The Lost Night (Page 35)

Instead, two bros sauntered in, making too much noise, monkeys hooting.

“You all right?” the bartender asked, smiling. He’d seen me jump. I laughed and assented, but the thought hit me: What the fuck am I doing here?

Suddenly I was old, exposed, the sad, single woman drinking alone among the children. Abruptly, I pictured my parents, and in piped the diatribe I sometimes find myself spitting into the silence: You were afraid of me, but I should have been afraid of you. If you’d been braver, maybe I’d have grown out of it. Maybe my brain could have matured, the unbridled blossoming everyone else’s neurons seem to enjoy. Maybe I wouldn’t have these black, gaping bullet holes in my own memory. Maybe I could have grown up like everyone else managed to do.

I glanced up and realized the bartender was looking at me; I’d been almost talking to myself, my expression curled into a mask of anger. I flashed him a smile and swept myself outside, gulping in the twilight air. I turned in the direction of the subway; a cab rounded the corner and I nearly stuck my arm out.

But I was so close to Calhoun now, just a few more bends, and I realized I’d hazily imagined myself getting inside—seeing if traversing those old, dark passageways would stir up anything useful. Maybe I’d try the walk from the rooftop to 4G to see just how far I’d drunkenly stumbled to SAKE. I crossed the overpass and glanced down at the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, clogged with cars. The heat was thick, sticky, changing form and coalescing into the cicadas’ hum.

I turned a corner and stood stunned for a moment: What the fuck was this? In place of Calhoun Lofts were two ugly buildings, all green glass and white molding. I took a few steps forward and craned my neck, as if these buildings were just a front and my home-away-from-home was hiding back there, obscured from view.

So it was gone. How had I missed this in my research? I pictured the demolition, a wrecking ball tumbling the cinder blocks in slow motion, a crane pawing at the foundation like a curious dog. I imagined the door to 4G buckling and then collapsing like cardboard; I saw the cubbylike bedrooms crumbling one by one. It was gone. The last clinging particles of Edie’s blood wiped totally clean. I felt something complicated in my chest, grief and dismay and relief and horror twisting around like fingers in a fist.

The front door to one of the buildings swung open and out popped a middle-aged woman carrying a small fluffy dog, which she set on the sidewalk. She bent to fix its collar and then jumped back—the thing was already peeing, splashing onto the cement directly in front of the glass doors. I turned away and called myself a cab; even as I waited, I felt a drowsy relief in entering my address.

In the taxi, I leaned my head against the backseat and cracked open the window. Outside, an endless scroll of bodegas and nail salons and cheap clothing stores unfurled. After a moment, my phone buzzed in my purse and I pulled it out to see, with a little jolt, a text from Josh: “Did you work on this?”

I clicked on the link he’d included: a Sir feature on a secretive Silicon Valley lab that claimed its user-friendly CAD program would revolutionize—nay, democratize—design.

“Someone on my team did,” I wrote. “Why?”

A thumbs-up. Then: “People were talking about it at the office today.”

“Nice. I think it’s kinda bullshit, tho. All hype like when the Segway debuted.”

A split second after hitting send, I realized he was too young to remember the Segway hoopla: mounting excitement over an invention that promised to transform transportation and then—splat.

After a few more blocks, I tried again: “How’s work otherwise?”

He didn’t reply. Didn’t even cue up the little bubble that meant he was typing. With a rinse of embarrassment, I turned off the screen and slipped the phone back into my bag.

* * *

At home, I stared at my laptop for a moment before giving in and searching through old news for Calhoun’s death sentence. It’d been sold to a developer and torn down in early 2017. The Google News search had brought up other stories, too, and I remembered why the space we’d adored had always had a sinister vibe to outsiders: the confusing junctions, exposed pipes, scuffed-up walls and wood, and eternal carpet of beer bottles and cigarette butts. I clicked on a story from 2012: EXPLOSION ROCKS BUSHWICK APARTMENT BUILDING. Anthony Stiles had been refurbishing the lofts one by one to justify a massive rent hike, and some idiot contractors had coated the floor in sealant and left it unattended to saturate. When the vapor reached the pilot light of the unit’s stove, kaboom. No one had died, but someone on the street had been hurt when the windows blew out.

