The Lost Night (Page 50)

I intuited that they wished I were chipper and sweet, like the other kids. When I wasn’t acting out, I daydreamed through class and got too entranced by chapter books to answer when adults called for me; at the principal’s urging, Mom took me to a hearing specialist, convinced I must be partially deaf, but I passed the aural tests with flying colors. According to the audiologist, I was just ignoring them. I remember Dad’s frustration that night and the bright, flapping knowledge that I’d done something wrong, though I wasn’t quite sure what.

The week after the hearing test, the first pill appeared next to my morning bowl of cereal. Ritalin, to help me focus. I began getting headaches, and at night sleep became elusive; as my Mickey Mouse clock ticked, I crafted pillow forts for stuffed animals and imagined the four legs of my bed came alive and whisked us off to foreign lands. Later, I switched to Adderall, which dried out my mouth and knotted my stomach. My spirits sank, but my grades improved. Dad kept taking me to the gun range, muttering about how I needed to master discipline. It was the one place where I knew he wouldn’t yell at me.

And then I was thirteen, sullied by hormones and bad skin and inexplicable feelings, fury and fear and lust and self-hatred in a constant spinning wheel. One night, my parents and I were arguing about whether or not I had to keep taking piano lessons—a stupid, banal fight, but it became bigger, much bigger. Then Dad, irrational Dad with his sudden manic anger and his conditional love, leaned right into my face and hissed, “I don’t know how we made you.” As I stared back at him, a switch flipped, and when Mom—pathetic, submissive Mom who pretended to be laid-back but actually just put up with all his shit—grabbed my shoulder, I whirled around and hit her with all my strength.

It felt…amazing. As if my emotions, normally ricocheting around my interior, had finally found an out. I marveled at how clear and lucid I felt, the way the spinning wheel had stopped.

We were at the top of the stairs, and Mom took a step back as she grabbed at her face. Her feet shuffled, her eyes like two moons, and then she was falling, her hands clawing at air, the wooden steps making awful knocking noises as they connected with her back, her side, her shoulder, and, finally, her head.

* * *

I heard a noise in the kitchen; my computer, announcing that I’d received a new email. I picked up the bottle of pills and padded back down the hallway, listening to the maraca shake of every step.

A cheerful email from Greg with a new password to try. It was somehow cute and sad, now that I knew I’d killed her: affable Greg unwittingly helping me track down this imaginary killer, someone Not Me who’d forced their way into Edie’s apartment to pick up a gun and push it against her temple. I imagined the rest of the Flip cam video playing out: It was probably Edie and this Jenna in there, in Edie’s own fucking apartment, having a drink or a smoke or a bump or whatever, and I’d hung out for a minute, biding my time, until Edie and I were alone and my anger could break out, torpedoing around the room as the music from two floors up made the ceiling shake. I imagined the moment the red drops hit my white shoes, how my drunk, panicking mind had made the most basic of scrambles: pushing the gun against her fingers, typing something simple into her big black laptop. A lash-out not that different from the hard shove I gave Josh, a sweet kid who’d had the bad fortune of meandering into my path. I wondered what switch he’d flipped, what innocent remark had awakened the orange-red rage in me. I closed my eyes, mentally replaying the video Tessa had shown me of that night. The church-organ-like blast of the semi’s horn, the chorus of screams. “I’m deleting this,” she’d said, “but…but I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

* * *

My father had put it only a little differently. “We’re going to say she slipped,” he said, gripping my arm so that it bruised brown and green, “but we aren’t going to forget this. You almost killed your mother.”

I didn’t accompany them to the hospital, instead locking myself in my room and watching out the window as the EMTs hoisted Mom into the ambulance, the side of her head soaked in blood. Dad paused to look up at me with pure hatred before clambering in after them. She had a severely sprained wrist and needed two stitches in her head, on a blob of scalp they had to first shave bare.

