The Lost Night (Page 32)

I want to push her off this building, I’d screamed. Suddenly I wanted Damien to delete it, eliminate the record of Alex and me fantasizing about her death. Muffled music swelled from inside the auditorium, and I rested my head on the back of the sofa. “Focus on the last few minutes,” I told him, and he nodded.

* * *

At home, my eyes fell on a stack of glossy photos, piled like a brick on a side table, the old photo albums on the floor underneath. I picked up the snapshots and recognized the image on top: Kevin and Sarah on the subway, next to me and too close, so Kevin’s head was huge. On his other side, Sarah peered over, her mouth distorted a bit: midword.

I realized with a happy spritz that I remembered this day: It was a springtime outing when the five of us—no, four, Alex couldn’t make it for some reason—had made our way upstate from Grand Central, hungover and slow-moving and pausing too long to gaze at the station’s teal ceiling. The plan was to hike the hills around Cold Spring, though none of us had proper footwear. I’d bought two disposable cameras at a bodega that morning, and we’d had no choice but to develop the images.

I smiled as I flicked through them; Edie had had the brilliant idea of turning hiking into a drinking game, and every time someone spotted a trail marker, everyone else had to drink. She never beamed in photos like me, instead turning away or smirking sleepily, always so effortlessly cool. There was a selfie she’d taken of both of us where she was pretending to bite my hair (perhaps the wind had been flopping it onto her face?), and I could still feel the weight of her arm around my shoulders, the thrilling calm of owning half an imaginary BEST FRIENDS necklace.

I paused on one: It was the inevitable shot of our shoes, four pairs on the dirty train’s floor. The others were beat-up, but mine were still shiny new, Keds as white as fresh snow. I could sort of recall the point of these pictures: We were proud of how shabby our shoes got, evidence of all the dirty hipster spelunking we’d done. For a moment I peered at it, feeling the realization coming, a gushing sensation like ice on a frozen river fissuring and running free. Then I lunged at my laptop, pulled up Facebook, and began to search.

There it was, posted September 26, 2009, by a work friend I’d clung to after severing the SAKE crew: another foot shot, my shoes on a picnic blanket with strawberries and baby carrots and chips nearby. My white canvas sneakers were the worse for wear, scuffed and gray. But there were two unmistakable spots on my right toe, each the size of a pencil eraser. Rusty red and permanent.

Panicked, I clicked through more photos of myself, further and further back in time. When had the dots appeared? My stupid shoes were so often cut off, photos from the knee or waist or shoulders up, or most of my body obscured by buzzing throngs of other twentysomethings. Finally, one of me playing on Kevin’s skateboard in McCarren Park, arms out, wobbly terror in my eyes. August 8.

Heartburn rang out in my ribs. Two weeks before Edie’s untimely death, at least, the shoes. They were spotless.

* * *

I woke up to a text from Damien: “Who’s the baddest bitch? I’m the baddest bitch.”

I sent question marks back, but he didn’t answer, so I hightailed it into work and left my office door open for him. He burst in ten minutes past our normal call time, the bastard. He was grinning like the goddamn Cheshire cat.

“So it was surprisingly easy to clean up the audio,” he announced. “I ran it through this filtering app that factors out the effect of a mic being covered by fabric or wrapped up in your hand or whatever. Listen.”

He held his phone out as the familiar footage rolled: a moment’s focus on 4G, my hand opening the door. Then instead of “Heavy skies senile?” I heard my own voice in a surprised little chirrup: a gasp, then “Have you guys seen Alex?”

It took a moment for it to sink in. Damien was still grinning.

“See?” he said. “You didn’t come upon her all alone and goad her into killing herself. Alex, neither. She was already in there with someone else.”

Relief like a shower: Someone else was in the room, not Alex, someone else who must have done this. Someone else who could’ve picked up the gun. Alex was innocent. And my Keds—what a stupid notion—that was chocolate syrup or ketchup or barbecue sauce on them, just as I’d figured at the time.

Then fear buzzed in me: Someone else was in the room. Someone who may have killed Edie and gotten away with it. And he could very well know that I’d been poking around in the past.

I stared at the final frame, a blur of brown and black as I’d hit the button to stop recording.

