The Lost Night

by Andrea Bartz

  The lost hours.

  “Maybe her mom called her down again,” I said. “After Lloyd left. They talked some more, they’re getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, so Edie brings her back inside to your apartment, which is newly empty.”

  “The gun—the weapon was Kevin’s gun, though, something in the room,” Alex said. “Her mom wouldn’t have known it was there.”

  “I’m not saying it was premeditated,” I pointed out. “Who the fuck knows what went on? Maybe her mom insisted on coming in to look for something, or to, I don’t know, tell Edie to pack up and go, and they were fighting and things got out of hand. Maybe it was an accident.”

  Sarah shook her head. “We have the phone records. Lloyd was the last person she texted. Her mom couldn’t have called again.”

  I bit my lip. “Okay, but maybe—”

  “This is crazy,” Sarah announced, a little too loudly. “We’re talking like I did when I was twenty-three and grieving and trying to make everything a lot more complicated than it actually was. Right?” She slurped her ice water. “Like, no, life isn’t actually a soap opera and the simplest answer is probably the right one. There’s a reason nothing you’ve uncovered during your…your investigation proves anything different.”

  The three of us watched one another across the booth, across the ten years.

  “But if Lloyd left the concert early,” I said, “maybe he quickly got all the photos he needed and headed back to—”

  “Lindsay, stop. Do you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how you sound?” Sarah pressed her palms flat on the table. “Look, with Edie…I loved the girl, but she had a lot of enemies. We could probably fill a stadium with people she had a beef with, right?” She let out a mirthless chortle. “She was smart, and funny, and incredibly charismatic and all that, but she could also be really horrible to people. I lived with her—I saw that firsthand. I mean, weren’t you guys fighting at the end? If I didn’t know you better…hey, you grew up shooting guns, right? You knew Kevin’s gun was there, you wandered away from the rest of us before the concert, you don’t remember a…a fucking thing from the night—”

  Alex piped up: “Hey, you know—”

  “And I know what you did.”

  We locked eyes. Did Sarah know about the Warsaw Incident, the drunken disaster Edie had promised not to share? Had she betrayed me?

  “To your mom. When you were a kid? Edie told me.”

  Not the Warsaw Incident—something worse. We stared at one another and the entire room vibrated with my heartbeat, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum.

  She pulled the napkin off her lap, folded it carefully. “I said if I didn’t know you better. Look, at the end of the day, I think she was really depressed, and she took some drugs that messed her up even further, and she was alone and everything sucked and she made a really bad decision.”

  Sarah knew. The dark childhood secret I’d let slip just once, soused on my friendship with Edie, deep into a game of Truth or Truth. I looked down at my hands, limp and folded in my lap like sleeping kittens. What are you two capable of?

  “But we’re still here. And, Lindsay, it’s been ten years. Ten years. If Edie were sitting here right now, she would look all of us in the eye and tell us we should move the heck on.”

  I felt rage rising within me, a steamy red spiral, but I fought it, moved my gaze back to the window and the people crisscrossing on the sidewalk outside. All consumed by their own little dramas.

  “You’re right,” I said softly. “You’re so right. I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m sorry to bring this up.”

  “It’s okay. I understand it’s—it’s not something you can talk about with a lot of people,” she said. She slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table, an odd, cinematic move, and said she’d better go. Alex and I slid out of the booth and gave her clumsy hugs. She was heading for the door when I remembered a final question.

  “Sarah, wait.” She turned and peered at me, and I cleared my throat. “We had a little tiff that night, you and I, right? Right after we came down from the roof. About my wanting to go home and not come with you to the show?”

  She nodded slowly. “That sounds right. I hate having to walk into stuff like that by myself.”

  “Then where was Alex?” We both turned his way.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Guys, I did a lot of coke back then. And I know you girls weren’t into it. Pretty sure I stopped on another floor to do a line and then met you at the show. I mean, right?”

  We all looked at one another. Frustration swelled and my instinct, suddenly, was to cry.

  “That sounds right,” Sarah said finally. “I remember finding you at the show. Well, see you later.” She headed for the exit.

  Alex was looking at me oddly. “ ‘What you did to your mom’?” he said.

  I shook my head, tears breaking free again, and walked past him toward the door. He called my name a couple of times, but I turned just long enough to say, “Alex, please don’t.” It was one of those silver days, overcast and still too bright, and when the door swung closed behind me, the air swallowed me right up.

  * * *

  On the subway ride home, I let this new horror unfold: Sarah knew. I couldn’t believe that Edie had told her, that all this time, another person knew what I’d done back in middle school. At the diner, I’d been too stunned to ask Sarah when Edie had shared it and why. Maybe Edie had gleefully gossiped about me, the same way she complained to me about Sarah; maybe she’d worked hard to keep both of us privately convinced we were in the number-one-friend spot. I felt a blast of nausea and tipped my sweaty forehead toward my knees.

  Middle-school Lindsay. I’d spent two decades scraping away any signs that, deep down, I was a violent, dangerous creature. In fact, for years I’d felt secretly relieved that Edie, the only other person who might think that, was long dead.

