I Was Here (15 page)

31

Ben offers to come pick me up at home, but I don’t want him to come here. We arrange
to meet in Yakima, outside the Greyhound station, at noon on Saturday. Then I call
Stoner Richard.

“Cody, long time, no hear. What’s the latest and greatest?”

“What are you doing Saturday night?”

“Are you asking me out?” he teases.

“Actually, I’m asking if I can sleep with you,” I tease back, before explaining that
I’m heading out on a road trip and need a place to crash Saturday night in Boise.

“There’s always room at the Zeller homestead. Just be prepared: if you come for a
Saturday night, the rev might want you to do things the Jerry way on Sunday.”

“Okay,” I say, not sure what the Jerry way means, but figuring it’s some Jerry Garcia
reference. “Also, there’s a slight catch.”

“Isn’t there always?”

“Ben McCallister’s going to be with me.”

I hear Richard inhale sharply. Either in dismay, or he could be taking a bong hit.
“Are you and him, are you guys . . . ?”

“No, no! Nothing like that. I haven’t even talked to him in more than a month. He’s
just helping me out.”

“Helping you out? I’ll bet he is.”

“It’s not like that. It’s about Meg.”

“Oh.” Richard’s voice goes serious.

“So can you put us up? We’re leaving here around noon, so we should get there around
six or seven.”

“Easily. Speed limit’s seventy-five on I-84, but no one goes slower than eighty. You’ll
make good time.”

“So, it’s okay for us both to stay?”

“There’s always room in Reverend Jerry’s manger,” Richard jokes. “We’re used to having
lost souls camped on the floor. For you, we might even scrounge up a couch.”

“The floor’s fine.”

“So long as it’s a separate floor from McCallister.”

x x x

I wait until Friday night to tell Tricia that I’m going. I’ve already canceled my
Monday and Tuesday cleaning jobs, figuring I’ll be back by Tuesday night at the latest.
I don’t know why I’m nervous about telling her.

She gives me a long look. “Where are you going?”

Tricia doesn’t keep me on a leash. But if I tell her, it’ll wind up right back with
the Garcias, and I don’t want them to know anything until I have something solid,
something helpful. Also, if I tell her, I’m scared that Tricia, even hands-off Tricia,
won’t let me go.

“Tacoma,” I say.

“Again?”

“Alice invited me down.”

“I thought she was in Montana.”

I should’ve learned my lesson from all my dealings with All_BS. The safest way to
lie is to shadow the truth.

“She is. She’s going home for the weekend,” I reply, hoping Tricia doesn’t remember
that Alice is actually from Eugene.

Tricia eyes me again.

“I’ll be back Monday night, Tuesday latest,” I add.

“You need me to clean any of your houses?”

I shake my head. Some messes can wait.

x x x

I can’t sleep at all Friday night, so Saturday morning I pack a few things—my boxful
of cash, which now totals five hundred and sixty dollars, my computer, and my maps—and
catch the first bus to Yakima. I arrive at nine thirty and plant myself at a depressing
coffee shop near the bus station, spreading my maps in front of me. It’s a straight
thousand-mile shot from here to Laughlin, cutting a triangle through Oregon and another
through Idaho, before shooting down the eastern spine of Nevada.

The waitress keeps refilling my coffee cup and I keep drinking, even though the burnt
swill is doing awful things to the acid in my stomach, not to mention my frayed nerves.
For the past twenty-four hours, I’ve done nothing but second-guess the decision to
call Ben.

The door to the diner rings. I look up absentmindedly and am surprised to see it’s
him. It’s only ten thirty; he’s not due for another hour and a half, and it’s a two-
to three-hour drive from Seattle, so he must’ve left at the crack of dawn, or sped
like the devil, or both.

My first impulse is to hunch down in my seat, buy myself more time. But I’m about
to spend two days cramped in a car with him, so I man up. I clear my throat and say,
“Hey, Ben.”

His face goes blank for a second, and then his eyes skitter around until he sees me
in my booth, the maps splayed out. He looks both nervous and relieved, and once again
his face is like a mirror, reflecting my feelings, because that’s exactly what’s going
on with me.

He sits down across from me. “You’re early,” he says.

“So are you.” I slide my coffee over to him. “You want some? She just refilled it.
So it’s fresh, or fresh to my cup, anyhow.”

