is important. I look back over my thoughts, like they’re behind me.
“Tessa,” I say. “You’re my closest friend. I care about you.” Have I ever said those words aloud? To anybody? I see another tactic: “I love you.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” She sniffs and shakes her head like she’s done crying, then stands and looks toward the kitchen. “This is taking so fucking long. Do you have anything to drink?”
I almost protest and then realize she’s moving away and this is my chance. I slide the phone out from under my butt, to the far side so it should be hidden from her, I think, and I hold down the button, but nothing happens, and I try to think what to do because it’s dead, it’s dead like Edie, it’s dead like I’m supposed to be. It’s dead like Anthony.
Holy shit. Anthony the landlord. Killed in a fire. Is that what she meant?
“What’ve you got there?” Tessa’s amused, patronizing, and she crosses over to me with an ease I can only dream of and pushes me to the side so that I collapse into the fetal position. The phone is hers, it’s in her hands, dead dead dead.
“Where did you even find this?” She’s half laughing. “Lindsay, you said you lost your phone. Was it actually in your apartment the entire time? Don’t you know how to geolocate it? God, Lindsay, how have you even made it this far in life?”
I’m crying now, stupid useless passive Lindsay with her conviction that everything was her fault and now it’s Tessa’s but mine, too.
“Oh, enough,” Tessa says. “Here, you can sit on the couch. Help me.” She grabs me under my armpits and waits until I shuffle my feet under me and then she plops me on the couch with a “Hup!” and then I’m sitting with terrible posture, sitting can kill you it’s the new smoking, and she sits beside me, and it’s just like a normal night when she comes to hang out with me except she’s going to kill me.
“Linds, shhh, maybe this isn’t so bad,” she coos. “Hey, you were always so unhappy. Right? Glorifying your twenties, saying you don’t feel like an adult, that nobody ever wants to be with you. Maybe this’ll be better. I’ll be right here with you.”
I’m not listening though because I see something on the side table behind her, and I can’t stare because then she’ll notice and turn and see it, too, but it’s there, and I can almost feel its smoothness in my fingers, and it’s standing upright like it means business, like someone set it there carefully, and I don’t know when, or how, or who, but probably Edie, dead Edie, Deedie, because there it is, directly behind Tessa. And I know she might be about to kill me, and I know that she might get away with it, but I also know that she hurt Edie, that’s a fact, someone should tell Sarah and Kevin they were right all along. And so I pull together all of my strength, I gather it like coffee beans that just spilled all over the floor, and I lunge at her, I jump like a fish and turn halfway in the air, and it’s balletic, I’m just like an Alvin Ailey dancer, the small one who looks like Edie.
I land with my head in her lap and look up at her and say as sweetly as I can, “I trust you, Tessa. I love you and I trust you and I know you know better than me.”
And my gamble is right and she doesn’t like this at all; she makes a face and wriggles out from me and I can’t see where she goes, but this is my chance, so I whip one arm behind me like I’m doing the backstroke, and my fingers find it, and it’s in my lap, and she’s still talking, and her voice gets a little quieter, which means she’s moving away.
And because it’s from an era when we didn’t want options options options, things were what they were and we didn’t fault them for not being four hundred other things, too, and I know I can easily make it work, so I feel around with my fingers and then push it deep down into the couch cushions.
Remember this, I scream at myself. Remember this remember this remember this.
“Tessa,” I call. “What happened after you started selling? What happened with Edie?”