I Was Here (19 page)

“I told no one any of this.”

“You told her
all
of that! You told
me
that!”

He stares at me. “Cody. It was Cody, wasn’t it? What
exactly
did I tell you?”

My mind spins as I try to recall the specifics, but I can’t think of anything except
for a collection of stupid quotes.

“Now it’s coming back to me. . . . The sunless planet. That was also you?” he asks.

Yes. That was me.

He sits down, settling in, like he’s about to watch one of his favorite movies.

“I thought that was an interesting way to put it. Would you want to go on living if
the sun went out? But, Cody, do you actually know what would happen if the sun died?”

“No.”
It comes out a squeak. Like a mouse.

“Within a week, the temperature on Earth would drop to below zero. Within a year,
it would fall to minus one hundred. Ice sheets would cover the oceans. Crops, needless
to say, would fail. Livestock would die. People who didn’t die of the cold would soon
die of starvation. A sunless planet, which is what you called yourself, wasn’t it?
It’s
already
a dead planet. Even if you’re still going through the motions.”

I’m a planet without its sun. I’m already cold and dead. That’s what he’s saying.
So I should just make it official.

Except, why then is there this heat traveling its way up my body, like a circuit?
Heat. The opposite of cold. The opposite of dead.

There’s a click at the door. And then a kid—zits, backpack, frown—walks in. My first
thought is that Bradford lures people here, and this is another one of All_BS’s victims.
Only this time, this time I’m here too, and I can save him. It’s not too late.

But then Bradford says, “What are you doing here?”

And the kid says, “Mom says you got the days mixed up again. She was pissed about
it.” He sees me then, gives me a questioning look.

“Go to your room, and we’ll discuss it in a second,” he says gruffly.

“Can I use your computer?”

Bradford nods curtly. The kid disappears down a hall. As I watch him go, I can’t help
but notice how drab this place is. The wood table with a stack of napkins in the middle.
The generic prints hanging on the wall. There’s a chipped bookcase; it’s not full
of philosophical tomes but supermarket paperbacks, the kind found in Tricia’s break
room. There’s one big book, a reference book called
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
, lying sidewise, so I can see all the sticky notes jammed into it.
This
is where he gets quotes from?

I hear the chime of the computer, and it’s like my brain clicks on.

Crappy condo, shitty job, depressing town. Bradford’s life is a lot like mine. Except
that every night, he fires up his computer and plays God.

“You should go now,” Bradford says. The calm, taunting tone has vanished. His voice
is icy again, like it was on the phone when someone barged in on him.

From down the hall, his son—who must be what, thirteen, fourteen, not so much younger
than me?—calls out, asking for a sandwich.

Bradford’s voice is tight as he promises a turkey and Swiss. He looks at me: “You
should go now,” he repeats.

“What would you do if someone did to him what you did to Meg?” I ask. And for a second
I picture it. His own turkey- sandwich-eating son, dead. Bradford grieving as the
Garcias have grieved.

Bradford stands up, and I know he has seen the scenario I just conjured. As he walks
toward me, the vein in his neck bulging, I should be scared. Except I’m not.

Because I don’t want his son to die. It wouldn’t even anything out. It would just
be one more dead kid. And somehow, this is the thought that gives me the strength
to stand up, to walk past him, and to leave.

x x x

I keep it together as I walk out the door, down the gravel path, past the drinking
neighbors, who are blasting classic rock now. I am okay until I look back at the condo
and picture the man who made Meg die—a monster, a father—preparing a turkey sandwich
for his son.

The sob that rises up comes from deep within me, as if it’s been festering there for
days, or weeks, or months, or maybe so much longer. I can’t hold it back, and I can’t
be near him when it comes. That’s where the danger is.

So I run.

I run down the dusty streets, churning up sand that flies into my nose. Someone is
coming toward me. At first I think it’s a mirage; there’ve been so many of those lately.
Except he doesn’t disappear the closer I get. Instead, when he sees me crying, he
too starts to run.

“What happened?” he repeats over and over, his eyes alive not just with worry, but
with fear. “Did he hurt you?”

