The Perfect Stranger

by Megan Miranda

  “I hope so,” I said. “I’m looking for a woman who worked here eight years ago.”

  The man looked to be mid-thirties at most. His eyes went wide. “Don’t think I’ll be much help. I started about four years ago.”

  “I just need a name. The names of the bartenders from that time.”

  “You the police?” he asked. Though he knew I wasn’t. “Didn’t think so. I’d have to look through the old employment records even if you were.”

  A man at the bar asked for the television channel to be changed, and Malcolm left me standing there.

  “He wouldn’t give it to you?” the hostess asked. “He’s got some superiority complex, like he’s so much better than the rest of us with his college degree.” She didn’t look at me when she said it. “Anyway, back then about half the girls were paid under the table. What’s the name, sweetheart.”

  “Emmy Grey,” I said. “Emmy, any last name.”

  She thought for a moment, shook her head. “I’ve been here ten years, never heard the name. When was this again?”

  “Summer, eight years ago. She was my height, had dark hair. Was probably early twenties.”

  She grinned. “Sounds like most of us here.”

  “Amelia Kent?” I asked, and again, she shook her head. “Ammi?”

  “Sorry I can’t be of help. You sure you know her name?” She put her hand on her hip, suspicious of my motives, and I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t even give her a name.

  I thought once more of a woman living off the grid. Becoming Amelia Kent for the moment. Casting her aside, becoming someone new. I lowered my voice. Said, “Leah Stevens?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Leah. Sounds familiar. Yes, Leah. Just for a summer, right?”

  I knew my eyes were wide, my face frozen.

  “I remember her. I remember because the boss just loved her. Had some spunk, he said. Can’t say I knew her well, though. What do you need with Leah? She okay?”

  I shook my head, unable to get a clear breath. “That’s all I needed.” The room was buzzing, a high-pitched warning that only I could hear.

  My wallet that I’d lost that night at the bar, long ago, when I was out with her. You’re okay, Leah, she’d said. It’s just stuff.

  All my credit cards. My driver’s license. It had taken me weeks to sort it all out, months to have everything replaced. And in the meantime, what was she doing with it? With me?

  “Thanks,” I said, backing out the door.

  Nothing was chance. Nothing was probability, an unintended cause and effect.

  Even then, Leah. She had you even then. The thing she had come back for was not this box at all. The thing she had come back for, all along, was me.

  I stumbled out into the daylight, squinted from the glare of the sun on the windows, listened to the trucks rumbling down the side streets. Wondering where she was, then and now.

  On the way back to my car, I landed myself at the public library, logged myself on to a machine, and looked once more, for Bethany Jarvitz. Not all articles had become accessible on the Internet, especially from that long ago. I used the dates I’d found in the article about the fire and went to the archives. Old-style archived copies of all the major papers. Found a few mentions I had missed the first time. One from mid-June, eight years earlier, when we were first roommates in that basement apartment:

  Bethany Jarvitz was taken into custody last week following an anonymous tip. She was indicted for arson and involuntary manslaughter in the death of Charles Sanderson, 32, of New Bradford, PA. She entered a plea of guilty this morning in exchange for a more lenient sentencing. The other suspect remains unidentified.

  And before that, another shot of Bethany’s face before she was found. The photo grainy and pixelated, but this time in color, zoomed out, so you could see the full image. Her face was harder to see clearly from the distance, but you could see the person beside her. A dark hood pulled over the person’s head, shielding the face, shoulders hunched over.

  A sliver of bright color caught my eye from lower in the frame. Bright green, in Bethany’s hand. I leaned closer to the screen, zoomed in until the pixels segregated into individual boxes of color. Neon green with a sliver of red. The lighter. The lighter in that box. The red from the heart, peeking out from her fist. The lighter that once had been in my hand.

  I wanted to call up Kassidy and give him a name: Melissa Kellerman. I’d given Noah the wrong one. Used the last of my goodwill on a dead girl. She was still out there, and I was chasing her ghost.

  Surely Bethany would’ve been offered a better deal for giving up her name. Emmy must have been scared she would. Always on the run, just in case.

  And then, because I had a habit of digging until I got what I wanted, I put the dead man’s name into the search, ready for the obituary. I had the year, the town, the age—the fingerprints and DNA of the written world.

  There wasn’t much on the case in the papers, which I soon discovered was because the victim was not the perfect reader bait. He had a history of offenses, an assault charge, but nothing that stuck.

  Then I saw where he was from. Not where the crime was committed but the place he had been born, had presumably grown up. A jolt of recognition. The place Vince told me he’d gone to high school in upstate New York. Where he’d first met Emmy as Melissa. The victim, Charles, was a man from the same town. And there it was, the potential that she knew him.

  According to the court report, he’d been drunk, passed out, when the blaze whipped through the home.

  The look she’d given me that night I confessed on the floor of our apartment. The look that said, I understand. The mirror, reflecting back.

  Emmy and I were similar, I thought. Then and now.

  Something had made us run.

  Something that eventually, when Bethany got out of prison, made her come back.

