I Was Here (17 page)

33

Outside the church, Ben tosses me the keys, like he knows that I need to drive. At
Twin Falls we cut off the interstate onto Highway 93. Ben starts yawning, his eyes
drooping. He camped on the floor of Richard and Gary’s room, and he says between Richard’s
snoring and Gary talking in his sleep, he didn’t get much rest.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” I suggest.

He shakes his head. “Goes against the code.”

“What code?”

“Touring code. Someone always has to stay up with the driver.”

“That makes sense if there’s a bunch of you, but there’s only two of us, and you’re
tired.”

He looks at me, considering.

“Look,” I go on. “We can just make up a new code.”

He continues to look at me. But then he gives in. He turns his face toward the window
and falls asleep, staying that way for the next three hours.

There’s something nourishing about seeing him sleep. Maybe it’s the sun, or maybe
my imagination, but the bluish tinge from underneath his eyes seems to fade a bit.
He sleeps until the highway ends and I pull into a gas station to fill up the tank.
Inside the station there’s a big map with a red circle denoting where we are: the
junction of Highway 93 and Interstate 80. To get to Laughlin, we jog east on 80 until
we go south on Interstate 15 near Salt Lake City. But if we were to go west, the interstate
would take us into California, dipping above Lake Tahoe.

After Harry had gotten back to me with the address, I’d looked at the lake for hours.
Though the town where he lived wasn’t on the lake, it was near it. The lake looked
so pretty, the water so clear and blue.

“How far is Truckee, California, from here?” I ask the guy behind the counter.

He shrugs. But a trucker in a Peterbilt hat tells me it’s about three hundred miles.

“Do you know how far it is from Truckee to Laughlin, Nevada? I mean, how far of a
detour is it?”

The trucker rubs his beard. “You’re probably adding three hundred miles to the trip.
It’s about five or six hundred miles from Truckee, and about five hundred miles from
here. Either way, you got a ways to go.”

I thank the trucker, buy $40 worth of gas, a California map, a couple of burritos,
and a liter of Dr Pepper. Then I go back to the car, where Ben is digging around for
his sunglasses.

“Think we’ll make Laughlin tonight?” he asks me.

“We’d be pushing it. We got off to a late start, so we wouldn’t get there till midnight.”
I start to pump the gas.

Ben gets out of the car and starts squegeeing the windows. “We might as well push
through. I’m all caught up on my sleep now. How long was I out for?”

“Two hundred and fifty miles.”

“So we can make it by tonight. I’ll take over.”

I stop squeezing. The pump goes silent.

“What?” Ben asks. He glances at the California map in my other hand. “Did you change
your mind?”

I shake my head. I didn’t. I haven’t. I still need to do this. To see it through.
But we’re close. I mean, we’re not
that
close. We’re three hundred miles away. And this might not be the right address, or
the current one. Harry said he’d moved around a lot. But three hundred miles away
is as close as I’ve been in a long time.

“When do you have to be back by?” I ask.

Ben scrapes a moth off the windshield, then shrugs.

“I might want to take a detour.”

“Detour? Where to?”

“Truckee. It’s in California, near Reno.”

“What’s in Truckee?”

If anyone will understand, it will be Ben. “My father.”

34

By ten o’clock, we are climbing high up into the Sierra Nevada mountains, getting
stuck behind motor homes and pickup trucks hauling huge motorboats. Ben’s been driving
for six hours straight. The car needs gas again, and we need to figure out a place
to stay, but I want to push forward, to get there.

“We probably should stop sooner rather than later,” Ben says.

“But we’re not there yet.”

“Truckee is right outside of Lake Tahoe. It’s summer. Places will be full. We’re better
off in Reno. Also, if we stay at a casino hotel, it’s gonna be cheaper.”

“Oh, right.” Hotels. Last night I didn’t have to think about that.

