Somebody I Used to Know

by David Bell

  “I bet that made for a long night,” I said.

  “I’d forgotten all about me and my problems. I didn’t think of the baby. I listened to Marissa cry all night. I even went into her room and lay with her, holding her close to me. I half expected she’d leave during the night.”

  “You mean run down to the police by herself?”

  Jade nodded. “But she didn’t. She was scared because Dad filled her head with so much noise. She thought she might go to jail. And Dad said over and over again that just having an arrest like that on your record could ruin you. No job. No credit. Her education would be set back. Maybe she’d never finish college. You know how concerned with appearances they were.”

  “Why didn’t she call me?” I asked.

  I tried to remember how I’d passed the time that weekend when Marissa was at home. I remembered going to a party off campus and working up a good buzz, and then stumbling home with my friends, trying to distract myself until she came back.

  “I told her to. Dad said not to tell anybody what was going on, but I told her to call you or another friend. Anyone. Just to say hi. But Marissa wouldn’t listen. She said the same thing over and over.”

  “Did she say she wasn’t worthy?” I asked.

  Jade pointed at me. “How did you know?”

  “I heard a variation of that right after she came back to Eastland. After your dad clearly won the argument. Right?”

  Jade stared into her glass. “When the paper came out the next day, it said the boy had died.” She lifted her hand to her chest. “Samuel Maberry. He was nine. Just a little boy.”

  “So your dad wouldn’t let Marissa go confess?”

  “The paper had a report from the only witness, Samuel’s grandmother, the woman we saw in the street. She got the color of the car wrong. And the make. She said it was a blue van and not a black SUV. And she said it looked like a dark-haired man was driving the car. She didn’t get any of the license number. Apparently, she really was too old to see that well, and I remember Dad staring at the paper and saying, ‘That’s about as good as the news could get.’”

  “That’s harsh. What about the dead boy?”

  “He didn’t mean about him, I’m sure.”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “This is my father, Nick. I loved him. He did act out of love, even if it’s hard to see.”

  “So what did he do next?” I asked. “What was the loving plan he came up with?”

  Jade finished her drink. “He started pulling strings. He wanted to get rid of the car. He wanted to move. He wanted us to go somewhere no one could ever find us. He wanted to go away so we could still have our lives, Marissa and I. Mom and Dad didn’t have a lot of close friends. They knew a lot of people, but they weren’t tied to things. We had some cousins back east, but that’s about it. He wanted to pull up stakes and run, but he couldn’t put it all together right away. He had to look into some things and make some calls. So he sat Marissa and me down and told us that, for the time being, maybe for the next week or so, we had to act like everything was perfectly normal. That meant I had to go back to my senior year of high school and hang out with my friends and do all the things I would normally do.”

  “And Marissa had to come back to Eastland,” I said.

  “Exactly. She didn’t want to go, but she did.” Jade looked over at me. “I guess she didn’t really act normal, did she?”

  She came back from that trip home, a trip I didn’t expect her to take or understand why she took at the time, and was immediately distant. She wouldn’t tell me why she’d gone to see her parents or what she’d done back in Hanfort. She’d never acted that way before.

  And then she broke up with me, repeating the line I’d heard Jade say.

  “I’m not worthy of being in a relationship with you,” Marissa told me, her voice and eyes distant. “I just can’t do it.”

  I begged and pleaded with her to explain, to just tell me anything at all that would help me understand how we went from being blissfully in love and happy to her dumping me as the result of one trip home.

  Thanks to Jade, I finally understood.

  At least I understood some of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “I need to ask you something, Jade,” I said, “and I need to know the answer.” I tried to contain my emotions, holding them back like thrashing wild horses. “And you can’t lie to me. You just can’t. What happened to Marissa? Did she die in that fire?”

  Jade looked away from me. She still held the glass in her hand, but it was empty. I couldn’t see her face or read the thoughts racing through her mind.

  “Jade? Is Marissa alive?”

  “It’s so hard for me to talk about her,” she said. “It’s my fault, like I said. I ended her life. None of this, none of the things we all lost, would have happened if it hadn’t been for me.”

  I moved closer, close enough to touch her arm though I didn’t. “Just answer my question.”

  “I want to talk about that fire. That may help you understand some things.”

  “Tell me, then. Fast.”

  She turned back around, and her eyes were clear, the tears gone. She said, “That fire . . . it saved us all in a way.”

  “How?”

  “Marissa withdrew from school. She went back to Eastland and severed all of her ties. Including with you. I told Eastland I wasn’t going to school there either. I made something up about financial trouble, and I gave up the whole scholarship. What was I going to do? Show up for college with a baby? Dad was hatching his plan to leave town. We had enough money to go. He was looking into getting us all new identities. They’d sell the house when they could. They thought we’d be fine.” She shuddered. “But something else was happening with the accident.”

