I nod, as if that makes sense to me.
He clicks on the encrypted file. “She probably meant to throw this away too, but the encryption got corrupted somehow and it prevented the machine from throwing it away.”
“What do you mean?”
“You found it in the trash, right?”
I nod again.
“She probably tried to empty it, but watch. . . .” He goes to the menu and selects “Empty Trash.”
“Don’t!” I yell.
He holds up his hand for me to stop. Some of the things empty, but then an error message reads, “The operation cannot be completed because the item ‘Unnamed Folder’ is in use.”
“I put some dummy folders in the trash so we could see that it’ll empty that, but not this. And don’t worry, I already copied this folder onto my computer. But my guess is, she meant to toss it, but couldn’t.”
“Oh.”
“Whatever it is, it’s something she didn’t want people to see. You sure you want to see it?”
I shake my head. I’m not sure at all. “This isn’t about what I want.”
“Okay. I’m doing something this afternoon, but I’ll work on it before and when I get home. It’s going to take a little bit of doing.”
I’m about to apologize, but I see the delight in Harry’s eyes, like I’ve just given him the world’s biggest puzzle. So I thank him instead.
He nods. “How are the cats doing?”
“Don’t know. That guy Ben took them.”
“He lives in Seattle, right?”
I shrug. I think that’s what he said.
“If you want to check on the cats, my church group is going up there this afternoon to paint a youth center. We could give you a ride.”
“They’re kittens, Harry, not babies. And they’re probably not even there. He was sending them to his mom.” Though the way Ben talked, I didn’t get the sense he was the kind of guy who saw his mom every week. “Anyhow, they’re not my concern anymore.”
He holds his hands up. “Sorry. You seemed pretty into them. Meg was.”
“I’m not Meg.”
He nods again. “Let me get to work on this.”
x x x
The morning drags on. Alice and Stoner Richard aren’t home and Harry hasn’t left his room, so I sit there, on the front porch, watching the rain come down. In the corner, I see one of the catnip-filled mice the kittens would spend hours attacking. It’s like it’s staring at me.
“Oh, fine.” I grab my phone and text Ben. How are the cats?
He texts back immediately: Out back. Trying to catch rain. Then he texts a picture of them frolicking in a yard.
Good pastime for Seattle cats.
Beats chasing tail.
You’d know.
Ha! Where are you?
Tacoma.
There’s a lag before the next text. Then, Come visit them? They grow up so fast.
I’m not entirely sure why my stomach does a little tumble except that the thought of seeing Ben McCallister is both repulsive and the opposite of that. Before I’ve had a chance to think too much about it, I text back: Okay.
Three seconds later: Need a lift?
I’m covered.
He sends me his address and tells me to text him when I’m on the road.
x x x
There’s a whole vanload from Harry’s church group going to Seattle, and I’m a little shocked to find Stoner Richard crammed into the back.
“Hey, Cody,” he says.
“Hey, Richard,” I reply. “Didn’t take you for a—”
“A Christian?” He laughs. “I’m just in it for the paint fumes. I’m all out of weed.”
One of the girls in the middle seat throws a paint roller at him. “Shut up, Richard. You are so full of shit.”
Cursing, stoner, do-gooding Christians. Okaayy.
She turns to me. “His father is a minister in Boise. Do you go to church?”
“Only because memorial services are so often held in them.”
She and Richard and Harry exchange a look, and even though I don’t think she goes to Cascades, it’s clear she knows what—and who—I’m talking about.
Someone blasts Sufjan Stevens, and Richard and Harry and the rest of the van sing along all the way to the outskirts of Seattle. I text Ben that I’m nearby.
Repeat just hit the litter box, he texts back. I’ll save it for you.
I allow a smile at that.
“Careful.” This from Stoner Richard. We’re pulling onto the off-ramp now, and he is climbing over the back row.
“You’re the one surfing in a moving vehicle.”
He squeezes next to me. “I know how guys like that are. Saw how he was with Meg. Charming on the outside, but inside, total douche.”
And here’s the crazy awful horrible thing. For one second, I almost defend Ben. But then I catch myself and I’m appalled, because Richard is right. Ben is a dick. He slept with Meg and then he blew her off, and now that she’s dead, he feels bad about it and he’s trying to be nice to me to make up for it.
I’m not sure why I’m here, why I’m in Tacoma picking at scabs that need to scar. Or why I’m in Seattle, being dropped off in front of a shabby Craftsman bungalow in Lower Queen Anne. But it’s like I’m being pushed along by a momentum stronger than me, because before I have a chance to change my mind, to tell the do-gooders that I’ll come with them for the afternoon and paint, Harry is telling me they’ll be back around five, and Richard is eyeing me with an expression that I can only describe as paternal, though I’m the last person in the world who would know what that actually looks like, and the van is roaring off.
I stand in front of the fading blue house, beer cans and cigarette butts out front. I try to summon some of that anger, that hatred for Ben, to somehow propel me inside.
