The Lost Night (Page 49)

New idea: the back door off the kitchen, the one leading to the fire escape over the alleyway. Locked religiously every time I checked, all three locks on the inner door and the deadbolt on the outer door, but it had been a Friday night, maybe some people had gone out there to smoke or something? Could I borrow some sandals?

Dallas gave me some also-way-too-small green flip-flops. Plaid pajama pants, doll-size sandals, my mother minutes away, I charged through the back alley to our little fire escape. I scaled up a few levels and the outer door was open and—the inside one, too! Thank the baby Jesus. I stumbled inside, half registering that the apartment was an absolute wreck. Dallas had climbed up after me, and I thanked her and shoved her out the door, telling her I’d bring back her clothes soon.

I pulled on jeans and a shirt, no time to do anything about my awful breath or gummy contacts. Then I grabbed Dallas’s clothes and ran to her door, carefully not locking myself out this time. Her front door was ajar, so I gave it a token knock and wandered in, bleating “Hello?” Finally I came upon her standing in a bra and shorts in the kitchen, holding (I swear) a potato, and she gave me the strangest look and asked, “Did you kick in the door?”

I gave her an equally bewildered face. “No…it was…open.”

Madison. I think that was her name. Or Addison? Something like that.

Then it was back to cleanup, throwing dishes in the sink, dragging beer cans to the trash. Mom burst in at noon on the dot. I was just playing it off like I’d overslept and hadn’t gotten a chance to clean yet when Kevin sauntered in, all sex-mussed, and before he could open his mouth, I was, like, “HI KEVIN MY MOM JUST GOT HERE WHAT’S UP MAN?” He kind of chuckled and went into his room, locking the door behind him.

Mom was about as horrified as I expected. She could tell I was hungover, but at least she had no way of detecting that I’d almost answered the door in a pair of women’s pants. Animal purred and rubbed her ankles and she made a face and raised her palms like she was convinced she’d pick up some serious disease in our apartment, avian flu or SARS or whatever. She asked me to lead her back out into the street and I took her to where Dad’s sedan was parked, past the cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and not one but two sleeping bodies in the hallway and staircase.

“I don’t want you living like this,” she told me seriously as we weaved toward the expressway.

“It’s what I can afford,” I replied. “And besides, there’s tons of talented people in the building. Who could really help me one day. The guitarist from The Sinks lived here.”

“The who?”

“The Sinks. They’re, like, millionaires now. You’re the one always telling me to network or whatever.”

She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “It just doesn’t look safe. I mean, who were those people asleep in the hallway?”

“I told you to come later in the day.”

“Noon on a Saturday is not exactly bright and early.”

I was too hungover to come up with a reply. Ugh. Why are moms always awesome until they’re actually there in person?

She turned to look at me and ran a hand over my shoulder. “I know you’ll make it work like you always do. What’s it like living with girls? Any cute ones?”

I wondered what she’d seen that’d tipped her off—maybe something in the bathroom. “Just one, and she has a boyfriend,” I lied. “And I’m not really thinking about that. I want to focus on my music.”

“Good for you,” she said. A new song came on the radio and she turned it up using buttons on the steering wheel. I didn’t notice her doing it right away and it was like the song magically swelled to swallow up the awkwardness.

At IKEA she went into Nazi shopping mode, whipping the cart one way or another when she had a new idea or saw something neither of us realized I needed. She tried to talk me into decorative pillowcases—shams, I think they were called?—even as I insisted I’d never be making my bed when it was lofted above my head.

“Oh come on, you don’t want girls to be totally turned off by your room, do you?”

“Oh my god, Mom. That’s so weird.” It was so weird. It was so weird that it became the only thought I had for the next fifteen minutes. Mom. You. Are. So. Weird.

Afterward, she took me and Kevin out to dinner at this brick-oven pizza place, the only restaurant I knew about, and dropped us off on her way back to the hotel. Kevin got out a joint before we’d even gone into the building, when my mom hadn’t even turned the corner. Inside, he told me that he’d heard that some hair metal band was having their debut or final or reunion or something show—can’t remember—and he’d heard there’d be a ton of free booze and drugs.

