The Lost Night (Page 54)

I moan. She’s quiet for a moment.

“And I squeezed it right as the band at the party hit this really loud note and…and the whole room shook, and for a second I thought it was just the music, but then Edie fell…she fell in slow motion and I saw the blood start to collect behind her and the song ended and it got so much quieter and I couldn’t move, I was just standing there with the gun still in my hand as the blood got closer and closer to my feet.”

She’s quiet and I realize tears are rolling down my jaw and neck.

“So then I texted Anthony.”

She pauses like it’s my turn to say a line, but I’m silent. What’s my line? Hello, prompter? Can we take it from the top? The whole audience leans forward, annoyed, the play can’t go on until I remember my—

“Anthony had—he had a rule that if I ever got into a jam while I was dealing for him, I could call his burner phone. So I put the chain on the door and texted him to come up. God, I was feeling so fucked up by that point. Like I was in this insane nightmare and just had to wake up. Lindsay?”

Should I play dead? No, then she might kill me. I can’t work out the logic of this, but I groan back anyway. “Mm-hmm?”

“Just checking. So I let Anthony in and he just keeps saying, ‘Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.’ He told me to lock the door behind him, but not with my bare hands. So I used a tissue. And then he’s staring at the body and goes, ‘Pick up the gun.’ I was shaking and I said, ‘I can’t.’ He started yelling: ‘Pick up the fucking gun!’ and I was just saying over and over, ‘I can’t!’ Then he points to the laptop open on the couch and goes, ‘Is that her fucking computer?’ and I said yes and he says, ‘Get the fuck over there, open up a Word document, and type what I tell you. And wipe your fingerprints off everything.’ ”

A clang and a quick shuffle; she must have knocked her can over. Why is she doing this? Is it because it’s her one and only chance to tell someone what the hell happened? I wish I’d never had anything to do with this. I notice with interest this cool black pool I could sink right into if I wanted.

“I remember I told him I wanted to call 911,” she continues, “but he kept saying no. I think because of the drugs, because he was afraid I would tell, or they would figure it out, and he’d lose the building, everything. He just kept saying, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ ”

She’s shaking so hard, her shoulders and arms, that I can see it from here.

“My brain was going a million miles an hour, I didn’t know if you’d told anyone what you’d seen, and I thought that everyone knew that Edie had cut me out the year before, everyone saw how upset I was, and there weren’t any witnesses to show that it’d been an accident. So Anthony told me what to type and I put tissue over two fingers…”

“You opened up a new file?” I say this without knowing why.

She hesitates. “Oh, fuck it. Her diary was already up as a Word document and I saved it on a thumb drive on my keychain and then did control-all to delete all the copy. Then I typed what Anthony told me to.”

This jiggles something in my brain, but I can’t figure out what.

“I’m not sure why I took it,” she says as if I’ve just asked her, as if she’s on late-night TV and a charming host is interviewing her, all laid-back and chatty. Cameras appear all around us, stage lights beaming down on her at my kitchen table. “I guess I was thinking that if she’d written anything about how much she hated me, that might…that might not be good for me.” She drags something heavy across the table, taps it. “And also…I don’t know. I wanted it. This was my one shot at figuring out what she was thinking, this, like, enigmatic person I’d been close with once…and since she was already dead, it wouldn’t do her any harm. Like me, now, telling you.”

There’s a thought that’s a bubble at the bottom of a jar of molasses. It begins its long, slow rise to the surface. “You,” I say, “made me…do it.” That isn’t right and I try it again from another angle, like opening up a tricky folding chair. “Made me…think I did it.”

“You know, the only thing I really had to do was send an email from Edie’s account. It’s crazy, I had no idea you’re legitimately violent. You almost killed that poor kid the other night. You really are out of control when you drink too much. You could have done it. Killed Edie. Why not?”

I can’t remember what I did and didn’t do. She’s right: Why not?

She stands again and pushes out her breath like she’s steeling herself. “Are you still not out? You’re like a goddamn horse.”

“Mmmph,” I answer, then focus on pulling my lips into a shape; it’s the middle of winter and they’re frozen. Icicles crystallizing on my eyelashes, my breath white fog. “I’m here.”

