The Lost Night (Page 16)

I couldn’t decide if that was encouraging or depressing.

“And people do?”

“People do what?”

“Find someone whose delusions line up with their own?”

“Apparently people do, Greg. Apparently they do.”

* * *

For a few months, I bumped into Edie here and there, the way denizens of this city always do. At first we made polite conversation, smiles forced, auras tense. Then one day that summer, we saw each other in a grocery store. I was heading up the escalator and one of us would have had to make an effort and I was tired and in a bad mood and so we didn’t. I didn’t have histrionically bad feelings toward her, just tiredness, just a sense that we were no longer worth each other’s time. A few weeks later, while I was at a conference in DC, someone texted me something confusing, so I Googled her and up popped an obituary. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t mention a cause of death and there wasn’t really anyone I could ask; I was out of town during the funeral, too, so I sent her parents a bereavement card and that was that. It’s horrible, of course, sad that she died so young, but it also felt strange and thick and faraway. Someone I loved doesn’t exist anymore. You pretend after a breakup that that person disappears, but in this case she did.

I know that’s what should haunt me the most, but what actually snags my mind from time to time, even all these years later, is how we met, the improbable connection, the perfect How We Met. I don’t understand why the universe wasted the whole scheme on that ephemeral redheaded fairy and a relationship that wasn’t going to work. Maybe we weren’t supposed to speak to each other at all and Craigslist messed with the natural order of things, I think to myself, staring at a wall of gleaming white Greek yogurts. I pull out five because my wife likes to take them to work. Maybe we were a miss from the start.

Chapter 5

LINDSAY

The Flip cam video ended with a freeze-frame of blurriness. I sat stock-still for a few seconds, then felt a curious rise through my torso, neck, and face like a glass being filled with water. A sudden muted hum like dipping your ears underwater. Then another punch of thick nausea.

Because the realization had hit me full force: I was there. After screaming that I wanted her dead, I had visited Edie in her living room the very night of her death. Drunk, murmuring, over-Edie’s-bullshit me, in a rendezvous I had no recollection of whatsoever.

Thoughts like popcorn:

Did I never make it to the concert, then?

What did I say to her?

What did I see?

What did I do?

Maybe she was already dead?

The time stamp. On my screen, I clicked back to the moment I’d opened the door: 11:11 (make a wish!). When had Sarah called the cops? I Googled around a bit before I realized that duh, this was an absurd thing to expect to find. Case files. I needed those case files.

I returned to the video, my stomach whirling. I cued it up to my entrance: navy-blue nail polish on my fingers, the smooth clack of the door opening. I listened over and over to the exclamation I’d made when I looked inside. It was gibberish, “[inaudible]” on a transcript. I listened to it enough times that the distortion eventually organized itself into a nonsensical phrase, namely me chirping “Heavy skies senile?,” and then that was all I could hear.

“Heavy skies senile?” Rewind. “Heavy skies senile?”

Fuck. Fucking brain hearing it wrong, latching onto the wrong words, the wrong interpretation.

Well, and. Fucking brain going totally offline at 11:11 on August 21, 2009.

A surge so sudden that I barely made it to the bathroom in time to vomit, hot tears and snot streaming down my face. When I finally sat back, I leaned my head against the wall and wept, weirdly enjoying the sound of the wet sobs bursting out of my throat. I listened and cried until I heard my phone vibrate in the kitchen. It was Tessa, finally seeing my text about un-deleting videos.

I called her, tears welling again as the phone rang, and I panicked about what I’d say when she picked up. Her “Hey!” was so inappropriately cheerful.

“Tessa, I was there,” I said, my voice wobbling. “I found a video from that night that I’d deleted right after, but in it I go to her apartment and—”

“Slow down, Lindsay, breathe,” she broke in. “I can’t hear anything you’re saying. Are you okay?”

“No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” The sound of my own croaking voice spooked me.

“What’s going on?”

I took a long, quavering breath. “Can you come over?”

