The Lost Night (Page 23)

“Look, I really don’t want to sit here and talk shit about Edie. Okay? She apologized way back before all—”

“No, of course not, neither do I. I’m sorry, I…” My ears caught up with me. She apologized? “Wait, you knew?”

“That she was cheating on me? That’s why we broke up.” A beat. “Wait, what were you talking about?”

Everything was alert, my eyes, ears, hands. The fact slid into a waiting slot: one motive, humming away. And if she’d been cheating on him that summer…whose baby had she lost?

Now I definitely couldn’t mention the miscarriage. I rifled around for a red herring. “I was just going to ask about the drugs,” I said. “Sarah told me that the autopsy showed that Edie had Molly in her system, and I don’t remember her ever using anything. So I wanted to ask about that.”

“Oh. Well, shit. Now I feel like an asshole.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “That’s totally not shocking or outside the realm of possibility for me. I knew Edie was sort of…boy crazy.”

“Look, we don’t need to get into this.”

I spotted a new tactic. “You know how Edie and I were fighting a lot that summer? Understanding what went down could help me make sense of that. Make peace with it, even.”

“What, with her cheating? Why would that matter at all? You don’t even know the guy.”

Was it Greg, maybe, Edie’s cool architect ex-boyfriend? How could it be someone I didn’t know, someone none of us knew about?

I let a few seconds drip past, then added a tremor to my voice. “I just want to understand what happened,” I half whispered, “for closure.” It sounded like something from a movie. When had my life knotted into a telenovela? Could I please go back to last Wednesday, when I went to Pilates and then binge-watched canceled television, cranking up the sound so that I could hear it over the air conditioner?

He heaved a big, manly sigh. “She put a stop to it after a few times,” he said, “after I found out. But it was…terrible.”

“How did you find out?” I prodded.

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t.” He let out a bitter little laugh, and I heard a plunk, like he was doing something else now. I sat with that, flipping through everyone I could think of. That building was so big, floor after floor of people tucked into plywood rooms like tchotchkes in a shadow box.

“Also, I didn’t know,” he said, when the quiet grew too large. “About the drugs. I didn’t think she ever used anything, either.”

“Huh.”

Again, the silence fizzed.

“Maybe that helps explain it,” he said. “Why she would kill herself. Because she was on something.”

“Fucked up,” I managed. Chemically, metaphorically, her, this. I didn’t even know how I meant it. Me.

Alex said he’d better “let me go” and mechanically we exchanged pleasantries. Then he hung up and I pictured us both seated in our apartments, peering miserably into the past.

Chapter 7

I looked up at the kitchen window, which faced a brick wall, while the world shifted to make room for this revelation. How had Edie had a secret affair without any of us noticing? I saw her at least a few times a week; the other three lived with her, for Christ’s sake. Then again, she’d been distant as soon as that June, hanging out with the crew less, wandering off on her own more. God, how little I’d known her. I flashed back suddenly to myself in my apartment the night after my big fight with Edie, crying to my kind but distant roommate who’d had no idea what to say, bleating between hiccups that it wasn’t just the things Edie had screamed at me, it was me, my own judgment, shaken to its core. I couldn’t believe I’d trusted her; I’d befriended her with these scales fitted firmly over my eyes.

I poured some seltzer into a juice glass and drank it down. The movements made me feel purposeful: Adult Woman Recaps Bottle and Places It Back in the Fridge. Then I called Tessa and she invited me over, sending a car to pick me up. I called Damien on the way and begged him to walk the few blocks from his place to hers, and he reached her front door just as I was getting out of the car.

In Tessa’s chic, white living room, I stroked Marlon’s soft back and told them everything I’d learned. Damien sipped the rosé he’d brought over. From a leather chair, Tessa listened, making notes on a notepad and nodding, a neat row of her cool geometric letters. Something about her manual note-taking soothed me. So anachronistic, a librarian still in love with physical things, card catalogs and musty books and those checkout slips glued inside the cover, stamped with date after date after date.

