My wallet that I’d lost that night at the bar, long ago, when I was out with her. You’re okay, Leah, she’d said. It’s just stuff.
All my credit cards. My driver’s license. It had taken me weeks to sort it all out, months to have everything replaced. And in the meantime, what was she doing with it? With me?
“Thanks,” I said, backing out the door.
Nothing was chance. Nothing was probability, an unintended cause and effect.
Even then, Leah. She had you even then. The thing she had come back for was not this box at all. The thing she had come back for, all along, was me.
I stumbled out into the daylight, squinted from the glare of the sun on the windows, listened to the trucks rumbling down the side streets. Wondering where she was, then and now.
On the way back to my car, I landed myself at the public library, logged myself on to a machine, and looked once more, for Bethany Jarvitz. Not all articles had become accessible on the Internet, especially from that long ago. I used the dates I’d found in the article about the fire and went to the archives. Old-style archived copies of all the major papers. Found a few mentions I had missed the first time. One from mid-June, eight years earlier, when we were first roommates in that basement apartment:
Bethany Jarvitz was taken into custody last week following an anonymous tip. She was indicted for arson and involuntary manslaughter in the death of Charles Sanderson, 32, of New Bradford, PA. She entered a plea of guilty this morning in exchange for a more lenient sentencing. The other suspect remains unidentified.
And before that, another shot of Bethany’s face before she was found. The photo grainy and pixelated, but this time in color, zoomed out, so you could see the full image. Her face was harder to see clearly from the distance, but you could see the person beside her. A dark hood pulled over the person’s head, shielding the face, shoulders hunched over.
A sliver of bright color caught my eye from lower in the frame. Bright green, in Bethany’s hand. I leaned closer to the screen, zoomed in until the pixels segregated into individual boxes of color. Neon green with a sliver of red. The lighter. The lighter in that box. The red from the heart, peeking out from her fist. The lighter that once had been in my hand.
I wanted to call up Kassidy and give him a name: Melissa Kellerman. I’d given Noah the wrong one. Used the last of my goodwill on a dead girl. She was still out there, and I was chasing her ghost.
Surely Bethany would’ve been offered a better deal for giving up her name. Emmy must have been scared she would. Always on the run, just in case.
And then, because I had a habit of digging until I got what I wanted, I put the dead man’s name into the search, ready for the obituary. I had the year, the town, the age—the fingerprints and DNA of the written world.
There wasn’t much on the case in the papers, which I soon discovered was because the victim was not the perfect reader bait. He had a history of offenses, an assault charge, but nothing that stuck.
Then I saw where he was from. Not where the crime was committed but the place he had been born, had presumably grown up. A jolt of recognition. The place Vince told me he’d gone to high school in upstate New York. Where he’d first met Emmy as Melissa. The victim, Charles, was a man from the same town. And there it was, the potential that she knew him.
According to the court report, he’d been drunk, passed out, when the blaze whipped through the home.
The look she’d given me that night I confessed on the floor of our apartment. The look that said, I understand. The mirror, reflecting back.
Emmy and I were similar, I thought. Then and now.
Something had made us run.
Something that eventually, when Bethany got out of prison, made her come back.
When Bethany got out, Emmy must’ve felt she owed her. Owed her eight years’ worth of life. She’d told her in that letter: I’ll be there when you get out. I’ll help. I promise.
And I had followed her. Followed her straight to the truth this time.
You can get there and not like the truth you find. Discover that the truth does not glimmer or shine or burn, or feel like ribs cracking open, a light escaping. That it can be the opposite. Bones folding in and over, as your body does the same.
When you realize that no one was who you thought.
When you stood in front of a sign for a roommate and thought the girl who took you in was salvation. When you constructed her that way, formed your edges around her. I had stood there, head pounding, ribs aching, unsure of everything in my life. I had stood there as no one.
And she had seen something in me, something familiar, something she could take and do with as she pleased. A face in a grainy picture that might belong to me instead.
Her friend, her cousin, in trouble. Who could bring Emmy down as well. A wave of nausea washed over me.
Do you believe in fate? she’d asked me once. She had. Of course she had. I’d turned up in front of her, eight years earlier, exactly what she needed.
A, B, or C, she’d asked. Do you help a friend in need, do you turn them in. All this time I thought she’d been asking where we stood, telling me exactly what we meant to each other. When really she was talking about someone else. A confession of her own.
Was she looking for me that night when I found her again? Why was she in that bar that night? The way she’d brushed up against me so I’d have to notice, making me turn and call, Emmy?
Bethany was someone she had always known.
I was the piece on the outside. A piece she needed. If I gave too much of myself, people would keep taking, Rebecca had said. And they did. They were.
I did not come first for Emmy. Not then, not now.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, WALKING BACK to my car from the library, I took the path from Government Center, the way I used to walk home. And then I went a little farther. Veering off Commonwealth, turning left down the second alley, as I had become accustomed to doing, by habit.
Then I placed my fingers on the familiar brick ledge, the cold seeping to my bones. The light slipping through the curtain. Pulled myself up on my toes to see her shadow.
* * *
THINGS COME BACK AROUND because we go looking for them. That’s why they seem to pop back up over and over, like fate. Emmy running into me in the barroom because she was looking for me. Following me, coordinating the perfect time to pass by that would make me look, make me call out to her—Emmy?
I wondered if she’d been following me before that. Earlier that same night, six months ago, when I’d stood in this very spot.
On my toes, my hand on the concrete windowsill, in the dark. In the dark, nobody could see out, but I could see in. I had watched as Paige picked the baby up out of the high chair, wiped its face, held it on her hip.