The door cracks open and out comes a little gray blur. I watch it go by. Pete. Ben was right. He’s gotten bigger.
Then the door swings wider, and Ben runs after him in bare feet, his hair wet. “Shit!”
“What?”
“We don’t let them out in the front.” He dives under a bush and comes back holding Pete by the scruff of his neck. “Too much traffic.”
“Oh.”
Ben holds out the now-compliant kitten for me to take. So I kiss him on his fuzzy head and he proceeds to claw me right under my ear.
“Ouch!” I yell.
“He gets a little rambunctious.”
“I can see that.” I hand him back to Ben.
“Let’s go inside,” he says.
He opens the door to the house. The hardwood floors are scuffed, but there are nice new built-in wooden shelves everywhere, full of books, record albums, and flickering novena candles. Ben turns on a light and leans in, and for a second I think he’s going to kiss me or something, and my fists tighten. But he pulls back my hair and peers at my neck. “That’s pretty nasty,” he says.
I touch my finger to the scratch, which is starting to rise into a welt. “It’s okay.”
“You should rinse it with hydrogen peroxide.”
“I’m fine.”
He shakes his head. “The cats use the litter box. You could get cat-scratch fever.”
“That’s not a real thing; it’s just a song.”
“It is too a real thing. Your glands swell up.”
“How do you know so much about cats?”
“We had a bunch of them growing up. My mom didn’t believe in spaying or neutering. For pets or humans.”
I follow him into a pink 1960s bathroom, humid from his recent shower. He digs around in the medicine cabinet and pulls out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He dabs some on a tissue and leans over toward me.
/>
I grab the tissue. “I can manage,” I say. The scratch goes white and foamy and stings for a second and then it’s fine. And then we’re just standing there in the bathroom, all warm and wet and small.
I walk out and Ben follows, giving me the tour: the mismatched furniture in the living room, the menagerie of musical equipment in the basement. He shows me his room, a dark futon and dark walls and an acoustic guitar in the corner and the same nice shelving as in the living room. I don’t go beyond the doorway.
The rain has stopped, so he leads me down a long staircase that slopes into the backyard. He gestures around. “This is where they spend most of their time.”
“Who?” And then I remember why I’m here. “Oh, the boys.”
“Actually, about that . . .” he begins.
“You had them snipped?”
“Meg already did.” He stumbles over her name but then rights himself. “But they’re not boys, not both of them. Repeat’s a girl. I figured they were brothers.”
“They must be littermates, and anyhow, it still works.”
“What still works?”
“The joke.” Ben looks at me, perplexed, so I explain. “Pete and Repeat went out in a boat. Pete fell out. Who was saved?”
“Rep—” He stops himself. “Oh, I get it.” He scratches his head and thinks for a second. “Except she named them wrong, because it’s not the girl who’s saved.”
And there we are. Back to the real reason I’m here. Not to see the kittens. But because of this. Because in some awful way, this binds us now. We stand there in the soggy afternoon. Then he sits down on the steps, lights up a cigarette. He offers me one. I shake my head. “Don’t drink. Don’t smoke,” I say, mimicking the eighties song Meg and I discovered on one of Sue’s old mixtapes.
“What do you do?” Ben asks, completing the lyric.
I sit down next to him. “Yeah, that’s a good question.” I turn to him. “What do you do?”
“I do odd construction jobs, woodworking. I play some shows.”
“Right. The Scarps.”
“Yep. We had a show last night and another tonight.”
“Doubleheader.”
“You could stay. Catch the show tonight. It’s in Belltown.”
“I’m staying in Tacoma.”
“I could give you a ride back, probably not tonight but tomorrow. You could crash here.”
Is he for real? I give him a disgusted look, and he sort of shrugs. “Or not.” He sucks on his cigarette. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“Visiting the cats,” I say, defensive. “You invited me, remember?” After I texted him. Why the hell did I text him?
“No, I mean on the coast. In Tacoma.”
I explain to him about Meg’s computer, the deleted files, the encrypted folder, Harry’s computer wizardry.
A weird expression crosses his face. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to read her emails.”
“Why, you got something to hide?”
“Even if I did, you already went and read my emails.”
“Yeah. That’s what got me started on this.”
He twirls the cigarette between his fingers. “But those emails were mine. Written to me. It was my right to show you those. I don’t think you should dig into private things like that.”
“When you die, you’re not a person anymore and privacy kind of becomes a moot point.”
Ben looks uncomfortable. “What are you looking for, exactly?”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But something is suspicious.”
“Suspicious how? Like she was, what, murdered?”
“I don’t know what I think. But something’s weird about it, something’s fishy. Starting with the fact that Meg wasn’t suicidal. I’ve been thinking about this. Even if I didn’t know what was going on when she moved here, I’ve known her all her life. And not in all those years did she ever think about this or talk about it. So something else happened. Something to push her over the edge.”
