I Was Here(22)

             Someone gasps. I look out at the crowd, everyone, dappled in sunlight. It’s a beautiful day, full of the promise of spring: clear skies, puffy clouds, the sweet scent of early flowers blowing in on the breeze. It’s wrong that there should be days like this. That spring should come. Some part of me thought it would stay winter this year.

             I see some people are crying. I made them cry. I’ve become toxic. Drink me and die. “I’m sorry,” I say before I bolt.

             I run off the grassy area, back to the road, heading out of the park, toward the main street. I need to get out of here. Out of Tacoma. Out of Meg’s world.

             I hear footsteps behind me. It’s probably Alice or possibly Stoner Richard, but I have nothing to say to them, so I keep running, but whoever’s behind is faster than I am.

             I feel a hand on my shoulder. I spin around. His eyes, this time, look like the color of a sky after sunset, almost violet. I’ve never seen someone whose eyes change colors, like some mood ring to the soul. If he even has a soul.

             We stare at each other for a minute, catching our breath.

             “I can tell you things. If you want.” His voice has that growl, but there’s also a hesitancy.

             “I don’t want to know those things.”

             He shakes his head. “Not that. But I can tell you things. If you want. About her life here.”

             “How would you know? If she was just a one-night stand?”

             He gestures his head in an away-from-here motion. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

             “Why are you even here?”

             “Her roommate gave me the flyer,” he says, answering how he knew about the service but not why he came.

             We stand there. “Come on. Let’s just go talk,” he says.

             “Why? Do you know why she killed herself?”

             Recoil. Like the recoil of a gun. It’s what he does again. Like he’s been physically yanked back. Only this time, it’s not anger that’s on his face; it’s something else. “No,” he says.

             We walk a ways to a McDonald’s. I’m suddenly ravenous, hungry for something that is not vegetarian or organic or healthy but is bred in a daily misery. We both get Quarter Pounder Extra Value Meals and take them to a quiet table next to the empty playground.

             We eat in silence for a while. And then Ben starts talking. He tells me about Meg arriving on the indie-band scene, immediately making friends with a lot of the local musicians, which sounds like her. He tells me about how easy it was for her, this eighteen-year-old college student from Bumfuckville, Eastern Washington, swanning in and everyone eating out of her hand, which also sounds like her. At first he was jealous of her, because when he came here from Bend, Oregon, two years ago, he felt like he’d been hazed by the music community before they’d let him play in the sandbox. He tells me about the faux fights they used to have about who was a better drummer: Keith Moon or John Bonham. Who was a better guitar player: Jimi Hendrix or Ry Cooder. Who wrote the catchiest songs in the world: Nirvana or the Rolling Stones. He tells me about Meg adopting the kittens, hearing them crying in a box in a Dumpster near the downtown Tacoma homeless shelter where she worked a few hours a week. She dug them out, brought them to the vet, and spent hundreds of dollars to get them well. He tells me how she hit up some of the more successful musicians in town for donations to pay for the treatments, which, again, sounds exactly like Meg, and how she fed them baby formula with eyedroppers because they were too small to eat cat food. Of all the things he tells me, it’s this image, of Meg coaxing tiny orphan kittens to eat, that makes me want to cry.