by Andrea Bartz
The fire had been eighteen months ago; we’d all moved on and missed the headline. But we’d sort of tacitly worshipped Anthony back in the day, this strong-jawed Peter Pan with a thick beard and the confidence a forty-three-year-old man should have but should never exercise around throngs of postgrads. He’d inherited the lofts in his thirties and would only periodically maintain them, showing up primarily for unscheduled appearances at parties and shows. He’d called Edie “Red,” and she’d feigned disgust while complaining that he’d burst into the apartment right as she was getting out of the shower to let her know about a new building code, refusing to leave as she stood there dripping. Even the guys had begrudgingly thought Anthony was cool, with his sleeve tats and long hair and wild stories about touring with his band in the nineties.
He was around a lot, but I’d interacted with him directly only a handful of times. Once I’d been stumbling out the front door, hungover from the night before and rumpled from sleeping on SAKE’s couch. I’d been wearing something ridiculous, my top and bottom both inches too short—a sexless walk of shame. Anthony had been standing out front, surveying from a few yards away an overflowing and likely vomit-splattered Dumpster.
“Hey, you got any cigarettes?” he asked.
I did, a pack I carried around like gum, although I rarely smoked, and only when drunk.
“I’ll pay you for it,” he offered, but I waved his dollar away.
He smiled at me, then leaned in for a light. I always felt self-conscious about this part, concerned I’d mess it up, but I didn’t.
“Smoke with me?” he said, but my stomach was already convulsing with nausea from all the booze I’d consumed the night before.
“I promise I’ll find a way to make it up to you,” he said, smirking again, and for a moment I felt special, even though he promptly forgot me.
God, how could we not have seen that he was the biggest, creepiest loser in the world?
Not that he deserved to die. Probably.
My phone rang and my heart skidded up my arms and out my fingers. I stared at Alex’s name for a moment before answering, briefly blanking on why I’d decided to call him.
“Lindsay! What’s going on, are you okay?” He still had a rich voice, low and resonant.
Suddenly I clammed up, and the enormity of what I needed to ask rushed in: Why did you hate Edie? What really went down between you two—when you were together, as you split, and then afterward, while you continued breathing the same beer-smelling Calhoun air? But it was my turn to speak, so I began forming words, the way you make up lyrics to sing along to a song you only sort of know.
“Sorry if I worried you,” I heard myself say. “I know this is out of the blue. I’ve been reading through my journals from back in, you know, our party era.” A lie: I hadn’t kept a diary during those years, instead abandoning journaling sometime in early college. It was something I always vaguely regretted but felt too old to change, like being unable to play the guitar or sail or understand football. “We had so much fun. Like, so much fun I don’t understand how we functioned on a daily basis. Do you remember that?”
He chuckled but still sounded bewildered. “Of course! That whole era was crazy.”
I opened a silence and he filled it. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that, too. We were poor as shit and living in that shithole and had no idea whatsoever.”
“Right? We were basically living in squalor. Which got me thinking about that horrible landlord you guys had, remember Anthony Stiles?”
Another beat, too long. “Yeah, that guy sucked.”
“I did a search for him the other day,” I went on. “After he came up in my journal, like, whatever happened to him, right? Turns out he died in a fire over a year ago. Isn’t that insane?”
“Whoa. Just like a random house fire?”
“Yeah, they never figured out the cause, but it was in the middle of the night. And I looked back even further and it turns out he was convicted of statutory rape a few years before that, which is especially terrifying. Because wasn’t he, like, sniffing around at parties and stuff all the time?” The rape charge was a lie, but Alex wouldn’t think to investigate it.
He kept his voice even. “I think so. Although I feel like he was dating someone in the building those last few months we were there. Right?”
“I have no idea.” Had that person called Anthony the night of Edie’s death? It was like a mosquito bite, south of painful: a reminder that they’d remained the kings of Calhoun just as I was written out of the narrative. With finality, right as I prepared to tell them all off in a glorious, Oscar-worthy monologue. God, the hubris. “Do you remember who?”
“Someone I thought you girls knew. I dunno. You’d know better than me if you were just rereading your diary.” He considered. “What, you think the rape charges are related to the fire?”
“Oh!” I said it like my teeny lady-brain couldn’t possibly have drawn such a connection. “I didn’t even think of that, do you think it could be?”
He grunted. “I don’t know. Maybe somebody didn’t like him for being a rapist. You shouldn’t rape people.”
“I agree. One should not.”
He let out a humorless ha.
“I was reading an entry about this warehouse party we all went to,” I tried, “like out on Knickerbocker or something. Remember those huge ragers that Kevin’s friends used to throw? Apparently one was carnival-themed and there were naked trapeze artists and shit. I was so scandalized.”
He laughed again. “That actually rings a bell,” he said. “Wasn’t that the party when Kevin spent the entire night trying to pull this dude from another band and then at the last minute the guy left with the douchebag in the marching-band cap who planned the whole party?”
“Ha, oh my god! It was like a drum-major cap! With the feather plume?” Thank god I’d reviewed those emails.