“Something to push her over the edge,” Ben repeats. He shakes his head and lights a fresh cigarette with the butt of his last one. “What, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. But there was this line in her suicide note, about the decision being hers alone to make. Like who else’s would it be?”
Ben looks tired. He’s quiet for a long time. “Maybe she wrote that to exonerate you.”
I hold his gaze for a moment longer than is comfortable. “Well, she didn’t.”
x x x
It starts to rain again, so Ben and I go back inside. He makes us burritos with some black bean and tempeh mixture that’s in the fridge and then shows me where he keeps a secret stash of cheese in a Tupperware container, and grates it on top. By the time we finish eating, we’ve spent all of one hour together, and the guys won’t be back until five and the time stretches ahead of us like a yawn. Ben offers to take me around Seattle, to see the Space Needle or something, but it’s unseasonably cold out and I don’t feel like going anywhere.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
There’s a small TV in the living room. Suddenly, the idea of doing something normal—no memorial services, no computer sleuthing, but just hanging out all afternoon in front of the TV, the kind of thing that hasn’t felt right to do since Meg—is so appealing. “We could watch TV,” I suggest.
Ben looks surprised, but then he grabs the remote and clicks on the set and hands me the changer. We watch a rerun of The Daily Show while the cats snuggle up next to us. Ben’s phone keeps vibrating with texts, chiming with calls. When he goes into the other room to take a couple of the calls, I can hear the low murmur of his side of the conversation—Something came up, maybe we can hang tomorrow night, he tells one caller. I overhear a squirmingly long conversation in which he repeatedly explains to some clearly dense girl named Bethany why he can’t visit her. He keeps telling her that maybe she can come up to see him. Seriously, Bethany, get a clue. Even I can hear his lack of conviction.
When he comes back to the sofa, I’ve flipped to MTV, which is having a marathon of 16 and Pregnant. Ben’s never seen it before, so I explain the premise to him. He shakes his head. “That’s a little too close to home.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I say.
His phone chirps with another text. “If you’d like some privacy, I can leave,” I offer.
“I would like some privacy, actually,” Ben says. And I’m about to gather my shit, wait out the next few hours in a café, when he turns off his phone.
We watch the show. After a few episodes, Ben gets into it, yelling at the TV like Meg and I used to. “Good argument for mandatory birth control,” he says.
“Have you ever gotten a girl pregnant?” I ask.
Ben’s eyes go wide. They’re an electric shade of blue now, or maybe it’s just the reflected glow of the TV. “That’s a personal question.”
“I kind of think we’re beyond standing on ceremony, don’t you?”
He looks at me. “There was a scare once, in high school, but it was a false alarm. Since then I learned my lesson. I always use condoms, unlike these assholes.” He points to the TV. “Sometimes I think I should go ahead and get snipped, like Pete and Repeat.”
“Like Pete. Repeat’s a girl, so she got her ovaries out or something.”
“Okay, like Pete.”
“Don’t you want kids? One day?”
“I know I’m supposed to. But when I picture my future, I don’t see it.”
“Live fast, die young.” Everyone romanticizes that notion, and I hate it. I saw a picture of Meg’s body from the police report. There is absolutely nothing romantic about dying young.
“No, it’s not like I see myself dead or anything. It’s just I don’t see myself . . . connected.”
/>
“I don’t know about that,” I say. “You seem pretty connected.” I gesture to his cell phone.
“I guess.”
“You guess? Let me guess. Did you have a girl over last night?”
His ears go a little pink, which answers the question.
“And will you have a girl over tonight?”
“That depends . . .” he begins.
“On what?”
“If you decide to stay over.”
“What the hell, Ben? Are you, like, some kind of addict? Can you not help yourself?”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “Chill, Cody. I meant if you crashed on the couch or something, you’d stay over.”
“Ben, I will clarify this for you so there are no misunderstandings: I will never sleep with you, or in the vicinity of you.”
“I’ll cross you off the list.”
“A long list, I imagine.”
He has the good grace to look embarrassed by this.
We watch the TV for a while longer.
“Can I ask you something else?”.
“If I say no, will that stop you?” he answers.
“Why do you do this? I mean, I get why guys want to have sex. I get that guys are all horny all the time. But why a different girl every night?”
“It’s not a different girl every night.”
“Near enough, I’m guessing.”
Ben pulls out a pack of cigarettes, toys with an unlit one. I can see he wants to light up, but I don’t think smoking’s allowed in the house. After a while he puts the cigarette back in the pack. “You know what you know,” he says.
“What’s that’s mean?”
“It just . . . becoming a man, it’s not like it’s something that happens instinctively. . . .” He trails off.
“Oh, please. I’ve never met my father and my mother is hardly a role model, and I don’t blame my shit on them. So what’s your story, you didn’t have a father, Ben? Cry me a river.”