I Was Here(21)
Author: Gayle Forman

“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.

15

After I decided I wouldn’t be going to UW but would be staying at home and attending the local community college, Tricia demanded I get a job. The Dairy Queen was hiring, so I asked for an application. I handed it in to the manager, who turned out to be Tammy Henthoff.

“You’re friends with that Garcia girl?” she asked, squinting at my application.

“Meg? Yeah. She’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s in college in Tacoma now, on a full scholarship,” I added. I was so proud of her.

“Uh-huh.” Tammy was not impressed. Or maybe she was just defensive. Since she’d run off with Matt Parner, people around here hadn’t been all that nice to her. She’d lost her job at the car dealership where her husband had worked, and I’d heard that Matt’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Melissa, and all her friends had taken to driving by the DQ and shouting nasty things. Not that Tammy didn’t deserve it. But Matt still had his job at the Jiffy Lube and no one drove by there yelling whore.

While Tammy was interviewing me, a bunch of high school students came by. The DQ had always been the local hangout, and it was then that I realized that if I got the job, I’d be serving burgers to people I’d spent the last four years not exactly snubbing, but sort of. Meg knew everyone here and she had her admirers for sure, but she wasn’t close with that many people. She had her family, the people she met online, and me. In middle school, teachers started calling us the Pod and it took, and then all sorts of people referred to us as that. We were known as a twosome. Even Tammy Henthoff, seven years out of high school, knew about us. Working here, it would be a daily barrage: Aren’t you Meg’s friend? And the piggyback question to that: If so, why are you still here?

Right about the same time, the night manager at the restaurant where Tricia works inquired if she knew anyone trustworthy who could clean her house, Tricia asked me—almost on a dare, it seemed; she knew how much I hated cleaning. But you can be good at things you hate. Pretty soon that one job turned into two and four and now six.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a call about a job as an attendant at Pioneer Park. Sue knew the woman who ran the parks department, and somehow, in the midst of everything, she put a word in for me and I got called in for an interview.

It was a good job, decent pay, benefits even. On the day of the interview with the superintendent, I walked to the park. And then I saw the rocket ship.

Pioneer Park was where Meg and I learned to ride our bikes. Where we’d run through the sprinklers and dreamed of the swimming pool the town sometimes talked about putting in there (it never happened; nothing here ever does). It was a place that wasn’t her house or my house or school or the DQ, where we could be alone and talk.

The capsule at the top of the rocket ship was like our magical private clubhouse. Anytime we climbed the rickety stairs and ladder up to the nose cone, we were the only people there, though it was obvious from all the ever-changing graffiti that we weren’t the only people to come up here.

Reading the graffiti out loud was one of our favorite things to do. There were hearts of couples long since broken up, and lyrics nobody remembered anymore. New stuff was always being scrawled over the old, though one line, Meg’s favorite, remained gouged into the metal: I Was Here. She loved that. “What more can you say, right?” she’d ask. She’d written the phrase on her own graffiti wall and kept threatening to get a tattoo of it one day, if she ever got over her fear of needles.

The whole deathtrap probably should’ve been condemned years ago, but it wasn’t. It was the highest point in town, and on clear days you could see for miles. Meg used to say you could see all the way to the future.

I turned around. I never even called the superintendent to cancel.

So I still clean houses. Maybe it’s for the best. Toilets are anonymous. They have no stories to tell, no recriminations to fling. They just take crap and flush.

Since coming back from this last trip to Tacoma, I actually find myself looking forward to work. The scrubbing, the endless repetition, the arriving at a manky sink, attacking it with bleach and steel wool and after a time, leaving it gleaming . . . befores/afters in life are never quite so stark.