“Then why am I here?”
Because I need you. That’s the truth. And it’s almost as frightening as what awaits me down the road. But that’s not what I tell Ben. “Because you’re wrapped up in this too.”
Recoil.
“So that’s what this is about?” His voice is hard, flat, angry, like the day he came for the T-shirt. “In that case, there’s no fucking way I’m letting you go see this guy. I already have Meg’s death on my conscience. I’m not adding yours to the pile.”
“He’s not going to kill me.”
“Why not? He killed Meg. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying all along?”
“Yeah, but not like that. He’s not going to pull a knife on me or anything.”
“How the hell do you know that? How do you know he doesn’t have an arsenal of shotguns? How do you know the suicide shit isn’t some side project? How do you know he doesn’t have a dozen bodies buried in the backyard?”
Because Bradford Smith uses a different type of weapon, and leaves you to do the dirty work yourself. “I just know,” I say quietly.
“You know what, Cody? You don’t know shit.”
I don’t know shit? I look at Ben and it’s like: Who the hell are you? I know where you came from too. We crawl in the same muck, Ben McCallister. I’m angry now. But that’s good. Angry is better than scared.
“Wait for me here,” I say.
“No way. You want to be like your friend and walk right into a trap? I’m telling you: don’t. I’m telling you, this guy is dangerous, and going to see him is a fucked-up idea. I never warned Meg, but I’m warning you. That’s the difference between you and me: I learn from my mistakes.”
“Ben, the difference between you and me would fill up a book.” I’m not sure how these words can feel so good and so false at the same time.
Ben gives me one last look, shakes his head, and then he walks away.
x x x
There’s no time to contemplate Ben’s desertion, which I think I’ve been expecting all along. It’s just me and Bradford. As it needs to be.
He lives in Unit J in a completely nondescript complex. White door. Levolor shades in the window. I can’t see inside. At the unit next door, a couple is out on the patio, drinking beer. They don’t so much as look at me, but it’s reassuring, knowing they’re there.
I ring the bell.
The man who answers has white hair and a beard. He’s wearing a pair of shorts and an oversize Hawaiian-print shirt that hangs over his gut. He’s grasping a large sweating glass in his hand, full to the top, the ice not yet melted. I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed. Because this can’t be him. This guy looks like a sloppy Santa Claus.
But then he says, “Can I help you?” And the voice: soft, guarded, familiar.
It takes me a second to find my own voice. “I’m looking for Bradford Smith.”
I can see something—suspicion, strategy—pinging across his face. “What’s your business here?”
What’s my business here? I had a story to tell him, a way to worm myself inside. But it vanishes from my head, and I can’t think of what to say except to blurt out the truth. He’s always had that effect on me, this person I’ve been lying to.
“You’re my business.”
He squints. “I’m sorry, but do we know each other?”
My heart is thudding so hard and fast, I swear he must be able to see it through my blouse. “My name is Cody.” I pause. “But you probably know me better as Repeat.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Do I need to repeat myself?”
“No,” he says calmly. “I understood. You oughtn’t be here.”
He starts to close the door. And all I can think is: I invited you to help me die, and you’re shutting the door in my face. It fires up my anger. Good. I need it now.
I wedge my foot in the doorway. “Oh, no, I should be here. Because I also know someone named Meg Garcia. You might know her as Firefly. Did you know her real name was Meg? That she had a best friend named Cody? A mother? A father? A brother?” The speech I rehearsed during the long drive is coming back to me.
Now that I’ve shown my hand, I half expect him to slam the door on me, but instead he steps outside. One of the beer-drinking neighbors throws an empty beer bottle into a garbage can; it clanks and shatters. Bradford appraises his neighbors, lips pursed. He looks at me and opens the door behind him. “Perhaps you’d better come inside.”
For half a second I think of Ben, the arsenal of guns, the buried bodies. But then I go in anyway.
It is spartan, and neater than any of the houses I clean—after I clean them. My legs are shaking, and if I sit, he’ll see my knees knocking, but if I stand, they might buckle. I split the difference and lean against the plaid couch.
“You knew her?” he asks.
The look on his face is peculiar. It’s not sinister at all. It’s almost eager. And that’s when I realize that he doesn’t know the gory details—and he wants to. I don’t say anything. I refuse him that satisfaction.
“So she did it,” he says. Of course he knows this now. My coming here gave it away. I gave him the satisfaction anyway.
“Because of you. You killed her.”
“How could I have killed her?” he asks. “I never met her. I didn’t even know her name until just now.”
“Maybe you didn’t actually do it with your hands, but you did it. . . . You did it the cowardly way. What was it you said? ‘The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.’” I make air quote marks with my fingers. I have this part planned too. “I’d say the opposite of bravery is you!”
