But this time was different. This time I wanted information.
By the end of the day, I hadn’t had a call from Emmy, but I did have a stack of seventy-five opinion pieces, all presumably about school safety, and the rumors, and Davis Cobb. This was how to start.
Truth and story—doesn’t matter which comes first, as long as you get where you need to be at the end.
As long as you end at the truth, all’s fair.
CHAPTER 7
I took the turns too fast, my back tires fighting for traction.
Slow down, Leah.
I eased my foot off the gas, listened to the engine relax, watched the dial of the speedometer drop, tried to remind myself that nothing would be altered by my presence. Still, I was itching for home.
I had a sudden irrational sensation that it was no longer me chasing a story but the story chasing me instead.
I pulled into the driveway, dust rising in the rearview mirror, and I could almost taste it. Emmy’s car still wasn’t back. The house took on a new slant, settled deep into the trees: slightly sunken, the charm giving way to disrepair.
I did a check of the rooms, as I had the night before, looking for any sign of her. My sad sticky note still rested against the gnome. A pathetic plea, like the one you might make in a voicemail even after you know your relationship is over.
Emmy had decorated the place—a chipped vase on the counter, a red ceramic heart hung from a nail over the couch, a random assortment of glass, plastic, and pewter knickknacks positioned haphazardly on end tables, over the refrigerator, on the kitchen windowsill. They’d turn up out of nowhere, like they had when we’d lived together years earlier. Our house was littered with them, as our apartment had been back then. It was a harmless habit, she’d claimed, and I rarely called her on it. Rarely called it what it was: theft.
Tokens, she called them. Reminders of places she’d been or people she’d been with. Emmy’s version of a scrapbook. A salt shaker from a restaurant where she’d eaten, an ashtray from the apartment of some hookup (though neither of us smoked), a magnet from the bar where she used to waitress on weekends.
Once, at our old place, she’d brought home a watch. I could tell from the heft of it, from the glint of the face and the multiple ticking pieces, that this was worth more than the typical items she lifted. She’d hung it from a nail over the door the morning she returned from John Hickelman’s piece-of-shit apartment, where it acted as our own makeshift wall clock.
“I’m sure he didn’t pay for this himself,” she said when I called her on it. And then, “Oh, come on, he had mirrors on his ceiling, for Christ’s sake.”
And it was hard to argue with that. So John Hickelman’s watch became ours. A game, really, as she knew I was uncomfortable with keeping it but that we would. She hung it from our bathroom towel bar. I moved it to the fridge. She hid it in my sock drawer. On and on it went, something I’d find only once I’d stopped looking, the surprise catching me in a laugh each time. Until I left it under her pillow, like the tooth fairy, and never saw it again.
These were the types of things she’d boxed up before she left for the Peace Corps, sealing it all up with silver duct tape. She’d asked me to keep this single box for her, as if these were the only things worth remembering.
Eight years, and I never heard from her. That box had moved with me for three apartments, out of some misguided sense of duty to her. Or some hope that she would come back for it.
* * *
I HAD LONG BELIEVED that life was not linear but cyclical.
It was the way news stories worked, and history—that you ended where you began, confused and gasping for breath.
And so I was not completely surprised when, eight years later, in a bar off a side street in the Back Bay, I saw Emmy again when my life was set to veer completely off track, as it had only once before.
She did not look as she had always looked: Her hair was dyed even darker, and her body had thinned and hardened, and her shoulders were hunched a little forward, maybe against the chill at night, but maybe not. And yet there was something quintessentially Emmy that had me calling after her, completely sure. I can only explain it this way: that I knew her deeply, if not thoroughly; that a four-month relationship can supersede all the boyfriends, all the friendships, that came after and lasted longer; that our friendship was born from the one time I’d stepped off track, done something unexpected that did not follow the predicted steps of my life. And for that reason, it shone brighter, and so did she.
She didn’t turn around at first as she brushed by me on the way past the bar, until I called again—“Emmy”—realizing I couldn’t remember her last name—had I ever really known it?
She spun around, and in the yellow glow of the overhead lights, I saw that the pockets under her eyes were discolored. And her eyes had that look I knew too well—that she wanted to escape. She was casting glances over her shoulder as she called back, “Leah?”
I stepped closer, and her face broke into laughter. She hooked her arms around my neck, and I circled mine around her back, feeling all the differences between then and now.
In the mass of people, she pressed her mouth close to my ear, and I could hear the laughter in her voice. “Oh my God, it’s you.”
When we pulled back, she looked over her shoulder again, and I asked, “Are you okay?”
She nodded in that familiar, easy way of hers, as if to say, Of course, I’m always okay, but she smiled tightly and said, “I need to leave.”
I picked up my purse and said, “Where to?”
“Anywhere but here,” she said, and it seemed so logical that I would take her back to my apartment—now in a nicer area, with a view—and we would sit on the floor and drink vodka.
“When did you get back?” I asked.
“Few years ago. I re-upped for another round after the first. I was living in D.C. after I got back, until a couple of months ago.” She was eating a loaf of my bread straight from the bag, and she noticed me watching. “I’m hungry all the time. But it’s like I can taste everything that went into this. Every container it’s been in, every hand that’s touched it, every machine and chemical.”
