Somebody I Used to Know (2 page)
Read Somebody I Used to Know Online
Authors: David Bell
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Contents
Excerpt from
THE FORGOTTEN GIRL
For Molly
CHAPTER ONE
W
hen I saw the girl in the grocery store, my heart stopped.
I had turned the corner into the dairy aisle, carrying a basket with just a few items in it. Cereal. Crackers. Spaghetti. Beer. I lived alone, worked a lot, and rarely cooked. I was checking a price when I almost ran into the girl. I stopped immediately and studied her in profile, her hand raised to her mouth while she examined products through the glass door of the dairy cooler.
I felt like I was seeing a ghost.
She looked exactly like my college girlfriend, Marissa Minor, the only woman I had ever really loved. Probably the only woman who had ever really loved me.
The girl didn’t see me right away. She continued to examine the items in front of her, slowly walking away from me, her hand still raised to her mouth as though that helped her think.
The gesture really got me. It made my insides go cold. Not with fear, but with shock. With feelings I hadn’t felt in years.
Marissa used to do the very same thing. When she was thinking, she’d place her right hand on her lips, sometimes pinching them between her index finger and thumb. Marissa’s lips were always bright red—without lipstick—and full, and that gesture, that lip-twisting, thoughtful gesture, drove me wild with love and, yes, desire.
I was eighteen when I met her. Desire was always close at hand.
But it wasn’t just the gesture that this girl shared with Marissa. Her hair, thick and deep red, matched Marissa’s exactly, even the length of it, just below her shoulders. From the side, the girl’s nose came to a slightly rounded point, one that Marissa always said looked like a lightbulb. Both the girl and Marissa had brown eyes, and long, slender bodies. This girl, the one in the store, looked shorter than Marissa by a few inches, and she wore tight jeans and knee-high boots, clothes that weren’t in style when I attended college.
But other than that, they could have been twins. They really could have been.
And as the girl walked away, making a left at the end of the aisle and leaving my sight, I remained rooted to my spot, my silly little grocery basket dangling from my right hand. The lights above were bright, painfully so, and other shoppers came past with their carts and their kids and their lives. It was close to dinnertime, and people had places to go. Families to feed.
But I stood there.
I felt tears rising in my eyes, my vision starting to blur.
She looked so much like Marissa. So much.
But Marissa had been dead for just over twenty years.
* * *
Finally, I snapped out of it.
I reached up with my free hand and wiped my eyes.
No one seemed to notice that I was having an emotional moment in the middle of the grocery store, in the milk aisle. I probably looked like a normal guy. Forty years old. Clean-cut. Professional. I had my problems. I was divorced. My ex-wife didn’t let me see her son as much as I wanted. He wasn’t my kid, but we’d grown close. My job as a caseworker for the housing authority in Eastland, Ohio, didn’t pay enough, but who ever felt like they were paid enough? I enjoyed the work. I enjoyed helping people. I tended to pour myself into it.
Outside of work, I spent my life like a lot of single people do. I socialized with friends, even though most of them were married and had kids. I played in a recreational basketball league. When I had the time and motivation, I volunteered at our local animal shelter, walking dogs or making fund-raising calls.
Like I said, I probably looked like a regular guy.
I decided I needed to talk to that girl. I started down the aisle, my basket swinging at my side. I figured she had to be a relative of Marissa’s, right? A cousin or something. I turned the corner in the direction she had gone, deftly dodging between my fellow shoppers.
I looked up the next aisle and didn’t see her. Then I went to another one, the last aisle in the store. At first, I didn’t see the girl there either. It was crowded, and a family of four—two parents, two kids—blocked my view. One of the kids was screaming because her mom wouldn’t buy her the ice cream she wanted.
But then they moved, and I saw the girl. She was halfway down the aisle, opening the door of another cooler, but not removing anything. She lifted her hand to her mouth. That gesture. She looked just like Marissa.
I felt the tears again and fought back against them.
I walked up to her. She looked so small. And young. I guessed she was about twenty, probably a student at my alma mater, Eastland University. I felt ridiculous, but I had to ask who she was. I wiped at my eyes again and cleared my throat.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She whipped her head around in my direction. She seemed startled that anyone had spoken to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But I really wasn’t. In that moment, I saw her head-on instead of in profile, and the resemblance to Marissa became more pronounced. Her forehead was a little wider than Marissa’s. And her chin came to a sharper point. But the spray of freckles, the shape of her eyes . . . all of it was Marissa.
