Why Can't I Be You (24 page)

I
lay in bed
in the hotel room, staring at the television. There was a nature show on about a mama bear and her cub. She nudged his furry little butt over logs and rocks and taught him how to catch fish and which berries were good to eat. She was gentle and attentive and anytime he wandered off, all he had to do was cry out for her and she’d find him. It broke my heart. I flipped the channels, but my brain was in overload. I couldn’t make sense of anything on the screen, and eventually I got tired of holding the remote. I rolled over and buried my head in the pillow and cried until I thought I might suffocate. My head throbbed.

Someone on the TV said, “The great thing about this product? It’s all about what isn’t there. No germs! No bacteria! No—”

And then I had a thought. A brilliant, crazy thought that got me out of bed. I dug through my bags until I found the box of Jessie’s pictures.

This time I looked at the list she’d scribbled on the back of the envelope. I lined up the photos in the order of the names. It wasn’t about the pictures that were there. It was about the pictures that were missing.

Jessie used the pictures as her portfolio for school. Maybe the ones in the box were the outtakes. The ones she didn’t use. So the best anagram portrait was the one she’d sent. The one that wasn’t there. I laid them out on the bed. All the faces of Jessie stared back at me. I matched each picture to a name on the envelope.

The only names without pictures were Ms. Rease Jigno and Maree Jigsons. I pulled out my laptop and searched for Rease. There were no results. But Maree Jigsons was on Facebook. Her profile picture was a dark silhouette of a person on the beach at sunset. There was no light on her face, but it had to be Jessie. Maree Jigsons wasn’t a real name.

Since we weren’t friends, I could only see the very basic details of her profile. She lived in Portland. She was a University of Oregon alum. She worked at a place called Morgan Studios. I found the website. Morgan Studios was a photography studio that appeared to specialize in portraits. It was owned by J. E. Morgan, but her bio only said that she was a University of Oregon alum and had studied abroad for a year after college as an assistant to a photographer I’d never heard of. She hadn’t posted a picture with her bio.

It wasn’t an airtight cover, but it’s not like she was in the witness-protection program. She just didn’t want to be found by her high school friends. There were enough J. E. Morgans in the world for her to stay lost. And her friends had stopped looking for her a long time ago. One of the girls I worked with used her mother’s maiden name on Facebook instead of her real last name, because she didn’t want her ex-boyfriend looking her up. It had to be more than coincidence linking Maree Jigsons to a photographer named J. E. Morgan.

I called down to the front desk. “I’m going to need to rent a car in the morning,” I said. “Can you help me with that?”

I
watched her through
the window for a long time. Morgan Studios had a small seating area and a reception desk in the storefront. Larger-than-life-sized portraits hung on the walls: A grandmother. A biker with a furry chest wearing a leather vest. A baby crying. A businessman with a spot the size of a tennis ball on his tie.

She walked around straightening magazines, threw an empty paper cup from a side table into the trash can behind the desk. She looked up at the portraits and studied them for a moment before walking over to straighten the one of the baby. She did look like me. Sort of. She was taller. She had more curves and honey-brown hair, with a few well-placed blond streaks, that fell in curls past her shoulders. She wore a plain black T-shirt, a gray cotton scarf wrapped loosely around her neck several times, and tall black boots, with tons of buckles, over ripped, faded jeans. She didn’t see me standing in the doorway outside, watching her through the glass. She was in her own world.

Jessie drummed on the desk. I wondered what song she had stuck in her head. I wondered if we actually had anything in common.

I waited for her to look up or notice me, but she didn’t. I finally worked up the courage to walk in. She looked up when the bell on the door jingled.

“I don’t do weddings,” she said, her voice was throaty and scratched. “I shoot babies, kids, portraits, corporate stuff, and other events. I even do bat mitzvahs.”

She smiled. “I don’t
shoot
babies,” she said, as if she thought that’s why I looked like I was about to go into shock. “I photograph them.” She hadn’t gotten a nose job. She had a thin gold hoop that curled into her nostril. Her smile was closemouthed but reckless. The wild look in her eyes and the matter-of-fact tone to her voice seemed to say that she’d done it all and seen it all, and, yes, it was fantastic. I could see why she’d gotten away with so much when she was younger.

