by Andrea Bartz
The bus was frigid and I wrapped my arms around me, feeling the staticky fluff of goose bumps—one of those silly leftovers from evolution, like the tailbone and appendix. But most of our adaptations are good ones. I remembered a story I’d fact-checked about a Japanese doctor who’d been arrested for surgically disconnecting young men’s fear circuits, plucking apart their brain fibers like a threadbare tapestry. It was a for-service hire, a dimming of the amygdala in a half-dozen humans, suddenly preternaturally brave. But also stupid, self-endangering. Fear is a survival mechanism, as any half-witted high school biology student can tell you. Darwin knew that dead men don’t reproduce.
But the impulse to rewire a brain, that I knew all too well. My own parents had worked hard at it, mucking around in my skull—chemically rather than surgically—from the time I was old enough to have a personality.
Middle school: me at my ugliest; Dad’s eyes as he turned to me, a mixture of fury and fear. The oval of blood growing syrupy on the floor. I read once that seventh grade is exactly when your brain undergoes its biggest changes since infancy, overproducing brain cells and then killing off most of them. Letting them duke it out for survival. Which is ironic, really, since seventh grade is a bunch of confused preteens doing the same thing.
* * *
I dashed outside at my stop and stepped through the rain toward Mrs. Iredale’s home. Her town house was orange brick and cute, with bay windows and navy trim and a small front yard in need of mowing. Next door some kids were playing in their own wet patch of lawn, stomping into puddles with their brows knitted in concentration. On the porch, my hand jumped out and rang the doorbell before I could stop to think about it.
No answer. Again, the relief/disappointment cocktail.
“What’s your name?” It was one of the girls next door, her wet hair matted to her face.
“I’m Lindsay.” I flashed them a smile. “What’s your name?”
“Sophie.” She picked a bathing suit wedgie unflinchingly. Kids can be so unflappable. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to Mrs. Iredale. I was friends with her daughter.”
She cocked her head. “Mrs. Iredale?”
Shit, was this the wrong house?
“Can I help you?” It was an adult voice, a knowing voice, coming up the path behind me.
“Mrs. Iredale, I’m Lindsay. Edie’s friend. I’m—I’m sorry to bother you.” I was struck, frozen. She was beautiful, with silver-streaked hair and Edie’s freckles and a serious expression on an otherwise impish face.
“It’s Ms.,” she said. “Ms. Iredale.”
“I’m sorry. That’s right. I’m…I’ve been thinking about putting together a little commemorative video of Edie to share with her friends,” I continued, cursing myself for wasting all that time on the bus not coming up with a better lie, “and I thought you might be interested in sharing some photos. And I have to tell you, I tried to find your number or email address and just wasn’t having any luck, but I saw your address online and was heading up to Riverdale this morning anyway, so…”
She peered at me. “You found my address but not my email?”
I shook my head, felt the rush of blood to my cheeks. “I’m sorry, that came out like a save-face kind of thing—to be honest, I had the idea when I was already on the bus here.”
“The commemorative video? Or coming to see me?”
“Oh, coming to see you, I mean. I’m doing the video either way. I found a few videos of all of us on my old Flip cam and thought it would be nice to edit together something I could share on Vimeo, so…”
I thought she’d interrupt me, but she just stared. I hung my closed umbrella off of the porch and shook raindrops from it gravely. They floated in a cloud before falling.
“Do you want to come inside and dry off?” Mrs. Iredale finally said.
“That would be great, if you don’t mind. My friend told me she’s running late, too, but I can get out of your hair in just a minute.”
She unlocked the door and held it open for me. She was almost a foot shorter than me and this felt wrong, oafish me wandering inside with a trail of wet footprints in my wake. I suddenly wondered why I hadn’t brought her a gift, some chocolates, flowers bound and wrapped in cellophane.
“Tell me your name again. Lizzie?” She pulled out a towel and handed it to me. She moved suddenly, jerkily.
