I Was Here (12 page)

24

The next day there is a message from All_BS. It simply says:
Who did you lose
?

It takes me a minute to realize he—by this point I’m almost certain he’s a man—is
referring to an older post. Which means he’s been watching me. I spend an hour thinking
about what to write, which story will be most effective, and then I circle back. The
true one will.

Repeat:
The better half of me.

Within twenty minutes he has responded again.

All_BS:
“Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is
more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”—James Baldwin

Repeat:
What do you mean by this?

The library closes before he has time to respond, leaving me to think about the quote
all night. I bring my computer with me to the Chandlers’ the next morning, and discover
they don’t lock their Wi-Fi network. I sneak into the bathroom and check to see if
there’s a response from All_BS. And there is.

All_BS:
Perhaps your better half, as you call it, was nothing more than a crutch. It can
be terrifying, after so long using one, to go without. Maybe that adjustment is what
you are going through now.

And that’s it. Nothing about offing myself, or life being the affliction. Only the
suggestion that Meg was my crutch.

The scary thing is, he’s right. Meg held me up. And without her, I’m falling down.

Repeat:
So you’re saying this is temporary, that I shouldn’t be thinking about catching the
bus because I’m just upset over my loss?

I hear Mrs. Chandler in the next room. I quickly hit post and stash my computer in
a corner. The rest of the morning, I worry that I somehow put him off. I practically
run to the library that afternoon, relieved to find a response waiting.

All_BS:
I’m saying no such thing.

Repeat:
Then what are you saying?

He must still be online. Because the reply is instant.

All_BS:
What are YOU saying?

I think hard before I answer.

Repeat:
I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s why I’m asking you.

All_BS:
Yes. That is why you’re asking me.

25

In the middle of June, I get a call from Alice. I haven’t spoken to her since the
last time I stayed with her, but when I answer the phone, she starts burbling away
like we chat every day.

“So I checked on the map, and you’re in Eastern Washington, right?” she asks after
she’s caught me up on things I don’t really care about. “Between Spokane and Yakima?”

There are hundreds of miles between Spokane and Yakima. I love how people consider
it flyover. But I don’t correct her. “More or less.”

“Cool! I’m working as a counselor at Mountain Bound. I’ll be outside of Missoula,
and I’m pretty sure I-90 goes through your neck of the woods.”

“It’s not far from here.”

“Perfect! It’s, like, seven hours from Eugene to Spokane, or wherever you are. A good
one-day drive. And then I can make it to Missoula the next day.”

It takes me a second to understand what she’s talking about. “You want to stay with
me?”

“If that’s all right,” she says.

We almost never have guests. Even Meg only slept here a handful of times. I’m already
trying to figure out how to explain Alice to Tricia. Where to put her. Tricia and
Raymond still seem to be together, judging by the number of nights she hasn’t been
home. Maybe she’ll stay at his place that night, though if I request that, it’s a
surefire way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

“When are you coming?”

“Day after tomorrow. Give me your address.”

And so I don’t have a choice. That night, I casually tell Tricia that someone is staying
over.

“Your boyfriend?” she accuses.

“There is no boyfriend,” I say. Then I think of Ben and then I get mad at myself for
thinking of Ben and then I justify thinking of Ben because he was the object of her
interrogation the last time this subject came up.

“Then who is it you’re talking on the computer with?”

“I’m not talking to anyone. I can’t, because we don’t have Internet access.”

“Ha! But you want it. And now you’re blushing. You’re hiding something.”

This time, she’s right. But not about a boyfriend. All_BS and I recently moved our
conversation off the message boards and onto an anonymous communication software,
and now we “talk” frequently. Our conversations, however, are frustratingly limited
by library hours.

They are also frustratingly not about suicide. At least not specifically. We speak
in generalities, and sometimes I forget who I’m chatting with. Last week, I mentioned
that I had a cold coming on, and he sent a recipe for a tea made of ginger and apple
juice. When it worked, I made a crack about the irony of him curing my cold. “Nice
to know someone cares,” I wrote. When he asked me what I meant by that, I started
typing a message about Tricia, until I realized what I was doing and deleted it.

I had to be more careful, not answer his messages spontaneously, or I’d screw up.
So now when I’m at the library, I save his messages to my Meg file and when I’m at
home, I write my responses, sending them the next time I’m online. It’s a frustrating
and clunky system, but the delay forces caution.

“The person staying over is Alice,” I tell Tricia. “I met her in Tacoma. She needs
a place to crash on her way to Montana.” There. The truth, or a sliver of it. One
of the things I’ve learned from dealing with All_BS is that if you hew close to the
truth, it’s much easier to lie.

“Hasn’t she ever heard of a motel?” Tricia asks.