“Alex is looking insanely sketchy, right?” I concluded. “Between this and that crazy shit he said out of nowhere on the tape.”

“I still haven’t watched it,” Damien announced, and Tessa rolled her eyes and brought him up to speed.

“He’s the hot one, right?” he added, after taking it all in.

I sighed. “Yes, Damien. And I thought Edie was obsessed with him. So I’m pretty shocked.”

“Seems suspect that he never told anyone, the police or anything,” Tessa said. “Not to mention the fact that he told the cops you came to the concert with him. He and Sarah can’t both be right.”

I nodded. “It’s weird, right? I need to figure out exactly how that went down. It wasn’t gonna happen on the phone.” I rubbed at the spot between my brows. The third eye. “I wonder if I can get him to meet up in person.”

“Good idea. In a public place, obviously.” Tessa tapped the pen cap against her lips. “I mean, whoever did this is probably not going to be very helpful.”

“I know.” If somebody else did this, if this wasn’t me running on a hamster wheel until I concluded it was indeed a regular old suicide, just like I’d always believed.

“Whomever she was sleeping with sounds pretty suspect, too,” she added. “Alex said it ended when he found out? Maybe someone didn’t like that.”

“Maybe. I wish he would’ve told me who it was.”

“Yeah.” She doodled on her page, a slow spiral.

“You know, I’m impressed with how much ass Edie was getting,” Damien said. It was a playful blow dart, and we all laughed. Marlon stirred, disturbed by my shaking torso.

“Right?” I said. “She conquers her building crush and then almost immediately starts sleeping with someone else on the side.”

“Didn’t you say you used to have a building crush, too?” Tessa asked.

I sighed. “No, the guy I was kind of obsessed with didn’t live in Calhoun. And it only culminated in hooking up once but still took over my brain for, like, a year.” The hurt had felt so senseless and embarrassing. This wasn’t a thing, I’d reminded myself over and over. It was like turning around after bowling a gutter ball, hoping to share an exaggerated shrug, only to discover that none of your friends were watching anyway.

“Ooh, what happened?” Damien said. He narrowed his eyes. “Was the sex bad?”

“I mean, yeah, but it wasn’t that. Oh, god. His name was Lloyd, of all things.” Confessing felt like a comfort, an abrupt hook from the horrifying thought of Alex hurting Edie. “I met him on a totally random night in the winter and then built him up in my mind as this Adonis for a few months. Then one night we were at the same party and ended up hooking up. Cue months of me pining over him as he didn’t return my texts, and then cue me waking up on Edie’s couch one morning and her saying, ‘Umm…you gave Lloyd a black eye.’ ” I was blushing, I could feel it, even all these years later. “Apparently I wandered into a party where Lloyd was, presumably made a fool of myself hanging all over him as he, like, casually tried to get rid of me, and then—just as Edie found me, lucky-slash-unlucky me—I guess I tried to playfully hit him with a pillow and somehow my elbow clocked him in the eye.”

A new thought, opening like an umbrella: Had it gone down that way? I’d seen his black eye later, as I refreshed his Facebook profile obsessively. He and I hadn’t spoken again, and I’d avoided the topic with Edie. Maybe she’d lied for my benefit. Maybe I’d confronted him, screamed in his face, thrown an object or an elbow or a punch.

“Serves him right,” Damien announced.

The front door jangled and Will walked in, clearly surprised to see Damien and me. He looked exhausted, and I promised, without prompting, that we’d be leaving soon.

“No, no, you’re always welcome here. I’m going straight to the gym, anyway.” He headed into the hallway.

“Lindsay, you’re welcome to stay in the guest room if you don’t feel like schlepping,” Tessa said once he’d left. “Use it now, before we turn it into a nursery.”

“I’m not invited?” Damien teased.

“Oh, please, you live five minutes away,” she replied.

I laughed. “Nah, I’ll leave you guys alone. Oh, but one other thing: I looked up Calhoun’s landlord,” I said. “Major creeper who had a weird crush on Edie.”