I Was Here (6 page)

“I’ll leave them with my mom next time I go to Bend. It’s pretty much a zoo at her
place anyway, so she won’t give a shit about two more strays.”

“What about until then?” I ask.

“I share a house in Seattle. It’s got a backyard, and my housemates are all vegans,
big into animal rights, so they can’t say no or they’ll risk looking like hypocrites.”

“Why would you do that?” I ask. I don’t know why I’m challenging him. I need to find
a home for the cats; Ben’s the only taker. I should shut up.

“I thought I just explained why,” he says. The growl back in his voice is a relief.

But by the way he’s looking at everything in the room but me, I think he knows that
he didn’t really explain why. And by the way I’m looking at everything in the room
but him, I know that I don’t really need him to.

x x x

The next morning, Ben comes by the house for the cats as I’m finishing taping up the
last of the boxes. I put Pete and Repeat into their carrier, collect all their toys,
and hand them over.

“Where are you headed?” he asks me.

“UPS depot and bus station.”

“I can give you a lift.”

“That’s okay. I’ll call a cab.”

One of the cats yowls from the carrier. “Don’t be stupid,” Ben says. “You’ll have
to pay for two cabs.”

I’m half afraid Ben will rescind his offer to take the cats, and that’s why he’s offering
the ride, but he’s already loading the duffel bags into the trunk and putting the
cats in the back. The car is filthy, full of empty Red Bull cans, smelling of cigarettes.
There’s a beaded cardigan balled up in the backseat.

The mysterious roommate Harry Kang helps us haul the boxes to the car, and though
we have not exchanged two words during my entire stay, he grasps my hand and says,
“Please tell Meg’s family that my family has been praying for them every day.” He
looks at me a moment longer. “I’m going to tell them to pray for you, too.” And though
people have been saying this crap to me all the time since Meg died, Harry’s unexpected
words bring a lump to my throat.

Pete and Repeat yowl all the way to the UPS place, and Ben waits with them in the
car while I ship the boxes. Then Ben drives me to the bus station in time for the
one p.m. bus. I’ll be home for dinner. Not that there’ll be dinner.

The cats continue to screech the whole time, and by the time we get to the bus station,
it smells like one of them has peed. By this point I’m convinced he’s going to say
he changed his mind, that the offer to take them was basically his revenge for my
T-shirt email.

But he doesn’t. When I open the door in front of the bus station, he says, “Take care,
Cody,” in a quiet voice.

I suddenly wish I were taking the cats. The thought of returning home alone makes
me desolate. As much as I want to put miles between me and Ben McCallister, now that
I’m doing just that, I understand what a relief it’s been to share this weight with
someone.

“Yeah. You too,” I tell him. “Have a good life.”

It’s not what I meant to say. It sounds too flippant. But maybe it’s the most you
can hope for someone.

10

The bus breaks down with a flat tire in the mountains, so I miss my connection in
Ellensburg and it’s after midnight when I get home. I sleep until eight, go clean
the Thomas house, and then that night, I lug the two bags over to the Garcias.

I ring the bell, which is something I rarely ever did before, and Scottie answers.
When he opens the door, I ask how it’s going but I don’t need to ask, because I smell
butter.

“Cupcakes,” he says.

“Delicious,” I say, attempting some cheer.

Scottie shakes his head. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’d like some broccoli
right about now.”

Joe and Sue hesitate when they see me, as if it’s not Meg’s clothes and books I’ve
brought back, but Meg herself. Then they come forward and are thanking me and Sue
is crying silently, and it’s just too much to bear. I know they love me. Sue has long
said she loves me like a daughter, but it’s different now that she doesn’t actually
have a daughter.

I turn to Scottie. If this is hard on me, it’s worse for him. So, as if I’m Santa
unpacking gifts, I say: “Shall we see what we’ve got?”

Except no one wants to see it. So I pull out her laptop, which I’ve kept separate
in my backpack. I hold it out to Joe and Sue. They look at each other; then they shake
their heads. “We discussed it,” Joe says, “and we want you to have it.”

“Me?” I know how expensive this computer was. “No. I can’t.”

“Please, we want you to,” Sue says.

“What about Scottie?”

“Scottie is ten,” Joe says. “We have the family computer. He has plenty of time to
have his own laptop.”

Sue’s face falters, as if she no longer trusts the promise of time. But she pulls
it together and says: “And you’ll need it for when you go away to college.”

I nod, and we all pretend like this is going to happen.

“It’s too much,” I say.

