The Lost Night (Page 40)

Middle-school Lindsay. I’d spent two decades scraping away any signs that, deep down, I was a violent, dangerous creature. In fact, for years I’d felt secretly relieved that Edie, the only other person who might think that, was long dead.

I checked the case files as soon as I got home, but Edie’s diary wasn’t among them—another timeline lost, her brief life instead flattened into phone records, ER discharge papers, a bloodless autopsy report. I dug around under my bed until I found the bag I was looking for, a small stack of old sketchbooks and diaries slipped into a canvas tote, and pulled out the spiral-bound notebook I’d been picturing.

I’d journaled sporadically in middle and high school, bored and lonely and newly determined to hone my writing skills. The act soothed me, the way my clacking fingers turned my brain’s chatter into narrative, something finite, controllable. I would type up entries on the hulking computer in my room because I didn’t like my own handwriting. I still don’t: rushed and leaning this way and that, too often unreadable. Crazy-person handwriting. I’d fiddled with the page settings to get the margins right, so that I could slice the sides off with an X-ACTO knife and glue them into this notebook.

It’s funny, come to think of it, that my parents let me keep an X-ACTO knife in my room. Perhaps they didn’t know about it.

I opened the journal at random, to sometime early sophomore year. Printers were shittier then, strips of black missing in the middle of lines of texts. Read between the lines, my neurons fired at random.

 I’m ravenous all the time now. Mom says it’s nerves, but I know it’s whatever they switched me to. They thought it was the Zoloft giving me headaches, though they haven’t gone away and now I’m convinced it’s this quiet hell of Onalaska, Wisconsin. M&D have eased up on the surveillance compared with last year, I guess because I’m almost 16 now and “making very promising progress,” as Dr. Mahoney wrote recently in an email Mom printed out and stupidly left on her desk: That’s how you discuss your dog in obedience school, not your daughter. I can’t wait for college. I don’t understand why people are so content to be here, imagining their whole lives spooling out without trying anything new or experiencing anywhere better.

What followed was a boring tale of being stuck at piano lessons, waiting for my parents to pick me up while a popular girl drove up for her own lesson and made polite, banal conversation. I could tell even from my written account that I’d been the bitch in the situation—so shy and self-conscious that I’d come across as hostile. How had I gone from hating popular girls to becoming one’s best friend?

I flipped forward a bit, the pages shuffling awkwardly under their glue. Josh was popular in high school, I decided. Maybe not prom king, but definitely prom court.

It was toward the end of that year that I started admiring my artsy classmates. I wrote something gushing about Michaela Leonard, a painter in eleventh grade who’d made a blog tribute to men in black-framed glasses. She let me burn copies of some of her CDs: The Get Up Kids, Weezer, The Dismemberment Plan. I could almost picture them, nacreous in my leather CD wallet.

I couldn’t play a CD now if I tried, I realized. I’d fact-checked a story once on futurists’ predictions, and one had commented that we’re in the digital dark ages: A few short centuries from now, historians won’t have any way to access the pixels and bytes into which we funnel our lives. The predigital stuff, this glue-y journal in my hands—that was what survived.

* * *

Sarah must have heard me, some weird tin-can-telephone telepathy stringing from my cerebrum to hers, because the next day she texted me a photo of a number written in curly, girlish handwriting. “Found my Moleskine from back then,” her message read. “This = Lloyd.”

I called him immediately, doubting he’d have the same number ten years on anyway. There was some clicking, then the sound of fumbling. “Whoa! Hello?”

“Hi, is this Lloyd Kohler?”

“Yep. Whoa, I was just trying to use my phone and you were there. Who is this?”

“My name’s Lindsay Bach. I know this is random, but we have a good friend in common from a long time ago. In New York.”

I felt my shoulders rise, ready for him to hang up.

“And who’s that?” he said finally.

“Please hear me out if you can. I’m calling about Edie Iredale.”