“Lindsay,” I told her.
“Were you one of Edie’s roommates?”
“No, but I was really close with all of them—Sarah and Kevin and Alex.” I said their names deliberately as a drumbeat, watching for a reaction between each. I thought I saw one after Alex, a tiny pulse around her eyes, but I couldn’t be sure.
“So you were a later friend. I thought for a second you were one of her earlier roommates. In Calhoun Lofts, right?”
“Right. Calhoun.” I wasn’t keeping up, wasn’t saying the right things.
“I see.” She watched me scuff my shoes across the welcome mat, and, feeling childish, I bent and started to unlace them.
“Lindsay,” she repeated. “I do remember you. Edie liked you.”
Liked to control me, maybe. “Well, you know how wonderful she was. Thanks for letting me step inside for a second.” I lined my shoes up by the door. “I’ve been thinking about her a ton, and honestly, just seeing your face—seeing the resemblance, it helps. I know that sounds crazy.” I looked down at my hands. Suddenly I was twenty-three and obsequious to grown-ups again.
When I looked up, Mrs. Iredale was giving a tired but real smile. “Thanks for saying that.”
“She was just magnetic. From the very first time I met her, I remember being captivated by her. So much wit and sparkle and life.”
Mrs. Iredale was one of those people who stares blankly as you speak, waiting until the end to react. It creeped me out and tripped up my speech—like when you’re on the phone and hear your voice echoing back.
“How did you know her again?” she asked.
“I met her back in…let’s see, 2008. Through Sarah, actually, whom I knew from working in magazines.”
She looked around. “Would you like to sit down? I think I left the coffee on.”
“Sure.” I followed her into the kitchen. “So as I was saying, Sarah and I met randomly and, you know, quickly became friends.” She held up a carton of half-and-half and I nodded. Then she frowned like I’d made the wrong choice. “So Sarah had me over to their apartment one night. That was back when they lived with those other girls.”
“I liked them,” she interrupted, leading me into the living room. “We had them over for dinner a few times.”
So she’d clearly liked the old roommates better than the SAKE ones. Had she not approved of Edie moving in with Alex so quickly?
“Well, Edie and I just really hit it off. And we became friends and hung out all the time at my apartment near Calhoun or, you know, at their place. It was…it was such a good era, having that really close-knit little group of friends.”
Mrs. Iredale perched on a love seat and blinked at me, both hands wrapped around her mug. Her tempo unnerved me, the random things she would and wouldn’t respond to.
“Robert and I didn’t really get a chance to know that group,” she said finally.
“Well, we all became friends right after we graduated from college,” I said. “The rest of us had just moved to New York. Maybe Edie just wanted that…that sort of faux independence you think you’ve got when you’re in your twenties. I remember feeling so grown up.”
Mrs. Iredale cocked her head. “Looking back on it, I feel bad for you guys,” she said unexpectedly. “I mean, not you in particular. Your generation. Promised everything and then, you know. Toppling off a cliff.”
“You mean…?”
“The recession. Obviously it hit those of us with mortga
ges and retirement accounts harder. But…Edie graduated in May 2008, poor thing.” She made a gesture, her fingers winging upward, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms: exactly the same motion Edie made. I hadn’t seen it in ten years.
“You know, I think that’s the reason a lot of people back then—my age—would take on this really affected air, just this blanket disapproval of everything,” I said. “Like ‘Oh, this band sucks, and that book sucks, and mainstream society is lame, and capitalism is a joke.’ If you refuse to align yourself with anything, you don’t give anything any power.”
“Interesting.” From her terrible posture, she lowered her head and took a sip of coffee. “Edie was like you. Always quick to cobble together a narrative and fit everything into the bigger picture. When she was small, she’d make little books that told the story of her day before.” She laughed, a rich, musical sound. “Eventually they just kept showing her making her book about the day before. They got pretty boring. But she loved it, her little record-keeping. And then the second she could write, she was filling up diaries as fast as we could buy them.”
