The Lost Night (Page 34)

“I hear you. That’s awesome. You should fucking do stuff, Edie. You’re smart as hell.”

“Thanks.” She crushed the cigarette butt and wrapped her arms around her knees, all freckles and bones. And that was that.

It was the only time we ever talked about her miscarriage, ever acknowledged it head-on. She was dead a few days after that, sprawled on our floor amid a beehive of accusations that she’d been depressed, erratic, contemplating taking her own life for days or weeks or months. It was bullshit, such bullshit. Homegirl wasn’t suicidal. Homegirl wasn’t going anywhere. Edie sucked a funnel of smoke into her lungs and felt fucking alive, dizzy with everything she had to get done before she got old enough to exhale, a long, contented sigh, tired but happy with all that she’d pulled off.

Chapter 11

LINDSAY

Damien’s smile melted as he watched me react. “Not the relief I was expecting,” he said.

An urgent command from somewhere deep: Lie. “I am relieved. Oh my god, it’s like a four-hundred-pound sandbag was just lifted off my shoulders. I was just so surprised I…I froze up. I really didn’t think you’d find anything.” I pictured SAKE and swapped in suspects next to Edie like paper dolls: Was Sarah in the room? Anthony? Kevin, somehow? My stomach clenched: Had I seen Edie with Lloyd?

Damien shrugged. “It wasn’t hard,” he said. “I was just excited to find something that would burst your bubble on the whole theory that you or Alex went in alone and picked a fight or whatever. Right?”

“Absolutely.” I pressed my hand on his arm. “Wow, this really changes things. Was there anything else in the video?”

“Not really, no. The footage of you guys at the beginning—you were on a roof, right?—it was about as clear as it was gonna get. There’s a little conversation with your friend, just her deciding to go to a party. But that’s it. You were movin’ around like a ninja.” He swept both hands into a fighting stance, and I giggled for his benefit.

“Thanks so much for doing that, Damien. This is…that’s a game-changer.”

“De rien, de rien.” He grabbed his phone and tapped at it. “There, I just sent you instructions on viewing it. Now please tell me you’re gonna let this go. Tessa is worried you’re getting all OCD about it.” He kept tapping at his phone, so he missed my hurt expression. Then he frowned and leaned in closer to the screen. My chest froze over.

“What is it?”

“You aren’t gonna believe this,” he said, still staring.

“What? Tell me!”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “The cops found my pornography book.”

I plopped into my chair. “I thought it was erotica?”

“Turns out somebody dropped it in a library return box, of all things. With the plastic wrap still on. Look!”

He turned the screen to show me a washed-out cell-phone photo of a book on a white desk. The cover displayed nothing but four letters—PEEK—and a picture of an erect penis. In grayscale.

He flipped his phone back around and smiled at it lovingly. “Talk about a hardcover, am I right?”

“I’m very happy for you and your penis.” I turned back to my computer.

“I am having a hell of a day,” he said. “I better buy a lotto ticket.”

“When you win, don’t forget us little people!” I called as he headed for his office. Wow, the cops accomplishing something. Unlike the useless detectives who’d investigated Edie’s death.

I logged into the video-filtering app Damien had sent me and listened until I found the conversation with Sarah. “Tiny fight,” she’d called it. Four minutes after I’d tossed the Flip cam into my purse and we’d all presumably headed inside.

“I’m gonna go,” my voice announced. The words tumbled together: “Hominago.”

“You’re not coming to the show?” Sarah, sounding cross.

A beat. “I gotta go home.”

“Ugh, nobody ever wants to do anything fun anymore.”

My voice rose in confused indignation: “Fuck you, I’m fun.”

“Just go.”

I had to listen to it twice to make out what I’d said next: “What about Edie?”

“Forget it. Just go then. Are you taking a cab?”

“Yeah, I’ll get one. I’m fine.”

Another pause, some fumbling, then my voice again: “What about Kevin?”

“Just go home, Linds.”

“Whatever.”

The sound of stomping; no additional dialogue. The conversation made me uncomfortable: Sarah’s sudden animosity, my own disgruntled curse. Sarah had tended to grow annoyed when others got drunk and fumbly, that much I recalled.

