by Andrea Bartz
Anthony had died before Calhoun was sold, and apartment and condo listings from the shiny new development sprinkled the internet. Most included a photo of the entryway as I’d seen it, white walls and green glass.
I thought again of Mrs. Iredale, bloodless and storm-eyed, standing with Edie right on that same patch of sidewalk. Ten years ago, on a Friday evening, she’d traveled all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie that her childhood home had been foreclosed and that they’d no longer be paying her grad-school tuition. Edie’s classes were surely about to start, far too late to apply for financial aid. That must have been disconcerting, destabilizing for Edie. And instead of reaching out to any of us, she’d contacted Lloyd for comfort.
Lloyd. My fact-checker light blinked on: Mrs. Iredale had dropped something verifiable, the kind of fact that—were it in a magazine story—I’d need to confirm before the issue could go to press. “He was photographing a concert that night,” she’d said, back when I was still trying to figure out who the fuck Roy was, “and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”
It didn’t take long to find the album archived on an event photography site: the band Man Man at Webster Hall, dozens of shots of the hairy musicians adorned in colorful hats and thick cloaks of sweat. There were photos of the after-party, too, cigarettes and whiskey drinks and cool, overexposed moments of candor. Lloyd had a photo credit on each one and the time stamps put him at the show at Edie’s time of death.
Of course, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t in a single one.
I made a valiant but doomed attempt to find audience members’ photos of that very show, in case Lloyd was visible onstage, but it was just too long ago, a time when files were organized and tagged so haphazardly. Instagram didn’t exist; Twitter didn’t let you post images. Fuck. I pressed my knuckles into my temples, fighting down a headache, then returned to the keyboard and searched hard for Lloyd himself.
Lloyd Kohler—not an especially common name, but after 2010, the man became a goddamn digital ghost. No website, no number, no email, not even a city. Just a smattering of forgotten photos, saturated and archaic, credited to him and hosted on other companies’ sites. Maybe he’d wiped his digital identity clean, like Tessa was always telling me to do—technological and informed and afraid of everything the government had on us. Or maybe he was just an off-the-grid hippie these days. Both seemed equally plausible.
I padded into the kitchen and poured a glass of water. Stories are like mazes, an early boss had told me. When you hit a dead end, you just turn around and try another way.
Alex picked up his cell on the second ring.
“Hello?” He sounded as eager as I felt.
“It’s Lindsay again,” I said. Then when he didn’t answer: “Lindsay Bach.”
“Oh, hi! I’m sorry, I don’t have you in my phone and I thought it was…We made an offer on a place in Sleepy Hollow, and the home inspector was supposed to—”
“I just needed to ask you something,” I blurted out, afraid he’d rush me off the phone. “It’s about Lloyd. I’m sorry, I know you don’t want to talk about him, but it’s important.”
“Lloyd? Lindsay—”
“I know you guys fought. I know you had a big blowout. But do you know if he and Edie ever fought?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re the only one who knows,” I said, my voice taut, “we’re the only ones who know about them, so you’re the only one I can ask.”
“Lindsay, what’s going on? You don’t sound right.”
“He was with her, Alex,” I said. “The night she died. She talked to her mom and then out walked Lloyd to take her away. They were still seeing each other.” The long silence crackled. “I’m sorry.”
“You know this how?”
“Um…anonymous tip,” I said lightly.
“No, if you and I are the only ones who know, who told you? Did you talk to him?”
“Should I not have? Is he dangerous?”
“Lindsay, you need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
“Is he? Is Lloyd dangerous?”
“What? No. Lloyd’s a dick, but he’s not dangerous. Or at least he wasn’t the last time I talked to him.”
“When was that?”
“Lindsay, what is this?”
“When did you talk to him?”
“Ten years ago. Okay? We met up a few months later—after Edie—and he manned up and told me the truth and apologized. Now can you tell me what’s going on?”
“He wasn’t violent?”
“No, I told you.”
Well, maybe he hides it, I thought. Like I have for the past twenty years. “Did you know they were hooking up again?”
“Not while it was happening. But, like, it wasn’t cheating. We weren’t together anymore.”
“But he still felt the need to come to you and tell you and apologize?”
“I mean, yeah. Bro code.”
I scrunched my eyes closed. “Do you know what they talked about? Him and Edie, on her last night?”
“She was just upset. Because of her mom.”
“And her mom told her…?”
“Lindsay, you know this. That they were losing their condo. That they couldn’t pay Lindsay’s tuition.”
But why rush to Calhoun to tell her? I froze, another question solidifying: Why did any of us know what they’d talked about? Edie hadn’t had time to tell us. Lloyd couldn’t. How had this intel leaked? Had Mrs. Iredale mentioned it to someone—Sarah, maybe?
“I met with Mrs. Iredale,” I said. “Not Lloyd. That’s how I knew.”
“Now that is legit not a good idea.”
