by Andrea Bartz
How she waited until we were almost at Calhoun’s front door to whisper, “Let’s walk in separately, and please don’t tell anyone,” then turned on her heels and headed down the block. How I thought about following her, watching her thin body recede and knowing I’d do nothing so that distance would make the decision for me. I went inside and took a shower and got ready for work. Alex looked around all curious, no doubt wondering where his new ex-girlfriend had spent the night. No one ever assumed I knew anything.
Two days later I found my hoodie spread out on my bed, newly washed and blood-free. For some reason, imagining Edie in the laundromat, rubbing extra detergent into the stains, was just the saddest fucking thing.
For about a week she acted impressively normal, a bit withdrawn, but everyone still chalked it up to the breakup. So I did my best to be normal, too, goofing off with the group and keeping everybody laughing. It seemed like a fluke that I was the one among us who helped a friend through a miscarriage, such a random, adult problem that just happened to thwack into me like a fly ball.
Then a few days later, I found her smoking on the front steps of the building, watching a little brown bird hop around the tangle of the block’s only tree. I sat down next to her and accepted a cigarette.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” She always had a musical voice, animated like a singer’s.
“What’s that?”
She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “It sucks to die when you’re old, but not that much because you’ve already spent so long on the planet, being human. And it sucks to die as a baby—or even before you’re born—but really not that much because you haven’t had time to, you know, grow attached to shit here. To really get into the whole human-being-on-planet-earth thing.” She tapped a bit of ash off the end. “So the worst thing is a young adult dying, like our age. Because you’ve just woken up to the fact that you’re a person, that you get to be an actual being and you’re not just, like, a little human robot on the conveyor belt your parents pushed you onto when you were little. But you’re not old yet, it’s not like ‘Whew, really lived that up.’ It’d be like—I don’t know—leaving right before the movie gets good.”
We smoked together for a minute. Two girls stepped around us to get into the building, both wearing cutoffs.
I said, “I think the media and whoever else get way dramatic when a young person dies—so much ahead of her, that kind of thing. Like the 27 Club.” I didn’t want to call her out as a cliché, but I also couldn’t ignore that she wasn’t exactly making a new observation.
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Were you thinking about…Did you think something bad was gonna happen at the hospital?”
She rolled her eyes. “Something bad did happen, Kevin.”
“I know, but I mean—like, did you really think you might die?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve been thinking about it more since then, though. And how weird it is that there was another life inside me.” She put her hand on her stomach. “Something that would have grown hair and teeth and worn clothes and gone through the conveyor belt and come out the other side, you know?”
I’d figured we’d never discuss the whole ordeal. I realized that up until that point, I’d only been about 80 percent sure it was even a miscarriage. Some other mysterious lady issue seemed plausible, too.
“But you’re saying maybe it wasn’t as bad for…?”
“This little sac of cells.” She took another drag. “It sucks it died before it could get out there and do anything, but at least it didn’t know what it was missing. Me, I would be so fucking mad if I didn’t get to stay here and do everything. I mean, not that I thought it was a him-or-me situation or anything, it wasn’t like the doctors were standing around going ‘We can operate to save the child, but it’ll endanger your life.’ The thing just up and died. But I guess I could have died. It could have implanted funny and stayed there building up an infection that’d blow me up from the insides. How much would that have sucked?”
I gave a slow, emphatic nod as I sucked on the end of the cigarette. I still wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“I want to fucking do shit. I don’t want to live forever, but I want to go balls-to-the-wall until I’m old and can leave contentedly, you know?”
“I hear you. That’s awesome. You should fucking do stuff, Edie. You’re smart as hell.”
“Thanks.” She crushed the cigarette butt and wrapped her arms around her knees, all freckles and bones. And that was that.
It was the only time we ever talked about her miscarriage, ever acknowledged it head-on. She was dead a few days after that, sprawled on our floor amid a beehive of accusations that she’d been depressed, erratic, contemplating taking her own life for days or weeks or months. It was bullshit, such bullshit. Homegirl wasn’t suicidal. Homegirl wasn’t going anywhere. Edie sucked a funnel of smoke into her lungs and felt fucking alive, dizzy with everything she had to get done before she got old enough to exhale, a long, contented sigh, tired but happy with all that she’d pulled off.