  When Bethany got out, Emmy must’ve felt she owed her. Owed her eight years’ worth of life. She’d told her in that letter: I’ll be there when you get out. I’ll help. I promise.

  And I had followed her. Followed her straight to the truth this time.

  You can get there and not like the truth you find. Discover that the truth does not glimmer or shine or burn, or feel like ribs cracking open, a light escaping. That it can be the opposite. Bones folding in and over, as your body does the same.

  When you realize that no one was who you thought.

  When you stood in front of a sign for a roommate and thought the girl who took you in was salvation. When you constructed her that way, formed your edges around her. I had stood there, head pounding, ribs aching, unsure of everything in my life. I had stood there as no one.

  And she had seen something in me, something familiar, something she could take and do with as she pleased. A face in a grainy picture that might belong to me instead.

  Her friend, her cousin, in trouble. Who could bring Emmy down as well. A wave of nausea washed over me.

  Do you believe in fate? she’d asked me once. She had. Of course she had. I’d turned up in front of her, eight years earlier, exactly what she needed.

  A, B, or C, she’d asked. Do you help a friend in need, do you turn them in. All this time I thought she’d been asking where we stood, telling me exactly what we meant to each other. When really she was talking about someone else. A confession of her own.

  Was she looking for me that night when I found her again? Why was she in that bar that night? The way she’d brushed up against me so I’d have to notice, making me turn and call, Emmy?

  Bethany was someone she had always known.

  I was the piece on the outside. A piece she needed. If I gave too much of myself, people would keep taking, Rebecca had said. And they did. They were.

  I did not come first for Emmy. Not then, not now.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, WALKING BACK to my car from the library, I took the path from Government Center, the way I used to walk home. And then I went a little farther. Veering off Commonwe
alth, turning left down the second alley, as I had become accustomed to doing, by habit.

  Then I placed my fingers on the familiar brick ledge, the cold seeping to my bones. The light slipping through the curtain. Pulled myself up on my toes to see her shadow.

  * * *

  THINGS COME BACK AROUND because we go looking for them. That’s why they seem to pop back up over and over, like fate. Emmy running into me in the barroom because she was looking for me. Following me, coordinating the perfect time to pass by that would make me look, make me call out to her—Emmy?

  I wondered if she’d been following me before that. Earlier that same night, six months ago, when I’d stood in this very spot.

  On my toes, my hand on the concrete windowsill, in the dark. In the dark, nobody could see out, but I could see in. I had watched as Paige picked the baby up out of the high chair, wiped its face, held it on her hip.

  Paige had stood in the kitchen as I watched that night. She’d stared up at the dark stairwell, as she’d done night after night since Aaron’s death. As if someone might come down the steps.

  That was where he’d done it. He’d taken his pills, crushed up in the bottom of a glass of red wine, to dull his nerves or to steel his resolve. Standing on the other side of the window that night, before I saw him hanging, I saw the glass on the table. The single glass of red wine, mostly empty. I wondered if he used the stepladder I saw tucked in the corner next to the fridge. Or if he’d stepped over the staircase railing halfway up. How he was sure the banister would hold.

  Paige had been humming a tune, shushing the baby. But her voice sounded too far, too dulled by the glass between us. On impulse, I’d held the phone to my ear, dialed their home line, heard the ringing inside. I’d seen Paige’s body stiffen. But then I’d heard footsteps racing behind me. I’d quickly hung up and spun around, staring into the shadows but seeing no one. I’d tucked my head down and kept to the shadows, darting around the corner and into the entrance of the nearest bar. So dark and hazy, my hands shaking with adrenaline as I ordered that first drink to still my nerves.

  Maybe even then she was there. Watching.

  Maybe she had tried before. Several times that day. On the subway; as I paid for my coffee. Maybe the day earlier in the aisle of the grocery store. Maybe she’d tried twenty times before I picked up my head and noticed.

  Nothing so perfect can be left to chance alone.

  Aaron showed back up because I was looking for him. I was always looking for him.

  I searched every year, every month: Aaron Hampton.

  Watched as he got his Ph.D. Married Paige, their smiling faces in the society section, the photo taken at the yacht club where her family were members. Boats and sails in the twinkling lights behind them.

  I watched as he started teaching. I watched, and I waited, and every time I typed his name, I felt the darkness, the empty gap of time, into which I still, all these years later, cannot see.

  That was the preamble and I craved the conclusion.

  Until finally, finally, I had my story. Could see the connections, feel the pieces sliding around, could focus him clearly in my sights. A story I knew my boss would want, that the people would want. “Four suicides in one year,” I told Logan, and his eyes lit up like a spark.

  The source. The source was a twenty-two-year-old female, just graduated, living with her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend. I did not make her up. I changed some details to protect her identity. And I hid her away so nobody could find her.

  They thought I did it to bring an innocent man down, but I did not.

  I did it to give voice to that anonymous girl whom no one could identify. I did not regret it.

  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.

  Still—maybe I sometimes felt robbed by his death, as if he were still winning, still saying even from the other side: Can’t prove anything.

  And so I’m still drawn to this window I know so well.

