The Lost Night

by Andrea Bartz

  But at the theater, the first act was lyrical and slow, not enough to keep my mind from wandering. The troupe spun and rolled in perfect, languid unison, and I found myself combing through the case files again, impressions rising like balloons: Kevin waiting at the ER, Sarah fumbling with her cell phone, Anthony reaching through the blood to feel for Edie’s pulse. Me, drunk and blank-faced, opening a window to let in the heat as my taxi wove its way through the night.

  The second dance was more my speed, with a pulsing drumbeat and spastic motion. My eyes settled on a corps member shorter than the others, with red hair and pale creamy skin; from back here, she reminded me of Edie, graceful and quick. I let my eyes relax and watched the dancers braid themselves together, now sideways, then a small explosion and limbs sticking out at awkward angles. Suddenly all of the dancers but the doppelgänger bolted offstage, and the music switched to something mournful, deep, and soulful. The redhead slunk in and out of the spotlight, moving slowly and then crashing into odd contortions, hitting the stage so hard that we could hear the thud from our balcony seats. I glanced over at Damien and saw that he was riveted, too, then realized I was crying, unassuming tears leaking down my cheeks.

  I cheered when it was over, hollering when the woman took her solo bow, letting the roar of applause cover up my sniffles as I pulled myself back together. At intermission, Damien and I stood among the throngs, sipping drinks.

  “So that last one got to you, huh?”

  I wasn’t sure he’d noticed. “Yeah, it was beautiful.”

  “You seem quiet tonight.”

  “Do I?”

  “You can talk to me. You thinking about your friend?”

  Goddammit, he’d invoked the secret code, the way to split me into a million sobbing pieces: He was nice to me.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said with a high-pitched laugh. The faucet of tears was on full blast.

  “Whoa. Here, come here.” Damien led me away from the crowd, which had begun streaming back into the theater, and settled us on a sofa in a random recess.

  “Babe, I didn’t realize this was bringing you down so much! You haven’t mentioned it in a while.”

  I shook my head. “I can tell you and Tessa think I’m being compulsive or whatever. But…you know that feeling when a situation is just totally out of your control? It’s like that. Only it’s about this really horrible thing that already happened, and the reason I wasn’t in control was because I drank too much.” I groaned. “You saw the video—you heard how Alex and I were saying awful stuff about Edie that night, how we wanted her dead. And it’s just…it’s really upsetting to think that he or I could’ve…I don’t know. Said something awful. Or that he could have done something awful.” Or that I could have seen something awful, witnessed the two of them fighting, him posturing with Kevin’s gun. Or, or, or.

  “Ohhh, girl.” He pulled me into a hug. “You know what they say about suicide: Nothing anyone says or does—”

  “I know, I know.” I slid away from his arms. “But it’s still really disturbing that I went and talked to her. I’d always thought she was alone in her apartment the whole time. Nobody really saw her that night at all, after she parted with her dude of the moment.” Fucking Lloyd.

  “So I have a confession,” he said. I raised my eyebrows. “I haven’t looked at your video. But I will! I’ll do it tonight. I’m a video editor, Linds. I can definitely find something you didn’t notice.”

  I want to push her off this building, I’d screamed. Suddenly I wanted Damien to delete it, eliminate the record of Alex and me fantasizing about her death. Muffled music swelled from inside the auditorium, and I rested my head on the back of the sofa. “Focus on the last few minutes,” I told him, and he nodded.

  * * *

  At home, my eyes fell on a stack of glossy photos, piled like a brick on a side table, the old photo albums on the floor underneath. I picked up the snapshots and recognized the image on top: Kevin and Sarah on the subway, next to me and too close, so Kevin’s head was huge. On his other side, Sarah peered over, her mouth distorted a bit: midword.

