The notifications came accordioned, one on top of the other. Two calls from Simon. Five texts from him. Nothing from the police.
Trina scrolled through. She had a voicemail from Monica.
“Call me as soon as you get this. It’s not good.”
They’d met at a tedious wedding that was trying way too hard to be classy—a jazz band and chocolate cheesecake instead of wedding cake and cookies. No one was dancing, and the bar was only white wine and lite beer. Monica spotted Trina leaning on the bar and sidled up to her like an old friend, whiskey on her breath and her dark tendrils pulled into a half-up chignon with a dragon-tipped spike thrust through the knot of hair. The dragon had fake ruby eyes that glowed under the fluorescent lights of the hotel ballroom. “Want to get out of here?” she’d asked Trina, and when Trina demurred, explaining that she wasn’t into women, Monica laughed hard and loud, explaining to the surrounding guests desperately trying to get drunk on room temperature Coors Light that neither was she, “but she’d gladly try if it meant leaving this corpse of a party.” Monica liked to search out parties, too, although she was braver than Trina with seeking out bar mitzvahs and retirements, anniversaries and family reunions. She worked in insurance, somewhere beige and bloodless. That’s how she’d described it when Trina asked her over tequila shots at the bar they went to after the wedding. That’s why she went out to parties: Looking for blood.
Monica picked up on the second ring.
“Where have you been?” Her voice sounded stretched. “This is crazy.”
“My phone broke.” Trina looked at her empty glass, and then shoved it and the bottle away from her. The glass skidded along the counter and fell onto the kitchen tile, smashing as it hit the floor. Trina stood still, aware of small shards of glass near her stockinged feet. “I just got back from campus. Two detectives cornered me while I was walking after class.”
“They called me at work. I have no clue how they even know we’re friends.”
“What were they asking you?”
“About your weekend. About what you usually do on Sunday nights. They wanted to know if you drank, if you did any ‘recreational’ drugs.” Trina could hear the quotes as Monica said the word “recreational.”
“What did you tell them?” Trina drank, sure, but she didn’t use drugs. Well, except for some high-end pot she smoked by herself after a long day of grading. Or just a long day.
“I didn’t tell them anything. I didn’t even admit I knew you.”
“So you hung up on the police?” Trina was incredulous. The option never occurred to her. She should have walked away, without a word, today on campus when they cornered her.
“No. I stayed on the line and told them ‘no comment’ for everything.”
“You’ve got balls.” Trina was impressed.
“Let’s just say it’s not the first time I’ve been questioned by the police.” Monica sighed. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Trina explained what they’d asked her, about the guy she met at the wedding and the picture the cops showed her from his social media profile. “I don’t know what happened to him, but I swear to you, he was fine when I left his hotel room last night.”
“I know,” Monica replied. Trina heard some voices in the background, and then the click of a door closing. “You’d never hurt anyone.”
Trina paused, thinking about what to tell her friend next, but Monica pushed on. “Look, I’ve got people coming in for a meeting. I have to go in a sec, but I’ll call you later, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. Just don’t talk to the police without a lawyer. I know a good one through a client—I’ll text you her details.”
“Thank you,” Trina told her friend. “This is all surreal. I don’t know what to make of it all.”
“I’m here to help.” There was rustling, and Trina heard Monica give a muffled, “Be right there.”
“Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll text you that number.”
Trina hung up. A few moments later her phone pinged with a contact for a Blanche Grainger, Esq. The name sounded moneyed, and Trina thought of the dwindling account in her checking, and the nonexistent savings account she’d never started.
How was she going to afford a lawyer, with no money or connections? With Monica, a low-level insurance agent, as her closest friend? God, she wished she had a rich uncle or even a gainfully-employed sister to fall back on. That she wasn’t alone, almost on unpaid probation from work, hobbling along from one day to the next without anything to look forward to but the hot bite of cheap gin and the touch of a stranger’s sweaty palms on her waist while the deejay blasted the extended version of “YMCA”.
And of course that’s when her mind went to Simon.
But Trina hated herself for it. Hated herself for even thinking it.
She went to her freezer and pulled out a fresh bottle of gin. A glass lay on the counter and Trina couldn’t tell if it was clean or not. She poured a slug and swallowed it in one desperate movement.
Then she dialed his number. Because what else could she do?