Downtown Reno is garish. Once we pass through the center, with all the big casinos,
their marquees advertising bands that were huge in Tricia’s day, it turns depressing:
dilapidated motels advertising nickel slots and $3.99 steak breakfasts.

We choose one of the crummy motels. “How much for the room?” Ben asks.

The rheumy-eyed guy behind the counter reminds me of Mr. Purdue. “Sixty dollars. Checkout’s
at eleven.”

“I’ll give you eighty bucks for two rooms and we’ll be out by nine.” I plunk down
the twenties on the counter. The guy looks at my chest. Ben frowns. The guy crumples
the money in his spidery hands, slides over two keys.

Ben pulls out his wallet and starts to hand me some cash, but I wave it away. “It’s
on me.”

We walk back to the Jetta in silence, its engine still ticking from the long drive
today. It has a bigger one tomorrow. I grab my bag and point toward my room at the
opposite end of the complex from his. “I’ll meet you back at the car at nine.”

“Tomorrow’s Monday,” Ben points out. “Maybe earlier’s better. In case he goes to work.
You don’t want to lose the day.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve lost all track of time. We’ve already been gone two
days. “Eight?” I say.

“Seven. Truckee’s still a half hour away”

“Okay. Seven.”

We stand there, looking at each other. Behind us a pickup truck screeches into the
parking lot. “Good night, Cody,” Ben says.

“Good night.”

Once in the room, I contemplate a bath, but when I see the dingy tub and the ring
of dead skin, I shower instead, soaking under the weak stream. I get out, dry myself
on napkin towels, and look around the room.

Death is the ultimate rite of passage, and it can be a most sacred ritual. Sometimes,
in order to make it personal, you must make it anonymous
. This was the advice I found in Meg’s decrypted files. Did Bradford himself write
that? It sounds like something he might say. I look around the room. This is exactly
the kind of place where Meg did it.

I imagine it all, locking the door, putting on the
DO
NOT
DISTURB
sign, leaving the note and tip for the maid. Going into the bathroom to mix the chemistry,
fan on so as not to alert other motel guests with the fumes.

I sit down on the bed. I picture Meg, waiting for the poison to take effect. Did she
lie down right away, or wait for the tingling to start? Did she throw up? Was she
scared? Relieved? Was there a moment when she knew she’d passed the point of no return?

I lie down on the scratchy bedspread and imagine Meg’s last minutes. The burning,
the tingling, the numbness. I hear Bradford’s voice whispering encouragement.
We are born alone, we die alone.
I start to see black spots; I start to feel it happening. Really happening.

Except that I don’t want it to! I shoot upright in the bed
.
I put my hand over my heart, which is beating so hard, as if protesting my thoughts.
It is
not
happening,
I tell myself.
You did
not
take poison. You
would
not take poison
.

With trembling hands, I grab my phone. Ben picks up right away. “Are you okay?” he
asks.

As soon as he asks it, I am. If not okay, then better. The panic subsides. I’m not
Meg catching that final bus, an anonymous voice whispering in my ear. I’m alive. And
I’m not alone.

“Are you okay?” he repeats. And it’s a real voice. Solid. If I needed him to be right
here with me, he would be.

“I’m okay,” I say.

Ben’s quiet on the line, and I just stay there, listening to the sound of him, comforted
by his presence, by the sound of his breathing. We stay like that for a while, until
I’m calm enough to go to sleep.

35

I meet Ben at the car at seven with a box of donuts and two coffees.

“What are we, cops?” he asks.

“We are sort of on a stakeout.”

Ben holds up a piece of paper. “I got gas. And directions to your dad’s place in Truckee.”

Dad
.
Dad’s place
. It’s a foreign concept. Like we’re driving to the moon. “Thanks.”

He holds out the paper, and for a second I hesitate. Harry had said that my father
had lived at six different addresses over the last ten years. It had given me a bad
feeling, though I wasn’t sure if it was because I was scared I wasn’t going to find
him, or scared of just what I might find.

I snatch the paper from Ben.

