by Andrea Bartz
I blink a few times. “You didn’t answer.”
“I needed time to think. And I had to make sure that it wouldn’t come back to you and that it wouldn’t happen again. I thought about just cutting off all contact, but…”
I squint hard, remembering. “You yelled at me. Said I was mean.”
“I didn’t yell. I was terse. I told you you had to get your life under control, that you couldn’t still be blacking out all the time. Which was true.”
I poke at this but can’t grasp it. My thirtieth birthday, when I was so awful to Tessa. Or was I?
I feel a new thought coming and I wait for it; I speak at just the right time, like it’s a clay pigeon curving at its peak. “Did you kill Anthony?”
Her face contorts with pain. “Seriously? Of course not! Who do you think I am?”
I don’t answer because it’s a tricky question. Who is she again? Then a thought worms its way through, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to say it because the grid’s down, but I have to try.
“You,” I say, “are a good. Person.”
Silence, and I’m not sure I actually said it, and then she lets out a little cackle. “How can you even say that right now?”
She listens for an answer from me, but the city’s gone dark; I forgot what I was thinking and my eyes won’t open anyway, my mouth is done moving, my tongue is like a fat pink dead slug inside my mouth, and so I stay silent, and then that’s an option, too, I’m out.
It’s quiet. Tessa lets out a surprised laugh and mumbles, “Well, of course.” I hear her move closer and I feel afraid, but it’s a little faint stream of one single battery trying to light up the whole grid, it’s faraway and ineffectual, just like me, I’m ineffectual and faraway. Music boils the air around us, it’s my playlist, it’s Edie’s, it’s so loud it’s rattling my skeleton, the skeletons in my skeleton, where did I hear that?
Tessa shakes my shoulder and it moves all of me like I’m a huge dead sleeping-bag pink slug.
There’s pain on the soft flesh of my upper inner arm, sharp and neon, she’s pinching me there it hurts if she doesn’t stop I’ll have to—
And then it stops. I’m so glad it stopped, thank you, Tessa, bye now.
She lets out air like a balloon deflating, pssshhhooo.
I hear the sound of her cocking the gun and suddenly I realize this is it and I’m Edie, I can’t remember if I’m Edie anymore and maybe it’s 2009 now and I’ve become her and this is the end and there’s pressure in my right hand and she’s folding it, molding my fingers carefully like it’s Claymation, like I’m in her stop-action film and right now she wants me to be—
The music hits a new hysterical triple-fortissimo as she slides my pointer finger into place and I don’t think because I don’t have time to. With every little atom of stardust left in me, I squeeze. Someone screams, Tessa or me or the music or Edie or inside my head, and there’s pain and hot sticky on my arm, and then—
Chapter 18
Someone’s saying something, but I’m so tired that before I can listen I need to close my eyes and let myself back into the cool deep pool, the deep end, just for a minute, maybe Lloyd will be there and he’ll do pull-ups on the diving board, if I can just
* * *
There’s something over my mouth, maybe I’m scuba diving in the deep black sea, but when I look around it’s not dark, it’s so bright it hurts, and there’s a man in white holding the mask over my mouth and I’m on my back on a table and my spine hurts and we’re moving and
* * *
I’m erupting. I’m on my left side and it’s bright and there are tubes shoved down my nose and someone’s turned a torch on in my stomach. I retch and try to scream and I rip away at whatever’s coming out of my face, but someone grabs my hand and starts saying something and it floats by, meaningless, a few times before I catch it: “You’re okay, just relax, you’re okay, keep your head down, that’s it, you’re safe, keep your head just like that, you’re fine.”
I keep erupting, my insides rushing out, a violent gush inward and then a big suck out, ocean waves swelling up my belly. Tears are pouring freely from my eyes. I try to ask what’s happening, but there’s something in my throat, something they need to remove, something keeping me from talking.
Someone reaches for my hand and I squeeze it. I breathe, my lungs struggling like I’ve just had the wind knocked out of me, and the voice keeps talking as I fight the mushrooming panic: “You’re okay, you’re fine, it’s gonna be okay.”
Finally the ocean stops and whatever’s stuck inside of me starts to move, pain in my nose and throat and entrails as it slithers upward, I retch and retch and try to yell out but I can’t, what’s in there, what’s in me? The hand around mine clasps tighter and someone touches my cheek tenderly, and then it’s not to be nice, it’s to grab the end of whatever’s coming out, the bottom scratching me as it curves out my nostril.
“It’s over, it’s over, you’re okay,” the voice finishes, and the panic doesn’t stop but it at least holds still as I gag and cough and roll farther onto my stomach. I look around and for the first time the shapes around me take on meaning: I’m in a hospital room, spotlit under bluish lights, with people in scrubs around me, busily doing things.
“What happened?” I ask, but it comes out like a croak. They’ve taken away my voice, I think wildly.
“You just had your stomach pumped. It’s gonna be hard to talk.” It’s the same voice, a woman’s, and I turn my head to look at her, pain grabbing my neck and torso. Someone’s helping me to sit up and then the bed is moving under me, hinging up into a chair.
