The Big Rewind Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my mom and my dad,

  and to everyone who’s ever made me a mix

  EPIGRAPH

  I’ve been searching high and low for you

  Trying to track you down

  —Warren Zevon, “Searching for a Heart”

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1: Brooklyn (Owes the Charmer Under Me)

  Chapter 2: The Toughest Girl in the World

  Chapter 3: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now

  Chapter 4: The Battle of Who Could Care Less

  Chapter 5: Boys on the Radio

  Chapter 6: What Have I Done to Deserve This?

  Chapter 7: Watching the Detectives

  Chapter 8: The Boyfriend Box

  Chapter 9: Everyday is Like Sunday

  Chapter 10: Sucker for Mystery

  Chapter 11: Say You’ll Be There

  Chapter 12: This Charming Man

  Chapter 13: Not About Love

  Chapter 14: The Impression That I Get

  Chapter 15: Running on Ice

  Chapter 16: Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not

  Chapter 17: Angels of the Silences

  Chapter 18: A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing)

  Chapter 19: When You Were Mine

  Chapter 20: Another Sad Love Song

  Chapter 21: Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now)

  Chapter 22: Hold on My Heart

  Chapter 23: Like a Virgin

  Chapter 24: Sing for Absolution

  Chapter 25: Letters from the Wasteland

  Chapter 26: Gimme the Goods

  Chapter 27: People Are People

  Chapter 28: Counting Back to 1

  Chapter 29: I Never Talk to Strangers

  Chapter 30: Accidentally Like a Martyr

  Chapter 31: Bad Liver and a Broken Heart

  Chapter 32: William, It Was Really Nothing

  Chapter 33: Nobody’s Baby Now

  Chapter 34: Bigmouth Strikes Again

  Chapter 35: Can’t Stand Losing You

  Chapter 36: Building a Mystery

  Chapter 37: (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night

  Chapter 38: A Sorta Fairytale

  Chapter 39: Some Guys Have All the Luck

  Chapter 40: Cinderella Undercover

  Chapter 41: Smile Like You Mean It

  Chapter 42: Learning the Hard Way

  Chapter 43: What a Fool Believes

  Chapter 44: Everything Falls Apart

  Chapter 45: King of Wishful Thinking

  Chapter 46: Keep Me in Your Heart

  Chapter 47: Turn That Heartbeat Over Again

  Chapter 48: Love Me Nots

  Chapter 49: Only the Good Die Young

  Chapter 50: Mike Post Theme

  Chapter 51: All My Little Words

  Chapter 52: Policy of Truth

  Chapter 53: Throwing It All Away

  Chapter 54: Here’s Where the Story Ends

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  BROOKLYN (OWES THE CHARMER UNDER ME)

  Nothing good ever comes in the mail. After my lack of cash forced me to let my Mojo subscription lapse, the only time I ever saw the name Jett Bennett was on cell phone bills and student loan payments. Six months ago a Swiss Colony Christmas catalog had arrived on the first chilly breath of fall, and I devoured it with the intensity of a teenage boy on his first porn site. I kept the battered pages hidden under my mattress long past Christmas and into spring, telling myself that this would be the year I splurged and ordered those beautiful petit fours. I told myself the same thing every year.

  That day’s mail brought two bills, a flyer for a new dry cleaner, and a small package wrapped in a magazine ad with a bunch of cartoon frogs and too much tape. I’ve got a smartphone, but I’m not too young to remember the exact weight and feel of a Maxell mix tape. They’re just slightly heavier than a regular cassette, weighed down with love and angst, track lists thick with rubber cement and collage.

  But this tape wasn’t for me. It had a Binghamton postmark and was addressed to my downstairs neighbor, KitKat. She was a party on a purple ten-speed, a neat-banged brunette who baked red velvet cupcakes and pot brownies, read tarot, and had both an NES and a Sega Genesis. For five hundred bucks a night, she’d pedal to your place and kick your party into stoned, sugared-up, future-knowing, eight-bit overdrive. Of course someone was sending her mix tapes. I was just surprised it wasn’t packaged in a vintage suitcase or a mason jar filled with glitter.

  I’d arrived in New York just over a year ago, with a master’s in music journalism and big dreams of backstage passes and bustling newsrooms. But instead of following Toto on their first U.S. tour in nearly a decade or snagging an exclusive interview with Daft Punk, like my grandmother assured me I would do the moment I arrived in her city, I wound up with a third-shift temp gig proofreading for a private investigating firm. It was not as glamorous as Humphrey Bogart or Jim Rockford made it seem, but it beat waiting tables—at the very least, it involved less small talk.

