The Perfect Stranger

by Megan Miranda

  Kyle cursed behind me, his jaw set, not looking directly at me. He threw on his shirt, ran his hand through his hair. There would be no sneaking out the window or the back door, since the car was parked directly behind his and she was already squinting at it.

  “She’s a doctor, not a reporter, calm down,” I said. But Kyle seemed incapable of calming down. Like he could map out the beginning of the end as well, and this was its starting point. “She’s probably just here because my mom sent her. We’re not that close.”

  “Still, I need to go,” he said.

  I saw her pulling her shoes out of the muddy earth as she walked up the path. She smoothed her hair back and looked up at the house. Rebecca’s hair was not blond by birth, but it had been that way since we were teenagers. It was always cut exactly to her shoulders, and I sometimes imagined she took scissors to it every morning, every time it encroached on her back. Always smoothed down and tucked motionless behind her ears. She paused at the bottom of the steps, taking a deep breath.

  I opened the sliding doors, met her out on the front porch.

  She dropped her bag on the first wooden step. “Surprise,” she said, and she half-grinned.

  “Hi,” I said. Then I walked down the steps and picked up her bag. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  She looked me over; made herself smile. “Did I wake you?”

  I looked over my shoulder briefly, lowered my voice. “No, I just have company.”

  She raised her eyebrows, peered over my shoulder as well. “And so early on a Saturday?”

  Kyle stepped out onto the porch, as if on cue, and raised his hand at her in greeting.

  I didn’t introduce him. Let her eyes wander from him to me.

  I cleared my throat. “Can you move your car?”

  She made a sound that could’ve been laughter but also could’ve been disgust. Sometimes with Rebecca it was hard to tell the difference.

  “No problem.”

  As she repositioned her car behind mine, Kyle stood beside me, waiting. And when Rebecca exited the car, he seemed unsure of what to do, how to extricate himself from us in front of her. He leaned over and wordlessly placed his lips on my cheekbone before striding toward his car. He greeted her as he passed, said something like Good morning or Have a nice visit, and Rebecca did one of her noncommittal moves: a tip of the head, both agreeable and dismissive.

  Standing together on the porch, we watched him go. “The latest?” she asked when his car turned out of sight.

  I shrugged.

  She laughed.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, which came out defensive when I’d meant to come out on the offensive.

  Rebecca was perpetually single, perpetually driven, single-mindedly focused. “Nothing, just didn’t realize you had time for this in between a police investigation and your missing roommate.”

  She was the older, wiser sister, advising me, as if she were attuned to the fact that everything was about to fall apart around me.

  “Do I get to come in?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “I wish I’d known you were coming.” I would’ve cleaned up, made an effort, made up Emmy’s room for her.

  She followed me inside, paused at the entrance to the kitchen. I tried to see it as she might: the shabby decor, the wooden floorboards that echoed underneath her steps.

  “I guess this is what they mean by rustic charm,” she said.

  Everything about Rebecca’s life was sterile. The white lab coat, the neoprene gloves, the disinfecting soap she used upon entering or exiting every patient room. I could see now that her fingertips were white, the nailbeds brittle. The clear polish a necessary reinforcement, not a fashion choice.

  “Mom sent you?” I asked.

  “Can’t I come on my own?” She smiled briefly before looking around. Still, she had to be here for a reason.

  I could imagine the conversation between them. My mother prompting, Have you talked to Leah recently?

  No, she cut me off the last time we spoke.

  She’s missing her calls. Maybe you should check in. Get her to come back. If anyone can do it, you can.

  Rebecca turned in the middle of the room. “What’s going on, Leah?” Then, when I didn’t answer right away, she dug a little deeper. “What are you doing here?”

  “Have you ever wondered if what we’re doing is the only path? If we weren’t meant for something else?” I asked, which felt too close to a confession.

  She paused at the couch, opted for the kitchen chair instead. “You know, you’re lucky you didn’t do grad school. You’re lucky you’re not in debt up to the whites of your eyeballs. You’re lucky you even have the choice.”

