The Lost Night (Page 44)

Tessa didn’t say anything, so I went on.

“I started making eyes with this guy as soon as I walked in. Eventually we started chatting, and he kept circling back to me while still hanging out with his friends. I blacked out around that point in the night, but Edie saw the rest. Apparently he and I flirted for a while, then were apart for a bit, and then I saw him making out with another girl. And apparently I…I just lost my shit.” Hot tears pressed into the washcloth; I wiped my nose.

“I was outside smoking when the girl came out by herself, and I…I attacked her, Tessa. I scratched her with my nails and just kept lunging at her, clawing and screaming.” I let out a few rickety sobs. “I went for her face. I drew blood. I woke up the next day with what looked like rust under my fingernails and—and dried blood on my forearms.” All I could remember from that night was a sense of rage, a deep conviction that someone was wrong, mingling with this weird elation, like bright barbs on top of a ball of fury.

I took a deep, wobbly breath. “Anyway, Edie succeeded in pulling me off her and shoving me into a cab, and the girl’s friends came and grabbed her and Edie took me home. I’m so fucking lucky I didn’t get charged with assault.”

“You are,” Tessa said, after a very long time.

“I know. The next morning I made Edie promise not to tell anyone, and she never mentioned it again.” Of course, for years I’d believed that Edie could be trusted, that she’d never told anyone what had happened with my mom ten years earlier. But she had—she’d run to Sarah and shared that secret. Maybe she’d spread this one, as well. Maybe everyone knew about the Warsaw Incident, too embarrassed to bring it up but quietly disgusted by me.

“But now you know,” I said. “So you can just stay away from me instead of finding out the hard way. Like Josh. Or Lloyd. Or Edie.”

I lay stock-still for another long beat, until I began to wonder if Tessa was still there. Then I felt a kiss on my forehead, just above the towel.

“You get some rest, okay?” she said. “I have to go to work.”

“Nooo, stay with me.”

“I can’t. But you’ll feel better after you get some more sleep. Text me and let me know how you’re doing, okay?” She gathered her things and left.

Three glasses of water and two pukes later, I managed to drag my laptop into bed with me and watch hours of a sitcom. Every blast of commercials, blaring and spastic, reignited my headache; every time, I rushed to mute it and then had nothing to do for ninety seconds but sit with my toxic, worthless, out-of-control self.

Eventually the trapezoid of sunlight sliding across my room disappeared into the ceiling. No one had called or texted me; outside there were birds singing, kids playing, people imbuing the world with bubbles of laughter and small, kindly acts. Not actively causing harm, not ripping others open at the seams so their blood would drip onto the ground. What was running through my head when I planted my palms on Josh’s chest and shoved with all my might? Had dopamine spurted over my brain as his eyes bugged in fear, his arms flailing uselessly?

I made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again, words flooding my brain, the internal dialogue growing louder, louder, louder. I lay back down, paused the TV show, and opened up a new document. Email notifications flooded the side of the screen. I was about to X them all out when I froze: Tessa hadn’t remembered to pose as me and email about being sick, had she?

“Shit,” I barked aloud. It was almost five on a summer Friday, so my boss was already gone. I had pages I was supposed to ship today. Why hadn’t anybody called me? I snatched up my purse, still crumpled in the hallway. Maybe her assistant was still in the office. Maybe I could make up something dramatic, something dramatic but not fact-checkable, so I couldn’t have been in the ER, but maybe I’d witnessed someone getting in a crazy accident, and somehow my phone had died and my watch wasn’t working and I’d spent all day off the grid in Urgent Care and then a police precinct—

My fingers, feeling for the smooth familiarity of my phone, stopped fumbling around in my purse and instead I dumped the contents onto the wood floor. Wallet, lipstick, gum, eye drops, pack of tissues. No phone in sight. I checked the zipper pockets, just to be sure. Let out another loud, low groan.

A few tears squeezed out of me, a single little sob over everything, my entire disgusting oeuvre.