Even if I could get the words out, I wouldn’t know what to say. He was a monster and
he was a person. He killed her and she killed her. I found Bradford but I didn’t find
anything. I’m choking on sand and dust and phlegm and grief. Ben keeps asking if he
did something, and I want to reassure him, he didn’t; he didn’t hurt me or touch me
or do any of those things. What finally comes sputtering out is this:

“He has a son.”

I try to explain. A teenage son. A son he protects, loves, even as he convinced Meg
to die, tried to do the same to me. Only I can’t get out the words. But Ben was with
me yesterday in Truckee. Which is maybe why it makes sense to him. Or maybe it’s that
we’ve always made sense to each other.

“Oh, fuck, Cody,” he says. And then he opens his arms automatically, like hugging
is something he does. And I step into them automatically, like being hugged is something
I do. As he holds me, I cry. I cry for Meg, who is forever gone from me. I cry for
the Garcias, who may be too. I cry for the father I never had, and the mother I did.
I cry for Stoner Richard and the family he grew up with. I cry for Ben and the family
he didn’t grow up with. And I cry for me.

38

After I calm down, we walk over to one of the paths along the river. It’s evening
now, but the powerboats and Jet Skis are still zooming around. The mighty Colorado
seems less like a major river than a paved aqueduct. Like everything about this trip,
it’s not what I hoped for. I tell Ben I can’t believe that
this
is the grand Colorado River.

“Follow me,” he says. And I do, down a boat ramp, to the edge of the water. “I used
to have a big map over my bed.” He kneels down next to the water. “The Colorado River
starts in the Rocky Mountains and cuts through the Grand Canyon and goes all the way
to the Gulf of Mexico. It might not seem like much here”—he leans over and scoops
a handful of water—“but when you hold the water, you’re kind of holding a piece of
the Rockies, of the Grand Canyon.”

He turns to me with his still-cupped hands, and I open mine as he lets go of his,
and the river water, which has come from places unknown, with stories untold, flows
from him to me.

“You always know the thing to say to make it better,” I say, so quietly I think my
words have gotten drowned out by the Jet Skis.

But he hears. “You didn’t think so when you first met me.”

No. He’s wrong. Because though I hated him, there has always been something about
Ben McCallister that made it better. Maybe that’s
why
I hated him. Because it’s not supposed to be better. And certainly not with him.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He reaches over and takes my wrists, and I clasp his, my own hands still wet with
the mysterious river.

I don’t let go and neither does he, and the river water stays between us all the way
back to our motel, where, inside our overheated room, we start to kiss. This one is
as hungry as the one at his house months ago, but it’s different, too. As if we are
opening ourselves to something. We kiss. My shirt falls to the floor, then Ben’s does,
too. The feel of his bare skin against mine is astonishing. I want more. I tug off
his jeans. I unzip my skirt.

Ben stops kissing me. “Are you sure?” he asks. His eyes have changed again, to that
inky blue of a newborn’s.

I am sure.

We make our way to the bed in a tangle of limbs. He is warm against me, hard, but
restrained, too.

“Do you have a condom?” I ask.

He leans over, pulls a shiny foil wrapper out of his wallet. “Are you sure?” he asks
again.

I pull him to me.

When it happens, I start to cry. “Should I stop?” Ben asks.

I don’t want him to stop. Though it is painful—more than I expected it to be—I’m not
crying because of how much I
hurt
. I’m crying because of how much I
feel
.

39

After, Ben falls asleep, locking me in the cavern of his arms. It’s like eighty degrees
in the room—that poor air conditioner coughing in the window is no match for the desert’s
brutal heat—and Ben himself radiates warmth like a furnace. But I don’t move, even
though I’m hot and sticky with sweat. I don’t want to move, and eventually I fall
asleep. I wake up a bunch of times in the night, and every time I do, Ben’s arms are
still locked around me.

And then I wake up in the morning, and they’re not, and I’m cold, even though the
room, which never cooled down in the night, is starting to get hot again. I sit up.
There’s no sign of Ben, though his stuff is in a neat pile in the corner.