  She was top of her class in med school, too. And she was too skinny, I decided. Outside the hospital or the city, you could see how tired she was. The age starting to show around her eyes.

  “Anyway,” she said, perching at the edge of the vinyl chair, “Mom says you’re cracking.” There were cracks everywhere, in the walls, between the furniture; Emmy, slipping through. “I cracked once, first year of residency. By the time you wake up and see your life, it’s too late, you know. It’s too late. You’re already there.”

  She said it with an edge, as if it were not just about my life but about hers, too. But it still held me; I’d never be free. She never could’ve guessed how right she was.

  “Seems like you got through it just fine,” I said.

  “Well, either way, here I am,” she said.

  I worried that anything I confessed would go straight to my mother. I missed Emmy. “Rebecca. I can’t go back.”

  Hoping she’d hear the meaning underneath, as Emmy would. See it plain on my face. Recognize it because it was something she herself understood, an expression she’d seen in the mirror. I waited while Rebecca stared; I waited to see what she would glimpse underneath the words.

  She sighed and took a soda from the fridge. It was Emmy’s. “I wish you’d talk to me,” she said.

  Where to start? How to start? She saw me as one thing, but there was too much, over time, that she hadn’t learned about me. But I wanted to give her something. She’d come all this way for me. “His name is Kyle,” I said, grinning, which made her laugh.

  “So, how’d you meet this Kyle?”

  “He’s the cop looking into Emmy.”

  She spun around, eyes wide. “You’re kidding.”

  “What?”

  “You have no respect for boundaries, Leah. And here I was, thinking I could help. Oh my God, this is going to end so, so badly.”

  Such a simple statement, and yet so exacting. The thing that brings everyone close enough to slip the knife between my ribs, face-to-face, while I sleep unguarded.

  “You give too much of yourself, Leah. People are bound to keep taking,” Rebecca said, and I heard the echo from my mother. It was a line I’d heard before somewhere. While Rebecca and my mother were stoic and practical and independent, I could never seem to get my feet planted firmly on the ground.

  From their perspective, there was a very clear fault in wanting to give away pieces of yourself with no guaranteed benefit. The point of work, in their mind, was to further yourself. This was how my mother pulled herself back up, the method of endurance that she successfully fed to Rebecca. And Rebecca couldn’t escape it now. So I let the criticism sit, I let it sting, I let her feel a step above. Because the truth was, I wouldn’t have traded my life for hers—not even now.

  “Okay,” she said, looking around the place. “Let’s start.”

  “Start what?” I asked.

  “The part where you tell me what’s going on so I can help you fix it.”

  It sounded like a joke until I realized she was serious. That she thought everything could be fixed.

  “Look, if you want to stay, stay. But we can’t do this part.”

  “Why not, Leah?”

  “Because you don’t know anything about my life anymore!”

&nbs
p; “Well, maybe what I’m trying to say here is that I want to!”

  Her cheeks had gone hollow, and I wondered if anyone checked in on her when things fell apart. I wondered if I would’ve done this—hopped on a plane, rented a car, driven to her place—to check in on her.

  I took a deep breath. Looked at her luggage. Focused on a task I could accomplish. “How long are you staying?” I asked.

  She seemed to sense that this was an olive branch, and she took it. Lowering her voice, leaning against the counter. “Just until tomorrow evening.”

  “Listen, I’m glad you’re here. I am. But I have a crap-ton of work to catch up on. So how about we just chill, okay?”

  “Chill,” she said.

  “Call Mom. Tell her you’re here. Tell her everything’s fine. You want to help? That’s what you can do.”

  In the meantime, I made up Emmy’s room. Was glad Rebecca was here after all, even if I didn’t like the reason for the visit. She was my big sister, and she kept her focus. She was the one you wanted in a crisis, it was true. She was someone who would hear the danger approaching, who would know what was real and what was not.

