Chapter one
Who's idea it was, I know not, and will probably never know, but the point is, it was somebody's baby, and it happened. Just like they do when they are tracking down the members of one's class for a such-and-such class reunion, somebody, somewhere (one of my old buddies, I suppose) managed to track down all... or most... of the ops and regulars from #alt-mmpr. IRC and the Internet we had used in the days when we had talked daily in that channel had been obsolete for some time, and most of us had long since lost connection with each other, but the time we had spent together was not forgotten.
"Honey, I'm home!" came the call from the front of the house. I heard little footsteps coming down the hall, followed by my husband's bigger, louder ones.
I clicked off the laptop and met my eldest daughter in the hall. "Hi Mommy!" she exlaimed.
"Hey Munchkin. How was preschool?"
She proudly presented me with a macaroni necklace. "Look what I made!"
"Oh, it's beautiful," I assured her. She had painted about twenty or so pieces of elbow macaroni in various colors and strung them together on a piece of green yarn. Not exactly an aspiring Piccasso, but it a mother's eyes, it was wonderful.
She took off down the hall, probably to check on her new baby sister. When she was gone, Chris pulled me into his arms and kissed me hello.
"How was work?" I asked him.
"Funny you should ask." A look of confusion crossed his face momentarily. "I got a call at work today... from--" he looked at the piece of paper in his hand. "Brent Crane."
The name sounded so familliar... I slowly began to remove the cobwebs from my memory and search for the origin of the name. "ZeoBrent," I said suddenly, almost in a whisper.
"Yeah."
I was suddenly very intruiged. "What did he want?"
"Well I guess um... Anycool-- Andrew Shortt-- remember him?"
"Yeah..."
"He um... he was diagnosed with having terminal brain cancer."
"Oh... man..." I had not spoken to AC or any of my old Internet friends, excluding Chris, since my freshman year in college... and that had been nearly six years ago, now. Terminal brain cancer? AC was only twenty five years old, by my calculations...
"Anyways, so he gave me the name and address of the hospital where Andrew is staying... and I was thinking..."
"Yeah," I agreed, before he could finish the sentence. "We should go."
Chapter 2
I was packing my suitcase for our trip when I heard a little voice from the doorway. "Mommy, have you seen my red shoe?" Taylor, our preschool-aged daughter, asked. She held up one shoeless foot.
I turned away from my suitcase and took Taylor by the hand. "Well now," I said slowly. "If you were a red shoe, where would you be?"
"On my foot."
I laughed. "True, very true." At that very moment, Jordan started wailing from the nursery. In my mind, I swore... there was no way we were going to make that plane at this rate. "Chris??"
Chris emerged from the den. "Yeah?"
"Take Taylor," I said, placing the girl's hand in her father's. "And go find her other shoe. Please," I added.
"No problem."
The two of them disappeared down the stairs, leaving me with the screaming infant and a two year old who, hopefully, would sleep until it was time to go. I marched into the nursery and changed Jordan's diaper. Then I placed her in her baby swing, where I could keep an eye on her. Finally, I returned to my packing.
It was another hour and a half before we were out the door and on our way to the airport. And we were barely out of our driveway when...
"Mommy, the baby's drooling. It's gross." (Taylor)
"Me, potty." (That was our two year old, Callie)
"Ow! Callie hit me!" (Taylor again)
"Me, potty!"
"Waaaaaaaaaa!" (Jordan)
I closed my eyes. I was getting a headache... WHAT a day.
Chapter 3
Somehow, we made it to the airport on time and boarded our plane. And it was onboard that plane that we ran into...
"Chris?"
"Yeah?" he looked up from his book.
"Look up there... that woman... she looks SO familiar..."
Chris took one look at where I was pointing and replied, "Jewel."
"The singer?"
"No! Jewel_Noxenet. Jen. Remember??"
I did. A little. My memories of what had happened in those IRC chat rooms were fuzzy-- which is a little odd because I spent so much time there. Then again, I did have some very clear memories of those days... memories of Chris and me. But the name Chris had just given me was like a key to all my memories. Suddenly, I had the urge to go up and say hi to her... but would she know who I was? I had barely remembered... would she?
"Becky?"
I looked up to find the woman, Jen, looking down at me with a slight look of bewhilderment on her face. "Jen?"
We hugged each other and then she informed me that she was on the trip to visit Andrew with her fiance, a young man she'd met at college.
"We're on our way there, too," I replied. "These are my girls, Taylor, Callie, and Jordan." I indicated each girl as I said her name. "And this is my husband..."
"Chris," she finished with a grin. "You invited me to the wedding, remember? Only... I wasn't able to be there." She looked at Chris. "And after all these years, I am finally able to put a face with that name."
We talked awhile longer before Jen had to return to her seat for landing. We knew we would probably see a lot of each other in the next couple of days...
Chapter 4
I guess I didn't stop to think how fast the news of Andrew's illness would spread. The waiting room on his floor was overflowing. Most of its occupants looked familiar to me, and a few, like myself, were holding small children.
"Becky?" I looked up at the sound of a familiar voice. "Kimberly Hart??"
"Thomas Micheal Kass," I replied with a grin.
"I saw you come in. That your kid?" he indicated Jordan, who was asleep in my arms.
I nodded. "Chris and the other two should be around... somewhere."
"Right here." Chris returned from a side corridor holding Callie by the right hand and Taylor by the left.
