and purses I couldn’t bear to give away, travel-size toiletries, expired pills, a sad cornucopia of detritus tucked into the pockets of my life. Then I flicked off the light and fell asleep, fully dressed and with my home in shambles, Facebook open on my laptop, fogging up the apartment with old, invisible air.
* * *
I dreamed about the camcorder, a creepy dream where Edie was still alive but somehow trapped inside its plastic walls, speaking to me through the little screen. Half awake, I grabbed my phone and murmured the storyline into its voice memo app, sure it was urgent, that my sleeping mind was onto something. When I played it back in the morning, my own voice sounded spooky and halting, the narrative meaningless. “She was inside but also behind,” it intoned, between long pauses and thick swallowing noises. “She said ‘four corners’ and…and I was outside in the fields and I knew them from other dreams.” I deleted the file midway through listening.
As I clattered around, making coffee, something echoed in my mind: inside but also behind. It repeated itself, a loop in a DJ’s mix, until I froze and felt the idea blossoming.
I dropped the spoon, black grounds scattering, and hurried into the living room. My bookshelf hulked along the wall, as long as an elephant and unusually deep. I yanked away books on shelf after shelf, revealing the random stuff I’d stashed behind them, in the dusty space along the cabinet’s back. And there it was, inside and behind the third row, sandwiched between a laptop charger and an obsolete Kindle. My Flip cam.
I carried it into the kitchen, then discovered it had an outdated jack, something I couldn’t connect to my laptop. I set it on my counter and texted Tessa to ask if she could borrow an adapter from work. When she hadn’t answered an hour later, I pulled on clothes and tromped to the dollar store at the end of my block. Nothing inside costs a dollar, but that place is like the goddamn Room of Requirement: ant trap, sunscreen, dish tub, lawn ornament, whatever you need, it’s there in a section you’ve never noticed before.
Tessa texted as I was cracking open my laptop to try the new cord.
“I should be able to borrow that. What for?”
“Thanks, but no need, I already got the connector. I found my old Flip cam.”
“From back then?”
“Right. Update: I’m not so sure it was a suicide now.”
It showed she was typing for a while, so I waited for something long, realizing with a spritz of embarrassment that she was probably going to chide me for writing something that legally loaded in a text.
Instead: “How come?”
I called her, but she rejected it.
“Still in the office,” she texted. “Trying really hard to finish something.”
On a Saturday? “No worries—let’s talk later.”
I wanted to pull the videos onto my laptop, but my machine wouldn’t recognize the old files, the systems a decade apart; still, the cord managed to siphon over some power and after a few seconds an outdated graphic appeared on the camcorder’s screen: FLIP VIDEO.
Navigation was a mess; I couldn’t view all the videos at once and discovered that I had to browse to the right or left to view them. The first was from March 2009, us waving and cracking up in the car, Alex behind the wheel, Edie navigating, Kevin inexplicably speaking in a bad French accent while Sarah and I howled with laughter. Another from later that month: a mess at first, loud EDM and green shapes fizzing in crazy circles, until I picked out our silhouettes and realized it was Edie on the dance floor in the back of a bar.
I skipped forward, forward, forward, hitting the last video just eleven skips later; so there were only twelve on here, a small batch. One, from May, began with Edie smiling into the camera like an anchorwoman, fuzzy in a streetlamp’s sallow glow.
“Edie, tell us what just happened,” my voice prompted from behind the camera.
“Well, we just had a bit of a run-in with the law,” she replied.
A male voice murmured something off-screen and I prompted him to repeat it: “She just saved our asses, that’s what happened.” It was Alex, sounding stressed.
I panned to him and he sucked on a cigarette. “What happened was we were pregaming in McCarren and Kevin had a whole six-pack sitting next to him like a fucking idiot,” he said, turning to his left to shoot