I trudged back over to my computer. I wouldn’t fiddle with the margins this time; I wouldn’t open an old notebook and find space to glue in the entry. But the act of recording had always soothed me, the steady clack of my fingers against the keys.

I’ve spent the entire day wishing I had some powerful depressants on hand so I could knock myself out for a while, but it wouldn’t even matter because then I’d wake up tomorrow or in the wee hours of tonight and still be me. I’d still be this rabid, unpredictable stranger pushing against the inside of my skin. Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if things had gone differently. Maybe I’d be calmer and more competent, less prone to blanks in my memory and erratic behavior when handed a drink, if my brain hadn’t been stewing since childhood in a constant bath of Prozac and Lexapro and Tofranil and Wellbutrin and Ritalin and Adderall and god only knows what else. If my parents hadn’t been such fucking cowards. If they’d actually considered the long-term consequences of a fucking tsunami of chemicals crashing into a developing brain. I can almost see the alternate timeline on Earth 2, the one where little Lindsay just knew acceptance and love.

For now, though, I’m fucked. Fucked and fucked up, and who knows how much is my own doing and how much is my parents’. By now, it hardly matters. All I know is my brain’s so warped that a single bump of cocaine has permanently screwed everything up. I’m scared—scared of my brain, scared of myself. Today I told another person about the Warsaw Incident. Now another human knows, another living person with the knowledge that she should stay far away from me.

I noticed that my arms and legs were freezing, my teeth chattering as if I were out in the cold. I was sprinting toward a cliff and couldn’t stop until I’d leapt, until the ground below me gave way to air. I let out a loud whimper and felt my fingers moving furiously.

My parents were right to be afraid of me, to place a pill next to my water glass every night at dinner and to not let me eat until they’d seen it slip down my throat. I don’t know what’s in me, why I’m like this. I didn’t think that side of me would ever show itself again. But it did, last night. Now I know for sure.

A dizzying swoop, like I’d done something irreversible. I went back to the top and added a salutation:

Dear Edie,

I read the whole thing over once as a bird screeched outside my window. I moved the cursor to the trash icon. Then I just closed my laptop, the draft left buzzing like a wasp trapped inside the window screen.

Chapter 14

I managed to leave the house late the next morning, blinking into the sun in slight surprise that it all still existed. I picked up groceries and a bag of expensive coffee beans and whirred them in my coffee grinder, enjoying the growl and the slight thrill of a spinning blade, one that could take off my fingertips if it tried. Last night’s freak-out already felt filmy and faraway; I remembered the jagged panic but couldn’t actually pull it up again.

The text came an hour later, right as I wasn’t thinking about him.

“Hey,” it began, and I read it in Michael’s voice: “How’s your week?”

I leaned a few inches back, as if to distance myself from it. Michael. I thought of all the energy I’d spent on Lloyd when I was too young to know better—when I was indomitable and upbeat, convinced things would work out okay just because I’d seen a glimmer of a beginning. I thought of Josh, smiling at me over a pizza slice as the East River rushed by behind him. Again and again, I’d been so quick to disregard the million other ways things could turn out, the possibilities funneling out of Point A like latticework.

I texted back: “Can I call you?”

I saw him beginning to answer, but it didn’t come through for thirty maddening seconds: “Sure.”

It was an awkward conversation, as these kinds of chats always are—the first time we’d talked voice to voice in almost four weeks. Four weeks when I hadn’t, for the first time, asked him to see me, testing the theory that if I stopped, he might evaporate like dew. He listened as I rattled off something about needing to feel respected even when I’m just casually dating, something about feeling like I was at the end of his priority list. I said, “This isn’t working,” like an actor with a script. He was so quiet. I pictured him fading away as he listened, becoming more and more transparent until he whiffed away like smoke.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when I reached the end of my soliloquy. His voice was as diaphanous as I’d expected, molecules and air. “Guess I fucked up.”

It hung there, and for a single second something split open in front of me, an alternate ending where he promised to do better and made a grand gesture and everything changed, so solid and real. It flashed in front of me and then blinked out just as quickly. The silence buzzed.

“Well, good luck with everything,” I said, to pierce it.