A beat. Then: “I’m on my way.”

* * *

I texted Damien, too, but again he didn’t respond. As Tessa sped across the East River, I watched the other videos; they were spastic, twenty-second snippets of drunk postgrads messing around. What was I looking for? In one from July, we passed a joint and discussed what our entrance music would be if we walked out to a song like a pro athlete taking the field. I suggested “Queen Bitch” for Edie and laughed cruelly, and she responded by playing it on her phone and remarking, “Oh, Lindsay, it’s cute when you try to be mean!” A ripple of annoyance. Was that a clue? Was that evidence?

Tessa set her watch to ping mine when she got close, and at the sound I walked to the window and watched her lock up her Citi bike on the street below. Cars whizzed behind her and I pictured it for a moment, a drunk driver careening off the road and onto the sidewalk, Tessa pinned to the bike-share structure from the waist down. My heart sped up at the thought and adrenaline shot through my limbs. I blinked again; she crossed the street and made her way up my stoop, then leaned on the bell. I buzzed the front door and heard it unlatch a few floors below.

I’d sprawled on the sofa. “Don’t you have those keys I gave you?” I asked, dangling a leg off the cushion.

“Somewhere. I didn’t realize getting up to let me in would be the death of you.” She set about making me tea, banged a cupboard.

“Thanks for coming over,” I called. “I hope you weren’t in the middle of anything.”

“It’s fine. Will and I were just watching TV.”

“Oh.” I scooched deeper into the couch and slung my knees over the armrest. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. I’m actually having this internal battle where I don’t want to tell anybody, but I think I’ll go crazy if I do that.”

Tessa carried over a steaming mug. “Just tell me what happened. We’re gonna figure it out.”

I leaned my head back and groaned. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“You said on the phone you were there? Start there.”

But I didn’t start there. I recounted Sarah’s casual admission that she’d questioned Edie’s cause of death, then launched into my call with Kevin, his reveal about a mysterious ER visit and a prescient conversation with Edie earlier that month, right before she died—his conviction that she wasn’t suicidal.

“Okay, that would definitely freak me out,” she said when I paused to rub my face. “But Sarah also course-corrected once she got a little perspective, right? She can’t have been that convinced if she dropped it afterward.”

“That’s true. Everything she mentioned on Monday was really flimsy. I can see why she kinda grew out of it.”

“What was she basing it on?”

I tugged at the teabag’s string. “Like, she mentioned how the gun was in Edie’s right hand, but she was a lefty like you. How she was found in her bra and underwear, that kind of thing.”

Tessa scrunched her nose. “I see why it all feels…alarming when you look at it through a new lens. But, Lindsay, you know that’s not much. And the two people behind this theory were Sarah, who’s rescinded it, and Kevin, who maybe felt motivated to not believe it was suicide since the gun was his.”

Jarring, the way the names popped out of her mouth. Like hearing your cousin call your father “Uncle Mike.”

“You mean so that he’d feel less responsible?”

“Right, exactly. How would you feel if your friend used your gun to kill herself? Maybe it was easier to pin it on some big, bad, anonymous monster, you know?” She picked at a hangnail. “All the adults in the situation, the detectives and her parents and everyone, concluded it was suicide, right?”

“I know, I know.” I pulled in a deep breath. “But there’s another thing. The reason I actually started poking around again is that…well, I think I told you Sarah remembered something differently from the night that Edie died. I have a memory of being up at this concert with her and Alex while Edie…while it happened, and Sarah was like, ‘No, you weren’t there, you’d already gone home.’ ”

“Whoa.”

“I know, it was really weird, she was adamant about it. But of course I was there, I remember it. I was drunk, but not wasted or anything. So I just kinda thought I’d…you know, prove her wrong. Obviously this was an important night to me.”

“But you said on the phone you think you…I couldn’t really understand you.”

I pulled my laptop off the coffee table and cued up the last few seconds of the video. “Watch this.”