“You want the wheel?” he asks.

I shake my head. Too nervous.

Ben seems to get this because once we’re on the road, he goes all chatty, telling
me about growing up in a snowboarding mecca like Bend but never having enough money
to hit the slopes, so he and his brothers would do crazy things, like outfit their
skateboards and ride them down snowy mountains. “My older brother Jamie broke both
his elbows one time.”

“Ouch.”

“Bend’s a lot like Truckee. Hippie redneck outdoorsy types.”

I nod.

“Here, we’re off the highway now. Direct me.”

A few minutes later we pull up in front of a dilapidated redwood house. The front
yard is littered with crap, a rusting lawn mower, a bunch of kids’ plastic toys, a
couch with stuffing coming out of it.

“Is this him?”

“This is the address Harry gave me.”

“Do you want to go in?”

I look at the grubby front yard. This is not the nice house of the nice man with the
nice family I’d painted for myself. Maybe Harry’s information is out-of-date.

“Or, we could just wait,” Ben says. “See who comes out.”

Yes. That. I nod.

We park the car across the street. Ben drinks his coffee and goes through about six
donuts. I watch as the house wakes up. Lights go on. Blinds snap up. Finally, after
about an hour, the front door yawns open, and a girl comes out. She’s younger than
me, maybe fourteen, and she seems sullen as she halfheartedly picks up some of the
crap off the lawn. A little while later the door opens again and out toddles a little
kid in a T-shirt and a diaper. The girl picks up the kid. I watch, confused. Is the
girl his daughter? Is the baby his? Or does the baby belong to the girl? Or is it
the wrong house?

“You want me to go to the door?” Ben offers.

“As what?”

“I dunno. A traveling salesman?”

“Selling what?”

“Whatever. Cable TV. Makeup. God.”

“You need nicer clothes if you’re peddling the Almighty.”

As we contemplate what to do, a low rumbling grows louder and louder until it’s like
an explosion, the telltale sound of a Harley-Davidson. It pulls up right next to us,
and we both slink down in our seats. The chopper passes and turns into the driveway
of the house, where it revs a few times, making the baby scream in fright. The girl
picks up the kid and starts yelling at whoever’s on the bike. The rider turns off
the noisy engine, and pulls off the helmet. A guy. He has his back to us, so I can’t
see him, but I can see the hatred reflected on the girl’s face. The front door bangs
open, and a woman with short black hair comes out, a cigarette in one hand, a sippy
cup in the other. Stubbing out the cigarette, she picks up the baby and starts arguing
with the motorcycle guy.

I watch all of this like it’s a movie. The motorcycle guy and the woman keep arguing.
She hands him the baby, who starts screaming, so he hands it directly over to the
girl. The woman says something, and he slams his hand against the seat of his chopper.
Then he turns away, looking right at me, but he doesn’t see me. But I see him. I see
his hair, the same chestnut color as mine, and his eyes, almond-shaped and hazel-gray,
just like mine, and his skin, olive, just like mine.

Just like mine.

There’s more shouting. The teen girl sets the baby down and stomps off crying. Then
the baby starts wailing. The woman picks it up and carries it inside, slamming the
door, and soon he follows, slamming the garage door.

Ben looks at me. Looks back at the house. Looks back at me. Shakes his head.

“What?” I say.

“It’s weird.”

“What is?”

He glances back at the house, back at me. “He looks like you, but that could be my
dad.”

I don’t say anything.

“Are you okay?” he asks after a bit.

I nod.

“Do you want to go in? Or come back later when they’ve maybe calmed down?”

When I was little, I liked to imagine my father as a businessman, an airplane pilot,
a dentist, someone different. But he’s not different at all. He’s exactly what I knew
he’d be. I shouldn’t be surprised. All along Tricia has called him the sperm donor.
He was probably some one-night stand I was the accidental product of. There’s no fairy-tale
reason why he never visited or answered my email or even sent me one lousy birthday
card. I’ll bet he has no idea when my birthday is. Why would he? That would imply
that my existence matters to him.