  “What?”

  “The father of the boy we killed, Bill Maberry. He was all over the news. He was kind of well-known in Hanfort. He owned a few restaurants and a used-car lot. He was a small-town big shot. He used to do TV ads for the restaurants, and he always seemed like a jerk. In the wake of the accident he talked to everyone in the media he could. He talked to every cop. He put up a reward for information. He said he wanted justice.”

  “That’s not really surprising, is it?” I asked. “He lost his son, suddenly and awfully.” I felt a shard of grief in my own heart for the Maberrys, people I didn’t even know. “Imagine that . . .”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I’ve thought about it many times. I know what it’s like to lose a child now. I’ve never had so much empathy for the Maberrys.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But the way Maberry talked about it back then—he said it over and over again. Justice. He gave that word an edge, a sharp edge. What he really seemed to be saying was he wanted revenge. He may as well have just said an eye for an eye. And then the police started expanding their search. They said maybe it wasn’t a blue SUV. Maybe it was any dark-colored vehicle. And maybe it wasn’t a dark-haired man driving. So it felt like the net was widening.” She shuddered again. “And that fucking car was sitting in our garage, just waiting for someone to find it. Finally, that’s when Dad started to lose it.”

  “I can’t imagine your dad really losing his cool,” I said. “He always seemed so in control. Almost like a robot.”

  “I’d never seen him that way either,” she said. “He got really paranoid. It scared the hell out of us. He bought a gun, this huge, ugly black thing. He had the locks reinforced on the house.”

  “If he was that scared, why did he send Marissa back to school?”

  “He thought she’d be safer there, away from the family. He wanted to send me away too, but I refused to go. And Mom wouldn’t let me out of her sight.”

  “What did he think was going to happen?”

  “That guy, Bill Maberry. Dad had heard about him. He had a reputation.
He’d been arrested a couple of times for assault. People said he had ties to criminals, that the cars he sold were stolen. I always thought it was just small-town gossip. You know how that can be. But Dad believed it all. He thought we were in danger, and he wanted to get out of town as fast as possible. He had just a few loose ends to tie up when the fire happened.”

  “Tell me, Jade. About Marissa. Tell me.”

  She took a deep breath. “She called us the night of the fire, Marissa did. She had been upset earlier in the evening. She felt bad about breaking up with you, about leaving her whole life behind. Dad’s friend, Roger Kirby . . .” She looked over at me. “Do you remember him?”

  “I do.”

  Jade placed her hand on her stomach as though she might be sick. “He’s a jerk. Anyway, he had gone to Eastland to see her, to make sure she knew the plan and was ready to go.”

  I felt the familiar stab in my heart. “People saw them together that night.”

  “I guess he didn’t want to talk to Marissa in front of her roommates.”

  “Why did Kirby go and not your mom or dad?”

  “It was Dad’s cloak-and-dagger stuff. He thought he might get followed. He wouldn’t let us go, Mom or me. He saw everything spinning out of his control, and he couldn’t stand that. So he sent Roger. Roger was the only other person who knew what had happened. Dad told him everything.”

  “I have to ask you.”

  “What?”

  “Were he and Marissa . . . was there something between them? Something romantic?”

  Jade whipped her head around to stare at me. “Roger and Marissa? Are you kidding?” She laughed a little. “Marissa was too smart for that. Far too smart. She loved you, Nick. She really did.”

  Jade must have seen how unconvinced I was. She reached out and squeezed my hand.

  “She loved you, Nick. I know she did. I mean it. She didn’t want any of this to go the way it went. None of us did. If I could take back those few minutes in the car . . .” Her eyes looked hollow, and a flush rose on her cheeks. “How I wish I could.”

  “If I’d known about it I would have helped her,” I said. “I would have fought for her. Hell, I would have run away with her.”

  “I know.” She squeezed again. “She was young. We both were. Dad controlled everything. We were children. Remember that. We were old enough to live as adults, but we were still children. Dad treated us that way.”

  “The fire. What happened? Did she die? You said she called you.”

  “She called us, Nick. She called to tell us that when she came home that night her house was burning down. She called to say she thought her roommates were dying. She called after the fire. She was alive, Nick. She wasn’t in the house when it burned.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  The feeling that passed through my body and mind in that moment was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt a release of some kind, the slacking of some tension that had been infusing every fiber of my being for the previous twenty years. My body went limp. I slid forward on the couch, almost flopping all the way onto the floor. I lifted my hand to my head, covering my eyes.

  Marissa didn’t die in the fire. Marissa had not died twenty years ago.

  The words cycled through my head with centrifugal force, knocking around the inside of my skull. I was overwhelmed.

  Jade moved next to me. “Are you okay, Nick?”

  “She’s alive,” I said, repeating the words like a prayer. “Marissa’s alive.”

