6
That night, I crash on the velour couch in my clothes. I wake up Sunday morning with Pete and Repeat sleeping on my chest and face. Either I’ve claimed their couch, or they’ve claimed me. I sit up in time to see the last roommate, who’s been invisible all weekend, drop a cereal bowl in the sink and disappear out the back door.
“Bye, Harry,” Alice calls after him.
So that’s Harry. According to Meg, he mostly stayed in his room with his many computers and his jars of fermented kimchi.
Alice goes into the kitchen and returns with a cup of coffee for me, which she announces is free-range and fair-trade and shade-farmed in Malawi, and I nod along as if my coffee needs go beyond hot and caffeinated.
I sit on the couch, watching the cats take playful swipes at each other’s faces. One of Repeat’s ears gets stuck inside out. I flick it straight for him and he mewls. It’s the most helpless sound, and like it or not, there’s no way I can take these guys to a shelter, no-kill or otherwise.
After I drink my coffee, I take my phone out onto the porch, where someone has set up a bunch of empty beer bottles in bowling-pin formation. I call Tricia. It’s only ten thirty, but miraculously, she answers.
“How’s the big city?” she asks.
“Big,” I reply. “Look, how do you feel about me bringing home a pair of kittens?”
“How do you feel about living someplace else?”
“It would be temporary. Until I find them a good home.”
“Forget it, Cody. I raised you for eighteen years. I’m not taking on any more helpless creatures.”
There are many things I resent about that sentiment; not the least is the implication that I’m a helpless creature that she’s coddled for years. I’d say I raised myself, but that would be unfair to the Garcias. When I got strep throat, it was Sue who noticed the gook on my tonsils and took me to the pediatrician for antibiotics. When I got my period, it was Sue who bought me pads. Tricia had just waved to the tampons in the medicine cabinet “for when the time comes,” not seeming to understand how terrifying the thought of inserting anything supersize absorbency might be to a twelve-year-old. As for the fifty hours of driving practice I needed to get my driver’s license, Tricia logged all of three of them. Joe did the remaining forty-seven, spending countless Sunday afternoons in the car with me and Meg.
“I might be here a few more days,” I say. “Can you cover me at Ms. Mason’s on Monday? There’s forty bucks in it for you.”
“Sure.” Tricia jumps at the money. She doesn’t ask me why I’m delayed or when I’ll be home.
I call the Garcias next. It’s a little trickier with them because if I mention the kittens, they’ll offer to take them in, even though the way Samson is around cats, it would be a disaster. I tell Sue I need a day or two longer to tie up a few of Meg’s loose ends. She sounds relieved, doesn’t ask any more questions. Just tells me to take as much time as I need. I’m about to hang up. Then she says:
“And, Cody . . .”
I hate those And, Codys. It’s like a gun being cocked. Like they’re about to tell me they know everything. “Yeah?”
There’s a long pause on the phone. My heart starts to pound.
“Thank you,” is all Sue says.
x x x
Inside, I ask Alice about the best way to find homes for the kittens. Good homes. “You could put an ad on Craigslist, but I heard sometimes those animals wind up in research labs.”
“Not helpful.”
“Well, we could put up flyers. Everyone likes pictures of kittens.”
I sigh. “Fine. How should we do that?”
“Easiest to take a picture of the cats, maybe email it to yourself, add some text, and print them out. . . .” she begins. “It might be simpler to use Meg’s laptop; it has a built-in camera.”
The eighteen-hundred-dollar computer her parents got her when she left for college. They’re still paying off the credit card bill for that.
I go up to her room and find the computer in one of the boxes. I turn it on. It’s password protected, but I put in Runtmeyer, and her desktop pops up. I bring the computer downstairs while Alice poses the cats together, which is harder than you’d think, and I understand where the expression “herding kittens” comes from. Finally, I snap a picture. Alice quickly uses the desktop publishing function to make up a flyer, and I take the thing back to Meg’s printer to print out a test copy.
I’m about to shut down her computer when I stop. Her email program is right there, right at the toolbar on the bottom, and without even thinking about it, I click it open. Immediately, a bunch of new mail downloads—junk, mostly, crap from anonymous people who don’t know she’s dead, though there are one or two Meg, We Miss You emails and one telling her she’s going to rot in hell because suicide is a sin. I delete that one.
I’m curious to know what the last email Meg sent was. Who was it to? Was it the suicide note? As I click over to the sent mail folder, I look around as if someone is watching me. But of course, no one is.
It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library fines?
How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you keep carrying on?
I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just says: Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you. Always.
Was that her good-bye? Did she send me a good-bye that I somehow missed?
I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.
I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a [email protected] a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.
You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.
I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first saw him play, a bunch of thanks for coming to my show, thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are some notes about upcoming gigs.
Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that Meg could flirt in for days.
But then there’s this abrupt change in tone. It’s cool. We’re still friends, he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed. I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February is wiped out. Weird.
I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says, Don’t worry about it. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly, that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister with ice in my veins: Meg, you have to leave me alone.
Yeah, she left you alone, all right.
Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says MUDHONEY. His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.
I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben from Meg’s account, with the subject line: Back from the Dead.
Your precious T-shirt, that is, I write. There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.
I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send. It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email. When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives, and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter. But then one time, you track down an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.