profile picture. That was how she still saw herself. With him.

She told Vonda about the belated text over lunch the next day. Her best friend had been taking her out for lunch almost every day since they'd heard that Rance's plane went down on the other side of the world. It had been a business trip. She and Rance had talked about her joining him, but she couldn't make her schedule work. Couldn't miss work. Given the number of days she'd missed work since then, the bitter irony of it wasn't lost on her. She swallowed the usual "I should've been with him" which Vonda had already heard a dozen times, and said instead, "It just hurts all over again. Worse than posts on social networks---those are all condolences. Seeing that text was just the cruelest thing..." No, it wasn't. His death was the cruelest thing that had happened, but this was like him dying all over again. "I mean, how is it possible that a text can just hang out there in the ether and not be delivered until two weeks, three days, and what, a half dozen hours, after he sent it?"

Vonda frowned. "You're not eating. That's why I take you to lunch. You'd starve if I didn't."

"I had melted ice cream last night," Beth reminded her.

"...That's not real food. And to answer your question...well...I don't know. Obviously it's possible because it happened, but the odds of something like that happening, and happening in a circumstance where it's particularly devastating, have to be pretty long. Just delete it and try not to dwell on it," she added gently. "You didn't delete it, did you?" she said softly.

Beth shook her head, reaching into her purse. The light on her phone was blinking. With a swipe, she cleared out the notifications without looking at them, and tapped the text app which was showing one unread message. "Oh, God. There's another one." She had just enough time to read the message before tears blurred her vision. She handed the phone across to Vonda, who silently read the messages. "The weather is bad. Like that time at the lake."  Followed by a message which had arrived just half an hour ago. "Looks like this is going to be a short trip. Home sooner than expected."