Somebody I Used to Know (34 page)

“Long story,” I said. “His family knows. We’ll see what they do with the information.”

We fell back into silence, twenty years hanging between us. Not exactly my vision of our reunion, but what could I really expect? We drove through the center of campus and then out on the north side, heading toward my apartment. Marissa made a couple of comments about buildings that had been torn down or put up. She said, “The whole place seems bigger than it used to be. I thought it would seem smaller, more cozy.”

“The town and the campus keep growing,” I said.

“I guess so.”

I looked at her, and she was looking out the window. I said, “I know you don’t want to be bombarded with questions, but there are so many.”

“One at a time,” she said.

“Fair enough. Did you call nine-one-one that night?” I asked.

“No, it wasn’t me,” she said. “I remember the police tried to find the caller, but I have no idea who it was.” She swallowed hard again. “When I came home . . . that night, the police and fire engines were already there. It was obvious what was happening.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Maybe we’ll talk about it all more. I’m prepared for that. Why did you even ask about the nine-one-one call? Did you remember they tried to find out who made it?”

“I didn’t remember that,” I said, “but I talked to one of the cops who investigated the fire. He said they never found out who made the call, so I thought maybe you had.”

“Not me. Probably some other drunk kid stumbling home who came upon the scene and freaked out.”

“Probably.”

When we pulled up to my building, Marissa tensed up. She looked around the lot, one way and then the other. “Can we get inside quickly? I don’t like being exposed this way.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll get the door. And I have a dog, but he doesn’t bite.”

“Just go, Nick. Please.”

She sounded desperate, so I hustled to the door and pushed it open. I turned to summon Marissa, but she was already moving, brushing past me and inside the apartment like a Special Forces operative.

Riley came out from the kitchen. I could have sworn his eyebrows went up when he saw Marissa. After living with me during a couple of years of near celibacy, he was seeing the fourth different woman cross my threshold in the past few weeks.

Marissa asked me to lock the door, and I did, going so far as to put the chain on. I wanted to do anything I could to reassure her, even though the only break-in I’d ever had was perpetrated by her sister.

But then I remembered Andrew and the attempt to get him into the car.

I understood her fear. Very well.

“Jade said you live alone.”

“I do. Me and Riley.”

I saw the apartment through her eyes, and it seemed small and bland.

“But you have a son?”

“A stepson. Did I mention that to Jade?”

Marissa sat down on the couch, in the same spot where her sister had sat. “No, I spied on you on Facebook. I saw some pictures of you with a boy, a really cute little boy.”

“I’m divorced. And he’s Gina’s, my ex-wife’s, son. But I got pretty close to him when we were married. I’ve been trying to see him more lately.”

Marissa smiled up at me. I was still standing. I didn’t want to sit. Too much energy, and I didn’t know where to direct it.

“I can tell you’re crazy about him,” she said. “I can see the way your eyes light up when you talk about him. And you used to say in college you couldn’t imagine yourself being a dad. Remember?”

“I certainly couldn’t imagine it back then. I guess I still can’t now. Being a kind of dad just fell into my lap when I met Gina. Maybe it was easier that way. I had less of a choice.” I needed to ask the next question. I couldn’t follow Marissa’s life on Facebook, so I had to ask her out loud. “And you? Kids? Married?”

“It’s easy to forget how little we know about each other.”

“Not for me, I guess. I
know
how little we know about each other. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

She reached up and pushed a loose strand of hair back off her face. “I struck out in the marriage department like you. I got divorced three years ago. Two kids, though. Two daughters. They’re twelve and fourteen. It’s about to really become an adventure. I’d show you pictures . . . but it seems silly to be thinking about that. I’m sure you have some bigger things you want to talk about.”

“I’d love to see the pictures,” I said. “But I agree, we have bigger things to talk about. Except I’d like to know where you live. Are you so close to Eastland that you could just show up today? Have you been right here the whole time?”

“Wisconsin,” she said. “I live with my kids in Wisconsin.”

“Wisconsin. I’ve never even been there.”

