I Was Here(51)
Author: Gayle Forman

x x x

I keep it together as I walk out the door, down the gravel path, past the drinking neighbors, who are blasting classic rock now. I am okay until I look back at the condo and picture the man who made Meg die—a monster, a father—preparing a turkey sandwich for his son.

The sob that rises up comes from deep within me, as if it’s been festering there for days, or weeks, or months, or maybe so much longer. I can’t hold it back, and I can’t be near him when it comes. That’s where the danger is.

So I run.

I run down the dusty streets, churning up sand that flies into my nose. Someone is coming toward me. At first I think it’s a mirage; there’ve been so many of those lately. Except he doesn’t disappear the closer I get. Instead, when he sees me crying, he too starts to run.

“What happened?” he repeats over and over, his eyes alive not just with worry, but with fear. “Did he hurt you?”

Even if I could get the words out, I wouldn’t know what to say. He was a monster and he was a person. He killed her and she killed her. I found Bradford but I didn’t find anything. I’m choking on sand and dust and phlegm and grief. Ben keeps asking if he did something, and I want to reassure him, he didn’t; he didn’t hurt me or touch me or do any of those things. What finally comes sputtering out is this:

“He has a son.”

I try to explain. A teenage son. A son he protects, loves, even as he convinced Meg to die, tried to do the same to me. Only I can’t get out the words. But Ben was with me yesterday in Truckee. Which is maybe why it makes sense to him. Or maybe it’s that we’ve always made sense to each other.

“Oh, fuck, Cody,” he says. And then he opens his arms automatically, like hugging is something he does. And I step into them automatically, like being hugged is something I do. As he holds me, I cry. I cry for Meg, who is forever gone from me. I cry for the Garcias, who may be too. I cry for the father I never had, and the mother I did. I cry for Stoner Richard and the family he grew up with. I cry for Ben and the family he didn’t grow up with. And I cry for me.

38

After I calm down, we walk over to one of the paths along the river. It’s evening now, but the powerboats and Jet Skis are still zooming around. The mighty Colorado seems less like a major river than a paved aqueduct. Like everything about this trip, it’s not what I hoped for. I tell Ben I can’t believe that this is the grand Colorado River.

“Follow me,” he says. And I do, down a boat ramp, to the edge of the water. “I used to have a big map over my bed.” He kneels down next to the water. “The Colorado River starts in the Rocky Mountains and cuts through the Grand Canyon and goes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It might not seem like much here”—he leans over and scoops a handful of water—“but when you hold the water, you’re kind of holding a piece of the Rockies, of the Grand Canyon.”

He turns to me with his still-cupped hands, and I open mine as he lets go of his, and the river water, which has come from places unknown, with stories untold, flows from him to me.

“You always know the thing to say to make it better,” I say, so quietly I think my words have gotten drowned out by the Jet Skis.

But he hears. “You didn’t think so when you first met me.”

No. He’s wrong. Because though I hated him, there has always been something about Ben McCallister that made it better. Maybe that’s why I hated him. Because it’s not supposed to be better. And certainly not with him.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He reaches over and takes my wrists, and I clasp his, my own hands still wet with the mysterious river.

I don’t let go and neither does he, and the river water stays between us all the way back to our motel, where, inside our overheated room, we start to kiss. This one is as hungry as the one at his house months ago, but it’s different, too. As if we are opening ourselves to something. We kiss. My shirt falls to the floor, then Ben’s does, too. The feel of his bare skin against mine is astonishing. I want more. I tug off his jeans. I unzip my skirt.

Ben stops kissing me. “Are you sure?” he asks. His eyes have changed again, to that inky blue of a newborn’s.

I am sure.

We make our way to the bed in a tangle of limbs. He is warm against me, hard, but restrained, too.

“Do you have a condom?” I ask.

He leans over, pulls a shiny foil wrapper out of his wallet. “Are you sure?” he asks again.

I pull him to me.

When it happens, I start to cry. “Should I stop?” Ben asks.

I don’t want him to stop. Though it is painful—more than I expected it to be—I’m not crying because of how much I hurt. I’m crying because of how much I feel.

39

After, Ben falls asleep, locking me in the cavern of his arms. It’s like eighty degrees in the room—that poor air conditioner coughing in the window is no match for the desert’s brutal heat—and Ben himself radiates warmth like a furnace. But I don’t move, even though I’m hot and sticky with sweat. I don’t want to move, and eventually I fall asleep. I wake up a bunch of times in the night, and every time I do, Ben’s arms are still locked around me.

And then I wake up in the morning, and they’re not, and I’m cold, even though the room, which never cooled down in the night, is starting to get hot again. I sit up. There’s no sign of Ben, though his stuff is in a neat pile in the corner.

I slip into the shower. There’s an achiness between my legs, my virginity freshly gone. Meg loved that I seemed tough and sexy, and was a virgin. And now I’m not. If she were here, I could tell her about it.

The shower goes icy, though it has nothing to do with the water temperature. Because I realize I couldn’t tell her. Because I did it with him. With Ben. And he was hers first, even if it was just once.

I fucked her. That’s what he said.

But I’m different. He and I, we became friends first.

The rest of that conversation hurls back to me. Before it all shot to shit, we were friends. And then: When you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.

No. This is different. “I am different.” I say it out loud in the shower. And then I almost laugh. Because how many other girls have fed themselves this line about Ben McCallister to make themselves feel better in the shower the morning after?

Faces flash before me: my father’s. The look of hatred for him on that teen girl’s face. Bradford’s look of fury when I said the thing about his son. The various shades of loathing I’ve seen on Ben’s face, which have no doubt been reflected on mine.