The Lost Night (Page 18)
“I remember,” Tessa said. “That era, I mean. All these weird aftershocks and this feeling like…” She hesitated.
“Like right after an earthquake, when you’re not actually sure if it’s about to get worse,” I offered.
Tessa nodded.
“You were still in Chicago then, right?” I asked.
She nodded again. We sucked on our chocolate. “I might have asked you this before, but I forget: Why was Kevin keeping a gun in the apartment?”
“Oh, it was awful. The good little Southern boy had this antique pistol from his grandfather that he kept in this chest in the living room—like a steamer trunk? He loved that gun. It didn’t occur to any of us that you can’t just randomly have an unlicensed firearm in New York. It was hardly ever loaded, and he never let us touch it. Apparently he’d gone target shooting in Bucks County the weekend before and just hadn’t dealt with it yet. God, he’ll never forgive himself.”
“Would Edie even be comfortable using it?”
“I dunno. I can’t think why she’d have touched it before.”
Tessa nodded and looked down. I pictured the gun in Edie’s slender hands. Maybe she’d pointed it at herself—or at me—just to fuck with me. It felt like something she’d do.
“I bet she’d never even held a gun before,” I added. “New York City’s not exactly a place where you grow up hunting.” Unlike Bumfuck, Wisconsin. Unlike me. And then the thought blared on, so loud I couldn’t stop it: I would’ve known exactly how to use Kevin’s gun. It would have been the most natural thing in the world. And I knew what an uncontrollable surge of anger could cause me to do. Had I…could I…?
With a crack, Tessa snapped another piece of chocolate from the bar. “So whoever had the gun had to know it was there and get it out of the chest to use it?” she asked.
I took a breath. “I’m, like, ninety-five percent sure it was put away. I mean, the living room wasn’t that big and we were all hanging out there earlier that night, and I certainly don’t remember seeing it. But it could have been out, sure.”
Tessa nodded. Her line of questioning, her certainty that it was someone else and had nothing to do with my friend-breakup fantasies, was giving me some relief, so I followed it, haltingly: “If we limit it to people who knew about the gun and where he kept it, it’s still a ton of people. He wasn’t secretive about it. We were more worried about it getting stolen than anything else. God, we were stupid.”
Tessa smiled sadly. “The age of invincibility,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She considered. “I take it you didn’t find anything helpful in your emails?”
“I don’t even know what I was looking for. Obviously I didn’t find one that was like ‘Hey, Lindsay, good thing I spotted you at the concert and not anywhere near Edie’s apartment on Friday.’ ” I shook my head. “I just don’t know, Tessa. I don’t know what I don’t know. And this goddamn video…it means that whatever I don’t know is a lot bigger than I realized.”
Softly: “Lindsay, I’m sure that whatever you’re worried about…that you said something, or saw something…I’m sure that’s not the case. The odds that everybody had it wrong and you’re just discovering this ten years later, based on this one totally inconclusive thing…” She opened both palms.
“Not everyone,” I countered. “Look at Sarah. Look at Kevin.”
“I hear you,” she said. “But at the same time, this seems like something where there’s no obvious way to get to the bottom of what happened. So if you just want me to listen, I’m here. But if you want my advice, I think you should just walk away. Nobody else is even thinking about this stuff all these years later.”
“If you thought someone had hurt your friend, wouldn’t you want to know?” I couldn’t tell her how much I needed to know, how I wouldn’t be able to live with myself until the truth had come to light. A tear slipped out and I brushed it away. “I’m a fact-checker, Tessa. If I’m grossly incorrect about this formative life event, I’d like to know. Besides, I’ve already requested the case files.”
“I understand.” Tessa leaned down and hugged me awkwardly. “Then I’ll help.”
Chapter 6
The next morning I woke up convinced I was overlooking something, something I’d looked at but not seen, a prickly cocklebur riding along unnoticed. Was it a photo on Facebook? A detail from the videos? I’d sent the August 21 clip to both Tessa and Damien, hoping one of them would notice something I hadn’t. Ugh, both of them listening to my voice, drunk and garbled: “I want to push her off this building!” I squeezed my eyes shut another moment and rolled out of bed.
