Who else knows about this? Mrs. Iredale had snapped at Alex. It looked different in this new light. “Edie seemed so driven,” I mused. “I’m surprised she’d slack on school stuff like that.”
“Well, people reason differently at that age.” She was using her psychiatrist voice again. “Their prefrontal cortices aren’t fully developed yet; just think of yourself, the decisions you made at that age. How you thought things through.”
Heat whooshed up through my throat and cheeks. “Good point.”
It wasn’t out of character, I realized suddenly. Avoidance was exactly how Edie had dealt with friendships once they became complicated. She was always shucking people off, Kevin had said. She was the center of everything, and then she’d be gone again, leaving a bombed-out group in her wake.
“That made it all the more distressing when Pat’s boss told us he couldn’t keep loaning us tuition money,” she went on. “We were already on the verge of losing our apartment, but we’d shielded that from Edie, too. She’d just buckled down and brought up her grades, and then we pulled the rug out on her.”
Right—the bad news Mrs. Iredale had come bearing the night of August 21. “But couldn’t she just get financial aid?” I asked.
“She’d missed the deadline. Classes were about to start, in fact. I was going to see if I could pull some strings with the bursar.”
“Then why rush to Calhoun to tell her?” It popped out of me like a hiccup. She squeezed her eyes shut, and I added, “The night she…the night.”
“Oh, Lindsay.” She jerked the sunglasses back into place. All at once, she seemed so frail and sad, the old witch in the woods. “I just needed to see her.”
“But why?”
Mrs. Iredale looked up at the treetops. There was that crackly pause again, the same fissure I’d felt from Kevin, from Alex, even from Lloyd: The truth was finally going to rupture through. Why? Because I’d asked.
“You can tell me,” I said, for what felt like the millionth time.
“I just had a horrible feeling,” she said, “about Edie. I knew something was wrong. I fell asleep on the couch after dinner, and I dreamed it first: Edie and…and someone she trusted, and I couldn’t remember what happened, exactly, but I woke up certain something was wrong, that something had happened to her. I’d never…I’m not a woo-woo kind of person, Lindsay, I’m a doctor, and nothing like this had ever happened to me before. But I just couldn’t shake this…this conviction. So I got in a cab and started calling.”
She dug in her bag, then dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
“She came out to see me, but she was looking at me like I’d lost my mind; she couldn’t understand what that’s like for a mother, to have these invisible cords tying you to your child. Are you a mother?”
“I’m not.”
“So you don’t know. You don’t know.” She blew her nose, composed herself. “I didn’t go all the way to Bushwick to talk about our finances. But Edie asked about tuition. She asked about the apartment and figured out that we were going into foreclosure, which I hadn’t planned to tell her. She figured this must all be about something else, that I was just panicking.”
A line from Lloyd floated into my head: She was, like, wild-eyed. Edie said her mom was freaking her out.
“And then I left. I couldn’t force her to come back with me.”
“Wow. I’m so sorry.” I pressed my palm onto her forearm. “I do believe you. About the premonition? I think that stuff is very real. Maybe scientists will figure it out someday, something with energy and…maybe quantum physics.”
She laughed, embarrassed. “Thanks. I know it’s silly. I’m glad Edie had a friend like you.”
A balloon of discomfort in my belly. She turned to me. “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me about those last days? With Edie? She and I hadn’t spoken in a while, and it just…it’d be nice to hear about.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale,” I replied. “I wish I had more to tell you, but she and I were sort of…in a bit of a rough period at that point.”
“A rough period?”
Why hadn’t I lied, plucked a happy memory from earlier in 2009? “You know how friendships are at that age. We just needed a little space.”
“Well, I hope you got it,” she said, then turned away. “Sorry. It’s just…I know she and Sarah were fighting, too. She was going