“It’s cold in the winter. But I’ve liked living there. It’s been good . . . until lately.”

I looked at the clock. “I need to call work.”

“Am I keeping you? Do you need to go back?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s been twenty years. They can fire me if they want.”

I stepped out of the room to call. I told Olivia something had come up and I needed to take the rest of the day off. She acted unconcerned, but then asked me if I would be in the next day since my caseload was getting backed up.

I answered her honestly. “Tomorrow? I have no idea what tomorrow holds.”

“Well, that’s mysterious,” Olivia said.

“It
is
a mystery. I agree.”

When I walked back to the living room I found Marissa looking over the things in my apartment. Books I’d both read and never read. A few pictures of Andrew. Old magazines.

“It’s not as clean as it should be,” I said.

“I don’t mind. It’s not like you were ever a neat freak.”

“I’ve gotten a little better since I was twenty.”

I asked myself a question then: What happens when the thing I’ve always wanted finally happens? Does that moment automatically erase all of my fears and anxieties? Should I have felt a sudden lightness, as though a heavy burden had been removed from my shoulders?

I couldn’t answer my own question. I felt as though I was still walking in a dream, which had been the only way I could approach Marissa for the previous twenty years. If anything, I felt further away from her than I had before, when I thought she was dead. During that time, she had no history. Those twenty years simply didn’t exist for her. But facing her in reality, I had to reckon with someone who had lived and loved and lost, someone who had been buffeted by things I could only imagine. Things I realized I might always have to imagine.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now,” I said.

“I don’t think there’s a playbook for meeting your first love after twenty years of thinking she was dead.”

“First love,” I said, echoing what she said.

She studied me. “First and truest,” she said.

I was shaking then, inside and out. “Yes, Marissa. The truest for sure.”

She came over and took me by the hand, and then she guided me to the couch where we sat down next to each other. Our knees touched, and the familiar but long forgotten surge of electricity that had always passed between us returned. It raced up my leg with a jolting quickness, hitting me in the center of my body and speeding on to my brain. I remembered the sensation well. It was ingrained like a primal instinct, and it felt so good to experience it again.

“I have to be honest with you,” she said. “I can’t stay. My children are with my ex-husband right now, visiting their grandparents. It’s spring break for the schools up there. But I have to get back to them. I’m scared thinking about them being there without me.”

“What are you afraid of? These people, the Maberrys?”

“Partially. They killed Emily. I know it.”

“How did they know who she was?” I asked. “Jade didn’t raise her. She looked like you more than Jade. But they couldn’t just go on that. How did they know?”

I saw disappointment on Marissa’s face. Either she didn’t want to be asked these questions or she simply didn’t want to answer them. But I didn’t see how we could move forward in any way without covering that ground. Whether she wanted to talk about it all or not, I had been swept up in everything.

She backed away from me just a few inches, breaking off the contact between our knees. She said, “I can’t say anything for certain. I only have guesses.” She looked over at me, and I nodded for her to go on. “Jade and Emily connected when Emily turned eighteen. That was the earliest age they could reach out to each other, and Jade initiated the contact. She found Emily through the adoption agency. And they started getting to know each other.
They
only had eighteen years to get caught up on. But they hit it off pretty well. Sometimes adoption reunions don’t go very well. I’ve known people who’ve been through it. But Jade and Emily did very well. They connected. They liked each other. Emily loved her parents, but she was curious about her birth mother. It seems natural to wonder about something that big. And it worked. It really worked.”

“That’s great for both of them,” I said. “They found exactly what they were looking for.”

“And Emily wanted to meet me, so she came to visit once up in Wisconsin. Jade pushed her to do it. She wanted us to get to know each other. She wanted Emily to have a sense of her family, especially since Mom and Dad are gone. Jade has lived a lot of different places over the years. Her life hasn’t always been easy since we moved away from Hanfort. Anyway, Emily came up for just a couple of days, and when I met her I couldn’t believe it. I’d always wondered what happened to that baby after Jade gave her up. You know, Jade didn’t want to go through with it after the accident. She wanted to keep her. But Mom and Dad said no way. They made all that effort to get us out of Hanfort and give us new lives, and they weren’t going to have a baby slowing Jade’s life down. They made her give Emily up. It ripped Jade’s heart out.” Marissa paused, looking at the floor and rubbing her hands together. “You know, she never had kids again after that. Emily is her only child.”

