They all had black and red stripes painted across their faces. It was a perfect match with the concert I’d been picturing for August 21—a wild show that rattled a random Calhoun apartment. I looked at the date and my stomach sank. This night, the one pictured at least, had been a full month before Edie died.
Chapter 2
The wine shop on Tessa’s block was closed, but the bodega wasn’t, so I picked up a six-pack and carried it awkwardly, the bottles clinking inside their cardboard carrier within the bodega’s plastic bag—a pointless beer turducken—past Tessa’s doorman and up the ancient elevator and to her door. Marlon, her cute terrier mutt, bounded up to my ankles and crouched, wagging his tail hysterically.
“Lindsay!” Tessa gave me a cursory hug and grabbed the beer. “My favorite kind, thank you!”
“Didn’t want to show up empty-handed. It smells amazing in here.” Something garlicky and rich.
“I made risotto. Here, come help me make a salad.”
I followed her into the kitchen and tapped a magnet on the fridge in the shape of a mug of Guinness.
“Your trip! I forgot to say thanks for the postcard.” I don’t know if she sends them to everyone or just to me because she knows how much I love her handwriting: the hip, squared-off lettering of an architect or artist, angular and typographic.
She smiled and swung the fridge door open, pulling the vegetable drawer out noisily. She always has fresh vegetables, not limp and forgotten and sometimes rotting white and green like mine. “Of course! You know, there’s exactly one post office left in all of Dublin, and the nineteen-year-old behind the counter acted like she’d never seen a postcard before.” She dropped a clatter of veggies in front of me and produced a cutting board.
“Well, you are the last person on earth still sending them.”
“It’s true. I should know, I catalog this shit all day.”
I turned on the tap and began scrubbing the vegetables. “So tell me about Dublin!”
“It was fun! Rainy. I mostly just drank Guinness with Will.”
“Sounds amazing. Is he coming tonight?”
“Eventually. He’s at work.” She banged around, cleaning up. Her kitchen’s all gleaming white and chrome. “Do you know what time Damien’s coming?”
“Oh, he said to eat without him—it’ll be eightish. Apparently Trent teaches spin on Thursdays, and he obviously can’t miss that.”
She laughed. “How’s everything for you? Work?”
“Ohh, the same.” I sliced a head of cauliflower right through the center and peered down at it. How like a brain it looked, the woody white just like a brain stem. For just a second, I saw the ruffled pink organ in front of me, blood spurting from the bottom.
“Are you still working crazy hours?”
I blinked the image away. “Only during shipping weeks. When we’re sending everything to the printer. And I care less with every passing month, which makes me sort of untouchable. So it’s fine. Should I cut up both tomatoes?”
Tessa looked back at me and nodded. “Still not interested in looking around for another job?”
I rolled my eyes. “There aren’t that many print magazines around anymore, Tessa. And they know I’m good at what I do. We can’t all love every second of our amazingly perfect jobs like you.”
She let out an awkward laugh. “Sorry. So tell me again what you need me to break into your old email for?” She’d turned back to the stove and the hood swallowed her words.
“It’s sort of dumb,” I began. “I randomly had dinner the other night with this friend from when I first lived in New York. And remember how when I was twenty-three, my best friend committed suicide?”
Tessa nodded, still bent over the pot.
“We started talking about the night it happened, and Sarah—the friend I just saw—we, like, remembered it really differently. It just got me thinking, that’s all. Set some nostalgia in motion.”
“You remembered it differently?”
“It made me realize how little I actually dealt with it at the time.” I didn’t mention Sarah’s odd claim about my whereabouts; I still felt sheepish about the discrepancy. “Instead of grieving and leaning on my other friends to get through it, I just cut them all off. I was so self-absorbed at twenty-three. Everyone is, I think.”
Tessa nodded and tested a bite of risotto.
“It’s almost weird that…that I haven’t thought about how odd my reaction was, if that makes sense. I never really tried to figure out why I reacted that way. And now I’m curious to go back through it with a little perspective.”