Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

Paige in the flesh aged ten years in an instant. Or maybe that was motherhood, automatically bumping you up a generation from your peers. Or losing your husband, finding him swinging from the banister. Either way, this was the Paige who stood before me: Her face had gone grayish, and her freckles had faded to nothing, or maybe that was the makeup. But I didn’t think so, because the under-eye circles were hollowed and obvious, her cheeks drawn in, the bones of her face more pronounced. The lines around her eyes radiated outward, as if she were squinting at me. But the rest of her had filled, breasts and hips and stomach, to bear and care for a child.

She wore a wool coat, but her collar was exposed, and I knew she was cold – she must have wanted to tuck her chin down against the wind, but she wouldn’t. Her lips were pink, her mouth slightly open, hair pulled back but not entirely successfully. Her hazel eyes usually seemed more green than anything else – but now they were dull, deadened. Whatever I had been about to say, to try, I lost my nerve at the sight of her.

She reached her hand into her coat pocket, never taking her eyes off me, and for the briefest moment, I thought she’d pull a gun – and that I wouldn’t blame her. That everyone walking by on the cross streets wouldn’t notice a thing, minding their own business. But instead she pulled out a phone.

“Wait,” I said, and she held the phone at her hip, undecided.

“One call,” she said. And her voice, after all this time, was so familiar, so close. It played tricks on me, made me slip back to thinking we were friends, that I could mend this. “One word from me and you’re in jail.”

She held that phone in front of her, and I could see her chest rising and falling, and what I’d first thought was fear, I now knew was something else – it was laced with something more, a feeling of power. My fate was in her hands, and she knew it.

“I moved away,” I said, hands held out, as if the phone were a gun pointed at my chest. “I don’t live here. I don’t come around here. I don’t call. I’ve moved, and I’ve moved on.”

“How nice for you,” she said. “You’ve moved on? Is this supposed to make me feel better? Then what the hell are you doing back here, hiding out behind my house?” Her face scrunched up in disgust. “ Looking in my window?”

“I need your help,” I said.

She started coughing, bent over at the stomach, shaking from a laugh that came out wrong. “I think you’d better go now, Leah.”

“Just wait. Do you remember the girl who I lived with when you came to visit me at the Allston place?”

Her eyes widened in shock or disbelief. “You mean the last time you spoke to me? You mean the time your creepy roommate sliced through my boyfriend’s arm?” She stepped closer, but all I felt was a surge of relief. Yes, she knew Emmy. Emmy was real, and I could prove it. “What did she do to you, to turn you into this person?”

It wasn’t Emmy who’d done something, it was Aaron. Emmy was just the rebound, the thing I gravitated toward, so unlike everything my life had been. So sure the danger was outside the four walls of the basement apartment and not inside.

“I need you to tell the police about her,” I said. “I’m going to call them, and I need you to tell them.”

“Oh, you need me to? I need you to not print lies about my husband, I need you to not push him to–”

“They weren’t lies!”

“One word from me, that’s all it would take. One call to the DA. .”

And yet she hadn’t. Was it long-ago friendship holding her back? Was it belief?

Music started playing faintly over the monitor, and Paige looked down at her hip.

“What’s that?” I asked. The faint classical music I’d heard once before when I stood here, from somewhere inside the house. Abruptly, the music stopped.

Paige frowned at me. “The crib toy. I have to go, the baby’s up.”

I was transfixed. The noise on the monitor, the baby saying ma, ma, ma, the sound of him hitting a button, the music starting up again. Transporting me back to the day after the article was published, when I peered in this very window, so curious.

“Get the hell out of here, Leah. If I see you here again, I’ll call the police.”

But I was riveted to my spot. The same music I’d heard the night I stood here six months earlier, finding Aaron swinging from the banister. The baby, pressing the attachment in his crib over and over. The baby was home, in his crib. Paige, not out for her after-work walk with the baby at all. .

She looked at me and then back at the house – she didn’t know I had been here that evening. She didn’t know what that noise meant to me, what it signified. “Paige,” I said, because I thought I finally understood why she hadn’t pursued a lawsuit after all.

The request for a lawyer. The refusal to speak.

If she hated me enough to file a restraining order, if I’d ruined her family, and her life, and pushed Aaron to his death with a lie – if she truly believed I had done all those things, why had no case been brought against me?

“If I ever see you again, I won’t hesitate,” she said. “I swear it.”

She went back up the steps, to her house, to her life, to her child waking from a nap. I watched as she took those same steps, her hand assured on the banister. I watched her go.

THE POLICE SAID SHE’Ddiscovered Aaron’s body that evening, after she returned home from her walk with the baby. But that was a lie – she had been here, in this house, when I saw Aaron hanging. All along, she was here.

My God, Paige, what did you do?

Maybe she was somewhere else in the house and didn’t know what was happening. Maybe she made up a story for a simpler resolution, for the police. Or maybe it was something more. .

The case would’ve taken her down, too. Her way of life. The money that was hers, all tied up in his name. Both their names dragged through the dirt.

Or maybe she knew. Maybe, deep down, she suspected. Maybe she was also to blame for a long period of time when he could’ve been adding more girls to the list. And now, finally, she could act.

Getting a restraining order against me to back her claim.

Taking all the information I’d given her. The pills I had found, that I knew had come from him. A supply he must’ve still had.

He put it in my drink, waited until I passed out. Tried to frame it like a suicide, I’d told her.

The grimy debris at the base of his wineglass, mixed into his drink, to let him go easy.

Or.

To make his limbs go ineffective and his mind scramble to keep up. The practiced knot I knew she could make from spending summers on her family’s yacht.

Standing on my toes, peering in the window, hearing the music play on a loop – she was home that night.

The baby was in the crib, and Paige was home, when Aaron swung, faintly twisting back and forth.

THE POLICE BELIEVED Ihad made Emmy up, pulled her out of thin air, created her in the likeness of who I wanted her to be. But suddenly, the curtain was pulled back, and I would see behind the stage, to everyone before their disguises.

I had believed everyone was something other than they were. That Noah was clever and Rebecca was happy. That Aaron was a monster and Paige too naive or blinded to want to see it. I had cast my life and assigned the roles, manufacturing all of them into the people I wanted them to be.

I stood in front of my car in the underground lot, the darkness and the silence surrounding me. Wondering what I’d be returning to, a house that didn’t belong to me, a place where I had no allegiances or ties.