  I realized with a happy spritz that I remembered this day: It was a springtime outing when the five of us—no, four, Alex couldn’t make it for some reason—had made our way upstate from Grand Central, hungover and slow-moving and pausing too long to gaze at the station’s teal ceiling. The plan was to hike the hills around Cold Spring, though none of us had proper footwear. I’d bought two disposable cameras at a bodega that morning, and we’d had no choice but to develop the images.

  I smiled as I flicked through them; Edie had had the brilliant idea of turning hiking into a drinking game, and every time someone spotted a trail marker, everyone else had to drink. She never beamed in photos like me, instead turning away or smirking sleepily, always so effortlessly cool. There was a selfie she’d taken of both of us where she was pretending to bite my hair (perhaps the wind had been flopping it onto her face?), and I could still feel the weight of her arm around my shoulders, the thrilling calm of owning half an imaginary BEST FRIENDS necklace.

  I paused on one: It was the inevitable shot of our shoes, four pairs on the dirty train’s floor. The others were beat-up, but mine were still shiny new, Keds as white as fresh snow. I could sort of recall the point of these pictures: We were proud of how shabby our shoes got, evidence of all the dirty hipster spelunking we’d done. For a moment I peered at it, feeling the realization coming, a gushing sensation like ice on a frozen river fissuring and running free. Then I lunged at my laptop, pulled up Facebook, and began to search.

  There it was, posted September 26, 2009, by a work friend I’d clung to after severing the SAKE crew: another foot shot, my shoes on a picnic blanket with strawberries and baby carrots and chips nearby. My white canvas sneakers were the worse for wear, scuffed and gray. But there were two unmistakable spots on my right toe, each the size of a pencil eraser. Rusty red and permanent.

  Panicked, I clicked through more photos of myself, further and further back in time. When had the dots appeared? My stupid shoes were so often cut off, photos from the knee or waist or shoulders up, or most of my body obscured by buzzing throngs of other twentysomethings. Finally, one of me playing on Kevin’s skateboard in McCarren Park, arms out, wobbly terror in my eyes. August 8.

  Heartburn rang out in my ribs. Two weeks before Edie’s untimely death, at least, the shoes. They were spotless.

  * * *

  I woke up to a text from Damien: “Who’s the baddest bitch? I’m the baddest bitch.”

  I sent question marks back, but he didn’t answer, so I hightailed it into work and left my office door open for him. He burst in ten minutes past our normal call time, the bastard. He was grinning like the goddamn Cheshire cat.

  “So it was surprisingly easy to clean up the audio,” he announced. “I ran it through this filtering app that factors out the effect of a mic being covered by fabric or wrapped up in your hand or whatever. Listen.”

  He held his phone out as the familiar footage rolled: a moment’s focus on 4G, my hand opening the door. Then instead of “Heavy skies senile?” I heard my own voice in a surprised little chirrup: a gasp, then “Have you guys seen Alex?”

  It took a moment for it to sink in. Damien was still grinning.

  “See?” he said. “You didn’t come upon her all alone and goad her into killing herself. Alex, neither. She was already in there with someone else.”

  Relief like a shower: Someone else was in the room, not Alex, someone else who must have done this. Someone else who could’ve picked up the gun. Alex was innocent. And my Keds—what a stupid notion—that was chocolate syrup or ketchup or barbecue sauce on them, just as I’d figured at the time.

  Then fear buzzed in me: Someone else was in the room. Someone who may have killed Edie and gotten away with it. And he could very well know that I’d been poking around in the past. />
  I stared at the final frame, a blur of brown and black as I’d hit the button to stop recording.

  Someone else was in the room when Edie died.

  Chapter 10

  KEVIN

  When I was in my early twenties, things were pretty fucking good, and I knew it. Not great—I was aware of the big list of wants hovering on the other side of the greener-grass hedge, how cool it’d be to have more sex, more money, another six inches or so in height and wingspan, that kind of thing. But shit was pretty good. I had a cheap roof over my head, space for the entire drum kit, and not a soul in the building who’d complain if I got the urge to play at one in the morning, two o’clock, three o’clock (rock); a buddy, Alex, who was good at guitar and willing to jam with me pretty much whenever I wanted; girl roommates who were always finding fun shit for us to do on weekends, apple picking and weird-ass art exhibits and outdoor shows and whatnot; a stupid but manageable job making mochas and cleaning espresso machines with other equally bleary-eyed friends at a coffee shop within walking distance of my place.