Someone else was in the room when Edie died.

Chapter 10

KEVIN

When I was in my early twenties, things were pretty fucking good, and I knew it. Not great—I was aware of the big list of wants hovering on the other side of the greener-grass hedge, how cool it’d be to have more sex, more money, another six inches or so in height and wingspan, that kind of thing. But shit was pretty good. I had a cheap roof over my head, space for the entire drum kit, and not a soul in the building who’d complain if I got the urge to play at one in the morning, two o’clock, three o’clock (rock); a buddy, Alex, who was good at guitar and willing to jam with me pretty much whenever I wanted; girl roommates who were always finding fun shit for us to do on weekends, apple picking and weird-ass art exhibits and outdoor shows and whatnot; a stupid but manageable job making mochas and cleaning espresso machines with other equally bleary-eyed friends at a coffee shop within walking distance of my place.

And this was back when basically nobody had a job, hiring freezes and mass layoffs all over the place like avalanches, like those videos of huge chunks of what looks like a mountain breaking off and speeding toward hell. That’s what it felt like, everything around us dropping with insane speed while I stood in the middle of my happy snow globe with shit whiskey and cool people and a few dollars and my drumsticks. Maybe not everyone appreciated it, but I knew we had it good.

So I guess I was pretty cheerful because I was on to that, and maybe in some subconscious way I was trying to convey that to everyone else, too: Dude, stop shitting on everything and come listen to this new album with me, it’s pretty good. Everyone was so negative all the time and I thought it was so funny, so affected. Rolling their eyes and hoisting up their noses at Murray Hill bros and Ugg-clad girls and popular songs and clueless parents and med-school-attending high school friends and themselves, hate hate hate hate. That was how it felt, like Duck, Duck, Goose only when they got to themselves they looked surprised and whispered “Duck!” too.

I remember once my roommate Sarah came home all upset because a guy on a packed subway had called her a “hipster bitch” after they got snappish about fitting through a door or something. She was all morose and finally our friend Lindsay asked what was up and when Sarah told us, Lindsay was so outraged and sympathetic, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Remember that word, “hipster”? It was the oddest thing, slippery as an eel, meant as a compliment when some out-members used it (like the New York Times speaking breathlessly about a new “hipster art installation”), but as an insult when certain out-members (see: the subway asshole) and even in-members (see: anyone dumb enough to utter the word inside Calhoun) used it. There were silly Tumblrs about it, stupid books picking the so-called “subculture” apart. We all wanted to naturally, effortlessly be hipsters without anyone calling us hipsters, we wanted to be the definition set forth by the supremely uncool editors of the Style section, but we would sooner die than let anyone know that, and also who the fuck cares what those losers at the Times think is cool? The fuck do they know about coolness? God, it was so funny then and it’s hilarious now.

So basically I just liked reminding everyone that yeah, ludicrous shit was going down and our parents’ net worth was plummeting, but we were doing just fine, the kids are all right, and so much is so funny if you know where to look. And I think Edie liked that, saw a bit of a kindred spirit, because she was amused, too, she was confident and gave zero fucks. I really didn’t know her that well when she first moved in with Alex and me that spring, had seen her around the building a bit, had the occasional beer with her in a Calhoun hallway or open-door living room. Alex seemed to like her a lot and when two rooms in our apartment opened up, the weird hippie chick from Portland and the mustachioed bro from Minnesota suddenly deciding to split, Alex seemed pretty thrilled about Edie moving in. Smiling to himself as he wandered toward the bathroom, that kinda thing. And it seemed like they were being smart about it, her still having her own separate room so they’d still have solo space. See? Shit’s not all bad.

* * *

It blows me away to think that Edie moved in in April and was dead by Labor Day. It felt like so much time. What was it about that era that slowed down the clocks and made every month feel brimming and eclectic like my steamer trunk in the living room? It reminds me of camp: Mom sent me one summer when I was nine or ten, and when I learned from her years later that the whole thing had been only three weeks long, I was blown away. Because so fucking much had happened, I was sure it had been the whole summer: best friends, alliances, enemies, crushes, breakups, entire operatic narratives compressed into twenty-one days. That’s how Calhoun felt, each week its own ginormous plotline.