“Cody, take it,” Joe says almost harshly. I understand then that giving me the computer
is not really a gift. But maybe my taking it is.

x x x

When it’s time to leave, Sue packs up a dozen cupcakes to take home. They’re frosted
pink and gold, colors that tell a story of sweetness and joy. Even food lies.

Scottie takes Samson out for a walk and joins me half the way home.

“Sorry about the computer, Runtmeyer.”

“S’okay. I can play DS.”

“You can come over and teach me to play one of your games.”

He looks at me seriously. “Okay. But you can’t let me win. I feel like people are
letting me win because I’m the dead girl’s brother.”

I nod. “I’m the dead girl’s best friend. So it’s an even playing field. Which frees
me up to totally kick your butt.”

It’s the first time I see Scottie smile in ages.

x x x

When I get home, Tricia is there, nuking a Lean Cuisine. “Want one?” she asks. This
is the height of mothering for her.

We sit down to Chinese Chicken, and I show her the laptop. She runs her hands over
it, impressed, and I wonder if she resents that the Garcias have provided me another
thing that she can’t. This in addition to all the dinners, the family camping trips,
everything that they gave me while Tricia was working at the bar or out with one of
her boyfriends.

“I’ve always wondered how to work one of these,” she says.

I shake my head. “I can’t believe you still don’t know how to use a computer.”

She shrugs. “I’ve got this far. And I know how to text. Raymond showed me.”

I don’t ask who Raymond is. I don’t need to know that he’s the latest Guy. Tricia
never bothers bringing them around, or introducing me, unless we happen to bump into
each other. Which is just as well. They’ve usually dumped her by the time it takes
me to learn a name.

We eat our meals. Tricia doesn’t want one of Sue’s cupcakes because they’re fattening,
and I don’t want one either, so Tricia digs around for low-fat Fudgsicles with only
moderate amounts of freezer burn.

“What was with the cats?” she asks me.

“Huh?”

“You asked if we could have cats. Are you trying to fill up the gap left by Meg with
a pet or something?”

I choke on my Fudgsicle. “No.” And then I almost tell her because I want to tell someone
about Meg’s cats, about her whole life there that I knew nothing about. But I’m pretty
sure the Garcias didn’t know about it either. And this town is small; if I tell Tricia
about the cats, she will invariably tell someone, and it’ll get back to Joe and Sue.
“There were a couple of kittens and they needed homes.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t give homes to every stray out there.”

She says this like people are constantly knocking down our door for a nice, dry, warm
place to stay, when, in fact, we are the strays.

11

An academic adviser from the community college leaves me a message, saying that they
are aware of my “extenuating circumstances” and if I want to come in for a meeting,
he will help me find a way to fix my record. Madison, a girl who���d been in most
of my classes at school, also calls, leaving another
Are you okay?
message.

I don’t return either call. I go back to work, picking up a few more cleaning jobs,
six a week now, decent money. Meg’s laptop stays on my desk, along with the rest of
my schoolbooks, all of them collecting dust. Until one afternoon, the doorbell rings.
Scottie is on the porch, with Samson, who’s tied up to a rail. “I’m here to take you
up on your offer to kick my butt,” he says.

“Come on in.”

We fire up the computer.

“What are we playing?” I ask.

“I thought we’d start with Soldier of Solitude.”

“What’s that?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” He clicks on the web program. “Hmm.” He fiddles around some
more. “I don’t see your network. Maybe we have to reboot the router.”

I shake my head. “There’s no router, Scottie. No Internet.”

He looks at me, then looks like around like he’s remembering who I am, who Tricia
is. “Oh, that’s okay. We can play something on your computer.” He pulls the laptop
back toward him. “What games do you have?”

“I don’t know. It depends if Meg had any games.” Scottie and I look at each other
and almost smile. Meg hated video games. Thought they sucked out valuable brain cells.
And sure enough, there’s nothing on the computer except what came preloaded.

“We can play solitaire,” I say.

“You can’t play solitaire with two people,” Scottie says. “That’s why it’s called
solitaire
.”

I feel like I’ve let him down. I start to close the computer. But then Scottie holds
it open. “Is that what she sent the note from?”

Scottie is ten. I am pretty sure it’s not healthy for him to be talking about stuff
like this. Not with me. I close the computer.

“Cody, nobody tells me anything.”

His voice is so plaintive. I remember the good-bye she sent him, also from this computer.
“Yes, this is the computer she sent the note from.”

“Can I see it?”

