Darkness clouds the windows and I don’t bother turning on any lights. Edie kept writing, writing, writing, right up until August 21, 2009. The realization mushrooms: Jenna, the woman I’d been thinking about just before…the night before I…
Then rapid-fire: how Tessa convinced me the IP address was mine; how easily she cracked open my old email. How she couldn’t clean up the Flip cam video’s audio when Damien took care of it in one night. How much she seemed to know about all those Calhounies when I’d only shown her a single video, shaky and dark.
Tessa is Jenna; Tessa has been lying to me. Lying and then monitoring, installing a watchman to crouch inside my laptop and record my every move.
What do I do? I think about calling the cops, but I’m not sure what to tell them; this proves nothing, after all, and Tessa was the one who didn’t press charges when I shot her, somehow. How had I shot her? Where the fuck had that gun come from? Suddenly it’s funny that I haven’t examined this harder. How skilled I’ve become at wiping my brain clean.
And how easy it would be to incriminate me if I did try to tell someone. “That’s why Lindsay was suicidal, Officer, she showed me this old Flip cam video and requested the case files and really, killing Edie was all she was talking about for weeks. And she’s dangerous, unfortunately. Here, I have footage of her pushing this kid into traffic a few weeks ago, outside a club in Ridgewood…” My stomach pitches, briefly threatening to expel everything, but I keep it down.
Whom can I talk to? Not my parents, not Damien; I call Sarah, my heart hammering as the phone rings, three times, four, then goes to voice mail. It’s late; she’s likely in bed, snuggled in a California King in her new Park Slope apartment. “PLEASE CALL ME ASAP,” I text her, and then I delete the conversation, paranoid. I glance around the apartment, suddenly afraid of everything. The gun. The red wound on Tessa’s shoulder. Whatever happened to the gun? Where is it now?
Finally, unsure what else to do and walloped with that postadrenaline exhaustion, I get ready for bed and collapse into it, my bedroom door locked as a backup to the front door. I curse my landlord for not installing a chain; I briefly consider setting up a trap, Home Alone style, for anyone who dares to visit me.
For the first time in a month, I skip the sleeping pills. I’m out almost instantly, and my dreams are vivid and rich: Tessa wearing white gloves and waving the gun around. Anthony, tragic Anthony, burning up inside a beautiful building. Fear flooding my body, adrenaline and cortisol fighting off the effects of too many Tofranils, of too many Tofranils and something else altogether.
I wake up blinking into the early-morning light, a bird singing too loudly outside my window: oowee, oowee, oowee. I grab my phone to check the time and my eyes fall on the voice memo app. The last time I used it, I murmured into the microphone about a dream, a dream where Edie was trapped inside my Flip cam and looking out at me from behind the—
I stumble into the living room and plunge my fingers into the dark spaces between the couch cushions. There are crumbs, and hair ties, and coins, but I need to physically flip the cushions to the floor before I spot it, dead against the black fabric: the Flip cam. The one I turned on in a brief moment of lucidity as the drugs took over my brain.
I stare at it for another moment, glossy in my palm, then lunge into the hallway and fling open the closet door. I yank things off the shelves, snapping open bags and boxes and piling them on the floor. I try the cabinets surrounding the TV, pulling out old magazines and dusty board games and outdated electronics, shit I scowl at as I shove it back into place. I move on to my bedroom, scattered with old notebooks, and I yank out plastic storage bins and fling through old purses and scarves and toiletries and expired medicine. I lumber back into the living room and run my hand along the dust behind my books.
It’s on the third shelf, as I know it should be: the adapter. Everything in my