I Was Here (5 page)

I take my drink to the empty porch. But when I get there, I see the porch isn’t empty
and I stop so suddenly, the drink sloshes out of the cup and onto my shirt.

He’s smoking a cigarette, the cherry of it burning menacingly in the dim, gray twilight.

I don’t know what surprises me most: that an email I sent actually had an impact.
Or that he looks like he wants to kill me.

I don’t give him the chance. I put my drink down on the porch railing and turn around
and go upstairs, trying to take them slowly, trying to act calm. He’s here for the
shirt, so I’ll get him the shirt. Throw it in his face and get him the hell out of
here.

I hear the sound of crunching gravel and then I hear him on the stairs behind me,
and I’m not sure what to do, because if I call out for help then I look weak, but
I saw that look in his eyes. It’s like he not only got my email but he got my hatred,
too, and now it’s cycling back to me.

I go into Meg’s room. His T-shirt sits on top of one of the piles where I left it.
He’s followed me upstairs and is standing in her doorway. I hurl the shirt at him.
I want him, every part of him, out of my space. But he just stands there. The shirt
bounces off him and falls to the floor.

“What the fuck?” he asks.

“What? You wanted your shirt; there’s your shirt.”

“What kind of person does that?”

“What did I do? You said you wanted your T-shirt—”

“Oh, cut the crap, Cody,” he interrupts. And it’s so startling to hear him say my
name. Not
Cowgirl Cody
in his stupid flirtatious growl. But my name, plain, naked. “You sent me an email
from a dead girl. Are you cruel? Or are you also some kind of crazy?”

“You wanted your T-shirt back,” I repeat, but now I’m scared, so it loses some of
its conviction.

He glares at me. His eyes are a whole different color here, in the pale light of Meg’s
room. And then I remember Meg’s last email.
You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
And the anger comes back.

“Couldn’t you let her have a souvenir?” I ask. “Maybe you should do that, with the
number of girls you probably screw. Hand out a commemorative T-shirt. But asking for
it back? Now that’s classy.”

“You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So enlighten me.” There’s an edge of desperation in my voice. Because he’s right.
I don’t know what I’m talking about. Maybe if I’d known, if I’d been more clued in
these last few months, we wouldn’t be standing here.

He stares at me like I am something putrid. And I can’t believe that this is the same
smarmy flirt from last night.

“What happened?” I ask. “Did you get bored with her? Is that what happens with you
and girls? It’s a failure of imagination, because if you had gotten to know her at
all, you would never have gotten tired of her. I mean, she was Meg Garcia, and who
the hell are you, Ben McCallister, to tell
her
to leave
you
alone?” My voice threatens to crack but I won’t let it. There will be time to lose
it later. There’s always time to lose it later.

Ben’s face changes now. Ice crystals form. “How do you know what I told her?”

“I saw your email:
Meg, you have to leave me alone
.” It sounded cruel before. But now, coming from me, it just sounds pitiful.

His face is pure annihilation. “I don’t know what’s more disgusting: reading a dead
girl’s email, or writing from a dead girl’s email.”

“Takes disgusting to know disgusting,” I say, now a third grader.

He looks at me, shaking his head. And then he leaves, his precious T-shirt a sad forgotten
rag on the floor.

7

It takes about an hour after Ben leaves for me to calm down. And another hour after
that to get the nerve to turn Meg’s laptop back on. Ben was right about one thing:
I didn’t really know what I was talking about. The way he said that suggested
Meg
had done something to deserve his assholishness. I know Meg. And I know guys like
Ben. I’ve seen enough of them go through Tricia over the years.

I open Meg’s email program again and go into her sent folder, but all I see are the
earlier emails, the ones from November: her side of the flirtation, stuff about which
musician wrote the best songs, who was the best drummer, which band was the most overhyped,
underhyped. And then, before the holidays, it all abruptly stops. It doesn’t take
a genius to see what happened: They slept together. Then he tossed Meg aside.

But what’s less clear is this hole in Meg’s messages. I know we didn’t correspond
much in the winter, but I’m pretty sure she wrote me some emails. I log onto my webmail
program just to be sure I didn’t imagine it, and while January is kind of a blank,
there are messages from February from her in my inbox. But those messages aren’t showing
up in her sent folder.

