Somebody I Used to Know (4 page)

But I hadn’t done anything to that girl, except try to speak to her in the grocery store. As I rode to the station, I tried to understand how anyone could hurt a girl like that. Who would want to violently end such a young life? And for what reason? A rape? A robbery? A lovers’ quarrel?

Other things came back to me during the brief car ride as well, things having to do with Marissa. We met during our freshman year of college when the dorm I lived in threw a mixer. I went with a few of my friends, not intending to stay long, but then a girl walked in wearing jeans that fit her body perfectly, her red hair cascading over her shoulders like a ruby waterfall. I’d seen her on campus a couple of times—walking on the quad, standing in line in the cafeteria—but we’d never spoken. She always seemed to be laughing or gesturing, always seemed to have some inner glow spilling out of her as though her body couldn’t contain it.

If my life had been a cartoon, the illustrator would have drawn my tongue hanging out until it reached the floor.

But the crowd swallowed her up. I caught occasional glimpses of her dancing, her body swinging to the music, her hair—that rich, wild hair—flipping across her face and then back as she moved. I remembered the song she danced to. “Seether” by Veruca Salt.

I was transfixed.

When my friends wanted to leave for another party, I told them to go on without me, that I’d catch up later. But I never did.

I circled the edges of the party, dancing sometimes, talking to other friends, but with one eye always looking for that wild redhead. I never came close, and eventually I lost sight of her altogether and assumed she’d moved on, like my friends had. Why wouldn’t she? I couldn’t imagine a girl like that would have only a lame freshman mixer to attend in a dorm on a Friday night. I imagined she had parties and invitations and adventures awaiting her, as many as she wanted.

I went down a short hallway, searching for the bathroom. The redhead emerged from the ladies’ room right in front of me. I almost froze in my tracks. We made eye contact, and I managed to say, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said, smiling.

But I didn’t stop. I went right on into the men’s room, where I stood alone in the middle of the floor, the sweat from the crowded room and dancing cooling on my back. I saw myself in the mirror. Thick brown hair. Bright blue eyes. Thin and fit. A young guy in all his glory. In his prime, right? Why not?

I turned around and went back out to the party. And there she stood at the end of the hallway. Her red hair was piled on top of her head now, and she fanned herself with her right hand. When I came closer, I saw hair plastered to the back of her neck by sweat, a spray of freckles across her skin.

She looked over at me. “It’s fucking hot.”

“It is.”

“Do you know what would be funny?” she asked.

I hesitated just a moment, a heartbeat that changed the rest of my life. I said, “It would be funny if you and I ended up married and having children, and we could always tell them we met outside the men’s room at a lame freshman mixer.”

It was her turn to hesitate. Everything hung in the balance between us. I figured she’d call me a creep or a weirdo. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit. I didn’t know where my statement had come from or why those words had tumbled out of my mouth. I simply felt bold. I felt that only bold words could work for a girl like the one standing before me.

“I was going to say wouldn’t it be funny if you were some super-Christian guy and within the first three words I ever spoke to you I dropped the f-bomb.” She smiled. “But your answer kind of surprised me, I have to admit.”

“No offense taken by the f-bomb,” I said. “I kind of liked it.”

That was Marissa. There was nothing predictable or conventional about her.

We left the mixer together and walked around campus that night. We told each other about our families, our lives in high school, our hopes and dreams. I was majoring in philosophy and thinking about grad school or maybe a job as some kind of social worker. Marissa wanted to travel, to take photographs and write, and maybe someday turn her experiences into a book.

I remembered our first kiss. Late that night, we walked beneath the falling leaves on the quad, and our hands found each other as though they possessed minds of their own. Once our bodies touched that way, it was over. At least for me, it was over. I belonged to her. And that scared me, as I was sure it scared her. Young guys always got nervous when the feelings grew that deep. I’d dated other girls, sure, but I always felt in control with them. I always believed I could come and go from the relationship if I wanted. No harm, no foul. I knew that wouldn’t be the case with Marissa.

