The Lost Night (Page 33)

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And it became a story line with a big twist when I came home and Edie’s shorts were covered in blood. Years later, the first time Evelyn had a seizure, as I sat bored and antsy in the hospital waiting room, I thought about that night, how preternaturally calm I’d been in that insane moment of crisis. I don’t believe in God as a big, bearded dude surrounded by winged angels, but I sort of wonder if that night with Edie was the universe testing me, like, Can he handle it? Is he gonna keep his head and take care of her, or is he gonna lose his shit?

And I kept it together, made her tie my black hoodie around her waist to cover the blood, shhh’ed her as she fretted through the boogers and tears about getting her blood all over it, got the name of the hospital out of the all-business paramedic to whom I for some reason wasn’t really a person, showed up in a cab myself a half-hour later and sat politely in the waiting room, headphones blaring, snoozing on and off, occasionally wandering to the front desk to make sure I hadn’t missed her.

When she finally stumbled back into the waiting room, she looked dead; her eyes were glazed and unfocused, fucking freaky, and she stared at me for a moment like I was a stranger, like whatever was happening inside her head was reality and I was part of this TV screen inconveniently stretching across her eyeballs. I waited for her to snap out of it, but after a few seconds I realized it wasn’t gonna happen, so I grabbed her arm and led her through the door, and we stood in the blazing sun as I called the only cab company in my phone.

If it was a test, I’m glad I passed it because now I have Evelyn and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. But Edie. Fucking pity. For two weeks I felt like a hero, all the more noble for being a secret one, and then bang, a bullet took her down, blood pouring out of her like spilled wine a second time in as many weeks.

Not a gun—my gun.

What kind of idiot keeps a sometimes-loaded gun in a huge catacomb of open doors and drugs and booze with drunks wandering in and out like sleepwalkers? How was I such a fucking idiot? There was a feeling of trust, though, one I can remember but can’t bring up, everyone sort of hating but mostly adoring everyone else in this secluded little scene, good people who were trying to make art and putting up with all the grossness of our building and New York City and themselves and one another in order to get there.

I remember a huge snowstorm sidelined the city late in the winter, and through some collective osmosis we all agreed to lock the doors to the outside and open the doors to our apartments and thus began a forty-eight-hour rager, bands jamming and joints passing hands and at one point throwing my body with four other near-strangers against the door to the roof, then running out shrieking and throwing snowballs and making angels in the snow. Someone put together a snowman and stuck a cigarette butt on it as a dick. We were all idiots, hopped up on camaraderie in a mostly scared and scorning outside world. But I was the idiot who owned a gun.

I would lock the trunk, that was my big smart move. That was, I figured, close enough to a gun safe. Only when the gun was loaded, when it was armed and dangerous on August the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st, in the year of our lord 2009, fucker was out just waiting for me to put it away. I spent a lot of time thinking about that the first year, walking through it in my mind frame by frame: how I came home on the 17th and dropped my messenger bag onto my bed where it sat for a few hours; how that evening I got out the pistol and the box of bullets and carried them into the living room, prepared to lock them away; how Edie had been in there on her laptop, had said something when I entered and we’d started to talk; how I’d registered that the trunk was still locked and my keys were back in the room and I’d take care of it later; and that’s when the scene sorta fades.

So many idiotic microdecisions, so many times I could have prevented the whole thing. I like to think there’s an alternate dimension where I locked the gun away, another, happier Kevin out there, hopefully not too different, hopefully still with Glenn and beautiful Evelyn and a nice house and all the stuff I’m grateful for, but also where Edie is alive somewhere, a stylist like she always dreamed of being, putting together beautiful outfits like art.

I replay the day of the ER visit, too, moments of it that clung to my memory like dryer lint, maybe because they held some clues or maybe just ’cause memory’s funny like that. I remember her staring out the window on the cab ride home, like I wasn’t even there, and then saying something so softly the silence hissed and I wasn’t sure she’d said anything at all, and then I whispered, “Huh?” and she turned suddenly and said, “Alex,” again, like it was a statement. I was like, “What about him?” and she said, “Don’t tell him,” and then turned back to the window as the cab scuttled along the street.

How she waited until we were almost at Calhoun’s front door to whisper, “Let’s walk in separately, and please don’t tell anyone,” then turned on her heels and headed down the block. How I thought about following her, watching her thin body recede and knowing I’d do nothing so that distance would make the decision for me. I went inside and took a shower and got ready for work. Alex looked around all curious, no doubt wondering where his new ex-girlfriend had spent the night. No one ever assumed I knew anything.

Two days later I found my hoodie spread out on my bed, newly washed and blood-free. For some reason, imagining Edie in the laundromat, rubbing extra detergent into the stains, was just the saddest fucking thing.

For about a week she acted impressively normal, a bit withdrawn, but everyone still chalked it up to the breakup. So I did my best to be normal, too, goofing off with the group and keeping everybody laughing. It seemed like a fluke that I was the one among us who helped a friend through a miscarriage, such a random, adult problem that just happened to thwack into me like a fly ball.

Then a few days later, I found her smoking on the front steps of the building, watching a little brown bird hop around the tangle of the block’s only tree. I sat down next to her and accepted a cigarette.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” She always had a musical voice, animated like a singer’s.

“What’s that?”

She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “It sucks to die when you’re old, but not that much because you’ve already spent so long on the planet, being human. And it sucks to die as a baby—or even before you’re born—but really not that much because you haven’t had time to, you know, grow attached to shit here. To really get into the whole human-being-on-planet-earth thing.” She tapped a bit of ash off the end. “So the worst thing is a young adult dying, like our age. Because you’ve just woken up to the fact that you’re a person, that you get to be an actual being and you’re not just, like, a little human robot on the conveyor belt your parents pushed you onto when you were little. But you’re not old yet, it’s not like ‘Whew, really lived that up.’ It’d be like—I don’t know—leaving right before the movie gets good.”

We smoked together for a minute. Two girls stepped around us to get into the building, both wearing cutoffs.

I said, “I think the media and whoever else get way dramatic when a young person dies—so much ahead of her, that kind of thing. Like the 27 Club.” I didn’t want to call her out as a cliché, but I also couldn’t ignore that she wasn’t exactly making a new observation.

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Were you thinking about…Did you think something bad was gonna happen at the hospital?”

She rolled her eyes. “Something bad did happen, Kevin.”

“I know, but I mean—like, did you really think you might die?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve been thinking about it more since then, though. And how weird it is that there was another life inside me.” She put her hand on her stomach. “Something that would have grown hair and teeth and worn clothes and gone through the conveyor belt and come out the other side, you know?”

I’d figured we’d never discuss the whole ordeal. I realized that up until that point, I’d only been about 80 percent sure it was even a miscarriage. Some other mysterious lady issue seemed plausible, too.

“But you’re saying maybe it wasn’t as bad for…?”

“This little sac of cells.” She took another drag. “It sucks it died before it could get out there and do anything, but at least it didn’t know what it was missing. Me, I would be so fucking mad if I didn’t get to stay here and do everything. I mean, not that I thought it was a him-or-me situation or anything, it wasn’t like the doctors were standing around going ‘We can operate to save the child, but it’ll endanger your life.’ The thing just up and died. But I guess I could have died. It could have implanted funny and stayed there building up an infection that’d blow me up from the insides. How much would that have sucked?”

I gave a slow, emphatic nod as I sucked on the end of the cigarette. I still wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“I want to fucking do shit. I don’t want to live forever, but I want to go balls-to-the-wall until I’m old and can leave contentedly, you know?”