Chapter 11
LINDSAY
Damien’s smile melted as he watched me react. “Not the relief I was expecting,” he said.
An urgent command from somewhere deep: Lie. “I am relieved. Oh my god, it’s like a four-hundred-pound sandbag was just lifted off my shoulders. I was just so surprised I…I froze up. I really didn’t think you’d find anything.” I pictured SAKE and swapped in suspects next to Edie like paper dolls: Was Sarah in the room? Anthony? Kevin, somehow? My stomach clenched: Had I seen Edie with Lloyd?
Damien shrugged. “It wasn’t hard,” he said. “I was just excited to find something that would burst your bubble on the whole theory that you or Alex went in alone and picked a fight or whatever. Right?”
“Absolutely.” I pressed my hand on his arm. “Wow, this really changes things. Was there anything else in the video?”
“Not really, no. The footage of you guys at the beginning—you were on a roof, right?—it was about as clear as it was gonna get. There’s a little conversation with your friend, just her deciding to go to a party. But that’s it. You were movin’ around like a ninja.” He swept both hands into a fighting stance, and I giggled for his benefit.
“Thanks so much for doing that, Damien. This is…that’s a game-changer.”
“De rien, de rien.” He grabbed his phone and tapped at it. “There, I just sent you instructions on viewing it. Now please tell me you’re gonna let this go. Tessa is worried you’re getting all OCD about it.” He kept tapping at his phone, so he missed my hurt expression. Then he frowned and leaned in closer to the screen. My chest froze over.
“What is it?”
“You aren’t gonna believe this,” he said, still staring.
“What? Tell me!”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “The cops found my pornography book.”
I plopped into my chair. “I thought it was erotica?”
“Turns out somebody dropped it in a library return box, of all things. With the plastic wrap still on. Look!”
He turned the screen to show me a washed-out cell-phone photo of a book on a white desk. The cover displayed nothing but four letters—PEEK—and a picture of an erect penis. In grayscale.
He flipped his phone back around and smiled at it lovingly. “Talk about a hardcover, am I right?”
“I’m very happy for you and your penis.” I turned back to my computer.
“I am having a hell of a day,” he said. “I better buy a lotto ticket.”
“When you win, don’t forget us little people!” I called as he headed for his office. Wow, the cops accomplishing something. Unlike the useless detectives who’d investigated Edie’s death.
I logged into the video-filtering app Damien had sent me and listened until I found the conversation with Sar
ah. “Tiny fight,” she’d called it. Four minutes after I’d tossed the Flip cam into my purse and we’d all presumably headed inside.
“I’m gonna go,” my voice announced. The words tumbled together: “Hominago.”
“You’re not coming to the show?” Sarah, sounding cross.
A beat. “I gotta go home.”
“Ugh, nobody ever wants to do anything fun anymore.”
My voice rose in confused indignation: “Fuck you, I’m fun.”
“Just go.”
I had to listen to it twice to make out what I’d said next: “What about Edie?”
“Forget it. Just go then. Are you taking a cab?”
“Yeah, I’ll get one. I’m fine.”
Another pause, some fumbling, then my voice again: “What about Kevin?”
“Just go home, Linds.”
“Whatever.”
The sound of stomping; no additional dialogue. The conversation made me uncomfortable: Sarah’s sudden animosity, my own disgruntled curse. Sarah had tended to grow annoyed when others got drunk and fumbly, that much I recalled.
I listened to it again. What about Edie and Kevin? Was I simply suggesting other people she could hang out with, forgetting in my fog that Kevin had left for Greenpoint? Where had Alex gone? And was there something more to Sarah’s Forget it. Just go at the mention of Edie?
An editor dropped in to discuss a story, and I quickly closed out of the app. I wouldn’t share it with Tessa. I wouldn’t share it with anybody.
