The Future We Wish We Had

MY FATHER, THE POPSICLE by Annie Reed

Jodi thought she was an orphan until one sweltering Thursday night in late June when she received The Letter from Billingsly, Wendham & Owens, attorneys at law.

That’s how she always thought of it after that. The Letter. Wasn’t that how you were supposed to think about things that changed your life? All capitalized and important?

At first she thought it was a joke. She’d just worked a double shift at Hot Dog on a Stick in the new mall south of town. She was dead tired, and sick of the smell of lemons, corn dog batter, and hot grease. Her head hurt from where she had to pull her hair up under that stupid striped hat, her shoulders ached from all the fresh lemonade she had to mix, and to top it all off, the air conditioning had been out on the bus ride home. To say the bus had been fragrant was the understatement of the century. She was in no mood for jokes. Her roommate Harry had a pretty twisted sense of humor. A fake letter from an attorney was just his style, but tonight it wasn’t funny.

“I ought to rip him a new one,” Jodi muttered as she opened her front door. “Hear that, Harry?” she said to her empty apartment. “I ought to rip you a new one.”

Not that Harry was home yet. Harry worked as a bartender at the only gay club in town, and tonight he was on swing shift. Whether he could hear her or not, after a day spent swallowing the snappy come-backs she wanted to make to clueless customers whose IQ wasn’t much higher than the hot dogs they ate, muttering about Harry’s lack of humor sure as hell made her feel better.

Still, the envelope did look kind of authentic. Hmmm…

Jodi dropped her keys and the rest of the mail on the coffee table. It was all junk mail flyers and offers for credit cards neither one of them could afford, so it didn’t much matter where she left it. She plopped down on the couch she’d rescued from a secondhand store, slipped off her sensible, style-free shoes so she could stretch her toes into the carpet, and ripped open the envelope.

She skimmed through the introductory stuff. Dear Ms. blah-blah-blah I represent more blah-blah-blah bankrupt estate. The word assets caught Jodi’s eye, but the word that brought her up short was father.

What?

If this was Harry’s idea of a joke, it definitely wasn’t funny. He knew she had no sense of humor when it came to her family, or lack thereof.

She ended up reading The Letter three times in a row, each time with an ever-increasing shakiness in the pit of her stomach, not to mention a growing sense of unreality.

The Letter wasn’t the easiest thing to understand. Jodi had managed to finish high school-barely-but there had been no money left after her mother died for college. She made enough to pay rent and keep herself fed, but higher education was out of the question. The letter writer sounded like he had degrees up the wazoo and wrote to impress. Way out of Harry’s league. But Jodi did understand enough of the letter to realize that she’d been wrong. She wasn’t an orphan after all. She did have a father.

He was just frozen solid.

Billingsly, Wendham & Owens, attorneys at law, occupied the twelfth floor of a fourteen-story office building of gleaming chrome and glass. It took Jodi three buses and nearly an hour to get there, and if it hadn’t been for the letter in her purse, she would have turned around and gone home without even stepping inside.

Jodi didn’t know which was more intimidating-the building or the idea of meeting with an attorney. Even when her mother had died, there’d been no attorneys involved. Jodi’s mother hadn’t owned much of anything. Jodi just kept paying the rent on their small apartment until the memories became too much and she realized she could move somewhere else if she wanted to. She had no one left to tell her she couldn’t.

She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor with three other women, all dressed far better than Jodi could afford. She’d worn her best pair of jeans and the only semi-dressy blouse she owned. She clutched her small purse as if it might fly away and leave her any minute.

The elevator ride was swift and quiet. No one in the elevator looked at anyone else, not even covertly in the mirrored walls. The doors opened directly into a reception area with a black marbled floor and indirect lighting. Jodi had to concentrate to keep her voice from shaking as she gave the receptionist, a girl probably no older than Jodi, the name of the letter writer-Artemus Owens, Junior, Esq., whatever that meant.

The receptionist took Jodi into a conference room with dark walls, thick burgundy pile carpet, and the same indirect lighting. A huge, dark wood table with a top so polished it looked mirrored dominated the room. High-back, black leather chairs surrounded the table. Jodi felt like she was sinking in black tar when she sat down.

The room was probably meant to soothe clients with an impression of old money, like in some of the movies Jodi had seen, but all it did was remind her of the little chapel in the hospital where her mother had died. Only here the room smelled like stale coffee instead of burning candles.

