I Was Here (21 page)

Joe strokes his chin in wonderment. “Nothing gets past kids. No matter how much you
try to protect them.” He sighs. “We’ve started talking to families of other suicide
victims. Putting it out in the open. It’s the only thing that seems to help.” He grasps
my hand so tight, the metal of his wedding band leaves an imprint. “I’ll talk to Scottie,”
he promises.

Sue comes back in from the kitchen. She puts down a heaping plate in front of me,
some kind of stew.

I take a bite.

“It’s homemade,” Sue tells me. Then she smiles. It may be the weakest smile I’ve ever
seen, but it’s there.

I take another bite. It turns out that I’m hungry after all.

41

I fall asleep that night at nine o’clock, still in my clothes, and when I wake up
at five the next morning, Tricia is asleep at the kitchen table. I touch her lightly
on the wrist.

“Did you just get home?” I ask.

She shrugs, all bleary-eyed and fuzzy.

“Were you waiting up for me?”

She shrugs again. “Sort of.”

“You can go to bed now. I’m fine.”

“You are?” She yawns. “How’d it go with Joe and Sue?”

“Good. I’ll tell you about it later, when you’re semiconscious.”

“Semiconscious,” she repeats. But then she gets serious. “But you’re okay?”

I nod. “I am okay.” I’ve been saying that for a long time, but now I understand that
it’s true.

“We’ll go to breakfast in a few hours. Diner?” she says.

“Sounds like a plan.”

Tricia trudges to bed. I unpack my bag and put all my filthy stuff in a pile. I’m
going to have to take a trip to the Laundromat today, or maybe I can ask Mrs. Chandler
if I can do a load at her place when I’m there next. People have been pretty generous
when I’ve asked for help. I put on a pot of coffee and go out to the front porch while
the coffee brews.

Dawn is breaking. The hills are pink with the first blushes of morning light, though
a layer of mist still covers the ground. There’s almost no one out on the street at
this hour, no cars, save for the paperboy’s pickup truck.

In the distance, I hear another car, the tick of its engine familiar, though it’s
not the Garcias’ Explorer, and Tricia’s ancient Camry is parked in the driveway. It
blurs down the next block, and I do a double take. No. It’s not possible.

But then it loops around and comes back down the next block, going slowly, like it’s
lost. I stand up from the porch and walk toward the street. The car stops suddenly.
Then it just sits there in the middle of the street, engine idling, before reversing
up the block and turning onto my street, stopping right next to the curb where I’m
standing.

He looks like hell. A day’s worth of beard on his face and who knows how many months
of sleeplessness purpling his eyes. Maybe he got this bad on the trip and I didn’t
notice because it happened by degrees, but the Ben who steps out of that car is almost
unrecognizable from that pretty, snarling boy I saw onstage a few months ago.

“What are you doing here?” I ask him.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” And he sounds so wrecked, it kills me. “Have a
good life?”

“
How
are you here? It’s, like, a twenty-four-hour drive.” I calculate how long it’s been
since I left him in Vegas yesterday: a little more than seventeen hours.

“It’s twenty-four hours if you stop.”

That explains it. Driving all night alone can age you a year in a day.

“How did you know where to find me?”

He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hands. “Meg told me where she lived. It’s a
pretty small town.” He pauses. “I’ve always known where to find you, Cody.”

“Oh.”

He looks so exhausted. I want to take him into my house, lay him down on my bed, pull
up the sheets, and touch his eyelids before they flutter to sleep.

“Why’d you run off like that?”

I don’t know what to tell him. I got happy. I got scared. I got overwhelmed. I put
my hands over my heart, hoping that explains it.

We stand there for a moment. “I saw Meg’s parents,” I say at last. “I told them about
Bradford. Apparently, the police had already told them about Meg’s involvement with
the Final Solution people.”

Ben’s drooping eyes widen in surprise.

“They also told me that Meg was depressed. She’d had a bad episode in tenth grade
that I didn’t recognize even though I was right there and even though I was her best
friend. And she had another after she moved to Tacoma. Before she met you.” I look
at him. His eyes, like the skin under them, seem bruised. “So, apparently, it’s not
your fault. Or mine.” I try to say this last part flippantly, but my voice hitches.

“I never thought it was your fault,” Ben says softly. “But I figured out that it wasn’t
mine, either.”

“But you said that her death was on your conscience.”

“It is. It always will be. But I don’t think I ranked enough to have caused it. And
besides . . .” he trails off.

“What?”

“I keep thinking, if it were my fault, it wouldn’t have brought you into my life.”

My eyes fill with tears.

“I’m in love with you, Cody. And I know that this is all complicated and confused
in a wholly fucked-up way. Meg’s death was a tragedy and the worst kind of waste,
but I don’t want to lose you because of the fucked-up way I found you.”

