Somebody I Used to Know

by David Bell

  I brought the water back to her, and she gulped it down.

  “More?”

  “Yes, please. I feel dehydrated. Too much crying.”

  I brought back another glass, which she also gulped down, and I sat down at the far end of the couch from her, ready to hear her explanation.

  “Emily Russell is your daughter,” I said.

  “Was.” Her face looked strained, on the point of shattering.

  “You don’t have to say it that way. She’s still your daughter. She always will be.”

  “Thanks.” She sniffled. “She wasn’t mine in a lot of ways. I understand that.”

  “You gave her up for adoption? Is that why you’re saying she wasn’t yours in a lot of ways?”

  She nodded. “I let go of her a long time ago. I didn’t expect to get her back, but I did. Just for a short time, she was kind of mine again.” She raised her hands and let them fall into her lap. “And then all of this.”

  “Why was she here in Eastland? Why did she have my name and address in her pocket when she died?”

  Jade started crying, more calmly than before, but the tears were coming again.

  “I had to protect her, Nick. I had to protect her from the people who wanted to kill her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “Who would want to kill that girl?” I asked. “What on earth could she have been mixed up in that would make that happen?”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Jade said. “It was mine. It all goes back to me.”

  “And this is why you’re in danger now? This is why you broke into my house in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know how much danger I’m in anymore. Maybe none. I’m not sure.”

  “Danger from what? Ordinarily I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but this whole thing has turned my life upside down. You have to understand that. I won’t say my life was perfect, but it was at least quiet. So I’d like to know.”

  Jade changed the subject. “I saw you with your girlfriend, the skinny one.”

  “Heather?”

  “I don’t know her name. The one who looks like a soccer mom.”

  “You watched me?”

  “I had to know I could trust you. I couldn’t just come in here when you were with your girlfriend. I couldn’t have other people know all of this. I had to be cautious. I saw you come home alone tonight. I knew the dog didn’t like to bark. Or at least he wouldn’t bite. He seems pretty placid, so I figured the window was safe.”

  “Tell me what this is about, Jade. And when you’re finished, I’m going to have a lot of questions.”

  She hesitated. I heard the tone in my own voice, the edge of anger beneath my words, the way my body had shifted, rising up on the couch as though to intimidate. I didn’t know what Jade had been through beyond the loss of her daughter, but I lowered myself back onto the couch and scooted away from her.

  “Okay,” I said, “if you don’t want to talk about it yet . . .”

  “I do. I need to.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “You’re probably one of the few people I can really tell all of this to. And I know you’ll understand. You know all about losing someone very close to you and having it change the course of your life. Right?”

  I nodded. I knew all too well. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  “Okay,” I said. “What happened? How did Emily get put in this kind of danger?”

  “It’s silly, but it’s still hard for me to think of her as Emily. I named her before I had her. I told myself the baby was going to be a girl, and I called her Meredith the whole time I was pregnant. Sometimes I still think of her as Meredith, even though I met her and knew her as Emily. It’s a trick my brain is playing on me, telling myself that those are two different girls. There’s Meredith who I gave birth to and let go of, and she’s just out there in the world doing fine. And there’s Emily, the girl who died. I wish I could make that reality somehow.”

  “It can be dangerous to contemplate all the different roads your life could have traveled.”

  “Indeed. Well. I got pregnant with Emily in high school. My senior year. You and Marissa were juniors at Eastland then.”

  “Was it that guy you dated back then? What was his name? Patrick or something?”

  “Patrick.” Jade laughed. “He was a little fool, wasn’t he? I wish it had been Patrick—I really do. He was kind. A fool, but a kind fool. No, it wasn’t him. It’s not important who the guy was. I got involved with someone I shouldn’t have been involved with. He’s out of the picture. He never really was in the picture. What mattered then and now is that I got pregnant, and I had to do something about it. Can you imagine being seventeen years old and having to tell your parents you’re pregnant? You know what my dad was like. Imagine telling him.”

  “I couldn’t imagine it. No.”

  “Exactly. He didn’t think his little girls did more than hold hands with boys, let alone sleep with them.”

  “So you didn’t have anyone to turn to at home. You couldn’t talk to your parents, and you didn’t want to talk to the boy. Let me guess. . . . You ended up reaching out to your big sister.”

  “Who else could I call? I knew she’d come. I knew she’d be there for me. She always was the most loyal person I knew.”

  Loyalty. I would have thought the same thing about Marissa. Back then and for the previous twenty years. I wasn’t sure anymore.

  “She dropped everything and came home for the weekend,” Jade said. “When she showed up, we acted like everything was normal. She told Mom and Dad she needed to get away from school and be mellow for the weekend. I played along. Of course, nothing was normal at all. I’d been in my room crying all week, hiding it from Mom and Dad. Mom asked if something was wrong, and I told her I just had my period. The exact opposite, of course. But Marissa came home that Friday, and she took me to a clinic to take care of it.”

