by Andrea Bartz
New idea: the back door off the kitchen, the one leading to the fire escape over the alleyway. Locked religiously every time I checked, all three locks on the inner door and the deadbolt on the outer door, but it had been a Friday night, maybe some people had gone out there to smoke or something? Could I borrow some sandals?
Dallas gave me some also-way-too-small green flip-flops. Plaid pajama pants, doll-size sandals, my mother minutes away, I charged through the back alley to our little fire escape. I scaled up a few levels and the outer door was open and—the inside one, too! Thank the baby Jesus. I stumbled inside, half registering that the apartment was an absolute wreck. Dallas had climbed up after me, and I thanked her and shoved her out the door, telling her I’d bring back her clothes soon.
I pulled on jeans and a shirt, no time to do anything about my awful breath or gummy contacts. Then I grabbed Dallas’s clothes and ran to her door, carefully not locking myself out this time. Her front door was ajar, so I gave it a token knock and wandered in, bleating “Hello?” Finally I came upon her standing in a bra and shorts in the kitchen, holding (I swear) a potato, and she gave me the strangest look and asked, “Did you kick in the door?”
I gave her an equally bewildered face. “No…it was…open.”
Madison. I think that was her name. Or Addison? Something like that.
Then it was back to cleanup, throwing dishes in the sink, dragging beer cans to the trash. Mom burst in at noon on the dot. I was just playing it off like I’d overslept and hadn’t gotten a chance to clean yet when Kevin sauntered in, all sex-mussed, and before he could open his mouth, I was, like, “HI KEVIN MY MOM JUST GOT HERE WHAT’S UP MAN?” He kind of chuckled and went into his room, locking the door behind him.
Mom was about as horrified as I expected. She could tell I was hungover, but at least she had no way of detecting that I’d almost answered the door in a pair of women’s pants. Animal purred and rubbed her ankles and she made a face and raised her palms like she was convinced she’d pick up some serious disease in our apartment, avian flu or SARS or whatever. She asked me to lead her back out into the street and I took her to where Dad’s sedan was parked, past the cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and not one but two sleeping bodies in the hallway and staircase.
“I don’t want you living like this,” she told me seriously as we weaved toward the expressway.
“It’s what I can afford,” I replied. “And besides, there’s tons of talented people in the building. Who could really help me one day. The guitarist from The Sinks lived here.”
“The who?”
“The Sinks. They’re, like, millionaires now. You’re the one always telling me to network or whatever.”
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “It just doesn’t look safe. I mean, who were those people asleep in the hallway?”
“I told you to come later in the day.”
“Noon on a Saturday is not exactly bright and early.”
I was too hungover to come up with a reply. Ugh. Why are moms always awesome until they’re actually there in person?
She turned to look at me and ran a hand over my shoulder. “I know you’ll make it work like you always do. What’s it like living with girls? Any cute ones?”
I wondered what she’d seen that’d tipped her off—maybe something in the bathroom. “Just one, and she has a boyfriend,” I lied. “And I’m not really thinking about that. I want to focus on my music.”
“Good for you,” she said. A new song came on the radio and she turned it up using buttons on the steering wheel. I didn’t notice her doing it right away and it was like the song magically swelled to swallow up the awkwardness.
At IKEA she went into Nazi shopping mode, whipping the cart one way or another when she had a new idea or saw something neither of us realized I needed. She tried to talk me into decorative pillowcases—shams, I think they were called?—even as I insisted I’d never be making my bed when it was lofted above my head.
“Oh come on, you don’t want girls to be totally turned off by your room, do you?”
“Oh my god, Mom. That’s so weird.” It was so weird. It was so weird that it became the only thought I had for the next fifteen minutes. Mom. You. Are. So. Weird.
Afterward, she took me and Kevin out to dinner at this brick-oven pizza place, the only restaurant I knew about, and dropped us off on her way back to the hotel. Kevin got out a joint before we’d even gone into the building, when my mom hadn’t even turned the corner. Inside, he told me that he’d heard that some hair metal band was having their debut or final or reunion or something show—can’t remember—and he’d heard there’d be a ton of free booze and drugs.
We took a few shots and then followed the migration up two floors and a hallway over. There were dudes wearing Lycra and singing in big swoopy harmonies. There were girls in neon wigs. One chick was wearing a full fairy costume, a totally cheesy thing with wings that someone probably made for Halloween some year. I took a lollipop out of her basket and the girl next to me did the same.
She waved her lollipop at me and smiled. She had a big thick sheet of black hair. “Yellow ones are the worst,” she said when the song had ended. “You hope it’s going to be pineapple or something, but it’s lemon.”
I offered her my orange one. She smiled wide.
Fuck the real world, I thought right then. Fuck clean apartments and boring roommates and perfectly groomed cats.
Calhoun Lofts was my best decision yet, I decided. And I was right.
Chapter 16
LINDSAY
I stared at my watch, where Tessa’s voice had been a moment ago. The news was having the strangest effect on me. I was stone sober, but I felt the long, downward brushstrokes I associated with the beginning of a pot high. Limbs loosening, spine turning to lead.