His fingers curl around the cup of coffee, which is black, no sugar, the same as he
likes it, I now remember. I take him in. His eyes are violet this morning, almost
bruised; they match the purplish skin under them. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says.

“Seems to be going around,” I say.

He nods. “So what’s the plan?”

“Drive to Boise today. We can stay with Stoner Richard—I mean, Richard Zeller. You
remember Meg’s roommate?”

“I remember.”

“He said we could crash at his place. It’s his parents’. Unless you want to stay somewhere
else.” He probably has plenty of places to stop, plenty of rock-and-roll crash pads.

“I’ll go where you go.”

A simple statement that feels like a blanket.

“You going to tell me what it is we’re doing?” he asks.

When I called Ben, I told him I’d found a person linked to Meg’s death and needed
someone to come with me while I talked to him. I hadn’t told him anything else. I
figured he didn’t need, nor would he want, to know what had happened in these past
few weeks when we’d been absent from each other’s lives. But now that he’s asking,
I’m scared to tell. Harry sent me a few cautioning emails, with links to articles
about girls meeting guys they’d met online and gruesome things happening. I appreciated
his concern but wasn’t sure it was applicable. Those were girls with romantic hopes,
guys with depraved intentions. That isn’t me and Bradford.

But what if Ben doesn’t see it that way? What if I tell him and he chickens out? What
if he refuses to take me?

When I don’t answer right away, Ben asks, “Am I on a need-to-know basis, or something?”

“No. I just . . .” I shake my head. “It’s a long drive.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s time. I’ll tell you. Later. I promise.” I pause. “How are the kids?” I ask.

“I brought pictures,” he says. And I expect him to show me on his phone, but he pulls
out one of those envelopes you get from a photo developer, and slides it across the
maps to me. I open it up, and inside are a few snapshots: Pete and Repeat chasing
a piece of string, washing each other’s faces, curled up sleeping together at the
foot of Ben’s bed.

“They’re so much bigger!”

Ben nods. “Teenagers. Pete brought home a dead mouse. I’m sure it’s a gateway thing.
It’s only a matter of time before they’re bringing home all sorts of animals.”

“Birds. Rats.”

“Then it’s possums, then small ponies. I wouldn’t put it past those two.”

I laugh. It feels like the first time in ages. I hand the photos back.

Ben shakes his head. “They’re for you.”

“Oh. Thanks. Do you want something to eat? Before we go?”

Ben shakes his head. “I came to kill time while I was waiting for you.”

“And here I am.”

“Here you are.”

The awkward silence that follows doesn’t bode well for the next two days.

“Should we get going?” I ask.

“Okay. I should warn you, the cigarette lighter outlet for the iPod is acting up,
so the music situation is precarious.”

“I’ll deal.”

“Also, less important to me but maybe not you: the AC’s kind of on the blink, which
is going to make Nevada desert driving in July rather interesting.”

“We’ll just stop at gas stations and douse ourselves with water and leave the windows
open. It’s what Meg and I used to do.” And then I stop myself. Everything spools back
to Meg. Every piece of my history, it seems.

“Sounds like a plan,” Ben says.

We head outside. He unlocks his car. It’s remarkably clean compared to the last time
I was in it.

“Do you want me to drive first?” I ask. “Or don’t you let girls drive your car?”

“I don’t make a habit of letting anyone drive my car.” He looks sidelong at me. “But
you’re not a girl anyway.”

“Oh, right. Have you categorized my species yet?”

“Not quite.” He tosses me the keys. “But you can drive.”

x x x

As soon as we hit the interstate, I relax. I got my license when I was sixteen, but
I so rarely get to actually drive anywhere, I forget how freeing it is to just have
open road in front of you, and wind in your hair. With the windows down and the stereo
on, it’s too loud to talk much, and that’s fine. Ben can’t ask me about Bradford,
can’t ask me about the last month, and can’t mention the kiss, either.

Outside of Baker City we stop for lunch at a place Ben knows. I’m skeptical about
a Chinese restaurant in the middle of redneck eastern Oregon, but Ben says the dumplings
are the best he’s ever had. It seems like he’s been here a lot. The young waitress
clearly knows him and keeps finding excuses to come by the table to refill our tea
and talk to him until her stern mother comes out from the kitchen and shoos her away.

