“You’re doing very well,” Penelope told Perry. She turned her screen toward him, just to indicate that her notes about him were positive. “We think we will keep you here just a few more days. Perhaps two nights.”

“And then that apartment is set up?”

“It is. Again, it’s small.”

“I remember. You’ve prepared me. You’re making me think it will be smaller than this room.”

“No, it will at least be larger than this.”

“Thank you. To you, and everyone else who has prepared something for me. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise.”

“Well, we don’t let anyone who is here walk out and just sleep outdoors,” she said.

“That’s changed, then. Good to hear.”

“And in fact we’ve learned something about that, about your assets. Well, two things. First, we have two more videos. They had been corrupted, and it has taken some time to restore them. But one is ready. And from the second one, we do know that Araceli left you a bank account. Which has earned interest for one hundred and twenty years.”

“Well. How about that. Is it – very large?”

“No. But it’s something. It’s about what I earn in a year. So you’ll have something for yourself. We would provide the basics for free, but you’ll be able to – ” she shrugged – “buy whatever clothes you want. That sort of thing.”

“Okay.”

“And now to the video. Are you ready?”

She pulled her screen wider and turned it toward him again.

The scene was white, but then resolved into two women, facing the camera. It was Jen and – another Jen. A younger one, still not quite as tall. It was actually Ara, of course.

“Hello Perry, we’re back,” Jen said. “We wanted to – record another of these.”

“Hi Daddy. I’m sixteen now.”

Ara smiled, and it struck Perry like a sunrise, like summer. She was radiant, just crushingly beautiful.

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My god, that’s what Jen must have been like at her age.

“I remember,” Ara continued, “that you seemed to talk about being sixteen as a threshold. You know, what with driving, high school, dating boys. All that. So I thought we should make another video. To let you know how I’m doing.”

She looked at her mother.

“She’s doing very well,” Jen said. “We are doing well. We have missed you so much. But . . . we move forward. We have to.

“We’re in the same house. Ara got into Maggie Walker.”

“I got in!” Ara repeated. Again, the beaming smile.

“She’s doing very well there, very busy. It’s nice that it's close, she’s there so often. And she should be driving soon, she has her permit.”

“And I’m on the field hockey team, varsity now. I picked it up three years ago. It’s really fun, and two of my friends are on the team.”

She kept smiling. Both of them looked so good: Ara in jeans and a white shirt, with Jen very sleek in black pants with a black jacket.

“Your job,” Jen said, quietly.

“What?”

“Tell him about your job.”

“Oh yeah! I’m working at the blue market! Where you used to take me! Shields! I saw they needed someone, so I’m there a couple times each week, in the evenings.”

“Ellison is still with us,” Jen said. “He hops all over. I’m afraid poor Whistler passed away, though. Just last year. He had a good long life.”

“I guess I should do something with his cage,” Ara said.

“We still have it,” Jen said. “She took it out of her room, but it’s in the basement still. We should give it to someone who needs it.”

They continued to talk to the camera, and each other, telling him of his parents, and Jen’s; a new nephew; bad weather. Jen spoke easily, but he couldn’t help feeling that, again with this video, as he had felt with the first, the idea to make it had been more Ara’s than hers. There was something in her eyes as she looked at the camera; or, more accurately, something missing from her eyes.

He had to wonder if she was seeing someone else. She was not old, and he couldn’t imagine she would spend the rest of her life alone.

“And I hope,” he said to himself, “I wasn’t one of those husbands who puts the wife off long-term relationships forever.”

But he couldn’t be sure how she felt, what exactly she was thinking. Sitting for a camera was never Jen’s thing, and he knew it must have been tiresome for her; especially now as a busy single parent who couldn’t be sure he would ever see this. She had to assume that the odds were strong that he never would.

And times of transition were always hard on a relationship, he knew; when one or the other had been away for some time. And this was the hardest time of transition known to any relationship in history. Jen was a pioneer as much as he was.

*

Ara spoke:

“Goodbye, Daddy. I miss you so much. I hope we can see you soon. I know we may not, but – I have to hope. I think about you every day. I wish we could just stop time until you’re better.”

“Goodbye for now, Perry,” Jen said. “We’re still waiting and hoping. I love you.” And with those final words, her last look into the camera before the screen turned white again, he saw her old eyes, and the connection he knew.