* * *
Over the next few days, Damien didn’t mention the video again, and I did my best not to think about it, occasionally waylaid by the hard-brake feeling of it wafting into my consciousness. Then everything would speed up, a sense of not knowing, of wanting to know so fucking hard I could scream, stomp, pound my fists against God’s chest.
One evening, as I was leaving the office, I paused at a window on my way to the elevator; the world was darkening sooner, summer tipping into fall. Twentysome floors below, people were just visible picking their way across streets and sidewalks.
Thoughts swarmed every which way, directionless. Whose baby was Edie pregnant with? Was she planning to keep it? Why didn’t she tell anyone but Kevin? Why didn’t Kevin tell anyone? Why was fucking everyone near 4G that fateful evening—Lloyd to comfort Edie by Calhoun’s front doors, Edie’s mom to deliver bad news, Sarah and presumably Alex to see a band just a few floors up?
I leaned my forehead on the glass and closed my eyes. And me, cruising straight to SAKE to force a friend breakup.
And now there was a new thought, humming underneath like a pipe organ’s deepest note. Now that I knew Alex hadn’t been there, now that all I was left with was my own drunken self calling “She’s a fucking bitch!” into the night sky. What the hell had gone on in there?
When I got out of the building, I turned left instead of right. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was walking until I saw the pier in the distance, jutting out over the water near the massive heliport, where copters thrummed and floated like gigantic dragonflies. Of course. I’d take the East River ferry to Williamsburg, a route that hadn’t even existed when we’d lived in the area. I climbed to the upper deck and looked east, feeling small and dazzled by the glittering skyscrapers along Brooklyn’s shore. So much silver and glass now, propped up like dominoes in the evening light. The ferry pulled into the South Williamsburg landing, and I clambered off between two condos and disappeared into the neighborhood I once knew.
At first glance, it wasn’t so different: town houses and old churches and drinking establishments on so many first floors, but with names I didn’t recognize. I turned onto Kent and rooted around for an overlay of what this street had looked like in my time—crummy semilegal concert venues, cheap apartments, grassed-over lots with graffiti on the particleboard fences enclosing them. Now, good-looking, well-dressed young professionals swarmed out of the office buildings and into the waterfront condos.
Around the corner, I froze at the sight of Mugger’s, one of our old haunts, my heart suddenly clanging, afraid that—what?—I’d open the door and find Alex and Kevin and Sarah and Edie in the corner, big-eyed and brazen under a garland of tacked-up Christmas lights? I went in, and the familiar smell, beer and sweat and old beat-up walls, hit me like a sound wave. One night we’d co-opted the casual karaoke in the back room here, signing one another up for increasingly ridiculous songs: Alex covering TLC, Sarah on Alice Cooper. Someone put me down for a Talking Heads song that apparently everyone knew but me, and when I’d started to look miserable, Edie had jumped onstage with me, sharing the mic and pulling me into crazy dance moves and turning the whole thing into a not-mortifying experience. I could still remember the high-pitched thrill of that night, playing what Kevin had dubbed karaoke roulette, freezing at the end of every song to see if my name was up next.
I sat at the bar and ordered a ginger ale. A couple walked in and picked a booth near the door, her thin and long-haired with epic eyeliner, him bearded and broad and confident. They looked so nonchalant about each other, so unimpressed that they’d found a partner, and I watched them for a little too long.
“You just getting off work?” The bartender was drying glasses with a towel, a cute, short guy in a sweater despite the heat.
“That’s right. Taking a walk down memory lane, actually.”
“Oh, did you used to come here a lot?”
“A very long time ago. It looks pretty much the same, though.”
He nodded easily and leaned against the counter. The door screeched open behind me and my heart froze up: For one moment I knew, absolutely knew, that Edie was walking into the bar. Why was I so afraid of her, still?
Instead, two bros sauntered in, making too much noise, monkeys hooting.
“You all right?” the bartender asked, smiling. He’d seen me jump. I laughed and assented, but the thought hit me: What the fuck am I doing here?