That’s weird. Did her computer have some sort of virus that ate several weeks of messages?
Or did she move her messages somewhere? I start looking through her other applications,
not sure what I’m looking for. I open up her calendar, but it’s empty. I check the
trash, thinking maybe the deleted files will be there. There’s a bunch of stuff there,
but most of what I open is gibberish. There’s one untitled folder. I try to open it,
but the computer says I can’t open it in the trash. I drag the folder to the desktop
and try again, but this time, I get a message that the file is encrypted. I’m afraid
it might have some virus that’ll fry her computer, so I drag it back to the trash.

It’s only nine thirty and I have not eaten, yet again, and I’m thirsty but don’t feel
like going back downstairs. So I take off my clothes and lie down in Meg’s haunted
bed, and right now the sheets smelling like her are kind of what I need. I know that
by sleeping here, I’ll mingle my smell with hers, lessen hers, but somehow that doesn’t
matter. That’s the way it always was before, anyhow.

8

I wake the next morning to a gentle rapping at my door. Bright sunlight is coming
through the open shade. I sit up in the bed; my head is full of sand.

There’s more knocking.

“Come in.” My voice is a croak.

Alice is standing there, another mug of coffee in her hand, harvested by hand by Nicaraguan
dwarves, no doubt.

I rub my eyes, accept the coffee with a grunt of gratitude. “What time is it?”

“It’s noon.”

“Noon? I slept, like, fourteen hours.”

“I know.” She looks around the room. “Maybe it wasn’t Meg. Maybe this room is like
that field of poppies in
The Wizard of Oz
and has a soporific effect.”

“What do you mean?”

“She slept an awful lot. Like, all the time. If she wasn’t hanging out with her ‘cool
Seattle friends’”—she makes air quotes here—“then she was sleeping.”

“Meg likes—liked—to sleep a lot. She ran at such high octane. She needed the sleep
to rejuvenate.”

Alice looks skeptical. “I never met a person who slept as much as that.”

“Also, she had mono in tenth grade,” I explain, and as soon as I say it, I remember
how awful that year was. Meg was out of school as much as she was in it; whole months
she had to do independent study because she was so laid flat.

“Mono?” Alice asks. “Why would that make her tired still?”

“She had a really bad case of it,” I reply, remembering how the Garcias wouldn’t let
me come over and see her, in case I caught it too.

“Sounds more like Epstein-Barr or something.” She sits down on the edge of her bed.
“I didn’t know that about her. I didn’t get to know her very well.”

“You only moved in a few months ago.”

She shrugs. “I know the others. And I don’t think they got to know her either. She
was a little standoffish.”

If Meg loved you, she loved you, and if she didn’t . . .The girl didn’t suffer fools.
“You just have to try to get to know her.”

“I
did
,” Alice insists.

“You can’t have tried that hard. I mean, there couldn’t have been a wellspring of
love to have put that album cover up on the door.”

Alice’s Bambi eyes fill with tears. “
We
didn’t put that up. She did. And we were told not to take anything down.”

Meg
put the cover up. I’m sure the suicide experts would call
that
a warning sign, a call for help, but it’s hard not to see Meg’s twisted sense of
humor in it somehow. A final calling card. “Oh,” I say. “That actually makes sense.”

“It does?” Alice asks. “It seemed so morbid to me. But like I said, I didn’t know
much about her. I’ve probably spent more time with you than I did with her,” she says
wistfully.

“I wish I could say you weren’t missing much, but you were.”

“Tell me about her. What was she like?”

“What was she like?”

Alice nods.

“She was like . . .” I open my arms to show bigness, the possibilities being endless.
I’m not sure if this describes Meg, or how I always felt when I was around her.

Alice looks so beseeching. So I tell her more. I tell her about the time Meg and I
got seasonal jobs as telemarketers—the most boring job in the world—and to keep us
entertained, Meg did all these different voices for the calls. She wound up doing
so well with her voices and selling so much of the crap that she surpassed her daily
quota and kept getting sent home early.

I tell her about the time our local library’s budget got slashed so badly that it
could only open three days a week, which was a major drag for me because when I wasn’t
at the Garcias’, I practically lived at the place. Meg didn’t use the library nearly
as much as me, but that didn’t stop her from going on a mission to stop the closures.
She finagled one of those moderately known, now hugely famous, bands she’d become
friendly with from her blog to play a Kill Rock Stars, Not Books benefit concert,
which brought people from all over the place to our town and raised some twelve thousand
dollars, which was great. But because the band was already well known, and Meg was
such an attractive poster child, we wound up getting all this national press, and
the library was shamed into
extending
its hours.

