I Was Here (3 page)

“I’m pretty much done,” I tell them. “Just have to close the boxes and I’ll be out
of here.”

“We’ll get the cats for you before you go,” Stoner Richard offers.

“The cats?”

“Meg’s two kittens,” Alice says. She looks at me and cocks her head to the side. “She
didn’t tell you about them?”

I refuse to show any surprise. Or hurt. “I don’t know anything about any cats,” I
say.

“She found these two stray kittens a couple months ago. They were totally emaciated
and sick.”

“Nasty shit coming out of their eyes,” Stoner Richard adds.

“Yes, they had some kind of eye infection. Among other maladies. Meg took them in.
She spent a ton of money at the animal hospital on treatments, and then she nursed
them back to health. She loved those kittens.” She shakes her head. “That’s what was
the biggest surprise to me. That she’d go through all that trouble for the kittens
and then, you know. . . .”

“Yeah, well, Meg worked in mysterious ways,” I say. The bitterness is so strong, I
swear they must be able to smell it on my breath. “And the cats are of no concern
to me.”

“But someone has to take them,” Alice says. “The house has been looking out for them,
but we’re not supposed to have pets and we’re all leaving for the summer and none
of us can take them.”

I shrug. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Have you seen these kittens?” Alice goes to the side of the house and starts making
kissing sounds, and soon enough two tiny fur balls bound into the living room. “This
one’s Pete,” she says, pointing to the mostly gray one with a black splodge on its
nose. “And the other one’s Repeat.”

Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?
Meg’s uncle Xavier told us this joke, and we used to torment each other with it.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Alice puts a kitten in my arms, where it immediately starts doing that pawing thing
that cats do when they’re trying to find milk. But then it gives up and falls asleep,
a little ball against my chest. Something tickles inside, an echo from another time
when it wasn’t all frozen in there.

The cat starts to purr, and I’m screwed. “Is there, like, an animal shelter here?”

“There is, but there are dozens of cats there, and they only keep them for three days
before, you know.” Alice mimes a knife to the throat.

Pete, or maybe it’s Repeat, is still purring in my arms. I can’t bring them home.
Tricia would have a shitfit. She’d refuse to let them come inside, and then they’d
get eaten by coyotes or killed by the cold in no time. I could ask if Sue and Joe
wanted them, but I’ve seen the way Samson goes after cats.

“Seattle has a few no-kill shelters,” Stoner Richard says. “I saw an Animal Liberation
Front thing about it.”

I sigh. “Fine. I’ll swing up to Seattle on my way out of town and drop the cats off.”

Stoner Richard laughs. “It’s not like dry cleaning. You can’t just drop them off.
You have to make an appointment for, like, an intake or something.”

“When have you ever had anything dry-cleaned?” Alice asks him.

Pete/Repeat mewls in my arms. Alice looks at me. “How long is your drive back?”

“Seven hours, plus I have to ship the boxes.”

She looks at me and then at Stoner Richard. “It’s three now. Maybe you should go up
to Seattle and bring the cats to a shelter, and you can leave first thing tomorrow.”

“Can’t
you
bring the cats to a shelter?” I ask her. “You seem to have it all worked out.”

“I have a Women’s Studies paper I need to work on.”

“What about after you finish?”

She falters for a second. “No. Those cats were Meg’s thing. I don’t feel right sending
them to a shelter.”

“Oh, so you’ll leave the dirty work to me?” I hear the anger in my voice, and I know
that it’s not Alice who’s left me the dirty work, but when she cringes, I get a grim
twist of satisfaction.

“Dude. I’ll drive you to Seattle,” Stoner Richard says. “We’ll get the felines settled,
and you can come here and get out of town first thing in the morning.” He seems like
he wants to be rid of me as much as I want to be rid of him. At least it’s mutual.

5

Seattle pet shelters, it turns out, are harder to get into than the hippest velvet-rope
night clubs. The first two are full, and no amount of begging works. The third one
has space, but it requires an application and a copy of the cats’ vet records. I tell
the pierced girl with her hipster no-leather shoes that I’m leaving town, that I have
the cats in the car, and she gives me the most snide look in the world and tells me
that I should’ve thought of this before I went and adopted a pet. I almost smack her.

“Wanna smoke that bowl now?” Stoner Richard asks after strike three. It’s eight o’clock
and the shelters are all closed for the night.

“No.”

“You wanna go to a club or something? Blow off steam? Since we’re in Seattle?”

I’m exhausted from the night before and I don’t want to be here with Stoner Richard
and I’m trying to figure out how I’ll get vet records when tomorrow is Sunday. I start
to beg off but then Richard says: “We can go to one of those hole-in-the-walls that
Meg liked to go to. Once in a while she’d deign to let us tag along.” He pauses. “She
had a whole klatch of friends up here.”

