I Was Here (8 page)

14

Tricia, the town-crier, has alerted about half of Shitburg that I’ve gone to Tacoma
again, which means that Joe and Sue have found out, only I don’t realize that until
they call me up and invite me over for dinner, and when I get there, they blindside
me with the simple question of why I went back.

“I left in a rush last time and I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

“Oh, Cody, you didn’t have to do that,” Sue says. She shakes her head and dumps some
boiled-in-a-bag pasta onto my plate; it looks like something Tricia would make. “You’re
so good to us.”

My secret—Meg’s secret—feels caustic. I hadn’t intended for it to
be
a secret. The entire bus ride home, I’d debated whether or not to tell them—would
it make any difference? Would it bring them more grief?—never coming to a decision,
but avoiding the Garcias when I got back. And then three days had gone by, and the
decision seemed to have made itself.

Sue clears the dishes. She eyes my plate but doesn’t mention how little I’ve eaten.
I notice that she just pushed her food around too. “Will you stay?” she asks. “Joe
finally went into her room.”

Meg’s room, which, according to Scottie, no one had really gone into since her death.
Scottie said he’d peeked in a few times because it looked the same as always, like
Meg was about to come home. I could picture it so clearly: the messy desk full of
wires and soldering guns. The corkboard with its collage of old record albums, charcoal
drawings, and photos. The graffiti wall, as we called the one opposite the windows
that had this ugly floral wallpaper. Until Meg got inspired and tore it down and Sharpied
all over the underlying plaster with favorite quotes and lyrics. Sue had been so mad
about that, first because it was defacing property and then because members of their
church, who’d been over for a potluck, thought that some of Meg’s writing was sacrilegious.
“You know how people are, Joe,” Meg had overheard Sue saying. But Joe had come to
Meg’s defense. Who cared about those gossips? If the wall was a good outlet for Meg,
leave it be. They could paint over it when she moved out. They never did, though.
Now I doubt they ever will.

“We found some of your things,” Joe says. “And some things of Meg’s you might like.”

“Another time,” I say. “I have to be up early for work.”

Is this how it is with lies? The first one comes hard, the second one easier, until
they slip off your tongue easier than truths—maybe because they are easier than truths.

I let myself out. But before the door shuts behind me, Scottie is there, leashing
Samson.

“Walkies?” he says to me.

“I gotta hurry,” I reply.

“That’s okay. Samson likes to run, dontcha, boy?”

I take off at a fast clip, and Scottie easily keeps up with me because he’s ten and
he has legs up to his elbows. Samson bounds along, sniffing for things to pee on.

When we’re at the end of the block, he asks me why I went back to Tacoma.

“I told you. I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

I don’t know if it’s harder to lie to kids or if they just have better bullshit detectors,
but in either case, he gives me this cynical look that hurts my heart. “Why’d you
really go?” he asks.

“Scottie, can we not do this?”

“Just tell me why you went. You found something, didn’t you?”

Scottie is tall and rangy and has Sue’s blond hair, though it’s starting to darken.
I know he thinks all his innocence has been destroyed, but he’s only ten years old.
It hasn’t. And if it has, he has time to get it back. But not if I tell him. How she
posed as a buyer from a cleaning company to order what should’ve been a heavy-duty
upholstery detergent. How she went through all this extra trouble, because that was
the Meg way, but also because she apparently was so hell-bent on dying, she needed
the chemical with the smallest margin of error. How meticulously she plotted it, in
that Meg fashion, like this were another concert she was trying to score a backstage
pass to.
First we’ll try the publicists and if that doesn’t work, we can try the radio station,
and failing that, we can always ask some of our band contacts to put in a word for
us,
she’d say. Her plans worked. They always worked.

Meg may not have sent Scottie the suicide letter, but she did send him an
I love you
farewell note. I think she wanted to leave him with that. If I tell Scottie what
I found, I’ll wreck that, maybe wreck him, too. And we’ve already lost one Garcia
this year. I shake my head. “Nothing to find, Scottie, except for lint on the carpet.”

