I Was Here (10 page)

19

After the show, we crash at someone’s house. I share a room with a very pierced college
student named Lorraine, who’s pretty nice, even if she won’t shut up about the guys
in the band. Ben and the rest of the Scarps camp out on the couch or in the basement
in sleeping bags. The next morning, we all eat Dumpster-dived bagels and then load
up.

“Prepare yourself,” Ben says.

“For what?”

“The reek. Eight nights of travel. You’ll get a case of jock itch just sitting in
the van.”

The rest of the band eye me suspiciously. Do they know I’m the dead one-night-stand’s
friend?

I sit down on a makeshift bench of two-by-fours stacked on top of a couple of amps.
Ben sits next to me. We get onto I-90, and the guys bicker about what they should
listen to. No one says a word to me. When we stop for gas and the guys go load up
on junk food, I ask Ben what the deal is.

“I’m breaking the code.”

“What code?”

“No girls in the van.”

“Oh.”

“But you’re not a girl.” He looks embarrassed. “Not that kind anyway.”

“What kind am I?”

Ben shakes his head. “I’m not sure yet. A previously undiscovered species.”

I fall asleep somewhere outside of Moses Lake and wake up with a start, leaning against
Ben, my ears popping as we come down the Snoqualmie Pass.

“God, sorry.”

“That’s okay.” He’s smiling a little.

“Did I drool?”

“I’ll never tell.”

He keeps grinning.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s just, you broke your promise, about never sleeping in my vicinity.”

I jerk away from him. “Technically, I broke it last night, when I slept under the
same roof as you. Score yourself a point, Ben. It’s the only one you’re going to get
off me.”

His eyes flash, and for a second there’s that Ben, the asshole. I’m kind of glad to
have him back. But then he scoots a little away, muttering something.

“What was that?”

“You don’t have to bite my head off.”

“I’m sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?” My voice is laced with sarcasm, and I’m not
sure why I’m so pissed off all of a sudden.

Ben scoots farther away, and I’m surprised to realize that maybe I did hurt his feelings.

“Look, I’m sorry . . .” I begin. “I’m tired and kind of keyed up about all this.”

“It’s okay.”

“I don’t mean to be a dick.”

He smiles again.

“Now what?”

“Most girls wouldn’t describe themselves as dicks.”

“Would you prefer I call myself a cu—”

“Don’t,” Ben interrupts. “I fucking hate that word.”

“Really? Most guys I know seem to think it’s interchangeable for female.”

“Yeah. My father is one of those guys. Used to call my mother that. All the time.”

“That’s gross.”

“What’s gross is her putting up with it.”

For all of Tricia’s faults, and they are legion, she mostly leaves her boyfriend drama
out of the house. Guys never stay at our place. She goes to theirs. If they call her
foul names, at least I never have to hear them.

“Why’d she put up with it? Your mom?” I ask.

Ben shrugs. “She got pregnant with my brother when she was seventeen. Married my dad.
Had three more by the time she was twenty-three, so she was kind of stuck with him.
Meanwhile he’s out and about, carousing. He has two more kids by his girlfriend; it’s
an open secret. Everyone knows. Including my mom. But she still stayed married to
him. They only got a divorce when my dad’s girlfriend threatened to take him to court
for child support. Cheaper and easier to dump my mom and marry the girlfriend. He
knew my mom wasn’t the kind to sue.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It gets worse. Mom’s finally free of the bastard and we’re all older, a little independent.
Things seem to be going okay. And what’s she do? Goes and gets pregnant again.”

“How many are you?”

“My mom had five kids, four with my dad, one with her current douchebag. And my dad
has two others that I know of, but I’m pretty sure he has more. He believes birth
control is the woman’s responsibility.”

“You’re like the redneck Brady Bunch.”

“I know.” He laughs. “Only we didn’t have a housekeeper like what’s her name?”

“Alice,” I answer.

“Alice.” He smiles. “Ours would have to have a white-trash name, like Tiffani.”

“Or Cody.”

Ben looks perplexed. I remind him that I clean houses for a living.

His face actually flushes. “Sorry, I forgot. I meant no disrespect.”

“Oh, please, it’s a little late for that now,” I say, though I’m smiling and then
he is too.

“So what’s your story?” he asks.

“My story? You mean like my family?”

He raises his eyebrow, like he just bared all, and now it’s my turn.