Suddenly I was old, exposed, the sad, single woman drinking alone among the children. Abruptly, I pictured my parents, and in piped the diatribe I sometimes find myself spitting into the silence: You were afraid of me, but I should have been afraid of you. If you’d been braver, maybe I’d have grown out of it. Maybe my brain could have matured, the unbridled blossoming everyone else’s neurons seem to enjoy. Maybe I wouldn’t have these black, gaping bullet holes in my own memory. Maybe I could have grown up like everyone else managed to do.
I glanced up and realized the bartender was looking at me; I’d been almost talking to myself, my expression curled into a mask of anger. I flashed him a smile and swept myself outside, gulping in the twilight air. I turned in the direction of the subway; a cab rounded the corner and I nearly stuck my arm out.
But I was so close to Calhoun now, just a few more bends, and I realized I’d hazily imagined myself getting inside—seeing if traversing those old, dark passageways would stir up anything useful. Maybe I’d try the walk from the rooftop to 4G to see just how far I’d drunkenly stumbled to SAKE. I crossed the overpass and glanced down at the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, clogged with cars. The heat was thick, sticky, changing form and coalescing into the cicadas’ hum.
I turned a corner and stood stunned for a moment: What the fuck was this? In place of Calhoun Lofts were two ugly buildings, all green glass and white molding. I took a few steps forward and craned my neck, as if these buildings were just a front and my home-away-from-home was hiding back there, obscured from view.
So it was gone. How had I missed this in my research? I pictured the demolition, a wrecking ball tumbling the cinder blocks in slow motion, a crane pawing at the foundation like a curious dog. I imagined the door to 4G buckling and then collapsing like cardboard; I saw the cubbylike bedrooms crumbling one by one. It was gone. The last clinging particles of Edie’s blood wiped totally clean. I felt something complicated in my chest, grief
and dismay and relief and horror twisting around like fingers in a fist.
The front door to one of the buildings swung open and out popped a middle-aged woman carrying a small fluffy dog, which she set on the sidewalk. She bent to fix its collar and then jumped back—the thing was already peeing, splashing onto the cement directly in front of the glass doors. I turned away and called myself a cab; even as I waited, I felt a drowsy relief in entering my address.
In the taxi, I leaned my head against the backseat and cracked open the window. Outside, an endless scroll of bodegas and nail salons and cheap clothing stores unfurled. After a moment, my phone buzzed in my purse and I pulled it out to see, with a little jolt, a text from Josh: “Did you work on this?”
I clicked on the link he’d included: a Sir feature on a secretive Silicon Valley lab that claimed its user-friendly CAD program would revolutionize—nay, democratize—design.
“Someone on my team did,” I wrote. “Why?”
A thumbs-up. Then: “People were talking about it at the office today.”
“Nice. I think it’s kinda bullshit, tho. All hype like when the Segway debuted.”
A split second after hitting send, I realized he was too young to remember the Segway hoopla: mounting excitement over an invention that promised to transform transportation and then—splat.
After a few more blocks, I tried again: “How’s work otherwise?”
He didn’t reply. Didn’t even cue up the little bubble that meant he was typing. With a rinse of embarrassment, I turned off the screen and slipped the phone back into my bag.
* * *
At home, I stared at my laptop for a moment before giving in and searching through old news for Calhoun’s death sentence. It’d been sold to a developer and torn down in early 2017. The Google News search had brought up other stories, too, and I remembered why the space we’d adored had always had a sinister vibe to outsiders: the confusing junctions, exposed pipes, scuffed-up walls and wood, and eternal carpet of beer bottles and cigarette butts. I clicked on a story from 2012: EXPLOSION ROCKS BUSHWICK APARTMENT BUILDING. Anthony Stiles had been refurbishing the lofts one by one to justify a massive rent hike, and some idiot contractors had coated the floor in sealant and left it unattended to saturate. When the vapor reached the pilot light of the unit’s stove, kaboom. No one had died, but someone on the street had been hurt when the windows blew out.