“That’s so cute!” I smiled at the thought: hundreds of scarlet-haired Edies coloring in yesterday’s coloring session, an endless hall of mirrors. “What was she like as a kid?”
“She was the shyest thing when she was little.” She slid her palm across the armrest, back and forth. “Then she turned ten or so and really came out of her shell.”
“Center of attention,” I said before I could stop myself.
She looked at me. “Yes, that’s true.”
“Did she develop…was she depressed when she was younger?” She blinked at me, and I hastily added: “I know you’re a psychiatrist, so I thought maybe—”
“We didn’t know,” she interrupted. “We should’ve been watching for it since it was in her family history, but we didn’t know until after.”
“Us neither.” I shifted in my seat. “You were pretty close with her, right? I know you came by Calhoun sometimes to see her.”
She stared hard at me, expressionless. “She was my daughter. I liked seeing her.”
I swallowed. “Well, did you talk to her about what was going on at Calhoun? Like, with Alex and everything?”
She picked up her mug and drank deeply, then set it down with a clink. “Lindsay, I know what you’re doing here.”
A cold spring of shock. I stared at her, my cup frozen in front of my throat.
“I’m not stupid,” she continued. “You’re not the first conspiracy theorist. But Edie killed herself. It wasn’t a freak accident. There wasn’t any foul play. Suicide.”
I brought the mug back down to my lap but couldn’t speak.
“She was depressed,” Mrs. Iredale continued, “and she hid it very well. But she was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and then she’d experimented for the first time with ecstasy, which is extremely problematic for someone with her delicate brain chemistry. I wish there hadn’t been a gun at her disposal, but if it hadn’t been that, it would have been another way. I saw her just hours before it happened. She didn’t seem well.”
It hung in the air for a moment. “Wait, what? You saw her?”
She shrugged. Then I caught it, a weird tic near her eye. “I came by to see her that night. Are you here to find out what we talked about, like that’s the missing piece?”
I didn’t answer. Everything was moving too fast. A coffee drip slid down the side of the mug and coated my fingers.
“I was there to deliver more bad news: that we were losing our home and could no longer help her out with her tuition. Not exactly the best revelations when you’re, as it turns out, fighting with your friends and going through a breakup and recovering from a medical emergency.”
My insides lurched. She knew—of course she knew about the baby, of course the autopsy report hit her eyeballs first—but it jarred me, how she tossed these things off like a grocery list.
So Mrs. Iredale had been in Calhoun the very night of Edie’s death. Now busily trying to convince me it was nothing but a suicide.
Something clicked. “Wait, other conspiracy theorists?”
She sighed and the same eye flicked again. “It’s been ten years, Lindsay. I think you should go.” There was a calm confidence in her syntax, as if it made perfect sense. As if I’d spent a decade on the armchair in Edie’s mother’s living room.
Sarah, right? She had to mean Sarah. I should talk to Sarah.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale. To have taken up your time. I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe me, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t come with a…conspiracy theory.” I wiped the drip on the side of the mug. “Guess I just miss her.”
She shook her head. “You can’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. I think about her every single day. And how I should’ve tried harder to persuade her to come back home with me, to talk some more.” She sighed and rubbed her temple. “I’ll never forgive that kid for convincing her to go back inside.”
My stomach did something gymnastic. This was too much all at once. The rain throbbed against the window and she glanced at it; when it rains, it pours, my neurons spit out.
“Who convinced her to go back into Calhoun?”
“Some boy she was seeing. He was texting her the whole time we were talking, and she must have told him where we were because eventually he showed up to escort her back inside.” She looked out the window again. “He introduced himself, seemed pretty polite. But maybe if we’d had more time to talk…”
Not Alex, whom she’d met before. “Do you remember his name?”
