“Yeah,” Gabe mumbled. “Me neither, come to think of it.”
“What?” I asked, looking up at him with a jolt, thinking I must have heard him wrong—or simply misunderstood what he was saying.
But then he clarified. “I haven’t been back there since the night your brother died, either,” he said, taking a sip of his beer.
“Wait. You were there that night?”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “You don’t remember?” He let out a nervous laugh, which I would overanalyze later, and added, “Thanks a lot.”
As I stared back at him, my heart began to race, and the haziest recollection of Gabe sitting at the bar, wearing a gray hoodie and nursing a pint of beer, returned to me. I wondered if it was a real memory—or just the power of suggestion. “Were you wearing a hoodie?” I asked, squinting into space.
“Hell if I know—” he started to say, then stopped. “Well, actually, I think I was. Maybe…”
“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?” I asked him, incredulous.
“Because you were there, that’s why,” Gabe said, softening the sarcastic edge I’d usually get with such an answer, given the emotional territory we were in.
“Did we speak?” I asked.
“No. Not really,” Gabe said with a little shrug. “We just said hello…in passing. That was pretty much it. But I was kind of sitting near you—at the end of the bar. Right at the corner. For some reason I do remember that.” He points at the corner of the napkin and says, “You were like this, facing the street…and I was right here, facing the back of the bar.”
Suddenly I had no appetite. I pushed my plate away and asked who he was with. I wanted, needed, to know every detail.
“Nobody, really,” he said, which was par for the course. “I knew a lot of people there. But I didn’t go there with anyone.”
My hands turned clammy, the way they always did when I thought about the nauseating minute-to-minute time line of that night. “What time did you get there? What time did you leave?”
Gabe used a chip to scrape the last bit of guacamole from the little bowl between us. “I don’t know, exactly,” he said, the chip halfway to his mouth before he changed his mind and dropped it onto his plate.
“Well, then, approximately?” I pressed.
He insisted that he truly didn’t know—that he couldn’t even ballpark it. “My guess would be as good as yours.”
“No,” I said with a sad little laugh. “Actually that’s not true. Your guess would still be better than mine.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because it does,” I said.
This answer must have been good enough for him, because he said, “Okay…well, if I had to guess…I’d say I got there around ten…and then left around…midnight. Maybe twelve-thirty.”
I closed my eyes, wondering if we could have been saying hello at the precise minute that Daniel was killed. What was I doing at exactly ten-fifty-four that evening? I had asked myself that question many times, though never with Gabe in the frame. And of course, that was before your cellphone could pretty much give you an answer, providing a near-perfect time-stamped record.
“What else do you remember?” I said. “About me on that night?”
Gabe bit his lip, then said, “Well…you were pretty lit. I remember that.”
I nodded, feeling a rush of thick shame, not for the first or last time. Shame that I was at a bar at the moment my brother was killed. Having fun. Laughing. Flirting with boys—probably lots of them. Getting blackout, stupid drunk.
“What else?”
“To be honest, Jo…that’s it. I don’t remember anything else.”
I could tell he was lying or at least covering something up because Gabe almost always told the truth, hence eliminating the need to add the “to be honest” qualifier.
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Tell me. What was I doing? Who was I talking to?”
“I don’t remember. A lot of people.”
“?‘A lot of people’ or you ‘don’t remember’? Which is it?”
He took a deep breath, then an even longer exhale. “I honestly don’t remember…exactly. A ton of people were there that night….It was near the holidays so everyone was home….”
“I know that,” I said, frustrated. Of course I knew it was near the holidays. It was December freaking twenty-second. I told him to please tell me something I didn’t know.
“As we’ve established,” Gabe said, sounding weary but patient, “I don’t know what you remember, and what you don’t remember. So please don’t get mad at me here. I’m trying the best I can to answer your questions.”
“I’m not getting mad at you,” I said, still sounding mad, but feeling something closer to desperation. “Just please tell me everything!”
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hand. “Shawna was there. You were talking to Shawna for a while…and a lot of the other usual Lovett girls from your class….”