The Perfect Stranger

by Megan Miranda

  “I didn’t know,” I’d said, standing before Logan’s desk. Lies beget lies, and I was already too far down the slope to stop now.

  “That’s bullshit,” he’d said, and his face was beet-red, caged anger personified. “What year did you graduate?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Did you know him, Leah?”

  I let the silence speak for itself—imagined how much worse it would look if he knew I’d once lived with him as well. “This is a serious conflict,” he said, which would end up being the biggest understatement of the conversation. This, in fact, was the nail in the coffin.

  “It’s the truth,” I shot back. I shouldn’t have been defensive. This is where I lost it, I now realize. As if, by my defense, he knew there was something worth defending at all.

  He stared into my eyes, and I stared back, and he flexed his fingers on top of the desk. “We’re going to need your source.”

  But it seemed that he already knew what I would say. It seemed like Noah had already warned him.

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  He didn’t move. Didn’t shake his head. Didn’t raise his voice. Let the end come gently and swiftly. “I need you to quit now,” he said. “I need you to quit, and pack your bags, and go right now. And hope to God this doesn’t come back.”

  I nodded and backed out of his office, my heart beating wildly. There was this terrible thrill before it plummeted deep. But for a moment, I felt it, and I knew what it was: It was truth, and I had done it. Rising to the surface, like air bubbles in boiling water, because I had turned on the stovetop and watched the red coils burning.

  CHAPTER 17

  I could not avoid this week’s call from home. My mother called every Sunday at ten A.M., without fail, like the faithful summoned to church. My sister got her calls on Sunday evening because of her work schedule. I’d asked her when we were together last Christmas if Mom felt the need to check in with her weekly as well, keeping tabs on her general life progress, and was relieved to discover that she did. It was moments like this when I felt closest to my sister: one of the few elements still tethering us together.

  Rebecca had laughed and said she’d rather get her calls over with earlier, like me, and get on with her day, but I thought she was lucky. Meanwhile, I’d have to spend the rest of Sunday replaying the conversation, considering my atonements.

  Last week I’d avoided my mom’s call by saying I needed to catch up on an assignment for my teaching certification classes, and she’d understood. Two weeks in a row, though, and she’d grow more concerned (was I falling behind? was I balancing everything okay?). The irony being that this week, I did really need to catch up.

  I answered on the first ring—better to get it over with, to face it head-on. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Good morning, Leah. How goes the education of the next generation?”

  “Fine. It’s a busy time of year. We’re entering midterms, so I’ve got a lot of grading.”

  I started cleaning up the kitchen, straightening Emmy’s knickknacks. I found it best to multitask while on the phone with my mother, to defray the nervous energy. Ever since I left Boston, I’d felt I had something to prove to her.

  “Rebecca’s having a particularly busy time, too,” she said. “Something about a highly competitive fellowship application. I don’t know the specifics. Maybe she’s told you about it?”

  “No,” I said, “she hasn’t told me.” No matter what my mother claimed, she knew exactly what my sister was working on. This was her reminder that I should keep up more with my sister. A seemingly endless hope she had for us, though Rebecca and I had never quite had that type of relationship. My mother had decided, years ago, that competition fueled success. Rebecca and I did not enter into this agreement willingly, instead veering so far from each other that we could never be considered on the same playing field.

  As I’d gotten older, I could understand why our mother pushed so hard. She raised us by herself after our father left when we were five and eight. He had another family somewhere, one I had no interest in meeting. A second try, a do-over. My mother had a pretty decent settlement, and the checks kept coming until I’d turned eighteen.

  But she did it on her own, raising us. She put herself through nursing school after he left, and she made sure we were always prepared to stand on our own feet. So we would never be blindsided, as she once was. I don’t remember much about that time, other than our neighbor watching us more often than not, but I wondered if Rebecca did. If that was why she was a little more driven, a little more stoic, a little tougher. If she saw who my mother had been before, and fought against it. If she remembered the days or weeks or months before my mother picked herself up and pushed on.

  For as long as I could remember, Rebecca was always the independent one. She achieved everything my mother had hoped, going to med school, excelling during her residency, never worrying about who would support her. Never being caught without a fallback plan when life didn’t turn out as expected. Never having a boyfriend turn on her, turn her in. Never living at the whim of another—on a pullout couch, in a basement apartment, all exposed nerves.

  My mother always said Rebecca was the practical one—that she could buckle down and get things done. In a crisis, she was the one you’d want.

  I, on the other hand, felt too deeply and relied on other people too heavily. I let things get to me, let them simmer and grow until they took me over. I threw myself into a job, a story, a relationship, with no fallback, and was surprised each time I got knocked down, scrambling for anything to hold on to. Sometimes I wondered if I was an affront to my mother’s brand of feminism.

  But when I graduated from college with my degree in journalism, she was just as happy as I’d remembered her being at Rebecca’s graduation. Look at you, she’d said. How you’ve channeled your faults into strengths. As if one had been merely masquerading as the other all along.