I frowned, tried to imagine stepping into a city after years of open air, open land. “Do you want to go back?”
“No, I don’t want to go back. I missed the death of my mother, and for what? I’m still trying to figure that out.”
I had thought she had been an idealist. We both were, in different ways. Me: the pursuit of truth, the naive belief that finding and reporting it could and would evoke real change. But hers ran deeper than her intentions. I supposed that was another reason I respected her. While the rest of us took internships to pad our résumés, and Paige went backpacking on her family’s dime, and Aaron did Habitat in the summers, Emmy dove full in. As she had done everything.
“My fiancé just found out I’m leaving,” she told me. I saw her eyes again. Pictured her pushing her way through the mass of people at the bar, looking over her shoulder. I poured her more vodka as she continued. “We moved up here a few months ago. A few months in a new place, and suddenly, you realize it’s never going to work.” She grimaced faintly, in a way that would be invisible to someone who didn’t know her the way I did. “Two years together, and I just now discovered the type of man he is.”
“Oh yeah? And what type is that?”
“The type who thought I would eventually become more like him. He was upset to discover I was exactly the same person I always was.”
“How upset are we talking?” I asked. The liquor was burning my throat at this point, my voice scratchy with what sounded like emotion.
She paused for a beat. “Upset enough that I’ll wait until he’s at work to go back for my things. If he hasn’t trashed them by then.”
She didn’t need to say anything more. This was the understanding we’d always had.
“Where are you going to go?” I asked.
She lifted her fingers as if to flick the im
aginary dust from the air. Something more whimsical than a shrug. “Somewhere else. Away from all the people, all the noise. From people like him.” She drained her glass, held it out to me again, her wrist so thin, the veins visible. “Kind of ironic,” she said, “it seems like people who aren’t grounded give all this weight to stability and planning, and the people who work the steady, traditional nine-to-fives envy the wanderers. Guess it was inevitable we’d be drawn to each other. Him, in finance; me, bouncing around in nonprofit work. But then he gets a transfer and I up and move with him, no job or anything, and everything changes. I guess he thought I’d settle or something. Find a steady job. But I don’t have that type of background or résumé. I’m not that type of person. He’s not who I thought, either, I guess. So here I go again.”
The vodka sat empty between us, and I pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge.
She kept talking, the alcohol coursing through her head, her tongue. “I think he was surprised I’d really up and leave him.”
I stared at her bare fingers. She curled them in, on her lap. “Sorry,” she said, raising her eyes to mine, smiling. “I don’t see you for eight years, and all I have is this sob story to vent. I’m fine. It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.”
But I didn’t want to talk about anything else. I was solidly drunk, infatuated with the person in front of me, with how she was so different from me and yet so familiar. “Emmy, what’s your last name?” I asked, and she laughed.
“You really don’t know?”
I shook my head. “I really don’t.”
“It’s Grey,” she said, still smiling, her eyes twinkling from the buzz.
“Emmy Grey,” I said, rolling her name around in my mouth. Yes, it suited her. “Emmy Grey, I need to leave the city,” I said, which felt like more of a confession than it was.
Everything was whimsical to Emmy, and so she probably thought I meant emotionally, spiritually, that I needed to seek out a new place for some personal growth. Not that I literally needed to leave this city before shit hit the proverbial fan.
“I have to get out of here,” I said, more serious now. Not talking about the wild egress of our thirties, as my friends called it—the mass exodus of thirtysomethings who get married and buy houses and commute in. But because I had to. There was nothing left for me here, not as Leah Stevens. Everything was a precipice.
Her eyes found mine over her glass, like she was reading something within me as well. “So come,” she said, as I knew she would.
She glanced once over her shoulder, to the clock, our bags dropped on the kitchen counter, the door. I saw her eyes again. Knew she didn’t want to go home until her fiancé was out of the apartment.
“You can stay here tonight,” I said.
In my memory, the rest of that night sounds like Emmy’s laughter and feels like a spell, dizzy and only half-real. I threw a dart at the map, she’d said, and all at once we were twenty-two again, in a bar, one eye closed, lining up to make that throw. How do you feel about western Pennsylvania?
I wondered if any of my other friends would do something like this, then I laughed to myself. Of course they wouldn’t. There was something so wild and free about Emmy. About the type of person who got kicked down and didn’t stay there. Who threw a dart at a map and thought, There, I’ll try again there.
How did I feel about western Pennsylvania? I felt good about it right then, with the words rolling off her tongue. It was familiar and yet new. It was close enough to come back, far enough to start fresh. I whispered it aloud, decided the name, the syllables stretching and slurring together, was bizarrely beautiful. I saw myself sitting on the front steps of a white porch. My hair down, coffee in hand. My laughter echoing in the open spaces. “Yes,” I said.
It was almost a joke. In the morning, I’d wake up, sober and with a headache behind my eyes, and I’d face the day.
But when I woke, Emmy was on my bed—how did she get there? The details were hazy. All I knew was she sat up and rubbed her eyes and said, “When do you want to go?”