I tell her about when Scottie, always a picky eater, got so bad that he became anemic.
The doctors said he had to eat more iron-rich food, and Sue was beside herself because
the kid would not eat healthy, no matter what. But Meg knew Scottie was obsessed with
tractors, so she went on eBay and found these tractor-shaped food molds and mashed
up potatoes and meat and spinach and put it all in a tractor mold and Scottie gobbled
it up.

Then there was the time Tricia and I had the world’s worst fight and I ran away to
find my dad, even though Tricia claimed he’d moved away years ago. I got as far as
Moses Lake before I ran out of money and courage, and just as I was about to start
blubbering and lose my shit, Meg and Joe pulled up. They’d been trailing my bus the
whole time. But I don’t tell Alice about that. Because that’s the kind of story you
share with a good friend. And I’ve only ever had one of those.

“So that was Meg,” I say, finishing up. “She could do anything. Solve anything for
anyone.”

Alice pauses, digesting that. “Except for herself.”

9

The latest Megan Luisa Garcia Funeral Show is being held at a small promontory down
on the Sound. A guitar player and a violinist play that Joan Osborne song “Lumina.”
Someone reads some Kahlil Gibran. The crowd isn’t huge, about twenty people, and everyone’s
wearing their regular clothes. The guy running the show is from the campus counseling
center but, thankfully, he doesn’t turn the whole thing into a suicide-prevention
public- service announcement, bulleting all the different warning signs that we all
so clearly missed. He talks about despair, how it thrives in silence. It’s one of
the things that drive people like Meg to do what they did and in the aftermath, the
despair that she left behind—even for people who may not have known her—has to be
honored and felt.

Then he looks out at the assembled group, and even though I’ve never met him, and
even though I’m sitting off to the side next to Alice, and even though it was only
begrudgingly that I agreed to go to this thing because I felt bad about accusing Alice
of putting up that Poison Idea cover, his eyes stop on me.

“I know a lot of us are struggling to make sense of this. That we didn’t know Meg
well might make the burden less, but it makes the processing hard. I’m told we have
her good friend Cody present, who I imagine is also grappling with this.”

I shoot dagger eyes at Alice because clearly she outed me, but she returns my gaze
with a level stare.

The guy up front continues: “Cody, I’d like to invite you to share, if you’d like,
anything about Meg. Or share what it is that you’re going through.”

“I’m not going up there,” I whisper to Alice through gritted teeth.

She stares at me, all wide-eyed innocence. “What you told me before was so helpful.
I thought maybe it would help other people too. And you.”

Everyone else is now staring at me. I want to kill Alice, who’s nudging me up. “Just
tell them about the library, about the food for her brother,” she whispers.

But when I get up there, what comes out isn’t cute stories about libraries or bands
or picky eaters.

“You want me to tell you something about Meg?” I ask. It’s a rhetorical question,
and my voice is pure sarcasm, but all those innocent lambs bob their heads encouragingly.

“Meg was my best friend, and I thought we were everything to each other. I thought
we told each other everything. But it turns out, I didn’t know her at all.” I taste
something hard and metallic. It’s an ugly flavor, but I savor it, the way you relish
the taste of your own blood when you have a loose tooth. “I didn’t know anything about
her life here. I didn’t know about her classes. I didn’t know about her roommates.
I didn’t know that she’d adopted two sick kittens and nursed them back to health only
to leave them homeless. I didn’t know that she went to clubs in Seattle and had friends
up there and crushes on guys who broke her heart. I was supposedly her best friend
and I didn’t know any of this because she didn’t tell me.

“She didn’t tell me that she found life to be so unbearably painful. I mean, I didn’t
even have a clue.” A kind of laugh escapes, and I know that if I’m not very careful,
what follows will be something I don’t want to hear, that no one wants to hear. “How
can you not know that about your best friend? Even if she doesn’t tell you, how can
you not know? How can you believe someone to be beautiful and amazing and just about
the most magical person you’ve ever known, when it turns out she was in such pain
that she had to drink poison that robbed her cells of oxygen until her heart had no
choice but to stop beating? So don’t ask me about Meg. Because I don’t know shit.”