“And Kevin was sooo wasted and he kept going, ‘But I’m the drum major! I’m the major…of the drums!’ ” Alex said, laughing hard.
“And drumming on things! As we dragged him out of there!”
“That’s it! That’s it!” Alex said. He came down again, sighed. “God, that kid was funny.”
“Do you ever hear from him anymore?” For some reason, I didn’t feel like mentioning that I’d called Kevin a few nights earlier.
He made a noncommittal noise. “Jaclyn still sends him a Christmas card. I always figured he’d pass through New York at some point and look me up, but it’s been a long time now.”
“That makes sense,” I uttered when the silence between us ballooned. “Oh, so guess who I had dinner with last week.”
“Sarah?”
“How’d you know?”
“We don’t have that many more people in common.”
“Oh, I thought maybe you saw she posted about it or something.”
“No, but I think I saw she moved back to the city, right?”
“That’s right, for her husband’s job.”
“How is she?”
“Really good! It was nice to see her.”
He didn’t ask more and I could feel it, how he wanted to wrap things up, the same way the girlfriend widens her eyes and pats at her partner’s shoulder when she’s ready for him to stop talking to you. Why hadn’t Sarah been terrified of Alex? How could she run around claiming—to everyone, to Alex—that Edie had been murdered, when the deceased’s own arrogant, hot, seemingly-adult-but-actually-twenty-four ex-boyfriend had just declared that he wanted to slit her throat?
I want that bitch out of my apartment! His voice had sounded younger then, warbly and immature. Did he remember saying that? Did he know that others had heard it?
I cleared my throat and found my fact-checker voice. “Oh, there’s something I wanted to ask you. Have you—actually, is it okay if I ask you something abou
t Edie? I’ve just been thinking about her a lot, with seeing Sarah and the anniversary coming up, but we totally don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” Another trick I’d picked up from my editor friends: Make the interviewee feel like not answering your question makes him the biggest dick in the world. It worked; Alex murmured me on. “Did you guys ever talk about either one of you moving out when you broke up? I was reading some stuff about…that period and how she and Sarah were over at my place a lot, kind of awkward in that Calhoun apartment…”
“Not really. We were broke and moving’s so expensive. And we had our own rooms, at least.”
“And she didn’t think to go stay with her parents or anything.”
“Well, no. But that doesn’t surprise me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just…I didn’t like them.”
“How come?”
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“I have time.”
“See, I kinda don’t.” It was so unexpectedly rude, I clutched a hand to my chest.
A new idea. “So I take it you don’t talk to them at all? I was just thinking, I came across some really great photos that I thought maybe they would—”
“I don’t talk to her mom anymore.”
“What about her dad?”
“Lindsay, you know her dad is—did you not hear this? Her dad died.”
“Oh my god. From what?”
“Suicide. A few years after…afterward.”
“Oh my god,” I repeated.
“Yeah, I mean, they’d lost their daughter and their home and apparently he still hadn’t been able to find a new job…and presumably he had a predisposition to mental illness or whatever. So sad.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I know. Pretty shocking when it always seemed like her mom was the unstable one.”
This rang a distant bell. “Remind me, she used to show up at Calhoun sometimes, right?”
“Yeah, she was…odd. Clinging to her youth, a little obsessed with her daughter. I remember she used to come crying to Edie whenever she was having, like, marital problems, which I thought was really weird.”
“Yikes. Do you know what happened to her?”
“She’s still kicking around Manhattan, as far as I know. She’s a psychiatrist, so maybe she finally figured her own shit out.” He swallowed. “We obviously didn’t keep in touch, but I used to look her up every once in a while. She got remarried at one point.”
“Well, that’s good. Jeez.” So I should probably stop thinking of her as Mrs. Iredale, like a little kid.
“Yeah. Whoa. Way to bring the mood down.”
“Right, sorry.” An opening, a bleak one, but I took it. “Well, since we’re already on the subject of depressing things, Sarah mentioned something I…I hadn’t known about Edie back then. That maybe didn’t make her look great, but I wanted to ask you about it.” A lie, but Sarah could have been the one to tell me about the miscarriage, right?
“Look, I really don’t want to sit here and talk shit about Edie. Okay? She apologized way back before all—”
“No, of course not, neither do I. I’m sorry, I…” My ears caught up with me. She apologized? “Wait, you knew?”
“That she was cheating on me? That’s why we broke up.” A beat. “Wait, what were you talking about?”
Everything was alert, my eyes, ears, hands. The fact slid into a waiting slot: one motive, humming away. And if she’d been cheating on him that summer…whose baby had she lost?
Now I definitely couldn’t mention the miscarriage. I rifled around for a red herring. “I was just going to ask about the drugs,” I said. “Sarah told me that the autopsy showed that Edie had Molly in her system, and I don’t remember her ever using anything. So I wanted to ask about that.”
“Oh. Well, shit. Now I feel like an asshole.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “That’s totally not shocking or outside the realm of possibility for me. I knew Edie was sort of…boy crazy.”
“Look, we don’t need to get into this.”
