I Was Here (4 page)

6

That night, I crash on the velour couch in my clothes. I wake up Sunday morning with
Pete and Repeat sleeping on my chest and face. Either I’ve claimed their couch, or
they’ve claimed me. I sit up in time to see the last roommate, who’s been invisible
all weekend, drop a cereal bowl in the sink and disappear out the back door.

“Bye, Harry,” Alice calls after him.

So that’s Harry. According to Meg, he mostly stayed in his room with his many computers
and his jars of fermented kimchi.

Alice goes into the kitchen and returns with a cup of coffee for me, which she announces
is free-range and fair-trade and shade-farmed in Malawi, and I nod along as if my
coffee needs go beyond hot and caffeinated.

I sit on the couch, watching the cats take playful swipes at each other’s faces. One
of Repeat’s ears gets stuck inside out. I flick it straight for him and he mewls.
It’s the most helpless sound, and like it or not, there’s no way I can take these
guys to a shelter, no-kill or otherwise.

After I drink my coffee, I take my phone out onto the porch, where someone has set
up a bunch of empty beer bottles in bowling-pin formation. I call Tricia. It’s only
ten thirty, but miraculously, she answers.

“How’s the big city?” she asks.

“Big,” I reply. “Look, how do you feel about me bringing home a pair of kittens?”

“How do you feel about living someplace else?”

“It would be temporary. Until I find them a good home.”

“Forget it, Cody. I raised you for eighteen years. I’m not taking on any more helpless
creatures.”

There are many things I resent about that sentiment; not the least is the implication
that I’m a helpless creature that she’s coddled for years. I’d say I raised myself,
but that would be unfair to the Garcias. When I got strep throat, it was Sue who noticed
the gook on my tonsils and took me to the pediatrician for antibiotics. When I got
my period, it was Sue who bought me pads. Tricia had just waved to the tampons in
the medicine cabinet “for when the time comes,” not seeming to understand how terrifying
the thought of inserting anything
supersize absorbency
might be to a twelve-year-old. As for the fifty hours of driving practice I needed
to get my driver’s license, Tricia logged all of three of them. Joe did the remaining
forty-seven, spending countless Sunday afternoons in the car with me and Meg.

“I might be here a few more days,” I say. “Can you cover me at Ms. Mason’s on Monday?
There’s forty bucks in it for you.”

“Sure.” Tricia jumps at the money. She doesn’t ask me why I’m delayed or when I’ll
be home.

I call the Garcias next. It’s a little trickier with them because if I mention the
kittens, they’ll offer to take them in, even though the way Samson is around cats,
it would be a disaster. I tell Sue I need a day or two longer to tie up a few of Meg’s
loose ends. She sounds relieved, doesn’t ask any more questions. Just tells me to
take as much time as I need. I’m about to hang up. Then she says:

“And, Cody . . .”

I hate those
And, Cody
s. It’s like a gun being cocked. Like they’re about to tell me they know everything.
“Yeah?”

There’s a long pause on the phone. My heart starts to pound.

“Thank you,” is all Sue says.

x x x

Inside, I ask Alice about the best way to find homes for the kittens. Good homes.
“You could put an ad on Craigslist, but I heard sometimes those animals wind up in
research labs.”

“Not helpful.”

“Well, we could put up flyers. Everyone likes pictures of kittens.”

I sigh. “Fine. How should we do that?”

“Easiest to take a picture of the cats, maybe email it to yourself, add some text,
and print them out. . . .” she begins. “It might be simpler to use Meg’s laptop; it
has a built-in camera.”

The eighteen-hundred-dollar computer her parents got her when she left for college.
They’re still paying off the credit card bill for that.

I go up to her room and find the computer in one of the boxes. I turn it on. It’s
password protected, but I put in
Runtmeyer
, and her desktop pops up. I bring the computer downstairs while Alice poses the cats
together, which is harder than you’d think, and I understand where the expression
“herding kittens” comes from. Finally, I snap a picture. Alice quickly uses the desktop
publishing function to make up a flyer, and I take the thing back to Meg’s printer
to print out a test copy.

I’m about to shut down her computer when I stop. Her email program is right there,
right at the toolbar on the bottom, and without even thinking about it, I click it
open. Immediately, a bunch of new mail downloads—junk, mostly, crap from anonymous
people who don’t know she’s dead, though there are one or two
Meg, We Miss You
emails and one telling her she’s going to rot in hell because suicide is a sin. I
delete that one.

