know her dad is—did you not hear this? Her dad died.”
“Oh my god. From what?”
“Suicide. A few years after…afterward.”
“Oh my god,” I repeated.
“Yeah, I mean, they’d lost their daughter and their home and apparently he still hadn’t been able to find a new job…and presumably he had a predisposition to mental illness or whatever. So sad.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I know. Pretty shocking when it always seemed like her mom was the unstable one.”
This rang a distant bell. “Remind me, she used to show up at Calhoun sometimes, right?”
“Yeah, she was…odd. Clinging to her youth, a little obsessed with her daughter. I remember she used to come crying to Edie whenever she was having, like, marital problems, which I thought was really weird.”
“Yikes. Do you know what happened to her?”
“She’s still kicking around Manhattan, as far as I know. She’s a psychiatrist, so maybe she finally figured her own shit out.” He swallowed. “We obviously didn’t keep in touch, but I used to look her up every once in a while. She got remarried at one point.”
“Well, that’s good. Jeez.” So I should probably stop thinking of her as Mrs. Iredale, like a little kid.
“Yeah. Whoa. Way to bring the mood down.”
“Right, sorry.” An opening, a bleak one, but I took it. “Well, since we’re already on the subject of depressing things, Sarah mentioned something I…I hadn’t known about Edie back then. That maybe didn’t make her look great, but I wanted to ask you about it.” A lie, but Sarah could have been the one to tell me about the miscarriage, right?
“Look, I really don’t want to sit here and talk shit about Edie. Okay? She apologized way back before all—”
“No, of course not, neither do I. I’m sorry, I…” My ears caught up with me. She apologized? “Wait, you knew?”
“That she was cheating on me? That’s why we broke up.” A beat. “Wait, what were you talking about?”
Everything was alert, my eyes, ears, hands. The fact slid into a waiting slot: one motive, humming away. And if she’d been cheating on him that summer…whose baby had she lost?
Now I definitely couldn’t mention the miscarriage. I rifled around for a red herring. “I was just going to ask about the drugs,” I said. “Sarah told me that the autopsy showed that Edie had Molly in her system, and I don’t remember her ever using anything. So I wanted to ask about that.”
“Oh. Well, shit. Now I feel like an asshole.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “That’s totally not shocking or outside the realm of possibility for me. I knew Edie was sort of…boy crazy.”
“Look, we don’t need to get into this.”
I spotted a new tactic. “You know how Edie and I were fighting a lot that summer? Understanding what went down could help me make sense of that. Make peace with it, even.”
“What, with her cheating? Why would that matter at all? You don’t even know the guy.”
Was it Greg, maybe, Edie’s cool architect ex-boyfriend? How could it be someone I didn’t know, someone none of us knew about?
I let a few seconds drip past, then added a tremor to my voice. “I just want to understand what happened,” I half whispered, “for closure.” It sounded like something from a movie. When had my life knotted into a telenovela? Could I please go back to last Wednesday, when I went to Pilates and then binge-watched canceled television, cranking up the sound so that I could hear it over the air conditioner?
He heaved a big, manly sigh. “She put a stop to it after a few times,” he said, “after I found out. But it was…terrible.”
“How did you find out?” I prodded.
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t.” He let out a bitter little laugh, and I heard a plunk, like he was doing something else now. I sat with that, flipping through everyone I could think of. That building was so big, floor after floor of people tucked into plywood rooms like tchotchkes in a shadow box.
“Also, I didn’t know,” he said, when the quiet grew too large. “About the drugs. I didn’t think she ever used anything, either.”
“Huh.”
Again, the silence fizzed.
“Maybe that helps explain it,” he said. “Why she would kill herself. Because she was on something.”
“Fucked up,” I managed. Chemically, metaphorically, her, this. I didn’t even know how I meant it. Me.
Alex said he’d better “let me go” and mechanically we exchanged pleasantries. Then he hung up and I pictured us both seated in our apartments, peering miserably into