Somebody I Used to Know (28 page)

Connect the dots,
Troy said.

But the dots I saw didn’t make sense. Something was missing.

I didn’t know what
really
drove Marissa away, both from her life and from me.

These thoughts cycled through my brain as I came awake. I’d been dreaming of Marissa, seeing her face again. The two of us in a park, holding hands, walking together.

Even though the dream was heartbreakingly real and painful, I wanted it to go on forever.

But then something thumped in the other room.

I sat up and waited, blinking sleep away. I looked down at the floor. Riley lifted his head, one ear cocked. He’d heard the noise as well, and it was enough of a concern that he actually rose to his feet and stared in the direction of the other room.

“What is it, boy?” I asked. “Was that in the parking lot?”

He remained frozen for a long moment, and then he turned to look at me.

I let my head fall back against the pillow. As soon as I did, the noise came again.

“Shit.” I sat up.

Someone was in the other room. I felt certain.

I reached for my phone, prepared to dial 911.

Then whoever was out there called my name.

“Nick? Are you there?”

Did I know the voice? I stood up and moved.

“Who’s there?” I asked, standing at the door of my bedroom.

The lights were still out all over the apartment, but when I looked toward the living room, I saw one of my windows open, the curtains lifting and falling in the cold night breeze. When I’d come home from seeing Troy, snow flurries were blowing across the road, cutting through the beams of my headlights. I felt the chill entering the apartment.

I looked around, trying to find whoever had called my name. I held the phone in my right hand, ready to dial.

“I’m calling the police,” I said. “Where are you?”

Riley came and stood by my side. He made a low whining sound in his throat.

“Heather? Is that you?”

Then the person emerged from the darkness by the front door. She stepped into a shaft of light that spilled across the living room from the parking lot. The slender body, the long legs. The graceful movements. As she revealed more of herself, I felt my body going into overdrive. Heart pumping. Sweat flowing. A ridge of bumps up my arms and down my back.

“Nick?” she said. “It’s me.”

I leaned against the doorjamb for support. I nearly dropped the phone on Riley’s head.

“Marissa?” I asked. “Oh, Jesus, Marissa, it’s you.”

She bent down near the couch and flipped on a lamp.

When the light hit her, illuminating her, I knew it was true.

Marissa. She was there, right in front of me. Like a dream.

“Oh, God, honey, it’s you,” I said, stepping forward. Rushing forward.

And then she held up her hand, took two steps backward.

“No, Nick,” she said. “I’m not Marissa.”

I froze, studying her. I saw the subtle differences. She was shorter. Her face rounder. The hair not quite as fiery red.

“It’s me, Nick. You remember me, don’t you? It’s been a lot of years, but you must remember me. We were practically family back then.”

And then I understood. I knew who she was.

“Wow,” I said, standing in the middle of the room frozen in place like a man made of stone, every system in my body still in overdrive. “Yes, I do recognize you, Jade.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

I
looked over at the open window. The curtains settled back against the wall as the cold breeze died.

“Jade, why did you come in that way?”

She followed my gaze, her face unperturbed. “I had to be careful. I didn’t know what I was coming into.”

“Careful? I almost called the police.”

She turned her head back toward me. “That’s not really what I’m afraid of. Do you mind if I sit?”

Before I answered, she was moving. She wore jeans, running shoes, and a zip-up Windbreaker with a logo I didn’t recognize. While she settled onto the couch, I walked over and closed the window, locking out the cold air.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Riley sniffed her hand, and then Jade started petting him. He gave in right away. His ears went back and his tail thumped against the floor. The poor sucker trusted everybody.

“Why don’t you sit, Nick?” she said.

I came closer to the couch but didn’t sit. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? All of it.”

“I do want to tell you all of it. That’s why I want you to sit. It’s not a short story.”

“Have you been following me?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been around, close to me. You were at the funeral down in Richmond, right? You came to the cemetery and then to the Russells’ house?”