I’m curious to know what the last email Meg sent was. Who was it to? Was it the suicide
note? As I click over to the sent mail folder, I look around as if someone is watching
me. But of course, no one is.

It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we
now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide
note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine
for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library
fines?

How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like
that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you
keep
carrying on?

I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just
says:
Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you
.
Always
.

Was that her good-bye? Did she send
me
a good-bye that I somehow missed?

I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before
she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.

I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a [email protected]
a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.

You don’t have to worry about me anymore.

It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak
and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.

I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the
fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least
from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because
his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first
saw him play, a bunch of
thanks for coming to my show
,
thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad
—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are some notes
about upcoming gigs.

Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in
another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin
cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple
in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down
the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that
Meg could flirt in for days.

But then there’s this abrupt change in tone.
It’s cool. We’re still friends,
he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed.
I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side
of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because
again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February
is wiped out. Weird.

I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says,
Don’t worry about it
. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly,
that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt
and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the
last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister
with ice in my veins:
Meg, you have to leave me alone
.

Yeah, she left you alone, all right.

Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t
recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says
MUDHONEY
. His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.

I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben
from Meg’s account, with the subject line:
Back from the Dead.

Your precious T-shirt, that is,
I write.
There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.

I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send.
It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email.
When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages
of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives,
and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and
by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter. But then one time, you track down
an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have
that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have
a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing
comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they
weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.

x x x

Alice and I blanket the part of Tacoma near the college with kitten flyers. Then she
gets the smart idea of putting them up around this fancy health food store where the
rich people shop. We take the bus, and on the way she tells me the place isn’t a Whole
Foods, but they might get a Whole Foods here soon, and when I say, “How thrilling,”
Alice says, “I know,” not catching the sarcasm at all, so I look out the window, hoping
she’ll shut up.

The trip is a bust because the store manager won’t let us hang flyers inside, so we
hand them out to the well-heeled customers with their recycled bags and they all look
at us like we’re offering them free crack samples.

It’s after five by the time we get back, and even perky Alice is flagging. I’m furious
and frustrated. I can’t believe it is this hard to find homes for kittens, and the
whole thing seems like some kind of sick joke, with Meg getting the last laugh.

The house smells of cooking, a weird, unpleasant odor of spices that don’t go together—curry,
rosemary, too much garlic. Tree is back, sitting on the couch drinking a beer.

“I thought you were leaving,” Tree says coolly.

Alice tacks one of the cat flyers onto the bulletin board by the door, next to a large
flyer for tomorrow’s Lifeline vigil. She explains how I’m trying to find homes for
Pete and Repeat.

Tree makes a face. “What, you have something against
kittens
?” I ask her.

She wrinkles her nose. “It’s just Pete and Repeat. Those names. They’re so
gay
.”

“I’m bisexual, and I don’t appreciate your derogatory use of
gay
,” Alice says, attempting to sound scolding but still somehow managing to sound chipper.

“Well, sorry. I know they’re the dead girl’s cats, but the names are still gay.”

When she says this, Tree seems less like a hippie than like one of the rednecks in
our town. It makes me hate her both more and less.

“What names do you prefer?” I ask.

Without hesitating, she says, “Click and Clack. That’s what I call them in my head.”

“And you think Pete and Repeat are bad?” Stoner Richard asks, appearing with a stained
apron and a wooden spoon. “I think we should call them Lenny and Steve.”

“Those aren’t cat names,” Alice says.

“Why not?” Stoner Richard asks, holding up the spoon, the contents of which bear the
strange odor of the kitchen. “Who wants a bite?”

“What is it?” Tree asks.

“Everything-in-the-fridge stew.”

“You should add the cats,” Tree says. “Then she wouldn’t have to find homes for them.”

“I thought you were a vegetarian,” Alice says acidly.

Stoner Richard invites me to share his horrible concoction. It smells like the spices
got into a rumble and everyone lost, though that’s not the reason I decline. I’m not
used to company. I’m not sure when that happened. I used to have friends—not good
ones, but friends—from school, from town. I used to be at the Garcias all the time.
Used to
seems far from where I am now.

I leave the roommates to their meal and go into the kitchen for a drink. I bought
a liter of Dr Pepper earlier and stowed it in the fridge, but Stoner Richard, in his
zeal to cook, has moved everything, so I have to dig for it. And there, in the back,
I find a couple of unopened cans of RC and my stomach drops out because the only person
I’ve ever known to drink that is Meg. I fill an old Sonics cup with ice and RC. When
I leave here, I don’t want to leave even the smallest part of her behind.