And now I’m weeping. “Fucking Ben McCallister. You make me cry more than almost any
person I’ve ever met,” I say. But I step toward him.

“I shed a few tears myself last night.” He steps toward me.

“I’ll bet. A thousand miles is a long way with no iPod.”

“Yeah. The music was what was missing.” He takes another step toward me. “I shouldn’t
have let you go. I should’ve said something yesterday, but it was intense for me,
too, and you scared me, Cody. You scare me a lot.”

“That’s because you’re a city dick,” I reply. “City dicks are always scared.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Well, you scare me, too,” I say.

I open my arms for him. And as it always is when I let myself be with Ben McCallister,
scared is the opposite of what I feel.

We stand there, holding each other in the waking morning. He brushes a lock of hair
out of my eyes, kisses me on the temple.

“I’m pretty fragile right now,” I warn him. “Everything’s sort of coming down all
at once.”

He nods. For him, too.

“And this could be tricky. ‘Complicated and confused in a wholly fucked-up way,’ as
you put it.”

“I know,” he says. “We’ll just have to ride it out, cowgirl.”

“Ride it out,” I repeat. I lean my head against him. His whole body heaves.

“Do you want to come inside?” I ask. “Sleep for a while?”

He shakes his head. “Maybe later.”

The sun is up, and the early morning mist has burned off. I reach for his hand. “Come
on.”

“Where are we going?”

“For a walk. I want to show you around. There’s a crazy rocket ship at the park where
the view goes on forever.”

I interlace my fingers with his, and we take off walking. Toward my past. Into my
future.

Epilogue

The year after Meg died, we laid her to rest.

We have one more service. There are no candles at this one, no “Amazing Grace,” not
even a religious officiate. But there will be Meg. Joe and Sue had her cremated, and
now her ashes will be scattered in the various places she loved. They struck a deal
with the Catholic cemetery to give her a grave there, so long as there wasn’t a body.

Today we’re going to let some of her go in the hills of Pioneer Park. Her friends
from town will be here, along with several of the Seattle people, and, of course,
the friends from Cascades.

Alice picked me up in the dorm and drove up with me last night, and Tricia welcomed
me home as if I’d been gone two years rather than two months. Since I’ve been at school,
she’s texted me practically every day. (Raymond is history, but his texting legacy
remains.) But she seems glad I did it, took the leap and applied for (begged for)
mid-term admission at the University of Washington. “I won’t be eligible for any scholarships,
and probably not even many grants. I’ll have to take out loans,” I told her.

“We’ll both take out loans,” she said. “There’re worse things to have hanging over
you than debt.”

x x x

Alice fusses over what to wear, regretting now that she didn’t bring anything black,
no matter how much I reassure her that it’s not that kind of service. We’ve all worn
enough black. Even Tricia scored a new dress off a sale rack; it’s turquoise.

“What are you wearing?” she asks me.

“Probably jeans.”

“You can’t wear jeans!”

“Why not?”

Alice has no answer for that. “When is everyone else getting here?”

“Richard got in last night. Ben left early this morning. He’s meeting us at the park.
He said Harry’s catching a ride with him.”

“I never see Harry anymore. He has an internship with Microsoft so he’s never on campus.”

“I know. We talked last week.” Harry had called to tell me that amid all the scrutiny,
the Final Solution boards shut down. That was the one concrete thing I managed to
accomplish from all this. The police had questioned Bradford Smith, subpoenaed his
computer, even. I liked to picture his look of indignation, crumbling into fear, when
the cops knocked on his door, when they walked away with his files. He must’ve known
that it was me behind this, the sunless planet who turned out to have some light left
in her after all.

But there were no charges filed. Bradford had been too careful, hadn’t broken any
laws. He’d used other people’s words, links to anonymous websites. Not enough tracked
back to him.

Before the boards got shut down, I occasionally went on them and checked for All_BS,
but I didn’t find him. He could’ve changed his username, or changed to a different
group, but somehow I don’t think so. For now, at least, I believe I’ve silenced him.

Joe and Sue met with attorneys who said that I might have gathered enough evidence
for a civil suit. They’re discussing it, but Sue says she doesn’t have the stomach
for the fight. It won’t bring Meg back, and right now, she says, we need not vengeance
but forgiveness. I’ve thought a lot about Jerry’s sermon lately. I think Sue may be
right. Though Bradford Smith isn’t the one any of us needs to forgive.

