I often imagine what he thought of me the first time we met. The first time we were in the same room, I wondered if he faltered in his plan. I wondered if he felt remorse looking at me. The first time, I didn’t notice him. But he was that kind of guy. A visible man forgotten if you glanced away too long. He had a way of staying seen, though.

It took almost three years for him to expose what he was to me. I used to glare into the darkness from the guilt. The part of me that always regretted vanishing in the middle of the night. I regretted the note I scribbled in anger. After he left, I wanted to scream because I tried to hate him and couldn’t find the toxin in me.

When he was sitting across the table and I came in, did he start to care or did he form his idea? I will always question if I was just his revenge. Was that all in his head when he came in our lives?

The first time I met Jeremy, my hair was to my waist, my dad had left, and my sister didn’t care. When I walked into my house, rambling about the weekend, I saw him from the corner. I was setting my bags on to the couch and over in the dining room, where my dad used to sit, was a different man. This was a moment I remember pausing. Frozen as time ticked on.

For a second I thought I recognized him as another police officer. Maybe I had seen him somewhere. I thought I was supposed to know him. But as I stared at him, seeing the oddities in his face, my mom rose from her place next to him to introduce us. She had seemed wary but that’s because she knew who he was. Who he was married to.

The memories of Jeremy have scorched a part of my mind but not as much as the moment I met him and the one where his suitcase hit the kitchen floor. These still smoke. Before I knew him, which I discovered in our last few months, our first encounter was nothing special. It used to be silly, maybe fond. But after, when I heard what he really thought, I picked it apart.

I could never see him as a man thinking about this poor little girl with a torn family he wanted to help like I once did. Because that’s not what he felt. After everything, he was nothing but a person of damage. If he had any true feelings, they came after and they came too late. 

My mom came to me then, in our first meeting, sullen and worn. She gave a simple introduction.
“This is Jeremy,” she talked lightly and turned to him,” and this is one of my daughters, Brandi.”
I still didn’t know him but I realized he wasn’t a cop. My grandparents sat at the table too. They were all eating dinner. Something my mom had made.

Jeremy had a clean and broad face and his hair was a short brown. He was a plain man. He was smiling and he stared at me as I stared back. But I looked away to talk to my mom.

I didn’t eat dinner with them because I already had at a friend’s. So I went upstairs to my mom’s room. The entire time the tv hummed from the noise, I was very conscious of our visitor. I didn’t know why he was there and didn’t find out until a few days later. The day I found the emails. That’s why he was at my house eating my mom’s cooking.
Jeremy had pulled the emails from his computer and printed them out for my mom. His wife had thought they were gone. The day I read them I found a certain numbness. I was neither sad or angry at my father for what he wrote to the other woman. To Jeremy’s wife. I had found a solitude in statute.

But Jeremy made that better. When we weren’t going to have a Christmas he was there, when mom couldn’t pay the house bills, he was there, and after awhile, when I had lost my father figure for a time, he was there.  In one of the worst moments my life, he stepped up to help.

He was there then, laughing in my dining room as I pretended to occupy myself with a cartoon. For three years he was there. And then he wasn’t. Then, he said all he could in a horrible string of words to stay gone.

My mom, who did love him, could not be with him. So we were going to move out of his house. We had moved into his house the summer after the divorce, nearly a year after I met the man at the table, because we had no where to go, and as I said, he was there.

The real Jeremy, the one I only overheard, did not like that. Or, I imagine he didn’t. I never really found out who Real Jeremy was. All I did know, was that he liked control. He liked the idea that he “won” us. My dad may have got his wife but he got his entire family. And I only know this through subtle remarks. Jeremy was excellent at concealing. It was his most prominent skill.

He could be kind and caring and the most open and fun person. He could be all of them. These were the elusion. And he was these things at first. But there were miniscule details about him that warranted suspicion.

To save himself, he left before we could. After tense weeks and a vicious fight in the basement, his boots pounded heavy up the stairs for the last time.

His words were nothing but a knife and when he was fully unleashed he stabbed and gutted. He said awful things to my mother that night. One thing he deadpanned, I’ll never understand.

“ I understand why Johnny left you.”

A part of my admiration had been severed, brutally, for him. It’s the first I heard from under the mask. A flash of everything came then. His chaotic laugh, the swords he kept on the wall, the surprise pranks, the trip to Maryland, and the pudding he made from scratch. All fake. 

A suitcase echo, an unrequited hug, and a quiet door click later and then he was gone. The fake and real all twisted together and running away. In some way, Jeremy arrived and left as a stranger. I came home one day as a kid and my dad was gone, but I had to watch Jeremy leave. Another thing I can’t forgive him for. He knew leaving like that would only scar. That’s why I think he did it.

I creeped cautiously to the basement where my mom was broken. When I saw her, the cuts were all over.

Everything Jeremy yelled wounded her. He knew that.

It wasn’t supposed to end so dramatic or in gashes. It was supposed to be a peaceful separation. A time for my mom, sister, and I to have a place of our own. We hadn’t had one in years. For whatever reason, the man under the mask hated this. I could never have imagined, never, that he could be cruel to us. I was wrong and tricked. Like most people were with Jeremy.

We were still in his house weeks later, which haunted my mother. He dropped by occasionally, drove by a few times too. He might have been gone, but since we were still in his house, he had some control. We hadn’t left his grasp yet.

One day after school, my mom came to get me. She was rushed and exasperated. Jeremy had come back to the house. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. When we got there, I didn’t look at him. I just passed through the kitchen to the basement to hide. I clung to the chilled cement. It kept me stable. It’s what I was good at; hiding.

I listened to my mom and him fight. He had the upper hand. He left first. It steamed my blood to think about him smug about that.

“ I’m not her father. She’s just a friend,” I heard him say it and it ruined me to hear it. After that, I didn’t want to be apart of my friend’s life any longer.

Maybe a day or two later I told my mom we had to leave. She wasn’t in any state to think correctly. She, in a smaller form, reverted back to when my father left.

On a random day with the help of a few friends, we packed up all of our stuff in a night and drove back to where it all started. I left a note for him, one I hoped would cut, on his desk. I’ve heard from someone since then he put it on his fridge. Which infuriated me. I couldn’t understand him.

It’s stuff like that, the small actions and great memories I had of him, that instilled the guilt in me. I used to think there was just one Jeremy. But now I am enlightened. There are two, really. When he was with us, I think the fake one started to shift. Maybe a third was becoming. I do think he loved us after a time even if everything started out false.

There were too many cupcake fights and late nights where he helped me with my stories for us to be nothing but his revenge. Or maybe I’m an optimist. But that’s the thing. I’ll never know because I didn’t know Jeremy or which part of him began to care. And two years later he is still that annoying enigma.

When I think about him now, I don’t see the Jeremy I came to care about. I see the one I’ll never understand. I see the Jeremy, with thoughts I can’t know, smiling at the table where my dad used to sit in our first paralyzing moment.