Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

I remembered Martha saying they were still waiting on next of kin at the hospital. I did a quick search of the name Melissa Kellerman but found nothing. It was such a common name, like my own, and I didn’t know what town she was from or her age. The hospital must not have had much luck, either.

I looked for details of the case leading to her incarceration. Wondered if someone could’ve come after her for revenge after all this time – taking justice into their own hands, thinking the court system had not done quite enough. Based on the victim’s name, which was all that was printed in the original article, I was able to trace the start of the story: a fire, suspected arson, that claimed the life of a thirty-two-year-old man inside. She had been caught on a security camera from a store across the street, along with one other person, though the other person remained unidentifiable from the footage. Only Bethany was facing the camera, and her image, zoomed in, grainy, and pixelated, was posted alongside a plea to the public to come forward with any information.

Bethany eventually had been picked up while crashing with friends. Someone had apparently turned on her, turned her in. The other person, as far as I could tell, had never been identified.

I almost responded to Noah, wanted to send my thanks, but I understood that this was it, the final severance package. That I was now on my own.

THAT NIGHT I REACHEDthe home of Vince Mendelson, first speaking with his wife, Tiffany. Tiffany was not fond of my calling, or my reasons for calling, and so I expected not to hear anything more from Vince himself. I was surprised when, at ten that night, I received a call from the man himself.

“This is Vince Mendelson,” he said, his voice gruff and deliberate. “I hear you spoke to my wife earlier, that you need information about a girl.”

I knew from the way he said a girl that there was a story here. He wouldn’t have called if there wasn’t one. It was as if he, too, had been waiting for this call all along.

“Yes, thanks for getting back to me. It’s about the apartment you were living in eight years ago in Allston. Your name wasn’t on the lease, but I hear you were the last person to occupy it.” Amelia had asked me not to use her name, and it was the least I could do – though I was sure he knew how I got his name. There was only one path that ended with him.

He sighed, cutting to the chase. “You spoke to her?”

“I did,” I said, and the silence hung between us – something unfinished there after all this time.

“Amelia said she assumed you were the one who stayed for the remainder of the lease.”

“I didn’t, though,” he said. “I moved out right after Ammi, after we broke up–”

“Wait. What did you call her?” I cut in.

“Amelia, sorry. She didn’t used to go by that. She went by Ammi.”

I thought of how similar that sounded. Whether I’d only heard the name how I thought it should be. Whether I was the one who’d created this Emmy to begin with. If the wind or her voice or the fact that I wasn’t fully present made the words slur, the letters shift, and I heard her say Emmy when really she had introduced herself as Ammi, as someone else altogether. And when I called her back, called her Emmy, started writing it this way – she had just gone with it. I was, in truth, searching for someone whom I had created.

“Amelia said there was a girl. The reason you broke up,” I said.

A girl, he’d said, as if he’d known it would circle back to this.

“Yeah. A girl I kind of knew from high school. I ran into her outside a bar, just a twist of fate. We were doing shots, way too many shots, and she gave me this story – her boyfriend had just kicked her out, she had nowhere else to go, and could she crash for the night. I mean, what could I really say? We had done way too many shots, and the next thing I know, I’m back home and Ammi’s standing over us, yelling. . I don’t know how she got there, I don’t think I. . Well, it was a long time ago. But she wouldn’t hear it, and I couldn’t prove it, and Ammi left a week later. I let myself mope for another few days before moving in with an old college buddy. It wasn’t my place to work out the details with the apartment. I figured Ammi handled it.”

Outside a bar. Her boyfriend had just kicked her out. She had nowhere else to go. Her profile in the crowded bar, a chance encounter. Me calling her name as she brushed by–

“Who was the girl,” I said. “The girl from high school. The girl in your bed.” A twist of fate, paths crossing again.

“Her name,” he said – and even before he said it, I could hear it, a whisper in my head – “was Melissa.”

VINCE LEFT ME WITHthe name of the high school and the year of graduation, one of the larger school systems in upstate New York. I looked up the contact information for the school, which had a pretty subpar website – I needed to see her face and know that it was her.

And I had to understand who Bethany was to her. I had to figure out what had happened, why Emmy was gone, why we were even here . One thing I knew for sure: She had dragged me into her past, as I had once brought her into mine.

I pictured her again in the bar, in my apartment, the way she ate straight from the bag when she didn’t seem to notice me watching – she was starving.

Had there even been a fiancé? Or had that, too, been a lie? Feeding me a story she knew would appeal to something baser inside that I would understand. I thought of all the things you couldn’t do without a name. Thought of all the things you wouldn’t be able to do alone. Rent or buy an apartment, a house, or a car. Get married. Get a job with benefits. If you stay in one place for too long, you’ll end up in someone else’s pictures, in someone else’s life.

I wondered if this was why she told me to come, why she was so willing. Not just to help me because I had no place else to go. But because she couldn’t move without someone else.

THE NEXT MORNING, Ihad plans to dig into Bethany’s background some more. But I had to get through the school day first. I refreshed my email, hoping to see a response from the high school contact I’d looked up after speaking with Vince, but there was nothing. I was jolted from the screen by the light knock on my door.

Izzy looked the same as always, polished and presentable, but her mouth was a set line, her eyes shifting back and forth.

“Yes, Izzy?”

She took a step inside the classroom, seemed to be unsure of what she was doing here. She had a paper in her hand, her fingertips blanching white, and she said, “I found this.” Though she didn’t hold it out to me.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Can I see it?”

She held it out in her fingers. It had been folded into a small square, the creases worried over, the edges tattered. “I didn’t know whether I should give it to you. I didn’t know.”

I unfolded the lined paper, smoothed it down on my desk, and tried not to make a sound.

It was a drawing, done in pencil, from across this very room. There was a rough sketch of a desk in the corner, a woman behind it, and I could tell from the details – the hair, the chin, the slope of the nose – that it was me. There were empty chairs between the woman and the viewer. And I knew that Theo had sat in that chair across the room during detention, intently working on something. That he’d first sketched the scene of the lake before throwing it away for me to find. This must’ve been what he was working on when we were leaving. But I didn’t understand why Izzy was showing me this, where she’d found it, what she thought it meant.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.