The Lost Night

by Andrea Bartz

  “What?” I yelp aloud, rereading.

  “What is it?” Tessa calls.

  I go over it one more time. “It’s from Greg, this guy who used to date Edie,” I say. “Remember how I ran into him in the street? I’d asked him to send me some photos of Edie, but the password he gave me didn’t work. He says he—” I look up, gasping. “He just remembered he had a Dropbox account from back then, apparently! He sent me another link to try. Not that I—”

  Tessa crashes out of the kitchen and stands before me, her eyes dark. “You didn’t write back, did you?”

  I frown. “Uh, I wrote back to find out who it was.”

  “Lindsay, no.” She shakes her head warningly, like I’m a dog. “No. That guy is the reason you met that little jackass who gave you coke and made you lose your phone and—and got set off on a really dark spiral.”

  I roll my eyes dramatically, about to tell her I don’t want to look at the stupid photos anyway, and she raises her voice to a shout. “I’m serious! I will not have you talking to anyone in that circle while you’re in this fragile state, here in—”

  “What, in your house?” I start to stand. “What are you even screaming about? I wasn’t even planning to write back to him, I just—”

  I stop short, because Tessa has brought her fingers up to her collar and jabbed them to the side, the gauze-covered wound on her shoulder staring right at me. I sputter, my larynx shorting out, then hang my head. I’ve heard it as clearly as if she’s said it: This is where that led.

  “After all I’ve done,” she says quietly, letting go of her shirt. “After everything.”

  She turns and walks back into the kitchen. I slump back onto the couch and block the number.

  * * *

  One night I demand a horror movie for no reason in particular; maybe I want something to jolt my system, to flick me out of this murky river of ugly, marbled feelings. I choose poorly and then panic when the bad guy pulls out a gun, creeping around the farmhouse while its inhabitants quiver with fear. I sniffle during a quiet moment and Tessa launches into action, turning off the movie, rushing to the bathroom, and returning with a box of tissues. She pats one against my eyes and cheekbones, a tender gesture that makes me cry harder.

  “Too close to home?” she says after a few seconds.

  I nod.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

  I shrug. “Can’t decide, which means I probably should.”

  She squares her listening face at me.

  I suck in a breath. “I just can’t believe I…I can’t believe I hurt you,” I manage.

  She rubs my shoulder.

  “It’s really scary to feel like you’re not in control of yourself, you know?” I say, and she nods, even though she doesn’t know. “One minute you’re feeling sorry for yourself and the next minute you’re in a hospital having hurt your best friend. Again.”

  “You don’t remember anything else?”

  I shake my head. “It’s just out of reach, like when you try to remember a dream later in the day.”

  “Well, listen.” She pulls back her arm and mashes her hands together. “I was there, and Lindsay, you were not trying to hurt me. You’d just told me you loved me. Seriously, you were on your last leg and you said, ‘You’re a good person.’ And it really…hearing that changed something in me. I looked you in the eyes and I decided you just had to make it, dammit, because where would I be without you? Who would I even be?” A pretty tear snakes over her cheek. “You know I’m here for you, right? I’m not going to let anyone hurt you, least of all yourself.” She squeezes my arm. “I won’t ever tell anyone anything you told me about Edie. Ever, ever, ever. And I’ll make sure Damien doesn’t, either. We’re past that. Okay?” I keep my eyes on the couch cushion and nod. “Remember that,” she continues. “Remember that. Remember that.”

  This jingles something in my memory, something unsavory, and I’m still for a moment, trying to catch it. Then I look up and Tessa is smiling at me, bright-eyed, and she lunges in for a hug.

  * * *

  A few nights later, I’m dicking around on my computer when I stand and knock a bottle of water onto the keyboard. An entire bottle, just squarely on it like the G key is a bull’s-eye. I screech and lunge and promptly flip the entire thing upside down, and water pours out from between the buttons, a waterfall. I whimper and turn it off and jerry-rig a way to bury the keys in a beach of dry rice. Then I pop two of my sleeping pills—Tessa’s left a dosage in my cabinet, in a tiny baggie—and go to sleep.