“Not much to tell. It’s sort of like your story and the opposite of it. It’s just
me and my mother, Tricia. No dad.”

“Did they split up?”

“Never together. She refers to him as the sperm donor, though he wasn’t, obviously,
because that would’ve meant Tricia actually intended to have me.” Tricia has remained
uncharacteristically quiet about my father, and over the years I’ve suspected it’s
because he is married. I picture him sometimes, in a nice house, with a nice wife
and nice kids, and half the time I resent the hell out of him for it, but the other
half of the time, I sort of understand. It’s a good life, that. If I were him, I wouldn’t
want someone like me to fuck that up either.

“Tricia thinks she raised me on her own,” I continue, “but really, it was the Garcias
who raised me.”

“Meg’s family?”

“Yeah. They’re like a real family. Mom, Dad, two kids.” I pause to correct myself
but look at Ben and see I don’t have to. “Family dinners. Games of Scrabble. That
kind of stuff. Sometimes I think if I hadn’t met Meg, I never would’ve known what
a normal family was like.”

I stop. Because remembering all those times at the Garcias, watching movies on their
worn couch, making plays and forcing Scottie to act in them, staying up too late by
the dwindling fire on camping trips—all of that fills me with warmth.
But
. Always the
but
.

Ben is watching me, like he’s waiting for me to say something else.

“But if that’s what happens to normal, what hope is there for the rest of us?” I ask
him.

He shakes his head. Like he just doesn’t know either.

20

We get back to Ben’s house and he unpacks his stuff, and we both spend a half hour
shining a flashlight around the walls and watching Pete and Repeat chase the beam.
It’s possibly the most fun I’ve had in months.

Ben makes a list of the clubs that Meg most often hung out in. None of them will get
going until around eleven, and they’ll stay happening until four in the morning. We
pound shots of espresso at his neighborhood café before setting off in his Jetta.

The first club is that one in Fremont I met Ben at. He introduces me to a group of
groovy-looking girls in cute dresses and cool shoes—Meg people. They’re all about
a decade older, but that wouldn’t have stopped her. When Ben explains who I am, one
of the women embraces me in a spontaneous hug. Then she holds me at arm’s length and
says: “You’ll get through it. I know it seems like you won’t, but you will.” Without
asking anything more, I get that she, too, has been through this, has been left behind,
and it makes me feel less alone.

None of these women knows anything about Meg going to the health center; most didn’t
even know she went to college. If Meg didn’t tell them even this, chances are she
didn’t tell them about the Final Solution. I don’t bring it up.

We go to another club. We’re barely past the bouncer when a girl with blonde choppy
hair flings herself into Ben’s arms. “Where have you been?” she demands. “I’ve texted
you, like, a hundred times.”

Ben doesn’t hug her back, just sort of taps her uncomfortably on the shoulder, and
after a minute, she takes a few steps back, jutting her lip into a fake pout. Then
she spots me.

“Hey, Clem,” Ben says. He seems tired. “I’ve been on tour.”

“Tour, huh? That’s what you’re calling it now,” she says, still looking at me.

“Hey. I’m Cody.”

“Cody’s a friend of Meg’s,” Ben adds. “Did you know Meg Garcia?”

Clem swivels toward Ben now. “Seriously? Are you, like, organizing a sorority for
your castoffs? Can we, like, all wear matching outfits?” She rolls her eyes and pouts
for real now. Then she makes a disgusted
pff
sound before flouncing off, giving Ben the finger as she goes.

“Sorry about that,” Ben says. To his shoes.

“Why should you be sorry?”

“She was . . . It was a while ago . . .” he begins, but I wave my hands to stop him.

“You don’t have to explain anything to me.”

He starts to open his mouth as if to say more, but then he spots a guy with thick
horn-rimmed glasses and the most elaborate pompadour I’ve ever seen. He’s standing
with a girl with short bangs and bright red lipstick. “That’s Hidecki,” Ben says.
“He knew Meg pretty well.”

Ben introduces us and we talk for a bit, but neither Hidecki nor the girl he’s with
know anything about Meg or the health center. After a while, I run out of questions,
and Hidecki asks about the cats.

“You know about the cats?”

The girl he’s with tells me that Hidecki donated a hundred dollars to their rehabilitation
fund. “So he feels invested,” she says.