“Scottie—”

“I know everyone wants to protect my innocence and stuff, but my sister swallowed
poison. It’s kinda too late.”

I sigh. I have a printout of her suicide note in the box under my bed, but I know
that’s not what he wants to see. I know he’s seen the note, or read it, or heard about
it. But he wants to see its origin. I open up the sent mail file. I show him the note.
With squinting eyes, he reads it.

“Did you ever think it was weird that she said that the decision was ‘my own to make’?”

I shake my head. I hadn’t.

“It’s just, when we used to get busted for doing something together and she wanted
to keep me out of trouble, that’s what she’d tell Mom and Dad. ‘Scottie had nothing
to do with it. It was my own decision.’ It was how she’d protect me.”

I remember all the times Meg dragged Scottie into one of her schemes and then had
to extricate him. She was always taking the fall for him. Most of the time, deservedly
so. I still don’t quite get what he’s saying, so the ten-year-old has to spell it
out for me.

“It’s almost like she’s protecting someone.”

12

After Scottie leaves, I go through Meg’s emails yet again. There’s all that deleted
sent mail, which I haven’t been able to understand. Why would she delete only the
sent messages but not the inbox? Or did she delete mail from her inbox, too, only
I don’t know what to look for? Why those six weeks? And what else did she delete?
Is there a way to find the old messages? Are they gone for good? I have no idea. I
don’t know anyone who would know this.

But then I remember Harry Kang, Meg’s roommate, who studies computers. I fumble for
the scrap of paper Alice wrote her cell phone on, and I call it. She’s not there,
so I leave a message, asking her to have Harry call me.

The next morning, at seven forty-five, my phone rings, waking me up.

“Hello.” My voice is groggy.

“This is Harry Kang,” he says.

I sit up in my bed. “Oh, Harry, hi, it’s Cody.”

“I know. I called you.”

“Right. Thank you. Look, I don’t know if you can help me with this, but I have a computer
and I’m trying to find deleted emails.”

“You’re calling me because your computer crashed?”

“It’s not my computer. It’s Meg’s. And I’m trying to recover files that I think she
tried to delete.”

He pauses now, as if considering. “What kind of files?”

I explain to him about all the missing sent messages and how I’m trying to recover
them, and recover any other messages that might’ve been deleted.

“It may be possible to do that using a data recovery program. But if Meg wanted those
files deleted, maybe we should respect her privacy.”

“I know. But there was something in her suicide note that makes me think that she
might not have acted alone, and then there’s a bunch of missing emails. It doesn’t
feel right.”

The line goes quiet for a minute. “You mean someone might’ve coerced her?”

Can you coerce someone to drink poison? “I don’t know what I mean. That’s why I want
to find those emails. I wonder if they’re in this folder I found in her trash. It
won’t open.”

“What happens when you try?”

“Hang on.”

I turn on the laptop and drag the file from the trash. I open it and get the encryption
message. I tell Harry.

“Try this.” He feeds me a bunch of complicated keystrokes. Nothing works. The file
remains encrypted.

“Hmm.” He gives me another set of commands to try, but still they don’t work.

“It seems like a pretty sophisticated encryption,” Harry says. “Whoever wrote it knew
what they were doing.”

“So it’s locked for good?”

Harry laughs. “No. Nothing ever is. If I had the computer, I could probably decrypt
it for you. You can send it down if you want, but you’ll have to hurry because school
ends in two weeks.”

x x x

I take the computer to the drugstore, which has a shipping outlet at the back. Troy
Boggins, who was a year ahead of me in high school, is working behind the counter.
“Hey, Cody. Where you been hiding?” he asks.

“I haven’t been hiding,” I say. “I’ve been working.”

“Oh, yeah,” he drawls. “Where you working these days?”

There’s nothing to be ashamed of about cleaning houses. It’s honest work and I make
good money, probably more than Troy. But Troy didn’t spend four years of high school
going on about how the minute the ink was dry on his diploma, he was getting the hell
out of here. Well, I didn’t either. Meg did, though like most of her plans, it became
my plan too. Then Meg left and I stayed.

When I don’t answer, Troy tells me it’ll cost forty dollars each way to mail the computer.
“Plus more if you want insurance.”

Eighty bucks? That’s how much a bus ticket costs. The weekend’s coming up, and I have
cash from the extra shifts. I decide to take the computer to Tacoma myself. I’ll get
the answers faster that way.

I tell Troy I changed my mind.

“No worries,” he says.