  And this was back when basically nobody had a job, hiring freezes and mass layoffs all over the place like avalanches, like those videos of huge chunks of what looks like a mountain breaking off and speeding toward hell. That’s what it felt like, everything around us dropping with insane speed while I stood in the middle of my happy snow globe with shit whiskey and cool people and a few dollars and my drumsticks. Maybe not everyone appreciated it, but I knew we had it good.

  So I guess I was pretty cheerful because I was on to that, and maybe in some subconscious way I was trying to convey that to everyone else, too: Dude, stop shitting on everything and come listen to this new album with me, it’s pretty good. Everyone was so negative all the time and I thought it was so funny, so affected. Rolling their eyes and hoisting up their noses at Murray Hill bros and Ugg-clad girls and popular songs and clueless parents and med-school-attending high school friends and themselves, hate hate hate hate. That was how it felt, like Duck, Duck, Goose only when they got to themselves they looked surprised and whispered “Duck!” too.

  I remember once my roommate Sarah came home all upset because a guy on a packed subway had called her a “hipster bitch” after they got snappish about fitting through a door or something. She was all morose and finally our friend Lindsay asked what was up and when Sarah told us, Lindsay was so outraged and sympathetic, but I couldn’t stop laughing. Remember that word, “hipster”? It was the oddest thing, slippery as an eel, meant as a compliment when some out-members used it (like the New York Times speaking breathlessly about a new “hipster art installation”), but as an insult when certain out-members (see: the subway asshole) and even in-members (see: anyone dumb enough to utter the word inside Calhoun) used it. There were silly Tumblrs about it, stupid books picking the so-called “subculture” apart. We all wanted to naturally, effortlessly be hipsters without anyone calling us hipsters, we wanted to be the definition set forth by the supremely uncool editors of the Style section, but we would sooner die than let anyone know that, and also who the fuck cares what those losers at the Times think is cool? The fuck do they know about coolness? God, it was so funny then and it’s hilarious now.

  So basically I just liked reminding everyone that yeah, ludicrous shit was going down and our parents’ net worth was plummeting, but we were doing just fine, the kids are all right, and so much is so funny if you know where to look. And I think Edie liked that, saw a bit of a kindred spirit, because she was amused, too, she was confident and gave zero fucks. I really didn’t know her that well when she first moved in with Alex and me that spring, had seen her around the building a bit, had the occasional beer with her in a Calhoun hallway or open-door living room. Alex seemed to like her a lot and when two rooms in our apartment opened up, the weird hippie chick from Portland and the mustachioed bro from Minnesota suddenly deciding to split, Alex seemed pretty thrilled about Edie moving in. Smiling to himself as he wandered toward the bathroom, that kinda thing. And it seemed like they were being smart about it, her still having her own separate room so they’d still have solo space. See? Shit’s not all bad.

  * * *

  It blows me away to think that Edie moved in in April and was dead by Labor Day. It felt like so much time. What was it about that era that slowed down the clocks and made every month feel brimming and eclectic like my steamer trunk in the living room? It reminds me of camp: Mom sent me one summer when I was nine or ten, and when I learned from her years later that the whole thing had been only three weeks long, I was blown away. Because so fucking much had happened, I was sure it had been the whole summer: best friends, alliances, enemies, crushes, breakups, entire operatic narratives compressed into twenty-one days. That’s how Calhoun felt, each week its own ginormous plotline.