There wasn’t a good way to lead into what I had to tell her. There was nothing I could say to soften it. It wasn’t like I could ask about her portrait rates and then casually say, “By the way, I’m a Jessie Morgan impersonator.”

“So,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been pretending to be you. I went to your high school reunion.” I handed her the photo box.

Her eyes widened. She took the box from me. Her hands were shaking. She gripped the box tightly to make them stop. Her knuckles turned white. Her lips tightened. She studied my face without saying anything.

“I fell into it,” I said. “It wasn’t planned. I was there for a conference, and Myra saw me and thought I was you.”

She smiled. It seemed like she was trying very hard to keep her shock to herself. “Yeah, I can see it,” she said, gesturing to my eyes. “In here. Maybe we have the same chin too.” She hugged the box to her chest and drummed the sides of it with her fingers.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Do they know?” she asked. Her voice was a raspy whisper. She cleared her throat. “That you’re not me?” She looked past me, out the window, like she was trying to pretend she didn’t really care about the answer. She blinked a few times.

“No, but Karen told them about the affair with Myra’s dad.”

“Shit,” she said softly. There was a hint of weariness, like an acknowledgment that things eventually catch up with a person. She put the box on the desk. She started to open it, looked at me, and then put the lid back on.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She was really quiet for a moment. She looked at her hands. “Well, I’m assuming Karen told everyone because she was being bitchy to you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“At least she didn’t let that bomb drop because she was mad at Myra. She thought she was hurting me. That’s slightly better than if she was trying to hurt My. Right?” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the desk drawer and gestured to me to follow her.

She was like the Pied Piper. It didn’t even occur to me to do anything other than follow her. The fact that she hadn’t really reacted much to my confession made me all the more fascinated. I think she knew that.

We walked through the studio, a big room with white walls and backdrops. With every step, the heels of her boots clacked against the floor. The buckles rattled. “With Karen,” she said, calling back to me over her shoulder, “all you can hope for is lesser shades of bitchy.”

She grabbed a leather jacket from a hook by the back door and put it on as she walked outside.

“It was going to come out eventually,” she said, sitting down on the back stoop. She pulled a cigarette out and stuck it in her mouth. “Mmph?” She grunted and held the box out to me.

I shook my head.

She cackled. “You can’t be my doppelgänger and not even smoke. It’s ridiculous. That!” she said, waving the cigarette box at me. “That is how they should have known.” She acted like she’d expected all along that there would be people out there who would want to be her. Like she’d seen it coming. The more we talked, the less I was sure if it was a ploy to hide her discomfort or sheer arrogance.

I decided not to tell her about me and Robbie and his last two cigarettes. I would keep that part for myself.

She lit her cigarette, took a deep drag, and blew smoke up to the sky. “I’m actually impressed Karen kept it a secret for so long. I assumed they already knew.” She got quiet again. “How are they?” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “Are they good?” Her eyes sparkled when she asked.

I told her about Myra and her store, and Robbie and Heather, and how Karen had two kids. It was hard. Like I was giving them back to her. Like I would fade completely once I did.

“And Fish?” she asked.

I didn’t want to tell her about Fish. He was the one I wanted to keep the most.

“He trains guide dogs,” I said. “Mr. Foster had a stroke.”

“Mr. Foster!” Jessie said, laughing. “That man hated me.”

“Really?”

She didn’t even react to the fact that he’d had a stroke.

“Yeah. I get it now. I used to see him as this bad guy for not wanting Fish to hang around me. But he just loves his kid. I have a little boy. I totally get it.”

My jaw dropped.

“He’s four,” Jessie said. “God! He’s not like Myra’s half brother or anything.” She laughed. “He’s only four. But if a girl like me ever strings Eddie along, I’ll rip her to pieces.” She stubbed her cigarette out on the stoop, leaving a black mark behind, and flicked it across the alley, making it someone else’s problem.