I turn to walk away. As I do, Troy says: “Wanna hang out sometime? Go out for a beer?”

Troy Boggins is the kind of guy that, if you added fifteen or twenty years, Tricia
would date. He never paid me any attention in high school. His sudden interest should
be flattering, but instead it feels ominous. Like without Meg by my side, it’s clear
what I am. What I’ve been all along.

x x x

When I tell Tricia I’m going back to Tacoma for the weekend, she gives me a funny
look. It’s not like she’ll stop me. I’m eighteen, and even if I weren’t, she’s never
been that kind of mother. “Is there a guy?” she asks.

“What? No! It’s for Meg’s stuff. Why would you say that?”

She narrows her eyes and sniffs, like she’s trying to smell something on me. Then
she gives me twenty bucks for the trip.

I text Alice that I’m coming and ask if I can crash, and she responds with a bunch
of exclamation points, like we’re buddies or something. She says she’ll be gone most
of Saturday at her internship, but we can hang out Sunday. I tell Harry I’m coming
too, and he says he’ll look at the computer right away, that he’s looking forward
to it.

x x x

I get in late, but the couch has been made up for me. I crash there. In the morning,
Harry and I go into his room, which has, like, five computers in it, all on and humming.
We turn on Meg’s. He opens her mail program first. “I’m not sure about retrieving
the deleted email,” he says once he’s looked around. “Her mail program is set to use
IMAP, so once messages are deleted here, they’re also gone from the server.”

I nod, as if that makes sense to me.

He clicks on the encrypted file. “She probably meant to throw this away too, but the
encryption got corrupted somehow and it prevented the machine from throwing it away.”

“What do you mean?”

“You found it in the trash, right?”

I nod again.

“She probably tried to empty it, but watch. . . .” He goes to the menu and selects
“Empty Trash.”

“Don’t!” I yell.

He holds up his hand for me to stop. Some of the things empty, but then an error message
reads, “The operation cannot be completed because the item ‘Unnamed Folder’ is in
use.”

“I put some dummy folders in the trash so we could see that it’ll empty that, but
not this. And don’t worry, I already copied this folder onto my computer. But my guess
is, she meant to toss it, but couldn’t.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever it is, it’s something she didn’t want people to see. You sure you want to
see it?”

I shake my head. I’m not sure at all. “This isn’t about what I
want
.”

“Okay. I’m doing something this afternoon, but I’ll work on it before and when I get
home. It’s going to take a little bit of doing.”

I’m about to apologize, but I see the delight in Harry’s eyes, like I’ve just given
him the world’s biggest puzzle. So I thank him instead.

He nods. “How are the cats doing?”

“Don’t know. That guy Ben took them.”

“He lives in Seattle, right?”

I shrug. I think that’s what he said.

“If you want to check on the cats, my church group is going up there this afternoon
to paint a youth center. We could give you a ride.”

“They’re kittens, Harry, not babies. And they’re probably not even there. He was sending
them to his mom.” Though the way Ben talked, I didn’t get the sense he was the kind
of guy who saw his mom every week. “Anyhow, they’re not my concern anymore.”

He holds his hands up. “Sorry. You seemed pretty into them. Meg was.”

“I’m not Meg.”

He nods again. “Let me get to work on this.”

x x x

The morning drags on. Alice and Stoner Richard aren’t home and Harry hasn’t left his
room, so I sit there, on the front porch, watching the rain come down. In the corner,
I see one of the catnip-filled mice the kittens would spend hours attacking. It’s
like it’s staring at me.

“Oh, fine.” I grab my phone and text Ben.
How are the cats?

He texts back immediately:
Out back
.
Trying to catch rain
. Then he texts a picture of them frolicking in a yard.

Good pastime for Seattle cats
.

Beats chasing tail
.

You’d know
.

Ha! Where are you?

Tacoma
.

There’s a lag before the next text. Then,
Come visit them? They grow up so fast.

I’m not entirely sure why my stomach does a little tumble except that the thought
of seeing Ben McCallister is both repulsive and the opposite of that. Before I’ve
had a chance to think too much about it, I text back:
Okay
.

Three seconds later:
Need a lift?

I’m covered
.

He sends me his address and tells me to text him when I’m on the road.

x x x

There’s a whole vanload from Harry’s church group going to Seattle, and I’m a little
shocked to find Stoner Richard crammed into the back.

“Hey, Cody,” he says.

“Hey, Richard,” I reply. “Didn’t take you for a—”

“A Christian?” He laughs. “I’m just in it for the paint fumes. I’m all out of weed.”