“A hundred dollars,” I say. “You must like cats.”

“I liked
Meg
,” he corrects. “She also saved me at least that much money when she fixed my amplifier.”

“She fixed your amp?”

He nods. “Swapped the volume pot and showed me how to do it. I was skeptical, but
she knew how to handle a soldering gun.”

“Yeah. She did,” I say. “And the cats are fine. Ben adopted them, actually.”

“Ben?” He gives Ben a look I wouldn’t exactly describe as friendly.

“Yeah. Even has pictures on his phone. Ben, show him your pictures.”

“Another time,” Ben says tersely. “We should hit some more clubs.”

We go to three more places. I meet all these people who knew Meg. Who miss Meg. But
no one knows about the health center. I get some names and email addresses of other
people she was friendly with. By four in the morning, we have no direct leads but
a bunch of contacts to follow up on. I’m so tired, my legs feel like they might collapse
from under me, and the whites of Ben’s eyes are redder than Stoner Richard’s after
a few bowls. I suggest we call it a night.

When we get back to his house, he leads me to his bedroom. I stop in the hallway outside
of it, like it’s radioactive in there. He looks at me. “You crash in here. I’ll sleep
on the couch.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take the couch,” I reply.

“It’s more comfortable here. And quiet.”

I wince. “Sorry, Ben, but there’s, like, a petri dish of half of Seattle’s female
population on your sheets.”

“It’s not like that, Cody.”

I scoff.
“Really?”

“Clem was a while—oh, forget it. I’ll just change the sheets for you.”

“I’m fine to take the couch.”

“Let me change the damn sheets, Cody.” I can’t blame him for being pissed. It is five
in the morning, and he did just come back from an eight-night tour of sleeping on
floors and in vans. But even so, he makes the bed, plumping the pillows and pulling
down the comforter in one corner so it looks all inviting.

I snuggle into the pillows. The cats scramble to the foot of the bed and tuck in there,
their nightly spot, I gather.

I hear Ben brush his teeth, and then I hear the floorboards creaking under his feet.
He stops in his doorway, and for a second I’m scared he’s going to come in and for
a second I’m scared I might want him to. But he just stands there.

“Good night, Cody.”

“Good night, Ben.”

x x x

I sleep until noon and wake up rested, the achiness I wear like a second skin gone.
When I go into the kitchen, Ben’s already up, drinking coffee and talking to his housemates,
whom he introduces me to. He’s eating a bowl of granola and offers me some.

“I can get it,” I say. I find a bowl from the drying rack and the granola from the
cupboard, and it’s weird how I’m making myself at home here.

Ben grins at me, like he recognizes the novelty of this, too, and then chats with
his housemates about the tour. They’re nice, not the rocker types I’d expected but
students and people with jobs. One of the guys grew up in a town about twenty miles
from where I live, and we lament the state of eastern Washington, stuck in some kind
of time warp, and question why, when you cross the Cascades, heading east, do people
start talking with southern accents?

The sun is out and Mount Rainier is lording it over the city, and it’s one of those
days that make you forget what happens here between October and April. After breakfast
Ben and I walk down the steps leading to the yard. Off to one side is a big bunch
of lumber, all covered with a tarp.

“What’s that?” I ask Ben.

He shrugs. “Just something I do in my multitude of spare time.”

I pull up the tarp. Under is the beginnings of some shelves, all clean sloping lines
like the ones up in the house. “You made these?” I ask.

He shrugs again.

“They’re really good.”

“Don’t sound so shocked.”

“Not shocked. More like mildly surprised.”

We sit down on the wooden steps and watch Pete and Repeat chase leaves and tackle
each other.

“They do know how to enjoy themselves,” he says.

“What? Wrestling?”

“Just being.”

“Maybe I should come back as a cat.”

He gives me a sidelong glance.

“Or a goldfish. Some dumb animal.”

“Hey,” he says, mock offended on Pete’s and Repeat’s behalf.

“Look how easy it is for them. What good is all of our intelligence if it makes us
crazy? I mean, other animals don’t kill themselves.”

He watches the cats, who have turned their attention to yanking on a fallen twig.
“We don’t know that for sure. Animals might not swallow poison, but maybe they stop
eating or separate from the herd, knowing it means they’ll be someone’s dinner that
way.”

