The Lost Night (Page 58)
Finally, unsure what else to do and walloped with that postadrenaline exhaustion, I get ready for bed and collapse into it, my bedroom door locked as a backup to the front door. I curse my landlord for not installing a chain; I briefly consider setting up a trap, Home Alone style, for anyone who dares to visit me.
For the first time in a month, I skip the sleeping pills. I’m out almost instantly, and my dreams are vivid and rich: Tessa wearing white gloves and waving the gun around. Anthony, tragic Anthony, burning up inside a beautiful building. Fear flooding my body, adrenaline and cortisol fighting off the effects of too many Tofranils, of too many Tofranils and something else altogether.
Remember this, I’d thought. Remember this, remember this, remember this.
I wake up blinking into the early-morning light, a bird singing too loudly outside my window: oowee, oowee, oowee. I grab my phone to check the time and my eyes fall on the voice memo app. The last time I used it, I murmured into the microphone about a dream, a dream where Edie was trapped inside my Flip cam and looking out at me from behind the—
I stumble into the living room and plunge my fingers into the dark spaces between the couch cushions. There are crumbs, and hair ties, and coins, but I need to physically flip the cushions to the floor before I spot it, dead against the black fabric: the Flip cam. The one I turned on in a brief moment of lucidity as the drugs took over my brain.
I stare at it for another moment, glossy in my palm, then lunge into the hallway and fling open the closet door. I yank things off the shelves, snapping open bags and boxes and piling them on the floor. I try the cabinets surrounding the TV, pulling out old magazines and dusty board games and outdated electronics, shit I scowl at as I shove it back into place. I move on to my bedroom, scattered with old notebooks, and I yank out plastic storage bins and fling through old purses and scarves and toiletries and expired medicine. I lumber back into the living room and run my hand along the dust behind my books.
It’s on the third shelf, as I know it should be: the adapter. Everything in my insides surges toward the sky and I grab it, a small black coil, and rip at its ends to untangle the knots.
I sit down on my bed, locking the door behind me, and begin to cry again: Without my computer, I don’t know where to plug this in. But the resolute part of me fights back, waving its little arms and stomping its little feet until I look again and see that the cord’s end is unusual but not totally weird; I sift through more jumbled cords until I find a plug that fits, an old digital camera charger from the same era. I push it into the wall and an outdated graphic appears on the camcorder’s screen: FLIP VIDEO.
I sit hunched on my bed for the full twenty-four minutes. I can’t make out the words, but the affect seeps through—strained and quavering at times, then the staccato of sobbing. I play it a second time with my phone held up to its speaker, recording. I find the email Damien forwarded me from the online sound-cleanup app he used to snap my warble into focus: Have you guys seen Alex? I tap through to the program and upload the file. My finger lingers over the Filter! button, with an exclamation point like it’s only meant for perky things, and then I press it.
It’s ready in less than a minute and I listen again, comprehending this time, pausing when my own sobs get so loud that I can’t hear Tessa’s voice. It cuts off at the beginning of her 911 call, which sounds eerily like Sarah’s—screeches, shock.
More hunches come to me like things I read in a book or maybe fact-checked in an article long ago—that Tessa sought me out, befriended me after changing her name and look. The button nose, the one I’ve always admired, now seems obviously fake. Greg helped me, he pointed me in the right direction, I think. And the White Lotus Thai…everything was off about it, even the delivery, though I can’t remember how. But I’m certain Tessa was behind that, too.
I hear the deadbolt clink and look up at my locked bedroom door; behind it, I know, Tessa is navigating her way in. When I crack it open, she’s dropping her keys and balancing a bag of groceries on her hip. For a moment, I see it: the Flip cam a flimsy weapon, beat into her temple over and over and over again until the skin bruises and splits open like a ripe stone fruit. Swelling pushing up through those wide eyes and that perfect nose, the one she didn’t deserve, the one she got to trick me. Blood trickling out like juice as she fights back, waving both arms wildly, the groceries spreading out on the floor, eggs cracked on the hardwood.