She had papers to grade. And bills to pay. Men to fight. Police to avoid. Trina felt like a terrible country song, twangy and tuneless.
Simon didn’t pick up when she called. After weeks of tracking her down, coming to her place of work and interrogating her students, now Simon was avoiding her.
Trina threw the phone on the counter. She was tempted to go online and read the news, but she couldn’t risk the fear inside her chest swallowing her whole.
Broken glass glinted from the floor, and so she grabbed a dustpan and broom from the closet and swept up her mess, tipping it all into the trash can. She threw on her coat and headed out the door, not sure where she was going but needing to get out of the close air of her apartment. One of her neighbors was closing their door down the hallway, and Trina ducked her head inside her coat’s hood to avoid catching their eye. She’d caught a glimpse of herself in her hallway mirror before leaving. Mascara streaked under her eyes like two bruises, hair scraggly and unbrushed, and her skin was dull from drink and stress and lack of happiness. But she couldn’t stay inside. She needed to get out.
At the street she turned left and headed to the End Zone. The name suggested it was a sports bar, but it wasn’t, except for the small TV in the corner that was always showing some sporting event on low volume. Otherwise, it was all dark wood and red curtains and good liquor with some sort of shipwreck theme that Trina could never really place. The bartenders were aloof yet friendly, and the other drinkers left Trina alone, which was the best kind of bar as far as she was concerned.
Tom never liked bars, and before he died Trina had never really spent time in one. After they started dating in college, it never became part of their routine with their social circle. They were more of the board games and dinner party crowd. They’d gone to a few bars when they were on vacation, mainly to check out the food flagged as really good on one of the apps Tom liked to read through when they traveled. But Trina never bellied up to a bar—she’d never felt the need to—until she lost Tom.
Trina didn’t bother to glance at her watch when she stepped in. There was a quiet murmur inside, with a few groups of drinkers scattered around the small bar tables, and three lone men sat separately at the bar, wide spaces between them. Trina slid into the farthest stool on the corner and ordered a whiskey neat.
About to settle into her drink, Trina heard someone call her name as though they were happy to see her. She felt like garbage and would prefer to sink into some small slice of oblivion.
“I thought that was you!” Trina recognized Addy, her teaching assistant from last semester flagging her down. It had been a rough semester, in part because their work styles were decidedly different from each other. In other words, Addy was a woman in her late twenties unbruised by the world and on top of her shit, and Trina was a decade older and drowning underneath everything life had thrown at her so far. They hadn’t gotten along very well, and in the end there was a formal reprimand threatened because of an email Trina sent where she might have implied Addy was purposefully trying to turn her students against her.
So why was Addy acting as though she was happy to see Trina in the middle of the afternoon at a crappy bar? Trina watched Addy stumble over to her, her high-heeled ankle boots catching on one of the seams in the floor. Addy fell over, catching herself on a bar table. There was a rip in her black tights that snaked its way up her thigh.
Addy was drunk. Very drunk.
“Oh my God it’s so good to see you.” Addy slouched onto the bar stool next to Trina. Looking around, Trina spotted a few other familiar faces gathered in a booth in the back corner. Graduate students in the department huddled together in their dark designer-knock-off coats and cheap beers.
Trina gave the group in the corner a nod, as they all watched the scene between her and Addy unfold. The bartender, a grey-haired man with a squinty eye, came over and set another shot down in front of Trina. “From the kids over there,” he said, knocking his head back at an angle to indicate the grad student crowd.
“I didn’t know people from campus came here,” Trina said to Addy, because she wasn’t sure what to say.
“You’re from campus.” Addy smiled and a hiccup burst out of her mouth. “And I am too.”
“Fair point.” Trina downed the shot and stood up to get the hell out of there. This was the last thing she needed right now.
“I defended my dissertation today.” Addy threw her arms up in the air in triumph. “I passed!”
“Congratulations.” Trina couldn’t bring herself to give the standard response of calling Addy by her new title of “Dr. Simpson.” She remembered when she passed her defense. How she thought that meant she’d achieved everything she could have ever dreamed of. She had Tom, she had her Ph.D., she had a great job lined up. Life was working out, one achievement racked up at a time.
Trina thought she might burst out in a sob. She threw some money on the counter and headed for the door.
“Wait!” Addy cried out. “I wanted to tell you something. That’s why I came over here. It’s important.”
The last words smeared together in Addy’s mouth.
