by Andrea Bartz
A roommate? Sarah?
“Was she Asian?”
“Edie?”
“The friend she was with.”
“No…I mean, I don’t think so. I don’t really remember what she looked like. I didn’t, like, hang out with her friends. Obviously.”
“And what happened?”
“Uhhhh, she recognized me, and we talked, and finally her roommate left and it was just us and we made out in the bar and then I took her back to my place. Which was sort of just a mattress on the floor in this shitty-ass railroad apartment in Bed-Stuy, so after that we just went to her parents’ apartment whenever they weren’t around.”
Right, as Alex had said. “And you knew she was seeing Alex?”
“I mean, yeah, but it sounded like it wasn’t going great. And it’s not like he and I were talking.”
“You’d fought?”
“Stupid thing over a guitar.”
Okay, so their stories matched. “When was that?”
“Hey, I know, let me just check my blog!” Sarcastically, with mock cheer.
“I know, I get it, it was a long time ago.” I sighed, felt a shudder in it, and decided to go with it. “I’m just trying to piece this together. Ten years too late.” I made sure he heard the wobble in my voice, added a loud sniffle for good measure. The silence bloomed between us and I tacked on another sniff and murmured, “Sorry.”
“Listen, babe,” he said. “It was a long time ago, so don’t hold me to anything. But I think Alex and I stopped hanging out, I don’t know, maybe February or March of that year? Winter sometime. And Edie and I started hooking up around May, and it lasted maybe a month or two before Alex…found out, so we stopped for a while. And then picked up again after they’d broken up, but didn’t, you know, tell him at the time, obviously.”
“Did you and Alex, like, have a stupid manly fistfight at some point or anything?”
“Nah. I just avoided him.”
For a moment, a scene stitched itself together in front of me, one that made sense: Edie and Lloyd canoodling in her apartment for some reason, Alex walking in on them, altercation, grabbing of a gun, Edie tries to intercept, shots fired. Then I remembered Lloyd had been up onstage snapping photos of a band.
“I don’t actually think I was involved. I was just trying to get you to open up.”
“Ha. Okay.”
A long silence.
“Are you gonna tell anyone?” I asked.
“Who would I tell?” Another swallowing sound. “I’m just a drunk piece of shit.”
I heaved a sigh, my stomach aching.
“Well, I gotta boogie,” he announced. “Good luck to you, kid.”
He hung up and I lay staring up at the ceiling, where a long crack snaked out of the doorframe, forked into two, and petered out just above my head.
* * *
I passed a few lonely nights eating dinner in front of the TV, willing Josh to text, Josh or Alex or Michael or someone, someone who’d want me to come out of my apartment and in doing so, to materialize again. At night I lay around my apartment and scared myself, imagining shapes hulking in the corners, wondering what was behind the shower curtain as I peed. Looking up into the mirror sharply, like I could catch the phantom lurking over my shoulder. Instead I just saw my own face, eyes pooled in blackness, cheeks sunken like a skull’s.
Early one morning, I awoke with a start, sweaty and twisted in my sheets and unclear if the heat had triggered a bad dream or vice versa. It took me a moment to register the fake blue light casting shadows on my bed—my laptop, which I’d left open and blank, was lit up now. An automatic update or something, I figured; I crept over, prepared to snap it shut.
My email was open—probably the last thing I’d looked at before bed. I almost closed the screen without reading it, fighting off that ache of curiosity.
Mostly stupid stuff, newsletters and promotions.
And one at the top, from fourteen minutes before.
From: Edith Iredale
To: Lindsay Bach
Wednesday, August 14, 2019 at 4:06 AM
Don’t.
Chapter 13
I thought about calling Tessa on the spot, even though it was four thirty in the morning and there was nothing in particular she could do. But I’d stopped updating her on the investigation, her and Damien. I battered around the apartment turning on lights and checking locks. Finally I forwarded the email to Tessa with a plea to call me. I felt anger building like a panic that no one was up to help me, that I was alone in this lunacy, getting emails from the dead.