I’m momentarily stunned by Richard’s use of both
deign
and
klatch
. But the truth is, I do actually want to see these places. I think of the club we
were meant to have gone to the weekend I came to visit. All the clubs we were meant
to have gone to all the weekends I didn’t come to visit. I know how excited Meg was
to be amid the music scene, though after the time I visited her, the breathless emails
about it all started to taper off and then stopped.

“What about the kittens?” I ask Richard.

“They’ll be fine in the car,” Richard says. “It’s, like, fifty-five degrees tonight.
They have food and water.” He points to Pete and Repeat, who, having squealed and
yowled the entire drive up, are now quietly nestled together in their carrier.

We drive to a club in Fremont by the canal. Before we go in, Richard lights up a small
pipe and smokes out the window. “Don’t want to give the kitties a contact high,” he
jokes.

As we pay our covers, he tells me that Meg went here a lot. I nod as if I know this.
The place is empty. It smells of stale beer, bleach, and desperation. I leave Richard
at the bar and go play pinball by myself. By ten o’clock the room starts filling up,
and by eleven the first of the night’s bands comes on, a very feedback-heavy outfit
whose lead singer growls more than he sings.

After a few okay songs, Stoner Richard finds me. “That’s Ben McCallister,” he says,
pointing to the guitar player/growler.

“Uh-huh,” I say. I’ve never heard of him. It takes a while for the Seattle scene to
filter all the way down to Shitburg.

“Did Meg mention him to you?”

“No” is all I say. Though I want to scream at people to stop asking me that. Because
I don’t know what Meg told me and I ignored, and what Meg didn’t tell me. Although
one thing I know for damn certain is that she didn’t tell me that she was in such
intense pain that the only way to take it away was to order a batch of industrial
poison and drink it down.

Stoner Richard is going on about Meg being obsessed with the guy, and it’s all sort
of white noise, because Meg was obsessed with a lot of guitar players in her day and
in her way. But then this particular guitar player, this Ben McCallister, he stops
to take a pull from his beer, holding the long neck of the bottle between two fingers,
his guitar hanging off his lanky hip like it’s a limb. And then he turns out toward
the crowd and the lights are on him, bright, and I see that his eyes are impossibly
blue and he does this thing, like he’s shielding his eyes from the sun and looking
out into the crowd for someone, but the way he does it, it makes something click.

“Oh, that must be Tragic Guitar Hero,” I say.

“Nothing heroic about that guy,” Stoner Richard says.

Tragic Guitar Hero
. I do remember her writing about him once or twice, which was notable because she
hadn’t written about any guys. At first it seemed she was into his band and she crushed
on him the way that she always crushed on the guys—and the girls—she met in bands.

Tragic Guitar Hero. She’d told me about his band, retro Sonic Youth–Velvet Underground
sound, infused with some modern sensibilities. Typical Meg stuff. But she’d also written
about his eyes, so blue, she’d thought he wore contacts. I look at them now. They
are
weirdly blue.

And then I remember a line from one of her emails. Meg had asked, “Do you remember
the advice that Tricia gave us back when she started working at the bar?”

Tricia loved to dispense advice, especially when she had an audience as attentive
as Meg. But somehow I’d known right away which pointer Meg was talking about.
Never sleep with the bartender, girls,
Tricia had warned us.

“Why? Because everyone does?” Meg had asked. She loved the way Tricia talked to us,
as if we were her friends from the bar, as if either of us was sleeping with anyone.

“There’s that,” Tricia had replied. “But mostly because you stop getting free drinks.”

Meg had written that it held true for Tragic Guitar Heroes, too. And I’d been confused
because Meg hadn’t mentioned being into this guy or going out with him, let alone
sleeping with him, something she had never done, except for that one time that we
had both decided didn’t really count. And surely if Meg had done something as momentous
as sleeping with a guy, she’d have told me. I was going to ask her about it when she
came home. And then she didn’t.

So that’s him. That’s Tragic Guitar Hero. He seemed so mythic, and usually attaching
a name to a mythical creature tames it. But knowing his name, Ben McCallister, doesn’t
do that.

I watch the band intently now. He does that thing that rockers do, swiping away at
his guitar, leaning into it and into the mic and then stopping playing, grasping the
mic like he would a lover’s neck. It’s all an act. But it’s a good one. I can imagine
his line of groupies. I just can’t believe Meg would be one of them.

“We’re the Scarps. Silverfish is up next,” Ben McCallister says at the end of their
short set.

“You about ready to go?” Stoner Richard asks me.

But I’m not ready. I’m wide-awake and furious at Ben McCallister, who, I now understand,
screwed my friend, in more ways than one. Did he treat her like some throwaway groupie?
Didn’t he realize that this was Meg Garcia he was dealing with? You don’t throw Meg
away.

