The Lost Night (Page 45)

“You, too,” he said, and that was that. After we’d hung up, I found Alex’s number in my contacts list and I stared at it for a moment before blocking it.

* * *

On Sunday, I woke up to an email from Mrs. Iredale. The subject line read “YOUR VIDEO,” and my blood frosted over when I saw it. She knows about the Flip cam video.

Dear Lindsay,

I thought I had your email and I’m glad to see I have it here. You said you were putting together a video in memory of Edie and if you do, I would like to see a copy very much. I looked around to see if I have more videos to share with you but I don’t since we never did have a video camera. I am of course thinking of her with the anniversary coming up this week and the video could be nice, and if you are free on Wednesday morning I always visit Summit Rock in Central Park on the anniversary, which was Edie’s favorite place to play in the park when she was little. It is near West 83rd St. You are probably working but I thought I would ask. Should you wish to come along please call me before then. My number is in my email signature below.

Best,

Susan

Well, shit. The made-up commemorative video. Had she really been overcome with sentimentality, or was she calling my bluff?

At least she’d given me a reason to call her. Instinctively, I fumbled around for my phone, then groaned. I opened Skype on my laptop and turned off the video function—no need for Mrs. Iredale to see me in my pajamas. Then I copied and pasted in her number and listened to Skype’s echoey ringing tone.

“Susan Iredale,” she intoned. Why hadn’t she changed her name when she remarried?

“This is Lindsay Bach. I just got your email.”

“Oh, good.”

I swallowed. “Finding footage for the video has actually been a little trickier than I thought,” I said. “I spoke with some of our other friends, but it’s actually hard to access video files from that long ago.”

“I don’t doubt it. That’s why I was surprised you were making it.”

I sighed. “I really appreciated your reaching out. I can send over a few clips I found, just of the Calhoun crew kinda hanging out.” A couple of the Flip cam videos had to be PG, right?

“I’d like that. This time of year is always difficult.”

“I’m sure. I also really appreciated your invitation to the park. I’ll have to be at work, unfortunately, but it’s nice that you…have a special spot for her.”

“Yes, she always liked it up there, once she learned that it’s the highest elevation in the park. You could see better from Belvedere Castle, but she preferred to just know she was on top.”

I stared down at the keyboard. “It’s cool that she grew up going to Central Park. I don’t get out there often enough.” I pictured Mrs. Iredale, wrinkled and jumpy and slight, and suddenly some strange, childlike part of me wanted her approval: a hug, forgiveness. “It’s supposed to be beautiful this afternoon. Would you have any interest in going for a little walk around there with me?”

A silence, long enough that I was about to check if the call had been dropped.

“That would be nice,” she said, her voice ragged. “How’s two o’clock?”

* * *

I climbed out of the subway at the Museum of Natural History, pausing to ogle its dizzying facade, how something so large could sit right here in the middle of this teeming Lego city. The air felt crisp and dry, unusual for August. Exactly like the first morning Edie missed.

I pushed in between the trees and spotted Mrs. Iredale hunched on a bench, big sunglasses obscuring her face, her chin turned up to the dappled sunlight. We said hello awkwardly, and when she stood and began walking, I slowed my gait to let her lead.

“You know, you’re the only one who reached out to me about her this year,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“Oh my god,” I blurted out. Not even her family members?

“I don’t talk about her anymore,” she said, “and no one wants to bring her up, as if I’ve forgotten all about her and they’ll be reminding me of something terrible. As if I don’t think about her every day.” She whipped her head over to look at some Italian tourists as they passed; how oddly she moved.

“Oh, wow. Well, I bet a lot of people are thinking about her and just aren’t sure what to say,” I offered. “She…she touched a lot of lives.”

“She did, didn’t she?” We both froze to let a puppy barrel past, two kids in hot pursuit. “I always think about what she’d be like if she were still with us. She’d be thirty-three now, you know.”

