office. Wow, the cops accomplishing something. Unlike the useless detectives who’d investigated Edie’s death.
I logged into the video-filtering app Damien had sent me and listened until I found the conversation with Sarah. “Tiny fight,” she’d called it. Four minutes after I’d tossed the Flip cam into my purse and we’d all presumably headed inside.
“I’m gonna go,” my voice announced. The words tumbled together: “Hominago.”
“You’re not coming to the show?” Sarah, sounding cross.
A beat. “I gotta go home.”
“Ugh, nobody ever wants to do anything fun anymore.”
My voice rose in confused indignation: “Fuck you, I’m fun.”
“Just go.”
I had to listen to it twice to make out what I’d said next: “What about Edie?”
“Forget it. Just go then. Are you taking a cab?”
“Yeah, I’ll get one. I’m fine.”
Another pause, some fumbling, then my voice again: “What about Kevin?”
“Just go home, Linds.”
“Whatever.”
The sound of stomping; no additional dialogue. The conversation made me uncomfortable: Sarah’s sudden animosity, my own disgruntled curse. Sarah had tended to grow annoyed when others got drunk and fumbly, that much I recalled.
I listened to it again. What about Edie and Kevin? Was I simply suggesting other people she could hang out with, forgetting in my fog that Kevin had left for Greenpoint? Where had Alex gone? And was there something more to Sarah’s Forget it. Just go at the mention of Edie?
An editor dropped in to discuss a story, and I quickly closed out of the app. I wouldn’t share it with Tessa. I wouldn’t share it with anybody.
* * *
Over the next few days, Damien didn’t mention the video again, and I did my best not to think about it, occasionally waylaid by the hard-brake feeling of it wafting into my consciousness. Then everything would speed up, a sense of not knowing, of wanting to know so fucking hard I could scream, stomp, pound my fists against God’s chest.
One evening, as I was leaving the office, I paused at a window on my way to the elevator; the world was darkening sooner, summer tipping into fall. Twentysome floors below, people were just visible picking their way across streets and sidewalks.
Thoughts swarmed every which way, directionless. Whose baby was Edie pregnant with? Was she planning to keep it? Why didn’t she tell anyone but Kevin? Why didn’t Kevin tell anyone? Why was fucking everyone near 4G that fateful evening—Lloyd to comfort Edie by Calhoun’s front doors, Edie’s mom to deliver bad news, Sarah and presumably Alex to see a band just a few floors up?
I leaned my forehead on the glass and closed my eyes. And me, cruising straight to SAKE to force a friend breakup.
And now there was a new thought, humming underneath like a pipe organ’s deepest note. Now that I knew Alex hadn’t been there, now that all I was left with was my own drunken self calling “She’s a fucking bitch!” into the night sky. What the hell had gone on in there?
When I got out of the building, I turned left instead of right. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was walking until I saw the pier in the distance, jutting out over the water near the massive heliport, where copters thrummed and floated like gigantic dragonflies. Of course. I’d take the East River ferry to Williamsburg, a route that hadn’t even existed when we’d lived in the area. I climbed to the upper deck and looked east, feeling small and dazzled by the glittering skyscrapers along Brooklyn’s shore. So much silver and glass now, propped up like dominoes in the evening light. The ferry pulled into the South Williamsburg landing, and I clambered off between two condos and disappeared into the neighborhood I once knew.
At first glance, it wasn’t so different: town houses and old churches and drinking establishments on so many first floors, but with names I didn’t recognize. I turned onto Kent and rooted around for an overlay of what this street had looked like in my time—crummy semilegal concert venues, cheap apartments, grassed-over lots with graffiti on the particleboard fences enclosing them. Now, good-looking, well-dressed young professionals swarmed out of the office buildings and into the waterfront condos.
Around the corner, I froze at the sight of Mugger’s, one of our old haunts, my heart suddenly clanging, afraid that—what?—I’d open the door and find Alex and Kevin and Sarah and Edie in the corner, big-eyed and brazen under a garland of tacked-up Christmas lights? I went in, and the familiar smell, beer and sweat and old beat-up walls, hit me