“I’d like that. This time of year is always difficult.”
“I’m sure. I also really appreciated your invitation to the park. I’ll have to be at work, unfortunately, but it’s nice that you…have a special spot for her.”
“Yes, she always liked it up there, once she learned that it’s the highest elevation in the park. You could see better from Belvedere Castle, but she preferred to just know she was on top.”
I stared down at the keyboard. “It’s cool that she grew up going to Central Park. I don’t get out there often enough.” I pictured Mrs. Iredale, wrinkled and jumpy and slight, and suddenly some strange, childlike part of me wanted her approval: a hug, forgiveness. “It’s supposed to be beautiful this afternoon. Would you have any interest in going for a little walk around there with me?”
A silence, long enough that I was about to check if the call had been dropped.
“That would be nice,” she said, her voice ragged. “How’s two o’clock?”
* * *
I climbed out of the subway at the Museum of Natural History, pausing to ogle its dizzying facade, how something so large could sit right here in the middle of this teeming Lego city. The air felt crisp and dry, unusual for August. Exactly like the first morning Edie missed.
I pushed in between the trees and spotted Mrs. Iredale hunched on a bench, big sunglasses obscuring her face, her chin turned up to the dappled sunlight. We said hello awkwardly, and when she stood and began walking, I slowed my gait to let her lead.
“You know, you’re the only one who reached out to me about her this year,” she said, staring straight ahead.
“Oh my god,” I blurted out. Not even her family members?
“I don’t talk about her anymore,” she said, “and no one wants to bring her up, as if I’ve forgotten all about her and they’ll be reminding me of something terrible. As if I don’t think about her every day.” She whipped her head over to look at some Italian tourists as they passed; how oddly she moved.
“Oh, wow. Well, I bet a lot of people are thinking about her and just aren’t sure what to say,” I offered. “She…she touched a lot of lives.”
“She did, didn’t she?” We both froze to let a puppy barrel past, two kids in hot pursuit. “I always think about what she’d be like if she were still with us. She’d be thirty-three now, you know.”
This was a chess game; if I was careful, I could win. “Do you think she’d still be in fashion? A stylist, like she talked about?”
“Maybe,” she said. “She was so good at that kind of thing. But she was struggling to stay focused back then.”
The near flunk-out Alex had mentioned. The one Mrs. Iredale had found so personally mortifying. I let the words out like someone leading a high-strung horse: easy, easy. “You know, I used to really struggle with ADHD myself, and Edie had a lot going on. It was a tough year for everyone, like you said the other week.”
The path sloped upward and Mrs. Iredale’s breath quickened. “It was odd,” she said. “Fashion was her dream for so long. But then she just started to let everything slip. It was when she was dating that architect, that older man, and I think she was trying to seem adult with him and like a twenty-three-year-old with all of you.” So the problem had begun earlier than Alex had thought. The mention of Greg evoked Josh; I felt a queasy pulse, tried to focus.
“From what I can tell,” Mrs. Iredale continued, “she stopped going to night classes, and then fell behind on the course work, and then got so stressed out that she started to give up on the whole thing.”
“Wow, that’s tough,” I murmured.
“And she didn’t know this at the time, but her father’s boss was loaning us the money for her tuition. If anyone had found out—if her father had known she wasn’t even going to class…”
What? He’d do what? Down her with a bullet in her shitty loft apartment?
“So I talked to her about it. I told her the truth about how we were covering her tuition and she turned it around. Talked to her professors, got her grades back up. I was so proud of her.” We’d reached the base of Summit Rock, and she sat on a bench, sliding her sunglasses up like a