And on that fall night, we came together. We stopped in a darkened patch between the gas lamps that lit the campus walkways. We turned to each other and kissed, and it was one of the few moments in my life when I completely lost myself. The world around us disappeared. The buildings, the students, the night sky.

When our lips parted, I ran my hand through her thick hair, my fingers disappearing in the deep red waves.

“Are you ready for this?” she asked.

“For what?” I asked. “For you?”

“For everything,” she said. “For this great adventure.”

I told the truth. I couldn’t tell her anything else.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m ready.”

And I was. For two years, it was the greatest ride of my life.

And I also remembered what it felt like when she broke up with me, just two days before she died. She didn’t just end our relationship. She told me she didn’t want to be my friend either. She told me she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to see me again.

She didn’t just break my heart. She steamrolled it.

And then two days later, she was dead.

The fire swept through the house she shared with three other girls on a Friday night in October, killing them all. An accident. A candle left burning unattended, possibly because the four of them had been out drinking. It could have happened to any young, careless kids. In this case, it happened to my favorite person.

I tried to convince myself over the years that it was all for the best, that Marissa and I wouldn’t have spent our lives together. We would have broken up late in college or shortly after, like most couples, and we both would have gone on to find other partners, other lives.

But I didn’t really believe any of that.

Marissa and I often talked about life after college and our fears about ending up stumbling through the kind of conventional lives our parents lived. One night a few weeks after we started dating we hopped into her car and drove off to Columbus, an hour away, to eat at a dumpy little diner called Heywood’s. Marissa was always hearing about places like Heywood’s and insisting that we try them. After eating hamburgers and sharing a milk shake, we sat across from each other, letting the conversation go wherever we wanted.

“We should run off somewhere,” she said.

“We just did. Heywood’s.”

“I mean after college,” she said. “Someplace no one would expect.”

“Disneyland?”

“A real place. Far away. New Zealand.”

“New Zealand?” I asked. “Do you know anything about New Zealand?”

“No,” she said. “That’s why we should go. Are you in?”

“Okay,” I said, humoring her but also appreciating her boldness. “After graduation, we’re going to New Zealand.”

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it,” I said.

She poked at the ice cubes in her water glass with her straw. “I don’t want to end up like my parents.”

“Old? With kids? What?”

“It’s not those things.” She kept poking the ice. “I don’t want to be . . . complacent. I don’t want to just . . . exist. You know? Moving from one day to the other as though I was just running out the clock.”

“Sure. My parents can seem the same way. They exist. They don’t live.”

“I don’t even know if my parents love each other,” she said. “My dad dictates everything. My mom goes along. I love them, but I don’t want to be like them when I get married.”

“I hear that,” I said. “My parents . . . they don’t even act like they like each other anymore. They can go days without really talking to each other.”

“Okay,” she said. “It’s decided. We both want more. We won’t settle. Ever.”

In some ways, it felt weird to be making postgraduation plans when we were still freshmen and had been dating for only a few weeks. But I loved her already. I knew that. And I also knew I shouldn’t be thinking about the future so much and assuming the two of us would be together. I didn’t want to get married young. I didn’t want to think too soon about settling down. Wasn’t that why we wanted to run off somewhere and avoid the traps of a conventional life?

“You never know,” Marissa said, as casual as could be. “Maybe the two of us will end up getting married someday.”

I can’t describe the feelings that raced through my body. Electricity. Electric charges sharp and pleasurable filled every cell. Was it possible this girl in front of me was really thinking about marrying me? About spending the rest of her life with me?

“Sure,” I said, “but isn’t that all a long way off? I mean, you don’t want to rush into anything, do you?”

Marissa looked up at me. She held my gaze for a long, steady moment, and our eyes locked into place, joined together as if by a magnetic force. Then she shrugged. Casually. Almost too casually.

“Yeah,” she said, looking away. “There’s time for all of that in the future.”

What I wouldn’t give to have that moment back.