Someone gasps. I look out at the crowd, everyone, dappled in sunlight. It’s a beautiful
day, full of the promise of spring: clear skies, puffy clouds, the sweet scent of
early flowers blowing in on the breeze. It’s wrong that there should be days like
this. That spring should come. Some part of me thought it would stay winter this year.

I see some people are crying.
I
made them cry. I’ve become toxic. Drink me and die. “I’m sorry,” I say before I bolt.

I run off the grassy area, back to the road, heading out of the park, toward the main
street. I need to get out of here. Out of Tacoma. Out of Meg’s world.

I hear footsteps behind me. It’s probably Alice or possibly Stoner Richard, but I
have nothing to say to them, so I keep running, but whoever’s behind is faster than
I am.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. I spin around. His eyes, this time, look like the color
of a sky after sunset, almost violet. I’ve never seen someone whose eyes change colors,
like some mood ring to the soul. If he even has a soul.

We stare at each other for a minute, catching our breath.

“I can tell you things. If you want.” His voice has that growl, but there’s also a
hesitancy.

“I don’t want to know
those
things.”

He shakes his head. “Not that. But I can tell you things. If you want. About her life
here.”

“How would you know? If she was just a one-night stand?”

He gestures his head in an away-from-here motion. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

“Why are you even here?”

“Her roommate gave me the flyer,” he says, answering how he knew about the service
but not why he came.

We stand there. “Come on. Let’s just go talk,” he says.

“Why? Do you know why she killed herself?”

Recoil. Like the recoil of a gun. It’s what he does again. Like he’s been physically
yanked back. Only this time, it’s not anger that’s on his face; it’s something else.
“No,” he says.

We walk a ways to a McDonald’s. I’m suddenly ravenous, hungry for something that is
not vegetarian or organic or healthy but is bred in a daily misery. We both get Quarter
Pounder Extra Value Meals and take them to a quiet table next to the empty playground.

We eat in silence for a while. And then Ben starts talking. He tells me about Meg
arriving on the indie-band scene, immediately making friends with a lot of the local
musicians, which sounds like her. He tells me about how easy it was for her, this
eighteen-year-old college student from Bumfuckville, Eastern Washington, swanning
in and everyone eating out of her hand, which also sounds like her. At first he was
jealous of her, because when he came here from Bend, Oregon, two years ago, he felt
like he’d been hazed by the music community before they’d let him play in the sandbox.
He tells me about the faux fights they used to have about who was a better drummer:
Keith Moon or John Bonham. Who was a better guitar player: Jimi Hendrix or Ry Cooder.
Who wrote the catchiest songs in the world: Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. He tells
me about Meg adopting the kittens, hearing them crying in a box in a Dumpster near
the downtown Tacoma homeless shelter where she worked a few hours a week. She dug
them out, brought them to the vet, and spent hundreds of dollars to get them well.
He tells me how she hit up some of the more successful musicians in town for donations
to pay for the treatments, which, again, sounds exactly like Meg, and how she fed
them baby formula with eyedroppers because they were too small to eat cat food. Of
all the things he tells me, it’s this image, of Meg coaxing tiny orphan kittens to
eat, that makes me want to cry.

But I don’t. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask. Now it’s my voice that sounds
like a growl.

Ben’s pack of cigarettes sits on the table, and in lieu of smoking one, he clicks
the lighter on and off, the flame hissing each time. “You seemed like you needed to
know.” The way he says it sounds like an accusation.

“Why are
you
telling me this?” I repeat.

Ben’s eyes are momentarily illuminated by the flame. And once again, I can see there
are so many shades of guilt. Ben’s, like mine, is tinged with red-hot fury, hotter
than the fire he’s toying with.

“She talked about you, you know,” he says.

“Really? She didn’t talk about you.” Which is untrue, of course, but I won’t give
him the satisfaction of knowing she had a moniker for him. Anyhow, turns out that
he wasn’t the tragic one.

“She told me how at one of your cleaning jobs, some guy tried to grab your ass and
you twisted his arm so far behind his back that he yelped and then upped your pay.”

Yeah, that happened to me with Mr. Purdue. A ten-dollar-a-week raise. That’s how much
an unwanted cop of my ass is worth.

“She called you Buffy.”

And more than the thing with Mr. Purdue, that’s how I know that Meg did tell him about
me. Buffy was her nickname for me when she thought I was being particularly kick-ass,
à la Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. She called herself Willow, the magical sidekick,
but she had it wrong: she was Buffy
and
Willow, strength and magic, all folded into one. I was just basking in her glow.