“What?”
“Talking to her.”
“How come?”
“You just don’t want to fuck with that lady. Trust me.” We had a weird…incident, he’d said in the restaurant, before polishing off his water glass.
“Tell me what happened. I know something happened with you and her parents.”
“Lindsay, have you lost your damn mind? This is nuts.” Why did he keep using my name?
“Please, I won’t try to talk to her again. I promise. Just tell me and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“That’s not what I…”
“Alex, please.”
He let out a sigh. “Are you okay? Do you need me to call someone for you?”
“I’m fine. I just bumped into Mrs. Iredale and learned about Lloyd, and the whole thing really shook me. I’ll feel better knowing I’m not crazy for finding her…unsettling.”
The phone line sizzled: three seconds, four.
“Okay,” he said. “Just please don’t tell anyone. So, when Edie and I first started dating, she was in her second semester of fashion school, right? And I started to notice that more and more, she just wasn’t going to class. And at first I thought, whatever, fashion school’s probably not that hard for a smart girl like Edie, maybe she just doesn’t need to be there, y’know?” A beat. “But after a few weeks, I started to question it. Like, are you getting notes from someone? Aren’t your finals coming up? Don’t you have, like, papers or assignments or something due? And it didn’t take long to figure out that she was just willingly flunking out of school. Well, I dunno if ‘willingly’ is right, but letting it happen. Like, failing all of her classes and not seeming that concerned about it.”
“Whoa! And she didn’t say why?”
“No, it was really weird. She was just, like, don’t worry about it. I didn’t want to be an overbearing boyfriend or whatever, but I couldn’t not worry about her.”
“You were worried that…that what, that this was a sign she’d given up on life or something?”
“That she was not right,” he said quickly. “It was just…I don’t know if it was some kind of
, like, episode or something, but it was bizarre. Edie was super smart. She went to NYU. And working in fashion was her dream, so what the hell was she doing flunking out? And not just getting Ds and Fs, I mean actually not turning shit in and getting incompletes. That can really fuck you over.”
“Well, to play devil’s advocate, everyone was pretty pessimistic about their professional lives back then,” I pointed out. “I could see how pursuing fashion in 2009 could feel kind of pointless.”
“But then you formally withdraw from your classes and go work in a clothing store. You know? This was super weird. And I knew her mom was a psychiatrist and would probably know what to do if Edie was having a breakdown or whatever, so one day at work I thought, Fuck it, and I called her.”
“Her mom?”
“Yeah. When I told her, the first thing out of her mouth was ‘You didn’t tell anyone, did you?’ ”
The sweep of goose bumps up my arms.
“That was her response?”
“Well, then she backpedaled and said this was the kind of thing they wanted to handle within the family and she’d appreciate my discretion, for Edie’s sake. She said, ‘Do you think it’s drugs?,’ ‘No,’ ‘Do you think it’s alcohol?,’ ‘No,’ and that was basically it. Edie and I never talked about it, so I don’t even know if she knew, y’know, that I’d told her mom. But she started going to class again. I’m lucky we were so goddamn in love, otherwise she’d probably have been furious with me.”
I wandered over to the couch. “But that left you with a bad taste in your mouth toward her mom.”
“I mean, obviously. What a psychopath.”
A tense silence, like we were both shocked by what he’d said.
“Anyway, I gotta go,” he said. “You’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, you don’t need to call my mom on me.”
Another long silence.
“G’night, Lindsay.” Then he hung up.
I stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. I shouldn’t have made that final, knee-jerk jab. It was my instincts working faster than my judgment (see easy callback, crack joke). I wrote out a text to Tessa and Damien, then deleted it. I’d have to pick through this tangle myself.
So Alex wasn’t suspicious of Lloyd, who’d formally apologized to him. But he didn’t like Mrs. Iredale, either. What kind of mother responds that way to her struggling daughter? Who cares more about how her child reflects on her than the kid’s actual well-being? The whole flunking incident added another dimension to the suicide theory, too; if Edie had been checked out as soon as that spring, it wasn’t a huge leap to think she’d be suicidal come August.
Spring semester, 2009. I plunked around in my old emails, searching for mentions of school from Edie: classes, study, midterms, grades. Nothing telling. And again I got wrapped up in reading our old threads, scenes that felt only tangentially related to my own history, story lines like something on TV: In one from March, I described how I’d found myself in the bedroom—the makeshift coatroom—at a lackluster house party the night before, digging through layers of fur and fringe and suede for my own vintage jacket. A man had entered and rifled around for his coat, too.
“One of those nights, hmm?” I’d said, smirking.
“I just feel like,” he’d hesitated, his shoulders slumping. “Tonight was so forgettable, you know? Years from now, I’m never going to remember it.”
