Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

“I’m sorry, Leah. I couldn’t figure you out, and I was wrong.” Such a smooth, practiced apology. One given too freely, in my opinion.

I was right that he had been assessing me from the start. That he could see something underneath, worthy of figuring out, which at first had been so appealing. But now it made me shut down, close off. A switch flipping.

“I promise you I am taking this very seriously. I promise you.” His hand was over mine, as if I might need to be reassured. But I didn’t respond.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Show her to me.”

Like this was a dare or a challenge and I had to win him over. Prove that Emmy Grey existed, that she had lived and loved and deserved to be found.

I had done this before: fighting my way in the editor meetings about why my stories were important and relevant. Laying out my case about why they should care and why readers would care. You find the angle, and you strike.

I didn’t know whether Kyle was genuine in his concern. But I did know how to make her real. I knew how to make him believe. I stood, gestured for him to do the same, showed him her bedroom, her clothes, wondered if he could conjure her into life, imagine her standing in this very spot. I saw his eyes drift to the watch on her dresser, but he didn’t touch it.

And I brought her to life. I brought her to him .

THE EMMY I METthe second time was much thinner than the girl I’d met eight years earlier. Back when we were younger, she used to wear her jeans low and her shirts high, and the strip of skin right before the flare of her hips begged men to touch it. And they did. I’d watch as their hands brushed up against her back, her side, as they said Excuse me with a hand on each hip, gently passing. She didn’t seem to notice. There’s an eight-year gap of missing time that I can’t give Kyle, but this is what I know, what I really know:

She sleeps with her mouth open, on her right side. The tip of her nose is always cold. She’s not afraid to use a knife.

I know she laughs when she’s nervous, falls silent when she’s angry. I know there’s a scar on the side of her rib cage, white and raised, and a constellation of freckles across her shoulders and her upper back.

The wooden walls have little insulation, is how I know her this well. The old creaky floors. The vents that cut to both our rooms across the hall. The shared bathroom. The fact that one of us will sometimes have to use the bathroom while the other is in the shower, or vice versa. Because I had to pull a stinger from her back this summer. And because, eight years ago, she’d caught a fever that went straight to her head, made her mad, and too hot, and deliriously thirsty, and she wouldn’t let me bring her to the hospital – the only compromise a tepid bath that I sat beside, terrified she’d pass out and drown if I left her.

I know her this well because, eight years ago, she would sometimes knock on my locked door in the middle of the night and say, He snores, or Restless leg syndrome, or His arm is a vise, I had to claw my way out to escape. She’d climb into bed beside me, and later I’d wake with the tip of her nose pressed against the back of my neck – always cold, even in the heat of summer. I’d feel her breath in a steady rhythm as I drifted back to sleep.

And after I said this all, I felt suddenly parched, the air too dry, my throat exposed, as if I had wrenched something from deep inside. I licked my lips, then felt my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

Kyle was standing in the middle of her bedroom, transfixed. I had woven him a story, cast him under a spell, hooked him, and he was mine.

“It’s not the way you think,” I said.

His eyes narrowed slightly, and his breathing stilled. This was another thing I had learned. You had to break a piece of yourself open to get them. You had to give something up. Something real.

“What’s the way I think?”

I swallowed. “I can tell from the way you’re looking at me what you’re thinking.”

I knew her the ways one might know a lover, not a roommate.

I knew her the way, I realized, only someone fixated would know another. And maybe I was. Maybe I was looking for something. Maybe I clung to her because I needed to cling to something. Maybe I kept that box because I couldn’t let go enough, and because I didn’t want to.

Emmy and I connected because there was something in her past that was hidden, as there was in mine. A wordless understanding. The turning of the door lock; this belief that we were protecting each other from something both ever present and infinitely far away.

Kyle shook his head, as if clearing out cobwebs or a spell. “I’m thinking this is a girl who has zero paper trail. Who did not want you to bring her to a hospital. Whose name is not on any lease. I’m thinking she was scared of something.”

It wasn’t until he spoke the words that I realized they were true. Emmy in the dim barroom, looking over her shoulder. Emmy pacing the halls at night, her steps lulling me to sleep. Emmy at the edge of the woods, standing perfectly still and watching for something.

By the time full darkness rolled in, both Kyle and the locksmith had left. I’d decided to keep our original locks, for the landlord and (I still hoped) for Emmy, but I’d added a secondary deadbolt on top to both doors. Only then did Kyle leave, back in cop mode. He’d gotten on the phone as soon as he left the house, his voice taken by the wind. My mind was going too fast, thinking of who was on the other end and what he might be saying.

After they were gone, I logged on to my computer and searched for any information I could get on James Finley. I wanted to know what he had done. Picture it and imagine the type of man he was.

There wasn’t much, after I weeded through all the people with the same name. I kept it to the crime section in the news, finally found a side article about a B&E in Ohio. Another here in Pennsylvania. The charge didn’t stick in Ohio, but it did in Pennsylvania, and he was still technically on probation.

Why hadn’t Emmy seen it? Why hadn’t he ended like all the other men, with her locking them in or out while staking out her safety with me? I’d assumed that after her fiancé, who had turned out not to be the man she thought he was, she had known better. That she could recognize the difference and would keep it at arm’s length.

“Jim again,” I’d said one morning when he’d dropped her off.

She must’ve read the disapproval on my face, because she gave me a slight smile, said, “He’s harmless, Leah. All bluster on the surface. You can see everything about him, plain as day.”

I knew not to argue after that, after her fiancé and the things she never said. Just the insistence that she didn’t want a phone or her name on the lease or any bill. She must’ve felt safer with a man like Jim, everything out there to see, rather than the way her ex had unexpectedly changed on her – the insidious way danger can sneak up from the inside of a person you thought you knew.

But that was Emmy, always flirting with disaster. It was why I saw her as the start of a story, something that could turn tragic.

I didn’t go to sleep until long after midnight. Couldn’t get the visions of Emmy out of my head – all the stories I’d told Kyle, like she was filling up the space around me. Her breath on the back of my neck, the bed now cold and empty without her. That time someone had stolen my wallet from my bag in an overpacked bar and she’d said, to ease my panic, “It’s just stuff, Leah. You’re still okay.” Words I repeated to myself even now. And when I’d calmed down, her hands on my shoulders, she’d smiled, counted down from three, and we’d skipped out on our tab.