  I figured she was talking about my attraction to the morbid, as she called it. Always wrinkling her nose when she said it. There was something vaguely distasteful about the books I chose, all gory thrillers, and the crime documentaries I watched, the way I’d browse the obituaries—all distant memories I could solve. And now I had channeled that into something worthwhile, built a life around it. The words I’d overheard years earlier, warming me on the inside: Rebecca helps the ones who can be saved, and Leah gives a voice to those who cannot. We were still two sides of the same coin, a pair, a unit.

  “Have you met anyone, Leah?”

  “I’ve met a lot of people, Mother.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  I thought of Kyle. Of Davis Cobb. “I went out on Friday with a woman I work with. We had a good time.”

  “Great,” she said. “Have you decided on next semester, then?”

  She didn’t seem to understand that this job wasn’t temporary. Still clinging to the idea that I was on a brief sabbatical, that I’d get it out of my system and then return to my predicted life.

  “I signed a contract for the full year,” I said. “Which I’ve told you before.”

  “Right. It’s just, I was speaking to Susanna—you remember her son, Lucas?—and she said he’s been freelancing in New York. Apparently, there’s a lot of movement there, if you’re looking for a change. If things went south with Noah, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to work together anymore.”

  I pressed my fingers into my temples. Grabbed a rag and started scrubbing the counters. “It’s not about Noah, Mom.”

  “Leah,” she said. “Why don’t you come home for a little while. Take a long weekend, some time away.” But I was no longer listening.

  I looked out the window, saw a shadow fall across the front porch—hadn’t heard the footsteps on the stairs or any car coming up the drive. I dropped the phone to my hip, heard my mother’s voice call my name from far away.

  I stepped slowly, softly, toward the glass door. Raised the phone to my face
and whispered, “Mom, I have to go. Someone’s here.”

  “Who?” she asked. But I’d already pressed the end key.

  By the time I slid the door open, whatever had been there was gone. A pitter-patter of steps, a rustle of leaves and branches. I stared off into the woods, squinting. The sun was still low, and I wondered if something small could cast a larger shadow. A cat on the banister. A coyote. A dog. Or whether it was something more.

  Whether it was the same person who had left me the newspaper.

  And if so, what the hell they were after.

  * * *

  I DO NOT FEEL safe in this house. It was a sudden, fleeting thought, gone as quickly as it had appeared. But I had learned to trust my instincts. I had learned to pay attention to those sudden, fleeting thoughts. And so I did what I would’ve told anyone else to do before they became the story themselves.

  Get out.

  I thought of Emmy missing, and James Finley in my house, and his record that Kyle had detailed in this very room. I wondered if the police had already picked him up for questioning or if he was out there still.

  I threw some clothes in an overnight bag, packed up my laptop and my schoolwork, my phone charger. I checked out the front doors, the side window, before I grabbed my keys and left. Then I drove myself over to Break Mountain Inn, where I parked in the lot in front of the lobby. I sat in my car, waiting, watching the road in the rearview mirror.

  A single car drove by without slowing down, but the Sunday-morning streets were otherwise calm and empty. None of the cars in the lot looked familiar. I grabbed my bag and walked into the lobby.

  A man looked up—the same man I’d seen the evening I went out looking for Emmy. “You again,” he said. He looked at the bag slung over my shoulder, and then at me, in my Sunday-lounge-around-the-house outfit, and grinned.

  “Hi,” I said. “I need a room for the night.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, his eyes glowing from the reflection in the computer screen. “The full night, then?”

  “Yes,” I said. I handed him my credit card and leaned against the counter. “Hey, did the guy you were covering for ever show back up?”

  He handed me a key on a ring, the number 7 written on a tag hanging from the loop. “Guess not, since I’m still here.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pushing through the door.

  I strode down the sidewalk, passed the three other cars in the lot, heard the television in a room as I walked by, laughter from another. Tried to picture Emmy walking this same strip with James Finley, using a key, laughing, and Jim following her inside.

  I tried not to picture the moment everything might’ve gone wrong.

  The room had gray carpet and tan walls and a thin green comforter over a queen-size bed. Thick beige curtains hung from the windows, and I pulled them closed and flipped the light switch, which cast a yellow circle over the bed. I slid the deadbolt and dropped my bags and thought, for a moment, that this was it. This was rock bottom.

  I had brought myself to a place where people stop caring who you are or what happens to you. The type of place where people don’t look too closely or for too long.

  A girl from the apartments, wandering alone at night by the lake.

  Emmy, hanging around some guy with a criminal record in a place like this.

  A woman by herself, paying for a motel room by the night—in the same town where she lived.

  If I got called out here to report on a crime—a woman found dead in the bathtub, blunt-force trauma to the head; or strangled on the bed, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling; or robbed at knife point in the parking lot—I’d know with sickening accuracy, before I even got the facts, that it wouldn’t be seen as worthy of the front page. It wouldn’t be the big story.