Jade leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. Something passed across the surface of her face, a small change that gradually grew. Her chin puckered, and her eyes filled with tears.

“What is it?” I asked, but I already knew.

The physical similarities. Her appearance at the cemetery and the house.

Someone claiming to be Emily’s birth mother.

Emily Russell.

“Your daughter?” I asked.

Jade nodded her head, and then buried her face in her hands. Her body shook with sobs. Riley looked at me, encouraging me to do something. I took a step forward, but Jade deserved more, so I sat on the couch next to her, pulled her to me, letting her cry on my shoulder. She smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, and the sobs continued to shake her body with great force.

After a few moments, she calmed a bit, and between deep breaths she said to me, “My baby, Nick. They killed my sweet baby girl.”

*   *   *

We sat that way for a good long while until Jade slowly gathered more and more of herself. I went to the bathroom and found a box of tissues and brought them back. She accepted them and wiped at her face, smearing her eye makeup across her cheeks. I felt as helpless as every man feels in the presence of a crying woman, so I did the only other thing I could think to do. I went to the kitchen and poured her a glass of water.

As I did, I sifted through my memories of Jade. She had just told me we were like family, but I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. A kind of family, I guessed. She was three years younger than Marissa and me, and the two of them always had the kind of love-hate relationship common to most siblings. To be honest, I didn’t think about Jade a great deal when Marissa and I dated. I didn’t pay much attention to anyone else besides Marissa. Jade was the somewhat annoying and very precocious younger sister of my college girlfriend. I saw her life in broad strokes. She studied a lot and, according to Marissa, partied a lot. She visited Eastland a couple of times, sleeping in Marissa’s dorm room or house, acting a little wide-eyed at the flurry of activity and craziness on a college campus. But our own relationship was limited to snarky asides and teasing jokes, an unspoken acknowledgment that in some ways we were both competing for Marissa’s attention.

I brought the water back to her, and she gulped it down.

“More?”

“Yes, please. I feel dehydrated. Too much crying.”

I brought back another glass, which she also gulped down, and I sat down at the far end of the couch from her, ready to hear her explanation.

“Emily Russell is your daughter,” I said.

“Was
.
”
Her face looked strained, on the point of shattering.

“You don’t have to say it that way. She’s still your daughter. She always will be.”

“Thanks.” She sniffled. “She wasn’t mine in a lot of ways. I understand that.”

“You gave her up for adoption? Is that why you’re saying she wasn’t yours in a lot of ways?”

She nodded. “I let go of her a long time ago. I didn’t expect to get her back, but I did. Just for a short time, she was kind of mine again.” She raised her hands and let them fall into her lap. “And then all of this.”

“Why was she here in Eastland? Why did she have my name and address in her pocket when she died?”

Jade started crying, more calmly than before, but the tears were coming again.

“I had to protect her, Nick. I had to protect her from the people who wanted to kill her.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

“W
ho would want to kill that girl?” I asked. “What on earth could she have been mixed up in that would make that happen?”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Jade said. “It was mine. It all goes back to me.”

“And this is why you’re in danger now? This is why you broke into my house in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t know how much danger I’m in anymore. Maybe none. I’m not sure.”

“Danger from what? Ordinarily I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but this whole thing has turned my life upside down. You have to understand that. I won’t say my life was perfect, but it was at least quiet. So I’d like to know.”

Jade changed the subject. “I saw you with your girlfriend, the skinny one.”

“Heather?”

“I don’t know her name. The one who looks like a soccer mom.”

“You watched me?”

“I had to know I could trust you. I couldn’t just come in here when you were with your girlfriend. I couldn’t have other people know all of this. I had to be cautious. I saw you come home alone tonight. I knew the dog didn’t like to bark. Or at least he wouldn’t bite. He seems pretty placid, so I figured the window was safe.”

“Tell me what this is about, Jade. And when you’re finished, I’m going to have a lot of questions.”