Tom looked a little surprised. "They're all yours?!"
"Yep..."
"Wow, you and Chris sure have been busy..." he smiled. "You've only been married, what? Five years?"
"Yeah. Taylor's the oldest, and she's four."
He raised his eyebrows a few times. "Like I said, busy, busy, busy..."
I hit him in the arm (not too hard, but he still pretended like it hurt.) "Same ol' Tom," I joked. Then I thought of something and changed the subject. "Have you been in to see AC-- err, Andrew yet?"
He nodded. "He doesn't look so good," he said, "But he's the same old Anycool. His atittude hasn't changed a bit."
"That's nice to know."
"Yeah."
I felt a little hand patting my leg and looked down to find Callie staring back up at me. "Daddy go," she informed me, pointing. Chris was starting to head down a side corridor. I took Callie by the hand and hurried to catch up.
Chapter 5
Chris knocked lightly on the door and when a voice called, "Come in," he opened the door and lead our girls and me inside. That was Anycool in that bed alright, but he wasn't the AC I remembered. He was thin and pale and had some IVs stuck in his arm. But Tom was right: inside, he hadn't changed a bit.
"Ahoy," he greeted us, sitting up just a little. "I wondered if I'd see you guys today."
"Oh, you didn't think we'd just desert you, did you?" I grinned.
He shrugged. "Canada's an awfully long ways from Florida... especially for a young family like yours."
"True, true," Chris replied. "But... we had to come."
"I appreciate it, I really do. All you guys being here... it's like... I never realized how much you all cared about me."
"We were like a family in those days, AC," I told him. "We stood up for each other, helped each other out..."
"That's the truth..."
"Me, up." Callie looked up at Chris and held her arms up towards him. "Up."
Chris smiled and picked her up. "Oof. You're gonna be too big for this pretty soon, sweetie."
Andrew looked around at our girls and grinned. "It must be nice, having kids... having a family... knowing that after you're gone some part of you is gonna stay behind..."
"Well, we try not to think about that," I said with a grin. "But... yes, I suppose, it's a comforting thought."
"That's the one regret I have about my life. I never got married, I never had children. And, now I never will."
"Oh, don't worry about that, Andrew. You're a young man, really, and I'm sure if you had more time, you'd be the perfect family man."
"If I had more time." Andrew looked out the window for a moment. "Who would've expected this of the Mighty Anycool, right? Who would've thought that I wouldn't live to see thirty? Not me..." There was a pause. "But I just want you to know," he continued finally, "That having you all here means a lot. It makes it all a little less painful, ya know?"
"I think so."
We left not much later when the girls started to get cranky. Our visit with our old friend had given us a lot to think about... like just how precious our lives and the lives of our children were. He was dying now, and there was nothing he could do about it. The same thing could just as easily happen to Chris, or to me, or to anyone else.
That night in our hotel room, after the girls had fallen asleep, Chris and I laid awake and talked, for the first time in a long time about our "dating" years on IRC, about the friends we had made back then, and about the good times we'd had together, long before we met face to face.
CHAPTER 6
Chris and I stayed in Toronto for a week, and then we had to go back home. We had a lives and careers waiting for us in Florida. But we had seen a lot of our old friends-- not all of them, but most of them-- and had learned a lot about what they were doing now. A lot of addresses and phone numbers were exchanged, and I knew now that we would keep in touch with most of them. We were even going to visit Jen sometimes, since we lived a lot closer together than we originally thought.
We would hear from Andrew every now and then, but our letters and calls from him became increasingly fewer and farther between as his condition got worse. About a month before he died, they stopped altogether.
It was one Tuesday afternoon when Chris and I received the news of our friend's death. It had been nearly six months since we'd been up to Ontario to visit him, and Andrew had put up quite a fight against his cancer. Still, on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, just before Jordan turned a year old, we received the sad news that he had passed away.
I had just returned home from picking up Taylor from kindergarten and Callie and Jordan from the day care when the phone rang. Since I knew Chris wasn't home yet and wouldn't be for quite sometime, I answered it. "Hello?"
"Hi... Becky?"
"Speaking. Who's this?"
"This is Brent Crane..." There was a pause. I remembered who he was now without a moment's hesitation. He and I had talked quite awhile one afternoon at the hospital in Ontario, and we had kept in touch ever since.
"Hey, Brent."
"Hey." He paused again. "I'm-- I'm sorry to be calling with news like this but I felt like you should know... AC-- Andrew passed away today."
I bit my lip to stop the tears I already felt welling up in my eyes. When I felt like I had control of my emotions enough to speak, I asked, "Is there-- I mean, of course there is-- where and when is the funeral?"
He gave me the information and I scribbled it down on a piece of paper. Not much later, I hung up the phone and turned to face my three children. Chris would be home soon and I would have to tell him. We would probably go up to Canada for the funeral and we would probably see all our old friends again. It was funny how it had all worked out. Time had passed and, like a lot of friends, we'd drifted apart. We'd moved on with our lives and forgotten, or pushed aside, the memories of all the hours we'd spent chatting away on IRC. It had taken the tragic death of one of us to jar our memories and bring us all back together again. So maybe Andrew's death had been premature and maybe he shouldn't have died so young. But if he had never gotten sick, I realized, we would never have been reunited, and we wouldn't have what we'd had so long ago and what we had once again: a great group of friends, a second family, and endless memories we could look back on together.
THE END