“Good, because I brought you something. Open your eyes.” I do and something new surges through me, cold and sharp, because she’s wearing white gloves and holding a gun out over my head.

“Why?” I manage.

“I don’t know, you bought it,” she says, casually, like a teenager.

“Okay,” I murmur.

“Oh Christ, Lindsay, you didn’t buy it. But it’ll look like you did. I got it on the darknet. Mostly untraceable, but I ran it through your IP address first, so if anyone really looks, you bought it. Easy.” IP address. That tickles something. None of my circuits are connecting and it’s not fair, I want to be smart again.

“You know, this is momentous, I hadn’t touched a gun in ten years before this one. Since I picked up Kevin’s. Well, Edie picked it up, technically. Picked it up, showed me how to use it, because for once in her fucking life she decided to be nice to me again. Ugh.”

I know I should be working out a plan, but the synapses in my brain have all sputtered out like a city grid gone dark, like a blackout…oh my god, I’m blacked out again, blacked out in a room with Tessa and a gun.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” she says. “I really am. But you got your one pass already, and I just can’t risk it. I mean, I spent years walking around in fear that someone would realize what I’d done, and it’s like God or the universe or whatever gave me a second chance at life. And I used it, you know? I met Will, and he’s wonderful, and we built this beautiful life and have a little boy or girl coming, and I just…I can’t risk it. I’m sorry. I can’t let you take it all away.”

I’m quiet for a few seconds. “My pass?”

She sighs sadly. “This isn’t the first time you’ve figured it out, Linds. Your thirtieth birthday. You were so drunk and so sad and alone, and you kept talking about Edie and looking at photos of her, and then suddenly you looked up at me, really stared, and then said, ‘I know you.’ And I kind of laughed and said, ‘Of course you do,’ and you said, ‘No, from before.’ ” She laughs through her tears. “And I looked at you and I just…my heart broke in two. It was over. The jig was up. How do you come back from that? So I poured us more shots: ‘Let’s toast to old times! Tell me about Edie.’ And you drank and drank and drank. I just kept putting shots in front of you. I was so scared that night, after I put you to bed and went home. I remember lying there next to Will and wondering if I should pack up and leave town. But then you texted me the next day. God, my heart was in my throat. And you asked if I could bring you Gatorade. Because you were so hungover. You had no idea. I literally fell to the floor with relief.”

I blink a few times. “You didn’t answer.”

“I needed time to think. And I had to make sure that it wouldn’t come back to you and that it wouldn’t happen again. I thought about just cutting off all contact, but…”

I squint hard, remembering. “You yelled at me. Said I was mean.”

“I didn’t yell. I was terse. I told you you had to get your life under control, that you couldn’t still be blacking out all the time. Which was true.”

I poke at this but can’t grasp it. My thirtieth birthday, when I was so awful to Tessa. Or was I?

I feel a new thought coming and I wait for it; I speak at just the right time, like it’s a clay pigeon curving at its peak. “Did you kill Anthony?”

Her face contorts with pain. “Seriously? Of course not! Who do you think I am?”

I don’t answer because it’s a tricky question. Who is she again? Then a thought worms its way through, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to say it because the grid’s down, but I have to try.

“You,” I say, “are a good. Person.”

Silence, and I’m not sure I actually said it, and then she lets out a little cackle. “How can you even say that right now?”

She listens for an answer from me, but the city’s gone dark; I forgot what I was thinking and my eyes won’t open anyway, my mouth is done moving, my tongue is like a fat pink dead slug inside my mouth, and so I stay silent, and then that’s an option, too, I’m out.

It’s quiet. Tessa lets out a surprised laugh and mumbles, “Well, of course.” I hear her move closer and I feel afraid, but it’s a little faint stream of one single battery trying to light up the whole grid, it’s faraway and ineffectual, just like me, I’m ineffectual and faraway. Music boils the air around us, it’s my playlist, it’s Edie’s, it’s so loud it’s rattling my skeleton, the skeletons in my skeleton, where did I hear that?