The Lost Night (Page 46)

“I’m not.”

“So you don’t know. You don’t know.” She blew her nose, composed herself. “I didn’t go all the way to Bushwick to talk about our finances. But Edie asked about tuition. She asked about the apartment and figured out that we were going into foreclosure, which I hadn’t planned to tell her. She figured this must all be about something else, that I was just panicking.”

A line from Lloyd floated into my head: She was, like, wild-eyed. Edie said her mom was freaking her out.

“And then I left. I couldn’t force her to come back with me.”

“Wow. I’m so sorry.” I pressed my palm onto her forearm. “I do believe you. About the premonition? I think that stuff is very real. Maybe scientists will figure it out someday, something with energy and…maybe quantum physics.”

She laughed, embarrassed. “Thanks. I know it’s silly. I’m glad Edie had a friend like you.”

A balloon of discomfort in my belly. She turned to me. “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me about those last days? With Edie? She and I hadn’t spoken in a while, and it just…it’d be nice to hear about.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale,” I replied. “I wish I had more to tell you, but she and I were sort of…in a bit of a rough period at that point.”

“A rough period?”

Why hadn’t I lied, plucked a happy memory from earlier in 2009? “You know how friendships are at that age. We just needed a little space.”

“Well, I hope you got it,” she said, then turned away. “Sorry. It’s just…I know she and Sarah were fighting, too. She was going through so much, with the miscarriage and everything, and it’s difficult to know that none of the people she normally counted on were there for her.”

Shame and outrage swelled, nausea with claws. Your daughter was a bitch, Mrs. Iredale. Your daughter peeled us off one by one like strips of dead, sunburned skin, and—

“Anyway, what do I know? It just shakes me to think about that dream. Here I thought someone else was trying to hurt her, but the person who hurt her was her.”

Edie and someone she trusted. Someone who threatened to push her off the building, who’d wandered into the room at just the right time, who knew how to pick up a handgun, throttle high on the grip, click off the safety, nestle the trigger inside the crease of the pointer finger’s knuckle. My heart pounded in my ears.

“Anyway, I’m sorry to be unloading on you.” She stood and her purse slipped from her shoulder. She caught it awkwardly. “I should probably get going.”

“You don’t want to climb up Summit Rock?” I asked.

“I can’t anymore,” she replied, and left.

I stood looking up at it; I pictured tiny Edie scrabbling up its face, sunlight rippling off her Ariel waves. I began to climb it myself, thrusting my weight forward against its pitch. At the top, I looked around: dense trees in every direction, no real indication that this was the park’s highest point.

Sometimes you can’t prove something. There’s no empirical evidence, no definite input from your senses. But you just know. You just know.

I looked down at my feet—black sandals, red toenails, the dirty hipster spelunking crammed so far into my past—and pictured how blood would flow over the rock’s surface here, rolling outward and then channeling into its crevices. As I watched, the stone turned to glitter and something pitched up my spine. I’m going to pass out, I realized, and my head and knees dropped instinctively.

“Hey, lady, you okay?” someone called. I blinked through the glitter, which beat hard inside my skull and hands. You’re okay, just breathe, you’re fine.

“That lady looks like she’s about to boot. Lady, you okay?” The rock was coming back into focus and I turned my head to see the teenager, wide-eyed and alarmed, clutching at her friends.

I opened my mouth to tell her I was fine, but what came out instead was a cough, an intense, body-racking hack that began somewhere deep and grew and grew and grew until my lungs squeezed shut and out came a stream of vomit, acidic and foul. The three girls gasped and made grossed-out noises. I spat and sat back on my haunches, crying.

“I’m sorry, I’m okay,” I croaked, standing carefully. We stared at one another, and then I turned and walked away, a blotch of my fetid insides drying on the rock behind me.

* * *

I almost skipped work on Monday, thinking vaguely that I was in trouble for Friday anyway, remembering that I needed to get a new phone but what was even the point, and then at the last minute I pulled on a dress and hailed a yellow cab in front of my building.

