We stand there. “Come on. Let’s just go talk,” he says.
“Why? Do you know why she killed herself?”
Recoil. Like the recoil of a gun. It’s what he does again. Like he’s been physically yanked back. Only this time, it’s not anger that’s on his face; it’s something else. “No,” he says.
We walk a ways to a McDonald’s. I’m suddenly ravenous, hungry for something that is not vegetarian or organic or healthy but is bred in a daily misery. We both get Quarter Pounder Extra Value Meals and take them to a quiet table next to the empty playground.
We eat in silence for a while. And then Ben starts talking. He tells me about Meg arriving on the indie-band scene, immediately making friends with a lot of the local musicians, which sounds like her. He tells me about how easy it was for her, this eighteen-year-old college student from Bumfuckville, Eastern Washington, swanning in and everyone eating out of her hand, which also sounds like her. At first he was jealous of her, because when he came here from Bend, Oregon, two years ago, he felt like he’d been hazed by the music community before they’d let him play in the sandbox. He tells me about the faux fights they used to have about who was a better drummer: Keith Moon or John Bonham. Who was a better guitar player: Jimi Hendrix or Ry Cooder. Who wrote the catchiest songs in the world: Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. He tells me about Meg adopting the kittens, hearing them crying in a box in a Dumpster near the downtown Tacoma homeless shelter where she worked a few hours a week. She dug them out, brought them to the vet, and spent hundreds of dollars to get them well. He tells me how she hit up some of the more successful musicians in town for donations to pay for the treatments, which, again, sounds exactly like Meg, and how she fed them baby formula with eyedroppers because they were too small to eat cat food. Of all the things he tells me, it’s this image, of Meg coaxing tiny orphan kittens to eat, that makes me want to cry.
But I don’t. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask. Now it’s my voice that sounds like a growl.
Ben’s pack of cigarettes sits on the table, and in lieu of smoking one, he clicks the lighter on and off, the flame hissing each time. “You seemed like you needed to know.” The way he says it sounds like an accusation.
“Why are you telling me this?” I repeat.
Ben’s eyes are momentarily illuminated by the flame. And once again, I can see there are so many shades of guilt. Ben’s, like mine, is tinged with red-hot fury, hotter than the fire he’s toying with.
“She talked about you, you know,” he says.
“Really? She didn’t talk about you.” Which is untrue, of course, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she had a moniker for him. Anyhow, turns out that he wasn’t the tragic one.
“She told me how at one of your cleaning jobs, some guy tried to grab your ass and you twisted his arm so far behind his back that he yelped and then upped your pay.”
Yeah, that happened to me with Mr. Purdue. A ten-dollar-a-week raise. That’s how much an unwanted cop of my ass is worth.
“She called you Buffy.”
And more than the thing with Mr. Purdue, that’s how I know that Meg did tell him about me. Buffy was her nickname for me when she thought I was being particularly kick-ass, à la Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. She called herself Willow, the magical sidekick, but she had it wrong: she was Buffy and Willow, strength and magic, all folded into one. I was just basking in her glow.
It feels wrong that he knows this about me, like he has seen my embarrassing baby pictures. Details he has no right to. “She told you a lot for a one-night stand,” I say.
He looks pained. What a good faker he is, that Ben McCallister. “We used to be friends.”
“I’m not sure friends is the word for it.”
“No,” he insists. “Before it all shot to shit, we were friends.”
The emails. The banter. The rock talk. The sudden change. “So what happened?” I ask, even though I know what happened.
Still, it’s shocking to hear him say it, the way he says it: “We fucked.”
“You slept together,” I correct. Because I know that much. I know that Meg, after what happened to her that other time, would not have done that with someone unless she was into him. “Meg wouldn’t just fuck someone.”
“Well, I fucked her,” Ben repeats. “And when you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.” He flicks the lighter on and lets it go dark again. “I knew it would, and I still did it.”
Now that’s he’s being honest, it’s both repellent and magnetic, like a terrible car crash you can’t help rubbernecking, even though you know it’ll give you nightmares later. “Why would you do that, if you knew that it would ruin things?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “You know how it is, when it’s in the moment and it’s all happening and you don’t think about the day after.” He looks at me, but the thing is, I don’t know. It would probably shock people to learn, but I’ve never. When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. Most of the time it seems inevitable anyway. Still, I didn’t need put a nail in the coffin by screwing any of the losers in Shitburg.
I don’t say anything, just stare at the empty playground.
“We only did it the once, but it was enough. Right after, everything went south.”
“When?” I ask.
“I dunno. Around Thanksgiving. Why?”
That makes sense. Her sleeping-with-the-bartender email came before the holidays. But the kittens? Those she found after winter break. And the thing with Mr. Purdue grabbing my ass had happened in February, a few weeks before she died. “But if things went south a while ago, how do you know all this recent stuff, about the cats? About me?”
“I thought you read the emails.”
“Only a couple.”
He grimaces. “So you didn’t see all the stuff she wrote me?”
“No. And a bunch of her mail is missing, between, like, January and the week before she died.”
A puzzled look passes over Ben’s face. “Do you have a computer here?”
“I can use Meg’s. In her room.”
He pauses, as if considering. Then he crumples up our empty food wrappers. “Let’s go.”
x x x