  I could picture Marissa stepping into that crisis. She would have been firm and calm, supportive and loving. She would have guided Jade through whatever she needed. Marissa often spoke affectionately of Jade, remembering times from their childhood. The things Marissa taught her little sister or helped her with—deciphering math problems or the mysteries of boys, selecting a dress for a freshman dance or dealing with mean girls. Jade couldn’t have made a better choice if she needed someone to be her rock.

  “I thought I was ready to do it,” Jade said. “I was going to end the pregnancy and be done with it. I had the scholarship to Eastland already. I couldn’t tell my parents and disappoint them. I didn’t want anything to do with the guy. I had a future, and it didn’t include a baby. Not at that point in my life. I knew my own mind.”

  “And Marissa was okay with that?”

  “She said she’d support me in whatever I wanted to do. I just needed to go to the clinic and talk to the people about it. I know now what she was doing. She wanted to make sure I really knew what I was getting into. And it worked. Once I got there and started talking to the counselor, the doubts began to creep in. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I could take care of a baby. Maybe I should tell Mom and Dad. They loved me. They’d help me. All of that raced through my brain until I just had to stop it all. I had to get out of there and think. So we left.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t rush,” I said.

  “I do think all the time that if we’d stayed that day, if I’d gone through with it the way I was supposed to, then everything that came after wouldn’t have happened the way it did. That Meredith, Emily, wouldn’t have ended up dead in that motel room.”

  “But she wouldn’t have had any life at all. It was brave of you to give her up.”

  But Jade didn’t seem to have heard me. She stared straight ahead as she said, “And that other boy, the one we killed, he would still be alive today.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Jade contin
ued to stare straight ahead. I wanted to ask questions, a lot of questions. But some things were coming together in my own mind as I watched her and waited.

  She asked me for more water, so I went and filled the glass again. While the water ran out of the tap, I thought about my trip to the storage garage and the abandoned car. And something Laurel mentioned in Hanfort still hovered just below the surface.

  I brought the water back and handed it to her. While she took another long gulp, I asked, “This boy you say you killed, was he hurt by a car?”

  Her eyes widened as she turned to me. “How did you know?”

  “They found Marissa’s car in a pond about a year ago. A work crew pulled it out. Some retired cop heard I was asking questions and showed it to me. The car was never reported stolen by your family, so why else would it be sitting in a pond in the middle of nowhere unless there was a crime involved? And you just answered that question. What exactly happened?”

  Jade didn’t answer. She was hiding something.

  “What happened, Jade? Just tell me. It’s been years. I’m not here to judge you.”

  “I don’t want you to think bad . . . of either one of us.”

  “Either one of you?” Then it became clearer to me. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “I did. It might as well have been me. I wasn’t driving the car, but it was all because of me. We wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it wasn’t for me.”

  “Marissa was driving?” I asked.

  Jade nodded. “I couldn’t have driven that day. I was too upset. Way too upset. I bawled the whole way as we left the clinic and drove home. Marissa had to take care of me. I was a mess. I was practically hyperventilating. I really did think my life was over, that I had no options or anything that could save me.”

  “It’s easy to see the world collapsing on us when we’re young.”

  “Sometimes it really is, though,” she said.

  I remembered the way I felt after Marissa’s death. The agony. The long hours I spent locked away, crying and mourning. “Sometimes, yes.”

  “We didn’t see the stop sign. We didn’t see it because of me. Marissa was trying to hand me a tissue, she was trying to talk to me, and she was trying to drive at the same time. She reached over. She looked at me. We were in a part of town we didn’t know as well. She ran the stop sign, and we heard the thumping sound against the front of the car.” Jade stared off at a distant point in the room. “I can still hear it today. It’s a memory that will never leave me. That awful thump.”

  “So she stopped the car and got out, right?”

  “She stopped the car.” Jade drank some more water. “We looked back, but I could barely see because my eyes were so puffy and watery. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. I remember thinking, It’s just a dog. Marissa just ran over a dog, that’s all. But she was looking back. She turned her head all the way around, moving her body in the seat so she could look. She froze that way, Marissa. She raised her hand to her mouth and just froze. I’ve never seen such a look of terror on someone’s face. I knew. I knew she’d hit a person.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Jade sighed. It seemed to come from deep within her. “We left,” she said. “Marissa drove away.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She panicked. She didn’t know what to do. Someone came out of one of the houses, I remember. An old woman. She lifted her hands to her face like she knew the kid. Marissa saw that. So she just drove off, and I didn’t even tell her to stop. I didn’t say anything. And when I looked back . . .” Her eyes filled with tears again, just as I knew they had on that long ago day that changed their lives. Everyone’s lives. “I saw the boy lying in the street. His arms above his head. His leg bent . . . the wrong way. And that woman, that old woman approaching him, the one who came out of the house. His grandmother, we later found out. I saw them, and she looked up at the car. But we didn’t stop. We just drove home. I’d stopped crying then. It was the quietest, most . . . somber car ride we’d ever taken.”

  I stood up and took a walk around the living room, Riley and Jade tracking me with their eyes. The accident itself was one thing, and it explained a great deal. But Marissa’s behavior . . . that was the part I couldn’t reconcile. The Marissa I knew—thought I knew—was honest to a fault. I had to accept her infidelity as well as her complicity in an accident she left the scene of, an accident that killed a child.