“Oh, what was it…Roy, I think. He told the cops the same thing as me—that she seemed really upset and shaken by our conversation.” She whipped her head over to look at me. “And no, he’s not a suspect. He was photographing a concert that night, and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”
Who the fuck was Roy?
“Wait, not Roy,” she announced suddenly, almost proudly. “His name was Lloyd.”
Chapter 8
For a moment my mouth gaped open like a fish’s. Edie was seeing Lloyd? My Lloyd, the object of my obsession? Did people know?
“Are you sure they were dating?” This was just a month or two after Edie and Alex had split. The next revelation blared: Maybe Edie had been cheating on Alex with Lloyd earlier that year, too. Perhaps he was the other man Alex wouldn’t name.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, it sure seemed like it.”
And then the question boomeranged back into me. Did I know? Had I seen something that summer? Had my intuition finished a puzzle and sat proudly back until I was drunk and uninhibited and suddenly able to catch up? Was there a split, forgotten second when I knew on the night of August 21?
“She was sick,” Mrs. Iredale announced, “and she was upset. Edie was someone who turned to relationships for—for comfort, so it doesn’t surprise me she was seeing someone new. He said it was casual. Afterward, I mean.”
Alex told me Edie had ended the affair “after a few times”; if my hunch was correct, she’d picked it up again after they’d broken up. Or maybe she’d never quit.
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Iredale stood, crossed as far as the fireplace, and stopped. “Lindsay, there aren’t…things don’t always fit together the way you want them to.” I thought of her late husband, of the moment she learned her daughter was dead; I stared at the dark circle of coffee in the bottom of my cup and nodded. “Whatever you’re trying to go back over and see how it looks if you piece it together a different way—it won’t change anything. It just is what it is.” She turned and walked into the kitchen.
I stood to follow her and noticed a few framed pictures propped up on the mantel—one of Mrs. Iredale and a nerdy older guy, presumably her second husband, on vaca
tion somewhere warm. Another of Mrs. Iredale and her late husband—god, he looked just like Edie, gangly and good-looking—waving under bright layers on a ski vacation. And one of Edie, teenage and lovely, sitting under a tree and reading obliviously while the wind tangled her halo of hair. I gazed at it, half expecting her to look up at me and wave. Edie, I whispered silently. Did you know you’d grow up to be kind of a bitch?
In the kitchen, I handed my mug to Mrs. Iredale and watched her load it into the dishwasher. “I get the feeling you didn’t know about Lloyd, so I’m sorry if that was…by design on Edie’s part or something,” she said. An observant woman, like Edie. She closed the dishwasher and looked out the window, toward a bird feeder. “No sign of the sun coming out. I’ll get your umbrella.”
* * *
The umbrella promptly snapped inside out, and I arrived at the bus stop soaked and bedraggled, damp hair spooling across my forehead and neck. I climbed into the bus’s brightness and caught my reflection in the window. The bags under my eyes had ballooned, the lines from my nose to my mouth deeply etched. Had that been a help or a disaster? I felt the questions growing and multiplying, two for every one answered, spreading like cancer cells.
On the one hand, Mrs. Iredale had a point, one mark in the suicide column: The stew of mental illness, drugs, and a pounding stream of bad news did point to the conclusion that she and the cops had come to. On the other hand, why the fuck had Edie been seeing Lloyd? If he came out and collected her, and he didn’t live in Calhoun, then certainly they must’ve clambered up to her room together…
We wheezed to a stop at a red light, and I turned over another odd detail: What had Mrs. Iredale been doing there just hours before the potential crime? “You can’t know,” she’d said. A slip, a tell that she was holding something back?
Her reason for rushing to Calhoun felt flimsy, too. Late on a Friday night, why bolt all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie something that could wait until morning? The condo would be foreclosed; they’d no longer be covering her grad-school tuition. Upsetting, but not earth-shaking—more Edie’s parents’ problems than her own.