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.”
I blink a few times. “You didn’t answer.”
“I needed time to think. And I had to make sure that it wouldn’t come back to you and that it wouldn’t happen again. I thought about just cutting off all contact, but…”
I squint hard, remembering. “You yelled at me. Said I was mean.”
“I didn’t yell. I was terse. I told you you had to get your life under control, that you couldn’t still be blacking out all the time. Which was true.”
I poke at this but can’t grasp it. My thirtieth birthday, when I was so awful to Tessa. Or was I?
I feel a new thought coming and I wait for it; I speak at just the right time, like it’s a clay pigeon curving at its peak. “Did you kill Anthony?”
Her face contorts with pain. “Seriously? Of course not! Who do you think I am?”
I don’t answer because it’s a tricky question. Who is she again? Then a thought worms its way through, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to say it because the grid’s down, but I have to try.
“You,” I say, “are a good. Person.”
Silence, and I’m not sure I actually said it, and then she lets out a little cackle. “How can you even say that right now?”
She listens for an answer from me, but the city’s gone dark; I forgot what I was thinking and my eyes won’t open anyway, my mouth is done moving, my tongue is like a fat pink dead slug inside my mouth, and so I stay silent, and then that’s an option, too, I’m out.
It’s quiet. Tessa lets out a surprised laugh and mumbles, “Well, of course.” I hear her move closer and I feel afraid, but it’s a little faint stream of one single battery trying to light up the whole grid, it’s faraway and ineffectual, just like me, I’m ineffectual and faraway. Music boils the air around us, it’s my playlist, it’s Edie’s, it’s so loud it’s rattling my skeleton, the skeletons in my skeleton, where did I hear that?
Tessa shakes my shoulder and it moves all of me like I’m a huge dead sleeping-bag pink slug.
There’s pain on the soft flesh of my upper inner arm, sharp and neon, she’s pinching me there it hurts if she doesn’t stop I’ll have to—
And then it stops. I’m so glad it stopped, thank you, Tessa, bye now.