  The next morning, I hit the power button, expecting little, and find that while the keyboard’s unresponsive, the screen—and possibly the hard drive—seems mostly fine. At the repair shop, a woman with a half-shaved head tells me they can open up the keyboard and check for water damage underneath. I’m annoyed with myself but unsurprised; this is far from the worst thing I’ve ever done, left to my own devices.

  I get a call a few hours later, from the same bored-sounding woman, it seems.

  “So this is weird,” she begins. “Did you install a keystroke tracker on your computer?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “What? No, I’m saying there’s a keystroke tracker on your laptop. Which I came across as soon as I popped off the keyboard. Like a hardware one.”

  It takes another few seconds for it to clunk into place. “A keystroke logger.” I know why I know what this is. Tessa installed one, years ago, to monitor her potentially cheating husband.

  “Right, installed on your laptop. I mean, damaged by the water, obviously. But it’s going to cost more if you want us to replace that, too.”

  Suddenly everything’s fuzzy, TV static sprinkled over my brain.

  “Are you able to tell who it’s…whom it’s transmitting to?” I ask evenly.

  “I mean, it’s totally fried from the water. You mean you…” She gasps. “Do you have, like, a stalker or something?”

  “Can you tell when it was installed?”

  “It’s a newer one, we sell this. I think it only came out in the last month or two. Hang on, I can check if the serial number…” She’s quiet for five seconds, ten. “No, we didn’t sell this one. But it’s only been out about six weeks. It’s new.”

  I shake my head, order the static to melt away like snow.

  “Okay. You can take it out. But just…keep it, I’ll pick it up, too. And fix the keyboard. Is that all that needs fixing?”

  “No, it’s the hard drive, too. So it actually won’t be ready until tomorrow.”

  I thank her and hang up.

  * * *

  Tessa is already there when I get home that night, chopping up root vegetables for roasting. She smiles and asks about my day as the butcher knife rolls against the cutting board, thwack thwack thwack. I’ve spent the whole subway ride home trying to come up with an alternate explanation, sifting back through my timeline for another moment my laptop was out of my sight or an innocent reason someone would need a log of every keystroke. Nothing.

  I do my best to act normal, to control my smile and keep my body language open, shoulders and chest and tender pink neck exposed. I offer to help and clatter around cheerfully, checking in the cabinets for something missing that she’d deem necessary. I remark that I’m out of parchment paper, but she lines the baking sheets with tin foil instead. I knock my glass measuring cup to the floor, where it explodes into a glorious orbit of shards, but Tessa just sweeps it up, saying she doesn’t need it for anything she’s making tonight.

  After dinner I order us cookies from a late-night bakery with notoriously lazy deliverymen, used to dealing with college students and potheads and other such poor tippers. When one leans on the buzzer, I pretend to begin getting up, but she murmurs, “I got it,” and heads for the front door. This is my chance.

  I find her laptop in her work bag,
in standby, and quickly search for my name; the first file to pop up is a Word document with an inscrutable file name, created in 2009. I hear the front door slam and realize she’s on her way back up; arms shaking, every nerve on fire, I airdrop the files onto my fancy new phone, watching as the taskbar agonizingly slides to the right. I can hear her in the hallway now, slowing from fatigue on the last few steps. Heart pounding, I watch as the little icon switches to “processing,” then turns into a green check mark. As the front door creaks open, I slam Tessa’s laptop closed, heave it back into her bag, and busy myself at the kitchen counter.

  Tessa stays over for another two hours, and I keep smiling, keep slowing my heart rate with deep breaths and praying she can’t see my blood vessels banging away in my throat and chest. Feigning normalcy, something I’m practiced at, I’ve been doing it for years. I tell her I’m sleepy—can’t wait to hit the hay, but of course I’ll see you tomorrow, we can get brunch, get home safe, text me when you arrive. She gives me a long hug and I try not to slam the deadbolt too eagerly.