  “She didn’t die in the fire,” Jade said. “No.”

  The clarification hit me with force. I lifted my head.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Where is she?”

  “Let me finish the story,” Jade said.

  “Where is she? Is she dead?”

  “Nick, I told you it’s hard for me to talk about my sister.”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Nick, wait. Listen to me.” She held her hands out to calm me down. I pushed myself back into place on the couch, but my mind still raced. The tension, the questions flowed through me like a wild river. I wanted to know. I needed to know.

  Jade said, “The fire ended up playing right into Dad’s hands. At first, he panicked even more. He went crazy. He thought it was the Maberrys, that they’d found out about the accident and Marissa’s involvement and they went to Eastland to kill her. He ordered Marissa home right away. He told her to get back to Hanfort as soon as possible, and he started packing things immediately. He wanted us to drive off as soon as Marissa walked in the door, even though it was the middle of the night. But by the time Marissa got home, he’d calmed down a little.”

  “That’s all he could think of?” I asked. “His plan?”

  “The police showed up about an hour later. Detectives from Hanfort. They must have been dispatched by the Eastland police. When they knocked on the door, Dad thought they were there to arrest Marissa, that they knew about the accident. He made her hide in her room. I don’t know what he was going to do if they really did want to arrest her. He had that gun.”

  “Jesus.”

  “But they weren’t there for that.”

  “No,” I said. “They were there to tell you that Marissa had died in the fire in Eastland.”

  Jade nodded. “They said they were working to identify the bodies, but they asked if we knew if Marissa had been home that night. Dad said he assumed she was. Where else would she be? And the next day it was official. Four people lived in the house. Four sets of remains found in the rubble. That was that. As far as the world was concerned, Marissa was dead. And Dad intended to take full advantage of it. Here was her new start without the threat of the police or the Maberrys ever coming after her. She was released to a new life completely. A clean slate, Dad kept calling it.”

  “A clean slate?” I asked. “Meanwhile he was content to let some other family not know their child had died in that fire? He didn’t care what happened to anyone else so long as his family was together and protected. Jesus, Jade. Your dad sounds like a psychopath.”

  “He was protecting us.”

  “One child was left dead in the street. Another family had to wonder for twenty years if their son died in that fire. I met them, Jade. They’re still wondering where their loved one went. And all because your dad wanted Marissa to have the future he dreamed for her.”

  Jade shifted in her seat. She looked agitated, nervous. “I don’t like the way you’re looking at this. He was a parent. His child was in trouble. A parent should do anything when their child is in trouble.” She looked around the apartment. “Maybe you don’t understand that.”

  “I understand that.” And I knew it was true. Would I do anything to protect Andrew? Of course. Would I break the law to do it? I might. I really just might. “But other people were affected. Other families.” I felt my argument losing a little steam the more I thought of Andrew.

  “We had a funeral for Marissa,” Jade said. “We bought the coffin and the plot and the stone and everything. They buried . . . whatever they found in the house.”

  “Charles Blevins. His name was Charles Blevins. That’s who they put in that grave.”

  Jade looked at me, curious. But she didn’t ask how I knew.

  “We let everyone believe Marissa was gone,” Jade said. “Her friends. The town. Our relatives. We let them let her go. And a week after the funeral we left. New identities, new town. New lives.”

  “Colorado?” I asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “Your parents died there,” I said. “But why were they buried under their real names?”

  “They wanted it that way, especially Mom. They’d been living as other people for so long, they didn’t want to spend eternity under an assumed name. Who could hurt them then?”

  “Weren’t they worried about you? Cou
ldn’t these people track you down through the obituaries?”

  “I was living under another name. I wasn’t living in Colorado. It was a long shot, a risk we were all willing to take.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So they got away with it. And you got away with it.”

  “I didn’t get away with it,” she said, her tone sharpening. “None of us did. You don’t know what it’s like to uproot your life, to give up everything you know. To live in fear.”

  “I lived with grief,” I said. I rubbed my hands together, trying to ease the tension I felt. “For twenty years. Where is she, Jade?”

  She didn’t respond, and something about her lack of response pushed my buttons harder than it should have. She’d taken on the countenance of a stubborn child: lips pursed tight, chin thrust forward defiantly. She owed me one piece of information. One. I moved a foot closer and raised my hand, palm out, calmly but in a way that was meant to signal that I meant business.

  Jade shrank back from me. “It’s not my place to talk about Marissa. Her life has been so difficult.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Nick. I can’t—”

  I reached out and clamped my hand on her wrist. “Jade, goddamn it!”

  She tried to jerk away. “Nick. No!”

  I didn’t see the blow coming. She swung her free hand, the left one, while she still held the small glass. It struck me against the side of the head, and while the glass didn’t shatter, I found myself watching swirling firework patterns before my eyes.