“Maybe.” I point at the cats. “Still, I’d like to be carefree like that again. I’m
starting to doubt I ever was. Were you?”

Ben nods. “When I was little. After my dad left, before my mom hooked up and got pregnant
with my little sister. Me and my brothers used to go exploring. We’d go swim in the
river or build forts in the forest behind where we lived. It was like being Tom Sawyer.”

I look at Ben, trying to imagine him young and unburdened.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks. “You don’t think I’ve read
Tom Sawyer
?”

I laugh. It’s a strange sound, that.

“I’ve read
Huck Finn
, too. I am very intellectual.”

“I don’t know if you’re intellectual, but I know you’re smart. Meg would’ve had no
patience for you if you weren’t. No matter how pretty you are.” I feel myself blush
a little, and look away.

“You’re no stranger to pretty, Cody Reynolds,” he replies. “For a dick, that is.”

I turn back to look at him, and for a second I forget about everything. And then I
remember that I can’t forget. “So, I have to tell you something else.”

Ben’s eyes, they change, like a traffic light going from green to yellow.

“I found other things from Meg. Things she’d posted on this suicide support group.”

Ben cocks his head.

“It’s not that kind of support group.”

His eyes change again, from yellow to red.
Stop
. But I can’t stop.

“You should probably just read it. I brought a printout. It’s up in your room with
my stuff.”

I follow him upstairs in total silence, the warmth of the day replaced with a chill,
though the sun is still plenty strong. I pull out the big sheaf of papers. “You should
start at the beginning.”

I watch him read. And it’s like watching an avalanche. First a few drifts of blowing
snow, and then a wave of it, and then his entire face is collapsing. The sick feeling
comes back, magnified a hundred times over by what’s playing out all over his face.

When he puts down the last page, he stares up at me, and his expression, it’s awful.
It’s fury and guilt, which I can handle because I’m used to them, but also fear and
dread, which set off bombs in my gut. “Fuck!” he says.

“I know, right?” I say. “He had a hand in it. In her dying.”

But he doesn’t respond. Instead, he goes to his own laptop and brings it to the futon.
He opens up his email program and goes to Meg’s emails. He scrolls through them until
he finds the one he’s looking for. It was written two weeks before she died.

“Read,” he says in a ruined voice.

He points to midway through the screen.

I haven’t been coming to Seattle as much lately, as you’ve probably noticed, and I
have to admit that at first it was because I was feeling kind of low and awkward about
what went down between us. I still can’t believe I acted the way I did. But it’s not
like that anymore. Remember, a while back you told me to find someone else to talk
to? I have. A whole bunch of someones. Some incredibly intelligent people who have
a very contrarian way of looking at things, and you know how that’s always appealed
to me, going against the grain. I think it’s why I’ve always been drawn to music and
to bands and to things like that, but you guys don’t have the lock on rebellion. There
are so many avenues. There are so many ways to live, to define what living means for
you and you alone. We are so narrow in our thinking, and once you understand that,
once you decide to not abide by these artificial constraints, anything is possible
and you are so liberated. Anyhow, that is what I’ve been learning from this new community.
And they are really helping me. I have no doubt people will be surprised by the direction
I take, but that’s life in the punk rock world, right? Anyhow, I gotta run. I’ve got
a bus to catch.

I finish reading and look up. Ben is crouched on the corner of the futon. “She was
trying to tell me,” he says. “About her fucked-up suicide group. She was trying to
tell me.”

“You couldn’t have known from that.”

“She was trying to tell me,” Ben repeats. “In
all
those emails. She was trying to tell me. And I told her to leave me alone.” He slams
his fist into the wall. The plaster cracks. And then he does it again, and his knuckles
start to bleed.

“Ben. Stop it!” I leap over to his corner of the bed and grab his fists before he
can punch the wall a third time. “Stop it! It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.
It wasn’t your fault.”

I repeat the words that I wish someone would say to me, and then suddenly we are kissing.
I taste his grief and his need and his tears and my tears.

“Cody.”
He whispers my name. And it’s the tenderness of it that shocks me back to reality.

I leap off the bed. Cover my lips. Tuck in my shirt. “I have to go,” I say.

“Cody,” he repeats.

“I have to get home
now
. I have to work tomorrow morning.”

“Cody,” he implores.

But I’m out of the room, the door slamming behind me before he has a chance to say
my name again.