We’d made the plan half-baked on hypotheticals, but there she was, and I stared at her, a mirror reflecting back. Wondering whether I could really upend my life, excise it from one place and set it in another; wondering whether such a thing was truly possible.
And then I stopped myself, sat at the computer, said, “Okay, let’s do this.”
Because thinking things through, which I’d done my entire life, carefully and deliberately, had gotten me absolutely nowhere but back to the start. A single misstep in an article, a calculated risk, and everything I’d accomplished, everything I’d become, had been wiped clean in an instant. There would be no do-over. There would be no coming back. Everything inside me vibrated with the word Go.
* * *
NOW I STOOD OVER the bathroom sink, staring deep into the mirror, as if I might blink and see Emmy instead.
I opened the mirrored medicine cabinet again. Her toothbrush sat at the same angle, the bristles stiff and dry. If she’d planned to stay with her boyfriend, wouldn’t she have taken it? Come back for it?
Maybe Jim bought her one. Maybe they shared one. But it was obvious now—now that I was looking for it—that she hadn’t been back. I hadn’t seen her in five days.
I was preoccupied by the empty bed, and the empty house, and the two warring sides: Don’t make a statement. But Emmy. Don’t get involved. But Emmy.
I checked the clock and out the window for the third time in as many minutes, holding tight to the hope that her car might round the bend at any moment. Went through the list of reasons I shouldn’t worry, yet again. She was a grown adult, probably staying at her boyfriend’s. It was so Emmy, honestly. Going wherever the wind took her, eventually landing here.
I checked every corner for missed sticky notes. Or forced entry. For signs of a struggle or blood.
Air, I just need some air. A clearer head.
I opened the secondary door at the end of the hall, past our bedrooms, which opened to a square of wood, one step down, straight to woods.
The afternoon light caught something on the decking. Something stuck between two boards. I used my nails to pry it out, the dainty silver chain glinting in the sunlight. The weight of the pendant—a black oval, misshapen edges—unraveling my last bit of rational calm. The chain hung from my palm, and the pendant fell off at a split in the chain itself. Two links, bent open, as if it had been ripped from someone’s neck.
The chain settled into the crease of my hand, and I began to shiver, as I had the first time I’d seen a crime scene.
I heard a car coming up the drive, and I didn’t think for a second that it was Emmy.
I raced around the side of the house to meet the cruiser moving slowly up the drive. He stopped in the middle of the lane and opened the door, his brow furrowed—this kid no older than Emmy and I had been when we first met.
“Everything okay?” he asked, one foot on the pavement, one foot propped on the floorboard. The engine was still running.
“I need to speak to Detective Donovan,” I said, gasping for breath. My hand went to the base of my throat. My pulse rebelled.
He looked beyond me at the house, as if he expected something to spring forth. A hand rested on his holster.
As if the danger were something either of us could see or defeat.
CHAPTER 8
By the time Kyle Donovan arrived and let himself in through the sliding glass door, the young cop who first pulled up, Officer Calvin Dodge (as he introduced himself once he’d realized there was no imminent threat), had gone through the basics. He’d sat in a vinyl seat across the kitchen table from me, the gnome between us, while I still had Emmy’s necklace clutched in my fist.
Officer Dodge asked me the typical questions after I showed him the necklace: Was there any sign of forced entry? Did anything look disturbed?
I clenched my fist tighter as I answered every irrelevant question, No, no, but he didn’t understand. I thoug
ht of the dangers of home rentals—copied keys and old locks, a history I couldn’t begin to know. People who might’ve gained the ability to come and go without disturbing anything. To move undetected. The danger you didn’t even know awaited.
I said, “The light was on in the living room three nights ago.”
I said, “Someone called the home line and hung up.”
I said, “Something happened to my roommate.”
At Kyle’s arrival, Officer Dodge stood, placed his hat back on his head, and turned to go. He paused at the entrance to share all the information he’d gotten thus far. “She’s worried about an Emmy Grey. Her roommate,” Dodge said, and Kyle nodded his thanks.
Kyle Donovan looked like a cop again. I decided it was all in his expression, that he could turn it on at will. He projected a confident authority in the school’s front office but a relaxed demeanor in my classroom. Today he was back to authority. I wondered if he had to actively flip the switch or if something automatic came over him, as something came over me when I approached a crime a scene.
“Hey there,” he said, sitting down in the freshly vacated seat.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
He tilted his head to the side. “I told you I would. I’m glad you called. I actually wasn’t even aware you had a roommate.”
“Emmy Grey,” I said. “We moved down here together this summer.”
“And you’d like to file a missing persons report?”
“No, something more. She’s not just missing. Something happened to her.” I unfurled my fist, showed him the necklace. “I found this on the back porch. She never takes it off.”
He narrowed his eyes at the pieces of chain. “Looks like it broke and fell off. She may not even know she’s missing it.” He leaned back in his seat, let out a slow sigh. “Look, we’ve been keeping an eye on the Cobb house. He hasn’t left today. I’m afraid this is my fault—that I’ve made you worried for nothing.”
I was already shaking my head. “No, no, not today. Before.”
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