Tricia comes to my door, all dolled up in the new dress that she’ll freeze in and
in heels that will get muddy on the trails. She looks pretty. She glances at Alice,
she looks at me, she looks at the picture of Meg, the one of her and me as kids at
the rodeo that I’ve left up on my wall. “Let’s do this thing,” she says.

x x x

We climb the trails of Pioneer Park into the small clearing in the woods. In the distance,
I hear Samson barking. Rounding the corner, I spot Joe and Sue talking to people they’ve
met in their suicide survivor group. The Seattle musicians are tuning their instruments.
Scottie is playing Hacky Sack with Richard and Harry. Sharon Devonne and some other
people Meg knew from school are talking to Mrs. Banks and her husband. Alexis and
her fiancé, Ryan, now back from Afghanistan, each hold a hand of their little girl,
Felicity. I’m a little surprised to see Tammy Henthoff here, standing alone. She catches
my eye and we nod.

Ben is off to the side, looking down the hill. I follow his gaze to the rocket ship,
and at the same time, we turn to look at each other. I don’t quite know how so much
gets communicated in one look, but it does
. Complicated and confused in a wholly fucked-up way
is a good way to describe it. But maybe that’s just how love is.

Ready?
he mouths.

I nod. I am ready. Soon the musicians will gather and play the Bishop Allen song about
fireflies and forgiveness and I will eulogize my friend and we will scatter a bit
of her to the wind. And then we will go down the hill, past the rocket ship, to the
cemetery, to her grave, where a marker will say:

Megan Luisa Garcia
I WAS HERE

Author’s Note

Many years ago I wrote an article about suicide in which I interviewed friends and
family members of young women who had taken their lives. That was when I “met��� Suzy
Gonzales, though I didn’t really meet her because she had already been dead for a
few years. Listening to friends and relatives talk about Suzy, I kept forgetting I
was reporting a piece on suicide. The portrait they painted was of a bright, creative,
charismatic, nonconformist nineteen-year-old—the kind of girl I might have interviewed
because she was publishing her debut novel, or releasing her first album, or directing
a cool indie movie. On the surface, she didn’t strike me—or the people I interviewed—as
someone who would kill herself.

Except for this one detail: Like every other young woman I’d profiled in that article,
Suzy suffered from depression. When she started to have suicidal thoughts, she reached
out for support, going to her university’s health center, but ultimately placing her
trust with a suicide “support” group, which both applauded her impulse to end her
life and gave her advice on how to do it.

I never really stopped thinking about Suzy, about the article I might’ve written about
her—the book she might’ve written, the band she might’ve fronted, the movie she might’ve
directed—had she gotten proper treatment for the condition that had put her in such
pain that ending her life seemed like the only way to relieve it.

More than a decade later, Suzy was the spark of inspiration for the fictional character
of Meg. And from Meg came Cody,
I Was Here
’s heroine. Cody is a young woman decimated by her best friend’s death, left raw and
grieving, full of sadness and anger and regret and questions that will never be answered.
Cody and Meg are fictional, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering: if Meg knew what
her suicide would do to her best friend, to her family, would she have done it? Or
from wondering if in the depths of her depression, Meg could even fathom such a ripple
effect.

According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, studies have consistently
suggested that the overwhelming majority of people who take their own lives—90 percent
or more—had a mental disorder at the time of their deaths. Among people who die by
suicide, the most common disorder is depression, though bipolar disorder and substance
abuse are also risk factors. Often, these illnesses are undiagnosed or untreated at
the time of death.

Note that I’m calling them
illnesses
. The same way that pneumonia is an illness. But with mental disorders, it gets thorny,
because “it’s in your head.” Except it’s not. Researchers have shown a link between
a risk of suicide and changes in brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, like serotonin.
This physiological condition causes a mental (and physical) reaction that can make
you feel truly dreadful, and, like pneumonia, if left untreated, in extreme cases,
can be fatal.

Thankfully, there are treatments, usually a mix of mood- stabilizing medications and
therapy. Refusing treatment for depression or a mood disorder is akin to getting a
pneumonia diagnosis and refusing to take antibiotics and go on bed rest. And doing
what Meg and Suzy did? That would be like getting a pneumonia diagnosis and then going
online for help that advises you to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day while running
in the rain. Would you ever follow that kind of advice?

Not every person who suffers from depression will be suicidal. The vast majority won’t.
And not everyone who has a thought about what it would be like to die is suicidal.
When Richard says, “Everyone goes there,” I think he is right. I think everyone has
days or weeks so lousy, they fantasize about simply not existing. This is different
from having suicidal thoughts taking over your head, having the thoughts become plans,
the plans become attempts. (For a list of specific warning signs and risk factors,
go here:
http://www.
afsp.org/understanding-suicide/warning-signs-and-risk-factors.)

Like Cody, like Richard, I have gone there. I’ve had my days. But I’ve never seriously
considered suicide. Which isn’t to say my life hasn’t been touched by it. Someone
very close to me attempted suicide long ago. He got help, and went on to live a long
and happy life. If suicide is a sliding door of might-have-beens, in Suzy and Meg’s
case, I see the ghosts of their lives unlived, and in this other case, I see the flipside:
a happy, full life that might never have been.

