“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?”