I Was Here (18 page)

37

I wake up the next morning in a darkened room, shafts of bright morning sunshine slanting
through the blackout shades. The clock reads ten thirty. I passed out around midnight.

Ben is still asleep in the other bed, and he looks sweet, all curled up around one
of the pillows. I take a minute to stretch, letting my muscles ease out of the crampedness
of twenty-four hours in the car.

“Hey,” Ben calls, his voice sticky with sleep. “What time is it?”

“Ten thirty.”

“Are you ready for today?”

The pizza box is still on the dresser. It seems crazy that last night—in another room
that Bradford might recommend, right in his backyard—I was able to forget why I’d
come here. But now there’s no forgetting. No denying. I am hot and cold and sick to
my stomach. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready.

“Ready,” I tell him.

He stares at me a long minute. Watches me as he peels off his nicotine patch and puts
on another one. “You don’t have to do this,” he says. “I’ll be just as happy if we
turn around right now.”

It’s a nice thing to say. But we already aborted one mission. That one didn’t matter.
This one does. I shake my head.

He puts on a shirt. “What’s your plan of attack?”

“I thought we’d stake out his house all day, like we did . . .” I don’t finish. Ben
gets it.

“But you said he worked at one of the casinos,” Ben replies. “They don’t have regular
shifts. He could work the graveyard.”

I hadn’t thought of that. “It might be a long stakeout.”

Ben looks at me for a minute. “What’s the name of the place he works at?”

“The Continental.” We drove past it yesterday. It made me shiver in the afternoon
heat to think of being that close to him. If he had such a strong effect on me over
the computer, with all those miles and false identities between us, what is he going
to do to me in person?

Ben opens the phone book and leafs through the pages.

“What are you doing?” I ask, but before he answers, he’s dialing. When someone answers,
he starts talking in a kind of a hick accent: “My buddy Brad Smith works there. I
don’t mean to hassle him, but I went and locked myself out of my house and he’s got
my spare keys. Can you tell me what time he’s on today so I can come grab ’em?”

There’s a brief pause as he’s put on hold. He looks at me and winks. The voice comes
back on the phone. “Oh. Right. Course. You know what time he gets off? I can swing
on by and grab my spare set off him.” More silence. “Five? Great. I’ll have to manage
till then. Thanks. I will. You too.”

Ben hangs up. “His shift is over at five.”

“Five,” I repeat.

“So assuming he goes straight home, five thirty or six.”

“Aren’t you a good detective.” I smile at him.

Ben doesn’t smile back. He’s all business now. “I say we get to his place early to
sniff it out, and then you do your thing.”

“My thing?”

“You have a thing, right?”

“Of course I have a thing.” I’ve spent the long hours of the drive working out exactly
what I’ll say to him. Like lines in a play. More pretend. Pretend to be Meg. Pretend
to be suicidal. Pretend to be strong enough to do this.

“Okay, so that gives us”—he looks at the clock—“six hours.”

I nod. Six hours.

“What do you want to do in the meantime?”

Throw up. Run. Hide. “I don’t know. What is there to do here?”

“We could sit by the pool, but I stuck my hand in it last night and it was warm as
piss.”

“Too bad I left my bathing suit at home.”

“We could hit one of those all-you-can-manage dollar- ninety-nine buffets.”

“I’ll bet you can manage a lot.”

“And I’d kill for an iced coffee. It’s, like, a thousand degrees. You’d think they’d
ice something other than the beer. We can grab breakfast at a casino, and then gamble.”

“I’m gambling enough on this trip; plus, I have no extra money. What I really want
is to zone out. Like, at a movie or something.”

“Okay. Buffet and movie. It’s a date.” He stops himself, even blushes a little. “Not
a date, but, you know.”

“Yeah, Ben,” I say. “I know.”

x x x

We don’t find iced coffee, but we do find a buffet, at which Ben eats an absurdly
huge amount of eggs, bacon, sausage, and various other meat products, as if trying
to store up for the vegan life back home. I manage to get down half a waffle. After,
we find a Cineplex in town, and watch one of those ridiculous movies about machines
that turn human. It’s part three or four in a series we haven’t seen before, but it
doesn’t matter. We groan at the terrible plot and share a tub of popcorn, and there
are whole minutes when I forget what I’m doing today. By the time the film lets out,
it’s almost three o’clock.

