I Was Here (2 page)

“I can go whenever,” I say. “Tomorrow if you want.”

“She didn’t have very much. You can take the car,” Joe says. Joe and Sue have one
car, and it’s like a NASA expedition how they plot out their days so Sue can drop
Joe off at work and get Scottie to school and get herself to work and then scoop them
all back up again at the end of the day. On weekends, it’s more of the same, doing
the grocery shopping and all the errands there’s no time for during the week. I don’t
have a car. Occasionally, very occasionally, Tricia lets me use hers.

“Why don’t I take the bus? She doesn’t have that much. Didn’t.”

Joe and Sue look relieved. “We’ll pay for your bus tickets. You can ship any extra
boxes UPS,” Joe says.

“And you don’t have to bring everything back.” Sue pauses. “Just the important things.”

I nod. They look so grateful that I have to look away. The trip is nothing: a three-day
errand. A day to get there, a day to pack, a day to get home. It’s the kind of thing
Meg would’ve offered to do without having to be asked first.

4

Every so often, I’ll read some hopeful article about how Tacoma is gentrifying so
much that it’s rivaling Seattle. But when my bus pulls in to the deserted downtown,
it all feels kind of desperate, like it’s trying too hard and failing. Sort of like
some of Tricia’s friends from the bar, fifty-year-old women who wear miniskirts and
platforms and makeup but aren’t fooling anyone.
Mutton disguised as lamb
is how the guys in our town describe them.

When Meg left, I promised I’d come visit once a month, but I wound up coming only
one time, last October. I’d bought a ticket to Tacoma, but when the bus pulled into
Seattle, Meg was waiting at the station. She’d had this idea we’d spend the day roaming
Capitol Hill, have dinner at some hole-in-the-wall dumpling place in Chinatown, and
go out to see a band play in Belltown—all the things we’d talked about doing when
we moved here together. She was so hyped about the plan; I couldn’t quite tell if
the day was her idea of a sales pitch, or a consolation prize.

Either way, it was a bust. The weather was rainy and cold, whereas back home it had
been clear and cold. Another reason not to move to Seattle, I told myself. And none
of the places we visited—the vintage clothing shops and comic book stores and coffeehouses—seemed
as cool as I’d thought they would be. At least that’s what I told Meg.

“Sorry,” she said. Not sarcastically, but sincerely, as though Seattle’s shortcomings
were her fault.

It was a lie, though. Seattle was great. Even with the rotten weather, I’d have loved
living here. But I’m sure I’d have loved living in New York or Tahiti or a million
other places I’d never get to.

We were meant to go see a band play that night, some people Meg knew, but I begged
off, claiming I was tired. We went back to her house in Tacoma. I was supposed to
stay most of the next day, but I told her I had a sore throat, and caught an early
bus home.

Meg invited me to come again, but I always had reasons why I couldn’t: my schedule
was busy, bus fare wasn’t cheap. Both of which were true, even if they weren’t the
truth.

x x x

It takes two buses to get from downtown to Cascades’ tiny, leafy waterfront campus.
Joe had instructed me to go to the administration building to get some papers and
a key. Even though Meg had lived off campus, the university runs all student housing.
When I explain who I am, they immediately know why I’m here, because I get that look.
I hate that look, and I’ve come to know it well: practiced empathy.

“We’re so sorry for your loss,” the lady says. She is fat and wearing the drapey kind
of clothes that only make her bigger. “We’ve been holding weekly support groups for
those impacted by Megan’s death. If you’d care to join us for one, there’s another
gathering coming up.”

Megan? Nobody but her grandparents called her that.

She hands me some literature, a color copy with a big smiling picture of Meg that
I don’t recognize. On top it says
Lifeline
with hearts dotting the
i
’s. “It’s Monday afternoon.”

“’Fraid I’ll be gone by then.”

“Oh, shame.” She pauses. “They’ve been very cathartic for the campus community. People
are quite shocked.”

Shocked
is not the word for it. Shocked is when I finally got Tricia to tell me who my father
was, only to find out that up until I was nine, he’d been living not twenty miles
away from us. What happened with Meg is something altogether different; it’s like
waking up one morning and finding out you live on Mars now.

“I’m only here for a night,” I tell her.

“Oh, shame,” she says again.

“Yes, shame.”

She hands me a set of keys and gives me directions to the house and tells me to call
if I need anything and I’m out the door before she hands me a card. Or worse, gives
me a hug.