We took a few shots and then followed the migration up two floors and a hallway over. There were dudes wearing Lycra and singing in big swoopy harmonies. There were girls in neon wigs. One chick was wearing a full fairy costume, a totally cheesy thing with wings that someone probably made for Halloween some year. I took a lollipop out of her basket and the girl next to me did the same.

She waved her lollipop at me and smiled. She had a big thick sheet of black hair. “Yellow ones are the worst,” she said when the song had ended. “You hope it’s going to be pineapple or something, but it’s lemon.”

I offered her my orange one. She smiled wide.

Fuck the real world, I thought right then. Fuck clean apartments and boring roommates and perfectly groomed cats.

Calhoun Lofts was my best decision yet, I decided. And I was right.

Chapter 16

LINDSAY

I stared at my watch, where Tessa’s voice had been a moment ago. The news was having the strangest effect on me. I was stone sober, but I felt the long, downward brushstrokes I associated with the beginning of a pot high. Limbs loosening, spine turning to lead.

So I’d sent it, then. I’d sent it in my sleep or scheduled it inside a gap in my memory, my brain and mind operating on two different timelines. And my last stand, the cross on which I’d hung the belief that it could be somebody else, someone crazier than me, this whole paranoid delusion that a menacing other was threatening me for blowing on the embers of Edie’s decade-old departure—it evaporated all at once. I’d sent the email, just as I’d tried to hurt Josh, just as I’d succeeded with Edie. This silly final scamper toward someone named Jenna felt embarrassing, gauche. It was just me, alone in my apartment with a steady pulsing sensation wafting downward from my skull.

It was just me, alone in SAKE with a dead body at my feet. The pistol shaking as my entire arm trembled. And then the only person who knew the real Lindsay, the monster, was gone for good.

I thought of the violence with my mother, with Lloyd, with Josh. At Warsaw. The anger, the graphic fantasies.

I needed to see the email from Edie again. I opened my computer and what popped up first was a document, the cursor blinking at the top.

Dear Edie,

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.

Depressants. I didn’t really need depressants. I had antidepressants, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, expiring in the top drawer of my vanity. One kind, I remembered, had the narrowest therapeutic range, prescribed at a level just south of toxic. Tofranil. I opened a new window and searched for it: lethal at 6.7 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. With 25 milligrams in a pill, that would mean…seventeen pills. Maybe twenty just to be safe. There was something satisfying and circular about it, the clear A to B of my parents plying me with the long line of pharmaceuticals that would eventually end me, too. I padded into the bedroom, pulled the orange bottle out of my dresser, and sat on the bed, clutching it in my hands like a chalice.

My eyes fell on my old diary, on the floor near a pile of shoes, and I picked it up, dreamlike, and pressed it open, the gluey pages crackling under the entries I’d pasted in.

 I hate my parents and my teacher and my classmates and everyone here, so I’m going to become a writer and get rich and move away from them all. And I’m starting right here, right now.

I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed, the notebook spread open across my abdomen. What a miserable time that had been, so miserable I’d spent two decades smashing it into the smallest lockbox in the deepest corner of my mind. It occurred to me for the first time that my disasters, the bloody calamities of my own making, came like clockwork: at thirteen, twenty-three, and now, pathetically, thirty-three. Jesus’s final age.

Tears slipped down my temples, the right and then the left. I thought back to the night that had started it all. I was about to start eighth grade, but tall, suddenly and freakishly bigger and stronger than both my parents. But no, that’s not the real origin; my parents had been suspicious of me for years by then, ever since I’d turned seven and begun to grow my own personality. I was a sullen child, moody and obsessive. And prone to tantrums, anger building up like steam under my skin and leading to something akin to a panic attack, though nobody called it that. “I can’t get my breath down to here,” I remember telling my mom, pointing at the bottom of my sternum and tearing up in alarm. And instead of acting, she watched me in fright until I was screaming and stomping and then called my dad down to spank me for my bad behavior. I never hurt anyone, but teachers labeled me a problem child and sent me home with pink slips and demerits for my parents to sign. Each one felt more confusing than the last, and after the panic was labeled anger enough times, I began to see it that way, too, the charged feeling blasting out of me on a shorter and shorter fuse.