Another massive silence. I went on: “I’m sure you don’t remember this, but you and I actually hung out a few times around then, too. Edie and I bumped into you and Alex Kotsonis and some girls one night in Manhattan and ended up on a rooftop. Hanging out in an empty pool.” And, later, having terrible drunken sex. And, later still, being engaged in battery, when I blackened your eye. My fridge clunked on, humming through the silence.

“Familiar. Fourteenth Street, right?”

He remembered. I felt a small, pathetic spurt of pleasure.

“Yes, that’s the one. And I know you and Edie kept seeing each other later. I don’t mean to bring up anything painful, but I’m just trying to”—I hesitated—“get some answers.”

“Ha. Is this like High Fidelity, where you talk to all her exes, only the twist is that she’s dead?”

I tried mirroring. “Pretty much, except that in the movie version, Catherine Zeta-Jones had nothing helpful to say. I’m hoping you can do better.”

“Doubt it. Why the fact-finding mission?”

“I think someone killed her,” I said. “I don’t think it was suicide.”

Another long wait and I began to regret my frankness. Why couldn’t I stick with the old party line, that I was looking back and trying to understand why Edie did what she did? What about this kooky kid, on whom I’d had a breathless crush ten years ago, made me blurt out the truth?

“What makes you say that?” He had one of those preternaturally calm voices, like an actor who manages to make all his lines sound improvised.

“Mostly little stuff.” Like that she was with someone in her living room shortly before the gun was fired. And that I’d walked into that living room moments before it happened, raring for a fight. It hit me in another wave: What the hell happened?

He groaned. “You know, I was stupid-lucky I had to work that night. Otherwise who knows what kinda story the cops woulda spun. Jealous lover or whatever.”

My heart pounded in the pads of my fingers.

“So you did talk to the cops.”

“ ’Course. They were pretty fucking incompetent, though. Didn’t even bother with me until I called ’em a few days later to ask what they’d found.”

“They didn’t track you down?”

“No, stupid NYPD just figured it was a suicide, case closed.”

So much candor. I slowed my breathing.

“Didn’t Edie’s mom see you, like, take Edie inside? Didn’t she tell the cops?”

“Fuck if I know what she told ’em. They just didn’t seem that interested.”

I flopped onto my bed. “And did you have something to tell them?”

“Huh?”

“About Edie. About how she seemed, or…how her mom seemed, or something.”

“Nah. I mean, they were both crying, her mom had just told her they were basically broke, right? She started texting me like whoa, begging me to come get her. So finally I did. I was only a couple blocks away.”

“Did you talk to her mom at all?”

“I mean, I introduced myself. Tried to be polite. It was awkward as hell because they were both crying. She was, like, wild-eyed.”

“Edie?”

“No, her mom. Like, she really didn’t want Edie to go. Edie said her mom was freaking her out.”

Freaking her out? Edie’s mother was an odd duck, but she seemed composed. “What exactly did Mrs. Iredale say?”

“Look, I dunno. She bounced as soon as I got there. And Edie didn’t really wanna talk about it. We only had a couple minutes before I had to leave for the show anyway. I was dragging around all my gear.”

“Where was Edie headed when you left?”

“Just back inside. I figured she was going to her place.” He started laughing. “Lady, you’re better at this than the cops, you know.”

“The cops. They never spun together a…jealous-lover story, like you said?”

“Buncha clowns.”

“What’d they miss? Were you jealous? I know you were keeping your relationship a secret.”

“Ah, fuck. We were just stupid fucking kids. Hanging on to each other while the world, you know, crumbled around us.”

This was the Lloyd I remembered, ADD-addled and talking like a beat poet. I felt a pulse of envy that he’d chosen to cling to Edie, not me.

“What are you talking about?”

“Fuck if I know. I’m pretty bombed.”

I waited him out.

“Let me tell you something, Lindsay.”

“I’m listening.”

A little exhale, like he’d just finished a deep sip. “When the ground splits open,” he said, “the only smart reaction is to run.”

The fuck?

“What do you mean, when the ground splits open?”