by Andrea Bartz
I played it out, the outlandish scenario: Could Mrs. Iredale have waited in SAKE with a gun, a fake suicide note already typed out on Edie’s computer? I couldn’t picture the woman getting into the building without anyone noticing, although she did know the way; she’d slipped inside to knock on SAKE’s door a few times before. I pictured her biding her time in the dirty hallway. Parties blaring in from every side, the boozy flotsam and jetsam of our hard-partying lifestyle littering the floor. Ridiculous.
It certainly didn’t sound like Mrs. Iredale thought I had anything to do with it. Edie liked you. Well, she liked everything I wanted, too. And unlike me, she got it.
My phone buzzed against my hip, and it was Alex fucking Kotsonis, well of course. I made up my mind to let it go to voice mail and then answered it at the very last second.
“Hey, Alex!”
“Hi! It’s…I was gonna say ‘It’s Alex.’ ”
“Yeah, your name came up.” I glanced outside again: lightning julienning the western sky.
“Old habit, I guess.” He laughed. “So look, I was thinking more about what you said the other night about Edie having drugs in her system, and I realized I kinda hung up before I even asked anything about that. Because that’s super weird. We both know she didn’t use anything. Right?”
“That’s what I thought. But it’s in the autopsy report. Hang on, let me look at it.” I put him on speaker and pulled it up. “ ‘There was a high level of,’ here goes, ‘methylenedioxymethamphetamine in the blood.’ That’s Molly.”
“Huh. I mean, everyone in the building was kinda into it, so it wouldn’t have been hard to get. I just don’t know where or when she would’ve taken it.”
“Yeah, it’s strange, right?” I said. “And that drug makes you happy. You don’t kill yourself on it.”
“If anything, people die because they jump off balconies and stuff. Makes you feel like Superman. Invincible.”
Maybe it’d turned Edie into even more of a braggart, a mean girl. Perhaps it made her say just the wrong thing to the exact wrong person who happened to be with her at that moment. Take me, for example: a little sniping on Edie’s part, maybe a snotty proclamation about Lloyd or about our clique’s true allegiance or about any one of my three thousand weak spots, could’ve set me off. Every clue, it seemed, offered dozens of possible interpretations.
“What are you doing tonight?” I blurted out. “Let’s get dinner,” I went on, when he didn’t say anything, “or just, like, grab a drink after work. It’ll be fun! We’re not too old to be spontaneous, right?”
He half laughed. “Maybe—I had a project I was going to finish up.” I knew this was my shot, the universe plopping Alex in front of me like a cat dropping a very dazed mouse.
“Alex, I think the fact that neither of us has firm plans tonight is a sign from above.” I kept my voice light. “It’s shitty outside and God wants us to get together and eat, you know, caloric things.”
“ ‘Caloric things.’ You really paint a picture with words.” I could hear it, the crack as he relented. “Can we meet near Grand Central so I can catch the train straight from there?”
* * *
I beat him to the restaurant and sat flicking through his photos on Facebook. He was still dreamy; I’d always had a vague crush on him, but he was Edie’s and way out of my league. I’d felt lucky just to be friends with him, to sometimes be spotted in public in such handsome company. Most of the pictures were of him and his wife: on vacation, at a play, at a wedding.
He pushed open the door and moved like I remembered, solid and with an easy swagger. He perked up when he spotted me, and I stood from the dinky table to give him a hug. He smelled warm and autumnal, and for a moment, my only thought was that it was good to see him. Then I remembered everything I needed to ask him, the simmering spite toward Edie that had only come out when we were drunk and my Flip cam was rolling. For a moment I saw it like a scene from a horror movie: Edie in her undies turning around just in time to see Alex raise the gun. I gave my head a little shake and began exchanging pleasantries. This must be what it’s like to be a sociopath.
“I’m so glad you could be convinced to come out tonight,” I said. “It’s been way too long. How’s everything?”
“Yeah, this was definitely unexpected. I’m good.”
We caught up politely: Alex was still working for the same company, still happily married, now looking to buy a home in Tarrytown. The waiter appeared and Alex began ordering a glass of wine, but I convinced him to make it a bottle. I’ve found it’s not hard to hide the fact that I don’t drink a single sip of my “half.”
I flashed back to us as buddies, hanging out on a cold winter night, drinking cocoa with schnapps and playing Before and After, a stupid word game we made up that involved easing band names into unrelated portmanteaus. Radioheadphones. Ace of Base-jumping. Once he and I had almost died of laughter over increasingly elaborate plans to open Destiny’s Child’s Pose, a yoga studio that played early-naughts R&B.
“Well, I’m at Sir magazine,” I volunteered.
“It’s been a while now, right?”
“Five years!” I nodded, eyebrows high. “They just switched us to a new platform that makes more interviews and photos and original documents and stuff available to the reader, so it’s like figuring out the whole fact-checking ethos anew.”
“That’s great. That’s really great.” Now he did the deliberate head bob. “Always good when it’s dynamic.”
The wine appeared and Alex had to do the dog and pony show, swirling, sniffing, tasting, approving.
