I Was Here(18)
Author: Gayle Forman

I walk out and Ben follows, giving me the tour: the mismatched furniture in the living room, the menagerie of musical equipment in the basement. He shows me his room, a dark futon and dark walls and an acoustic guitar in the corner and the same nice shelving as in the living room. I don’t go beyond the doorway.

The rain has stopped, so he leads me down a long staircase that slopes into the backyard. He gestures around. “This is where they spend most of their time.”

“Who?” And then I remember why I’m here. “Oh, the boys.”

“Actually, about that . . .” he begins.

“You had them snipped?”

“Meg already did.” He stumbles over her name but then rights himself. “But they’re not boys, not both of them. Repeat’s a girl. I figured they were brothers.”

“They must be littermates, and anyhow, it still works.”

“What still works?”

“The joke.” Ben looks at me, perplexed, so I explain. “Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?”

“Rep—” He stops himself. “Oh, I get it.” He scratches his head and thinks for a second. “Except she named them wrong, because it’s not the girl who’s saved.”

And there we are. Back to the real reason I’m here. Not to see the kittens. But because of this. Because in some awful way, this binds us now. We stand there in the soggy afternoon. Then he sits down on the steps, lights up a cigarette. He offers me one. I shake my head. “Don’t drink. Don’t smoke,” I say, mimicking the eighties song Meg and I discovered on one of Sue’s old mixtapes.

“What do you do?” Ben asks, completing the lyric.

I sit down next to him. “Yeah, that’s a good question.” I turn to him. “What do you do?”

“I do odd construction jobs, woodworking. I play some shows.”

“Right. The Scarps.”

“Yep. We had a show last night and another tonight.”

“Doubleheader.”

“You could stay. Catch the show tonight. It’s in Belltown.”

“I’m staying in Tacoma.”

“I could give you a ride back, probably not tonight but tomorrow. You could crash here.”

Is he for real? I give him a disgusted look, and he sort of shrugs. “Or not.” He sucks on his cigarette. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“Visiting the cats,” I say, defensive. “You invited me, remember?” After I texted him. Why the hell did I text him?

“No, I mean on the coast. In Tacoma.”

I explain to him about Meg’s computer, the deleted files, the encrypted folder, Harry’s computer wizardry.

A weird expression crosses his face. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to read her emails.”

“Why, you got something to hide?”

“Even if I did, you already went and read my emails.”

“Yeah. That’s what got me started on this.”

He twirls the cigarette between his fingers. “But those emails were mine. Written to me. It was my right to show you those. I don’t think you should dig into private things like that.”

“When you die, you’re not a person anymore and privacy kind of becomes a moot point.”

Ben looks uncomfortable. “What are you looking for, exactly?”

I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But something is suspicious.”

“Suspicious how? Like she was, what, murdered?”

“I don’t know what I think. But something’s weird about it, something’s fishy. Starting with the fact that Meg wasn’t suicidal. I’ve been thinking about this. Even if I didn’t know what was going on when she moved here, I’ve known her all her life. And not in all those years did she ever think about this or talk about it. So something else happened. Something to push her over the edge.”

“Something to push her over the edge,” Ben repeats. He shakes his head and lights a fresh cigarette with the butt of his last one. “What, exactly?”

“I’m not sure. But there was this line in her suicide note, about the decision being hers alone to make. Like who else’s would it be?”

Ben looks tired. He’s quiet for a long time. “Maybe she wrote that to exonerate you.”

I hold his gaze for a moment longer than is comfortable. “Well, she didn’t.”

x x x

It starts to rain again, so Ben and I go back inside. He makes us burritos with some black bean and tempeh mixture that’s in the fridge and then shows me where he keeps a secret stash of cheese in a Tupperware container, and grates it on top. By the time we finish eating, we’ve spent all of one hour together, and the guys won’t be back until five and the time stretches ahead of us like a yawn. Ben offers to take me around Seattle, to see the Space Needle or something, but it’s unseasonably cold out and I don’t feel like going anywhere.

“What do you want to do?” he asks.

There’s a small TV in the living room. Suddenly, the idea of doing something normal—no memorial services, no computer sleuthing, but just hanging out all afternoon in front of the TV, the kind of thing that hasn’t felt right to do since Meg—is so appealing. “We could watch TV,” I suggest.

Ben looks surprised, but then he grabs the remote and clicks on the set and hands me the changer. We watch a rerun of The Daily Show while the cats snuggle up next to us. Ben’s phone keeps vibrating with texts, chiming with calls. When he goes into the other room to take a couple of the calls, I can hear the low murmur of his side of the conversation—Something came up, maybe we can hang tomorrow night, he tells one caller. I overhear a squirmingly long conversation in which he repeatedly explains to some clearly dense girl named Bethany why he can’t visit her. He keeps telling her that maybe she can come up to see him. Seriously, Bethany, get a clue. Even I can hear his lack of conviction.

When he comes back to the sofa, I’ve flipped to MTV, which is having a marathon of 16 and Pregnant. Ben’s never seen it before, so I explain the premise to him. He shakes his head. “That’s a little too close to home.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I say.

His phone chirps with another text. “If you’d like some privacy, I can leave,” I offer.

“I would like some privacy, actually,” Ben says. And I’m about to gather my shit, wait out the next few hours in a café, when he turns off his phone.