I step out into the hallway.
“I thought I could make French toast,” she says, smiling, then busies herself with the groceries. “Do you want to make us some coffee?”
I follow her into the kitchen, pressing the front door closed as I pass.
“What’s up, you okay?” She’s already whipped out a cutting board.
I clear my throat. “Sorry, I’m fine. I forgot to take my sleeping pills last night, so I’m kind of out of it.”
“I gave them to you, right? Where’d you leave them?” She’s taken off her sling, and with a fat chef’s knife, she begins calmly destroying a pineapple, dismantling its spiny skin.
“Just in the bathroom. I’ll take them tonight.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Sounds like we both need coffee then.”
I stare at her, then shake my head. “Sorry. Right.” I pull the beans and grinder out of the cabinet. What do I do?
She fries up our French toast and I suggest we eat in the living room, far from all my sharp objects. She agrees, still cheerfully soliloquizing about her in-laws’ concerns over how barky little Marlon will treat the baby.
“I thought it would be a whole power-struggle, territorial thing,” she says, taking a sip of coffee, “but Will’s dad was insisting dogs just get jealous and insecure. We finally looked it up at the table, and wouldn’t you know it, he was right.”
“Tessa,” I break in.
“What?”
“I found the keystroke logger.” How much would she admit to?
“Huh?”
“On my laptop. Like you used on Will. And I know I didn’t put it there, so.”
She pops a chunk of pineapple in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “What are you saying?”
I take a deep breath. “Is it yours?”
A beat, a long one, and then Tessa’s expression softens. “Linds, you don’t know what it’s like to have to stop your best friend from killing herself. It made me realize you’re really fucking good at not letting on when you’ve hit rock bottom.” She sets her fork down on the plate. “I just didn’t want that to happen again. I’m sorry if that feels like an invasion of privacy, but I didn’t know what else to do. I can’t always be here to keep an eye on you, and…” She spreads her palm over her belly. “I mean, soon it’s gonna be kind of hard to see each other at all.”
I blink at her, then nod. We eat in silence for a few more seconds.
“There’s something else,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I know you’re Jenna.”
She swallows, blinks. “Who’s Jenna?”
“I remember you now.”
Another silence, both of us frozen, and then, from inside my room, the sound of my phone ringing. We both turn to look at it as the hollow buzz starts again.
Then we’re both moving, a race, and the dishes explode on the floor as I dash into my bedroom, yanking my phone off the nightstand just in time to see that it’s a missed call from Damien. I’d thought Tessa was running for the same thing, but I look up and she’s in the doorway with a knife from the sink, sticky with fruit juice.
“Give me the phone,” she says, a hand outstretched.
“Tessa…”
“Give me the fucking phone. Don’t test me.”
I stare at her, then look down and begin frantically swiping. Home button, emergency call, 9—
She snatches it out of my hands and glares at me as it begins ringing again. She holds down a button to turn it off, then slips it into her back pocket.
“Okay, let’s calm down,” I say, lifting my palms. “Think this through. You don’t want to hurt me.”
“None of this was supposed to happen,” she says as her eyes fill with tears. “I thought you’d just make peace with what you’d done.”
“Tessa, put that down.” I back farther into the bedroom and she follows, the knife tip shaking.
“I’m sorry, I can’t, you can’t know.”
“Think this through. This isn’t gonna save you. It’ll only make everything worse.”
She shakes her head. “I have to do it,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
The moment slows and I have time to take it all in: the knife quivering in her left hand, the tear that tumbles down her cheek, the sudden step forward with her left foot, and then—graceful, slow-motion—the right hand swooping out and closing around my wrist.
I jerk back and yank at her fingers with my other hand, and the knife darts forward, slices my knuckles. I scream and keep twisting, then shift my weight and land a kick to her gut. She shrieks and releases my arm, doubling over.
“I’m pregnant!” she screams, as if I’m the reckless one. “How could you!”