That Monday, I’d met Dr. Mahoney, a wiry-haired pediatric psychiatrist with a particular interest in aggression and disobedience. Every night for a week, we sat across from each other in uncomfortable armchairs, and through my braces I answered her questions in a small voice. Afterward I pressed my ear against her office door as she discussed with my mother everything wrong with me; “oppositional defiant disorder” seemed to be the problem, and the solution was both physical—weekly therapy, constant surveillance from the time I got home from school until bedtime, my door never closed, my computer time never unmonitored—as well as chemical. Three new pills appeared next to my dinner plate, and my parents eagerly watched me swallow them after we said grace.

The pills made me feel foggy and faraway, and for the first time in years, I could sleep at night. But that sleep had become a conduit for awful dreams: one where I found a long knife under my pillow and crept into the basement with it, then came upon Dad sitting on the weight bench in the dark. Another where we were at Uncle Bob’s farm with targets tacked to trees, my ungainly hands curled around a rifle, and Mom didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to walk out in front of us. Still another where I opened a kitchen cabinet and found it filled with handguns, ones I’d never touched in real life. Around that time, violent images began seeping into my daytime as well, quick bloody visions that still invade my mind decades later. I told no one. I was stuck with a head that’d never do anyone any good, not even after they’d brined it in a cocktail of drugs, not even after they’d pointedly moved all of Dad’s guns into a gun safe, not even after my pickled brain realized its own constant narration could be inked down into writing and a path emerged: To Be A Writer Someday. That one hadn’t panned out, either. Instead I was thirty-three years old and alone, a single pathetic generation, and I’d generated nothing but misery in my wake.

I snapped open the bottle, child-protection my ass, and shook twenty orange and white tablets onto the table. I shoved aside my empty Thai food containers and organized the pills into four even lines. Filled a glass of water at the sink and swallowed the first row, one by one.

* * *

As I waited to see what would happen, I tried the new password Greg had just emailed and opened all the photos at once. Fifty-six Edies appeared, each one like a finger pressed on a bruise. I let my sniffle turn into a sob as I clicked through them.

“I’m sorry, Edie,” I whispered. “It should’ve been me.”

I felt woozy, drunk. Edie on a carousel; Edie in a hammock; Edie in a kitchen; Edie picking apples. Edie unaware that she was already on a speeding train, that her trajectory was set and in under a year she’d live in the past alone, in old photos and videos, just echoes.

Near the end, something made me stop and scroll back a few images. I squinted at it and blew it up to full size: Edie at a party, people scattered around the hardwood floor, her holding up a large homemade card that read “When you’re 22…” across the front.

I leaned in closer, my heart speeding. The lettering on the card. Triangular and hip, handwriting I’d recognize absolutely anywhere.

And off to the right, a girl I’d otherwise barely notice, with light brown bangs covering her eyes and a nose that didn’t look quite right, but those thin lips, lips and a crack of teeth that for the first time looked familiar.

Memories like flashbulbs:

That conversation right here in the living room, when I’d first shown Tessa the video. How she’d confidently recited all their names, Alex, Sarah, Edie; how after one viewing, she’d looked up and asked, “Where’s Kevin?” even though I hadn’t told her that the dark-haired guy was Alex.

Jenna, I thought wildly. Mysterious, dissipated-into-the-dust Jenna.

No. Absolutely not. But now the memories were strobing of their own accord:

The gun was in Edie’s right hand, but she was a lefty like you.

Damien’s little frown when he told me he’d cleaned up the audio so easily.

The deftness with which she’d hacked into my old email; the grave proclamation that the IP address was mine.

Six years back, the night I first met her, tipsy in a bookstore: You look so familiar to me!

With shaking hands, I typed four words into Google: Jenna Smith, plus Teresa Hoppert. The first result was a wedding announcement on the alumni page of an all-boys high school in Ohio: William Eric Hoppert (’02) to Jenna Teresa Smith.

She’d barely even bothered to conceal her former name.

I heard a clang behind me and turned around in time to see the deadbolt flop to the left. I thought about running across the room, moving at supersonic speed to throw my weight against the door, but before I could stand, the doorframe filled with the hallway’s light.

Chapter 17

I wake up to the day I am going to die.

It narrates itself in my head like an audio file, Today is the day you are going to die, in a bit of a sing-song, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”