At Meg’s old house, no one answers when I knock, so I let myself in. Inside it smells
of beer and pizza and bongwater, and something else, the ammonia scent of a dirty
cat box. There’s the sound of jam bands, Phish or Widespread Panic, the kind of bad
hippie music, I muse, that would make Meg want to shoot herself. Then I catch myself
and remember that she did, in effect, shoot herself.

“Who are you?” A tall and ridiculously pretty girl stands before me. She’s wearing
a tie-dyed peace sign T-shirt, and she is sneering.

“I’m Cody. Reynolds. I’m here for Meg. For her stuff.”

She stiffens. As if Meg, the mention of her, the existence of her, has completely
harshed her mellow. I already hate this girl. And when she introduces herself as Tree,
I wish Meg were around so we could give each other that imperceptible look we’d developed
over the years to register our mutual disdain.
Tree?

“Are you one of her roommates?” I ask. When she first arrived, Meg sent me long emails
about her classes, her professors, her work-study job, and, in some cases, these hilarious
character portraits of each roommate, actual charcoal drawings she scanned for me.
It was the kind of thing that normally I’d have adored, reveling in her haughtiness,
because that’s how it had always been: Meg and Me Versus the World. Back home, they
referred to us as the Pod. But reading the emails, I had the sense that she was purposefully
playing up her roommates’ faults to make me feel better, which only made me feel worse.
In any case, I didn’t recall a Tree.

“I’m friends with Rich,” bitchy hippie Tree replies to me. Ahh, Stoner Richard, as
Meg called him. I met him last time I was here.

“I’ll get on with it,” I say.

“You do that,” Tree replies. Such open hostility is a shock after a month of people
tippy-toeing around me.

Outside Meg’s door, I half expect one of those shrines that have popped up in town;
whenever I see one, I want to yank the heads off the flowers or throw the candles.

But that’s not what I find. There’s an album cover pasted on the door: Poison Idea’s
Feel the Darkness
. The image is of a guy holding a revolver to his head.
This
is her roommates’ idea of a memorial?

Breathing hard, I unlock the door and turn the knob. Inside, it’s not what I expect
either. Meg was notoriously messy, her bedroom at home full of teetering stacks of
books and CDs, drawings, half-completed DIY projects: a lamp she was trying to rewire,
a Super 8 film she was trying to edit. Sue said that her roommates had just locked
the door and left it as was, but it looks like someone has been in here. The bed is
made. And much of her stuff is already neatly folded. There are unassembled boxes
under the bed.

It will take two hours to do this at most. Had I known, I would’ve taken the Garcias’
car and done it as a day-trip.

Sue and Joe had offered me money for a motel, but I didn’t accept it. I know how little
they have, how every spare cent went toward Meg’s education, which, even with a full
scholarship, still had all kinds of hidden costs. And her death has been a whole other
expense. I said I would sleep here. But now that I’m in her room, I can’t help thinking
of the last time—the only time—I slept here.

Meg and I have shared beds, cots, sleeping bags, without a problem since we were little.
But the night of my visit, I’d lain in bed awake next to a soundly sleeping Meg. She
was snoring slightly and I kept kicking her, like it was her snoring that was keeping
me awake. When we got up Sunday morning, something mean and hard had taken root in
my belly, and I felt myself itching for a fight. But the last thing I’d wanted to
do was fight with Meg. She hadn’t done anything. She was my best friend. So I’d left
early. And not because of any sore throat.

I go back downstairs. The music has changed from Phish to something a little more
rocking, The Black Keys, I think. Which is better, if a strange turn. There’s a group
of people sitting on a purple velour couch, divvying up a pizza and a twelve-pack.
Tree is with them, so I walk on by, ignoring them, ignoring the smell of pizza that
makes my stomach gurgle because I haven’t eaten anything except for a Little Debbie
snack cake on the bus.

Outside, it’s misting. I walk a ways until I get to a stretch of diners. I sit down
at one and order a coffee, and when the waitress gives me a dirty look, I get an anytime
$2.99 breakfast and figure that this earns me the right to camp here for the night.

After a few hours and four or five refills, she mostly leaves me be. I take out my
book, wishing I’d brought some page- turnery thriller. But Mrs. Banks, the town librarian,
has me on a Central European author kick these days. She goes through phases like
that with me. Has done ever since I was twelve and she spotted me reading a Jackie
Collins novel at Tricia’s bar where I sometimes had to hang out when Tricia worked.
Mrs. Banks asked what else I liked to read, and I rattled off a few titles, mostly
paperbacks Tricia had brought home from the break room. “You’re quite a reader,” Mrs.
Banks said, and then she invited me to come to the library the following week. When
I did, she got me signed up for a card and loaned me copies of
Jane Eyre
and
Pride and Prejudice.
“When you finish, tell me if you like them, and I’ll get you something else.”