We went back into the studio. She pulled a bottle of scotch out of the bottom drawer of her worktable. “My parents didn’t give a shit. Fish was lucky to have a dad who hated me.”

We sat on the floor, drinking from paper cups. I stopped after a few sips. She did not. I looked around at all the photography equipment. Everything looked shiny and new. There was a row of camera cases on one counter and an enormous computer monitor on a desk in the corner. She was doing well for herself.

“Did you really climb out the bathroom window after Fish told you he loved you?” I asked.

Jessie caught herself just before she spit a mouthful of booze. She swallowed with a loud gulp. “No! No!” She shook her head and laughed. “I said I had to go to the bathroom, but I really just went to the parking lot and drove away.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Fish in his graduation gown, heartbroken. “That’s totally different.”

“Hey, Fake Jessie,” she said, pointing her finger at me. “I don’t think you get to judge.”

“True,” I said.

“What was I supposed to do? I was sleeping with my best friend’s father. Fish was telling me he loved me. Myra’s mother threatened to tell Myra and my parents if she ever had to even look at me again.” She sniffed and wiped her nose with her hand. “I’d already made all the bad decisions. It’s not like I could fix anything. I didn’t crawl out the bathroom window, but if that was the only way out? I would have freaking crawled through the sewer if I had to. I was a caged animal.”

We talked for almost two hours. Every time I thought I hated her, she won me over again by saying something that was kind or smart or showed the slightest hint of vulnerability. And it all fit. She was Jessie
Fucking
Morgan. She was exactly the kind of person who would have stolen her dad’s credit card and checked into a hotel, worn a tube top and a miniskirt to give a debate speech, sang karaoke even though she had a terrible voice, and thrown a rock through Robbie’s window. She was exactly the kind of person who would leave everyone behind. It made sense.

“You could come back with me,” I said. I don’t know if I wanted her to say she would or she wouldn’t. I don’t know what I wanted to happen.

“If screwing Myra’s dad was the worst of what I’d done,” Jessie said, “I might be able to go back and see them again. But I fucked everything up and then I jumped ship.” She had tears in her eyes. Her nostrils flared. “I can’t make up for that. They gave me everything that was solid in my life. I never even said good-bye.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and wiped her hand on her jeans.

“Maybe you can talk to them. Fix things. They’re such good people.”

“They’re such good people,” she said, laughing. “I fucking know they’re good people.” She pointed a finger at me. “You don’t have to tell me they’re good people. I fucking know.”

I felt like I should be afraid of her, but I wasn’t. I felt sorry for her.

She stretched her legs out in front of her and rolled her feet back and forth, the buckles of her boots clanged against the beat-up hardwood floor. “They even tried to find me. Myra sent me an e-mail asking if I was her ‘dear friend Jessie Morgan from Mount Si,’ and I never wrote her back. I can’t fix that. And it wasn’t a one-time thing with Myra’s dad. It was six months of nights.”

“God!” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Yeah, you didn’t know that part, did you? Six months. She’s never going to forgive me. It will always be a failing situation.”

“But you were a kid. An adult took advantage of you. Maybe Myra will understand that.”

“You know . . . ,” Jessie said, pulling the box of cigarettes from the pocket of her jacket. “You know . . .” Her voice trailed off. She took a cigarette out and lit it, even though we were inside. She blew smoke at the ceiling. “Oh, don’t even start with me, Fake Jessie. Just don’t.”

“Jenny.”

“Whatever. It’s not like you know. It’s not like you were there.” She was quiet for a long time, smoking. Staring into space. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat next to her, watching the smoke curl into the air and disappear.

“But do me a favor,” she said finally, as if we were still midconversation. “If you see them again, tell them I’m sorry.” She stubbed her cigarette butt out on the bottom of her boot, ashes falling to the floor. “I love them. It’s just that I’m not the same Jessie anymore, and I really can’t go back.”

When we walked out of the studio, I noticed, on the wall, a framed picture from that shoot she did in high school. Karen, Robbie, Heather, Myra, and Fish standing in a line, smushing their faces together. Jessie wasn’t in the picture.