by Andrea Bartz
Best,
Susan
Well, shit. The made-up commemorative video. Had she really been overcome with sentimentality, or was she calling my bluff?
At least she’d given me a reason to call her. Instinctively, I fumbled around for my phone, then groaned. I opened Skype on my laptop and turned off the video function—no need for Mrs. Iredale to see me in my pajamas. Then I copied and pasted in her number and listened to Skype’s echoey ringing tone.
“Susan Iredale,” she intoned. Why hadn’t she changed her name when she remarried?
“This is Lindsay Bach. I just got your email.”
“Oh, good.”
I swallowed. “Finding footage for the video has actually been a little trickier than I thought,” I said. “I spoke with some of our other friends, but it’s actually hard to access video files from that long ago.”
“I don’t doubt it. That’s why I was surprised you were making it.”
I sighed. “I really appreciated your reaching out. I can send over a few clips I found, just of the Calhoun crew kinda hanging out.” A couple of the Flip cam videos had to be PG, right?
“I’d like that. This time of year is always difficult.”
“I’m sure. I also really appreciated your invitation to the park. I’ll have to be at work, unfortunately, but it’s nice that you…have a special spot for her.”
“Yes, she always liked it up there, once she learned that it’s the highest elevation in the park. You could see better from Belvedere Castle, but she preferred to just know she was on top.”
I stared down at the keyboard. “It’s cool that she grew up going to Central Park. I don’t get out there often enough.” I pictured Mrs. Iredale, wrinkled and jumpy and slight, and suddenly some strange, childlike part of me wanted her approval: a hug, forgiveness. “It’s supposed to be beautiful this afternoon. Would you have any interest in going for a little walk around there with me?”
A silence, long enough that I was about to check if the call had been dropped.
“That would be nice,” she said, her voice ragged. “How’s two o’clock?”
* * *
I climbed out of the subway at the Museum of Natural History, pausing to ogle its dizzying facade, how something so large could sit right here in the middle of this teeming Lego city. The air felt crisp and dry, unusual for August. Exactly like the first morning Edie missed.
I pushed in between the trees and spotted Mrs. Iredale hunched on a bench, big sunglasses obscuring her face, her chin turned up to the dappled sunlight. We said hello awkwardly, and when she stood and began walking, I slowed my gait to let her lead.
“You know, you’re the only one who reached out to me about her this year,” she said, staring straight ahead.
“Oh my god,” I blurted out. Not even her family members?
“I don’t talk about her anymore,” she said, “and no one wants to bring her up, as if I’ve forgotten all about her and they’ll be reminding me of something terrible. As if I don’t think about her every day.” She whipped her head over to look at some Italian tourists as they passed; how oddly she moved.
“Oh, wow. Well, I bet a lot of people are thinking about her and just aren’t sure what to say,” I offered. “She…she touched a lot of lives.”
“She did, didn’t she?” We both froze to let a puppy barrel past, two kids in hot pursuit. “I always think about what she’d be like if she were still with us. She’d be thirty-three now, you know.”
This was a chess game; if I was careful, I could win. “Do you think she’d still be in fashion? A stylist, like she talked about?”
“Maybe,” she said. “She was so good at that kind of thing. But she was struggling to stay focused back then.”
The near flunk-out Alex had mentioned. The one Mrs. Iredale had found so personally mortifying. I let the words out like someone leading a high-strung horse: easy, easy. “You know, I used to really struggle with ADHD myself, and Edie had a lot going on. It was a tough year for everyone, like you said the other week.”
The path sloped upward and Mrs. Iredale’s breath quickened. “It was odd,” she said. “Fashion was her dream for so long. But then she just started to let everything slip. It was when she was dating that architect, that older man, and I think she was trying to seem adult with him and like a twenty-three-year-old with all of you.” So the problem had begun earlier than Alex had thought. The mention of Greg evoked Josh; I felt a queasy pulse, tried to focus.
“From what I can tell,” Mrs. Iredale continued, “she stopped going to night classes, and then fell behind on the course work, and then got so stressed out that she started to give up on the whole thing.”
“Wow, that’s tough,” I murmured.
“And she didn’t know this at the time, but her father’s boss was loaning us the money for her tuition. If anyone had found out—if her father had known she wasn’t even going to class…”
What? He’d do what? Down her with a bullet in her shitty loft apartment?
“So I talked to her about it. I told her the truth about how we were covering her tuition and she turned it around. Talked to her professors, got her grades back up. I was so proud of her.” We’d reached the base of Summit Rock, and she sat on a bench, sliding her sunglasses up like a headband. The eye tic again.
Who else knows about this? Mrs. Iredale had snapped at Alex. It looked different in this new light. “Edie seemed so driven,” I mused. “I’m surprised she’d slack on school stuff like that.”
“Well, people reason differently at that age.” She was using her psychiatrist voice again. “Their prefrontal cortices aren’t fully developed yet; just think of yourself, the decisions you made at that age. How you thought things through.”
Heat whooshed up through my throat and cheeks. “Good point.”
