Of course—like everyone who moves away from New York. I smoothed a napkin on my lap. A husband: Kevin was still twenty-four in my mind, jumpy and juvenile. “When did he move again?”
“As soon as he’d finished his community service. That winter after…afterward.”
Her face darkened, but then the waiter reappeared and we politely placed our orders, Sarah nodding eagerly when he offered to bring another round. She asked me more about my work, and I learned a bit about the executive recruiting she’d been doing in St. Louis and how now the tables had turned and she had to get herself hired and the bar was set high when every headhunter is so good at the game, and my god, the irony. We giggled at the appropriate times. Twice she made a cute hand gesture, her little fists up near her chest like sock puppets, and she was Sarah Kwan again, Sarah Kwan with the cool raspberry lipstick and an impossible crop top and a yard of thick glossy hair.
She didn’t mention Edie again until we were finishing dessert, picking at a shared flourless chocolate cake. “It’s crazy to think about how much has happened in ten years,” she announced. “I was so glad to hear you wanted to get together. I thought about reaching out a few times over the years, but I just wasn’t sure after…I mean, after how everything went down after Edie.”
“That’s exactly how I felt, to be honest,” I said. “I know I just sort of…went MIA afterward. I mean, I guess we were all just grieving in our own way. We were so young. None of us were equipped to deal with it.” She nodded and looked away, and I realized she wanted me to go on. “I always thought you had it worse than anyone, Sarah. Worse than everyone. I mean, you found her. God, I haven’t thought about this in so long.”
I’d done my crying and then I’d let Edie go, tucking the whole ordeal away so that it couldn’t taint what came before. Now I recalled a nugget I’d learned from fact-checking a feature on an innocent man, condemned by poorly recalled witness testimony: When you pull up a memory, you’re actually recalling the last time you remembered it—not the event itself. One day, one by one, we’d all stopped refreshing the memory. So I was surprised by how quickly the night came back to me now that I’d called it up. Now that Sarah was sitting across from me and talking about August 21, 2009, in dark, tenebrous terms.
It had been a Friday. A band had been rattling the windows in an apartment two floors up from Edie’s place, and a bunch of us were standing around at the concert, drunk or pretending to be. The guitars and bass were so loud, I could feel the vibrations in my collarbone. I remember registering with a flapping concern that I was too drunk, then scurrying out to the street, where a random girl had helped me hail a taxi home. Edie hadn’t been at the concert with us; Edie had been home alone, two floors down, crafting a brief suicide note and then pulling out the gun. Her time of death, we later learned, was while we were watching the band, their meandering chords cloaking the single gunshot. The rest I knew from my friends’ accounts, repeated so many times that I could see it: midnight, pitch black, Sarah hobbles into the apartment and flicks on the overhead lights, trying not to make too much noise in case Edie’s already asleep. Her screams had rattled the whole building, shrill and sharp and with that beelike whine hovering descant just above her cries.
“I know, it was awful.” She listed forward and I suddenly realized Sarah was drunk.
“You moved back home, right?” I’d always wondered if her parents had checked her into some kind of psych ward. I’d pulled away after a few weeks but continued to watch the amputated friend group from the relative safety of social media; Sarah had gone off the grid completely, deactivating her accounts and only reemerging a few years later with a new, smiling Facebook profile and friend requests all around.
“Yeah, my parents were pretty worried about me. I mean, I was acting like a lunatic, going all conspiracy theorist.”
“What do you mean?”
A sheepish laugh. “You remember. I guess I just didn’t want to believe my best friend could