The Lost Night (Page 36)

“He wasn’t violent?”

“No, I told you.”

Well, maybe he hides it, I thought. Like I have for the past twenty years. “Did you know they were hooking up again?”

“Not while it was happening. But, like, it wasn’t cheating. We weren’t together anymore.”

“But he still felt the need to come to you and tell you and apologize?”

“I mean, yeah. Bro code.”

I scrunched my eyes closed. “Do you know what they talked about? Him and Edie, on her last night?”

“She was just upset. Because of her mom.”

“And her mom told her…?”

“Lindsay, you know this. That they were losing their condo. That they couldn’t pay Lindsay’s tuition.”

But why rush to Calhoun to tell her? I froze, another question solidifying: Why did any of us know what they’d talked about? Edie hadn’t had time to tell us. Lloyd couldn’t. How had this intel leaked? Had Mrs. Iredale mentioned it to someone—Sarah, maybe?

“I met with Mrs. Iredale,” I said. “Not Lloyd. That’s how I knew.”

“Now that is legit not a good idea.”

“What?”

“Talking to her.”

“How come?”

“You just don’t want to fuck with that lady. Trust me.” We had a weird…incident, he’d said in the restaurant, before polishing off his water glass.

“Tell me what happened. I know something happened with you and her parents.”

“Lindsay, have you lost your damn mind? This is nuts.” Why did he keep using my name?

“Please, I won’t try to talk to her again. I promise. Just tell me and you’ll never hear from me again.”

“That’s not what I…”

“Alex, please.”

He let out a sigh. “Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone for you?”

“I’m fine. I just bumped into Mrs. Iredale and learned about Lloyd, and the whole thing really shook me. I’ll feel better knowing I’m not crazy for finding her…unsettling.”

The phone line sizzled: three seconds, four.

“Okay,” he said. “Just please don’t tell anyone. So, when Edie and I first started dating, she was in her second semester of fashion school, right? And I started to notice that more and more, she just wasn’t going to class. And at first I thought, whatever, fashion school’s probably not that hard for a smart girl like Edie, maybe she just doesn’t need to be there, y’know?” A beat. “But after a few weeks, I started to question it. Like, are you getting notes from someone? Aren’t your finals coming up? Don’t you have, like, papers or assignments or something due? And it didn’t take long to figure out that she was just willingly flunking out of school. Well, I dunno if ‘willingly’ is right, but letting it happen. Like, failing all of her classes and not seeming that concerned about it.”

“Whoa! And she didn’t say why?”

“No, it was really weird. She was just, like, don’t worry about it. I didn’t want to be an overbearing boyfriend or whatever, but I couldn’t not worry about her.”

“You were worried that…that what, that this was a sign she’d given up on life or something?”

“That she was not right,” he said quickly. “It was just…I don’t know if it was some kind of, like, episode or something, but it was bizarre. Edie was super smart. She went to NYU. And working in fashion was her dream, so what the hell was she doing flunking out? And not just getting Ds and Fs, I mean actually not turning shit in and getting incompletes. That can really fuck you over.”

“Well, to play devil’s advocate, everyone was pretty pessimistic about their professional lives back then,” I pointed out. “I could see how pursuing fashion in 2009 could feel kind of pointless.”

“But then you formally withdraw from your classes and go work in a clothing store. You know? This was super weird. And I knew her mom was a psychiatrist and would probably know what to do if Edie was having a breakdown or whatever, so one day at work I thought, Fuck it, and I called her.”

“Her mom?”

“Yeah. When I told her, the first thing out of her mouth was ‘You didn’t tell anyone, did you?’ ”

The sweep of goose bumps up my arms.

“That was her response?”

“Well, then she backpedaled and said this was the kind of thing they wanted to handle within the family and she’d appreciate my discretion, for Edie’s sake. She said, ‘Do you think it’s drugs?,’ ‘No,’ ‘Do you think it’s alcohol?,’ ‘No,’ and that was basically it. Edie and I never talked about it, so I don’t even know if she knew, y’know, that I’d told her mom. But she started going to class again. I’m lucky we were so goddamn in love, otherwise she’d probably have been furious with me.”

I wandered over to the couch. “But that left you with a bad taste in your mouth toward her mom.”

“I mean, obviously. What a psychopath.”

A tense silence, like we were both shocked by what he’d said.

“Anyway, I gotta go,” he said. “You’re okay, right?”

“Yeah, you don’t need to call my mom on me.”

Another long silence.

“G’night, Lindsay.” Then he hung up.

I stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. I shouldn’t have made that final, knee-jerk jab. It was my instincts working faster than my judgment (see easy callback, crack joke). I wrote out a text to Tessa and Damien, then deleted it. I’d have to pick through this tangle myself.

So Alex wasn’t suspicious of Lloyd, who’d formally apologized to him. But he didn’t like Mrs. Iredale, either. What kind of mother responds that way to her struggling daughter? Who cares more about how her child reflects on her than the kid’s actual well-being? The whole flunking incident added another dimension to the suicide theory, too; if Edie had been checked out as soon as that spring, it wasn’t a huge leap to think she’d be suicidal come August.

Spring semester, 2009. I plunked around in my old emails, searching for mentions of school from Edie: classes, study, midterms, grades. Nothing telling. And again I got wrapped up in reading our old threads, scenes that felt only tangentially related to my own history, story lines like something on TV: In one from March, I described how I’d found myself in the bedroom—the makeshift coatroom—at a lackluster house party the night before, digging through layers of fur and fringe and suede for my own vintage jacket. A man had entered and rifled around for his coat, too.

“One of those nights, hmm?” I’d said, smirking.

“I just feel like,” he’d hesitated, his shoulders slumping. “Tonight was so forgettable, you know? Years from now, I’m never going to remember it.”

Then he’d glanced up under heavy brows and our eyes met, and he took a step closer to me, and I let out a giggle as suddenly we were making out, hard, rolling around on the crumpled pyramid of outerwear. After a minute or two, someone in the doorframe cleared their throat and we’d pulled away, laughing. Before he could say anything else, I’d snatched my coat and darted out into the street below.

I did remember that, vaguely. I forget if he was cute. That wasn’t the point.

A knock at the door, and my heart seized up. I closed my laptop and crept over, then peered through the peephole. Gasping, I flicked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.

“Alex.”

He had his chin tucked and his brow knitted, all broody. “Can I come in?”

I held the door wider and watched him step inside. This couldn’t be real; this was an odd dream, the details all wrong.

“Nice place you got,” he said, even though it’s really not. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked over to the couch.

“What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Oh.” I was befuddled but remembered my lines. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“That’d be amazing, yeah. Do you have some whiskey or something?”

I nodded and walked into the kitchen, then opened the cabinet over my fridge. In the back was a dusty bottle of scotch, something a clueless research assistant had gifted me for Christmas. I’d almost given it to Damien on the spot, but instead I stuck it back here next to a small fire extinguisher.

“Ice?” I called.

“Nah, neat.”

Robotically, I handed it over.

“Thanks,” he said. “You don’t want any?”

I took a long breath in and out. “Alex, I don’t drink.”

“But at the restaurant—”

“I didn’t drink anything. I just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

He sat on the couch and looked up at me. My whole torso tingled, my chest and belly.

“That’s not it,” I heard myself say. “I wanted you to drink, because I wanted you to open up. About Edie.”

He patted the cushion next to him and I sat obediently.

“There’s only one Healing Hands Reiki in Brooklyn,” he said finally, with a grin.