I read them in three days. I’d liked
Jane Eyre
best, even though I hated Mr. Rochester and wished he’d died in the fire
.
Mrs. Banks had smiled at that, then handed me
Persuasion
and
Wuthering Heights
. I tore through those in a few days. From that point on, I would go into the library
at least once a week to see what books she had for me. It seemed amazing that our
tiny branch had such an endless stock of books, and it was years later that I’d learned
that Mrs. Banks was special-ordering books through interlibrary loan that she thought
I’d like.

But tonight the contemplative Milan Kundera she gave me is making my eyelids heavy.
Every time they flutter closed, that waitress, as if possessing radar, comes by to
refill my coffee even though I haven’t touched it since the last refill.

I hold out until about five in the morning and then pay my bill and leave a big tip
because I’m not sure if the waitress was being rude by not letting me sleep or if
she was keeping me from getting kicked out. I wander around the campus until the library
opens at seven, and then I find a quiet corner and fall asleep for a few hours.

When I make my way back to Meg’s house, a guy and a girl are drinking coffee on the
porch.

“Hey,” the guy says. “Cody, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Richard,” he says.

“Right. We met before,” I say. He doesn’t seem to remember. He was probably too stoned.

“I’m Alice,” the girl says. I remember Meg mentioning a new roommate moving in for
the winter term, taking the place of some other girl who transferred out after one
semester.

“Where’d you go?” he asks.

“I stayed in a motel,” I lie.

“Not the Starline!” Alice asks in alarm.

“What?” It takes me a second to realize that the Starline is
the
motel. Meg’s motel. “No, some other dive.”

“Would you like some coffee?” Alice asks.

All the coffee I drank last night has turned acidic in my stomach, and though I’m
hazy and exhausted, I can’t fathom drinking any more. I shake my head.

“Wanna smoke a bowl?” Stoner Richard asks.

“Richard,” Alice swats at him. “She has to pack up all that
stuff
. I don’t think she wants to be stoned.”

“I’d think she’d
wanna
be stoned,” Stoner Richard replies.

“I’m good,” I say. But the sun is fighting its way out of the thin haze of cloud and
it’s making everything so bright that I feel dizzy.

“Sit down. Eat something,” Alice says. “I’m practicing making bread, and I have a
new loaf.”

“It’s slightly less bricklike than usual,” Richard promises.

“It’s good.” Alice pauses. “If you slather it with lots of butter and honey.”

I don’t want the bread. I didn’t want to get to know these people before, and I certainly
don’t want to now. But Alice is gone and back with the bread before I know it. The
bread is kind of dense and chewy, but she’s right; with butter and honey, it’s decent.

I finish it up and brush the crumbs from my lap. “Well, I’d better get to it.” I start
toward the door. “Though someone already did the heavy lifting. Do you know who packed
up her stuff like that?”

Stoner Richard and Alice look at each other. “That’s how she left the room,” Alice
says. “She packed it up herself.”

“Girl was on top of shit till the bitter end,” Richard adds. He looks at me and grimaces.
“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It saves me work,” I say. And my voice sounds so nonchalant, like
this is such a load off my plate.

x x x

It takes about three hours to pack the rest of her stuff. I pull out holey T-shirts
and underwear because why do they need that? I throw away her stacks of music magazines,
piled in a corner. I’m not sure what to do about her bed sheets because they still
smell like her, and I have no idea if her scent will do to Sue what it’s doing to
me, which is making me remember Meg in such a real visceral way—sleepovers and dance
parties and those talks we would have until three in the morning that would make us
feel lousy the next day because we’d slept like hell but also feel good because the
talks were like blood transfusions, moments of realness and hope that were pinpricks
of light in the dark fabric of small-town life.

I am tempted to inhale those sheets. If I do, maybe it will be enough to erase everything.
But you can only hold your breath for so long. Eventually, I’ll have to exhale her,
and then it’ll be like those mornings, when I wake up, forgetting before remembering.

x x x

The UPS place is downtown and I’ll have to get a taxi, cart the stuff over, ship it,
come back for the duffels, and be ready to catch the last bus at seven. Downstairs,
Alice and Stoner Richard are where I left them. It’s unclear to me if these students
at this supposedly well-regarded college ever actually study.