GriefBot

Two weeks after she died, Clarisse arrived at our doorstep in a cardboard box.

My dad was the one who brought her into the living room, while my mother reached into her curly hair and pulled out a bobby pin to rip the tape open, since getting scissors would require too much time, apparently. And before I could ask what they’d ordered, and why the box was so big, the flaps had been opened and there she was.

It looked nothing like my sister. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, at first. An assorted bundle of delicate-looking metal pieces was nestled inside, amongst plastic baggies of plastic and screws.

For a split second I thought maybe they’d bought me a present, which would have been odd, because no elaborate gift could soothe the loss of Clarisse. Flowers were nice. Understated. A small, meaningful gesture. Especially yellow ones, like the buttercups she once liked to yank out of the ground when we went outside to play.

But this wasn’t a bouquet of flowers.

“Angie,” my mother said, extending a thin arm. “Come see.”

I didn’t move. Dad was already taking the bundle out of the box, fiddling with its intricate pieces with ginger fingers. Not at all the way he would handle any other contraption. Clarisse and I had helped him put tons of machines together, everything from bookshelves to lawn mowers, and I’d never seen him so gentle with screw and metal.

“Dad,” I said. My voice crackled in my throat. Betrayed the dread I felt. “What is that?”

“She’s here for us,” he said, clicking a couple smooth plastic armour-looking pieces together over the metal core of the contraption’s body. “For you, honey.”

I stood and watched as he assembled a tiny metal skeleton the size of Clarisse.

When he was finished, he pressed a circle in its chest. Right over where the heart would have been, if it really was my little sister.

The illusion of skin and clothes immediately enveloped the light frame, and then I knew exactly who it was supposed to be. Lying across the living room floor, four feet tall, with sun-kissed skin and a blue romper, was the spitting image of my dead sister.

Golden-red hair curled across the rug, over her neck, so real that I was afraid at the thought of touching it, running my fingers through it.

Her cheeks were pink. Her ears were pierced. Her eyes were closed.

My breath was stuck in my lungs. It couldn’t escape. Or wouldn’t.

“Hello, Clarisse,” my mother said in a soft, broken tone. For a second I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but when I realized my stomach dropped.

The figure on the floor opened its eyes. And then, light and graceful, as though it had no metal skeleton to speak of, the girl sat up, curling her feet beneath her. “Hello,” it said, in my sister’s lilting voice.

Oh, no.

Why it took me so long to realize it, I might never know. Hadn’t I expected it? The delivery, the assembly? The soft glow of its skin, the tangles in its hair?

Grief Bot.

My friend had one, my friend Marsha. Her grandmother. I’d actually believed she was a real live human up until a year ago, when Marsha pulled me aside and told me to stop asking about her grandma’s birthday whenever I visited for lunch.

Her grandma didn’t have a birthday. She wasn’t born. She didn’t age. She had a metal skeleton and no soul.

Marsha’s grandmother had been the same for eleven years, ever since her granddaughter was a baby, ever since I was toddling around in diapers.

And now? Was that this figure’s destiny? To stay forever golden and young?

Forever in my house?

“Angie?”

I heard the voice and my mind came snapping back to earth. “What?”

“Did you hear me?”

It was her voice. Her voice.

I shuddered.

“I’m GriefBot.”

I swallowed. “I know.”

“I’m here to make the journey of loss easier on you,” the robot said, using words Clarisse never would have used. Phrases she would have never strung together.

But those eyes. Those were my sister’s eyes.

The robot reached out its hand, grazed its fingers against my cheek, and I felt my sister’s touch. Not the cold, smooth feel of plastic or metal, but the soft warmth of her fingertips.

I loved it.

But I hated it, too. This hunk of plastic and metal, masquerading as my flesh and blood.

“Whatever you feel is okay.” The robot withdrew its hand from my face. “Grief isn’t one emotion,” it said sweetly. “You may feel sad. Or disgusted. Confused. Even relieved. Whatever you’re experiencing, it’s okay.”

Suddenly I wanted to be alone in my room, hidden under the covers of my bed, where I could sob in peace. Away from my parent’s eyes, away from my friends who had been trying to call on me for a week now, away from this horrific phantom sitting in my living room.

But I couldn’t break down. Not in front of Mom and Dad. Not here. So I nodded, and at the next possible chance I excused myself for the bathroom. And I sat there for a while, on the rim of the tub, willing the tears not to fall.

They showed the robot her room.

Clarisse’s room.

And they showed the robot Clarisse’s pajamas, the matching set with blue flowers on it and holes in the knees. And at 8 o’clock, they tucked the robot in Clarisse’s bed, and closed Clarisse’s door.