  And then I sat at my computer to do some work while Rebecca began to clean. I didn’t object; I just let her be. If she thought this could help, it, too, would be my gift to her.

  Rebecca had the radio on while I worked at the kitchen table, and occasionally, she would call, “Trash or keep,” and I would say, “Trash.”

  My email dinged, and I sat upright. I had a new message from TeachingLeahStevens. From Theo. I opened the message. A single line. The girl forgets about the man in the car.

  All the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. He wasn’t backing down or cowering. Part of me was worried at first that I had pushed him too far, as I had pushed Aaron. Part of me had expected Theo to show up at my doorstep, begging me not to tell. Pleading with me, It was a joke. Just a joke.

  But he was not. He was doubling down, as if he didn’t believe I had any proof it was him all along. Or, if I did, that I would not come forward. And why? Because he had something on me—I had forgotten about the man in the car. He must’ve been talking about James Finley, and I didn’t understand—

  “Leah?” Rebecca stood at the counter, watching me closely.

  “Sorry, what?”

  She held up the paper. The one from Boston, pulled out from a drawer during her cleaning. “Trash or keep,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. “Keep,” I said.

  I saw those girls again. The interchangeable faces at the crime scenes, all of them blurring together. The girls in the article, faces shifting. How close I had come to being one of those girls myself.

  What I had imagined: Aaron lowering my body into the tub. The setup: She hadn’t been hired after graduation. Had to crash with us, with no money, staying on our couch. She was too embarrassed to tell her mom, even. She was drinking, she was upset. We didn’t know—

  How close had it been? One pill? Two? Or had I lashed out at Aaron, disrupting his perfect scene? Had I screamed after all, so a witness might come forward, and he couldn’t take the risk?

  How close I had come to becoming a photo in a newspaper. A quick shake of the head before the reader moves on. Someone else’s story, constructed around the hidden truth. A voice that nobody hears.

  CHAPTER 33

  As Rebecca returned to cleaning out the kitchen drawers, I dug through my school supplies, searching for the journal entries. I’d been rethinking everything Theo had written or said to me. The words on the phone, the vaguely threatening remarks in his emails. Do you ever wonder who else sees you? he had written.

  And now I wondered what else I had misinterpreted, filtering through a different person or a different context. I flipped through Theo’s journal to the entry he made in the weeks before Bethany was found at the side of the lake. I read the words again, as I had read them to Kyle earlier:

  The boy sees her and he knows what she has done.

  The boy imagines twisted limbs and the color red.

  What if he wasn’t talking about an imaginary person? I had briefly thought back then that his journal entry was referring to me, thought he was implying that he knew about my past—because I was looking for it. I was waiting for it. Imagined he could’ve been talking about the terrible thing people thought I had done: lying in a story that led to the death of Aaron Hampton. But what if he had been talking about something else?

  What if he was trying to tell me something right then?

  I needed him to explain. He had to be on the computer right now.

  I’m listening, I wrote.

  The computer dinged in response.

  Meet me there in 30 minutes.

  I looked at Rebecca, looked at the clock, looked back at the screen.

  Meet you where? I wrote.

  I waited. I waited. I refreshed my inbox. Ten minutes passed and he still hadn’t responded. If he hadn’t by now, he wasn’t going to. There were twenty minutes left.

  I grabbed my keys. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “Hey, wait. Where are you going?” Rebecca took a step closer, and I worried she would insist on coming with me.

  “One hour, Rebecca,” I called as I walked through the door. “I’ll come back.” I raced out the door, strode to my car, and hoped that was true.

  There were only so many places he could mean. I knew where he lived, and I knew where the man in the car had been found.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into the empty lot in front of Lakeside Tavern. The lights were off inside, too early for the lunch shift, and the flag whipped on top of the pole. I walked around to the back, to the packed gravel incline where they had pulled Emmy’s car from the lake.

  I stepped in a pocket of mud, the cold wind whipping up off the water, and wished I’d remembered my jacket. I was alone. I checked my watch, stood at the water’s edge, and scanned the trees around me.