“Here. We need you to drink this.” Someone else hands me a cup of something thick and black. It looks like the insides of a monster, whatever spits out when you cut its head off. I don’t move.
“It’s that or we put another tube down your throat,” the man says, waggling it, and I take it. “It’s activated charcoal. It’s going to help your body get rid of the last of the imipramine.”
Two fat tears roll down my cheeks. I nod and pull the cup up to my lips. The first sip tastes like cement, and I gag again. The rest I knock back in one long slug, chug chug chug. It works quickly and after a minute I grab around for a hand and am helped into the bathroom, my stomach creaking like an old wooden floor. Afterward I lie on the hospital bed, staring up at an ugly drop ceiling, realizing with sad resignation that, once again, I have no idea what happened the night before.
I must’ve fallen asleep because when I wake, Tessa’s sitting next to the bed, smiling, and she leans forward and coos, “Hey, look who’s up!” Softly, the tone you reserve for an infant.
“What happened?” My voice is still hoarse, like I’ve spent the night screaming.
She rests her hand on my arm. “You’re okay, that’s the important part.”
I squint. “Why is your arm like that?” It’s in a splint, midnight blue.
“I’m fine. More important, how are you feeling?”
I turn away and take in the ceiling again, the long rows of fluorescent lights. “I guess I mostly feel weak,” I tell her. “I don’t know what happened.” A thought blooms: “They said they pumped my stomach?”
She smiles again and rubs my arm. “You’re safe now, that’s what’s important,” she says again.
I blink at her. “What were they pumping? What happened?”
“You don’t remember anything?”
“No, I remember waking up here and they were fucking pumping my stomach.” Distress is roiling again, a pot of water on the stove.
“It’s okay, don’t get upset. Here, I’ll get the nurse.” She stands and finds a button, ignoring my protests. It’s an intercom; a crackly voice says someone will arrive shortly. She plops back into her seat.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” she prompts.
“Not much,
” I say. “I’m really confused. I remember being at home and feeling upset and sitting on my bed. Then not much else.” I have the feeling something bad happened, something very bad. I don’t recall pulling out the secret bottle of whiskey. Did I start drinking?
“So you don’t remember the antidepressants?” she asks, her eyes wide and blue.
I frown again. “I can’t remember if I took my Wellbutrin last night,” I say finally. This is hurting my throat, all this talking. “Why, what happened?”
“I mean, you’d just figured out—”
A doctor waltzes into the room, presumably a doctor with his white coat and cool, incurious eyes.
“I’m glad to see you’re awake,” he says, giving us both clammy handshakes. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess. My throat hurts. And my stomach.” And strangely, something deep under my hip joints, little triangles of tender pain.
He nods, still towering over me. “Your stats all look good.”
“She doesn’t remember anything,” Tessa calls out. “From last night.”
He nods again. “Miss Bach, you’ll be scheduled for a psychiatric evaluation. I can get you a wheelchair if you’re unable to walk.”
I shake my head. “I really just want to go home. Can’t Tessa take me home?”
“We can’t discharge you until you’ve had a psychiatric evaluation.”
“Because I can’t remember anything?” I gasp. “Do they think I have a brain tumor or something? And it’s pushing on my…my hippocampus?” The memory center. I’m pleased with myself for remembering its name. Seems to bode well for my neurological health.
He glances at Tessa, then back at me. “No, we don’t have any reason to believe you have a brain tumor. Do you have any interest in eating or drinking? You’re well hydrated, but…”
I glance at the IV snaking into my arm. “I’m not really hungry, no.”
“When your appetite returns, just stick with bland stuff. Toast, crackers, tea. Okay?” I nod, but it’s Tessa who says okay.
“You’re in from the OR, right?” he finally says, like he’s been trying to work something out, and Tessa responds, as if they’re speaking their own language: “Yeah, but I was already discharged, I’m fine.”
“Would you like to speak to the psychiatrist as well?”
“I probably should, yeah.” Her cheeks turn pink. “Are they gonna tell her…what happened?”
“Most likely.” He grabs at his hip, like his phone has just buzzed. “Someone will be in shortly.” And with that, he’s gone.
We let the silence swell for a few seconds.
“Tessa, what’s happening?”
“I don’t want you to freak out. Okay? Everything’s fine, I need you to know that.”
“I’m calm. I’m, like, half dead, I don’t even have the energy to get worked up. But I need you to tell me what the fuck is going on.”
She chews on her lower lip, then drags her chair right up next to me.
“I came by your place last night,” she says, “just to check on you. After I called you about the IP address from that email from…from Edie’s account, and we fought on the phone. Do you remember that?”
I think about it. “I remember that phone call, yeah. But I don’t remember your coming over.”
She swallows. “I rang the buzzer and you didn’t answer, and someone else was coming out, so I went up to your floor. And I could hear really loud music, like late-naughts music I wouldn’t normally expect from you, and I tried calling but then remembered you lost your phone, so I tried banging on the door.” She lifts her hand to her hair; her fingers are shaking a bit. “And I just got…a terrible feeling. I mean, the kind of stuff you’ve been telling me lately, all the stuff with Edie…I just got really scared. I was, like, wailing on that door. And finally I remembered I had your keys on me, so I let myself in, and you were on the couch, not coherent at all.”