“I’ll take the couch; she can have my room.”

Tricia sighs. “No. You can take my bed. I’ll stay at Raymond’s.”

I nod, as if the idea never occurred to me.

x x x

The next night, at precisely six o’clock, Alice arrives, tooting her horn as she comes
down the street like she’s the marshal of a July Fourth parade. Some of the neighbors
come out to see what the commotion is, and Alice waves to them, grinning.

“So this is where you live?” she says.

I nod.

“It’s not what I expected. It’s so . . . small.” She stops. “Not your house. Your
house is big. I mean, the town.”

My house is a cinder-block cell with two tiny bedrooms. Small would be a step up.

Now she’s flustered. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you seem so streetwise.
I’d have thought you grew up somewhere else.”

“Nope. This is me.”

We go inside. I show Alice to my room. I’ve put clean sheets on the bed for her. She
flops back onto it, taking in the band flyers on my wall, all the pictures of me and
Meg.

“So this is where Meg grew up too?”

I nod again.

“How long did you guys know each other?”

“A long time.”

There’s a picture of the two of us at a rodeo, maybe from fifth grade. The bucktoothed
phase. “Is that you?” Alice asks, leaning in.

I should take all this down. “Yep.”

“You must have a lot of history here.”

I think of the Dairy Queen. The rocket ship. The Garcias’ house. “Not really,” I say.

We’re silent for a while. Then Alice announces she’s taking me out to dinner. “No
arguments!”

“All right. Where do you want to go?”

“What are our options?”

“Your usual fast food. A bar and grill where my mother works, but trust me, you don’t
want to go there. A diner. A couple of Mexican places.”

“Is the Mexican any good?”

Joe always said that Sue’s cooking was better than his mother’s, and much better than
any of the places in town. We almost never went to them. “Not particularly.”

“I passed a Dairy Queen on the way in. We could go there.”

I picture the DQ, Tammy Henthoff, the usual suspects hanging out. “Let’s do Mexican,”
I say.

We head over to Casa Mexicana, full of red booths and velvet paintings of bullfighters.
Our waiter is this guy Bill, whom Tricia used to hang out with, which is how it always
is in Shitburg. We order our food, and then Alice asks for a strawberry margarita
with a shot of tequila. Bill cards her, and she hands over an ID.

“And a virgin for you, Cody?” Bill asks with a smirk.

I hate this town. I can’t even order a meal without it feeling loaded. “Just a Dr
Pepper.”

“Are you twenty-one?” I ask Alice when Bill leaves.

“No, but Priscilla Watkins is.” She hands over her fake ID.

I’m impressed. I didn’t think Alice had it in her.

As we wait for our drinks, the Thomas family comes in. Mrs. Thomas sort of waves;
Mindy, who seems to be arguing with her sister over a hair-straightening iron, ignores
me. I shake my head.

“What?” Alice asks.

How do you explain Shitburg to someone who describes her hometown as Eden?

Bill returns with the drinks. As soon as he’s gone, I grab Alice’s shot and down it.
“Order another one.”

We keep drinking. Alice grows maudlin. She starts talking about Meg. Loudly. How she
wishes she could’ve known her better. How glad she is that she knows me. Somewhere
it registers that she is saying nice things, but Mindy Thomas is two booths over and
I want Alice to shut up.

When the food comes, Alice starts shoveling it into her mouth. “Oh. Yum. This is so
good. We have, like, no good Mexican in Eugene!”

“Hmm,” I say, forking a mass of cheese off the enchilada. It peels away like skin
after a sunburn. I push it to the side and try the rice.

“So, have you talked to Ben McCallister?” Alice asks out of the blue.

It’s a dark restaurant, so she can’t see my face go red. “No.”

“Not at all?”

“Why would I?”

“I dunno. You two seemed like you had a . . . a spark.”

A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark
. When we first started talking, All_BS quoted that to me—Dante, he said it was. I
think he was trying to explain how simple musings could lead to big life-changing
ideas. His way of encouraging me, and I had to remind myself not to be reassured by
it, because the life- changing idea he was selling me on was life-ending.

“No spark,” I say. I push my plate away.

“That’s probably good.”

“Why?” I hear the challenge in my voice.

“For one, Meg was totally gaga over him.”

“I thought you claimed you didn’t know her at all.”

“I didn’t. But she talked about Ben. And invited us to come to his band’s gigs. So
she must’ve been.”

“Her inviting you to a gig wasn’t Meg being into Ben; it was Meg being Meg.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while, just slurps to the bottom of her drink. “Oh,
that reminds me. Did you ever find the person Meg confided in about taking antidepressants?”

“Nope.”