I slip into the shower. There’s an achiness between my legs, my virginity freshly
gone. Meg loved that I seemed tough and sexy, and was a virgin. And now I’m not. If
she were here, I could tell her about it.

The shower goes icy, though it has nothing to do with the water temperature. Because
I realize I couldn’t tell her. Because I did it with
him
. With Ben. And he was hers first, even if it was just once.

I fucked her
. That’s what he said.

But I’m different. He and I, we became friends first.

The rest of that conversation hurls back to me
. Before it all shot to shit, we were friends
. And then:
When you fuck a friend, it ruins everything
.

No. This is different. “I am different.” I say it out loud in the shower. And then
I almost laugh. Because how many other girls have fed themselves this line about Ben
McCallister to make themselves feel better in the shower the morning after?

Faces flash before me: my father’s. The look of hatred for him on that teen girl’s
face. Bradford’s look of fury when I said the thing about his son. The various shades
of loathing I’ve seen on Ben’s face, which have no doubt been reflected on mine.

I think of one of the first emails I read from him. The one that got this whole thing
started.

You have to leave me alone
.

Through the cardboard walls, I hear the sound of the door opening and closing. I turn
off the taps, now embarrassed to be in the bathroom with all my clothes out in the
room. I wrap myself in as many towels as I can find, and tiptoe to my bag.

“Hey,” Ben says. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see he’s not looking at me, either.

“Hey,” I say back, eyes lasering in on my heap of clothes.

He starts to say something, but I interrupt. “Hang on. Let me get dressed.”

“Yeah, okay.”

In the bathroom, I throw on my dirty-even-for-me cutoffs and a T-shirt, and spend
some time toweling off and trying not to think of how, out there, Ben would not look
at me
.

I take a deep breath and open the door. Ben’s busy mixing up some kind of drink. Without
looking up, he starts talking superfast. “I was on a mission to find iced coffee.
Apparently there are Starbucks here, but they’re all in the casinos, and I didn’t
feel like dealing. But nowhere else had iced, not even the actual coffee shop. So
in the end I got some fresh-ish hot coffee and my own ice, and I think that’ll work.”

He’s talking a mile a minute, babbling about iced coffee with the kind of caffeinated
specificity I’ve only ever heard from Alice. And he still isn’t looking at me.

“I got half and half,” he goes on. “For some reason I like my cold coffee with milk.
It reminds me of ice cream or something that way.”

Stop talking about coffee!
I want to scream. But I don’t. I just nod.

“Do you want to hit one of those buffets, power up before we hit the road, or should
we put some distance between us?”

Yesterday Ben said that the difference between him and me was that he learned from
his mistakes. He was right. And I’m an idiot.

“I vote for distance,” I say.

His eyes flicker up for a second and then they skitter away, like I gave the right
answer. “That’s cool. Whatever you want.”

I want you
. I want to lie back down on the bed and have his arms lock around me. But I know
that’s not how it works. When you fuck the bartender, the free drinks dry up. I learned
this from Tricia. I learned it from Meg. I learned it from Ben himself. It’s not like
he didn’t tell me exactly what he was.

“In fact, I need to get home,” I tell Ben.

“That’s where we’re headed.” He folds a shirt.

“Like, now.”

He stares at the bedspread on the mostly made bed we didn’t sleep in last night. “Car
needs gas and probably oil,” Ben says. His voice is harder, that hint of a growl returning.
“If you’re in such a hurry, you could take care of that while I pack up.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say. His arms, the comfort of them, feel so far away now.
“Meet you at the car?”

Ben tosses me the keys and I catch them, and he’s about to say something but then
doesn’t, so I scoop up my crap and haul it outside. I’m gassing up, when my phone
rings and I reach for it. Ben. This is so stupid. We’re both being stupid.

“Cody! Where the hell are you? You were supposed to be home two days ago.”

It’s not him. It’s Tricia. As soon as I hear her voice, my throat closes.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Mom?”
I say.

“Cody, where are you?” I hear the fear in her voice. Because I never, ever call her
Mom.