It feels wrong that he knows this about me, like he has seen my embarrassing baby
pictures. Details he has no right to. “She told you a lot for a one-night stand,”
I say.

He looks pained. What a good faker he is, that Ben McCallister. “We used to be friends.”

“I’m not sure
friends
is the word for it.”

“No,” he insists. “Before it all shot to shit, we were friends.”

The emails. The banter. The rock talk. The sudden change. “So what happened?” I ask,
even though I know what happened.

Still, it’s shocking to hear him say it, the way he says it: “We fucked.”

“You slept together,” I correct. Because I know that much. I know that Meg, after
what happened to her that other time, would not have done that with someone unless
she was into him. “Meg wouldn’t just fuck someone.”

“Well, I fucked her,” Ben repeats. “And when you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.”
He flicks the lighter on and lets it go dark again. “I knew it would, and I still
did it.”

Now that’s he’s being honest, it’s both repellent and magnetic, like a terrible car
crash you can’t help rubbernecking, even though you know it’ll give you nightmares
later. “Why would you do that, if you knew that it would ruin things?”

He sighs and shakes his head. “You know how it is, when it’s in the moment and it’s
all happening and you don’t think about the day after.” He looks at me, but the thing
is, I don’t know. It would probably shock people to learn, but I’ve never. When you
are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. Most of
the time it seems inevitable anyway. Still, I didn’t need put a nail in the coffin
by screwing any of the losers in Shitburg.

I don’t say anything, just stare at the empty playground.

“We only did it the once, but it was enough. Right after, everything went south.”

“When?” I ask.

“I dunno. Around Thanksgiving. Why?”

That makes sense. Her sleeping-with-the-bartender email came before the holidays.
But the kittens? Those she found after winter break. And the thing with Mr. Purdue
grabbing my ass had happened in February, a few weeks before she died. “But if things
went south a while ago, how do you know all this recent stuff, about the cats? About
me?”

“I thought you read the emails.”

“Only a couple.”

He grimaces. “So you didn’t see all the stuff she wrote me?”

“No. And a bunch of her mail is missing, between, like, January and the week before
she died.”

A puzzled look passes over Ben’s face. “Do you have a computer here?”

“I can use Meg’s. In her room.”

He pauses, as if considering. Then he crumples up our empty food wrappers. “Let’s
go.”

x x x

Back in Meg’s room, he launches his webmail program. He does a search for her name
and a whole screen of emails pop up. He scoots out of the chair and I sit down in
it. Repeat comes bounding through the open door to claw at the cardboard boxes.

I start at the beginning, the flirty banter, all the stuff about Keith Moon and the
Rolling Stones. I look at Ben.

“Keep going,” he says.

And I do. The flirtation grows. The emails get longer. And then they sleep together.
It’s like a black line drawn in space. Because after, Ben’s emails become distant,
and Meg’s kind of desperate. And then they just get weird. Maybe if they were written
to me they wouldn’t seem so weird. Except they were to Ben, a guy she slept with once.
She wrote him pages and pages of stuff, everything about her life, the cats, me; it
reads like very detailed journal entries. The more he tried to push her away, the
more she wrote. She wasn’t totally clueless. It’s clear she knew what she was doing
was odd because she ended several notes, some of which were eight or ten pages long,
with a need for reassurance:
We’re still friends, right?
Like she’s asking for permission to keep telling him all this stuff. I’m embarrassed
to be reading this, embarrassed on her behalf, too. Is
this
why she deleted her sent mail?

The emails to Ben go on like this, every few days, for several weeks, and it’s impossible
to read them all, not just because they’re long but because they’re giving me a horrible
twist in my gut. Within the emails are references to texts and phone calls she made
to him. When I ask Ben how often, he doesn’t answer. And then I see one of his last
emails to her:
Find someone else to talk to,
he told her. Shortly after that email,
You have to leave me alone
. And then I think of her last email to him:
You don’t have to worry about me anymore.

I have to stop. Ben is now looking at me with an expression I don’t like. I prefer
the cocky strutting asshole from a few nights ago. Because I want to hate Ben McCallister.
I don’t want him looking at me with soft eyes. I don’t want him looking vulnerable,
almost needy, like
he
wants reassurance. And I certainly don’t want him doing something generous, like
offering to take the kittens off my hands, which is what he does.

I just stare at him. Like,
Who are you?