2009, it was harder to keep tabs on people. You had to wait for them to come to you. I suddenly remembered long nights of drawing out text conversations with boys—seeing their responses, setting my phone down, sipping a beer, and taking three hours to respond. Just ’cause.
Alex, then. Everything tightened at the idea of confronting him, of speaking to the dude who’d spoken so poorly of Edie moments before she died. I had no idea he’d had that revulsion pulsing just under the surface. But it was like jumping into a cold lake: I found his number in his email signature and texted before I could think about it. He wrote back right away: “Whoa hi!”
“Can you hop on the phone?” I typed back. I wanted to just call, since I knew he was literally holding his cell. Ten years ago I would’ve just dialed. Fuck this era.
He took longer to write back this time. “I could call in like an hour? Hope everything’s okay???”
“Please do, and thank you!!” I stood up and walked to the bathroom, staring into the sink and watching the water swirl into the drain. I began to feel that urgent drive, faraway at first and then with growing intensity, somewhere deep in my low back and groin: Keep going.
I opened the notes from the interview with Kevin gingerly, as if winding a jack-in-the-box. It occurred to me that he could be my tiebreaker, the third vote on whether or not I’d made it to the show; then I remembered he’d left for his own concert while we were still pregaming on the roof.
The notes began the same as the others, how they’d met in spring 2009 when Edie and Alex started dating, how she’d moved in with them along with Sarah in April. It was hard to picture the conversation—little Kevin shifting between bad postures while two detectives gave him the third degree, arrested for the first time in his cheery life. It sounded like Kevin started to get emotional next, noting that he and Edie had become better friends and that she’d cried to him about fights she’d had with Sarah and me.
Which would have been surprising enough in its own right, since I could barely imagine them exchanging more than pleasantries, but then this sentence boomed out of the document like a cannon:
Accomp decedent to ER early August, likely 8/4, when she complained heavy cramping; visible blood. Assume miscarriage. Left + not discussed/told friends. CHK.
Jesus. The ER visit he’d mentioned. I pulled up my email index from that era and searched for August 4, apparently a Tuesday: mundane emails to coworkers and one from Sarah mentioning an upcoming party, reminding Kevin he still owed rent and finishing with “BTW, anyone seen Edie in like a week? Is she officially avoiding everyone or just me?” Kevin had responded about the rent the next day, diplomatically ignoring the stuff about Edie, and the thread had petered out.
Back in the cops’ scribbles, I saw that Kevin went on to say that he’d had a show the night of Edie’s death and had taken his bandmate’s van to Greenpoint. They’d been the headliners, taking the stage around 11 p.m., and he’d only heard the news when he turned his phone back on around 1:00. I verified it on fact-checking autopilot: a tweet from the venue from early August 22, 2009, thanking Static Pony for a BRUTAL NIGHT.
I set aside the detectives’ notes and searched for Edie’s medical records. I saw dental records, an annual OB-GYN visit, and then bingo: admission forms from Mt. Sinai Medical Center, dated “8/4/09, 9:06 p.m.” Retrieved on official police business about a week after the interviews took place. I scanned Edie’s frantic handwriting on the intake forms, noting that symptoms had begun around 5:00 p.m. but she’d never had cramps this intense before and she was experiencing bleeding heavier than any period. Poor thing, on a scale of 1 through 10 she rated her pain a 9. I hit page-down; she was seen by 10:48, where, according to her discharge forms, a doctor determined she’d had a completed miscarriage—confirmed with a surgical dilation and curettage, which sounded scary, and then an ultrasound, which sounded expensive—and had been approximately six weeks along. She was given relaxants, monitored overnight, and released in the morning. And off Edie went, back to Calhoun Lofts. No longer pregnant and with no one to confide in but, oddly, Kevin.