I listened to it again. What about Edie and Kevin? Was I simply suggesting other people she could hang out with, forgetting in my fog that Kevin had left for Greenpoint? Where had Alex gone? And was there something more to Sarah’s Forget it. Just go at the mention of Edie?

An editor dropped in to discuss a story, and I quickly closed out of the app. I wouldn’t share it with Tessa. I wouldn’t share it with anybody.

* * *

Over the next few days, Damien didn’t mention the video again, and I did my best not to think about it, occasionally waylaid by the hard-brake feeling of it wafting into my consciousness. Then everything would speed up, a sense of not knowing, of wanting to know so fucking hard I could scream, stomp, pound my fists against God’s chest.

One evening, as I was leaving the office, I paused at a window on my way to the elevator; the world was darkening sooner, summer tipping into fall. Twentysome floors below, people were just visible picking their way across streets and sidewalks.

Thoughts swarmed every which way, directionless. Whose baby was Edie pregnant with? Was she planning to keep it? Why didn’t she tell anyone but Kevin? Why didn’t Kevin tell anyone? Why was fucking everyone near 4G that fateful evening—Lloyd to comfort Edie by Calhoun’s front doors, Edie’s mom to deliver bad news, Sarah and presumably Alex to see a band just a few floors up?

I leaned my forehead on the glass and closed my eyes. And me, cruising straight to SAKE to force a friend breakup.

And now there was a new thought, humming underneath like a pipe organ’s deepest note. Now that I knew Alex hadn’t been there, now that all I was left with was my own drunken self calling “She’s a fucking bitch!” into the night sky. What the hell had gone on in there?

When I got out of the building, I turned left instead of right. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was walking until I saw the pier in the distance, jutting out over the water near the massive heliport, where copters thrummed and floated like gigantic dragonflies. Of course. I’d take the East River ferry to Williamsburg, a route that hadn’t even existed when we’d lived in the area. I climbed to the upper deck and looked east, feeling small and dazzled by the glittering skyscrapers along Brooklyn’s shore. So much silver and glass now, propped up like dominoes in the evening light. The ferry pulled into the South Williamsburg landing, and I clambered off between two condos and disappeared into the neighborhood I once knew.

At first glance, it wasn’t so different: town houses and old churches and drinking establishments on so many first floors, but with names I didn’t recognize. I turned onto Kent and rooted around for an overlay of what this street had looked like in my time—crummy semilegal concert venues, cheap apartments, grassed-over lots with graffiti on the particleboard fences enclosing them. Now, good-looking, well-dressed young professionals swarmed out of the office buildings and into the waterfront condos.

Around the corner, I froze at the sight of Mugger’s, one of our old haunts, my heart suddenly clanging, afraid that—what?—I’d open the door and find Alex and Kevin and Sarah and Edie in the corner, big-eyed and brazen under a garland of tacked-up Christmas lights? I went in, and the familiar smell, beer and sweat and old beat-up walls, hit me like a sound wave. One night we’d co-opted the casual karaoke in the back room here, signing one another up for increasingly ridiculous songs: Alex covering TLC, Sarah on Alice Cooper. Someone put me down for a Talking Heads song that apparently everyone knew but me, and when I’d started to look miserable, Edie had jumped onstage with me, sharing the mic and pulling me into crazy dance moves and turning the whole thing into a not-mortifying experience. I could still remember the high-pitched thrill of that night, playing what Kevin had dubbed karaoke roulette, freezing at the end of every song to see if my name was up next.

I sat at the bar and ordered a ginger ale. A couple walked in and picked a booth near the door, her thin and long-haired with epic eyeliner, him bearded and broad and confident. They looked so nonchalant about each other, so unimpressed that they’d found a partner, and I watched them for a little too long.

“You just getting off work?” The bartender was drying glasses with a towel, a cute, short guy in a sweater despite the heat.

“That’s right. Taking a walk down memory lane, actually.”

“Oh, did you used to come here a lot?”

“A very long time ago. It looks pretty much the same, though.”

He nodded easily and leaned against the counter. The door screeched open behind me and my heart froze up: For one moment I knew, absolutely knew, that Edie was walking into the bar. Why was I so afraid of her, still?