I sound so brave myself when I say it. No sign of the chickenshit I truly am, about to collapse on my jelly legs.
His mouth twists, like he just tasted something a little off. But then he composes himself again, and his smile is two clicks away from benevolent. I hear a high-pitched whine in my ear as sweat breaks out on parts of my body that don’t normally sweat.
He’s looking at me now, running his thumb across his fingers. His nails are neat and trimmed, much better kept than mine, which are ragged from scrubbing sinks and toilets.
“You lost the better part of you,” he says. “That’s what you wrote. It was her. Meg. Your ‘better half.’ And you’re trying to redeem yourself, because she left you out of the decision.”
He has my number. He always has. Even when we were corresponding over a message board, he saw through me. All at once, the folly of my plan, of “catching” him, drains out of me, and so does the remaining strength in my legs. I sink onto the couch. “Fuck you,” I say, because whatever script I came up with is useless now.
Bradford goes on in this almost gentle voice. “Except maybe you don’t mean she was your better half. Maybe she was your other half.” He takes a sip of his drink. “Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it’s as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny.”
He’s talking to me the way he would on the boards, circular, so it takes a minute to understand what he’s suggesting.
“You’re saying I want to die, like Meg?”
“I’m just repeating your words.”
“No! You’re putting your words into my mouth. You want me to die. Like you wanted Meg to die.”
“How did I ‘want’ Meg to die?” he asks, now making air quotes himself.
“Let’s see: you told her how to get poison. How to write a suicide note. How to keep it from family. How to alert the police. How to erase incriminating emails. You told her not to go on antidepressants. You told her not to keep living.”
“I told no one any of this.”
“You told her all of that! You told me that!”
He stares at me. “Cody. It was Cody, wasn’t it? What exactly did I t
ell you?”
My mind spins as I try to recall the specifics, but I can’t think of anything except for a collection of stupid quotes.
“Now it’s coming back to me. . . . The sunless planet. That was also you?” he asks.
Yes. That was me.
He sits down, settling in, like he’s about to watch one of his favorite movies.
“I thought that was an interesting way to put it. Would you want to go on living if the sun went out? But, Cody, do you actually know what would happen if the sun died?”
“No.” It comes out a squeak. Like a mouse.
“Within a week, the temperature on Earth would drop to below zero. Within a year, it would fall to minus one hundred. Ice sheets would cover the oceans. Crops, needless to say, would fail. Livestock would die. People who didn’t die of the cold would soon die of starvation. A sunless planet, which is what you called yourself, wasn’t it? It’s already a dead planet. Even if you’re still going through the motions.”
I’m a planet without its sun. I’m already cold and dead. That’s what he’s saying. So I should just make it official.
Except, why then is there this heat traveling its way up my body, like a circuit? Heat. The opposite of cold. The opposite of dead.
There’s a click at the door. And then a kid—zits, backpack, frown—walks in. My first thought is that Bradford lures people here, and this is another one of All_BS’s victims. Only this time, this time I’m here too, and I can save him. It’s not too late.
But then Bradford says, “What are you doing here?”
And the kid says, “Mom says you got the days mixed up again. She was pissed about it.” He sees me then, gives me a questioning look.
“Go to your room, and we’ll discuss it in a second,” he says gruffly.
“Can I use your computer?”
Bradford nods curtly. The kid disappears down a hall. As I watch him go, I can’t help but notice how drab this place is. The wood table with a stack of napkins in the middle. The generic prints hanging on the wall. There’s a chipped bookcase; it’s not full of philosophical tomes but supermarket paperbacks, the kind found in Tricia’s break room. There’s one big book, a reference book called Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, lying sidewise, so I can see all the sticky notes jammed into it. This is where he gets quotes from?
I hear the chime of the computer, and it’s like my brain clicks on.
Crappy condo, shitty job, depressing town. Bradford’s life is a lot like mine. Except that every night, he fires up his computer and plays God.
“You should go now,” Bradford says. The calm, taunting tone has vanished. His voice is icy again, like it was on the phone when someone barged in on him.
From down the hall, his son—who must be what, thirteen, fourteen, not so much younger than me?—calls out, asking for a sandwich.
Bradford’s voice is tight as he promises a turkey and Swiss. He looks at me: “You should go now,” he repeats.
“What would you do if someone did to him what you did to Meg?” I ask. And for a second I picture it. His own turkey- sandwich-eating son, dead. Bradford grieving as the Garcias have grieved.
Bradford stands up, and I know he has seen the scenario I just conjured. As he walks toward me, the vein in his neck bulging, I should be scared. Except I’m not.
Because I don’t want his son to die. It wouldn’t even anything out. It would just be one more dead kid. And somehow, this is the thought that gives me the strength to stand up, to walk past him, and to leave.
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 h
ave 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.