Tessa called a little after seven, her voice scratchy, and I put her on speakerphone.
“So somebody hacked into Edie’s account and sent you that?” she said.
“Apparently! Unless we’re now of the belief that the dead can fucking send emails.” I looked around again, grateful for the buttery light that pressed in from the windows, washing away the shadows.
“So…we think this means what?”
“This means someone knows I’ve been poking around and wants me to stop. Right? Probably whoever else was in the room, whom I just missed with my camera. I mean, what else could it mean?”
“Is it a threat?” She sounded a little more awake now. “Should we call the police?”
I took a long sip of coffee. “Is that a stupid idea?”
“It just might be hard to explain. Or to get them to do anything for you. I mean, since there wasn’t an actual verbal threat. Hang on, let me ask Will.”
I picked at my cuticle as they discussed it in muffled voices. “Okay, I’m right,” she announced, suddenly loud. “Since there wasn’t an actual threat, let alone a quote-unquote credible one, there’s not much they’d do. Do you want me to look into the header info?”
“Header? Is that like metadata?”
“Sort of. It’s the data involved in getting an email from Point A to Point B. Maybe it’ll show who actually sent it.”
A sprig of hope. “Yes! That’s a great idea. Thank you.” We were quiet for a moment.
“Lindsay, this is fucking weird. This is scary.”
“I know.”
“Are you still talking to people about this? I worry about you. I was already worried about your emotional well-being—”
“You mean my mental health.”
“—but now I’m actually worried for your safety,” she finished. She didn’t correct me.
“I’ll stop,” I told her, wishing it were true, wishing I could. “Let me know about the header, though, okay? But I’ll delete all my files and everything. ’Cause you’re right. This is getting weird.”
“Do you want to stay here tonight?”
“No,” I said, because my next move was to keep searching.
* * *
Lying in bed that evening, I finally found a photo on the website of Nicky Digital, a then-ubiquitous party photographer: Lloyd onstage, adjusting his lens, a few feet behind Man Man’s bespectacled drummer. So his alibi did check out. Lloyd really was handsome, with his striking bone structure and tousled blond hair. We’d had sex in April, a month before he and Edie had begun hooking up. Of course he didn’t want to keep fucking me. Nobody ever does.
I set the computer on my nightstand and flicked off the light, exhausted but unable to sleep. For hours I lay in a fugue state, my body mostly asleep but my mind still meandering, curling like a mist over a landscape of thoughts of Michael or Alex or Josh, somewhere else, probably real but possibly my own invention. I feel lonely, my brain quietly announced, and hearing it so baldly, my eyes welled up. I fell asleep in a fuzzy sleeping bag of self-pity.
Rain pinged against my air conditioner. Morning. I padded across the room and pulled the curtain aside: a downpour, splattering against the window and turning Fu
lton Street into a smear of green and gray. A perfect day to feel sorry for myself, to believe and not-believe that Edie was murdered, that the world was stiff and cruel and somebody out there wanted me dead, too. A taxi almost hit a jaywalker, the driver leaning on the horn instead of the brakes, and beneath an umbrella I could just make out a lifted hand, the middle finger held high. I blinked away the tableau of what would’ve happened if the jaywalker hadn’t gotten out of the way in time. Supine on the ground, a limb crushed flat. Bystanders circling up stupidly. A scarlet pool rippling outward from his body, mingling with the rain and—
My watch and phone and laptop all vibrated at once from different parts of the apartment. I squinted at my computer, and it took me a minute to make sense of the incoming message. Three letters, all from Josh: Hey.
At seven forty-five on a Thursday morning. Was he still out partying or something? It’d been more than two weeks since I’d seen him, since we’d sat on a bench and said stoner-y things about moving around in time, in the fourth dimension. I knew I should make him wait a bit, punish him for the unanswered texts and the fortnight of silence, so I puttered around, cleaning up the living room and brewing coffee and putting away clean dishes and it’d still only been eight minutes and I’d run out of things to do, so fuck it: Hey!