And then I leave him there. On the corner. In the dark.

15

After I decided I wouldn’t be going to UW but would be staying at home and attending
the local community college, Tricia demanded I get a job. The Dairy Queen was hiring,
so I asked for an application. I handed it in to the manager, who turned out to be
Tammy Henthoff.

“You’re friends with that Garcia girl?” she asked, squinting at my application.

“Meg? Yeah. She’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s in college in Tacoma now, on a full
scholarship,” I added. I was so proud of her.

“Uh-huh.” Tammy was not impressed. Or maybe she was just defensive. Since she’d run
off with Matt Parner, people around here hadn’t been all that nice to her. She’d lost
her job at the car dealership where her husband had worked, and I’d heard that Matt’s
soon-to-be-ex-wife, Melissa, and all her friends had taken to driving by the DQ and
shouting nasty things. Not that Tammy didn’t deserve it. But Matt still had his job
at the Jiffy Lube and no one drove by there yelling
whore
.

While Tammy was interviewing me, a bunch of high school students came by. The DQ had
always been the local hangout, and it was then that I realized that if I got the job,
I’d be serving burgers to people I’d spent the last four years not exactly snubbing,
but sort of. Meg knew
everyone
here and she had her admirers for sure, but she wasn’t close with that many people.
She had her family, the people she met online, and me. In middle school, teachers
started calling us the Pod and it took, and then all sorts of people referred to us
as that. We were known as a twosome. Even Tammy Henthoff, seven years out of high
school, knew about us. Working here, it would be a daily barrage:
Aren’t you Meg’s friend?
And the piggyback question to that:
If so, why are you still here?

Right about the same time, the night manager at the restaurant where Tricia works
inquired if she knew anyone trustworthy who could clean her house, Tricia asked me—almost
on a dare, it seemed; she knew how much I hated cleaning. But you can be good at things
you hate. Pretty soon that one job turned into two and four and now six.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a call about a job as an attendant at Pioneer Park.
Sue knew the woman who ran the parks department, and somehow, in the midst of everything,
she put a word in for me and I got called in for an interview.

It was a good job, decent pay, benefits even. On the day of the interview with the
superintendent, I walked to the park. And then I saw the rocket ship.

Pioneer Park was where Meg and I learned to ride our bikes. Where we’d run through
the sprinklers and dreamed of the swimming pool the town sometimes talked about putting
in there (it never happened; nothing here ever does). It was a place that wasn’t her
house or my house or school or the DQ, where we could be alone and talk.

The capsule at the top of the rocket ship was like our magical private clubhouse.
Anytime we climbed the rickety stairs and ladder up to the nose cone, we were the
only people there, though it was obvious from all the ever-changing graffiti that
we weren’t the only people to come up here.

Reading the graffiti out loud was one of our favorite things to do. There were hearts
of couples long since broken up, and lyrics nobody remembered anymore. New stuff was
always being scrawled over the old, though one line, Meg’s favorite, remained gouged
into the metal:
I Was Here
. She loved that. “What more can you say, right?” she’d ask. She’d written the phrase
on her own graffiti wall and kept threatening to get a tattoo of it one day, if she
ever got over her fear of needles.

The whole deathtrap probably should’ve been condemned years ago, but it wasn’t. It
was the highest point in town, and on clear days you could see for miles. Meg used
to say you could see all the way to the future.

I turned around. I never even called the superintendent to cancel.

So I still clean houses. Maybe it’s for the best. Toilets are anonymous. They have
no stories to tell, no recriminations to fling. They just take crap and flush.

Since coming back from this last trip to Tacoma, I actually find myself looking forward
to work. The scrubbing, the endless repetition, the arriving at a manky sink, attacking
it with bleach and steel wool and after a time, leaving it gleaming . . . befores/afters
in life are never quite so stark.

Today I clean two houses in a row, hauling laundry and ironing pillowcases, and cleaning
the squared kitchen tile with a squeegee. The tile isn’t really tile; it’s linoleum.
But that’s how Mrs. Chandler likes it done, and who I am to argue?