One of the girls in the middle seat throws a paint roller at him. “Shut up, Richard.
You are so full of shit.”

Cursing, stoner, do-gooding Christians. Okaayy.

She turns to me. “His father is a minister in Boise. Do you go to church?”

“Only because memorial services are so often held in them.”

She and Richard and Harry exchange a look, and even though I don’t think she goes
to Cascades, it’s clear she knows what—and who—I’m talking about.

Someone blasts Sufjan Stevens, and Richard and Harry and the rest of the van sing
along all the way to the outskirts of Seattle. I text Ben that I’m nearby.

Repeat just hit the litter box,
he texts back.
I’ll save it for you
.

I allow a smile at that.

“Careful.” This from Stoner Richard. We’re pulling onto the off-ramp now, and he is
climbing over the back row.

“You’re the one surfing in a moving vehicle.”

He squeezes next to me. “I know how guys like that are. Saw how he was with Meg. Charming
on the outside, but inside, total douche.”

And here’s the crazy awful horrible thing. For one second, I almost defend Ben. But
then I catch myself and I’m appalled, because Richard is right. Ben is a dick. He
slept with Meg and then he blew her off, and now that she’s dead, he feels bad about
it and he’s trying to be nice to me to make up for it.

I’m not sure why I’m here, why I’m in Tacoma picking at scabs that need to scar. Or
why I’m in Seattle, being dropped off in front of a shabby Craftsman bungalow in Lower
Queen Anne. But it’s like I’m being pushed along by a momentum stronger than me, because
before I have a chance to change my mind, to tell the do-gooders that I’ll come with
them for the afternoon and paint, Harry is telling me they’ll be back around five,
and Richard is eyeing me with an expression that I can only describe as paternal,
though I’m the last person in the world who would know what that actually looks like,
and the van is roaring off.

I stand in front of the fading blue house, beer cans and cigarette butts out front.
I try to summon some of that anger, that hatred for Ben, to somehow propel me inside.

The door cracks open and out comes a little gray blur. I watch it go by. Pete. Ben
was right. He’s gotten bigger.

Then the door swings wider, and Ben runs after him in bare feet, his hair wet. “Shit!”

“What?”

“We don’t let them out in the front.” He dives under a bush and comes back holding
Pete by the scruff of his neck. “Too much traffic.”

“Oh.”

Ben holds out the now-compliant kitten for me to take. So I kiss him on his fuzzy
head and he proceeds to claw me right under my ear.

“Ouch!” I yell.

“He gets a little rambunctious.”

“I can see that.” I hand him back to Ben.

“Let’s go inside,” he says.

He opens the door to the house. The hardwood floors are scuffed, but there are nice
new built-in wooden shelves everywhere, full of books, record albums, and flickering
novena candles. Ben turns on a light and leans in, and for a second I think he’s going
to kiss me or something, and my fists tighten. But he pulls back my hair and peers
at my neck. “That’s pretty nasty,” he says.

I touch my finger to the scratch, which is starting to rise into a welt. “It’s okay.”

“You should rinse it with hydrogen peroxide.”

“I’m fine.”

He shakes his head. “The cats use the litter box. You could get cat-scratch fever.”

“That’s not a real thing; it’s just a song.”

“It is too a real thing. Your glands swell up.”

“How do you know so much about cats?”

“We had a bunch of them growing up. My mom didn’t believe in spaying or neutering.
For pets or humans.”

I follow him into a pink 1960s bathroom, humid from his recent shower. He digs around
in the medicine cabinet and pulls out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He dabs some
on a tissue and leans over toward me.

I grab the tissue. “I can manage,” I say. The scratch goes white and foamy and stings
for a second and then it’s fine. And then we’re just standing there in the bathroom,
all warm and wet and small.

I walk out and Ben follows, giving me the tour: the mismatched furniture in the living
room, the menagerie of musical equipment in the basement. He shows me his room, a
dark futon and dark walls and an acoustic guitar in the corner and the same nice shelving
as in the living room. I don’t go beyond the doorway.

The rain has stopped, so he leads me down a long staircase that slopes into the backyard.
He gestures around. “This is where they spend most of their time.”

“Who?” And then I remember why I’m here. “Oh, the boys.”

“Actually, about that . . .” he begins.

“You had them snipped?”

“Meg already did.” He stumbles over her name but then rights himself. “But they’re
not boys, not both of them. Repeat’s a girl. I figured they were brothers.”