The Lost Night

by Andrea Bartz

  She stops crying long enough to laugh. “Did she?”

  I nod. The phone is close to my butt now and the thought comes into focus that she should not be staring at me, not good at all, nope. I speak before I lose it: “So you started selling for him?”

  She doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve said the same thing three times like a goddamn wind-up doll. Maybe she’s on drugs now. Why am I on drugs again?

  “I did. Free drugs for me. God, he was such a loser. I wasn’t sad to see him go.”

  I don’t understand. “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “Oh, never mind,” she says, “not important.”

  But I think that means it is important. I look back over my thoughts, like they’re behind me.

  “Tessa,” I say. “You’re my closest friend. I care about you.” Have I ever said those words aloud? To anybody? I see another tactic: “I love you.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She sniffs and shakes her head like she’s done crying, then stands and looks toward the kitchen. “This is taking so fucking long. Do you have anything to drink?”

  I almost protest and then realize she’s moving away and this is my chance. I slide the phone out from under my butt, to the far side so it should be hidden from her, I think, and I hold down the button, but nothing happens, and I try to think what to do because it’s dead, it’s dead like Edie, it’s dead like I’m supposed to be. It’s dead like Anthony.

  Holy shit. Anthony the landlord. Killed in a fire. Is that what she meant?

  “What’ve you got there?” Tessa’s amused, patronizing, and she crosses over to me with an ease I can only dream of and pushes me to the side so that I collapse into the fetal position. The phone is hers, it’s in her hands, dead dead dead.

  “Where did you even find this?” She’s half laughing. “Lindsay, you said you lost your phone. Was it actually in your apartment the entire time? Don’t you know how to geolocate it? God, Lindsay, how have you even made it this far in life?”

  I’m crying now, stupid useless passive Lindsay with her conviction that everything was her fault and now it’s Tessa’s but mine, too.

  “Oh, enough,” Tessa says. “Here, you can sit on the couch. Help me.” She grabs me under my armpits and waits until I shuffle my feet under me and then she plops me on the couch with a “Hup!” and then I’m sitting with terrible posture, sitting can kill you it’s the new smoking, and she sits beside me, and it’s just like a normal night when she comes to hang out with me except she’s going to kill me.

  “Linds, shhh, maybe this isn’t so bad,” she coos. “Hey, you were always so unhappy. Right? Glorifying your twenties, saying you don’t feel like an adult, that nobody ever wants to be with you. Maybe this’ll be better. I’ll be right here with you.”

  I’m not listening though because I see something on the side table behind her, and I can’t stare because then she’ll notice and turn and see it, too, but it’s there, and I can almost feel its smoothness in my fingers, and it’s standing upright like it means business, like someone set it there carefully, and I don’t know when, or how, or who, but probably Edie, dead Edie, Deedie, because there it is, directly behind Tessa. And I know she might be about to kill me, and I know that she might get away with it, but I also know that she hurt Edie, that’s a fact, someone should tell Sarah and Kevin they were right all along. And so I pull together all of my strength, I gather it like coffee beans that just spilled all over the floor, and I lunge at her, I jump like a fish and turn halfway in the air, and it’s balletic, I’m just like an Alvin Ailey dancer, the small one who looks like Edie.

  I land with my head in her lap and look up at her and say as sweetly as I can, “I trust you, Tessa. I love you and I trust you and I know you know better than me.”

  And my gamble is right and she doesn’t like this at all; she makes a face and wriggles out from me and I can’t see where she goes, but this is my chance, so I whip one arm behind me like I’m doing the backstroke, and my fingers find it, and it’s in my lap, and she’s still talking, and her voice gets a little quieter, which means she’s moving away.

  And because it’s from an era when we didn’t want options options options, things were what they were and we didn’t fault them for not being four hundred other things, too, and I know I can easily make it work, so I feel around with my fingers and then push it deep down into the couch cushions.

  Remember this, I scream at myself. Remember this remember this remember this.

  “Tessa,” I call. “What happened after you started selling? What happened with Edie?”

  She wanders back in. I hear her sit at the table, and I loll my head her way.

