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.