On the way home, Samson straining at his leash because he knows food is next, Scottie asks me, “You know what I don’t get?”
I think we’re still taking about video games, so I’m not prepared for what he says next.
“I don’t get why she didn’t send me the note too.”
“Do you even have an email address?” I ask. Like this was her reason.
He rolls his eyes. “I’m ten, not two. I’ve had one since third grade. Meg emailed me stuff all the time.”
“Oh. Well, she probably, probably wanted to spare you.”
For a second, his eyes look just as hollowed out as his parents’. “Yeah, she spared me.”
x x x
Back at the house, the guests are leaving. I catch Sue dumping a tuna casserole into the garbage. She gives me a guilty look. When I go to hug her good-bye, she stops me. “Can you stay?” she asks in that voice of hers, so quiet, so different from Meg’s garrulous one. Meg’s voice that could make anyone do anything, anytime.
“Of course.”
She gestures toward the living room, where Joe is sitting on the couch, staring into space, ignoring Samson who is begging at his feet for the expected dinner. In the fading twilight, I look at Joe. Meg took after him, with his dark, Mexican looks. He seems like he’s aged a thousand years in the past month.
“Cody,” he says. One word. And it’s enough to make me cry.
“Hi, Joe.”
“Sue wants to talk to you; we both do.”
My heart starts to hammer, because I wonder if they’re finally going to ask me if I knew anything. I had to answer some cursory questions from the police when all this went down, but they had more to do with how Meg might have procured the poison, and I had no idea about any of that except that if Meg wanted something, she usually found a way to get it.
After Meg died, I went and looked up all the suicide signs online. Meg didn’t give me any of her prized possessions. She didn’t talk about killing herself. I mean, she used to say things like, “If Ms. Dobson gives us another pop quiz, I am going to shoot myself,” but does that count?
Sue sits down next to Joe on the worn couch. They look at each other for half a second, but then it’s like that hurts too much. They turn to me. Like I’m Switzerland.
“Cascades’s term ends next month,” they tell me.
I nod. University of the Cascades is the prestigious private college where Meg got a scholarship. The plan had been for both of us to move to Seattle after high school graduation. We’d been talking about this since eighth grade. Both of us at the University of Washington, sharing a dorm room for the first two years, then living off campus for the duration. But then Meg had gotten this amazing full ride at Cascades, a way better package that what the UW offered. As for me, I’d gotten into the UW but without scholarships of any kind. Tricia had made it pretty clear she couldn’t help me. “I finally got myself out of debt.” So in the end, I turned down the UW and decided to stay in town. My plan was to do two years at community college, then transfer to Seattle to be near Meg.
Joe and Sue sit there quietly. I watch Sue pick at her nails. The cuticles are a complete mess. Finally, she looks up. “The school has been very kind; they’ve offered to pack up her room and ship everything to us, but I can’t bear a stranger’s hands touching her things.”
“What about her roommates?” Cascades is tiny and hardly has any dorms. Meg lives—lived—off campus in a house shared with some other students.
“Apparently, they’ve just locked up her room and left it like that. Her rent’s paid through the end of the term, but now we should empty it out and bring everything . . .” Her voice catches.
“Home,” Joe finishes for her.
It takes me a second to realize what they want, what they’re asking me. And at first I’m relieved because it means I don’t have to fess up that I didn’t know what Meg was contemplating. That the one time in her life she might’ve needed me, I failed her. But then, the weight of what they’re asking skids and crashes in my stomach. Which isn’t to say I won’t do it. I will. Of course I will.
“You want me to pack up her things?” I say.
They nod. I nod back. It’s the least I can do.
“After your classes end, of course,” Sue says.
Officially, my classes end next month. Unofficially, they did the day I got Meg’s email. I’ve got Fs now. Or incompletes. The distinction hardly seems to matter.
“And if you can get the time off work.” This from Joe.
He says it respectfully, as if I have an important job. I clean houses. The people I work for, like everyone in this town, know about Meg, and they’ve all been very nice, telling me to take all the time I need. But empty hours to contemplate Meg aren’t what I need.
“I can go whenever,” I say. “Tomorrow if you want.”
“She didn’t have very much. You can take the car,” Joe says. Joe and Sue have one car, and it’s like a NASA expedition how they plot out their days so Sue can drop Joe off at work and get Scottie to school and get herself to work and then scoop them all back up again at the end of the day. On weekends, it’s more of the same, doing the grocery shopping and all the errands there’s no time for during the week. I don’t have a car. Occasionally, very occasionally, Tricia lets me use hers.
“Why don’t I take the bus? She doesn’t have that much. Didn’t.”
Joe and Sue look relieved. “We’ll pay for your bus tickets. You can ship any extra boxes UPS,” Joe says.
“And you don’t have to bring everything back.” Sue pauses. “Just the important things.”
I nod. They look so grateful that I have to look away. The trip is nothing: a three-day errand. A day to get there, a day to pack, a day to get home. It’s the kind of thing Meg would’ve offered to do without having to be asked first.
4
Every so often, I’ll read some hopeful article about how Tacoma is gentrifying so much that it’s rivaling Seattle. But when my bus pulls in to the deserted downtown, it all feels kind of desperate, like it’s trying too hard and failing. Sort of like some of Tricia’s friends from the bar, fifty-year-old women who wear miniskirts and platforms and makeup but aren’t fooling anyone. Mutton disguised as lamb is how the guys in our town describe them.
When Meg left, I promised I’d come visit once a month, but I wound up coming only one time, last October. I’d bought a ticket to Tacoma, but when the bus pulled into Seattle, Meg was waiting at the station. She’d had this idea we’d spend the day roaming Capitol Hill, have dinner at some hole-in-the-wall dumpling place in Chinatown, and go out to see a band play in Belltown—all the things we’d talked about doing when we moved here together. She was so hyped about the plan; I couldn’t quite tell if the day was her idea of a sales pitch, or a consolation prize.