That night, nestled deep in my blankets, fighting off that awful burning feeling in my throat, I had to wonder why.

Over dinner, while the robot recharged on the sofa, we’d had an agonizing conversation about what a GriefBot is. Why it would be helpful for us as a grieving family. Or, really, three-fourths of a family.

How, if we wanted, we could tell GriefBot the things we wish we’d told Clarisse. If we wanted to say goodbye, we could. If we wanted to take her to the playground again, we could.

Really, GriefBot would ease our feelings. Take away the pain, the regret. The grief.

Of course, that’s not what Dad said, exactly, but that’s what he meant, and I knew it.

But I still didn’t understand. This thing sleeping in my sister’s bed–it wasn’t her. No matter what I told her, I would never be talking to Clarisse. I would never hear her laugh again, no matter how many times I could make the robot giggle.

Things only got worse from that day on. Every day, the robot would wake up, emerge from Clarisse’s room, sit down with us at breakfast. It wouldn’t eat–that was about the only thing it couldn’t do–but when the clock struck 8:00, it would grab my sister’s backpack and stand with me at the bus stop.

The stupid thing went to school.

But that was normal, I reminded myself, pulling on my sweater, thinking of Marsha’s grandma and avoiding the robot’s gaze as we stood alone on the sidewalk.

We were early for the bus. A dull haze coated the street. Fitting weather for the occasion.

The GriefBot wasn’t just for us, as it turned out. The other students, the teachers–they could also talk with it. Hug it. Run around with it during recess.

And that was normal. What the robot was for.

“You’re so quiet.” The voice broke through the fog.

I didn’t reply.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

By it, I was sure the robot meant Clarisse. What else could it be referencing? But I bristled. “Talk about what?”

A silence.

The robot shifted back and forth on its feet, like Clarisse would have. “You could tell me about her.”

“My sister?”

The robot nodded. Slowly.

I bit my tongue. “Why?”

It dropped its eyes–Clarisse’s eyes–to the pavement, as though it was feeling sheepish. Shy.

Maybe it was. Did robots have feelings?

“Why not?”

No one had asked me to do that. Talk about Clarisse. What she’d liked, or hadn’t liked. Who she had been.

I swallowed again.

“Well,” I started, and before I knew it everything was spilling out, all the silly stories of her, how she was obsessed with pink, and how she broke her arm falling from a swingset, and how on the same swingset we would play scissors and dodge one another as we swung with our friends, and how she took some scissors once and chopped off a lop of her pretty golden-red hair, and how her cheeks would get really red when she was mad and I would tease her for it and that would make her face even brighter. And how she loved yellow flowers, and the buttercups that grew in the meadow down the street, the meadow where we would go to play, and when we came home we would always have to check for ticks because of the tall grass, where all kinds of bugs and animals made their home.

“She loved the meadow?” the robot asked.

“She loved the meadow.” I adjusted my backpack, looking away. No tears. “I’ll take you. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“After school.”

The school day passed like it always did. Long and slow. The lessons drifted past me, never sitting in my brain the way they had when I could walk home to a warm homemade dinner, with my sister trailing behind me on the sidewalk.

GriefBot didn’t trail. She–it–walked at a steady pace, energetic on its little legs. Right beside me. Never leaving my side.

That night, after Mom and Dad tucked it into Clarisse’s bed, I crept out of my room. Across the hall. Pushed open the bedroom door, and light fell in an arrow across the floor into the pink room I hadn’t entered since my sister had left.

“Angie?” a hushed voice said.

“Yeah. It’s me.”

“What are you doing?” The robot sat up, wiping sleep from its eyes, though robots don’t need sleep. Or did they?

“Watch,” I said, pulling Clarisse’s desk over from the wall. “Be quiet, and pass me that blanket.”

“You should be asleep.”

“Be quiet and I’ll tell you about my sister.”

That shut it up real quick. The robot tossed the blanket and I folded it over the desk, shoving books on top so it didn’t slip off. “Look,” I said. “A tent.”

“Oh.”

It was confused. “Clarisse and me did this a lot.”

“Oh,” and my sister’s face brightened in the dim light. “I love it.”

I pulled her under and we sat in the dark for a long time, wrapped up in bedcovers, snug under the cover of night. In whispers we spoke of the girl whose eyes sparkled in front of me, whose lips mumbled questions in quiet words, whose brows furrowed when I confessed that I didn’t know what my last words to Clarisse had been. I just couldn’t remember.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I said. And then we agreed to go to sleep, and I crawled out of the tent and into the lonely, heavy darkness of my own bedroom, forgetting for a time that it was not Clarisse in the room across the hall.