“You’re in Cobble Hill?” he asked.
“Fort Greene, and yep, also going on five years now! It’s a New York City miracle. I’ve got the nicest landlord, so I just haven’t seen a reason to leave. He owns this woo-woo place called Healing Hands Reiki on the ground floor and lives right above it, so I’m his only tenant.” Aggressive hairpin turn: “We’ve come a long way from Bushwick.”
“Yeah, the lofts were pretty shitty, huh? Weird to think about us living there.”
“I didn’t. I knew better.”
He chewed his bread, smiling. “That’s right. But we were only there, what? A little less than two years. We had some good times in that loft.”
“Hell, yeah, we did.”
“On track to be the best years of my life, weirdly. I still can’t believe—” His eyes popped up and the waiter leaned in to set down our food. Goddamn waiters and their impeccably bad timing. Alex picked up his fork and got quiet again.
How had Kevin put it, back when this all began? “Figure out what really went on that night.” Alex had answers, but getting them was going to take more work than I thought.
“Do you still play guitar at all?” I asked between bites.
He shrugged. “Not really. I used to play when I got home from work sometimes, but lately I’ve just been too tired.”
“You used to be really good,” I said lamely.
“A couple guys at work and I keep talking about starting a band together. Jam out like a bunch of old losers. Hard to actually make it happen, though.”
I poured him more wine and then looked back down at my noodles.
“Fleetwood Mac and Cheese,” I said.
“Oh my god.” He nodded his approval. “Well played, Bach. Okay. Um…Aimee Mann-agement funds.”
“Oh my god, we’re so old. You never would have come up with that back in the day.” We both cracked up, and just like that, ten years between us splintered apart.
“I have to tell you, seeing you and Sarah in the flesh in the span of a week is pretty surreal,” I said.
“Do we look old to you?”
“Well, now I realize how old I’ve gotten.”
Alex laughed. “You look the same! Do I really look old now?”
“Oh, sir,
I think you dropped your fishing pole!” I mimed handing something back to him; he played along. “But no, none of us looks old. I guess it’s more that twenty-three seems absurdly young now. I’ve been looking at old photos and…god, we were babies. You know what I realized?”
“What’s that?”
“Remember Edie’s boyfriend, Greg? That older architect she dated right before you?”
“Sure.” He kept chewing, listening attentively. No particular ire toward the man she’d left for Alex.
“He was our age, like now, when he started dating Edie, who was twenty-three. Can you imagine?”
He considered. “I guess I have buddies who date girls that age. But yeah, seems a little…stunted. Like, what do they even have in common?”
“Apart from the unshakable belief that he’s a demigod?” I cracked, and he guffawed. “Edie had mentioned in an email that her mom liked that dude. Which, you’d think a mother would be suspicious of a grown man interested in her postgrad daughter.”
“That so?”
No, it was a blatant lie. I had no idea how Mrs. Iredale felt about Greg. But I nodded.
“Well, I can’t imagine her mom had anything nice to say about me.”
This again. “Why do you say that?”
He shook his head. “Never mind.”
“No, I’m curious! You said you didn’t like them.” It’s a long story, he’d said on the phone. And when I told him I had time: See, I kinda don’t.
“It’s just—we had a weird…incident.”
The waiter leaned in to refresh our water. Fuck.
“Why are we talking about this again?” Alex said in the ensuing silence.
“Alex, I want to tell you something.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I know about Lloyd.”
His eyes widened and I held my breath. If my gamble was wrong and Lloyd wasn’t the paramour Alex had been referring to…
“What?”
“I actually knew him.”
“You did ?”
“Yeah, I met him the same night Edie did. Well, the same night you and Edie met for the first time officially.”
“In the city?”
“Yeah, we ended up hanging out on a rooftop on Fourteenth.”
He squinted at me. “You were there?”
Ouch. “I was indeed!”
“Huh.” He leaned back and looked around suspiciously. “In my head it was her old roommate.”
“Which one?”
“I forget her name. She had the nose.” He outlined a bump over his own face. What a nice descriptor for him to use.
“Well, it was me,” I continued, “and I remember you bros seeming pretty tight, so I was really surprised he’d do that to you.”
“Oh, we stopped hanging out long before he and Edie started hooking up.”
Lucky break that he hadn’t asked how I’d found out about the affair. Men’s brains really do work differently—without the real-time social mapping, perhaps, the 3-D blueprints of relational information. “Right, you guys had a falling-out. Did he start hooking up with Edie as, like, a revenge thing?”
He snorted. “Revenge? We weren’t on a soap opera.” He shrugged. “It was just some dumb elementary-school shit. He borrowed my nicest guitar and fucked it up and refused to fix it. He was also this brilliant deadbeat who was too high and coked up to actually accomplish anything. We got into a stupid fight and I told him so. I used to have some anger issues.”
More wine appeared and we both waited through its uncorking. Another lucky break: He was still a fast drinker.
“Anger issues?” I asked finally, spinning the ruby liquid around in my glass.