“That’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard,” I said.

“We’d started to hear the Maberrys suspected us. It was the car, really. Roger was the one who dumped it out in that pond. He did Dad’s bidding for him. Once they pulled the car out, the Maberrys must have heard about it. I think Bill Maberry has friends on the police force. He was prominent in the community. He knew everybody around there. He put it together somehow. We moved so suddenly after the accident. We owned a dark SUV. And that SUV ends up dumped in a pond. The pieces fit together, at least enough to prompt the Maberrys to look further into things. They tried to see if they could find me. Or Jade. Any of us, I suspect, but we were the only two left.”

“But you were off the map,” I said. “You were dead, as far as anyone knew. Weren’t you living under another name?”

“I was. Shae McKee. My married name was Shae Hancock.”

“Shae’s your middle name.”

“I knew you’d remember.” She smiled at me, reaching out and squeezing my hand. “Everyone in Wisconsin calls me Shae.”

“Even your ex-husband?”

“Even him. I was Shae when he met me. He knows the whole story, by the way. He and Roger Kirby are the only people outside of the family who know it all, and Dad didn’t talk to Roger too much after we moved. And you now.” She steepled her fingers in front of her mouth for a moment before going on. “The Maberrys tracked me down. Maybe they used an investigator or something. I know they had money. And I hadn’t gone so far off the grid that I couldn’t be found. I wasn’t in witness protection. I was a suburban mom with two kids and a deep, dark secret.” She sighed. “Some weird things started to happen right before Emily visited. I felt like I was being followed. To be honest, I’d started to feel normal again over the previous five years. I’d quit looking over my shoulder all the time. We put Mom and Dad’s real names in the obituaries since Jade and I didn’t live in Colorado. I just wasn’t thinking every minute that someone was going to find out what I’d done when I was twenty. But this sensation felt real. I saw the same car behind me every time I went out. Then my daughter Liza saw the same car when she went to school one day. Bill Maberry found me. I knew it, and it scared the hell out of me. I kept thinking he’d tell the police, that one day an officer would knock on the door and arrest me in front of my kids. That was my real fear.”

“And clearly that didn’t happen,” I said.

“No. Worse. The Maberrys took matters into their own hands. Emily came to visit about two months ago. I don’t know what happened after that, but as near as I can guess, he saw me with Emily. He tracked her down to her home and then to here. Maybe he thought killing her was greater punishment for me than anything else.” She reached up and wiped her eyes. “Maybe he thought she was my daughter instead of Jade’s.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Marissa closed her eyes and looked very much like someone who wanted to disappear, to wish her surroundings and problems away and never see them again. She sat that way for a long moment, eyes closed. Silent.

Then she opened her eyes. “When I broke up with you after the accident, I told you I wasn’t worthy of you. That’s how I felt.”

“No,” I said. “It’s an awful thing to say or think.”

“It’s true. It was true then, and it’s true now. Everyone who follows me, everyone who gets dragged into my orbit ends up getting hurt.” She sprang off the couch and grabbed her purse. “I have to go.”

“No.”

She moved quickly across the room.

I was up and after her, taking two long strides so we met at the door.

“No,” I said. And I remembered the lesson from Jade. Marissa had been through as much. More. She wouldn’t want to be grabbed or manhandled. I held out my hand. Gentle. Easy. “Where are you going to go now?”

“Home. My girls. My life. That’s my life.”

“No,” I said. “Just stay. It’s too far to drive tonight.”

“You’re in danger. We’re both in danger.”

“We can handle it together,” I said. “I know the police. A detective. Tell
him
the story. They can protect you. They can stop the Maberrys.”