I Was Here(69)

             “Who wants to know?”

             “It’s Cody.” I pause. “Meg’s friend.”

             There’s silence on the line, not a friendly one. She’s not going to speak. So I continue.

             “So, um, I saw Alice a few weeks ago.”

             “Congratulations.”

             Good old Tree. At least she’s consistent.

             “She mentioned that Meg might’ve confided in you about going on antidepressants or something,” I say.

             “Confided in me?” There’s something between a laugh and a bark. “Why would she do that? We didn’t exactly do each other’s nails.”

             It’s such a bizarre image that I almost smile. “It didn’t seem likely, but Alice mentioned you having said something. She couldn’t remember what.”

             “She never confided in me. But someone should’ve force-fed her a whole bottle of antidepressants. She so obviously needed them.”

             The almost-smile dies. “What are you talking about?”

             “I’ve never met anyone who spent so much time in bed. Except for my mom when she’s having a depressive episode.”

             “Your mom?”

             “She’s bipolar. I don’t know if Meg was. I never saw her manic, but I saw her depressed. Trust me, I know what that looks like.”

             I’m about to tell Tree about the mono, how tired Meg had sometimes gotten since then, how if she slept enough for five people, it was because she expended the energy of ten people. She needs a little time to rejuvenate, Sue would sometimes say, closing the door, sending me away.

             Then Tree says, “Plus, healthy people don’t talk that way about suicide.”

             The hair on the back of my neck rises. “What?”

             “We had a feminist lit class together, and one night me and her and a few other girls were in a café, studying at a table, and Meg starts quizzing everyone about how they’d off themselves. We were reading Virginia Woolf, and at first I thought it was because of that. Everyone had their half-baked answers. Guns or pills or jumping off a bridge, but not Meg. She was very specific: ‘I’d take poison and I’d do it in a hotel room and I’d leave the maid a big tip.’”

             Neither of us says anything. Because of course, that’s exactly what Meg did do.

             “At which point I told her that she should stop moping and get to the campus health center for some Prozac already.”

             A friend told me to go to the campus health center to get some meds.

             “It was you,” I whisper into the phone.

             I can hear her surprise crackle through the phone. “Me?”

             “She said a friend talked her into going to the campus health center, and I’ve talked to dozens of people, and no one ever mentioned a thing, no one thought to suggest it. Except you.”

             “We weren’t friends.”

             “Well, we were. We were best friends and not only did I not suggest this, I didn’t think to.”

             “Then we both failed her,” Tree says. And there’s such anger in her voice. And it’s then I get it. The animosity. It’s Meg. It’s the tentacles of her suicide, reaching out, burning people who barely knew her.