Mr. Owens didn’t keep her waiting long. Jodi had been expecting someone old. Weren’t old guys the only ones who got their names on the letterhead and sat around in offices like this? Artemus Owens, Jr., looked like he was thirty-maybe-and he wasn’t even wearing a tie. He had dark hair and kind eyes and looked like he could have been a manager at one of the stores in the mall, only nicer. He even shook her hand like she was a grownup.

“I understand you’re here about the Cryonomics bankruptcy,” he said as he sat down. “What can I do for you?”

“About this letter.” Jodi pushed the letter toward him across the glassy surface of the conference table. “I don’t get it. Does this mean my father’s alive?”

Mr. Owens glanced at the letter, looked up at her. “Well, not exactly ‘alive’ in the accepted definition of the word. He’s been stored at the Cryonomics facility for the last ten years.”

Stored? That made her father-her father; god, how odd it was to even think that she actually had a father-sound like some unwanted piece of furniture locked away in a storage shed.

“I still don’t get it. What does ‘stored’ mean?”

Mr. Owens tented his fingers on the table in front of him. “You don’t know about any of this, do you?”

Jodi shook her head. At least his voice was kind. He didn’t make her feel like one of her high school teachers when she’d given a wrong answer in class. “I didn’t even know I had a father,” she said. Jodi’s mom had never mentioned him, not that she wanted to share that gem with a relative stranger.

Mr. Owens pushed a button on the phone and asked someone named Shirley to bring in two bottles of water. “And one of those Cryonomics brochures we have in the file.

“OK, it goes like this,” Mr. Owens said to Jodi. “Cryonics is the process of preserving people who are dying so that at some unknown time in the future they can be defrosted when technology exists to cure whatever’s wrong with them. Some call it science, others call it desperation. Cryonomics made a business out of it, although not very successfully, as it turned out. The specifics about the process and the company are in the brochure Shirley’s bringing in.”

Jodi actually knew a little bit about cryonics. She and Harry had Googled Cryonomics, and in turn cryonics, after he’d come home from work.

After she’d whacked him on the arm when he wouldn’t stop laughing.

After he’d realized the letter was serious.

“That’s…” Jodi shook her head. “That’s just science fiction. I mean, it was in one of those old television shows my mom used to watch. Nobody really believes that stuff, do they?”

“At the time Cryonomics filed for bankruptcy, they listed twenty-three individuals who’d submitted to the procedure. Your father was one of them.”

Twenty-three frozen corpsicles. And here Jodi thought religious cultists were gullible. Her father had done this? Why hadn’t her mother ever told her? Had she even known?

“I didn’t know,” Jodi said in a small voice.

The conference room door opened, and one of the women from the elevator brought in the water and a thick booklet. Mr. Owens pushed one of the bottles and the booklet across the table to Jodi along with his letter. She started to thank the secretary, but the woman had left the conference room as silently as she came.

“Do you have an attorney?” Mr. Owens asked her. His voice was still kind.

Jodi shook her head. “Do I need one?”

Not that she could afford to hire an attorney. Not on what she made frying corn dogs.

“You might want to look into it. I represent Cryonomics, so I can’t represent you. The reason I sent you this letter is to advise you that your father’s body, for lack of a better word, the trust fund he set up for its continuing care, and the machinery he’s stored in are considered assets. The bankruptcy court views Cryonomics as a high-tech mortuary, essentially. The bankruptcy trustee is going to require Cryonomics to liquidate its assets. Do you understand what that means?”

Jodi understood maybe one word in three. All of a sudden she felt like the dumbest kid in the class.

“Just tell me what I’m supposed to do,” she said.

Whether she’d do it or not… well, there was something to be said for not having a parent around-a living parent, anyway-to tell her what to do.

“I can’t tell you what to do,” he said. “That’s what you need an attorney for, to help you figure it out. But I will tell you this. Cryonomics is going out of business. Cryonomics has been storing your father’s body, but they’re not going to be able to do that anymore.”

He took a long drink out of his water bottle. Jodi wondered if he did that on purpose, to give her a chance to figure out what he meant. He didn’t have to. She got it. This time she knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“You’re going to have to figure it out on your own. What to do with your father. Before the court decides for you.”

“You mean they’d let him thaw?” Harry said. He shivered, only partly for effect. “That’s just disgusting.”

