The Lost Night (Page 29)

“Come on, Lindsay.”

“I wanna know! You don’t think we always wondered why you guys broke up? You were so weirdly secretive about it!”

“Cool, so you guys were just talking about us all the time.”

We’d regressed; we were bitchy twentysomethings again.

“Well, I think it matters! We were worried about you two. And nobody would tell us what the fuck was going on.”

“Well, maybe it was nobody’s fucking business!”

“But it was! We were all in that apartment together—”

“You didn’t even live there!”

He’d struck a tuning fork and I let it ring out. The sting crept into my eyes and I willed them to fill with tears; one hard blink and a drop slipped down my cheek.

“Look, Lindsay, I—”

“No, it’s fine.” I smeared it with my palm.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just…not fun to talk about.”

Why, because you killed her? “I get it. It’s hard for me, too. Especially because we…she and I were fighting. So even up until the end, I didn’t have the warmest feelings.”

An endless second as I waited to see if he’d take the bait: Me too, it was so hard to go on living together…“Yeah, that sucks,” he said finally.

Ugh. “Sarah brought up how Edie was kind of…disengaging from everyone that summer,” I offered. Like you, you idiot. I caught you on film saying you wanted to slit her throat.

“I mean, we’d just broken up.”

“I know. That must have been so hard deciding to stay friends and roommates and everything.”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

I refilled his glass and put a palm on his forearm, summoning my most earnest, empathetic face. “I’m really, really sorry about Edie and Lloyd,” I said.

“Yeah, it was bad.” I waited for him to go on. “And I found out in the worst way possible.”

He froze long enough that I murmured, “You can tell me.”

He stared at my fingers, then slowly turned over his wrist. He slid his elbow back a few inches until our palms touched; my whole arm lit up and I willed myself to focus.

“We were sorta having some trouble anyway,” he said, “fighting all the time and trying to fix it in the stupidest way possible. And she decided to stay at her parents’ place because they were out of town. I was going to go over and surprise her, bring flowers, right? I mean…I was really into her.” I nodded him on. “I called her as I was walking over from the subway, pretending I was still in Bushwick, and she picked up and sounded normal, said she was watching a movie or whatever. Then the doorman let me upstairs and I got to their door, and for some crazy reason it wasn’t locked and I followed the noise to the bedroom, and…yeah, you can’t fucking unsee that.”

I remembered research discussed in my human sexuality class in college, how for a woman learning a partner’s deeply in love with someone else is the most painful thing imaginable, but for a man, sexual infidelity—another person’s body where his once was—is impossibly hurtful. Infuriating. Crazy-making.

“Wow, I’m so sorry,” I said. Then: “How on earth did you keep living together after that?”

“It was pretty idiotic in retrospect,” he said. “They saw me storm out, and she stayed at her parents’ for a few days, calling me nonstop to cry and apologize and say how important I was to her.” He shrugged. “I felt bad. And I still loved her. And she had so much shitty stuff going on with her parents and school and everything. So I guess it felt like breaking up but not kicking her out was, like, the adultest thing to do.”

Slowly, slowly, our fingers were moving until they interlocked. He had such nice hands, strong fingers with neat fingernails.

“Why didn’t you move out?” I asked.

He stared. “It was my apartment,” he said simply, like it was obvious that a king couldn’t be cast from his castle. What’s the word? Abdicate.

“What was it like living together after that?”

“Oh, fine. Obviously sort of uncomfortable, but fine.”

Except for the repressed rage, the kind that came out in front of a camcorder the night of Edie’s murder.

“So you forgave her? That’s amazing. I don’t know if I could have done that.”

He shrugged.

“I guess I’m, like, extra-obsessed because I don’t remember her last night very well.” I stared at the purple ring beneath my wineglass, a stenciled splotch.

“You were pretty wasted, right?”

I nodded. “For a long time I really hated myself for it,” I said softly, adding a tremor. I willed my eyes to fill up with tears again, and slowly, they obliged. “Here was this pivotal night and I wasn’t there for her, I wasn’t…It was like I wasn’t there.”

I peeked up at him: He had that wild male look in his eyes, the expression men get when a woman is crying and they’ll lop off their own hand with a scythe if it’ll make the female freak-out stop.

“It was…Lindsay, you know you didn’t miss anything. It was just a normal night, until it was…I mean, the most horrible night imaginable.”

I pulled my fingers out from his and ran my knuckles against my tears. “I don’t even remember being at the concert with you guys,” I went on. False: I could see and hear and feel it now, a memory richer than real life. “I don’t even know what we talked about or how everything went down. And I couldn’t ask anyone because I’d seem like a crazy person, trying to make it about me.”

“Lindsay. You know it’s…you shouldn’t feel that way.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t planning to bring any of this up,” I lied. “I guess I’ve just had this…this preoccupation lately of wanting to piece together what happened. Where everybody was, what we were all doing, when we—when I—last saw her. That way I could…well, I’d know, and I could stop wondering.”

He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “Shit, Lindsay. You really want to know?”

I nodded.

“It’s exactly what you already know. Edie was avoiding us. Kevin left to go play a show and the rest of us took a bunch of shots—gin or something, something bad—and headed to the show. You got surprisingly drunk, so you said you were gonna go home.”

“So I did go to the concert?”

“Yeah.” He frowned. “As far as I can remember. You were there, right? Or did you leave right before?”

“I’m not sure, which is creepy. I know I was out front and a random girl called a car for me.” I shook my head. “If only there were some way I could just go back and look, you know? Something that could tell me what happened.” Would he bring up the camera? Did he even remember it?

He put on his man-laying-out-the-truth voice. “Lindsay, there was nothing any of us did or didn’t do that led to Edie’s suicide. It doesn’t work like that. It sucks, and I know we all wish things had gone down differently, but it just is what it is. She was clearly a very troubled girl.”

So faraway, another cheesy line from a movie. Again, I tried it on: About two months after the breakup, could Alex have walked over to Kevin’s open chest, picked up the weapon, and pulled the trigger? Dropped it in his panic and tapped out some semblance of a suicide note? Absurd. But there had been no signs of a struggle, just Edie in her underwear, high on ecstasy and still frozen—in Alex’s mind—midcoitus with Lloyd.

How well does anyone really know their friends? Edie was proof that the answer is: not well at all.

I let the conversation veer back into normalcy, tapering off the sniffles and throwing in a few snappy jokes to prove everything was all right. He kissed my cheek as we hugged good night, and then we headed in opposite ways in the dank post-rain night.

* * *

As soon as I got home, I poured La Croix over a pile of ice cubes and called Tessa, omitting the detail that stuck out like a blinking light: our fingers, interwoven.

“God. As if he weren’t looking sketchy enough already,” she said, after I brought her up to speed. “Means, motive, and opportunity, right?”

“I know.” I sank into my couch. “God, I really don’t want it to be him. I’ve always liked him, you know? And I always thought it was so noble that he and Edie kept living together after the breakup. Which is ironic, I guess, if that’s what put him over the edge.”

“I’m worried about you,” she said. “If he really did this and he thinks you’re getting close to figuring it out…”

Alex wouldn’t hurt me, right? I stood up and slid the curtains closed. “It’s not like I could go to the police right now. I have no proof.”

“I know. But…maybe it’s time to cool it on pressing him. He knows you met with Sarah, who was the first person to suspect that Edie was murdered, right? And now you get in touch all full of questions…”

She was right, but I told my thousandth lie of the day. “I’m fine. You don’t need to worry about me.”

We’d said good night and were about to hang up when I blurted it out: “Is everything okay?”