The Lost Night (Page 56)

She chews on her lower lip, then drags her chair right up next to me.

“I came by your place last night,” she says, “just to check on you. After I called you about the IP address from that email from…from Edie’s account, and we fought on the phone. Do you remember that?”

I think about it. “I remember that phone call, yeah. But I don’t remember your coming over.”

She swallows. “I rang the buzzer and you didn’t answer, and someone else was coming out, so I went up to your floor. And I could hear really loud music, like late-naughts music I wouldn’t normally expect from you, and I tried calling but then remembered you lost your phone, so I tried banging on the door.” She lifts her hand to her hair; her fingers are shaking a bit. “And I just got…a terrible feeling. I mean, the kind of stuff you’ve been telling me lately, all the stuff with Edie…I just got really scared. I was, like, wailing on that door. And finally I remembered I had your keys on me, so I let myself in, and you were on the couch, not coherent at all.”

Her eyes glisten with tears, jewel-like. “And I ran over to you and you were saying all this stuff about how you were sure you’d…you’d killed Edie, and you just wanted to die, and I saw this empty bottle of pills out on the table and your laptop had a search up for how much it would take to kill yourself, and you were just totally, totally out of it.” She takes a sharp breath in. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, Lindsay. It was just…your eyes.” She shakes a hand in front of her own brow. “Wild-eyed. And I was like, ‘Hang on, hang on, help is coming,’ and you—”

She swings her chin away, tears dripping. A few breaths, steeling herself. “You pulled out a gun. It was just sitting there next to you. And you held it up to your head and told me you would shoot yourself if I called 911.”

A few loud sniffles; I’m frozen, riveted, unable to process what she’s saying. It’s the same tumbling sensation I felt when friends haltingly told me about Josh in the alley, about Lloyd’s bruised eye, about the Warsaw Incident. How did I get a gun?

“And I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared. So I waited until you relaxed your arm and then tried to grab it from you, and you somehow—” She peeks back up at my face, then looks down again. “It somehow went off. I’m fine, and the baby’s fine, it just went into my shoulder and they said it was the best possible way it could’ve hit me. You and I are both okay. That’s what’s important. We’re together, and we’re fine.”

She stares at me, then lunges in and wraps me in a one-armed hug, her tears forming a wet moon on my hospital gown. I hug her back, hard, scared of myself but also sinking into the warm bath of Tessa’s attention, how she loves me and cares for me despite my being a sad and savage mess.

“I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup,” I whisper, and she kind of coos.

* * *

It doesn’t strike me until several hours later, still waiting for my psych evaluation and watching daytime TV, the irony: I shot my best friend. And not for the first time.

* * *

The psychiatrist looks like a bird and speaks with a thick Staten Island accent. She hands me pamphlets and demands that I find a therapist. She asks me twenty times if I’m having suicidal thoughts, not even varying the language much, and I keep repeating myself: Nope, nope, nope. She asks if I have someone to take me home and I reply that my friend Tessa is waiting for me. She frowns and glances down at her notes, then tells me I can leave.

Tessa sets me up in her guest room, no questions asked, with a well-thought-out suitcase she’s put together from the mess of my apartment. She hands me my laptop the next day, wordlessly, and I notice there’s no activity on it from that night, no emails sent or received, no record of files opened or websites visited. It’s just as well—whatever I came across, whatever final nail I pounded into my own coffin, I probably don’t need to see again. The night is gone, snipped out of my timeline, scribbled out of my personal history. Lost.

And Tessa, who found me, cooks delicious dinners and watches old movies with me, dutifully looking up critics’ ratings and cueing trailers while I lie back and make the final call. She seems to get a vague thrill out of playing caretaker, watching over me like an old-timey nurse, Lindsay Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At night, new pills keep me from dreaming, pills that Tessa carries around so I can’t shake out too many at once, and I welcome sleep, a dip into the formless universe where nothing ever happened. It’s only when I’m up that I remember what I’ve done. Twice, Tessa wakes to the sound of me vomiting and wordlessly pulls back my hair, holding it in a gentle fist like we’re inebriated coeds.