  “What happened when you made it home?” I asked, still standing. My legs felt weak, the floor beneath me uncertain.

  “We pulled into the garage. We weren’t supposed to park our cars in there, but we did that day. Marissa looked over at me and she said, ‘I’m going to tell Dad. And then we can tell the police.’ She was crying. She leaned her head down against the steering wheel and sobbed. She kept saying over and over, ‘I killed that boy. I killed him.’ I tried to comfort her. It was total role reversal. I told her that it was an accident, that she hit the boy because she was tending to me. I also told her the boy might be okay. We knew a kid in grade school who got hit by a car. The car went right over him, knocked him out. He just had a concussion and a bunch of scrapes.”

  “But not this time,” I said.

  “Do you know how sometimes you can just feel something, especially things that have to do with death? I just felt it when we drove away from that boy. He was dead. I knew it. I felt it. Marissa must have felt it too.”

  “She clearly didn’t tell anyone, right? She didn’t go to the police or we’d all have known about it.”

  Jade held up a finger as though asking me to be patient. “Marissa did decide to tell. We waited for Mom and Dad to come home. When they did, the four of us sat down in the living room, and we told them everything. I remember Dad came in pissed because we’d parked in the garage. That quickly became the least of his worries.”

  “You told them about the pregnancy too?”

  “All of it. I look back on that conversation and think that must have been one of the single worst moments in the history of parenting. Finding out in one fell swoop that your oldest daughter ran over a kid with her car because your other daughter got knocked up.” She laughed a little, a low, faint sound. “I watched my father while we told him. I think he aged ten years during the conversation. You remember him. He could be such a . . .”

  “Hard-ass?”

  “A prick. A real prick. Mom once said, ‘You know your father. He can be as understanding as Hitler.’ Nice, right? But I sure felt sorry for the old man during that conversation. Mom held up well. She hugged me. She hugged Marissa. She told us she loved us. She told us we’d get through it no matter what. It’s blurry, the whole thing, but I remember those moments with Mom.”

  “Didn’t your parents make her tell?” I asked. “Didn’t they say they were going to call the police? It was an accident. Marissa wanted to tell. Did they make her go?”

  Jade leaned forward, staring at the floor. I waited. And waited.

  She started shaking her head.

  “Dad stood up. He said, ‘I’ve made a decision. We’re going to take care of this, and we’re going to take care of this the right way.’ I thought he meant he was going to call the cops and march Marissa down there to face the music. Instead, he asked if anyone had seen us hit the boy. And then he said he wanted to look at the car.”

  “What was he doing?” I asked.

  “I knew immediately what he was up to. I’d seen him get that way before. He was working up some kind of a plan.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  “Dad went out and looked at the car. Marissa couldn’t look at it, she couldn’t bear to, but I went with him. I saw the blood and a little bit of hair on the bumper and the headlight. I actually puked when I saw it. I went outside the garage and puked. Mom was inside with Marissa, and Dad came out where I was puking and took me by the a
rm. He said, ‘Jade, what are the odds that old woman got the license number?’ I said she didn’t seem to be looking at us. She was looking at the kid. And he asked me how old the woman was. I said, ‘She looked pretty old. Maybe eighty.’ Back then, of course, everybody looked old to me. I was a teenager. The wheels were turning in his head. He asked me if anybody knew about the baby, and I said no.” Jade shook her head. “You know what’s funny? In the middle of all that, neither one of them asked who the father was.”

  I went out to the kitchen. I kept a bottle of bourbon in the cabinet, something I only took out on rare occasions: after a long day at work or on the off chance I received a raise or a promotion. It seemed like a good time for it, although not a celebration. I grabbed the bottle and two glasses and brought them to the living room. I poured each of us a shot. Jade threw hers back without hesitation, and I followed suit. I poured another, and we both did the same thing.

  “So your dad wanted to cover the whole thing up?” I asked, the liquor burning on its way through my system.

  “He did cover the whole thing up. He said we both had bright futures, and it was his job as a father to do anything in his power to see we lived them to the fullest. He said he’d put his money, his job, his reputation on the line to protect us.” Jade poured herself another shot but only sipped it. “It’s funny.” She grimaced a little from the liquor. “I know it was his way of saying he loved us. He saw himself that way. The protector. The big man. That’s who he was.”

  “And you all just went along with it?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. Mom pitched a fit. She said there was no way we were just going to make it go away. She said they’d raised us to accept responsibility for our actions, no matter what they were, and we both had to face the music. She’d love us and support us always, but we had to be responsible.” Jade swirled the glass of bourbon in her hand. The amber liquid caught the light from the lamp and glowed through her fingers. “Mom always gave in to Dad, but that night she showed a lot of steel. She bowed her back and stood up to him. And they reached a compromise. They said we’d all wait until the next day to see the news. If the boy lived, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for Marissa. If he died . . . well, nobody really admitted that as a possibility. Even though Marissa and I both suspected the truth.”