Jodi and Harry sat on the couch devouring a half-and-half pizza, Jodi’s side black olive and mushrooms, Harry’s side sausage and onions. They usually only had pizza once a month, but tonight made twice in one week. Jodi felt the emotional upset of finding out your father was a popsicle in a pressure-controlled tank was a sufficient reason for splurging.

The Cryonomics brochure lay open on the coffee table next to the pizza box. She’d studied it until she thought her brain might explode.

“I don’t know what to do,” Jodi said. “I mean, it’s my father, right? I can’t just let him die.”

“Technically, you know, he’s already dead.”

“He didn’t think so.”

“How can you know that?”

She pointed at the brochure. “Kind of obvious, Captain Oblivious. He must have bought into this whole idea.”

It still sounded like a scam to her. Paying someone to store your body in deep freeze after you died just on the off chance that you might be cured someday. Not that California wasn’t chock full of odd cults and scam artists ready to prey on the gullible, but this had to top everything Jodi had ever heard about.

Then there was that whole paying thing. As far as Jodi knew, her father had never paid one cent to help support her. Help pay her way through college. Help her get the hell out of Hot Dog on a Stick.

And another nasty thought-did he even know she existed?

How could she decide what to do with a complete stranger, even if they were related by blood? Not every father was a father. Hers certainly wasn’t. Did she really owe him any of this angsting over his future? If he even had a future?

“You could just walk away,” Harry said, like he’d read her thoughts.

Harry was weird like that sometimes, like he was the sorta-kinda brother she’d never had. Maybe when you didn’t have a family, you created one.

“But then there’s all that money,” Harry said, voicing the other nasty thought Jodi had been trying to ignore.

Trust fund, Mr. Owens had said.

Jodi might not know legal stuff, but she knew that trust fund meant money. Her father had set up a trust fund to keep himself frozen for as long as it took. That must mean a lot of money.

“I don’t think I could walk away from all that money if it was me,” Harry said.

Harry didn’t walk away from much, actually, but Jodi loved him anyway.

“It might not be anything,” Jodi said. “The company is going bankrupt. That means they’re not making any money. Maybe he didn’t leave enough.”

Harry ate another bite of pizza. “Only one way to find out,” he said around a mouthful of sausage.

Jodi put her piece of pizza back down in the box. “I’m not going back to that lawyer.” Mr. Owens might have been an okay guy, but she still felt like he’d talked down to her at the end, and she wasn’t about to go back.

“So don’t,” Harry said. “Listen. He told you the company listed the trust as an asset, right? Well, if it’s listed, that means it’s got to be part of the court’s records. All that stuff’s public record.”

Harry had dated a reporter for the local newspaper a few months ago. The guy had tried to impress Harry with how important his job was, but it turned out all he did was report births, deaths, court filings, and an occasional human interest story so dull it usually put Harry to sleep. But Harry had learned more about how the court system worked than Jodi ever would. What would it hurt to look? At least then she’d have some idea what, besides her father the popsicle, was at stake.

“You feel like driving me up there?” she asked.

Harry patted her on the arm. “That’s my good girl,” he said, and finished off the last of his slice of pizza.

Jodi just looked at hers.

My good girl.

Wasn’t that what a father was supposed to say?

The bankruptcy court was in one of the crumbling old buildings downtown, one complete with marble columns covered in decades of pigeon droppings, not that far from the law offices of Billingsly, Wendham & Owens. Jodi felt a little more self-assured this time venturing into the world populated by lawyers. Maybe because she had Harry with her, and he’d actually worn what he called his straight clothes-khaki slacks, a navy silk polo shirt, and freshly polished loafers. Nothing like blending in with the natives.

Jodi let Harry guide her through the maze of room after room of files and paperwork. Harry explained that most of the documents were on computer, but there was a per-page charge for even looking at the files online. This was supposed to save the court staff from wasting time dealing with paper files and the public. But Harry just had to flirt with one of the clerks, a pretty girl he had no interest in, to get her to bring the appropriate file for his “sister” to look at.

“Just one of my many useful bartending skills,” Harry whispered to Jodi after the clerk left with a little giggle.

It took a while for them to find the right document in the huge Cryonomics bankruptcy file. If Mr. Owens was getting paid by the word, he was making a mint on this case.