Then he’d glanced up under heavy brows and our eyes met, and he took a step closer to me, and I let out a giggle as suddenly we were making out, hard, rolling around on the crumpled pyramid of outerwear. After a minute or two, someone in the doorframe cleared their throat and we’d pulled away, laughing. Before he could say anything else, I’d snatched my coat and darted out into the street below.
I did remember that, vaguely. I forget if he was cute. That wasn’t the point.
A knock at the door, and my heart seized up. I closed my laptop and crept over, then peered through the peephole. Gasping, I flicked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
“Alex.”
He had his chin tucked and his brow knitted, all broody. “Can I come in?”
I held the door wider and watched him step inside. This couldn’t be real; this was an odd dream, the details all wrong.
“Nice place you got,” he said, even though it’s really not. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked over to the couch.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Oh.” I was befuddled but remembered my lines. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“That’d be amazing, yeah. Do you have some whiskey or something?”
I nodded and walked into the kitchen, then opened the cabinet over my fridge. In the back was a dusty bottle of scotch, something a clueless research assistant had gifted me for Christmas. I’d almost given it to Damien on the spot, but instead I stuck it back here next to a small fire extinguisher.
“Ice?” I called.
“Nah, neat.”
Robotically, I handed it over.
“Thanks,” he said. “You don’t want any?”
I took a long breath in and out. “Alex, I don’t drink.”
“But at the restaurant—”
“I didn’t drink anything. I just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
He sat on the couch and looked up at me. My whole torso tingled, my chest and belly.
“That’s not it,” I heard myself say. “I wanted you to drink, because I wanted you to open up. About Edie.”
He patted the cushion next to him and I sat obediently.
“There’s only one Healing Hands Reiki in Brooklyn,” he said finally, with a grin.
“I’m impressed you remembered.” I looked down at my knees. I’d changed into sweatpants after I got back from Bushwick and now I wished I looked cuter.
“It’s a memorable name.” He sighed and looked straight ahead. “I was in an Uber to Grand Central and found myself putting it in. As the destination. You really worried me on the phone.”
I shrugged. “I was just disturbed by everything Edie’s mom told me. She’s a disturbing woman.”
“That’s for damn sure.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I just don’t understand why you’re going back into all this stuff. So many years later. If I can help, I wanna help.”
His hand slid to the back of my neck, and like gravity was pulling me, I leaned into him. His chest smelled like autumn; his hand rubbed my far shoulder.
“Alex, I found this horrible video,” I told him, and my eyes filled with tears.
He craned his neck to look at me. “A video?”
“From the night Edie died.” A tear broke free. “Here, I’ll show you.” I stood up and got my laptop from the table, careful to leave a few feet between us when I sat back down. His knees sloped toward me as I found Damien’s email with the cleaned-up clip; I hit play, then hooked my heels on the sofa and wrapped my arms around my shins.
“I want that bitch out of my apartment!”
“I want to push her off this building!”
“I want to slit her throat!”
I could feel Alex cringing next to me. When the screen darkened, I hit stop.
“That’s all there is,” I lied. “The rest is just it recording inside my bag.”
“All these years you’ve had this, and you never told anyone?”
“I just found it,” I said. “I must have deleted it that same night. I just found my old camcorder and figured out how to recover deleted videos.”
“Wow. Did you show Sarah?”
I shook my head. “It scared the shit out of me. And the fact that neither you nor Sarah ever mentioned it makes me think…” I trailed off.
“I one hundred percent do not remember that,” he said, pointing at the co
mputer. “I seriously don’t. My mother didn’t raise me to talk like that, dude. I don’t even know.” His voice was getting higher, his head shaking back and forth—a basketball player insisting he didn’t just foul.
“I know. Obviously, I feel the same way. I mean, yeah, we’d been fighting, and I wasn’t totally happy with her, but I would never…wish her harm.” I picked at my fingernails. “So you don’t remember this conversation at all? Or me having a camera?”
“Not at all. Swear to god.”
I nodded. “I believe you.” I didn’t want to show him my squabble with Sarah, when I declared I wouldn’t come to the concert—my alibi, the spot we both assumed I’d been. And I definitely didn’t want to show him the end of the video, the part where I stumbled into SAKE. Because I didn’t want him to suspect me. Ten years later, an unsolved death hanging in the balance, and I cared most about his esteem.
“So you don’t remember deleting it?”
I shook my head, then looked at him slowly. Who’s to say I deleted it, really? Couldn’t it have been someone else, perhaps the other person in the room, alarmed to discover a recording device jangling around in my bag?
“So this is why you had so many questions. About Lloyd. And Edie’s mom.”
I nodded. “I can’t shake this hunch that it wasn’t a suicide. That something happened to Edie.”
He didn’t reply and I pressed my forehead against my knees. “My friends think I’m obsessed,” I murmured, “like this is taking over my life. But you get it, right? Why we need to figure it out?”
“Of course. That doesn’t make you obsessed. It just makes you a good friend. Hey, don’t cry.”