I go back to the motel to change. I’m not sure why, but I’ve brought one of my nicer
outfits, which happens to be a skirt-and-top ensemble I wore to one of Meg’s many
memorial services. Ben and I pay for another night at the Wagon Wheel, deciding, rather
than leaving tonight, to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and power through the drive
home, doing it in shifts, rock-and-roll-tour style.

At the front desk we get directions to Bradford’s apartment complex. It’s not that
far from here, about a half mile away.

“Let’s walk,” I say. We have time, and I’m too nervous to sit around waiting, so we
walk along the dusty streets until we find a sun-bleached stucco building surrounded
by dead grass, with a cracked cement pool.

But we’re early. It’s only just five. “We probably shouldn’t hang out right here,”
I say. So we walk back a ways toward a liquor store a few blocks away.

“What time do you want us to go in?” Ben asks.

“
I
should go at five thirty.”

“And what time should
I
go?”

“I kind of think I need to do this alone.”

Ben’s eyes narrow. “I kind of think you don’t.”

“I appreciate that, but I need to talk to him myself.”

“So you want me to lurk in the bushes?” He doesn’t seem pleased with this option.

“Bradford is cagey. If he so much as suspects that anyone is with me, there’s no way
he’ll talk to me.” It isn’t that I’m not frightened of Bradford; I am. But it needs
to be just me in there. “I want you to wait for me here.”

“Here?” Ben is incredulous.

“Here.” I am pleading.

“So I was just the ride, is that it?”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Then why
am
I here?”

Because I need you.
That’s the truth. And it’s almost as frightening as what awaits me down the road.
But that’s not what I tell Ben. “Because you’re wrapped up in this too.”

Recoil.

“So that’s what this is about?” His voice is hard, flat, angry, like the day he came
for the T-shirt. “In that case, there’s no fucking way I’m letting you go see this
guy. I already have Meg’s death on my conscience. I’m not adding yours to the pile.”

“He’s not going to kill me.”

“Why not? He killed Meg. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying all along?”

“Yeah, but not like that. He’s not going to pull a knife on me or anything.”

“How the hell do you know that? How do you know he doesn’t have an arsenal of shotguns?
How do you know the suicide shit isn’t some side project? How do you know he doesn’t
have a dozen bodies buried in the backyard?”

Because Bradford Smith uses a different type of weapon, and leaves you to do the dirty
work yourself. “I just know,” I say quietly.

“You know what, Cody? You don’t know shit.”

I don’t know shit?
I look at Ben and it’s like:
Who the hell are you?
I know where you came from too
.
We crawl in the same muck, Ben McCallister
. I’m angry now. But that’s good. Angry is better than scared.

“Wait for me here,” I say.

“No way. You want to be like your friend and walk right into a trap? I’m telling you:
don’t. I’m telling you, this guy is dangerous, and going to see him is a fucked-up
idea. I never warned Meg, but I’m warning you. That’s the difference between you and
me: I
learn
from my mistakes.”

“Ben, the difference between you and me would fill up a book.” I’m not sure how these
words can feel so good and so false at the same time.

Ben gives me one last look, shakes his head, and then he walks away.

x x x

There’s no time to contemplate Ben’s desertion, which I think I’ve been expecting
all along. It’s just me and Bradford. As it needs to be.

He lives in Unit J in a completely nondescript complex. White door. Levolor shades
in the window. I can’t see inside. At the unit next door, a couple is out on the patio,
drinking beer. They don’t so much as look at me, but it’s reassuring, knowing they’re
there.

I ring the bell.

The man who answers has white hair and a beard. He’s wearing a pair of shorts and
an oversize Hawaiian-print shirt that hangs over his gut. He’s grasping a large sweating
glass in his hand, full to the top, the ice not yet melted. I’m not sure whether I’m
relieved or disappointed. Because this can’t be him. This guy looks like a sloppy
Santa Claus.

But then he says, “Can I help you?” And the voice: soft, guarded, familiar.