Anthony had died before Calhoun was sold, and apartment and condo listings from the shiny new development sprinkled the internet. Most included a photo of the entryway as I’d seen it, white walls and green glass.

I thought again of Mrs. Iredale, bloodless and storm-eyed, standing with Edie right on that same patch of sidewalk. Ten years ago, on a Friday evening, she’d traveled all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie that her childhood home had been foreclosed and that they’d no longer be paying her grad-school tuition. Edie’s classes were surely about to start, far too late to apply for financial aid. That must have been disconcerting, destabilizing for Edie. And instead of reaching out to any of us, she’d contacted Lloyd for comfort.

Lloyd. My fact-checker light blinked on: Mrs. Iredale had dropped something verifiable, the kind of fact that—were it in a magazine story—I’d need to confirm before the issue could go to press. “He was photographing a concert that night,” she’d said, back when I was still trying to figure out who the fuck Roy was, “and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”

It didn’t take long to find the album archived on an event photography site: the band Man Man at Webster Hall, dozens of shots of the hairy musicians adorned in colorful hats and thick cloaks of sweat. There were photos of the after-party, too, cigarettes and whiskey drinks and cool, overexposed moments of candor. Lloyd had a photo credit on each one and the time stamps put him at the show at Edie’s time of death.

Of course, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t in a single one.

I made a valiant but doomed attempt to find audience members’ photos of that very show, in case Lloyd was visible onstage, but it was just too long ago, a time when files were organized and tagged so haphazardly. Instagram didn’t exist; Twitter didn’t let you post images. Fuck. I pressed my knuckles into my temples, fighting down a headache, then returned to the keyboard and searched hard for Lloyd himself.

Lloyd Kohler—not an especially common name, but after 2010, the man became a goddamn digital ghost. No website, no number, no email, not even a city. Just a smattering of forgotten photos, saturated and archaic, credited to him and hosted on other companies’ sites. Maybe he’d wiped his digital identity clean, like Tessa was always telling me to do—technological and informed and afraid of everything the government had on us. Or maybe he was just an off-the-grid hippie these days. Both seemed equally plausible.

I padded into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. Stories are like mazes, an early boss had told me. When you hit a dead end, you just turn around and try another way.

Alex picked up his cell on the second ring.

“Hello?” He sounded as eager as I felt.

“It’s Lindsay again,” I said. Then when he didn’t answer: “Lindsay Bach.”

“Oh, hi! I’m sorry, I don’t have you in my phone and I thought it was…We made an offer on a place in Sleepy Hollow, and the home inspector was supposed to—”

“I just needed to ask you something,” I blurted out, afraid he’d rush me off the phone. “It’s about Lloyd. I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to talk about him, but it’s important.”

“Lloyd? Lindsay—”

“I know you guys fought. I know you had a big blowout. But do you know if he and Edie ever fought?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re the only one who knows,” I said, my voice taut, “we’re the only ones who know about them, so you’re the only one I can ask.”

“Lindsay, what’s going on? You don’t sound right.”

“He was with her, Alex,” I said. “The night she died. She talked to her mom and then out walked Lloyd to take her away. They were still seeing each other.” The long silence crackled. “I’m sorry.”

“You know this how?”

“Um…anonymous tip,” I said lightly.

“No, if you and I are the only ones who know, who told you? Did you talk to him?”

“Should I not have? Is he dangerous?”

“Lindsay, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Is he? Is Lloyd dangerous?”

“What? No. Lloyd’s a dick, but he’s not dangerous. Or at least he wasn’t the last time I talked to him.”

“When was that?”

“Lindsay, what is this?”

“When did you talk to him?”

“Ten years ago. Okay? We met up a few months later—after Edie—and he manned up and told me the truth and apologized. Now can you tell me what’s going on?”