to get a vague thrill out of playing caretaker, watching over me like an old-timey nurse, Lindsay Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. At night, new pills keep me from dreaming, pills that Tessa carries around so I can’t shake out too many at once, and I welcome sleep, a dip into the formless universe where nothing ever happened. It’s only when I’m up that I remember what I’ve done. Twice, Tessa wakes to the sound of me vomiting and wordlessly pulls back my hair, holding it in a gentle fist like we’re inebriated coeds.
Will is pleasant to me but seems quietly alarmed, like I’m an injured animal Tessa brought in from the sidewalk—an inconvenience likely to lead to more distress for her. He’s working late in advance of a trial, so I see little of him, but he smiles tightly when we pass in the morning. Once I overhear them arguing through the wall and suspect he wants me out, and again, fuckup Lindsay is fucking up other people’s lives. After a week, I move home while Tessa is at work. My apartment is neater than I left it.
I email my boss about a medical emergency, keeping things vague; I get an impatient note from her and decide to go in, indignant but also relieved to sink back into the drumbeat of working and calling sources and conferring with editors and jumping whenever someone knocks on my office door. Damien still has lunch with me most days, but I can tell he’s uncomfortable; I don’t know how much Tessa told him and I don’t ask. He’s never been great at dealing with real shit.
Tessa comes over most nights, and she’s a rock, as ever, kind-faced and concerned and wordless when I try to thank her, to express some small piece of how she’s keeping me sane. Sometimes I remember, in a rush, what must’ve happened, how I had to be the one left alone with Edie in her final moments. Primed for a friend fright, possibly newly aware that she was having sex with Lloyd. And I just don’t know how the scene ended. On good days, I believe I left without ever touching Kevin’s gun, my only weapon an especially poorly timed chew-out. But on most days, my brain weaves up an image that makes me cry or puke or worse: blood and brains and a body collapsing with a thud as music pounds through the ceiling.
Tessa and I fight once, a bizarre flare-up right after I’ve taken my sleeping pills, my logic just beginning to blink out. Tessa’s doing something in the kitchen when my phone chirps, my shiny new phone with its sleek case and crisp sounds. It’s a text from a number I don’t recognize—not unusual, since my contacts didn’t transfer over—and so almost without reading it, I write back: “Just got a new phone, who is this?”
“What?” I yelp aloud, rereading.
“What is it?” Tessa calls.
I go over it one more time. “It’s from Greg, this guy who used to date Edie,” I say. “Remember how I ran into him in the street? I’d asked him to send me some photos of Edie, but the password he gave me didn’t work. He says he—” I look up, gasping. “He just remembered he had a Dropbox account from back then, apparently! He sent me another link to try. Not that I—”
Tessa crashes out of the kitchen and stands before me, her eyes dark. “You didn’t write back, did you?”
I frown. “Uh, I wrote back to find out who it was.”
“Lindsay, no.” She shakes her head warningly, like I’m a dog. “No. That guy is the reason you met that little jackass who gave you coke and made you lose your phone and—and got set off on a really dark spiral.”
I roll my eyes dramatically, about to tell her I don’t want to look at the stupid photos anyway, and she raises her voice to a shout. “I’m serious! I will not have you talking to anyone in that circle while you’re in this fragile state, here in—”
“What, in your house?” I start to stand. “What are you even screaming about? I wasn’t even planning to write back to him, I just—”
I stop short, because Tessa has brought her fingers up to her collar and jabbed them to the side, the gauze-covered wound on her shoulder staring right at me. I sputter, my larynx shorting out, then hang my head. I’ve heard it as clearly as