The next day, after we climbed off the bus, and I noticed the stares from a couple of the younger kids from Clarisse’s class, we didn’t head home. We walked past it, without stopping, and my pace quickened as we neared it.

The meadow.

It was exceptionally beautiful today. The tall grass rolled in the wind, daisy heads dipping in the breeze like ships in a green sea. The dirt was soft under my shoes, so I bent and took them off to feel the squishy goodness of the soil. “Here, you try it,” I said to GriefBot, and it unbuttoned its little mary janes and dipped its toes in the earth.

And it smiled with Clarisse’s crooked teeth.

I showed it the pond where we would sneak around trying to spot bullfrogs before they leapt into the depths. I showed it the lily pads and the buds getting ready to bloom, and the mud lacing the edge of the water, and the ripples that distorted our faces. The tadpoles that clustered on the bottom of the pond until you poked a finger in and they scattered.

“Try to catch one,” I found myself laughing, for the first time in ages, as the robot marveled. “Come on, watch!” I demonstrated, cupping my hands and splashing into the water. “Look, I got one! He’s so tiny.”

GriefBot bent over to look at the little creature swimming in my hands, and it watched for a minute before I saw its eyes move elsewhere, to something behind me. Without a word it got up, skirt rustling, and walked away.

“Hey, where are you going?” I turned to watch as it wandered further into the meadow. I dumped the tadpole back into the water before leaping up to follow. “Wait up!”

I jogged up to meet the robot, the smile fading from my lips. It had been short-lived anyway. “What are you doing?”

It was standing still. Then it bent over and plucked something from the ground, before turning to face me.

There, in Clarisse’s hand, was a yellow flower.

“She liked these,” GriefBot said.

Standing there, in the late daylight, in that blue dress and with bare feet, I forgot to remember that my sister was dead. That she would never wake up. That I would never hear her voice or her laugh again.

Because here she was, standing before me, small and innocent and only eight years old. With a whole life ahead of her, a life longer than either of us could imagine, because we were both only kids.

And then it hit me again like a truck. Clarisse was dead.

“I know why you’re here,” I said suddenly.

She looked up. Clarisse looked up at me. “What?”

“You’re not here to help me. Or my parents. Or all those kids in your class.”

Clarisse’s brow furrowed.

“My parents brought you here so they could pretend their daughter’s still alive. That Clarisse is still alive. But you’re not my sister,” I said. Something hot and ugly was rising up in my throat, faster than I could suppress it, shove it down and back into the pit of my belly. My vision was blurry, the yellow flower in the robot’s hand only a blob of color. “You’re nothing like her. You’ll never be!”

They thought they could replace her. My sister. With a lifeless, soulless, ghost of a being. “Who are you?” I shouted at it, and it flinched.

“I’m not anyone,” it whispered. “You’re right, Angie. I’m not your sister. You’re upset because I’m not your sister.”

“No. I’m upset because you’re trying to be!” The tears were streaming down my face, burning trails down my cheeks and salting my lips. “How can we grieve for her if we can’t admit that she ever died?”

That pathetic flower was still clutched in the robot’s hand.

“You’re not helping us,” I cried. “You’re making it worse–so much worse.”

A single tear dripped down the robot’s face. Clarisse's face.

Suddenly I was clutching my sister’s body in my arms, wrapping her in the embrace I wish I could have given her before she left the house and never came back home. Squeezing her tight to my chest, burying my face in her glowing golden-red hair, running my fingers through its tangles though I knew it wasn’t really her. And the robot was crying, too, soft tears like Clarisse’s, clutching my arms with her soft warm hands, and though I still didn’t know if its emotions were real or if it was all just a performance, a program of some kind, I just sat and cried with it.

And when my tears had dried, and we were left holding each other in the evening glow, I pulled her gently off me and looked into my sister’s blue eyes for one last time.

“I miss her,” I said.

“I know you do.” It sniffled.

“You can’t help anymore.”

“I know.” It offered me the now-crumpled flower.

I took it in my hand, savoring its feel. Its velvety broken petals and its prickly stem. “Thank you,” I said.

Then I placed my hand over the robot’s chest, where its heart would have been had it really been my sister, and pressed the button.

The skin and clothes and illusion of my sister melted away, gone, leaving only a thin skeleton of plastic and metal.

I laid it across the grass, next to the pond, where the reeds grew tall and thick and the robot could rest in peace.

And I left it there, because no matter what my parents would say, or whether the kids in Clarisse’s class would be alarmed, I could cry now. My house was no longer haunted.

My sister was dead, but I didn’t need a fake one to ease my grief.

So I left the robot’s frame in the tall grass, where it could melt into the earth, where no one would find it and try to resurrect and tarnish the memory of Clarisse.