Lloyd buoyed up in my mind, so I searched for him in my old email database. It didn’t take long to find my email to Edie from April, the day after Lloyd and I had finally hooked up, drunken sex three months in the making on my end and perhaps two hours on his:
E—my head is pounding and my insides all hurt and oh my god let’s never ever drink whiskey again, but I don’t even care because I am seriously walking on air. OH MY GOD. I like him so much it’s embarrassing. I am sitting in my cubicle beaming like an idiot even though I’m super hungover and my hair smells like smoke and I clearly didn’t shower before booking it into work. He is sofa king hot. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, but the short story is: REALLY GOOD. Remind me to tell you his story about the dishwasher. He got my number in the morning and said he’d text and I’m a liiiiittle bit panicking because I haven’t heard from him but I’m sure it’s fine. Gah, did that really all happen last night? I’m not sure I’d believe it if there weren’t witnesses. OMG. SO HOT.
I grinned retroactively at my airheaded tone. I’d seen Lloyd only a couple of times after that magical January night on the rooftop; Alex and Lloyd had had a falling-out shortly after, Edie had told me, one that precluded Alex from directly setting us up. I can’t remember now why I didn’t just take matters into my own hands, since I knew Lloyd personally, since it shouldn’t have been that hard to ask him out for drinks. He didn’t live in Calhoun, so I didn’t bump into him much; maybe he’d been coolly distant (“Oh, we’ve met before?”), and yet I continued crushing, undeterred.
The story of the dishwasher was gone, too, lost to the ages, but I remembered other pieces of that Monday night. Edie and I were hanging out in some strangers’ Calhoun apartment, a weird space with a hammock suspended from the ceiling, so loose that when you sat in it, your body sunk into an L. We were standing around, drinking bad whiskey out of mugs, when Lloyd and another dude walked in. It all felt a little miraculous: that he was there at all, that Alex (Edie’s new official boyfriend and Lloyd’s ex-friend) wasn’t; that Edie, knowing I had a huge crush on the guy, had given him a big wave and then backed away once he jangled over to say hello. I was blushing fire-red, but Lloyd had been friendly, had picked up the conversation. God, I could still remember it now: the mounting excitement as Lloyd didn’t turn away, the delightful realization that every time he took a few steps to refresh his glass or speak to someone else, he came back and rejoined me. That mutual unspoken thrill: This is happening.
I couldn’t recall much about the sex now except for a belated certainty that it was not good; at the time I was so thrilled to be making out, so grateful when someone chose to unwrap my body instead of the body of any of the other women in the room and building and Brooklyn and world. I had a vague memory of him crashing down next to me and falling asleep within seconds of coming, and I lay there smiling into the night, my heart beating fast: He likes me, he likes me, he likes me. Which, of course, made everything that came after all the more upsetting.
* * *
On Sunday, the unlikeliest day for bureaucratic progress, the case files appeared in my inbox, compressed into an attachment like a present ripe for the opening. In a few seconds, I had everything open: the coroner’s report, police notes, incident report, autopsy report—a novel-length pile of information all about my onetime best friend’s death. I checked the total page count: 124 pages, too long to print. So I clicked on whatever came first alphabetically and began reading. It was an autopsy report, dense and clinical:
Autopsy authorized by: Dr. Allan Dennis for New York City
Identified by: Fingerprints and dental comparison
Rigor: Absent
Livor: Purple
Age: 23
Race: White
Sex: Female
Length: 65 inches
Weight: 117 pounds
Eyes: Green
Hair: Red
Body heat: Refrigerated
God, I could practically hear Dr. Dennis bleating off the stats to a lab tech with cool detachment, Edie’s body on a table just like on TV shows. The report described her clothing next: just the polka-dot bra, stained with blood, and the red lacy thong. Such an undignified way to die.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION: This is the unembalmed body of a white female which weighs approximately 117 pounds. and measures 65 inches in height. The physique is ectomorphic. The head hair is red, wavy, and long, measuring approximately 21 inches in greatest length. The irides are green.