“I might know who it is.”

“You think?” I don’t care anymore, because the point of finding that person was to
find All_BS, and I already did that.

“I’m not positive, but I think it’s Tree.”

“Tree? Right!”

“I think it was,” Alice says, sounding wounded.

“You obviously don’t know shit about Meg.”

“I believe we’ve established that,” Alice says defensively. “I still think it’s her.”

No. Meg would’ve hated Tree, and Tree didn’t seem that charmed by Meg. “Not her,”
I mumble. I am suddenly tired, and my limbs no longer feel as if they are totally
in my control. I remember, belatedly, why I don’t like to be drunk.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Alice says, waving her hands. “But she said something that made
me think it. I can’t remember now. But you should call her.”

x x x

The next morning, Alice gets ready to leave for her wonderful summer of adventure,
and I get ready to clean toilets. I am hungover in a way that has less to do with
the tequila I drank than with what it brought out in me. Why wasn’t I nicer to Alice?
When she has been nothing but sweet to me? When I actually like her? I know I should
say something to her, but before I can find the words, she’s tooting her horn and
disappearing down the street.

I wave until she turns the corner. And as I watch another person drive out of here
to some better place, I understand exactly why I wasn’t nicer.

x x x

The Purdues are on vacation, so the day after Alice leaves, I have a day off. I head
straight to the library, earlier than usual. The comforting hush of the place has
been overtaken by the laughter and yelps of little kids. It’s story time.

On my way to the tables in the back, I spot Alexis Bray in the story circle, holding
hands with her little daughter. I can’t remember the girl’s name, even though she
came with Alexis to almost all of Meg’s services, sitting quietly on her mother’s
lap. At one of the receptions, Alexis asked me if I wanted to go for coffee. I said
I’d call her but I never did. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to meet in the first place.
She was four years ahead of Meg and me, and I didn’t know much about her except that
she used to go out with Jeremy Driggs, though he wasn’t the father of her little girl.
Apparently, it was some guy in the Army.

She waves at me now. As does Mrs. Banks, who gestures for me to sit in one of the
carrels off to the side, where it’s quieter. Although not much. Story time is a pretty
raucous affair. The assistant librarian is reading some story about a bunny that keeps
telling its mother all the ways it’s going to run away, even though, obviously, if
the rabbit meant business, it would not be telling its mother. When you’re serious,
you keep quiet.

One of the little kids shambles away from the circle over to where I’m sitting. His
diaper sags halfway down to his knees and there’s a big stain of what looks like peas,
but could be something grosser, down the front of his
Cars
shirt. I’m disgusted. Kids are like parasites. I suspect Tricia has had the same
thought about me. I wonder if Meg did too.

The librarian moves on to a different book, something about disappearing balloons,
which sounds even more stupid. Which is maybe why my little foul-diapered friend shows
no interest in returning to story time; he just stares at me with soupy eyes.

I try to look away, but it’s not easy when someone is staring at you. The effort not
to look makes my stomach churn like the agitator of a washing machine.
Churn. Churn. Churn.
I see Alice in the mountains of Montana, surrounded by a bunch of other similarly
chirpy people.
Churn. Churn. Churn.
I see Hendrix swallowing that mouse.
Churn. Churn. Churn.
I see Meg at her computer, typing her time-delayed suicide note.
Churn. Churn. Churn.
I see me, at this very library, clicking open her suicide note:
I regret to inform you . . .

The little kid is still at my side, his grubby, sticky hands inches away from the
keyboard. “You
really
don’t want to get any closer,” I say, giving him my most menacing look, in case the
threat in my voice wasn’t clear enough.

His chin crumples before he starts to cry. His mom hustles over, apologizing to me,
which means she probably doesn’t know what I said, but Alexis gives me a weird look,
which means she probably does.

So this is who I’ve become, someone who picks fights with toddlers.

I return my attention to the computer, scrolling through All_BS’s words:
the tiny spark, the mighty flame. Screw your courage to the sticking place.
The little kid is now sobbing from the safety of his mother’s lap. I feel ashamed,
but the shame has forced some clarity upon me: I can keep picking small fights, or
brave the big one.

Time to screw my courage. Or go down trying.

In quick succession, I send two messages. The first is to Harry Kang, asking him what
kind of information I’d need to track someone down, because all this becoming All_BS’s
buddy does me no good unless I can find out who he is.

The second is to All_BS:

I’m ready. I want to take the next steps. Will you help me?

As soon as I hit send on the second message, my anger, my angst, my self-pity disappears,
leaving only a calm and steely resolve. I wonder if this was how Meg felt.

The little kid has stopped crying and is now staring at me resentfully with his tearstained
face. I look back at him and smile.