I never met anyone else like her. I hadn’t loved anyone the same way since then, not even Gina, the woman I’d married seven years ago.

When Marissa died, it was like a giant steel door slammed shut on one part of my life, the part in which I could have been happy, truly happy sharing my life with someone else. For just a moment in the grocery store, I felt as if Marissa were alive again, that some piece of her was back.

Was it crazy to say that the death of that girl—the girl whose name I still didn’t know—hit me with the same force that Marissa’s death had? Was it crazy to say I felt like I’d lost Marissa all over again?

*   *   *

My fingerprints were already on file with the city. Not because of my previous run-in with the law, but because of my job as a caseworker. In order to make sure landlords didn’t violate the rights of their tenants, I went into a lot of homes and apartments, so they fingerprinted me when I was hired and did an extensive background check.

When the fingerprint technician at the police station took my hand in hers and told me to just relax, I’d been through it before. I wasn’t relaxed, but I knew the procedure, so I tried to make my mind a blank while she rolled my hand around on the ink pad and then the card stock.

The DNA test was similar to going to the doctor’s office to get checked for strep. The same technician pulled out a giant Q-tip thing and ran it around the inside of my cheek. She was about as gentle as someone trying to scrape rust off a boat hull. When that was finished, she led me to Detective Reece’s empty desk and told me to sit and wait.

No one seemed concerned about me running off. Sure, the room was full of cops, but none of them paid any attention to me. Phones rang, printers printed, radios crackled. I called work from my phone and told them I was running late. I didn’t say why, and they didn’t ask. I worked on my own a lot, out in the field, so things were pretty flexible.

My head felt better. Not normal, but better. The pain from my moderate hangover had subsided, but I was hungry, and I knew I wouldn’t feel one hundred percent until I ate something substantial.

Reece came back twenty minutes later. He sat at his desk without looking at me and started shuffling through some papers. I knew enough to suspect it was a strategy, one designed to make me feel uncomfortable, nervous. I refused to give in, so I sat back in my chair and waited for him to speak.

Finally, he said, “Is there anything else you need to tell me, Mr. Hansen?”

“No,” I said.

“You’ve had time to think. Maybe something else has crossed your mind. Maybe you remember something that is relevant to this investigation.”

“I have a question,” I said. “What is the girl’s name? Can you at least tell me that?”

“Why do you want to know her name?” Reece asked. “Assuming you don’t already know it.”

“I don’t know it. And I don’t like calling her ‘the girl’ as though she’s not a real person. And I’m wondering, still, if she might be related to my ex-girlfriend. I knew her family pretty well.”

Reece considered me for a moment, and then he said, “I had a girlfriend in college who dumped me. You know what I did?” He waited a beat for a response, and when I didn’t say anything he went on. “I said to myself, ‘Easy come, easy go.’ Why would I want to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me? Am I right? Too many fish in the sea and all that. Especially for young guys in their prime.”

I had the feeling he was trying to help me, that he really believed he was sharing some piece of profound wisdom with me.

“I hear you,” I said.

“I don’t think you do.” He shuffled some more papers around on his desk. “The victim’s identity will be made public pending notification of her next of kin. It should be in the afternoon paper.”

The victim.
It sounded so cold. Her identity was slowly being stripped away.

“Can I go, then?” I asked.

Reece considered me again. “You don’t have any plans to travel, do you?”

“No.”

“Don’t make any. I want to be able to find you anytime I want.”

“You know where I live.”

Reece looked at something behind me, tracking it with his eyes. I waited for a moment, assuming he’d turn back to me, but he didn’t. He followed the progress of something—likely
someone—
who was moving through the room.

I turned in my chair and saw what he saw. A man and a woman, escorted by another detective, were led into a private room on the far side of the station. The couple’s heads were bent low, so I couldn’t see their faces, but they seemed to be carrying a heavy burden. The detective with them, a woman, gently placed her hand on each of their backs as they passed her and entered the room. The woman had reddish hair, but from a distance I couldn’t tell if it was her natural color.