Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

“They’re removing life support. There’s been no brain activity. I thought you should know. That you might want to be here.”

Bethany Jarvitz was about to die. Except that wasn’t exactly true. She had been dying since the day she was found, there on the shore of the lake. She had just taken a long time in doing it.

There would be no follow-up in the papers. Not for a girl like this, in a place like this, so long from when the event took place. She would die in a hospital, regulated and medicated. There was nothing newsworthy. Not like there would’ve been if she’d died right then on the side of a lake, bleeding out.

“I can’t come,” I whispered. I couldn’t be at her side with the police and doctors waiting around. Drawing the connections between us once more. Not with what Theo knew and what he might say.

“Nobody has,” Martha said, and the line went dead.

I had disappointed her along with everyone else. I was not the girl she thought I was. I said a silent prayer for Bethany Jarvitz, sitting at the empty kitchen table, which I hadn’t done since long ago, when my father left. I said a prayer for all of them, the quietly overlooked, the ones whose stories would never be heard, who fade away with no one there to watch them go.

REBECCA LEFT SUNDAY EVENINGbecause of work. I could see, in her face, that she was debating not going at all. That she could sense something brewing here, under my skin, and I fought to keep it from her. “You’ll come home for the holidays?” she asked, proof that I would be fine between now and then.

“Yes,” I said. After she left, I knew what I had to do. I called in to the school hotline, left a message that I would be taking some accrued sick days, and lined up a substitute for the next two days.

I was to blame for many things. But I wasn’t about to serve time for something I didn’t do.

All relationships fall into three categories, Emmy had said with her feet up on the couch, the fog of vodka clearing. And she’d laid it out for me in that simple, straightforward way.

Take anyone you know. Let’s say you know they’ve killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police. B, do nothing. Or C, help them bury the body.

I thought about it now, thought about what I’d said back then with my head foggy, and the room blurring, in the basement apartment with the inescapable heat making everything feel closer.

“So, which is it, Leah?”

“For you?”

She flipped onto her stomach. “Of course.”

A test, even then.

“None of the above,” I said. “You can’t escape the truth. It finds you eventually.”

This was my belief. That the truth rises to the surface like air bubbles in boiling water. That it rushes upward like a force of nature, exploding in a gasp of air when it reaches the surface, as it was always intended to do.

“Not always,” she said. “Not for Aaron.” It was the first time she’d used his name.

“It would if I wanted it to,” I said.

She paused, her eyes flitting over mine, as if brushing up against something brief and fleeting. “Okay, fine, so you pick option B, then? You’d do nothing?”

“No, not nothing.” I rolled onto my stomach. “I wouldn’t hide a body. But I guess I’d hide you.”

“A life in your basement, huh? Or a passport in a fake name to a country with no extradition?”

“No, no,” I said. Something was forming in my mind. A way. An option D. “No, the way to hide. . You’d have to be erased.”

“This sounds like an assassination euphemism.”

“Ha. No, the best way to hide is to pretend you never existed in the first place.”

She raised her eyebrows, the corners of her mouth tipping up, and then she burst out laughing, like she couldn’t contain it anymore – and I did the same. How impossible; how outlandish.

I looked around our house again, the one that was only in my name. The car that could not be tied to her. I heard people’s witness statements – nobody had seen her. Nobody could vouch for her. And I wondered if this was her plan all along.

She would disappear as if she had never existed at all – and I was the only one left to take the fall.

I KEPT A LOWprofile. I wanted no evidence of this trip. Not in credit card receipts, or phone traces, or witness statements. I would travel like Emmy would have traveled in order to find her.

No plane tickets. Cash only. No nice hotels that require ID and a credit card for incidentals. To stay off the grid, you’re pushed to the fringe of society. You’re pushed to the No-Tell Motel, with all the other people trying to keep off the grid for one reason or another. You’re pushed to find cash any way you can get it, to barter with safety as an afterthought. When the police come to question others for your whereabouts, you can’t count on your friends. Someone had turned Bethany in, seeing her face in the paper. Someone who knew where she was staying. A friend, I guessed. Most people have too much at stake. Children, jobs, spouses, their integrity. They won’t lie if there’s a chance they’ll be found out.

I left before sunrise; I had plans to sleep in my car if needed, freshening up at rest areas off the highway, with nothing but Emmy’s box for company in my trunk.

I kept my phone off.

I imagined Emmy, or Melissa, or whoever she was, doing the same. No license, no credit cards, no name. Leaving again– So here I go again, she’d said that night when she found me again. But first she had come for me.

I had assumed what I now held in the trunk was what she had come back for. This box. Something inside that she needed eight years later. Something she had left behind after all.

I arrived in the late afternoon – hitting the beginning of rush hour in reverse. I hated driving in the city. Hated it then, hated it now. Hated it even worse when the streets were so congested that the people walked faster than you drove. So I parked in a lot near Fenway, paid the attendant cash, and made my way to the nearest T stop.

The fall air was crisp and the sky a deceptive clear blue. It was cold, but winter hadn’t turned yet, and people walked the streets in sleek coats, no gloves or hats or scarves necessary. I stepped into the mass of people, and I wished suddenly for winter.

In Boston, they don’t really do a good job of warning you about the winter. The postcards look snow-covered and beautiful, the streets still filled with people, the wisps of cold air and the wool coats and waterproof boots all part of the charm, the allure. They don’t tell you that most of the time, it’s pure misery. Waiting for the bus, walking to the T stop, the persistent dry cough that permeates through the office. The bathrooms and office lobbies covered in melted snow. And us, slowly thawing out inside. The chapped lips, the red noses, the dry skin around our knuckles, and the way the sweaters itch across our collarbones. How you want nothing more than to stay in. The things you do to stay warm.

And then there’s the gray. How the sky cover goes dark in the late fall and seems to stay that way for weeks on end, always ready for snow or rain. How the cold seems to hover in a fog, like a mirage, just off the ground. And everyone bundles up in layer after layer because you all have to walk everywhere, the puffs of white escaping like smoke as you elbow past one another.

And nobody seems to notice you. You could be anyone under the down jacket and scarf wrapped over your mouth, your hat pulled down over your ears and your hair. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A sheep in wolf’s. And this is why, no matter how many people are out on a street, this does not make for more witnesses but somehow fewer. It could be anyone. Anyone standing on their toes, peering in the window.