“What’s up?” he typed back.
“Not too much,” I wrote. “You?”
“Same.”
“Big plans for tonight?” I said, because I was suddenly bored, because this was boring and some bizarre cocktail of boredom and fear was making me reckless.
“Still figuring it out. You?”
“Same.” Then: “Let me know if you want to meet up later.”
“Yeah, def!” he said, right away, and I glared at the phone for its succinctness, for being the conduit for an answer that could either mean yes, we’ll meet up, or yes, I’ll let you know if I feel like it.
* * *
Alex updated his Facebook photo that day, a beaming picture with his perfect wife, and I glared at them both. After work I showered and shaved my legs, just in case, and as the sun sank behind neighboring buildings and nobody contacted me to do anything, I slipped into a robe and reopened the old email archives. I poked around without a clear plan, knowing I should be more systematic about this, I should at least be recording my search terms. I cringed my way through a few email exchanges with Edie where I clearly wanted to ask about Lloyd; I hadn’t known they were sleeping together and still saw her as my connection to my crush. I brought him up with faux casualness, begging between the lines for an update. I’d finally broken down and sent him a text, laboriously composed to strike the proper breezy tone, and he hadn’t responded, which filled me with a wash of shame.
Dating sucks. Fuck Josh; I didn’t want to see him anyway.
But he did text, a little after ten, and I was immediately nervous, looking around like a trapped animal.
“Hey! You out?”
“Just finishing up dinner,” I lied, then instantly regretted it: He could ask where, he could fact-check me.
“Come hang out!” he replied. “I’m at Jimmy Rhoda’s.”
I looked it up: a dive bar in Bed-Stuy, a gritty, gentrifying neighborhood that reminded me of the Bushwick I’d known.
“Will you be there for a bit?”
“I’ll wait for you,” he said, and, unsure what else to do, I sent him a smiley face and ducked into the bathroom, heart pounding like the circa 2009 playlist I put on the speakers.
* * *
I was about to leave when I turned around, stepping back to the cabinet over my fridge. The scotch was still there, next to the fire extinguisher. In case of emergency. I thought of Josh’s gleaming smile, then of Alex’s soft lips, fringed by a five o’clock shadow. I froze like someone at the top of the high dive and then took a swig straight from the bottle, chasing it with water and then swishing some mouthwash so I wouldn’t smell like a damn alcoholic. I coughed at its golden burn, and as my cab coasted along Myrtle Avenue, I felt the forgotten, familiar sensation—booze prickling outward from my belly. I was going to meet Josh’s friends, which was strange but somehow casual, a hurdle I’d never crossed with Michael but that I’d sail past with Josh before we had any reason to think it mattered. I wondered how many of them would be sitting around with him. I wondered, too, if they’d think I looked nice, clad for more or less anything in tight jeans and a racerback top. Surely Josh would think I looked pretty. Surely that’s why he invited me.
I pushed open the bar’s door without noticing the bouncer murmuring at me from the side, and I had to back out to hand him my ID. Then back inside and the music crescendoed, something hip and bass-y, and I took a few steps in and scanned the crowd, sure I’d find him soon, sure I could do this without shrinking into myself and hunching over my phone.
I spotted someone from behind, talking animatedly, and it looked more or less like him, and anyway, how many men with thick wavy black hair could there be in this bar, and anyway, I looked hot, who wouldn’t want to talk to me? I tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped talking and turned around and it was him. We smiled at each other and he stood up to give me a hug with a kiss on the cheek, then kept his arm strung across my shoulders as he introduced his friends, a pretty black woman with a sculpted ’fro and a surprisingly tall Asian guy with a good handshake, what a hip and casually diverse crowd. I forgot their names right away but it didn’t matter because we were already hanging out anyway.