After forty-five minutes of diligent reading, Jodi finally saw the name that had been in Mr. Owens’s letter-Andrew Sommersby. Her father’s name. Jodi hadn’t even known his name until she read it in The Letter. Now here it was again in an official court document. Jodi’s last name was Carnahan. Her mother’s name.

“Wow,” Jodi said. “He’s really there.”

She realized that up until this moment, she’d still thought that this was some kind of big joke. But here it was, in the court’s own file. She didn’t think anyone played jokes with a court.

Her father’s name was on a chart with twenty-two other names. Each name listed a date of interment and next of kin. Jodi’s name wasn’t listed next to her father’s, but her mother’s was. Someone-maybe the clerk-had handwritten “deceased” next to her mother’s name.

“Have you found anything on the trust?” Harry asked.

Jodi shook her head. It had to be here somewhere, right?

Three pages later, Jodi found another chart, this one listing all the trusts. Twenty-three trusts, twenty-three frozen people. None of the trusts was named Sommersby. None of the trusts identified the person it supported. How was she supposed to tell what her father would have named his trust when she didn’t know anything at all about Andrew Sommersby?

Jodi scanned the list again, frustrated.

Next to her, Harry let out a low whistle. “My good God, will you look at that? he whispered.

She looked at the column Harry was pointing at, the one she’d been ignoring in her search for the right name. What she saw were rows of numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. Numbers with more zeros than Jodi had ever seen in her life.

She felt the blood drain out of her face.

Her father’s trust could be any one of the ones on this page. And any one of these trusts could fund not only four years of college, but probably graduate and post-graduate school too, not to mention a nice house and a car of her own.

Holy shit.

Did this mean she was rich?

Jodi dialed Artemus Owens’s phone number from a pay phone in the courthouse lobby. She tried to ignore the way her fingers trembled and her stomach clenched around the soda she’d had in Harry’s car.

Harry stood next to her, leaning in to listen.

“About this trust fund,” she said once Mr. Owens answered the phone. “Does it belong to Cryonomics?”

She heard Mr. Owens let out a deep breath. “That would depend on the terms of the trust document. You realize I can’t advise you.”

Jodi rubbed her forehead. She wished her hands would stop trembling. “I know that,” she said. “I just need to know whether the whole thing belongs to that company, or whether, you know-” She took her own deep breath. “-it might actually belong to me because he’s my father.”

There. She said it.

Harry gave her a little hug.

“Figured out how much is at stake, did you?” Mr. Owens asked. He didn’t sound upset. In fact, Jodi thought she could almost hear the smile in his voice.

“Yeah,” Jodi said. “So, does it?”

She heard a rustle of papers on the other end of the line, then the tapping of computer keys.

“Well, I can tell you this,” Mr. Owens said. “It’s public record, and you could probably have found out for yourself if you’d kept reading what you’ve obviously looked at. Cryonomics is only claiming income from the trust as an asset. In other words, the trust earns money, and that income is what the company’s been using to maintain your father. The figures are annual estimates, rounded to the nearest dollar.”

“Wait.” Jodi was having a hard time comprehending what he was saying. “What’s on the chart… that was only income?”

“Yes.”

Jodi dropped the phone. She thought Harry might have caught it before it hit the floor, but she couldn’t focus on that. All she could see were numbers followed by lots of zeros, and that wasn’t even the real number.

Her father must have been a millionaire. At least.

And he’d never provided anything for her mother, or for her.

She walked away from the phone, leaving Harry to deal with Mr. Owens. All of a sudden she was too angry to talk to anyone.

Her father had left her mother to deal with a life of penny-pinching and never having enough to make ends meet. A life of macaroni and cheese dinners, and coupon clipping, and keeping the heat at sixty in the winter just to save on the electric bill.

Jodi knew exactly what she wanted to do.

Let the bastard thaw.

“Calm down,” Harry said.

He’d run after her only to find her pacing by the side of his car.

“I want him to die,” Jodi said. Apparently too loudly and with way too much venom if the wary look she got from an older couple passing by on the street was any indication. “Do you know what he did to us? How we had to live? While he-what, dreamed about his nice little fantasy where he gets to be resurrected so he can ruin someone else’s life?”

Harry opened the car door and herded her inside. She jammed the seatbelt closed, then pounded her fist on the dashboard.

