alternate dimension where I locked the gun away, another, happier Kevin out there, hopefully not too different, hopefully still with Glenn and beautiful Evelyn and a nice house and all the stuff I’m grateful for, but also where Edie is alive somewhere, a stylist like she always dreamed of being, putting together beautiful outfits like art.
I replay the day of the ER visit, too, moments of it that clung to my memory like dryer lint, maybe because they held some clues or maybe just ’cause memory’s funny like that. I remember her staring out the window on the cab ride home, like I wasn’t even there, and then saying something so softly the silence hissed and I wasn’t sure she’d said anything at all, and then I whispered, “Huh?” and she turned suddenly and said, “Alex,” again, like it was a statement. I was like, “What about him?” and she said, “Don’t tell him,” and then turned back to the window as the cab scuttled along the street.
How she waited until we were almost at Calhoun’s front door to whisper, “Let’s walk in separately, and please don’t tell anyone,” then turned on her heels and headed down the block. How I thought about following her, watching her thin body recede and knowing I’d do nothing so that distance would make the decision for me. I went inside and took a shower and got ready for work. Alex looked around all curious, no doubt wondering where his new ex-girlfriend had spent the night. No one ever assumed I knew anything.
Two days later I found my hoodie spread out on my bed, newly washed and blood-free. For some reason, imagining Edie in the laundromat, rubbing extra detergent into the stains, was just the saddest fucking thing.
For about a week she acted impressively normal, a bit withdrawn, but everyone still chalked it up to the breakup. So I did my best to be normal, too, goofing off with the group and keeping everybody laughing. It seemed like a fluke that I was the one among us who helped a friend through a miscarriage, such a random, adult problem that just happened to thwack into me like a fly ball.
Then a few days later, I found her smoking on the front steps of the building, watching a little brown bird hop around the tangle of the block’s only tree. I sat down next to her and accepted a cigarette.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” She always had a musical voice, animated like a singer’s.
“What’s that?”
She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “It sucks to die when you’re old, but not that much because you’ve already spent so long on the planet, being human. And it sucks to die as a baby—or even before you’re born—but really not that much because you haven’t had time to, you know, grow attached to shit here. To really get into the whole human-being-on-planet-earth thing.” She tapped a bit of ash off the end. “So the worst thing is a young adult dying, like our age. Because you’ve just woken up to the fact that you’re a person, that you get to be an actual being and you’re not just, like, a little human robot on the conveyor belt your parents pushed you onto when you were little. But you’re not old yet, it’s not like ‘Whew, really lived that up.’ It’d be like—I don’t know—leaving right before the movie gets good.”
We smoked together for a minute. Two girls stepped around us to get into the building, both wearing cutoffs.
I said, “I think the media and whoever else get way dramatic when a young person dies—so much ahead of her, that kind of thing. Like the 27 Club.” I didn’t want to call her out as a cliché, but I also couldn’t ignore that she wasn’t exactly making a new observation.
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Were you thinking about…Did you think something bad was gonna happen at the hospital?”
She rolled her eyes. “Something bad did happen, Kevin.”
“I know, but I mean—like, did you really think you might die?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve been thinking about it more since then, though. And how weird it is that there was another life inside me.” She put her hand on her stomach. “Something that would have grown hair and teeth and worn clothes and gone through the conveyor belt and come out the other side, you know?”
I’d figured we’d never discuss the whole ordeal. I realized that up until that point, I’d