I Was Here(16)

             It’s not the suicide note. She composed that two days before she died, and, as we now know, set it to deliver automatically the day after she died. After the suicide note, she wrote a handful of emails, including one to the library contesting a fine for an overdue book. She knew she was going to die and she was worried about library fines?

             How can a person do that? How can they make a decision like that, write an email like that, and then just carry on? If you can do that, can’t you keep carrying on?

             I check more of the sent mails. There’s one to Scottie the week she died. It just says: Hey, Runtmeyer, I love you. Always.

             Was that her good-bye? Did she send me a good-bye that I somehow missed?

             I scroll back some more, but it’s odd: There’s a bunch of messages from the week before she died, then a big six-week gap of nothing, then it picks up again back in January.

             I’m about to shut the whole thing down when I see something Meg sent to a bigbadben@podmail.com a few days before she died. I hesitate for moment. Then I open it.

             You don’t have to worry about me anymore.

             It’s a different kind of good-bye, and in spite of the happy face I can feel her heartbreak and rejection and defeat, things I’ve never associated with Meg Garcia.

             I go into her inbox and search for emails from bigbadben. They stretch back to the fall, and the first bunch are mostly quick and witty, one-line bits of banter—at least from him. I can’t see her responses here, only his side of the conversation, because his email lopped off her side with every reply. The early emails are after Meg first saw him play, a bunch of thanks for coming to my show, thanks for being so nice when the band sucks so bad—bullshit self-deprecation that a six-year-old could see through. There are some notes about upcoming gigs.

             Then the tone turns more chummy, then flirty—in one message he dubs her Mad Meg, in another he goes on about her electric shitkickers, which must be the orange snakeskin cowboy boots she picked up at the Goodwill and wore everywhere. There are a couple in which he calls her insane because everyone knows that Keith Moon is hands down the best drummer in the world. There are a few more with this kind of rock-talk that Meg could flirt in for days.

             But then there’s this abrupt change in tone. It’s cool. We’re still friends, he writes. But I can feel the discomfort even here, three steps and four months removed. I look at her sent mail to see what she wrote to him. I see the early stuff, her side of the banter about Keith Moon, but I can’t see what prompted the later emails, because again, there’s that chunk of missing sent email. Almost all of January and February is wiped out. Weird.

             I click back to Ben’s emails to her. Another email says, Don’t worry about it. Another asks her not to call him that late. Another says, not quite so reassuringly, that yeah, they’re still friends. Another email asks if she took his Mudhoney T-shirt and if so, can he have it back because it was his dad’s. And then I read one of the last ones he sent. One simple sentence, so brutal it makes me hate Ben McCallister with ice in my veins: Meg, you have to leave me alone.

             Yeah, she left you alone, all right.

             Yesterday, I’d found a large T-shirt, black and white and red, neatly folded. I didn’t recognize it, so I’d put it in the giveaway pile. I grab it now. It says MUDHONEY. His precious T-shirt. He couldn’t even let her have that.

             I go back to the laptop and, with fury in my fingers, send a new email to bigbadben from Meg’s account, with the subject line: Back from the Dead.

             Your precious T-shirt, that is, I write. There’s a limit on miracles and second comings.

             I don’t sign it and before I have a chance to overthink it, I’ve already pressed send. It takes all of thirty seconds for regret to set in, and I remember why I hate email. When you write a letter, like, say, to your father, you can scrawl pages and pages of all the things you think are so important, because you don’t know where he lives, and even if you did, there’d be all that time to find an envelope and a stamp and by that point, you would’ve ripped up the letter. But then one time, you track down an email address and you’re near a computer with Internet access so you don’t have that nice cushion and you type what you’re feeling and press send before you have a chance to talk yourself out of it. And then you wait, and wait, and wait, and nothing comes back, so all those things you thought were so important to say, really, they weren’t. They weren’t worth saying at all.