Harry glared at her as he got in the driver’s seat. “Just because you’ve found out your father, the popsicle, is a tightwad, that’s-”

“Corpse. He’s a corpse who doesn’t know it yet.”

“Okay. Have it your way. He’s a corpse. That still doesn’t mean you can take it out on my car.”

Jodi took a deep breath. Harry’s Mustang Cobra was his pride and joy. Most of his bartending tips went toward his car payments.

“Sorry,” Jodi muttered.

“Besides, he’s a rich corpse. And you’re his only next of kin, right?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. Or at least I’m the only one Mr. Owens could find. But I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Oh, honey, of course you do. Don’t be ridiculous. If you didn’t want the money, we wouldn’t have made this trip, would we?”

She picked at a hole in her jeans instead of answering. This wasn’t her best pair. It was her second-best pair, and they weren’t supposed to have holes in the legs.

Harry started up the car and pulled into traffic. Jodi sat quietly in the passenger seat trying not to think about anything at all. Couldn’t she just go back to the way things were a couple of days ago? At least then she’d been poor but not quite so angry about it. And she didn’t have such a big weight on her shoulders. No matter how angry she was at the former Mr. Andrew Sommersby, he still was her father, absent and irresponsible or not.

After a few minutes she looked out the window expecting to see familiar streets on the way back to their apartment. What she saw was an on-ramp to the interstate.

She turned toward Harry. “Where are we going?”

He glanced at her, then went back to watching the traffic.

“It’s your day off, right? Well, if you’re going to let him thaw, you might want to meet him first,” he said.

What?

“Sit back and enjoy the ride,” Harry said. “We’re going to Cryonomics.”

For a high-tech company, the Cryonomics building looked like little more than a standard warehouse with once-fancy landscaping and a snazzy front office. Jodi could see the resemblance to the lushly depicted building in the company’s brochure, but clearly impending bankruptcy had taken a toll on nonessentials. Like watering the lawn.

Or paying for staff.

One harried-looking middle-aged woman looked up from a desk piled high with paperwork when Jodi and Harry walked in the front door. Cardboard packing boxes with open lids surrounded her desk like a fort. She was in the process of shoving papers into a shredder.

“Lawyers frown on that sort of thing,” Harry said over the whine of the shredder.

“What?” The woman pushed up her glasses and turned the shredder off, then glanced at the papers in her hand. Understanding dawned on her face. “Oh, this stuff.” She waved it at them. “I don’t think we need to preserve the office football pool from 1998 for posterity. Amazing the amount of junk you collect over the years.”

She put the papers down on top of another stack on her desk. The woman looked sad, Jodi thought, like she was saying goodbye to an old friend. Jodi wondered if she was losing her job too. Probably, if the company was closing.

“Are you from the bankruptcy trustee’s office?” the woman asked. “I don’t have the final figures for you yet. The judge gave us until next month.

“No,” Jodi said. “I’m… uh…” How to say this. “I’m the daughter of one of your clients. Andrew Sommersby. Your attorney contacted me.”

The woman blinked, then she smiled. “I didn’t know Andrew had a daughter. I’m Willomina Hardy.”

“Jodi Carnahan. Rachel’s daughter.”

Willomina shook Jodi’s hand, and then Harry’s. “Excuse the mess,” she said. “You’re the first relative who’s come out to visit. Everyone else has just made arrangements through the mail, or through their lawyers.”

“Arrangements?” Jodi asked.

“For transfer of their loved ones to a new facility.” Willomina pushed at her glasses again. “That is what you’re here for, isn’t it? Have you found a new place for your father?”

Jodi shook her head. “I’m sorry, but…” She took a deep breath and started again. “I didn’t even know I had a father until two days ago.”

Willomina put a hand to her chest. The gesture seemed as old-fashioned as her name, and definitely out of place in a cryonics company. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Surely your mother told you.”

“Jodi’s mother passed away several years ago,” Harry said. “I don’t think she knew about this either.”

“Oh dear,” Willomina said again.

She stepped around the packing box fort to make her way to a file cabinet. The cabinet was locked. Willomina took a key from around her neck and unlocked it, opened the second file drawer, and took out a large file pocket.

“I’m sure your father put down your mother as next of kin,” Willomina said. She rummaged through the folder, found a slim manila file and opened it. She flipped to a page in the back, then nodded her head. “Yes, here it is. Next of kin-Rachel Carnahan. Relation… oh.” Willomina paused. “Ex-wife. How unusual.”