  Depending on the day, on the rest of the shitty things done to or by other people that particular cycle, it might get nothing more than a mention in the crime beat. Any reader would give it a quick read, a shake of the head, before moving on.

  I knew what they’d be thinking, skimming for the relevant details before drawing their inevitable conclusion:

  What did you expect?

  You’ve done this to yourself.

  CHAPTER 18

  It was just after midnight when my phone rang, and the room spun at first, disorienting. It took me a moment to place myself, as it had for nearly a month after I’d moved here.

  First the television screen, the heavy curtains, the strip of light under the door from the outside lights. Then the numbers displayed on the clock, the phone ringing to my right. I bolted upright and fumbled for my cell.

  “Leah?” It was Kyle, and he sounded worried, or frantic, or upset.

  It was after midnight, and he was calling. I was jolted awake with the fear of what he was about to tell me. Picturing Emmy the last time she’d looked at me, her laughter, the piece of hair the wind blew in front of her face. “Yes?”

  He paused, and I heard the sound of a car door slamming shut. “I was at your house. I am at your house. You aren’t here, and I was worried. But— Sorry, I just wanted to check.” He paused again. “I was just worried.”

  I stared at the clock again. Pictured him in my driveway, lights off, my car gone. Imagined what he must’ve been thinking. Only so many places I’d be at this hour of the night. “I’m not with someone else, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “No,” he said. He was. “Okay, yes. Okay, so it’s none of my business. I was just in the area, and the day was, well, it was a day, and I thought I’d check on you, just to check, and your car was gone . . .”

  “I got scared,” I said, and then I laughed, realizing how ridiculous this was. I was at a motel ten miles from my house. Nobody knew I was here. “You told me about James Finley, and I didn’t want to be at that house anymore. I went to a motel. And now I feel ridiculous.”

  “Oh. Oh. You’re okay, then.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

  I heard the air moving through the phone, the noises of the outside. “I’m sorry I woke you,” he said.

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t really sleeping, anyway.” Which was a lie. I had been completely out, somewhere else, my brain finally off.

  “Where are you?” he asked. His mouth was pressed closer to the receiver.

  “Why, are you gonna stop by?” I had said it as a joke, then realized it wasn’t. I pictured him in my bed yesterday morning, the scar on his chest, the slow and steady rise and fall of his breathing. I held my breath, waiting for his reply.

  “Yeah, I’m gonna stop by.”

  I felt my smile growing. “Break Mountain Inn. I’m in room seven.”

  * * *

  I SAW THE ARC of his headlights through the gap of the curtains, heard the hum of the engine, the metallic clicks of the motor cooling after it turned off. And his footsteps along the sidewalk, the faint rap of his knuckles as his shadow appeared under the door.

  I opened the door in much the same state I’d answered his call: in sweatpants and an oversize T-shirt, hair tied back in a loose braid.

  “Hey,” he said as he skirted by me into the room as if avoiding detection.

  “Yeah, hey.” I locked the door behind him.

  “Classy,” he said, looking around, grinning with half his mouth.

  I placed one hand on my hip. “This is all very illicit,” I said. It felt like part of a joke. Lines we were acting out for the benefit of someone else. Two people with a script, desperately trying to remember their next lines. Otherwise we’d have to cut the scene, figure out what the hell we were doing here—sober now, not a coincidental meeting at a bar, but premeditated and deliberate.

  He fell onto my bed, over the covers, with his shoes on, lying on his back with his hands behind his head. “It occurs to me, coming here after midnight and all, that this probably seems like I called you up for a specific reason. And I just want to put it out there, in my defense, that it’s more like six P.M. for me right now. I’m just getting off work.”
>
  “So . . . you want to get some dinner?” I asked, smiling.

  He shook his head against the pillow, also smiling.

  “Then your defense is shit,” I said, and I laughed as he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto the bed beside him.

  I was still laughing as he cursed the crappy bed, the crappy room, as he joked that we shouldn’t waste time or we’d be charged an extra hour. But I saw myself for a moment—as both subject and object again—and I wondered if this was part of rock bottom.

  There she is, Leah Stevens, a girl in a shitty motel. A call in the middle of the night. With half her clothes still on. Clinging to the idea of someone else and not wanting him to go.

  Thinking, Look at yourself, Leah, look at yourself, over and over you fall, and pulling back for a moment, dragging the scene into focus. But then Kyle whispered my name, and I looked up at him instead, falling back under. Finding that thing I was searching for. How he couldn’t stop looking at me, under that shitty halo of light, as if he couldn’t believe I was here, and real.

  * * *

  I WAS STILL RIDING the high Monday morning. My bags were in the trunk of my car out in the faculty parking lot while I taught class. I’d vacated the motel, determined to go back home. To figure out who had sent the paper my way. To find out if there was anything real to fear or if this was just my imagination running away with me.

  And so I ignored the first buzz of someone’s phone. Kept talking right over it while I faced the board. Ignored that first whisper, the trace of something in the air, as it brushed against the back of my neck.