“Wow. You know everyone on the I-84 corridor?” I ask him.

“Just in the Chinese restaurants. Along I-5, too.”

I motion toward the waitress, who is smiling at him. “Is she a fan from when you came
through here with one of your bands?”

Ben gives me a look. “I was never here with a band. I ate here with my little sister,
Bethany.”

That name is familiar. And then I remember that was one of the girls Ben was talking
to on the phone when I went to see him in Seattle that first time.

“Bethany is your little sister?”

He nods. “Yeah. She was having a tough time at home. Back then I was couch-surfing
in Portland, so I swooped in, all big hero man, to pick her up and take her on a road
trip. I was going to take her to Utah. To Zion. I’ve always wanted to go there.” He
swigs his tea. “Car broke down here. Piece of shit Pontiac.”

“What happened to your road trip? You guys hitch?”

“Nah. Bethany was only eleven.” Ben shakes his head. “I had to call my stepfather
to come get her, and we hung out here while he drove up. He was so pissed at me that
he refused to give me a lift back to Bend. I didn’t have anything going in Portland,
so I wound up hitching to Seattle. It’s how I landed there.”

“Oh.” It’s not exactly the rock-star-chasing-his-dreams story. “Where is she now?
Bethany?”

Ben’s eyes go flat. “There.”

I’m not exactly sure where there is, but by the way he says it, I know it’s not a
place you’d want to be.

“Let’s finish up and get back on the road,” he suggests. “You know, Chinese food means
we’ll be hungry again in an hour.”

“Ha. We only have a couple of hours till Boise. And Richard texted to say that they’re
grilling tonight.”

Ben perks up. “Grilling? Like real meat? Nothing tofu?”

I text Richard back to ask if there will be tofu, and he texts me back a puking emoticon.
“You’re safe,” I tell Ben.

We gas up and Ben takes the wheel, and it’s only when we get into the car and back
on the interstate that I notice Ben didn’t smoke after lunch. In fact, he hasn’t smoked
the whole time we’ve been on the road.

“If you’re not smoking for my benefit, don’t worry about it,” I tell him. But then
I notice that the car doesn’t smell like an ashtray the way it did before.

Ben smiles kind of bashfully. He lifts up the sleeve of his shirt to show me a flesh-colored
patch. “I quit.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Aside from the fact that cigarettes are deadly and expensive?” he asks.

“Right, aside from that?”

Ben slices the quickest of looks my way before turning his attention back to the road.
“I guess I needed a change.”

x x x

By six o’clock we are in the outskirts of Boise, the tilting early evening sun making
the foothills surrounding the city go red. I pull out the directions that Richard
emailed me, and guide Ben through the downtown and out past the military area to a
pretty tree-lined street with sprawling ranch houses. We stop in front of one with
an overflowing orange bougainvillea bush and a big white van in the driveway. “This
is it,” I tell Ben.

As we knock on the front door, I kick myself. We should’ve brought something, some
kind of gift or something. That’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to do. Too late
now.

No one answers. We ring the bell. Still nothing. People are home. There’s a TV on
and there’s a sound of voices inside. We knock again. Still no answer. I’m about to
text Richard when Ben opens the door and sticks his head inside. “Hello,” he calls.

A kid bounds up, a huge grin zigzagging across her face, which is sort of messed up
by a cleft palate or one of those things you see in those TV commercials asking for
money. “Maybe we have the wrong house,” I whisper. But then the kid shouts, “Wichard,
your fwiends are hewe,” and five seconds later Richard ambles over, scoops the girl
up, and ushers us inside.

“This is CeCe,” he says, tickling the girl under her arms as she screams in delight.
He points around the room to where three more kids are sitting on beanbags and cushions,
watching a movie. “That’s Jack, Pedro, and Tally.”

“Hi,” I say.

“Hey,” Ben says. “
Toy Story
?”

“Three,” Pedro says.

Ben nods knowingly.

“Who are they?” I whisper to Richard as he sets CeCe down.

“Family 2.0,” Richard says.

“Huh?”

“They’re my brothers and sisters, the second string, though really more like first
string. My other brother, Gary, is out back, and my sister Lisa is currently in Uganda
working with orphans or something extremely noble.”