  I watch through the window until her bike pulls out in traffic and then I open the document. At first I can’t figure out what I’m reading—it’s first-person, but it doesn’t sound at all like Tessa. Entries are dated, and there are mentions of Sarah and Calhoun Lofts, and nausea is blossoming in my belly and my heart is pounding inside my ribs and my brain is going what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

  July 1, 2008, just a month before Sarah and Edie came into my life: complaints about an annoying dustup with a roommate named Jenna; excitement and trepidation over a boyfriend named Tyler. I scroll forward a few pages, to the Fourth of July: more sadness spinning toward this Jenna, and loneliness, isolation. “I had the dream again,” it reads, “lying on the floor with blood pouring out of me, trying to cry out but I can’t make a sound.” A full year before the bloody miscarriage and then her bloody end. This is obviously Edie’s diary. What the fuck is Tessa doing with it?

  Darkness clouds the windows and I don’t bother turning on any lights. Edie kept writing, writing, writing, right up until August 21, 2009. The realization mushrooms: Jenna, the woman I’d been thinking about just before…the night before I…

  Then rapid-fire: how Tessa convinced me the IP address was mine; how easily she cracked open my old email. How she couldn’t clean up the Flip cam video’s audio when Damien took care of it in one night. How much she seemed to know about all those Calhounies when I’d only shown her a single video, shaky and dark.

  Tessa is Jenna; Tessa has been lying to me. Lying and then monitoring, installing a watchman to crouch inside my laptop and record my every move.

  What do I do? I think about calling the cops, but I’m not sure what to tell them; this proves nothing, after all, and Tessa was the one who didn’t press charges when I shot her, somehow. How had I shot her? Where the fuck had that gun come from? Suddenly it’s funny that I haven’t examined this harder. How skilled I’ve become at wiping my brain clean.

  And how easy it would be to incriminate me if I did try to tell someone. “That’s why Lindsay was suicidal, Officer, she showed me this old Flip cam video and requested the case files and really, killing Edie was all she was talking about for weeks. And she’s dangerous, unfortunately. Here, I have footage of her pushing this kid into traffic a few weeks ago, outside a club in Ridgewood…” My stomach pitches, briefly threatening to expel everything, but I keep it down.

  Whom can I talk to? Not my parents, not Damien; I call Sarah, my heart hammering as the phone rings, three times, four, then goes to voice mail. It’s late; she’s likely in bed, snuggled in a California King in her new Park Slope apartment. “PLEASE CALL ME ASAP,” I text her, and then I delete the conversation, paranoid. I glance around the apartment, suddenly afraid of everything. The gun. The red wound on Tessa’s shoulder. Whatever happened to the gun? Where is it now?

  Finally, unsure what else to do and walloped with that postadrenaline exhaustion, I get ready for bed and collapse into it, my bedroom door locked as a backup to the front door. I curse my landlord for not installing a chain; I briefly consider setting up a trap, Home Alone style, for anyone who dares to visit me.

  For the first time in a month, I skip the sleeping pills. I’m out almost instantly, and my dreams are vivid and rich: Tessa wearing white gloves and waving the gun around. Anthony, tragic Anthony, burning up inside a beautiful building. Fear flooding my body, adrenaline and cortisol fighting off the effects of too many Tofranils, of too many Tofranils and something else altogether.

  Remember this, I’d thought. Remember this, remember this, remember this.

  I wake up blinking into the early-morning light, a bird singing too loudly outside my window: oowee, oowee, oowee. I grab my phone to check the time and my eyes fall on the voice memo app. The last time I used it, I murmured into the microphone about a dream, a dream where Edie was trapped inside my Flip cam and looking out at me from behind the—

  I stumble into the living room and plunge my fingers into the dark spaces between the couch cushions. There are crumbs, and hair ties, and coins, but I need to physically flip the cushions to the floor before I spot it, dead against the black fabric: the Flip cam. The one I turned on in a brief moment of lucidity as the drugs took over my brain.