On the bridge, Manhattan blared into view outside the window, the morning sun a spotlight on the whole jagged skyline. I leaned over and stared like a kid, noticing how all the stubbier buildings grazed the true skyscrapers’ knees. How huge they must have seemed when they were first constructed; how solid and invincible. Now they were just background noise, anonymous and serving only to give the massive towers contrast.

A subway roared past us on the bridge and I jumped at the noise. In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes fell on me.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yep,” I lied, although of course I couldn’t be.

Bewilderingly, no one mentioned my absence on Friday. Truly no one would miss me if I were gone. I answered emails and passed story proofs in a fog, closing the door to my office as often as possible so that no one would try to speak with me. At night, I cleaned up my desk before I left, deleting some personal things from my hard drive and wiping the crumbs off the space around my keyboard. I walked all the way to the subway entrance and watched it for a moment, the frantic influx and outflow like ants at the top of an anthill. The breeze picked up, and I walked over to the ferry instead, feeling the floating docks bow under my feet. It was a half-hour walk from DUMBO to my apartment, one I desperately needed.

There was an air of ceremony to it, a farewell cruise, as I stood at the ship’s stern, wind whipping in and out of my lungs so fast I couldn’t control it. I stepped onto Brooklyn’s soil and headed east along the cobblestone streets. I thought of Josh as I passed the old pizza place, praying I wouldn’t actually see him.

A few blocks inland, I waited at a light with strangers, watching the stream of cars and waiting for my chance to jaywalk, to charge out into oncoming traffic and prove I wasn’t afraid. My eyes fell on the man next to me, tall and blondish with a messenger bag strapped across a burgeoning gut.

“Greg?”

It popped out of me before I could think. I didn’t feel surprised; I knew it was New York showing off again. So tiny and tightly folded, an M.C. Escher city.

He blinked at me. “Excuse me?”

“You’re Greg Bentley, right?”

“Yeah…do I know you?”

We were missing the WALK sign; people streamed around us.

“This is weird! I was trying to find you a few weeks ago, and here you are.”

“Trying to find me?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, how do we know each other?”

“I’m a friend of Edie Iredale’s. We met a few times when you guys were dating.”

“Edie!” He smiled and his shoulders relaxed. “I haven’t heard that name in so long. Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Lindsay,” I said, offering him my hand. He shook it eagerly. Despite Josh’s insistence that his boss was an upstanding citizen, I hadn’t expected Greg to be this warm. The whole situation felt peculiar, dreamlike.

“I was just thinking how it’s been ten years,” he said. “Were you working on a memorial or something?”

I blinked at him, processing. Finally I swallowed. “Yeah, for the anniversary. I was just tracking down some people who were important to her back then. And that was definitely you.”

His green eyes twinkled. “She was really a great girl. Are you doing a digital scrapbook or something? Or a memorial site?”

I nodded again, slowly. What had I told Mrs. Iredale? “I wanted to see if there was enough material to make a memorial video. Or just compile some photos.”

“Oh, well, I might be able to help, because I’m a photographer! An amateur one, but I’m sure I have some photos of her on my old laptop.” He looked around happily. “Man, so funny bumping into someone from my former life. I just stopped into the office to pick up a couple things—I’m on paternity leave right now, actually.”

“Congratulations,” I said, and he thanked me.

Suddenly he unzipped his bag and dug around. “I have a better idea. I had a Flickr account back then, which all my photos went into. I’ll write it down for you.” He drew out a notepad, leather-bound and filled with graph paper. I peered at the pages as he flipped forward, noticing that he didn’t have architect handwriting at all: It was impressively girly, a beautiful sweeping cursive, like the nineteenth-century letters you find in archives. I thought of Tessa’s cool, pointy script, which would’ve looked more at home here. He jotted down a URL and a password and handed the ripped sheet to me.

I folded it up and slid it into my purse. “Thanks so much, Greg,” I said, still stunned. “Really funny running into you.”