“Not yet,” I tell Richard, and then I’m up out of my seat and over at the bar where
Ben McCallister is standing, drinking another beer and talking to a group of people
who are telling him what a great set it was. I march up to him, but once I’m standing
right behind him, so close I can see the vertebrae in his neck and the tattoo atop
his shoulder blade, I have no idea what to say.

But Ben McCallister seems to know what to say to me. Because after a few seconds’
chitchat with the other girls, he turns around and looks at me: “I saw you out there.”

Up close, Ben McCallister is much prettier than any boy has a right to be. He has
what I can only assume are Irish good looks: black hair, skin that on a girl would
be called alabaster but on a rocker is just perfectly pasty. Full, red lips. And the
eyes. Meg was right. They look like contacts.

“You saw me out where?” I ask.

“Out there.” He points to the tables in the club. “I was looking for a friend of mine;
he said he’d come, but it’s impossible to see anything with the lights.” He mimics
shielding his eyes against the glare, just as I’d seen him do from the stage. “But
then I saw you”—he pauses for a beat—“like maybe
you
were who I was looking for.”

Is this what he does? Use this line? Is it so rehearsed that he even plants the little
eye shield squint-into-the-crowd thing during the show? I mean, it’s a great line.
Because if I was in the crowd, then it’s like,
Wow, you were looking for me
. And if I wasn’t, well, then you said that nice thing and what a sensitive rocker
you must be to believe in something like fate.

Is this the line he used on Meg? Did
this
work on Meg? I shudder to think of my friend falling for this crap, but then with
Meg far away from home, with glitter dust in her eyes and guitar fumes up her nose,
who knows?

He takes my silence for coyness. “What’s your name?”

Will my name ring a bell? Did she mention me to him? “Cody,” I say.

“Cody, Cody, Cody.” He gives my name a test drive. “It’s a cowgirl name,” he drawls
on. “Where you from, Cowgirl Cody?”

“Cowgirl country.”

His smile is slow, like he’s intentionally rationing it. “I’d like to visit Cowgirl
country. Maybe I can come and you can take me for a ride.” He gives me a meaningful
look, in case I haven’t caught the double entendre.

“You’d probably get bucked right off.”

Oh, he likes that. He thinks we’re flirting, the dickwad. “Would I, now?”

“Yeah. Horses can smell fear.”

Something on his face falters for a second. Then: “What makes you think I’m scared?”

“City dicks always are.”

“How do you know I’m a city dick?”

“Well, we’re in a city. And you’re a dick, aren’t you?”

A flurry of confusion passes over his face. I can see he’s not sure if I’m just a
violent flirter, the kind of girl who’d be hot, if a little angry, in bed, or if this
has actually passed over into something else. But he arranges his face into the lazy
wannabe rock-star slackery smile. “Who exactly have you been talking to, Cowgirl Cody?”
His tone is light, but underneath it’s laced with something less pleasant.

I make my voice go all breathy, the way Tricia does so well. “Who have I been talking
to, Ben McCallister?” I lean in close.

He leans in close too. Like he thinks we might kiss. Like most of the time, it really
is
this easy for him. “You know who I haven’t been talking to much?” My voice is pure
breath.

“Who?” he says. He’s close enough that I can smell the beer.

“Meg Garcia. I haven’t talked to Meg Garcia in more than a month. How about you?”

I’ve heard the term
recoiling
before, but when I see Ben McCallister snap away from me, I understand what it means.
Because he jumps back like a snake—recoiling—before it strikes.

“What the fuck?” he asks. The flirting portion of our evening has ended, and Ben’s
voice is now truly a growl, a wholly different sound from the bullshit thing he sang
with.

“Meg Garcia,” I repeat. It’s hard to look into his eyes now, but in the last month,
I’ve become an expert at hard things. “Know her?”

“Who are you?” His eyes are burning with something, a kind of fury, and they make
the irises icy. They don’t seem like contacts anymore.

“Or did you just screw her, and screw her over?”

There’s a tap on my shoulder. Stoner Richard is behind me. “I’ve got to be up in the
morning,” he tells me.

“I’m done here.”

It’s getting on for midnight and I’ve had three hours’ sleep and have forgotten to
eat another meal, and I’m shaky. I manage to walk to the front of the club before
I stumble. Richard grabs my arm, and it’s then that I make the mistake of turning
around to throw one last death-ray at the cocksure, shallow, pretty-boy poser, Ben
McCallister.

I wish I hadn’t. Because when I look at Ben McCallister one last time, he has this
expression on his face—it’s the particular contortion when fury meets guilt. And I
know that look. I see it every day in the mirror.