She hesitated. I heard the tone in my own voice, the edge of anger beneath my words, the way my body had shifted, rising up on the couch as though to intimidate. I didn’t know what Jade had been through beyond the loss of her daughter, but I lowered myself back onto the couch and scooted away from her.

“Okay,” I said, “if you don’t want to talk about it yet . . .”

“I do. I need to.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “You’re probably one of the few people I can really tell all of this to. And I know you’ll understand. You know all about losing someone very close to you and having it change the course of your life. Right?”

I nodded. I knew all too well. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

“Okay,” I said. “What happened? How did Emily get put in this kind of danger?”

“It’s silly, but it’s still hard for me to think of her as Emily. I named her before I had her. I told myself the baby was going to be a girl, and I called her Meredith the whole time I was pregnant. Sometimes I still think of her as Meredith, even though I met her and knew her as Emily. It’s a trick my brain is playing on me, telling myself that those are two different girls. There’s Meredith who I gave birth to and let go of, and she’s just out there in the world doing fine. And there’s Emily, the girl who died. I wish I could make that reality somehow.”

“It can be dangerous to contemplate all the different roads your life could have traveled.”

“Indeed. Well. I got pregnant with
Emily
in high school. My senior year. You and Marissa were juniors at Eastland then.”

“Was it that guy you dated back then? What was his name? Patrick or something?”

“Patrick.” Jade laughed. “He was a little fool, wasn’t he? I wish it had been Patrick—I really do. He was kind. A fool, but a kind fool. No, it wasn’t him. It’s not important who the guy was. I got involved with someone I shouldn’t have been involved with. He’s out of the picture. He never really was in the picture. What mattered then and now is that I got pregnant, and I had to do something about it. Can you imagine being seventeen years old and having to tell your parents you’re pregnant? You know what my dad was like. Imagine telling him.”

“I couldn’t imagine it. No.”

“Exactly. He didn’t think his little girls did more than hold hands with boys, let alone sleep with them.”

“So you didn’t have anyone to turn to at home. You couldn’t talk to your parents, and you didn’t want to talk to the boy. Let me guess. . . . You ended up reaching out to your big sister.”

“Who else could I call? I knew she’d come. I knew she’d be there for me. She always was the most loyal person I knew.”

Loyalty. I would have thought the same thing about Marissa. Back then and for the previous twenty years. I wasn’t sure anymore.

“She dropped everything and came home for the weekend,” Jade said. “When she showed up, we acted like everything was normal. She told Mom and Dad she needed to get away from school and be mellow for the weekend. I played along. Of course, nothing was normal at all. I’d been in my room crying all week, hiding it from Mom and Dad. Mom asked if something was wrong, and I told her I just had my period. The exact opposite, of course. But Marissa came home that Friday, and she took me to a clinic to take care of it.”

I could picture Marissa stepping into that crisis. She would have been firm and calm, supportive and loving. She would have guided Jade through whatever she needed. Marissa often spoke affectionately of Jade, remembering times from their childhood. The things Marissa taught her little sister or helped her with—deciphering math problems or the mysteries of boys, selecting a dress for a freshman dance or dealing with mean girls. Jade couldn’t have made a better choice if she needed someone to be her rock.

“I thought I was ready to do it,” Jade said. “I was going to end the pregnancy and be done with it. I had the scholarship to Eastland already. I couldn’t tell my parents and disappoint them. I didn’t want anything to do with the guy. I had a future, and it didn’t include a baby. Not at that point in my life. I knew my own mind.”

“And Marissa was okay with that?”

“She said she’d support me in whatever I wanted to do. I just needed to go to the clinic and talk to the people about it. I know now what she was doing. She wanted to make sure I really knew what I was getting into. And it worked. Once I got there and started talking to the counselor, the doubts began to creep in. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I
could
take care of a baby. Maybe I
should
tell Mom and Dad. They loved me. They’d help me. All of that raced through my brain until I just had to stop it all. I had to get out of there and think. So we left.”