  “Lindsay, there isn’t much of a point. In an hour I’ll once again be the only person who knows.”

  “Then you have nothing to lose,” I announce, like I’m in a movie and it’s go time.

  “Fine,” she says. I hear the crisp hiss of a La Croix opening, tsst. “It’s been bottled up for fucking forever, so it’s time you hear it. Since you have no idea despite being there.” She glugs, exhales. “August 21, 2009.

  “I was in my apartment alone. On a Friday night, as usual. I’d just toked up and taken some Molly, so I was in a weird sort of swirly mood. And someone banged on the door. So I open it and Edie is standing there with tears on her cheeks. I would see her around every now and then, but we’d been avoiding each other, obviously. I’m so surprised to see her and I think maybe she’s going to hug me or apologize or something, but instead she looks at me and goes, ‘Jenna, you have drugs, right?’ ”

  She swallows hard, then takes another sip of seltzer. “And I…I was like, ‘Sure, I have whatever you want,’ and she was like—I remember this word for word—she said: ‘I wanna forget. I wanna climb out of my life and feel good for a few hours.’ ” A heavy metallic sound; she’s rolling the bottom edge of the can on the table. “So I suggested Molly, since it makes people feel happy and not overthink-y like pot.” Her voice gets even smaller. “And also maybe because I know it makes you feel…connected to the people around you. I actually thought…I thought maybe we’d go back to being friends.

  “So I gave her one and took another myself. And guess what, it worked like a fucking charm. Once it kicked in, she was super happy and peppy and excited to be hanging out with me. And she announced that she wanted to go out, she wanted to dress up and go find a party and dance and prove to everyone that she didn’t give a fuck, so she was stripping, flinging clothes off around my apartment.

  “And she…she sort of suddenly looked around and yelled, ‘Fuck, I don’t have any clothes here!’ And we both just laughed and laughed and laughed. Just falling on the ground laughing. So she wanted to run into her apartment and change, and I was trying to get her to put some clothes on, but she was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, no one will see us, come on!’ And she grabbed my hand and her clothes and took off running. It was so silly, like we were in a spy movie—she’d stop at every corner and look around it very carefully, she opened the door to the stairwell all, you know, mock covert—we were laughing so hard the entire way.”

  “Then what?” I say. Making my vocal cords vibrate is beginning to feel like a chore, like when you’re too high and those muscles want to go to sleep.

  She drums her fingers on the can. “So we went to her apartment. It was empty; apparently you guys were all getting wasted on the roof. She got out her laptop to show me something and then got distracted and went into the kitchen and announced that she was going to make us a snack. She was acting really weird, and I was especially confused because, like, I’d taken some stuff, too. But then before she could even pull any food out, she went back into the living room and was like, ‘You have to see this,’ and held out a gun she’d pulled out of god-knows-where.”

  The last line croaks up into a sob. She pushes back her stool and stands to rummage i
n her purse. She sets something on the table, but I can’t turn my head to look. I don’t want to hear the rest. I want to pause the story, maybe switch to a nice Pixar movie instead.

  “She picked up the gun and kinda stared at it, and then she said, ‘Kevin showed us how to use this, isn’t it gorgeous?’ And she clicked the safety off and then on again, kind of playing with it, and goes, ‘Don’t you love that sound?’ And I…I was like, ‘Hey, be careful, you should put that down.’ But I was still trying to be nice because…well, I guess ’cause I didn’t want to, like, yell at her when she’d just started acknowledging me again.”

  Tessa is pathetic. Suddenly I know this with certainty, like someone’s just read it to me from a book.

  “And then the door opens and you fucking stumble in.”

  My heart clenches.

  “Drunk off your ass, barely able to walk, you stagger right in and ask if we know where your other friends are and blink at us stupidly, and Edie puts the gun down and walks right over to you and gives you a big hug and goes, ‘Ohh, Lindsay, I’m so sorry we’ve been fighting!’ ” She’s using a nasal voice that doesn’t sound like Edie’s at all. “And she gives you some little speech about how she loves you and knows you’re a good person and shit. And you try to tell us to come to the concert with you, but I point out that Edie is undressed, and off you go, stumbling back into the night like a wasted mess.”