  * * *

  And it became a story line with a big twist when I came home and Edie’s shorts were covered in blood. Years later, the first time Evelyn had a seizure, as I sat bored and antsy in the hospital waiting room, I thought about that night, how preternaturally calm I’d been in that insane moment of crisis. I don’t believe in God as a big, bearded dude surrounded by winged angels, but I sort of wonder if that night with Edie was the universe testing me, like, Can he handle it? Is he gonna keep his head and take care of her, or is he gonna lose his shit?

  And I kept it together, made her tie my black hoodie around her waist to cover the blood, shhh’ed her as she fretted through the boogers and tears about getting her blood all over it, got the name of the hospital out of the all-business paramedic to whom I for some reason wasn’t really a person, showed up in a cab myself a half-hour later and sat politely in the waiting room, headphones blaring, snoozing on and off, occasionally wandering to the front desk to make sure I hadn’t missed her.

  When she finally stumbled back into the waiting room, she looked dead; her eyes were glazed and unfocused, fucking freaky, and she stared at me for a moment like I was a stranger, like whatever was happening inside her head was reality and I was part of this TV screen inconveniently stretching across her eyeballs. I waited for her to snap out of it, but after a few seconds I realized it wasn’t gonna happen, so I grabbed her arm and led her through the door, and we stood in the blazing sun as I called the only cab company in my phone.

  If it was a test, I’m glad I passed it because now I have Evelyn and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done. But Edie. Fucking pity. For two weeks I felt like a hero, all the more noble for being a secret one, and then bang, a bullet took her down, blood pouring out of her like spilled wine a second time in as many weeks.

  Not a gun—my gun.

  What kind of idiot keeps a sometimes-loaded gun in a huge catacomb of open doors and drugs and booze with drunks wandering in and out like sleepwalkers? How was I such a fucking idiot? There was a feeling of trust, though, one I can remember but can’t bring up, everyone sort of hating but mostly adoring everyone else in this secluded little scene, good people who were trying to make art and putting up with all the grossness of our building and New York City and themselves and one another in order to get there.

  I remember a huge snowstorm sidelined the city late in the winter, and through some collective osmosis we all agreed to lock the doors to the outside and open the doors to our apartments and thus began a forty-eight-hour rager, bands jamming and joints passing hands and at one point throwing my body with four other near-strangers against the door to the roof, then running out shrieking and throwing snowballs and making angels in the snow. Someone put together a snowman and stuck a cigarette butt on it as a dick. We were all idiots, hopped up on camaraderie in a mostly scared and scorning outside world. But I was the idiot who owned a gun.

  I would lock the trunk, that was my big smart move. That was, I figured, close enough to a gun safe. Only when the gun was loaded, when it was armed and dangerous on August the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st, in the year of
our lord 2009, fucker was out just waiting for me to put it away. I spent a lot of time thinking about that the first year, walking through it in my mind frame by frame: how I came home on the 17th and dropped my messenger bag onto my bed where it sat for a few hours; how that evening I got out the pistol and the box of bullets and carried them into the living room, prepared to lock them away; how Edie had been in there on her laptop, had said something when I entered and we’d started to talk; how I’d registered that the trunk was still locked and my keys were back in the room and I’d take care of it later; and that’s when the scene sorta fades.

  So many idiotic microdecisions, so many times I could have prevented the whole thing. I like to think there’s an alternate dimension where I locked the gun away, another, happier Kevin out there, hopefully not too different, hopefully still with Glenn and beautiful Evelyn and a nice house and all the stuff I’m grateful for, but also where Edie is alive somewhere, a stylist like she always dreamed of being, putting together beautiful outfits like art.

  I replay the day of the ER visit, too, moments of it that clung to my memory like dryer lint, maybe because they held some clues or maybe just ’cause memory’s funny like that. I remember her staring out the window on the cab ride home, like I wasn’t even there, and then saying something so softly the silence hissed and I wasn’t sure she’d said anything at all, and then I whispered, “Huh?” and she turned suddenly and said, “Alex,” again, like it was a statement. I was like, “What about him?” and she said, “Don’t tell him,” and then turned back to the window as the cab scuttled along the street.