Over the next few days, when I’m not working, I carry my cleaning zeal over to Tricia’s
and my tiny house, taking bleach and an old toothbrush and going at the shower grout,
which has gone black with mildew. Tricia is so shocked when she sees the tiles go
from gray to their previous white-and-blue state, she doesn’t even say anything sarcastic.

I keep myself busy in a frenzy until I don’t have a gig, and our house is as clean
as it’s been since we moved in. I sit on my bed and organize my earnings by bill denominations:
I’ve made two hundred and forty bucks this week alone. I have to give Tricia one hundred
dollars for my share of bills, but that leaves me with quite a surplus, and nothing
to spend it on. Theoretically, I am saving for the move to Seattle. Theoretically,
I learned in physics that the universe is expanding at a rate of, like, forty-five
miles a second, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel that way when you’re standing still.

I shove the money into my metal box under the bed. Tricia has been known to pilfer
cash if it’s lying around. The house is quiet and stuffy, more claustrophobic than
normal. I slide on my flip-flops and walk into town. Outside the Dairy Queen, I see
a bunch of people I went to school with clustered on the benches under the cottonwood
trees, including Troy Boggins. They wave and I wave back but they don’t invite me
to sit down with them and I don’t pretend I want to.

I go to the library instead. Now that Meg is gone and her house is no longer my second
home, this is my sanctuary. Plus, it has air-conditioning.

Mrs. Banks is sitting behind the reference desk, and when she sees me, she waves me
over. “Cody, where have you been? I was about to send these back.” She pulls out a
rubber-banded stack of books, more of the Central Europeans. Karel Capek’s
War with the Newts
, Bohumil Hrabal’s
Too Loud a Solitude
, a collection of Kafka short stories.

“Thanks,” I say. I
am
out of books, but as soon as I enter the cool of the library, I understand that’s
not why I’m here.

I make my way to the computer terminals. I type
Final Solution
and
suicide
into the search box. It brings up mostly Hitler and neo-Nazi stuff, though there
is one page that seems promising, but when I click on it, it won’t load. I try the
other sites from the search, and they won’t either.

“Is there something wrong with the computers?” I ask Mrs. Banks.

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“I can’t get pages to load.”

“Cody,” she asks, “are you looking at naughty sites?”

She’s teasing, but I flush red anyway. “I’m doing a research project.”

“On what?”

“Neo-Nazi groups.” Another lie. It just pops right out.

“Ahh, that’ll do it. I can lift the filters for you if you like,” she says.

“No,” I say quickly. Nobody can know about this. And that’s when I remember I have
my own computer now. And the library has free Wi-Fi. “I mean, I have to leave now.
But tomorrow?”

“Anytime, Cody,” she says. “I trust you.”

x x x

The next day, I bring Meg’s laptop to the library, and before I get started, Mrs.
Banks shows me how to get around the filters. Then I get to work. The Final Solution
website isn’t so much a website as an entry portal. You have to click on a button
claiming that you’re over eighteen. When I do, I’m redirected to an index with different
topic headings. I open a few messages. A lot of them are spam. A lot more are ranting.
I scroll through a few pages and it seems like a waste of time. And then I see a subject
heading:
What about My Wife?

The post is from some guy who claims he wants to kill himself but wonders what it
would be like for his wife, whom he loves.
Will it ruin her life?
he writes.

There’s a string of replies below. The majority opinion is that his wife will probably
be relieved, that she’s probably miserable too, and by offing himself he’ll put them
both out of their misery.
Women are way better at bouncing back from this kind of thing,
one person writes.
She’ll probably remarry within a few years and be much better off.

Who
are
these people? Is
this
who Meg was talking to?

I read the responses again, so casual that you’d think they’re offering advice on
how to fix a broken carburetor, and as I do, my neck grows hot and something churns
in my stomach. I don’t know if these people had anything to do with Meg. I don’t know
if this guy really intended to kill himself, or if he actually did. But I know one
thing: You don’t just bounce back.