  I know there’s a stepping-stone in logic here, a leap from that to whatever came next, but I can’t make it. This was nice. Why did this make Tessa so mad?

  “So like a moron, I turn to Edie and expect her to make amends with me, too, but instead she turns to me and goes, ‘Thanks for the Molly, but I don’t think you’re a good person.’ ”

  Right, because you’re a lunatic, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

  “Such a fucking cunt.” Her voice is small now, small and shaky like a Chihuahua. “And I felt this flash of rage and I grabbed the gun and lifted it, just to scare her, just to show her she’s not the queen of everything, and then, right when I was about to drop it down…”

  She scrapes back the stool and sits down again. She cries loudly for a few minutes, the kind of cry you have in private, hoping the neighbors can’t hear you.

  “You know, in eighth grade I took this geography class,” she says weakly, “and the teacher passed around this, like, little ancient carving she’d gotten in Djibouti or some shit. And when it got to me I just—I couldn’t help it, I pressed it just the littlest bit, and it snapped in two. And she was so crestfallen. It was like that. I just…squeezed.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I say, with effort. “You’ve rewritten it.”

  She snarls. “Oh fuck, what does it even matter. I can make the whole thing skewed in my favor if you want. She was threatening me, she said she hated me, she forced me to kill her in self-defense. Is that what you want to hear? It doesn’t matter, you won’t be around to weigh in tomorrow.”

  I moan. She’s quiet for a moment.

  “And I squeezed it right as the band at the party hit this really loud note and…and the whole room shook, and for a second I thought it was just the music, but then Edie fell…she fell in slow motion and I saw the blood start to collect behind her and the song ended and it got so much quieter and I couldn’t move, I was just standing there with the gun still in my hand as the blood got closer and closer to my feet.”

  She’s quiet and I realize tears are rolling down my jaw and neck.

  “So then I texted Anthony.”

  She pauses like it’s my turn to say a line, but I’m silent. What’s my line? Hello, prompter? Can we take it from the top? The whole audience leans forward, annoyed, the play can’t go on until I remember my—

  “Anthony had—he had a rule that if I ever got into a jam while I was dealing for him, I could call his burner phone. So I put the chain on the door and texted him to come up. God, I was feeling so fucked up by that point. Like I was in this insane nightmare and just had to wake up. Lindsay?”

  Should I play dead? No, then she might kill me. I can’t work out the logic of this, but I groan back anyway. “Mm-hmm?”

  “Just checking. So I let Anthony in and he just keeps saying, ‘Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.’ He told me to lock the door behind him, but not with my bare hands. So I used a tissue. And then he’s staring at the body and goes, ‘Pick up the gun.’ I was shaking and I said, ‘I can’t.’ He started yelling: ‘Pick up the fucking gun!’ and I was just saying over and over, ‘I can’t!’ Then he points to the laptop open on the couch and goes, ‘Is that her fucking computer?’ and I said yes and he says, ‘Get the fuck over there, open up a Word document, and type what I tell you. And wipe your fingerprints off everything.’ ”

  A clang and a quick shuffle; she must have knocked her can over. Why is she doing this? Is it because it’s her one and only chance to tell someone what the hell happened? I wish I’d never had anything to do with this. I notice with interest this cool black pool I could sink right into if I wanted.

  “I remember I told him I wanted to call 911,” she continues, “but he kept saying no. I think because of the drugs, because he was afraid I would tell, or they would figure it out, and he’d lose the building, everything. He just kept saying, ‘Not yet, not yet.’ ”

  She’s shaking so hard, her shoulders and arms, that I can see it from here.

  “My brain was going a million miles an hour, I didn’t know if you’d told anyone what you’d seen, and I thought that everyone knew that Edie had cut me out the year before, everyone saw how upset I was, and there weren’t any witnesses to show that it’d been an accident. So Anthony told me what to type and I put tissue over two fingers…”

  “You opened up a new file?” I say this without knowing why.

