x x x
I sleep until noon and wake up rested, the achiness I wear like a second skin gone. When I go into the kitchen, Ben’s already up, drinking coffee and talking to his housemates, whom he introduces me to. He’s eating a bowl of granola and offers me some.
“I can get it,” I say. I find a bowl from the drying rack and the granola from the cupboard, and it’s weird how I’m making myself at home here.
Ben grins at me, like he recognizes the novelty of this, too, and then chats with his housemates about the tour. They’re nice, not the rocker types I’d expected but students and people with jobs. One of the guys grew up in a town about twenty miles from where I live, and we lament the state of eastern Washington, stuck in some kind of time warp, and question why, when you cross the Cascades, heading east, do people start talking with southern accents?
The sun is out and Mount Rainier is lording it over the city, and it’s one of those days that make you forget what happens here between October and April. After breakfast Ben and I walk down the steps leading to the yard. Off to one side is a big bunch of lumber, all covered with a tarp.
“What’s that?” I ask Ben.
He shrugs. “Just something I do in my multitude of spare time.”
I pull up the tarp. Under is the beginnings of some shelves, all clean sloping lines like the ones up in the house. “You made these?” I ask.
He shrugs again.
“They’re really good.”
“Don’t sound so shocked.”
“Not shocked. More like mildly surprised.”
We sit down on the wooden steps and watch Pete and Repeat chase leaves and tackle each other.
“They do know how to enjoy themselves,” he says.
“What? Wrestling?”
“Just being.”
“Maybe I should come back as a cat.”
He gives me a sidelong glance.
“Or a goldfish. Some dumb animal.”
“Hey,” he says, mock offended on Pete’s and Repeat’s behalf.
“Look how easy it is for them. What good is all of our intelligence if it makes us crazy? I mean, other animals don’t kill themselves.”
He watches the cats, who have turned their attention to yanking on a fallen twig. “We don’t know that for sure. Animals might not swallow poison, but maybe they stop eating or separate from the herd, knowing it means they’ll be someone’s dinner that way.”
“Maybe.” I point at the cats. “Still, I’d like to be carefree like that again. I’m starting to doubt I ever was. Were you?”
Ben nods. “When I was little. After my dad left, before my mom hooked up and got pregnant with my little sister. Me and my brothers used to go exploring. We’d go swim in the river or build forts in the forest behind where we lived. It was like being Tom Sawyer.”
I look at Ben, trying to imagine him young and unburdened.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks. “You don’t think I’ve read Tom Sawyer?”
I laugh. It’s a strange sound, that.
“I’ve read Huck Finn, too. I am very intellectual.”
“I don’t know if you’re intellectual, but I know you’re smart. Meg would’ve had no patience for you if you weren’t. No matter how pretty you are.” I feel myself blush a little, and look away.
“You’re no stranger to pretty, Cody Reynolds,” he replies. “For a dick, that is.”
I turn back to look at him, and for a second I forget about everything. And then I remember that I can’t forget. “So, I have to tell you something else.”
Ben’s eyes, they change, like a traffic light going from green to yellow.
“I found other things from Meg. Things she’d posted on this suicide support group.”
Ben cocks his head.
“It’s not that kind of support group.”
His eyes change again, from yellow to red. Stop. But I can’t stop.
“You should probably just read it. I brought a printout. It’s up in your room with my stuff.”
I follow him upstairs in total silence, the warmth of the day replaced with a chill, though the sun is still plenty strong. I pull out the big sheaf of papers. “You should start at the beginning.”
I watch him read. And it’s like watching an avalanche. First a few drifts of blowing snow, and then a wave of it, and then his entire face is collapsing. The sick feeling comes back, magnified a hundred times over by what’s playing out all over his face.
When he puts down the last page, he stares up at me, and his expression, it’s awful. It’s fury and guilt, which I can handle because I’m used to them, but also fear and dread, which set off bombs in my gut. “Fuck!” he says.
“I know, right?” I say. “He had a hand in it. In her dying.”
But he doesn’t respond. Instead, he goes to his own laptop and brings it to the futon. He opens up his email program and goes to Meg’s emails. He scrolls through them until he finds the one he’s looking for. It was written two weeks before she died.
“Read,” he says in a ruined voice.
He points to midway through the screen.
I haven’t been coming to Seattle as much lately, as you’ve probably noticed, and I have to admit that at first it was because I was feeling kind of low and awkward about what went down between us. I still can’t believe I acted the way I did. But it’s not like that anymore. Remember, a while back you told me to find someone else to talk to? I have. A whole bunch of someones. Some incredibly intelligent people who have a very contrarian way of looking at things, and you know how that’s always appealed to me, going against the grain. I think it’s why I’ve always been drawn to music and to bands and to things like that, but you guys don’t have the lock on rebellion. There are so many avenues. There are so many ways to live, to define what living means for you and you alone. We are so narrow in our thinking, and once you understand that, once you decide to not abide by these artificial constraints, anything is possible and you are so liberated. Anyhow, that is what I’ve been learning from this new community. And they are really helping me. I have no doubt people will be surprised by the direction I take, but that’s life in the punk rock world, right? Anyhow, I gotta run. I’ve got a bus to catch.
I finish reading and look up. Ben is crouched on the corner of the futon. “She was trying to tell me,” he says. “About her fucked-up suicide group. She was trying to tell me.”
“You couldn’t have known from that.”
“She was trying to tell me,” Ben repeats. “In all those emails. She was trying to tell me. And I told her to leave me alone.” He slams his fist into the wall. The plaster cracks. And then he does it again, and his knuckles start to bleed.
“Ben. Stop it!” I leap over to his corner of the bed and grab his fists before he can punch the wall a third time. “Stop it! It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.”
I repeat the words that I wish someone would say to me, and then suddenly we are kissing. I taste his grief and his need and his tears and my tears.
“Cody.” He whispers my name. And it’s the tenderness of it that shocks me back to reality.
I leap off the bed. Cover my lips. Tuck in my shirt. “I have to go,” I say.
“Cody,” he repeats.
“I have to get home now. I have to work tomorrow morning.”
“Cody,” he implores.
But I’m out of the room, the door slamming behind me before he has a chance to say my name again.