It wasn’t out of character, I realized suddenly. Avoidance was exactly how Edie had dealt with friendships once they became complicated. She was always shucking people off, Kevin had said. She was the center of everything, and then she’d be gone again, leaving a bombed-out group in her wake.
“That made it all the more distressing when Pat’s boss told us he couldn’t keep loaning us tuition money,” she went on. “We were already on the verge of losing our apartment, but we’d shielded that from Edie, too. She’d just buckled down and brought up her grades, and then we pulled the rug out on her.”
Right—the bad news Mrs. Iredale had come bearing the night of August 21. “But couldn’t she just get financial aid?” I asked.
“She’d missed the deadline. Classes were about to start, in fact. I was going to see if I could pull some strings with the bursar.”
“Then why rush to Calhoun to tell her?” It popped out of me like a hiccup. She squeezed her eyes shut, and I added, “The night she…the night.”
“Oh, Lindsay.” She jerked the sunglasses back into place. All at once, she seemed so frail and sad, the old witch in the woods. “I just needed to see her.”
“But why?”
Mrs. Iredale looked up at the treetops. There was that crackly pause again, the same fissure I’d felt from Kevin, from Alex, even from Lloyd: The truth was finally going to rupture through. Why? Because I’d asked.
“You can tell me,” I said, for what felt like the millionth time.
“I just had a horrible feeling,” she said, “about Edie. I knew something was wrong. I fell asleep on the couch after dinner, and I dreamed it first: Edie and…and someone she trusted, and I couldn’t remember what happened, exactly, but I woke up certain something was wrong, that something had happened to her. I’d never…I’m not a woo-woo kind of person, Lindsay, I’m a doctor, and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. But I just couldn’t shake this…this conviction. So I got in a cab and started calling.”
She dug in her bag
, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
“She came out to see me, but she was looking at me like I’d lost my mind; she couldn’t understand what that’s like for a mother, to have these invisible cords tying you to your child. Are you a mother?”
“I’m not.”
“So you don’t know. You don’t know.” She blew her nose, composed herself. “I didn’t go all the way to Bushwick to talk about our finances. But Edie asked about tuition. She asked about the apartment and figured out that we were going into foreclosure, which I hadn’t planned to tell her. She figured this must all be about something else, that I was just panicking.”
A line from Lloyd floated into my head: She was, like, wild-eyed. Edie said her mom was freaking her out.
“And then I left. I couldn’t force her to come back with me.”
“Wow. I’m so sorry.” I pressed my palm onto her forearm. “I do believe you. About the premonition? I think that stuff is very real. Maybe scientists will figure it out someday, something with energy and…maybe quantum physics.”
She laughed, embarrassed. “Thanks. I know it’s silly. I’m glad Edie had a friend like you.”
A balloon of discomfort in my belly. She turned to me. “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me about those last days? With Edie? She and I hadn’t spoken in a while, and it just…it’d be nice to hear about.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale,” I replied. “I wish I had more to tell you, but she and I were sort of…in a bit of a rough period at that point.”
“A rough period?”
Why hadn’t I lied, plucked a happy memory from earlier in 2009? “You know how friendships are at that age. We just needed a little space.”
“Well, I hope you got it,” she said, then turned away. “Sorry. It’s just…I know she and Sarah were fighting, too. She was going through so much, with the miscarriage and everything, and it’s difficult to know that none of the people she normally counted on were there for her.”
Shame and outrage swelled, nausea with claws. Your daughter was a bitch, Mrs. Iredale. Your daughter peeled us off one by one like strips of dead, sunburned skin, and—
“Anyway, what do I know? It just shakes me to think about that dream. Here I thought someone else was trying to hurt her, but the person who hurt her was her.”
Edie and someone she trusted. Someone who threatened to push her off the building, who’d wandered into the room at just the right time, who knew how to pick up a handgun, throttle high on the grip, click off the safety, nestle the trigger inside the crease of the pointer finger’s knuckle. My heart pounded in my ears.
“Anyway, I’m sorry to be unloading on you.” She stood and her purse slipped from her shoulder. She caught it awkwardly. “I should probably get going.”
“You don’t want to climb up Summit Rock?” I asked.
“I can’t anymore,” she replied, and left.
I stood looking up at it; I pictured tiny Edie scrabbling up its face, sunlight rippling off her Ariel waves. I began to climb it myself, thrusting my weight forward against its pitch. At the top, I looked around: dense trees in every direction, no real indication that this was the park’s highest point.
Sometimes you can’t prove something. There’s no empirical evidence, no definite input from your senses. But you just know. You just know.
I looked down at my feet—black sandals, red toenails, the dirty hipster spelunking crammed so far into my past—and pictured how blood would flow over the rock’s surface here, rolling outward and then channeling into its crevices. As I watched, the stone turned to glitter and something pitched up my spine. I’m going to pass out, I realized, and my head and knees dropped instinctively.
“Hey, lady, you okay?” someone called. I blinked through the glitter, which beat hard inside my skull and hands. You’re okay, just breathe, you’re fine.
“That lady looks like she’s about to boot. Lady, you okay?” The rock was coming back into focus and I turned my head to see the teenager, wide-eyed and alarmed, clutching at her friends.