It takes me a second to find my own voice. “I’m looking for Bradford Smith.”

I can see something—suspicion, strategy—pinging across his face. “What’s your business
here?”

What’s my business here?
I had a story to tell him, a way to worm myself inside. But it vanishes from my head,
and I can’t think of what to say except to blurt out the truth. He’s always had that
effect on me, this person I’ve been lying to.

“You’re my business.”

He squints. “I’m sorry, but do we know each other?”

My heart is thudding so hard and fast, I swear he must be able to see it through my
blouse. “My name is Cody.” I pause. “But you probably know me better as Repeat.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Do I need to
repeat
myself?”

“No,” he says calmly. “I understood. You oughtn’t be here.”

He starts to close the door. And all I can think is:
I invited you to help me die, and you’re shutting the door in my face
. It fires up my anger. Good. I need it now.

I wedge my foot in the doorway. “Oh, no, I
should
be here. Because I also know someone named Meg Garcia. You might know her as Firefly.
Did you know her real name was Meg? That she had a best friend named Cody? A mother?
A father? A brother?” The speech I rehearsed during the long drive is coming back
to me.

Now that I’ve shown my hand, I half expect him to slam the door on me, but instead
he steps outside. One of the beer-drinking neighbors throws an empty beer bottle into
a garbage can; it clanks and shatters. Bradford appraises his neighbors, lips pursed.
He looks at me and opens the door behind him. “Perhaps you’d better come inside.”

For half a second I think of Ben, the arsenal of guns, the buried bodies. But then
I go in anyway.

It is spartan, and neater than any of the houses I clean—
after
I clean them. My legs are shaking, and if I sit, he’ll see my knees knocking, but
if I stand, they might buckle. I split the difference and lean against the plaid couch.

“You knew her?” he asks.

The look on his face is peculiar. It’s not sinister at all. It’s almost eager. And
that’s when I realize that he doesn’t know the gory details—and he
wants
to. I don’t say anything. I refuse him that satisfaction.

“So she did it,” he says. Of course he knows this now. My coming here gave it away.
I gave him the satisfaction anyway.

“Because of you. You killed her.”

“How could I have killed her?” he asks. “I never met her. I didn’t even know her name
until just now.”

“Maybe you didn’t actually do it with your hands, but you did it. . . . You did it
the cowardly way. What was it you said? ‘The opposite of bravery is not cowardice
but conformity.’” I make air quote marks with my fingers. I have this part planned
too. “I’d say the opposite of bravery is you!”

I sound so brave myself when I say it. No sign of the chickenshit I truly am, about
to collapse on my jelly legs.

His mouth twists, like he just tasted something a little off. But then he composes
himself again, and his smile is two clicks away from benevolent. I hear a high-pitched
whine in my ear as sweat breaks out on parts of my body that don’t normally sweat.

He’s looking at me now, running his thumb across his fingers. His nails are neat and
trimmed, much better kept than mine, which are ragged from scrubbing sinks and toilets.

“You lost the better part of you,” he says. “That’s what you wrote. It was her. Meg.
Your ‘better half.’ And you’re trying to redeem yourself, because she left you out
of the decision.”

He has my number. He always has. Even when we were corresponding over a message board,
he saw through me. All at once, the folly of my plan, of “catching” him, drains out
of me, and so does the remaining strength in my legs. I sink onto the couch. “Fuck
you,” I say, because whatever script I came up with is useless now.

Bradford goes on in this almost gentle voice. “Except maybe you don’t mean she was
your better half. Maybe she was your
other
half.” He takes a sip of his drink. “Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic
with them, it’s as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny.”

He’s talking to me the way he would on the boards, circular, so it takes a minute
to understand what he’s suggesting.

“You’re saying I want to die, like Meg?”

“I’m just repeating your words.”

“No! You’re putting your words into my mouth. You
want
me to die. Like you wanted Meg to die.”

“How did I ‘want’ Meg to die?” he asks, now making air quotes himself.

“Let’s see: you told her how to get poison. How to write a suicide note. How to keep
it from family. How to alert the police. How to erase incriminating emails. You told
her not to go on antidepressants. You told her not to keep living.”