“You look like you need a drink,” Josh said, and he was right, I did, and he guided me over to the bar and asked what I was having and I said, “Jameson on the rocks,” knowing it was the cool thing to order, and he looked impressed and paid for it even though I must be the one who makes so much more money, although I don’t know, people with knowledge of 3-D technology are probably more in demand than anachronistic print staffers. We made small talk by the bar as we waited for my drink, my wit on full display this time, and he smiled and toasted my glass with his beer when it arrived.
We stayed for three rounds at Jimmy Rhoda’s, the crowd getting thicker and steamier around us, and then someone checked their watch and said we should probably go to Rocco’s. Josh asked if that was cool and I nodded, smiling, and we all squashed into a cab, me for some reason in the middle but it was fine. Now the cab was cruising to Ridgewood, and Queen came on the radio and I pointed out we were listening to Queen on the way to Queens, and no one else knew the words but at least they all laughed and let the song play out, sing it Mr. Mercury.
Rocco’s apartment was like a nice place with shitty furniture clustered here and there, a big black marble kitchen island piled high with beer and mixers, and we squished onto old couches drinking wet, cold cans of PBR while someone fiddled with the music on the wireless speakers that were scattered around so the music was coming from everywhere. Josh sat close and fetched me drinks whenever I wanted a new one and then I noticed a little white plastic bag, like the kind from a jewelry store, making its way around the circle and people were passing it with a teeny tiny spoon, dollhouse-size, and I squinted and focused even though I saw two spoons posing as one and realized it was cocaine, getting closer, and unlike Alex, unlike most of my friends in Calhoun, I’d never done it, so I probably shouldn’t start now.
“I’m fine,” I said, in what I hoped was a casual tone, waving my hand as it passed me by, and nobody said anything or seemed to mind, so it was fine.
There was a woman on my left with cool sleeve tattoos and I asked her about them and she was cool, too, an artist who’d designed some of them herself, and I asked her how old she was and she said thirty-one and that’s only two years younger than me, so I felt better about that, too. We talked about a ton of things; I don’t remember what, but we really liked each other.
Then someone announced it was time to go to the party and I was confused because I thought we were at the party alr
eady, but apparently this was just a pregame even though it was ungodly late, and Rocco’s roommate was dancing burlesque at a warehouse party or something, and he could get us all in, so we were going to go. Who knew these things happened on Thursday nights? I think I said that aloud. We walked, laughing into the hot night, then Josh hung back a little so it was just us walking together, and I can’t remember what we talked about, but he was smiling at me.
Oh, I think at one point the girl with the tattoos pulled me aside to tell me Josh is a really good guy and I smiled and beamed and was just, like, “I know.”
Oh, and when we were almost at the venue I complained that I was starting to get sleepy and the girl said, “Here!” and got out the baggie and dipped her keys into the end and held it up to me, and I figured it was such a small amount that I went ahead and sucked it up into my nose, and I’m not sure it did anything, but it did sort of taste bad in there, like when you’re congested and you sniff in some of that nose-clearing stuff. Afrin.
Then we were at the party and there was a big line outside, but Rocco knew to just walk to the front and say something and when we turned around he had entry passes like business cards for all of us, and we took them and showed them at the door and showed our IDs, too, and put everything back into our wallets and then the party inside was like a storm, flashbulbs and lasers and strobe lights and platforms with pretty people in lamé bathing suits dancing on them, and a mass of people dancing everywhere, like a whole shag carpet of dancing people. And Josh got me a beer and then we were dancing together, swooping around and letting the music pound through our skeletons, and I wondered why I never dance like this anymore, and then Josh grabbed my chin and kissed me, and it was kind of a gross, sloppy kiss, but we were both drunk so what do you expect, and then we were making out on the dance floor and I kind of giggled, remembering how Edie used to call dance-floor make-outs DFMOs, and then