Her eyes glisten with tears, jewel-like. “And I ran over to you and you were saying all this stuff about how you were sure you’d…you’d killed Edie, and you just wanted to die, and I saw this empty bottle of pills out on the table and your laptop had a search up for how much it would take to kill yourself, and you were just totally, totally out of it.” She takes a sharp breath in. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, Lindsay. It was just…your eyes.” She shakes a hand in front of her own brow. “Wild-eyed. And I was like, ‘Hang on, hang on, help is coming,’ and you—”
She swings her chin away, tears dripping. A few breaths, steeling herself. “You pulled out a gun. It was just sitting there next to you. And you held it up to your head and told me you would shoot yourself if I called 911.”
A few loud sniffles; I’m frozen, riveted, unable to process what she’s saying. It’s the same tumbling sensation I felt when friends haltingly told me about Josh in the alley, about Lloyd’s bruised eye, about the Warsaw Incident. How did I get a gun?
“And I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared. So I waited until you relaxed your arm and then tried to grab it from you, and you somehow—” She peeks back up at my face, then looks down again. “It somehow went off. I’m fine, and the baby’s fine, it just went into my shoulder and they said it was the best possible way it could’ve hit me. You and I are both okay. That’s what’s important. We’re together, and we’re fine.”
She stares at me, then lunges in and wraps me in a one-armed hug, her tears forming a wet moon on my hospital gown. I hug her back, hard, scared of myself but also sinking into the warm bath of Tessa’s attention, how she loves me and cares for me despite my being a sad and savage mess.
“I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup,” I whisper, and she kind of coos.
* * *
It doesn’t strike me until several hours later, still waiting for my psych evaluation and watching daytime TV, the irony: I shot my best friend. And not for the first time.
* * *
The psychiatrist looks like a bird and speaks with a thick Staten Island accent. She hands me pamphlets and demands that I find a therapist. She asks me twenty times if I’m having suicidal thoughts, not even varying the language much, and I keep repeating myself: Nope, nope, nope. She asks if I have someone to take me home and I reply that my friend Tessa is waiting for me. She frowns and glances down at her notes, then tells me I can leave.
Tessa sets me up in her guest room, no questions asked, with a well-thought-out suitcase she’s put together from the mess of my apartment. She hands me my laptop the next day, wordlessly, and I notice there’s no activity on it from that night, no emails sent or received, no record of files opened or websites visited. It’s just as well—whatever I came across, whatever final nail I pounded into my own coffin, I probably don’t need to see again. The night is gone, snipped out of my timeline, scribbled out of my personal history. Lost.
And Tessa, who found me, cooks delicious dinners and watches old movies with me, dutifully looking up critics’ ratings and cueing trailers while I lie back and make the final call. She seems to get a vague thrill out of playing caretaker, watching over me like an old-timey nurse, Lindsay Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At night, new pills keep me from dreaming, pills that Tessa carries around so I can’t shake out too many at once, and I welcome sleep, a dip into the formless universe where nothing ever happened. It’s only when I’m up that I remember what I’ve done. Twice, Tessa wakes to the sound of me vomiting and wordlessly pulls back my hair, holding it in a gentle fist like we’re inebriated coeds.
Will is pleasant to me but seems quietly alarmed, like I’m an injured animal Tessa brought in from the sidewalk—an inconvenience likely to lead to more distress for her. He’s working late in advance of a trial, so I see little of him, but he smiles tightly when we pass in the morning. Once I overhear them arguing through the wall and suspect he wants me out, and again, fuckup Lindsay is fucking up ot
her people’s lives. After a week, I move home while Tessa is at work. My apartment is neater than I left it.
I email my boss about a medical emergency, keeping things vague; I get an impatient note from her and decide to go in, indignant but also relieved to sink back into the drumbeat of working and calling sources and conferring with editors and jumping whenever someone knocks on my office door. Damien still has lunch with me most days, but I can tell he’s uncomfortable; I don’t know how much Tessa told him and I don’t ask. He’s never been great at dealing with real shit.
Tessa comes over most nights, and she’s a rock, as ever, kind-faced and concerned and wordless when I try to thank her, to express some small piece of how she’s keeping me sane. Sometimes I remember, in a rush, what must’ve happened, how I had to be the one left alone with Edie in her final moments. Primed for a friend fright, possibly newly aware that she was having sex with Lloyd. And I just don’t know how the scene ended. On good days, I believe I left without ever touching Kevin’s gun, my only weapon an especially poorly timed chew-out. But on most days, my brain weaves up an image that makes me cry or puke or worse: blood and brains and a body collapsing with a thud as music pounds through the ceiling.
Tessa and I fight once, a bizarre flare-up right after I’ve taken my sleeping pills, my logic just beginning to blink out. Tessa’s doing something in the kitchen when my phone chirps, my shiny new phone with its sleek case and crisp sounds. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize—not unusual, since my contacts didn’t transfer over—and so almost without reading it, I write back: “Just got a new phone, who is this?”