  I checked the case files as soon as I got home, but Edie’s diary wasn’t among them—another timeline lost, her brief life instead flattened into phone records, ER discharge papers, a bloodless autopsy report. I dug around under my bed until I found the bag I was looking for, a small stack of old sketchbooks and diaries slipped into a canvas tote, and pulled out the spiral-bound notebook I’d been picturing.

  I’d journaled sporadically in middle and high school, bored and lonely and newly determined to hone my writing skills. The act soothed me, the way my clacking fingers turned my brain’s chatter into narrative, something finite, controllable. I would type up entries on the hulking computer in my room because I didn’t like my own handwriting. I still don’t: rushed and leaning this way and that, too often unreadable. Crazy-person handwriting. I’d fiddled with the page settings to get the margins right, so that I could slice the sides off with an X-ACTO knife and glue them into this notebook.

  It’s funny, come to think of it, that my parents let me keep an X-ACTO knife in my room. Perhaps they didn’t know about it.

  I opened the journal at random, to sometime early sophomore year. Printers were shittier then, strips of black missing in the middle of lines of texts. Read between the lines, my neurons fired at random.

  I’m ravenous all the time now. Mom says it’s nerves, but I know it’s whatever they switched me to. They thought it was the Zoloft giving me headaches, though they haven’t gone away and now I’m convinced it’s this quiet hell of Onalaska, Wisconsin. M&D have eased up on the surveillance compared with last year, I guess because I’m almost 16 now and “making very promising progress,” as Dr. Mahoney wrote recently in an email Mom printed out and stupidly left on her desk: That’s how you discuss your dog in obedience school, not your daughter. I can’t wait for college. I don’t understand why people are so content to be here, imagining their whole lives spooling out without trying anything new or experiencing anywhere better.

  What followed was a boring tale of being stuck at piano lessons, wai
ting for my parents to pick me up while a popular girl drove up for her own lesson and made polite, banal conversation. I could tell even from my written account that I’d been the bitch in the situation—so shy and self-conscious that I’d come across as hostile. How had I gone from hating popular girls to becoming one’s best friend?

  I flipped forward a bit, the pages shuffling awkwardly under their glue. Josh was popular in high school, I decided. Maybe not prom king, but definitely prom court.

  It was toward the end of that year that I started admiring my artsy classmates. I wrote something gushing about Michaela Leonard, a painter in eleventh grade who’d made a blog tribute to men in black-framed glasses. She let me burn copies of some of her CDs: The Get Up Kids, Weezer, The Dismemberment Plan. I could almost picture them, nacreous in my leather CD wallet.

  I couldn’t play a CD now if I tried, I realized. I’d fact-checked a story once on futurists’ predictions, and one had commented that we’re in the digital dark ages: A few short centuries from now, historians won’t have any way to access the pixels and bytes into which we funnel our lives. The predigital stuff, this glue-y journal in my hands—that was what survived.

  * * *

  Sarah must have heard me, some weird tin-can-telephone telepathy stringing from my cerebrum to hers, because the next day she texted me a photo of a number written in curly, girlish handwriting. “Found my Moleskine from back then,” her message read. “This = Lloyd.”

  I called him immediately, doubting he’d have the same number ten years on anyway. There was some clicking, then the sound of fumbling. “Whoa! Hello?”

  “Hi, is this Lloyd Kohler?”

  “Yep. Whoa, I was just trying to use my phone and you were there. Who is this?”

  “My name’s Lindsay Bach. I know this is random, but we have a good friend in common from a long time ago. In New York.”

  I felt my shoulders rise, ready for him to hang up.

  “And who’s that?” he said finally.

  “Please hear me out if you can. I’m calling about Edie Iredale.”

  Another massive silence. I went on: “I’m sure you don’t remember this, but you and I actually hung out a few times around then, too. Edie and I bumped into you and Alex Kotsonis and some girls one night in Manhattan and ended up on a rooftop. Hanging out in an empty pool.” And, later, having terrible drunken sex. And, later still, being engaged in battery, when I blackened your eye. My fridge clunked on, humming through the silence.

  “Familiar. Fourteenth Street, right?”

  He remembered. I felt a small, pathetic spurt of pleasure.

  “Yes, that’s the one. And I know you and Edie kept seeing each other later. I don’t mean to bring up anything painful, but I’m just trying to”—I hesitated—“get some answers.”

  “Ha. Is this like High Fidelity, where you talk to all her exes, only the twist is that she’s dead?”

  I tried mirroring. “Pretty much, except that in the movie version, Catherine Zeta-Jones had nothing helpful to say. I’m hoping you can do better.”

  “Doubt it. Why the fact-finding mission?”

  “I think someone killed her,” I said. “I don’t think it was suicide.”

  Another long wait and I began to regret my frankness. Why couldn’t I stick with the old party line, that I was looking back and trying to understand why Edie did what she did? What about this kooky kid, on whom I’d had a breathless crush ten years ago, made me blurt out the truth?

  “What makes you say that?” He had one of those preternaturally calm voices, like an actor who manages to make all his lines sound improvised.