She spent a few more minutes looking through the file. Jodi stood next to Harry, arms wrapped around herself, and waited.

Now that she was here, Jodi was less sure about pulling the plug on her father. It was one thing to think about it miles away with anger to fuel her decision. It was something else again when faced with the reality of Willomina and her old-fashioned concern.

“Well,” Willomina finally said. “Your mother is listed not only as next of kin, but also co-beneficiary of his trust. You say she passed away?”

Jodi nodded.

“Were you appointed her executrix?” Willomina asked.

Jodi frowned. That sounded official. “I don’t understand.”

“The executrix of her estate, dear. Were you appointed executrix by the court?”

“We didn’t have anything. When she died, it was just her and me. No lawyers or courts.” Jodi felt small, like she’d felt when it first hit her she was alone in the world. “It was just us.”

“Oh, dear.”

Willomina took off her glasses. They hung off a chain around her neck, cushioned against her ample breasts.

“Well, I’m no expert at this, but I’d say your mother had quite a lot, actually, when she died. You might need to see a lawyer after all, dear.”

Another person telling her to get a lawyer. “And pay him with what?” Jodi asked, frustrated with the whole thing. “I don’t have any money!”

“That’s not exactly true.” Willomina took something else out of the file. “I can give you a copy of the trust document. Have your attorney contact us, and let us know what arrangements you’ll like made for your father.”

Jodi waited while Willomina made the copies. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To know?

But it wasn’t all she wanted.

“Can I see him?” Jodi asked, her voice soft, barely audible over the sound of the copier.

Willomina frowned at her. “You can’t really see him, dear. Our tanks don’t have viewing windows. We’ve always thought it was better if the family remembered their loved ones the way they were. It can be upsetting to see someone after they’ve been preserved.”

“But that’s just it. I never met him. I don’t have any memories of him.”

“You never…”

For a minute Jodi thought Willomina was going to say “oh dear” again, but she didn’t. Instead she reached into the folder and pulled out a video cassette tape.

“Then I think it’s about time you met your father, don’t you?”

The viewing room, as Willomina called it, was a small, private theater with four rows of plush seats and a screen only a little bigger than some of the new flat-screen televisions Jodi saw at the mall. Jodi sat alone in a seat in the back row. She’d asked Harry to stay with her, but he said she should meet her father by herself for the first time.

“Next viewing, I’m right there,” he said, and he’d gone out the door with Willomina, leaving Jodi alone with a remote control.

She took a deep breath of stale air. Heart pounding, she pushed Play.

The screen came alive with a shot of the Cryonomics logo, the same one Jodi had seen on the brochure, followed by a simple white on black title page with her father’s name-Andrew Sommersby.

And then there he was.

Jodi was amazed that he looked so young. On screen, he looked little older than Artemus Owens. Shouldn’t a father be old?

Andrew Sommersby had Jodi’s straight black hair, her thin face, and the same cleft in her chin boys had always teased her about. He had deep circles under his eyes, and his skin had a pallor to it. Jodi remembered what she’d read about cryonics-everyone who elected to undergo this process had an incurable illness. Her father had recorded this tape when he knew he was dying.

“Hello,” the Andrew on the tape said. “I’m Andrew Sommersby. I’m told I have to leave a video record of my wishes just in case someone wants to challenge my election to have myself cryonically preserved. So here’s the official part.”

He looked down at something, probably a printed form, and read what sounded like a canned statement. Kind of like how Jodi had recited the Pledge of Allegiance in school. She’d said it so many times the words lost their meaning.

“Now, that’s over,” Andrew said. He looked back up at the camera. “I can’t imagine anyone challenging my wishes. Rosie-”

Jodi’s breath caught in her throat. Her mother’s nickname had been Rosie.

“-you don’t even know I’m ill, do you, sweetheart?”

Andrew sighed on tape. It was such a forlorn sound, Jodi felt her chest grow tight. I’m not going to cry, she told herself. She never cried. Not anymore.

“I know you’ll never see this, but I want to explain a few things to you. Probably more for you than me, but you know how I am. Belt and suspenders, you used to say. Belt and suspenders. That’s probably what this is all about, when you get right down to it. Belt and suspenders in the age of technology.”

On screen Andrew coughed, a raspy, painful sound. He paused to take a drink of water.