  “Close enough, I guess.” His voice came from down the shoreline, and I stepped closer to the trees. I put my hand on the nearest trunk to keep myself steady, and I saw him sitting on a felled log near the waterline around the bend. He wore a brown shirt, dark track pants, mud-streaked sneakers. If he hadn’t spoken, I might’ve looked right past him—right through him.

  “What are we doing here, Theo,” I said.

  He tipped his head to the side. “Weird that you don’t remember. I could’ve sworn it was you . . .”

  “What was me,” I said. I walked closer toward him, rubbing the sides of my arms.

  “The girl that night. The girl dragging the body to the lake . . .”

  I sucked in a breath. “You saw it?”

  “I see a lot of things,” he answered.

  “You didn’t tell anyone?”

  He stood then, and I remembered he was so much taller than I was. “No,” he said. “I don’t know. I didn’t know the man. I thought maybe he did something to the girl first. Maybe he deserved it. None of my business, right. The girls were both so much smaller.” He looked me over again.

  “Girls? More than one?” And I had this awful hope, even as he was telling me this. Emmy. Maybe he had seen her.

  “Not at first. First there was just the one.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well, like I said, the girl dragging the body, she looked just like you.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his lips thinning as he smiled.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “When was this, Theo.” And when he didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t you think you at least owe me that?” But I knew better than to think that the world was fair, that for every take there would be a give.

  He laughed then. “By the way, there are no cameras in the library,” he said. “Most you could get is an IP address. Which would be the same for any teacher, student, or employee of the school. Including Coach Cobb.”

  “How do you know that?”

&nb
sp; “God, do you have any clue what happens in that library after hours?” He laughed again. “No, I’m sure there are no cameras.”

  “I have the phone number,” I said. “Of the burner phone. I know it was you.”

  He tipped his head, just faintly. Neither confirming nor denying. “You don’t have anything, Leah,” he said.

  I turned around, walked away. I wouldn’t get anywhere, but I would not be in Theo Burton’s debt.

  “It was a Monday night,” he called after me, and I froze. “Or Tuesday morning. Couple weeks ago, maybe a month. I can’t remember exactly. I was on my way back from JT’s trailer. Cuts right by your place, you know. I like to walk through the woods. Nobody notices.” I turned to face him and saw that he was smiling. I follow you, Leah. I watch. “Anyway, I saw that girl, holding him under the arms, in the woods on my way back home. I followed them here. His limbs were all twisted, and the front of his shirt was covered in red. I knew he was dead. He was already dead.”

  “You didn’t do anything?”

  “And risk my own life? Anyway, she seemed to be waiting for something. And that’s when the car pulls up.” He pointed to the gravel behind us where I’d been waiting for him, as if I already knew all this. “And that’s when the other girl gets out, and she’s freaking out. I mean, I’m surprised nobody heard them—I was so sure she was going to call the police.”

  The breeze blew in off the water, but my skin felt numb. I couldn’t possibly feel any colder.

  “What did she look like, this other girl?”

  “Tiny little thing, short hair, skinny. But it was dark.”

  “What did she say, Theo. When she was freaking out. What did she say.” I needed to know whether the police were right about Emmy after all. That she was not a victim but a perpetrator. Or if she had merely stumbled too close to the danger, not realizing what lurked just inside. Those angry letters I’d found at Bethany’s, the hidden rage, undelivered, festering for years. I wanted so desperately to believe that I had not been blinded by her, too.

  “I don’t remember. I wasn’t really paying attention to her.” Implying that he was watching Bethany closely. The girl who could’ve been me. “Like I said, she was kind of freaking out, but the other girl, she was so calm. Said, He showed up at my place, asking for more. He had to go. You know he did. We have to do this.” He licked his lips. “I tried to get closer, to hear. But I think they heard me instead, because they both stopped talking—and then I left. I don’t know what happened next. But I’m guessing they put him in the car, didn’t they?” He kept saying they as if he meant something else—that it was really me.