So I’d sent it, then. I’d sent it in my sleep or scheduled it inside a gap in my memory, my brain and mind operating on two different timelines. And my last stand, the cross on which I’d hung the belief that it could be somebody else, someone crazier than me, this whole paranoid delusion that a menacing other was threatening me for blowing on the embers of Edie’s decade-old departure—it evaporated all at once. I’d sent the email, just as I’d tried to hurt Josh, just as I’d succeeded with Edie. This silly final scamper toward someone named Jenna felt embarrassing, gauche. It was just me, alone in my apartment with a steady pulsing sensation wafting downward from my skull.
It was just me, alone in SAKE with a dead body at my feet. The pistol shaking as my entire arm trembled. And then the only person who knew the real Lindsay, the monster, was gone for good.
I thought of the violence with my mother, with Lloyd, with Josh. At Warsaw. The anger, the graphic fantasies.
I needed to see the email from Edie again. I opened my computer and what popped up first was a document, the cursor blinking at the top.
Dear Edie,
I’ve spent the entire day wishing I had some powerful depressants on hand so I could knock myself out for a while, but it wouldn’t even matter because then I’d wake up tomorrow or in the wee hours of tonight and still be me.
Depressants. I didn’t really need depressants. I had antidepressants, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, expiring in the top drawer of my vanity. One kind, I remembered, had the narrowest therapeutic range, prescribed at a level just south of toxic. Tofranil. I opened a new window and searched for it: lethal at 6.7 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. With 25 milligrams in a pill, that would mean…seventeen pills. Maybe twenty just to be safe. There was something satisfying and circular about it, the clear A to B of my parents plying me with the long line of pharmaceuticals that would eventually end me, too. I padded into the bedroom, pulled the orange bottle out of my dresser, and sat on the bed, clutching it in my hands like a chalice.
My eyes fell on my old diary, on the floor near a pile of sh
oes, and I picked it up, dreamlike, and pressed it open, the gluey pages crackling under the entries I’d pasted in.
I hate my parents and my teacher and my classmates and everyone here, so I’m going to become a writer and get rich and move away from them all. And I’m starting right here, right now.
I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed, the notebook spread open across my abdomen. What a miserable time that had been, so miserable I’d spent two decades smashing it into the smallest lockbox in the deepest corner of my mind. It occurred to me for the first time that my disasters, the bloody calamities of my own making, came like clockwork: at thirteen, twenty-three, and now, pathetically, thirty-three. Jesus’s final age.
Tears slipped down my temples, the right and then the left. I thought back to the night that had started it all. I was about to start eighth grade, but tall, suddenly and freakishly bigger and stronger than both my parents. But no, that’s not the real origin; my parents had been suspicious of me for years by then, ever since I’d turned seven and begun to grow my own personality. I was a sullen child, moody and obsessive. And prone to tantrums, anger building up like steam under my skin and leading to something akin to a panic attack, though nobody called it that. “I can’t get my breath down to here,” I remember telling my mom, pointing at the bottom of my sternum and tearing up in alarm. And instead of acting, she watched me in fright until I was screaming and stomping and then called my dad down to spank me for my bad behavior. I never hurt anyone, but teachers labeled me a problem child and sent me home with pink slips and demerits for my parents to sign. Each one felt more confusing than the last, and after the panic was labeled anger enough times, I began to see it that way, too, the charged feeling blasting out of me on a shorter and shorter fuse.
I intuited that they wished I were chipper and sweet, like the other kids. When I wasn’t acting out, I daydreamed through class and got too entranced by chapter books to answer when adults called for me; at the principal’s urging, Mom took me to a hearing specialist, convinced I must be partially deaf, but I passed the aural tests with flying colors. According to the audiologist, I was just ignoring them. I remember Dad’s frustration that night and the bright, flapping knowledge that I’d done something wrong, though I wasn’t quite sure what.
The week after the hearing test, the first pill appeared next to my morning bowl of cereal. Ritalin, to help me focus. I began getting headaches, and at night sleep became elusive; as my Mickey Mouse clock ticked, I crafted pillow forts for stuffed animals and imagined the four legs of my bed came alive and whisked us off to foreign lands. Later, I switched to Adderall, which dried out my mouth and knotted my stomach. My spirits sank, but my grades improved. Dad kept taking me to the gun range, muttering about how I needed to master discipline. It was the one place where I knew he wouldn’t yell at me.
And then I was thirteen, sullied by hormones and bad skin and inexplicable feelings, fury and fear and lust and self-hatred in a constant spinning wheel. One night, my parents and I were arguing about whether or not I had to keep taking piano lessons—a stupid, banal fight, but it became bigger, much bigger. Then Dad, irrational Dad with his sudden manic anger and his conditional love, leaned right into my face and hissed, “I don’t know how we made you.” As I stared back at him, a switch flipped, and when Mom—pathetic, submissive Mom who pretended to be laid-back but actually just put up with all his shit—grabbed my shoulder, I whirled around and hit her with all my strength.
