“We only did it the once, but it was enough. Right after, everything went south.”
“When?” I ask.
“I dunno. Around Thanksgiving. Why?”
That makes sense. Her sleeping-with-the-bartender email came before the holidays. But the kittens? Those she found after winter break. And the thing with Mr. Purdue grabbing my ass had happened in February, a few weeks before she died. “But if things went south a while ago, how do you know all this recent stuff, about the cats? About me?”
“I thought you read the emails.”
“Only a couple.”
He grimaces. “So you didn’t see all the stuff she wrote me?”
“No. And a bunch of her mail is missing, between, like, January and the week before she died.”
A puzzled look passes over Ben’s face. “Do you have a computer here?”
“I can use Meg’s. In her room.”
He pauses, as if considering. Then he crumples up our empty food wrappers. “Let’s go.”
x x x
Back in Meg’s room, he launches his webmail program. He does a search for her name and a whole screen of emails pop up. He scoots out of the chair and I sit down in it. Repeat comes bounding through the open door to claw at the cardboard boxes.
I start at the beginning, the flirty banter, all the stuff about Keith Moon and the Rolling Stones. I look at Ben.
“Keep going,” he says.
And I do. The flirtation grows. The emails get longer. And then they sleep together. It’s like a black line drawn in space. Because after, Ben’s emails become distant, and Meg’s kind of desperate. And then they just get weird. Maybe if they were written to me they wouldn’t seem so weird. Except they were to Ben, a guy she slept with once. She wrote him pages and pages of stuff, everything about her life, the cats, me; it reads like very detailed journal entries. The more he tried to push her away, the more she wrote. She wasn’t totally clueless. It’s clear she knew what she was doing was odd because she ended several notes, some of which were eight or ten pages long, with a need for reassurance: We’re still friends, right? Like she’s asking for permission to keep telling him all this stuff. I’m embarrassed to be reading this, embarrassed on her behalf, too. Is this why she deleted her sent mail?
The emails to Ben go on like this, every few days, for several weeks, and it’s impossible to read them all, not just because they’re long but because they’re giving me a horrible twist in my gut. Within the emails are references to texts and phone calls she made to him. When I ask Ben how often, he doesn’t answer. And then I see one of his last emails to her: Find someone else to talk to, he told her. Shortly after that email, You have to leave me alone. And then I think of her last email to him: You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
I have to stop. Ben is now looking at me with an expression I don’t like. I prefer the cocky strutting asshole from a few nights ago. Because I want to hate Ben McCallister. I don’t want him looking at me with soft eyes. I don’t want him looking vulnerable, almost needy, like he wants reassurance. And I certainly don’t want him doing something generous, like offering to take the kittens off my hands, which is what he does.
I just stare at him. Like, Who are you?
“I’ll leave them with my mom next time I go to Bend. It’s pretty much a zoo at her place anyway, so she won’t give a shit about two more strays.”