rifle, and Mom didn’t realize she wasn’t supposed to walk out in front of us. Still another where I opened a kitchen cabinet and found it filled with handguns, ones I’d never touched in real life. Around that time, violent images began seeping into my daytime as well, quick bloody visions that still invade my mind decades later. I told no one. I was stuck with a head that’d never do anyone any good, not even after they’d brined it in a cocktail of drugs, not even after they’d pointedly moved all of Dad’s guns into a gun safe, not even after my pickled brain realized its own constant narration could be inked down into writing and a path emerged: To Be A Writer Someday. That one hadn’t panned out, either. Instead I was thirty-three years old and alone, a single pathetic generation, and I’d generated nothing but misery in my wake.
I snapped open the bottle, child-protection my ass, and shook twenty orange and white tablets onto the table. I shoved aside my empty Thai food containers and organized the pills into four even lines. Filled a glass of water at the sink and swallowed the first row, one by one.
* * *
As I waited to see what would happen, I tried the new password Greg had just emailed and opened all the photos at once. Fifty-six Edies appeared, each one like a finger pressed on a bruise. I let my sniffle turn into a sob as I clicked through them.
“I’m sorry, Edie,” I whispered. “It should’ve been me.”
I felt woozy, drunk. Edie on a carousel; Edie in a hammock; Edie in a kitchen; Edie picking apples. Edie unaware that she was already on a speeding train, that her trajectory was set and in under a year she’d live in the past alone, in old photos and videos, just echoes.
Near the end, something made me stop and scroll back a few images. I squinted at it and blew it up to full size: Edie at a party, people scattered around the hardwood floor, her holding up a large homemade card that read “When you’re 22…” across the front.
I leaned in closer, my heart speeding. The lettering on the card. Triangular and hip, handwriting I’d recognize absolutely anywhere.
And off to the right, a girl I’d otherwise barely notice, with light brown bangs covering her eyes and a nose that didn’t look quite right, but those thin lips, lips and a crack of teeth that for the first time looked familiar.
Memories like flashbulbs:
That conversation right here in the living room, when I’d first shown Tessa the video. How she’d confidently recited all their names, Alex, Sarah, Edie; how after one viewing, she’d looked up and asked, “Where’s Kevin?” even though I hadn’t told her that the dark-haired guy was Alex.
Jenna, I thought wildly. Mysterious, dissipated-into-the-dust Jenna.
No. Absolutely not. But now the memories were strobing of their own accord:
The gun was in Edie’s right hand, but she was a lefty like you.
Damien’s little frown when he told me he’d cleaned up the audio so easily.
The deftness with which she’d hacked into my old email; the grave proclamation that the IP address was mine.
Six years back, the night I first met her, tipsy in a bookstore: You look so familiar to me!
With shaking hands, I typed four words into Google: Jenna Smith, plus Teresa Hoppert. The first result was a wedding announcement on the alumni page of an all-boys high school in Ohio: William Eric Hoppert (’02) to Jenna Teresa Smith.
She’d barely even bothered to conceal her former name.
I heard a clang behind me and turned around in time to see the deadbolt flop to the left. I thought about running across the room, moving at supersonic speed to throw my weight against the door, but before I could stand, the doorframe filled with the hallway’s light.
Chapter 17
I wake up to the day I am going to die.
It narrates itself in my head like an audio file, Today is the day you are going to die, in a bit of a sing-song, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
I blink a few times before the brown line in front of me organizes itself into a floor. Then I detect pressure on my back and legs and realize I’m on it—I’m on the floor. The vibrations running directly into my left ear are footfalls. They must be hers. Man, my head hurts. If I could just roll my head back a