I spotted a new tactic. “You know how Edie and I were fighting a lot that summer? Understanding what went down could help me make sense of that. Make peace with it, even.”
“What, with her cheating? Why would that matter at all? You don’t even know the guy.”
Was it Greg, maybe, Edie’s cool architect ex-boyfriend? How could it be someone I didn’t know, someone none of us knew about?
I let a few seconds drip past, then added a tremor to my voice. “I just want to understand what happened,” I half whispered, “for closure.” It sounded like something from a movie. When had my life knotted into a telenovela? Could I please go back to last Wednesday, when I went to Pilates and then binge-watched canceled television, cranking up the sound so that I could hear it over the air conditioner?
He heaved a big, manly sigh. “She put a stop to it after a few times,” he said, “after I found out. But it was…terrible.”
“How did you find out?” I prodded.
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t.” He let out a bitter little laugh, and I heard a plunk, like he was doing something else now. I sat with that, flipping through everyone I could think of. That building was so big, floor after floor of people tucked into plywood rooms like tchotchkes in a shadow box.
“Also, I didn’t know,” he said, when the quiet grew too large. “About the drugs. I didn’t think she ever used anything, either.”
“Huh.”
Again, the silence fizzed.
“Maybe that helps explain it,” he said. “Why she would kill herself. Because she was on something.”
“Fucked up,” I managed. Chemically, metaphorically, her, this. I didn’t even know how I meant it. Me.
Alex said he’d better “let me go” and mechanically we exchanged pleasantries. Then he hung up and I pictured us both seated in our apartments, peering miserably into the past.
Chapter 7
I looked up at the kitchen window, which faced a brick wall, while the world shifted to make room for this revelation. How had Edie had a secret affair without any of us noticing? I saw her at least a few times a week; the other three lived with her, for Christ’s sake. Then again, she’d been distant as soon as that June, hanging out with the crew less, wandering off on her own more. God, how little I’d known her. I flashed back suddenly to myself in my apartment the night after my big fight with Edie, crying to my kind but distant roommate who’d had no idea what to say, bleating between hiccups that it wasn’t just the things Edie had screamed at me, it was me, my own judgment, shaken to its core. I couldn’t believe I’d trusted her; I’d befriended her with these scales fitted firmly over my eyes.
I poured some seltzer into a juice glass and drank it down. The movements made me feel purposeful: Adult Woman Recaps Bottle and Places It Back in the Fridge. Then I called Tessa and she invited me over, sending a car to pick me up. I called Damien on the way and begged him to walk the few blocks from his place to hers, and he reached her front door just as I was getting out of the car.
In Tessa’s chic, white living room, I stroked Marlon’s soft back and told them everything I’d learned. Damien sipped the rosé he’d brought over. From a leather chair, Tessa listened, making notes on a notepad and nodding, a neat row of her cool geometric letters. Something about her manual note-taking soothed me. So anachronistic, a librarian still in love with physical things, card catalogs and musty books and those checkout slips glued inside the cover, stamped with date after date after date.
“Alex is looking insanely sketchy, right?” I concluded. “Between this and that crazy shit he said out of nowhere on the tape.”
“I still haven’t watched it,” Damien announced, and Tessa ro
lled her eyes and brought him up to speed.
“He’s the hot one, right?” he added, after taking it all in.
I sighed. “Yes, Damien. And I thought Edie was obsessed with him. So I’m pretty shocked.”
“Seems suspect that he never told anyone, the police or anything,” Tessa said. “Not to mention the fact that he told the cops you came to the concert with him. He and Sarah can’t both be right.”
I nodded. “It’s weird, right? I need to figure out exactly how that went down. It wasn’t gonna happen on the phone.” I rubbed at the spot between my brows. The third eye. “I wonder if I can get him to meet up in person.”
“Good idea. In a public place, obviously.” Tessa tapped the pen cap against her lips. “I mean, whoever did this is probably not going to be very helpful.”
“I know.” If somebody else did this, if this wasn’t me running on a hamster wheel until I concluded it was indeed a regular old suicide, just like I’d always believed.
“Whomever she was sleeping with sounds pretty suspect, too,” she added. “Alex said it ended when he found out? Maybe someone didn’t like that.”
“Maybe. I wish he would’ve told me who it was.”
“Yeah.” She doodled on her page, a slow spiral.
“You know, I’m impressed with how much ass Edie was getting,” Damien said. It was a playful blow dart, and we all laughed. Marlon stirred, disturbed by my shaking torso.
“Right?” I said. “She conquers her building crush and then almost immediately starts sleeping with someone else on the side.”
“Didn’t you say you used to have a building crush, too?” Tessa asked.
I sighed. “No, the guy I was kind of obsessed with didn’t live in Calhoun. And it only culminated in hooking up once but still took over my brain for, like, a year.” The hurt had felt so senseless and embarrassing. This wasn’t a thing, I’d reminded myself over and over. It was like turning around after bowling a gutter ball, hoping to share an exaggerated shrug, only to discover that none of your friends were watching anyway.