“I need to come home.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. But I need to come home. Right now.”

“Where are you?”

“Laughlin.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Nevada. Please . . . I want to come home.” I’m about to lose it.

“Okay, honey, don’t cry. I can figure this out. Laughlin, Nevada. Cody, hang tight.
I’m gonna work this out. Leave your phone on.”

I have no idea how Tricia is going to figure this out. She’s as broke as me. And she
doesn’t know how to use a computer and she probably doesn’t even know where Nevada
is, let alone Laughlin. But I feel better somehow.

x x x

Ben’s waiting downstairs in front of our room when I get back. I dig my sunglasses
out and put them over my red eyes. I pop the trunk and he loads everything in. “I’ll
drive,” I say.

It’s maybe not the best idea. I’m shaky, but at least if I’m driving, I’ll have something
to focus on.

“Okay,” Ben mumbles.

“Tell me when you would like to stop and eat,” I say formally.

He just nods.

In the car, he focuses on the music, but the iPod adapter has died, so there’s only
radio, and it’s all crap. He finally lands on a Guns N’ Roses song, “Sweet Child o’
Mine.” I used to like the song, but now, like everything, it’s digging a crater into
my stomach.

“My mom loved this song,” he says.

I nod.

“Listen, Cody.” It sounds exactly like the Garcias and their
And, Cody’
s.

Before I can answer, my phone rings. I reach for it and it falls onto the floor. I
swerve.

“Watch it!” Ben shouts.

“Answer it!” I shout back.

He scrambles for the phone. “Hello,” he says. He turns to me. “It’s your mom.”

“Tricia,” I say, taking the phone.

“You shouldn’t drive and talk at the same time,” Ben scolds.

I roll my eyes at him, but I pull on to the shoulder.

“Where are you now?” Tricia doesn’t ask me who answered or why I’m not in Tacoma like
I said I would be. It’s never been her way to worry about the details.

“I don’t know. About twenty miles outside of Laughlin. On Highway 95.”

“Have you passed Las Vegas yet?”

“No. It’s not for another forty miles or so.”

I hear her sigh with relief. “Good. There’s a one-thirty nonstop flight on Southwest
from Vegas to Spokane. Think you can make it?”

“I think so.”

I hear Tricia say something and in the background, lots of voices. “Okay, we’ll book
you on that. If you miss it, there’s another after, but it connects through Portland,
so you’d have to change planes.” I listen to her talk, like she’s some kind of travel
agent, like we do this all the time, when in fact I’ve never been on an airplane before.

“Call me once you’re on the plane so I’ll know when to pick you up. They don’t let
you go to the gate anymore, apparently, so I’ll meet you down at baggage claim.”

“Okay,” I say. Like any of this makes sense to me.

“I’ll text you the flight information,” she says, and I’m at once grateful to Raymond
for introducing her to this technology. “And I’ll see you this afternoon. I’ll get
you home.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“What are moms for?”

I hang up and look at Ben, who’s looking at me, confused, though I can tell he heard
both sides of the conversation.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m gonna get out in Vegas, fly the rest of the way home.”

“Why?”

“It’ll be easier, faster for you; you won’t have to go out of your way.” The route
from here to Seattle passes right through my part of eastern Washington, and now he’ll
have to drive those thousand miles alone. But I
am
making it easier for him. That part is true.

We spend the next hour in silence. We get to the Las Vegas airport around noon. I
pull in to the loading zone, where the cars are parked two abreast. Behind us, there’s
beeping, mad rushing, like cowboys, moving the cattle along. I grab my things and
Ben gets out of the passenger side, watching me.

I turn to him. He’s standing there, leaning up against the car. I know I have to say
something. To thank him. To release him. Maybe releasing him
is
the way to thank him. But before I say anything, he asks, “What are you
doing
, Cody?”

It hurts. It all hurts so much. But this is wrong. In so many ways. So I say to him
what I said all those months back, though there’s nothing flip about it. It’s maybe
the most you can wish for anyone.

“Have a good life,” I say. And then I slam the door shut behind me.