This was a chess game; if I was careful, I could win. “Do you think she’d still be in fashion? A stylist, like she talked about?”

“Maybe,” she said. “She was so good at that kind of thing. But she was struggling to stay focused back then.”

The near flunk-out Alex had mentioned. The one Mrs. Iredale had found so personally mortifying. I let the words out like someone leading a high-strung horse: easy, easy. “You know, I used to really struggle with ADHD myself, and Edie had a lot going on. It was a tough year for everyone, like you said the other week.”

The path sloped upward and Mrs. Iredale’s breath quickened. “It was odd,” she said. “Fashion was her dream for so long. But then she just started to let everything slip. It was when she was dating that architect, that older man, and I think she was trying to seem adult with him and like a twenty-three-year-old with all of you.” So the problem had begun earlier than Alex had thought. The mention of Greg evoked Josh; I felt a queasy pulse, tried to focus.

“From what I can tell,” Mrs. Iredale continued, “she stopped going to night classes, and then fell behind on the course work, and then got so stressed out that she started to give up on the whole thing.”

“Wow, that’s tough,” I murmured.

“And she didn’t know this at the time, but her father’s boss was loaning us the money for her tuition. If anyone had found out—if her father had known she wasn’t even going to class…”

What? He’d do what? Down her with a bullet in her shitty loft apartment?

“So I talked to her about it. I told her the truth about how we were covering her tuition and she turned it around. Talked to her professors, got her grades back up. I was so proud of her.” We’d reached the base of Summit Rock, and she sat on a bench, sliding her sunglasses up like a headband. The eye tic again.

Who else knows about this? Mrs. Iredale had snapped at Alex. It looked different in this new light. “Edie seemed so driven,” I mused. “I’m surprised she’d slack on school stuff like that.”

“Well, people reason differently at that age.” She was using her psychiatrist voice again. “Their prefrontal cortices aren’t fully developed yet; just think of yourself, the decisions you made at that age. How you thought things through.”

Heat whooshed up through my throat and cheeks. “Good point.”

It wasn’t out of character, I realized suddenly. Avoidance was exactly how Edie had dealt with friendships once they became complicated. She was always shucking people off, Kevin had said. She was the center of everything, and then she’d be gone again, leaving a bombed-out group in her wake.

“That made it all the more distressing when Pat’s boss told us he couldn’t keep loaning us tuition money,” she went on. “We were already on the verge of losing our apartment, but we’d shielded that from Edie, too. She’d just buckled down and brought up her grades, and then we pulled the rug out on her.”

Right—the bad news Mrs. Iredale had come bearing the night of August 21. “But couldn’t she just get financial aid?” I asked.

“She’d missed the deadline. Classes were about to start, in fact. I was going to see if I could pull some strings with the bursar.”

“Then why rush to Calhoun to tell her?” It popped out of me like a hiccup. She squeezed her eyes shut, and I added, “The night she…the night.”

“Oh, Lindsay.” She jerked the sunglasses back into place. All at once, she seemed so frail and sad, the old witch in the woods. “I just needed to see her.”

“But why?”

Mrs. Iredale looked up at the treetops. There was that crackly pause again, the same fissure I’d felt from Kevin, from Alex, even from Lloyd: The truth was finally going to rupture through. Why? Because I’d asked.

“You can tell me,” I said, for what felt like the millionth time.

“I just had a horrible feeling,” she said, “about Edie. I knew something was wrong. I fell asleep on the couch after dinner, and I dreamed it first: Edie and…and someone she trusted, and I couldn’t remember what happened, exactly, but I woke up certain something was wrong, that something had happened to her. I’d never…I’m not a woo-woo kind of person, Lindsay, I’m a doctor, and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. But I just couldn’t shake this…this conviction. So I got in a cab and started calling.”

She dug in her bag, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue.

“She came out to see me, but she was looking at me like I’d lost my mind; she couldn’t understand what that’s like for a mother, to have these invisible cords tying you to your child. Are you a mother?”