“Let’s go,” I tell Ben.

“Are you sure? He’s right there.”

“Let’s go.” My words snap. Ben doesn’t say anything else. He pulls a U and we go.

36

Once we’re back on the highway, it’s like someone has vacuumed the Cody out of me.
Ben keeps giving me these worried looks, but I avoid them. I avoid him. I scrunch
my sweater into a ball against the window, and eventually, I fall asleep.

When I wake up a few hours later, the cool mountain air of the Sierra Nevadas has
been baked away by the hot dry Nevada desert. I can almost forget that the detour
ever happened.

My head is hazy from the heat, and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and the crusty
remnants of what I suspect is drool on my lips. Ben is watching me, and even though
I liked seeing him sleep, being on the opposite end of it, I feel exposed. “Where
the hell are we?” I ask.

“Literally the middle of nowhere. We passed a place called Hawthorne a while back,
but other than that, nothing. I haven’t even seen any cars on the road. On the plus
side, you can speed like crazy out here.”

I glimpse the dashboard. Ben’s going ninety. The empty, straight road stretches ahead
of us and shimmers with mirages, little oases of water in the desert that don’t really
exist. No sooner do we reach one than it disappears into the asphalt and another appears
on the horizon.

“At this rate, we should make Vegas by five and Laughlin by seven,” Ben says.

“Oh.”

“Are you okay?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” I reach for a now-tepid bottle of Dr Pepper. “This
is disgusting.”

“When you see a 7-Eleven, holler.” He sounds peeved, but then he looks at me and something
softens. He opens his mouth to say something, but then seems to think again and stays
quiet.

I sigh. “What?”

“It’s not you; it’s him.”

I’m still feeling kind of naked in front of him. So I snap back, “Is that a line you
give to girls when you dump them? ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”

Ben turns toward me, then back toward the road. “I might if it ever got to that point,”
he says frostily. “I was talking about your dad.”

I don’t answer. I don’t want to talk about my dad, or whatever that man back there
was.

“He’s a fuckwad,” Ben continues. “And it has fuck-all to do with you.”

I still don’t say anything.

“I mean, maybe I don’t know anything about what you’re going through, but it’s something
my mom always told me about my dad. That it wasn’t me. It was him. And I never believed
her. I always thought she was humoring me. Because it had to be my fault. But seeing
that asshole, and you, maybe I’m starting to reconsider.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

Ben’s eyes are glued to the road, as if he has to concentrate very hard on the flat,
straight highway. “When your dad is an asshole from the get-go—and it doesn’t get
more from the get-go than denying your existence—it’s not because
you
did anything wrong. It’s because
he
did.” His words spill out in a rush. Then he adds, “And maybe it’s none of my business,
but I’ve been wanting to say that to you for, like, the last two hundred and eighty-seven
miles.”

I look at Ben now. And again I wonder how it is that we can feel so many of the same
things and be so utterly different.

“You thought it was your fault, with your dad?” I ask him.

Ben doesn’t say anything, just nods.

“Why?”

He sighs. “I was a sensitive kid. A crybaby. Always running to Mommy. He hated that.
Told me to toughen up. So I tried. I tried to man up. Be like him.” He grimaces. “But
he still couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

I don’t know what to say. So I just tell Ben that I’m sorry.

He lets go of the wheel for a second, raises his hands in the air, like,
What you gonna do?

I have to resist the urge to touch Ben on the cheek. I can’t imagine what that must
have been like, having a dad whose idea of manhood was how Ben described it. Spending
your life emulating that and trying to escape it all at once. I think of Tricia. About
her being gone so much, and about her endless string of three-month flings. About
refusing to put me in touch with my father. About how she basically abdicated her
job, let the Garcias take over parenting me. I’ve always resented her for this, but
now I’m wondering if maybe I should be thanking her.

x x x

Traffic picks up around Vegas and then, suddenly, we’re in a huge city and it’s disorienting
and strange, and then an hour later, we’re back in the middle of nowhere, and then
an hour after that, we’re in Laughlin.