Will is pleasant to me but seems quietly alarmed, like I’m an injured animal Tessa brought in from the sidewalk—an inconvenience likely to lead to more distress for her. He’s working late in advance of a trial, so I see little of him, but he smiles tightly when we pass in the morning. Once I overhear them arguing through the wall and suspect he wants me out, and again, fuckup Lindsay is fucking up other people’s lives. After a week, I move home while Tessa is at work. My apartment is neater than I left it.

I email my boss about a medical emergency, keeping things vague; I get an impatient note from her and decide to go in, indignant but also relieved to sink back into the drumbeat of working and calling sources and conferring with editors and jumping whenever someone knocks on my office door. Damien still has lunch with me most days, but I can tell he’s uncomfortable; I don’t know how much Tessa told him and I don’t ask. He’s never been great at dealing with real shit.

Tessa comes over most nights, and she’s a rock, as ever, kind-faced and concerned and wordless when I try to thank her, to express some small piece of how she’s keeping me sane. Sometimes I remember, in a rush, what must’ve happened, how I had to be the one left alone with Edie in her final moments. Primed for a friend fright, possibly newly aware that she was having sex with Lloyd. And I just don’t know how the scene ended. On good days, I believe I left without ever touching Kevin’s gun, my only weapon an especially poorly timed chew-out. But on most days, my brain weaves up an image that makes me cry or puke or worse: blood and brains and a body collapsing with a thud as music pounds through the ceiling.

Tessa and I fight once, a bizarre flare-up right after I’ve taken my sleeping pills, my logic just beginning to blink out. Tessa’s doing something in the kitchen when my phone chirps, my shiny new phone with its sleek case and crisp sounds. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize—not unusual, since my contacts didn’t transfer over—and so almost without reading it, I write back: “Just got a new phone, who is this?”

“What?” I yelp aloud, rereading.

“What is it?” Tessa calls.

I go over it one more time. “It’s from Greg, this guy who used to date Edie,” I say. “Remember how I ran into him in the street? I’d asked him to send me some photos of Edie, but the password he gave me didn’t work. He says he—” I look up, gasping. “He just remembered he had a Dropbox account from back then, apparently! He sent me another link to try. Not that I—”

Tessa crashes out of the kitchen and stands before me, her eyes dark. “You didn’t write back, did you?”

I frown. “Uh, I wrote back to find out who it was.”

“Lindsay, no.” She shakes her head warningly, like I’m a dog. “No. That guy is the reason you met that little jackass who gave you coke and made you lose your phone and—and got set off on a really dark spiral.”

I roll my eyes dramatically, about to tell her I don’t want to look at the stupid photos anyway, and she raises her voice to a shout. “I’m serious! I will not have you talking to anyone in that circle while you’re in this fragile state, here in—”

“What, in your house?” I start to stand. “What are you even screaming about? I wasn’t even planning to write back to him, I just—”

I stop short, because Tessa has brought her fingers up to her collar and jabbed them to the side, the gauze-covered wound on her shoulder staring right at me. I sputter, my larynx shorting out, then hang my head. I’ve heard it as clearly as if she’s said it: This is where that led.

“After all I’ve done,” she says quietly, letting go of her shirt. “After everything.”

She turns and walks back into the kitchen. I slump back onto the couch and block the number.

* * *

One night I demand a horror movie for no reason in particular; maybe I want something to jolt my system, to flick me out of this murky river of ugly, marbled feelings. I choose poorly and then panic when the bad guy pulls out a gun, creeping around the farmhouse while its inhabitants quiver with fear. I sniffle during a quiet moment and Tessa launches into action, turning off the movie, rushing to the bathroom, and returning with a box of tissues. She pats one against my eyes and cheekbones, a tender gesture that makes me cry harder.

“Too close to home?” she says after a few seconds.

I nod.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.