If I believed in ghosts . . .
Ghosts from a happy time in my past . . .
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
The girl just looked at me. Her eyes moved across my body, sizing me up. Taking me in. She looked guarded.
“I was wondering if you were related to the Minor family,” I said. “They lived in Hanfort, Ohio. It’s been about twenty years since I’ve seen them. I know it’s a long shot—”
The girl had been holding a box of Cheerios and a carton of organic milk. When I said the name “Minor,” she let them both go, and they fell to the floor at my feet. The milk was in a cardboard carton, but the force of it hitting the floor caused it to split open. Milk leaked onto the cruddy linoleum, flowing toward my shoes.
“Careful,” I said, reaching out for her.
But the girl took off. She made an abrupt turn and started walking away briskly, her bootheels clacking against the linoleum. She didn’t look back. And when she reached the far end of the aisle, the end closest to the cash registers, she started running.
I took one step in that direction, lifting my hand. I wanted to say something. Apologize. Call her back. Let her know that I hadn’t meant any harm.
But she was gone.
Just like Marissa, she was gone.
Then the family of four, the one I had seen earlier with the child screaming for ice cream, came abreast of me. The child appeared to have calmed down. She clutched a carton of Rocky Road, the tears on her face drying. The father pointed to the mess on the floor, the leaking milk and the cereal.
“Something wrong with her?” he asked.
My hands were shaking. I felt off-balance. Above my head, the cloying Muzak played, indifferent to my little drama with the girl who looked so much like Marissa.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t even know who she was.”
CHAPTER TWO
I
thought of Marissa all evening. It’s safe to say I was feeling a little sorry for myself. Indulging in nostalgia, which can be enjoyable up to a point.
I drank beer on the couch in my apartment while a basketball game I didn’t care about played on the TV. A pile of work waited in my briefcase, but I ignored it. I never did that, but after seeing the girl in the store, I did. I ate some cheese and crackers but gave up on my plan to cook the spaghetti I’d bought. My only company that night was Riley, the aging mutt I’d rescued from the local humane society shortly after my divorce two years earlier. I volunteered there to keep myself busy and to give something back. Eventually, they convinced me to take a dog home. He looked to be a mixture of German shepherd and retriever, and the humane society had estimated his age to be at least eight when I adopted him, maybe older.
The humane society didn’t know much about Riley’s life before he was abandoned to their care, but they suspected he’d suffered some neglect or abuse, because he was so passive and skittish when I adopted him. He used to jump and cower at every noise, and he rarely if ever barked or growled. He’d grown slowly more comfortable and confident over the previous couple of years, and I’d grown used to having him around. As I lounged on the couch, brooding, he sat at my feet, hoping for cracker crumbs.
Marissa and I had met during our freshman year at Eastland University. When I thought of who I was when I arrived at college, I realized I was just an awkward man-boy who only dreamed of meeting his soul mate. Marissa was beautiful, confident, outgoing, determined. Meeting her unlocked things in me that might never have been unlocked otherwise. She got me like no one ever had. And no one has since. We understood each other without words. I felt my connection to her in the deepest core of my being. How many people meet someone like that in their lives? Not many, but I did. And then, two years later, she was taken away from me in a house fire on a warm fall weekend.
That was why seeing the girl in the grocery store shook me to the core. I had managed to get on with my life. I had managed to tell myself I’d gotten over losing Marissa.
But I hadn’t.
I went into my bedroom and dug around in the bottom of my closet. I kept a shoebox there full of items from my time in college, mostly things from my relationship with Marissa. Letters, notes, ticket stubs. And the multiple-time-zone watch she gave me on my twentieth birthday.
We were supposed to travel after college, which explained the need for a multiple-time-zone watch. We never got to take those trips, and I never wore the watch again after Marissa died. But I kept it, and from time to time I’d take it out of the box. When the battery died every few years, I’d take the watch to the jewelry store and have it replaced. I liked to think about that watch being there, close by me, and always running like a beating heart.
I brought it back to the couch with me and slumped down into the cushions, opening another beer. I was supposed to play in my basketball league, but I just didn’t feel like it. I never drank very much, never more than one a day, if that, but when I came home from the grocery store that night, I threw back three and then four and opened a fifth, staring at my watch and wondering who that girl was. And why she’d acted so damn spooked when I simply spoke to her.