  “Mostly little stuff.” Like that she was with someone in her living room shortly before the gun was fired. And that I’d walked into that living room moments before it happened, raring for a fight. It hit me in another wave: What the hell happened?

  He groaned. “You know, I was stupid-lucky I had to work that night. Otherwise who knows what kinda story the cops woulda spun. Jealous lover or whatever.”

  My heart pounded in the pads of my fingers.

  “So you did talk to the cops.”

  “ ’Course. They were pretty fucking incompetent, though. Didn’t even bother with me until I called ’em a few days later to ask what they’d found.”

  “They didn’t track you down?”

  “No, stupid NYPD just figured it was a suicide, case closed.”

  So much candor. I slowed my breathing.

  “Didn’t Edie’s mom see you, like, take Edie inside? Didn’t she tell the cops?”

  “Fuck if I know what she told ’em. They just didn’t seem that interested.”

  I flopped onto my bed. “And did you have something to tell them?”

  “Huh?”

  “About Edie. About how she seemed, or…how her mom seemed, or something.”

  “Nah. I mean, they were both crying, her mom had just told her they were basically broke, right? She started texting me like whoa, begging me to come get her. So finally I did. I was only a couple blocks away.”

  “Did you talk to her mom at all?”

  “I mean, I introduced myself. Tried to be polite. It was awkward as hell because they were both crying. She was, like, wild-eyed.”

  “Edie?”

  “No, her mom. Like, she really didn’t want Edie to go. Edie said her mom was freaking her out.”

  Freaking her out? Edie’s mother was an odd duck, but she seemed composed. “What exactly did Mrs. Iredale say?”

  “Look, I dunno. She bounced as soon as I got there. And Edie didn’t really wanna talk about it. We only had a couple minutes before I had to leave for the show anyway. I was dragging around all my gear.”

  “Where was Edie headed when you left?”

  “Just back inside. I figured she was going to her place.” He started laughing. “Lady, you’re better at this than the cops, you know.”

  “The cops. They never spun together a…jealous-lover story, like you said?”

  “Buncha clowns.”

  “What’d they miss? Were you jealous? I know you were keeping your relationship a secret.”

  “Ah, fuck. We were just stupid fucking kids. Hanging on to each other while the world, you know, crumbled around us.”

  This was the Lloyd I remembered, ADD-addled and talking like a beat poet. I felt a pulse of envy that he’d chosen to cling to Edie, not me.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fuck if I know. I’m pretty bombed.”

  I waited him out.

  “Let me tell you something, Lindsay.”

  “I’m listening.”

  A little exhale, like he’d just finished a deep sip. “When the ground splits open,” he said, “the only smart reaction is to run.”

  The fuck?

  “What do you mean, when the ground splits open?”

  “I mean that’s what we were living, babe, you, me, Edie, everyone back then. When we were coming out of this fucked-up phase of politeness and fake prosperity and everyone believing they just had to act proper to get everything they’d ever dreamed of on a silver platter.”

  I gave a noncommittal “Mmm.”

  Again, the sound of swallowing. “Edie was bored out of her mind,” he said. “Oh, I remember. She was getting a useless degree in like theoretical clothing design, and she was stuck with Alex because they lived together, right?”

  I assented.

  “And she had those rich, miserable parents in the city and she just, I don’t know, she totally got it. We were just, you know, living our way through it.”

  I felt him wait for me to say something, so I tried mirroring again, some faux-hippie shit. “Proving that, like, you weren’t gonna let the monster shaking the tree take you down.”

  “Exactly. You got it.” He tittered. “An
d now we’re back to being hubristic motherfuckers and everyone who’s doing semi-okay feels even more entitled to act like they earned it, survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog meritocratic bullshit.”

  I pictured him now, hair long and scraggly, brain cells desiccated like overbaked cookies.

  “When did you start seeing her?”

  He giggled. “You really do sound like a cop.”

  “I’m not.” Suddenly, recklessly: “I think I might have been involved. In her death.”

  Surprised silence, then laughter, full-on guffaws. “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “We were fighting, I know how to use a gun, I was blackout drunk, and I was hanging around her apartment that night. I’m—that’s why I’m investigating.”

  “Well, shit.” He collected himself. “Here I thought I was an alcoholic.”

  “Fuck you.” Panic was fanning out inside me: Why had I told him, what had I done?

  “Go ahead, Sherlock. I’m an open fucking book.”

  Everything tightened. “Do you think she killed herself?”

  “I dunno. I guess not if you killed her.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I mean, she had some fucked-up stuff going on, but so did everyone else.”

  “Like what?” Had he known about the miscarriage?

  “Aw, you know. Secret love affair.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt her?”

  “Nah. Edie was cool. I mean, unless you secretly hated her.”

  I was growing dizzy; the room tilted like I’d just gotten off a roller coaster. “When were you guys actually hooking up?”

  “Fuck if I remember.”

  “Can you try? When did it start, what season was it?”

  “Ohhh, fuck. Let’s see. I ran into her at a bar in my neighborhood, she was with…I think she lived with the girl. And we were sitting outside so it had to be summer. Actually…I think it was one of the first truly nice days, so maybe May?”