  She hesitates. “Oh, fuck it. Her diary was already up as a Word document and I saved it on a thumb drive on my keychain and then did control-all to delete all the copy. Then I typed what Anthony told me to.”

  This jiggles something in my brain, but I can’t figure out what.

  “I’m not sure why I took it,” she says as if I’ve just asked her, as if she’s on late-night TV and a charming host is interviewing her, all laid-back and chatty. Cameras appear all around us, stage lights beaming down on her at my kitchen table. “I guess I was thinking that if she’d written anything about how much she hated me, that might…that might not be good for me.” She drags something heavy across the table, taps it. “And also…I don’t know. I wanted it. This was my one shot at figuring out what she was thinking, this, like, enigmatic person I’d been close with once…and since she was already dead, it wouldn’t do her any harm. Like me, now, telling you.”

  There’s a thought that’s a bubble at the bottom of a jar of molasses. It begins its long, slow rise to the surface. “You,” I say, “made me…do it.” That isn’t right and I try it again from another angle, like opening up a tricky folding chair. “Made me…think I did it.”

  “You know, the only thing I really had to do was send an email from Edie’s account. It’s crazy, I had no idea you’re legitimately violent. You almost killed that poor kid the other night. You really are out of control when you drink too much. You could have done it. Killed Edie. Why not?”

  I can’t remember what I did and didn’t do. She’s right: Why not?

  She stands again and pushes out her breath like she’s steeling herself. “Are you still not out? You’re like a goddamn horse.”

  “Mmmph,” I answer, then focus on pulling my lips into a shape; it’s the middle of winter and they’re frozen. Icicles crystallizing on my eyelashes, my breath white fog. “I’m here.”

  “Good, because I brought you something. Open your eyes.” I do and something new surges through me, cold and sharp, because she’s wearing white gloves and holding a gun out over my head.

  “Why
?” I manage.

  “I don’t know, you bought it,” she says, casually, like a teenager.

  “Okay,” I murmur.

  “Oh Christ, Lindsay, you didn’t buy it. But it’ll look like you did. I got it on the darknet. Mostly untraceable, but I ran it through your IP address first, so if anyone really looks, you bought it. Easy.” IP address. That tickles something. None of my circuits are connecting and it’s not fair, I want to be smart again.

  “You know, this is momentous, I hadn’t touched a gun in ten years before this one. Since I picked up Kevin’s. Well, Edie picked it up, technically. Picked it up, showed me how to use it, because for once in her fucking life she decided to be nice to me again. Ugh.”

  I know I should be working out a plan, but the synapses in my brain have all sputtered out like a city grid gone dark, like a blackout…oh my god, I’m blacked out again, blacked out in a room with Tessa and a gun.

  “Sweetie, I’m sorry,” she says. “I really am. But you got your one pass already, and I just can’t risk it. I mean, I spent years walking around in fear that someone would realize what I’d done, and it’s like God or the universe or whatever gave me a second chance at life. And I used it, you know? I met Will, and he’s wonderful, and we built this beautiful life and have a little boy or girl coming, and I just…I can’t risk it. I’m sorry. I can’t let you take it all away.”

  I’m quiet for a few seconds. “My pass?”

  She sighs sadly. “This isn’t the first time you’ve figured it out, Linds. Your thirtieth birthday. You were so drunk and so sad and alone, and you kept talking about Edie and looking at photos of her, and then suddenly you looked up at me, really stared, and then said, ‘I know you.’ And I kind of laughed and said, ‘Of course you do,’ and you said, ‘No, from before.’ ” She laughs through her tears. “And I looked at you and I just…my heart broke in two. It was over. The jig was up. How do you come back from that? So I poured us more shots: ‘Let’s toast to old times! Tell me about Edie.’ And you drank and drank and drank. I just kept putting shots in front of you. I was so scared that night, after I put you to bed and went home. I remember lying there next to Will and wondering if I should pack up and leave town. But then you texted me the next day. God, my heart was in my throat. And you asked if I could bring you Gatorade. Because you were so hungover. You had no idea. I literally fell to the floor with relief.”