“I wish you could see the future as I see it, Rosie dear, but that was another thing we disagreed on. You always saw the technology of the future as fiction. I saw it as science waiting to happen. Just think of it. All the things we read about, all the things we grew up watching on television together-they’re all just waiting to be invented! Can’t you feel it? Don’t you want to experience that? See it take shape and form and substance? I know I do, but then again, I’ve always been the dreamer too. Odd combination, a dreamer who’s a belt and suspenders guy. But I don’t deny I’m an odd duck in a world full of swans.

“I hope you’re happy in your life. I’ve done what you asked when we divorced. I’ve stayed away from you. I’ve tried to send you money, but you always send it back. You were a proud woman. Independent as hell, as passionate as a man could ever want.”

Jodi felt her cheeks blush. She wondered if she should watch any more of the tape. She almost felt like she was reading a love letter not meant for her. But her father’s next words took her breath away.

“I’ve stayed away from our daughter too, like you asked me. It’s the hardest thing I’ve even done, and there have been many times I’ve watched her and wanted so desperately to walk up to her and say ‘Hello, I’m your father,’ but I didn’t. I wanted to be a part of her life. I admit a part of me hates you for taking that away from me, but that’s how much I love you. You have always been the love of my life. My only regret-only regret-in doing this is that you won’t be there when I wake up. Maybe my daughter will be, with children of her own. I promise I won’t intrude on her life. But a man can want to live to see his grandchildren, don’t you think?”

Jodi felt tears prick at her eyes again. On screen, Andrew held his hands out wide.

“If I can’t have that,” he said, “what have I done all this for? I’ve amassed a fortune thanks to a bit of ingenuity and good luck, but without living to see my grandchildren, what really have I done?”

Andrew rubbed at his face with one unsteady hand. It took him a minute before he looked back at the camera.

“So here, in my own words, are my wishes. I believe the technology will exist one day, maybe one day soon, to revive me and cure me of the cancer that’s invaded my bones. I wish to live to see that day. I want to be around to buy my grandchild a balloon in the park, even if he never knows it was his grandpa, and maybe ride in a car that floats above the ground. I want to see my daughter grow into an old woman, see her happy and healthy and loved as much as I loved my Rosie. And if that’s not enough of a last will and testament, I don’t know what is.”

The camera held on Andrew’s face for a moment, and then the screen went black.

Jodi put her head in her hands and cried.

The new apartment was twice the size of Jodi’s old place. She missed Harry’s techno music and his dirty dishes in the sink. He still came over at least once a week, and they ordered half-and-half pizza for old time’s sake. Tonight Harry brought it with him, along with a six-pack of imported beer.

“We’re celebrating,” he said, hugging Jodi after he put the pizza on her new dining room table.

“It was just an A,” she said.

“An A in psychology,” Harry said. “When did you ever get an A in any ‘ology’ class?”

Never. Science had never been her strong suit, but she’d been unusually motivated the last six months. She had the rest of the year to go before she had to declare a major, but she was seriously leaning toward some sort of bachelor of science degree. She might even go to law school. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

“Picked up your mail,” Harry said, dropping it next to the pizza box. The latest issue of Popular Science landed on top.

These days Jodi read everything she could about life sciences, particularly any advances in nanotechnology. The people at the Institute for Cryonics told her the best chance for revival of cryonically preserved people was in the area of nanotechnology. Science fiction meets science fact. Given what she knew about her parents, that was about the best way to describe her life.

She’d taken Willomina’s advice. She’d left Cryonomics and made an appointment with a lawyer specializing in trusts, shown him the document Willomina had given her, and let him earn his $300 an hour figuring out a way to keep her father in his tank and let her have something of a life for herself.

Jodi’s lawyer had earned every bit of his hourly fee. Andrew Sommersby had been transferred to The Institute for Cryonic Research and Studies in southern California, a non-profit foundation, where he was still happily frozen as he wished. Jodi had enrolled in college and kissed Hot Dog on a Stick goodbye.

Harry opened two beers and handed one to Jodi. “What shall we toast to?” he asked.

Clinking bottles to an A seemed kind of lame. Even if it was an A in psychology.

“I’ve got it,” Jodi said.

She touched her bottle to Harry’s, the clink of glass loud in her new apartment.

“Here’s to giving a little boy a balloon,” she said. “And the look on my father’s face when he does it.”