I Was Here(105)

             Sue taps her chest. “I’ve struggled with this for such a long time, not only depression but the stigma of it in a small town, and I didn’t want her saddled with that at age fifteen.” She pauses. “If I’m honest, what I really didn’t want was for her to be saddled with a disease she got from me. So we kept it quiet.”

             Joe looks down at the table. “We thought we were doing the best thing at the time.”

             “We got her on antidepressants, of course,” Sue says. “And she improved. So much so that she wanted to go off them after she graduated high school. We tried to talk her out of it. I know depression, and it’s not something that visits once and disappears.”

             Sue’s moods. The house’s smells. Depression. That’s what it’s like?

             “We knew things weren’t right as soon as she got down there,” Joe says. “She was sleeping all the time, missing classes.”

             “We tried to get her help, to get her on track,” Sue says. “We were thinking of making her take a term off. We talked about it—fought about it, more like—all through winter break.”

             “That’s why we couldn’t invite you to join us,” Joe says.

             Winter break. My family is driving me crazy.

             “We had decided to force the issue if she wouldn’t take steps. To bring her home if we needed to, even if it meant losing her scholarship. But then in the New Year, she seemed to get better. Only she wasn’t. She was planning her escape.”

             “I didn’t know,” I say.

             “None of us did,” Sue says, starting to cry now.

             She was my best friend. If I’d been there, for the winter break, or for the school year, I would’ve known. About her depression, how bad she was feeling. It might be different. She might be here.

             “I didn’t know,” I repeat, only this time it comes out as a piercing howl. And then my grief bursts like an aneurysm, the blood everywhere.

             Joe and Sue watch me hemorrhage, and as they do, it’s like they finally understand.

             Joe reaches out to grab my hand as Sue says the words I’ve been yearning to hear: “Oh, baby, no, no, no. Not you. It’s not your fault.”

             “I was going to move to Seattle,” I say between sobs. “We were going to have this great life together, but . . .” I don’t know how to finish. I didn’t have the money. I got scared. I got stuck. So she went. And I stayed.

             “No!” Joe says. “That’s not it. You were the world to her. You were her rock back here.”

             “But that is it. Don’t you see?” I cry. “When she went away, I was mad. At me mostly, but I took it out on her. I wasn’t there for her. If I had been, she would’ve come to me instead of him.”

             “No, Cody,” Sue says. “She wouldn’t have.”

             There’s a devastating finality in Sue’s voice. She wouldn’t have. Meg would’ve kept it a secret, as she always did.

             Joe clears his throat, his way of holding back tears. “I get why you went after this guy, Cody. Because if this Bradford did it, then someone else murdered her. Someone other than her. Then maybe we could grieve her with clean, simple broken hearts.”

             I look up at Joe. Oh, God. I miss her so much. But I am so angry with her. And if I can’t forgive her, how can I forgive myself?

             “But if Meg weren’t sick in the first place, she wouldn’t have been in that man’s crosshairs,” Sue says, looking imploringly at Joe. “He wouldn’t have had any power over her. Look at Cody. She went on those boards, she tangled with that man. We just read the messages.” Sue turns to me now. “And you’re still here.”