Life can be hard and beautiful and messy, but hopefully, it will be long. If it is,
you will see that it’s unpredictable, and that the dark periods come, but they abate—sometimes
with a lot of support—and the tunnel widens, allowing the sun back in. If you’re in
the dark, it might feel like you will always be in there. Fumbling. Alone. But you
won’t—and you’re not. There are people out there to help you find the light. Here’s
how to find
them
.

If you are in pain and needing help, the first step is to tell someone. Parents, older
siblings, aunts, uncles—find any adult whom you trust: a minister, a school counselor,
a doctor, a nurse, a family friend. This is a
first
step, not a final one. It’s not enough to confide in someone. Once you tell someone,
he or she can help you find the professional help and support you need.

If you cannot reach out to a responsible adult, or are unsure what to do next for
yourself or a loved one, the National Foundation for Suicide Prevention has a crisis
hotline for immediate support: 800-273-TALK.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s website (http://www.afsp.org) has
a wealth of information, from risk factors and warning signs to important resources
for survivors of suicide, including information on finding a support group.

LGBT youth account for a disproportionate number of suicides. If you are gay, lesbian,
trans, bi, or queer, and are thinking of ending your own life, contact the Trevor
Project (
www.thetrevorproject.org
). Their 24/7 hotline number is 866-488-7386.

To learn more about Suzy Gonzales, go to
http://www.suzys law.com
.

Acknowledgments

This is the place where writers tend to thank all the people who helped get a book
made. But there’s a difference between thanking—a show of gratitude—and acknowledging—a
recognition of a contribution. So this time, I’m going to try to stick to the true
spirit of the word and acknowledge those responsible for bringing
I Was Here
to life.

I acknowledge Michael Bourret, whose advocacy, support, candor, and friendship makes
me brave—and makes me want to be braver.

I acknowledge the entire team at Penguin Young Readers Group. This is our fifth book,
and seventh year, together. At this point it feels like a marriage, albeit one with
many sister wives (and even a few husbands): Erin Berger, Nancy Brennan, Danielle
Calotta, Kristin Gilson, Anna Jarzab, Eileen Kreit, Jen Loja, Elyse Marshall, Janet
Pascal, Emily Romero, Leila Sales, Kaitlin Severini, Alex Ulyett, Don Weisberg, and
last but certainly not least, my publisher, editor, and friend, the wonderful Ken
Wright.

I acknowledge Tamara Glenny, Marjorie Ingall, Stephanie Perkins, and Maggie Stiefvater,
for reading drafts at critical times, and offering wise, thoughtful, and expansive
feedback.

I acknowledge my Brooklyn Lady Writer™ friends, with whom I work, drink (coffee mostly),
plot, and dream: Libba Bray, E. Lockhart, and Robin Wasserman. Tip of the hat to Sandy
London, even though he’s not a lady, and to Rainbow Rowell, Nova Ren Suma, and Margaret
Stohl even though they’re not Brooklyn.

I acknowledge my Brooklyn non-writer friends who help me keep it together: Ann Marie,
Brian and Mary Clarke, Kathy Kline, Isabel Kyriacou, and Cameron and Jackie Wilson.

I acknowledge Jonathan Steuer for helping me to sound mildly proficient in computer
geekery.

I acknowledge Justin Rice, Christian Rudder, and Corin Tucker for first inspiring
me with their music, and then again with their generosity.

I acknowledge Lauren Abramo, Deb Shapiro, and Dana Spector for getting my work to
a wider audience.

I acknowledge Tori Hill for being a magical elf in the night who gets things done.

I acknowledge the greater YA community—authors, librarians, booksellers. To quote
the great Lorde: “We’re on each other’s team.”

I acknowledge Mike and Mary Gonzales for their grace and generosity.

I acknowledge Suzy Gonzales, the spark of this book. I would’ve preferred to know
her, not the character I invented because of her. Suzy’s parents tell me that in life
she always tried to help people. In death, too, perhaps.

I acknowledge all of the women and men who have struggled with depression or mood
disorders or mental illness and suicide, and have found a way to cope, and better
yet, to thrive.

I acknowledge all the men and women who have struggled with depression or mood disorders
or other mental illness and suicide, who have not found a way to cope, and who have
succumbed.

I acknowledge the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (
www.afsp.org
) for tipping the scales in favor of the thriving, and for helping us to understand
this complicated condition better.

I acknowledge my parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, and nephew for all their myriad
forms of support.

I acknowledge Willa and Denbele for their ferocity and their love.

I acknowledge Nick, for being here, with me.