  I could see curtains shifting now, a fan overhead, someone moving in the kitchen. And then a door creaking open, the outside light flipping on, bridging the gap between my world and theirs.

  CHAPTER 35

  I pressed myself into the brick behind the stack of garbage bins, hoping she wouldn’t see me. But she had a garbage bag in her arm, and something crackled from her hip, radio static. A baby monitor. I held my breath, but I’d been cornered. She stood in front of the garbage containers, the trash dumped in, and said, “Turn around or I’ll call the police.”

  So, what option did I have? I raised my hands in front of me, and I turned around.

  She wordlessly sucked in a breath.

  What can I say, really, about how Paige had changed through the years?

  More so than I’d thought when she was just a shadow behind the curtains, with her lines and colors softened and filtered through the double-paned window. Or when she was just a whiff of a person moving through the crowd while I focused on the red ponytail in the distance, the smoothed-back part, the frizz she could never fully tame, on which she grew less and less compelled to try as time went on.

  Paige in the flesh aged ten years in an instant. Or maybe that was motherhood, automatically bumping you up a generation from your peers. Or losing your husband, finding him swinging from the banister. Either way, this was the Paige who stood before me: Her face had gone grayish, and her freckles had faded to nothing, or maybe that was the makeup. But I didn’t think so, because the under-eye circles were hollowed and obvious, her cheeks drawn in, the bones of her face more pronounced. The lines around her eyes radiated outward, as if she were squinting at me. But the rest of her had filled, breasts and hips and stomach, to bear and care for a child.

  She wore a wool coat, but her collar was exposed, and I knew she was cold—she must have wanted to tuck her chin down against the wind, but she wouldn’t. Her lips were pink, her mouth slightly open, hair pulled back but not entirely successfully. Her hazel eyes usually seemed more green than anything else—but now they were dull, deadened. Whatever I had been about to say, to try, I lost my nerve at the sight of her.

  She reached her hand into her coat pocket, never taking her eyes off me, and for the briefest moment, I thought she’d pull a gun—and that I wouldn’t blame her. That everyone walking by on the cross streets wouldn’t notice a thing, minding their own business. But instead she pulled out a phone.

  “Wait,” I said, and she held the phone at her hip, undecided.

  “One call,” she said. And her voice, after all this time, was so familiar, so close. It played tricks on me, made me slip back to thinking we were friends, that I could mend this. “One word from me and you’re in jail.”

  She held that phone in front of her, and I could see her chest rising and falling, and what I’d first thought was fear, I now knew was something else—it was laced with something more, a feeling of power. My fate was in her hands, and she knew it.

  “I moved away,” I said, hands held out, as if the phone were a gun pointed at my chest. “I don’t live here. I don’t come around here. I don’t call. I’ve moved, and I’ve moved on.”

  “How nice for you,” she said. “You’ve moved on? Is this supposed to make me feel better? Then what the hell are you doing back here, hiding out behind my house?” Her face scrunched up in disgust. “Looking in my window?”

  “I need your help,” I said.

  She started coughing, bent over at the stomach, shaking from a laugh that came out wrong. “I think you’d better go now, Leah.”

  “Just wait. Do you remember the girl who I lived with when you came to visit me at the Allston place?”

  Her eyes widened in shock or disbelief. “You mean the last time you spoke to me? You mean the time your creepy roommate sliced through my boyfriend’s arm?” She stepped closer, but all I felt was a surge of relief. Yes, she knew Emmy. Emmy was real,
and I could prove it. “What did she do to you, to turn you into this person?”

  It wasn’t Emmy who’d done something, it was Aaron. Emmy was just the rebound, the thing I gravitated toward, so unlike everything my life had been. So sure the danger was outside the four walls of the basement apartment and not inside.

  “I need you to tell the police about her,” I said. “I’m going to call them, and I need you to tell them.”

  “Oh, you need me to? I need you to not print lies about my husband, I need you to not push him to—”

  “They weren’t lies!”

  “One word from me, that’s all it would take. One call to the DA . . .”

  And yet she hadn’t. Was it long-ago friendship holding her back? Was it belief?

  Music started playing faintly over the monitor, and Paige looked down at her hip.

  “What’s that?” I asked. The faint classical music I’d heard once before when I stood here, from somewhere inside the house. Abruptly, the music stopped.

  Paige frowned at me. “The crib toy. I have to go, the baby’s up.”

  I was transfixed. The noise on the monitor, the baby saying ma, ma, ma, the sound of him hitting a button, the music starting up again. Transporting me back to the day after the article was published, when I peered in this very window, so curious.

  “Get the hell out of here, Leah. If I see you here again, I’ll call the police.”

  But I was riveted to my spot. The same music I’d heard the night I stood here six months earlier, finding Aaron swinging from the banister. The baby, pressing the attachment in his crib over and over. The baby was home, in his crib. Paige, not out for her after-work walk with the baby at all . . .

  She looked at me and then back at the house—she didn’t know I had been here that evening. She didn’t know what that noise meant to me, what it signified. “Paige,” I said, because I thought I finally understood why she hadn’t pursued a lawsuit after all.

  The request for a lawyer. The refusal to speak.