“Dude, let’s stop talking about this. As we already established, we were stupid twenty-three-year-olds.” He scrunched up his mouth. “Actually, I think I was twenty-four.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” I picked up my fork again. “How did you find out? About Edie and Lloyd?”
“Come on, Lindsay.”
“I wanna know! You don’t think we always wondered why you guys broke up? You were so weirdly secretive about it!”
“Cool, so you guys were just talking about us all the time.”
We’d regressed; we were bitchy twentysomethings again.
“Well, I think it matters! We were worried about you two. And nobody would tell us what the fuck was going on.”
“Well, maybe it was nobody’s fucking business!”
“But it was! We were all in that apartment together—”
“You didn’t even live there!”
He’d struck a tuning fork and I let it ring out. The sting crept into my eyes and I willed them to fill with tears; one hard blink and a drop slipped down my cheek.
“Look, Lindsay, I—”
“No, it’s fine.” I smeared it with my palm.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It’s just…not fun to talk about.”
Why, because you killed her? “I get it. It’s hard for me, too. Especially because we…she and I were fighting. So even up until the end, I didn’t have the warmest feelings.”
An endless second as I waited to see if he’d take the bait: Me too, it was so hard to go on living together…“Yeah, that sucks,” he said finally.
Ugh. “Sarah brought up how Edie was kind of…disengaging from everyone that summer,” I offered. Like you, you idiot. I caught you on film saying you wanted to slit her throat.
“I mean, we’d just broken up.”
“I know. That must have been so hard deciding to stay friends and roommates and everything.”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
I refilled his glass and put a palm on his forearm, summoning my most earnest, empathetic face. “I’m really, really sorry about Edie and Lloyd,” I said.
“Yeah, it was bad.” I waited for him to go on. “And I found out in the worst way possible.”
He froze long enough that I murmured, “You can tell me.”
He stared at my fingers, then slowly turned over his wrist. He slid his elbow back a few inches until our palms touched; my whole arm lit up and I willed myself to focus.
“We were sorta having some trouble anyway,” he said, “fighting all the time and trying to fix it in the stupidest way possible. And she decided to stay at her parents’ place because they were out of town. I was going to go over and surprise her, bring flowers, right? I mean…I was really into her.” I nodded him on. “I called her as I was walking over from the subway, pretending I was still in Bushwick, and she picked up and sounded normal, said she was watching a movie or whatever. Then the doorman let me upstairs and I got to their door, and for some crazy reason it wasn’t locked and I followed the noise to the bedroom, and…yeah, you can’t fucking unsee that.”
I remembered research discussed in my human sexuality class in college, how for a woman learning a partner’s deeply in love with someone else is the most painful thing imaginable, but for a man, sexual infidelity—another person’s body where his once was—is impossibly hurtful. Infuriating. Crazy-making.
“Wow, I’m so sorry,” I said. Then: “How on earth did you keep living together after that?”
“It was pretty idiotic in retrospect,” he said. “They saw me storm out, and she stayed at her parents’ for a few days, calling me nonstop to cry and apologize and say how important I was to her.” He shrugged. “I felt bad. And I still loved her. And she had so much shitty stuff going on with her parents and school and everything. So I guess it felt like breaking up but not kicking her out was, like, the adultest thing to do.”
Slowly, slowly, our fingers were moving until they interlocked. He had such nice hands, strong fingers with neat fingernails.
“Why didn’t you move out?” I asked.
He stared
. “It was my apartment,” he said simply, like it was obvious that a king couldn’t be cast from his castle. What’s the word? Abdicate.
“What was it like living together after that?”
“Oh, fine. Obviously sort of uncomfortable, but fine.”
Except for the repressed rage, the kind that came out in front of a camcorder the night of Edie’s murder.
“So you forgave her? That’s amazing. I don’t know if I could have done that.”
He shrugged.
“I guess I’m, like, extra-obsessed because I don’t remember her last night very well.” I stared at the purple ring beneath my wineglass, a stenciled splotch.
“You were pretty wasted, right?”
I nodded. “For a long time I really hated myself for it,” I said softly, adding a tremor. I willed my eyes to fill up with tears again, and slowly, they obliged. “Here was this pivotal night and I wasn’t there for her, I wasn’t…It was like I wasn’t there.”
I peeked up at him: He had that wild male look in his eyes, the expression men get when a woman is crying and they’ll lop off their own hand with a scythe if it’ll make the female freak-out stop.
“It was…Lindsay, you know you didn’t miss anything. It was just a normal night, until it was…I mean, the most horrible night imaginable.”
I pulled my fingers out from his and ran my knuckles against my tears. “I don’t even remember being at the concert with you guys,” I went on. False: I could see and hear and feel it now, a memory richer than real life. “I don’t even know what we talked about or how everything went down. And I couldn’t ask anyone because I’d seem like a crazy person, trying to make it about me.”
“Lindsay. You know it’s…you shouldn’t feel that way.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t planning to bring any of this up,” I lied. “I guess I’ve just had this…this preoccupation lately of wanting to piece together what happened. Where everybody was, what we were all doing, when we—when I—last saw her. That way I could…well, I’d know, and I could stop wondering.”