  I stare at it for another moment, glossy in my palm, then lunge into the hallway and fling open the closet door. I yank things off the shelves, snapping open bags and boxes and piling them on the floor. I try the cabinets surrounding the TV, pulling out old magazines and dusty board games and outdated electronics, shit I scowl at as I shove it back into place. I move on to my bedroom, scattered with old notebooks, and I yank out plastic storage bins and fling through old purses and scarves and toiletries and expired medicine. I lumber back into the living room and run my hand along the dust behind my books.

  It’s on the third shelf, as I know it should be: the adapter. Everything in my insides surges toward the sky and I grab it, a small black coil, and rip at its ends to untangle the knots.

  I sit down on my bed, locking the door behind me, and begin to cry again: Without my computer, I don’t know where to plug this in. But the resolute part of me fights back, waving its little arms and stomping its little feet until I look again and see that the cord’s end is unusual but not totally weird; I sift through more jumbled cords until I find a plug that fits, an old digital camera charger from the same era. I push it into the wall and an outdated graphic appears on the camcorder’s screen: FLIP VIDEO.

  I sit hunched on my bed for the full twenty-four minutes. I can’t make out the words, but the affect seeps through—strained and quavering at times, then the staccato of sobbing. I play it a second time with my phone held up to its speaker, recording. I find the email Damien forwarded me from the online sound-cleanup app he used to snap my warble into focus: Have you guys seen Alex? I tap through to the program and upload the file. My finger lingers over the Filter! button, with an exclamation point like it’s only meant for perky things, and then I press it.

  It’s ready in less than a minute and I listen again, comprehending this time, pausing when my own sobs get so loud that I can’t hear Tessa’s voice. It cuts off at the beginning of her 911 call, which sounds eerily like Sarah’s—screeches, shock.

  More hunches come to me like things I read in a book or maybe fact-checked in an article long ago—that Tessa sought me out, befriended me after changing her name and look. The button nose, the one I’ve always admired, now seems obviously fake. Greg helped me, he pointed me in the right direction, I think. And the White Lotus Thai…everything was off about it, even the delivery, though I can’t remember how. But I’m certain Tessa was behind that, too.

  I hear the deadbolt clink and look up at my locked bedroom door; behind it, I know, Tessa is navigating her way in. When I crack it open, she’s dropping her keys and balancing a bag of groceries on her hip. For a moment, I see i
t: the Flip cam a flimsy weapon, beat into her temple over and over and over again until the skin bruises and splits open like a ripe stone fruit. Swelling pushing up through those wide eyes and that perfect nose, the one she didn’t deserve, the one she got to trick me. Blood trickling out like juice as she fights back, waving both arms wildly, the groceries spreading out on the floor, eggs cracked on the hardwood.

  I step out into the hallway.

  “I thought I could make French toast,” she says, smiling, then busies herself with the groceries. “Do you want to make us some coffee?”

  I follow her into the kitchen, pressing the front door closed as I pass.

  “What’s up, you okay?” She’s already whipped out a cutting board.

  I clear my throat. “Sorry, I’m fine. I forgot to take my sleeping pills last night, so I’m kind of out of it.”

  “I gave them to you, right? Where’d you leave them?” She’s taken off her sling, and with a fat chef’s knife, she begins calmly destroying a pineapple, dismantling its spiny skin.

  “Just in the bathroom. I’ll take them tonight.” Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “Sounds like we both need coffee then.”

  I stare at her, then shake my head. “Sorry. Right.” I pull the beans and grinder out of the cabinet. What do I do?

  She fries up our French toast and I suggest we eat in the living room, far from all my sharp objects. She agrees, still cheerfully soliloquizing about her in-laws’ concerns over how barky little Marlon will treat the baby.

  “I thought it would be a whole power-struggle, territorial thing,” she says, taking a sip of coffee, “but Will’s dad was insisting dogs just get jealous and insecure. We finally looked it up at the table, and wouldn’t you know it, he was right.”