It felt…amazing. As if my emotions, normally ricocheting around my interior, had finally found an out. I marveled at how clear and lucid I felt, the way the spinning wheel had stopped.
We were at the top of the stairs, and Mom took a step back as she grabbed at her face. Her feet shuffled, her eyes like two moons, and then she was falling, her hands clawing at air, the wooden steps making awful knocking noises as they connected with her back, her side, her shoulder, and, finally, her head.
* * *
I heard a noise in the kitchen; my computer, announcing that I’d received a new email. I picked up the bottle of pills and padded back down the hallway, listening to the maraca shake of every step.
A cheerful email from Greg with a new password to try. It was somehow cute and sad, now that I knew I’d killed her: affable Greg unwittingly helping me track down this imaginary killer, someone Not Me who’d forced their way into Edie’s apartment to pick up a gun and push it against her temple. I imagined the rest of the Flip cam video playing out: It was probably Edie and this Jenna in there, in Edie’s own fucking apartment, having a drink or a smoke or a bump or whatever, and I’d hung out for a minute, biding my time, until Edie and I were alone and my anger could break out, torpedoing around the room as the music from two floors up made the ceiling shake. I imagined the moment the red drops hit my white shoes, how my drunk, panicking mind had made the most basic of scrambles: pushing the gun against her fingers, typing something simple into her big black laptop. A lash-out not that different from the hard shove I gave Josh, a sweet kid who’d had the bad fortune of meandering into my path. I wondered what switch he’d flipped, what innocent remark had awakened the orange-red rage in me. I closed my eyes, mentally replaying the video Tessa had shown me of that night. The church-organ-like blast of the semi’s horn, the chorus of screams. “I’m deleting this,” she’d said, “but…but I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
* * *
My father had put it only a little differently. “We’re going to say she slipped,” he said, gripping my arm so that it bruised brown and green, “but we aren’t going to forget this. You almost killed your mother.”
I didn’t accompany them to the hospital, instead locking myself in my room and watching out the window as the EMTs hoisted Mom into the ambulance, the side of her head soaked in blood. Dad paused to look up at me with pure hatred before clambering in after them. She had a severely sprained wrist and needed two stitches in her head, on a blob of scalp they had to first shave bare.
That Monday, I’d met Dr. Mahoney, a wiry-haired pediatric psychiatrist with a particular interest in aggression and disobedience. Every night for a week, we sat across from each other in uncomfortable armchairs, and through my braces I answered her questions in a small voice. Afterward I pressed my ear against her office door as she discussed with my mother everything wrong with me; “oppositional defiant disorder” seemed to be the problem, and the solution was both physical—weekly therapy, constant surveillance from the time I got home from school until bedtime, my door never closed, my computer time never unmonitored—as well as chemical. Three new pills appeared next to my dinner plate, and my parents eagerly watched me swallow them after we said grace.
The pills made me feel foggy and faraway, and for the first time in years, I could sleep at night. But that sleep had become a conduit for awful dreams: one where I found a long knife under my pillow and crept into the basement with it, then came upon Dad sitting on the weight bench in the dark. Another where we were at Uncle Bob’s farm with targets tacked to trees, my ungainly hands curled around a rifle, and Mom didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to walk out in front of us. Still another where I opened a kitchen cabinet and found it filled with handguns, ones I’d never touched in real life. Around that time, violent images began seeping into my daytime as well, quick bloody visions that still invade my mind decades later. I told no one. I was stuck with a head that’d never do anyone any good, not even after they’d brined it in a cocktail of drugs, not even after they’d pointedly moved all of Dad’s guns into a gun safe, not even after my pickled brain realized its own constant narration could be inked down into writing and a path emerged: To Be A Writer Someday. That one hadn’t panned out, either. Instead I was thirty-three years old and alone, a single pathetic generation, and I’d generated nothing but misery in my wake.
I snapped open the bottle, child-protection my ass, and shook twenty orange and white tablets onto the table. I s
hoved aside my empty Thai food containers and organized the pills into four even lines. Filled a glass of water at the sink and swallowed the first row, one by one.
* * *
As I waited to see what would happen, I tried the new password Greg had just emailed and opened all the photos at once. Fifty-six Edies appeared, each one like a finger pressed on a bruise. I let my sniffle turn into a sob as I clicked through them.
“I’m sorry, Edie,” I whispered. “It should’ve been me.”
I felt woozy, drunk. Edie on a carousel; Edie in a hammock; Edie in a kitchen; Edie picking apples. Edie unaware that she was already on a speeding train, that her trajectory was set and in under a year she’d live in the past alone, in old photos and videos, just echoes.
Near the end, something made me stop and scroll back a few images. I squinted at it and blew it up to full size: Edie at a party, people scattered around the hardwood floor, her holding up a large homemade card that read “When you’re 22…” across the front.
I leaned in closer, my heart speeding. The lettering on the card. Triangular and hip, handwriting I’d recognize absolutely anywhere.
And off to the right, a girl I’d otherwise barely notice, with light brown bangs covering her eyes and a nose that didn’t look quite right, but those thin lips, lips and a crack of teeth that for the first time looked familiar.