Laughlin is like a strange hybrid: part nowhere desert town, but plunked down in the
center of it are all these high-rise hotels jutting out from the banks of the Colorado
River. We drive through the depressing strip of downtown to a more modest stretch
of motel–casinos, stopping at the Wagon Wheel Sleep ’n’ Slots, which is advertising
rooms for forty-five dollars a night.

We pull in and ring the bell, and a friendly woman with her hair in braids asks if
she can help us.

“Do you have two rooms?” Ben asks.

The cash is depleting faster than I’d thought. I think about last night’s motel-room-induced
panic attack, Ben’s comforting voice on the other end of the phone. What he told me
earlier today in the car. “One room, two beds,” I say.

I pay for the room and we go unpack the car. It was so clean and tidy when we left,
but now it’s littered with trip detritus. I attempt to tidy some of it while Ben carries
both of our bags up to the room.

When I get upstairs, he’s shuffling through a bunch of papers. “They have takeout
menus. Do you want to go out and grab something to eat? Or order a pizza?”

I remember our afternoon a few months back: burritos, TV, the couch.

“Let’s do pizza.”

“Pepperoni? Sausage? Both?”

I laugh. “One or the other.”

Ben picks up the menu, and a half hour later pizza, garlic knots, and vats of Pepsi
and Dr Pepper show up at the door. We spread it all out on a towel on one of the beds
and sit cross-legged, having a picnic.

“God, it’s good to be out of the car,” I say.

“Yeah. Sometimes after a tour, my ass vibrates for days.”

“Too bad it’s not one of those motels with the vibrating beds; you could keep the
magic going.”

“I’ve never actually seen one of those,” Ben says.

“No, me neither. I actually haven’t stayed in that many motels.” The truth is, I can
count on one hand the number of nights I’ve stayed in a hotel or motel. Tricia wasn’t
one for vacations. Most of the trips I’ve taken have been with the Garcias, and we
usually went camping or stayed with their relatives.

“So not many opportunities to share a motel room with a guy before?” Ben asks lightly
as he pays an inordinate amount of attention to his pizza crust.

“None.”

“So you’ve never shared a room before?” Ben asks. “With a guy?” He seems strangely
shy.

“I’ve never shared
anything
with a guy before.”

Ben looks up from his crust and stares me in the face, like he’s trying to determine
exactly what I’m saying. I hold his stare, letting my look answer the question. His
eyes, a soft blue, like the empty swimming pool outside, widen in surprise.

“Not anything?”

“Nope.”

“Not even . . . a pizza?”

“Oh, I’ve eaten pizza with guys before. But I’ve never
shared
one. There’s a big difference.”

“There is?”

I nod.

“So what about now?”

“What
about
now?”

He looks at me.

“What’s it look like?” I ask.

His brow crumples, a squall of confusion, as if he’s not sure we’re talking about
pizza anymore. He glances at the corpse of the pie. “It looks like you had two slices
and I had four and you don’t like pepperoni as much as I do.”

I nod, acknowledging the greasy pile of pepperoni I’ve picked off.

“And that this is all happening in a motel room that we’re both sitting in,” he continues.

I nod again. For a moment I’m reminded of the pledge I made never to sleep under the
same roof as him. Maybe he is too. Obviously, tonight I’m breaking that, though the
truth is, I broke it in spirit a while ago. And none of it seems to matter anymore.

“So what does that mean?” he asks. He’s trying to sound casual, but he looks eager,
and very young.

“It means that I’m sharing with you.” That’s all I’m willing to give him, though in
truth, it seems like a lot. Then something I said yesterday when I was trying to convince
him to nap in the car comes back to me:
We can make up a new code
.

I think that’s what we might be doing here.