I opened my mouth to tell her I was fine, but what came out instead was a cough, an intense, body-racking hack that began somewhere deep and grew and grew and grew until my lungs squeezed shut and out came a stream of vomit, acidic and foul. The three girls gasped and made grossed-out noises. I spat and sat back on my haunches, crying.
“I’m sorry, I’m okay,” I croaked, standing carefully. We stared at one another, and then I turned and walked away, a blotch of my fetid insides drying on the rock behind me.
* * *
I almost skipped work on Monday, thinking vaguely that I was in trouble for Friday anyway, remembering that I needed to get a new phone but what was even the point, and then at the last minute I pulled on a dress and hailed a yellow cab in front of my building.
On the bridge, Manhattan blared into view outside the window, the morning sun a spotlight on the whole jagged skyline. I leaned over and stared like a kid, noticing how all the stubbier buildings grazed the true skyscrapers’ knees. How huge they must have seemed when they were first constructed; how solid and invincible. Now they were just background noise, anonymous and serving only to give the massive towers contrast.
A subway roared past us on the bridge and I jumped at the noise. In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes fell on me.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yep,” I lied, although of course I couldn’t be.
Bewilderingly, no one mentioned my absence on Friday. Truly no one would miss me if I were gone. I answered emails and passed story proofs in a fog, closing the door to my office as often as possible so that no one would try to speak with me. At night, I cleaned up my desk before I left, deleting some personal things from my hard drive and wiping the crumbs off the space around my keyboard. I walked all the way to the subway entrance and watched it for a moment, the frantic influx and outflow like ants at the top of an anthill. The breeze picked up, and I walked over to the ferry instead, feeling the floating docks bow under my feet. It was a half-hour walk from DUMBO to my apartment, one I desperately needed.
There was an air of ceremony to it, a farewell cruise, as I stood at the ship’s stern, wind whipping in and out of my lungs so fast I couldn’t control it. I stepped onto Brooklyn’s soil and headed east along the cobblestone streets. I thought of Josh as I passed the old pizza place, praying I wouldn’t actually see him.
A few blocks inland, I waited at a light with strangers, watching the stream of cars and waiting for my chance to jaywalk, to charge out into oncoming traffic and prove I wasn’t afraid. My eyes fell on the man next to me, tall and blondish with a messenger bag strapped across a burgeoning gut.
“Greg?”
It popped out of me before I could think. I didn’t feel surprised; I knew it was New York showing off again. So tiny and tightly folded, an M.C. Escher city.
He blinked at me. “Excuse me?”
“You’re Greg Bentley, right?”
“Yeah…do I know you?”
We were missing the WALK sign; people streamed around us.
“This is weird! I was trying to find you a few weeks ago, and here you are.”
“Trying to find me?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, how do we know each other?”
“I’m a friend of Edie Iredale’s. We met a few times when you guys were dating.”
“Edie!” He smiled and his shoulders relaxed. “I haven’t heard that name in so long. Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Lindsay,” I said, offering him my hand. He shook it eagerly. Despite Josh’s insistence that his boss was an upstanding citizen, I hadn’t expected Greg to be this warm. The whole situation felt peculiar, dreamlike.
“I was just thinking how it’s been ten years,” he said. “Were you working on a memorial or something?”
I blinked at him, processing. Fina
lly I swallowed. “Yeah, for the anniversary. I was just tracking down some people who were important to her back then. And that was definitely you.”
His green eyes twinkled. “She was really a great girl. Are you doing a digital scrapbook or something? Or a memorial site?”
I nodded again, slowly. What had I told Mrs. Iredale? “I wanted to see if there was enough material to make a memorial video. Or just compile some photos.”
“Oh, well, I might be able to help, because I’m a photographer! An amateur one, but I’m sure I have some photos of her on my old laptop.” He looked around happily. “Man, so funny bumping into someone from my former life. I just stopped into the office to pick up a couple things—I’m on paternity leave right now, actually.”
“Congratulations,” I said, and he thanked me.
Suddenly he unzipped his bag and dug around. “I have a better idea. I had a Flickr account back then, which all my photos went into. I’ll write it down for you.” He drew out a notepad, leather-bound and filled with graph paper. I peered at the pages as he flipped forward, noticing that he didn’t have architect handwriting at all: It was impressively girly, a beautiful sweeping cursive, like the nineteenth-century letters you find in archives. I thought of Tessa’s cool, pointy script, which would’ve looked more at home here. He jotted down a URL and a password and handed the ripped sheet to me.
I folded it up and slid it into my purse. “Thanks so much, Greg,” I said, still stunned. “Really funny running into you.”
“You, too! You’ll have to send me the video or site or whatever you end up putting together.” He produced a business card for me. “Have you talked to other people for it?”
I nodded. “Her…her mom, and her old roommate Sarah, just some old friends.” Bringing up Alex, whom she’d dumped Greg for, seemed unwise.
He hooked his thumbs around the strap of his bag. “If you haven’t yet, you should talk to her best friend. Jenny…Jenna, I think.”
“Jenna,” I repeated. “Do you remember her last name?”