  But what my grandmother did give me was a sublet of her rent-controlled apartment in the Barter Street district of Brooklyn, just east of Williamsburg and, judging by how people dressed, slightly beyond Thunderdome. She was traveling on a transcontinental honeymoon with her new husband, Royale, and I had been on the verge of getting kicked out of the eleven-person, four-bedroom artist loft I had been living in over in Williamsburg. For $350 a month, I’d gotten an inflatable twin mattress between two curtains, two milk crates for storage, one shelf in our room’s mini fridge, a five-minute shower at 10:25 P.M., and a half hour of television every Tuesday and Saturday. I’d once woken up to my left-side neighbor filming me for one of the random-image films he made us watch during his Monday night TV time, while my right-side neighbor snorted a lot of coke and screamed at her canvases because she said the fear in her paint made for bolder colors. One of the girls at MetroReaders, the temp agency that kept me in Trader Joe’s and Netflix, had known the apartment had an opening, and I’d conned my way in by telling them I was a performance artist. But just before my grandmother left, I suspected they were catching on to the fact that my “performance” consisted of eating pesto and watching movies on my laptop. I managed to get out before they called one of their “artist meetings,” where they all talked shit about someone under the guise of intervention. I saw it coming and had moved into my grandmother’s place before they woke up the next afternoon.

  KitKat was the first person I’d met when I moved in; she showed up at my door with a basket of muffins and lightbulbs, a list of takeout places, and the offer to show me around the neighborhood when I got settled. In the six months I’d been there, we’d only hung out a few times, but I liked her in a big-sister kinda way.

  I loved the place, with its enormous claw-foot bathtub and tiny kitchen, and there was a part of me that hoped my grandmother would move into Royale’s penthouse on Ninetieth and Central Park West, allowing me to stay there forever. I could easily afford the $700 a month she’d paid since 1975, when Barter Street was a working-class neighborhood made up of beat cops and public school teachers instead of a hipster paradise of art-house baristas and record store clerks.

  My grandmother was, by far, the oldest person in her four-story building, a rent-controlled holdout who made tea when the other, younger tenants came by to borrow her chairs for their parties. When I first moved in, every person I met told me how cool they thought my grandmother was—they loved her antique china set, her huge collection of art books, her stories of what the neighborhood was like whe
n she’d first signed the lease. In a way, I suppose, my grandmother was the original Barter Street hipster, which probably explains why she stayed on the block as long as she did. She was even in on the Barter Street system, helping the neighbors’ kids or siblings with math homework in exchange for help fixing her computer or setting up her TV.

  But she had been single for nearly forty years after my dad’s father died, and, in exchange for borrowing her vintage lace tablecloths for a photo shoot, one of her neighbors had helped her set up a dating profile on a site for mature singles. Almost immediately, she met Royale, and they were married a year after their first date. He, a former Manhattan law partner, had whisked her away to visit all the sights that she, a modest-living CUNY math professor, had only ever seen on the Travel Channel, leaving me to sublet.

  I took my mail upstairs and left it in a single pile on the kitchen table. I would sort it later, but the afternoon was getting late, and that meant KitKat was probably baking. Dropping by with a piece of her mail would surely land me a cupcake, a cup of tea, and a chance to chat at the table she’d decoupaged with pictures of food. All I could hope was that she wasn’t baking vegan, gluten-free bricks for Perk Up!, the coffeehouse at the end of our block, where all the too-hip mommies drank soy lattes and tried to out-mommy each other. KitKat insisted Perk Up! used to be a cool place, filled with straight-edge types writing screenplays, but all the ex-hipsters who’d wed in handfasting ceremonies, where the guests dressed like Coachella rejects, needed someplace to blog about the organic bamboo nappies Artisan and Corindolyn were wearing. Better there than Egg School, where the rest of us brunched.

  If she were any other neighbor, I would have just left the package on the table next to the mailboxes, but KitKat had established, early on, that she didn’t want her mail left out. But she did it in her quirky KitKat way, bringing me an envelope of mine that had gotten put in her box by mistake, along with a tiny bottle of sparkling lemonade. She explained that if I got a piece of her mail, I should bring it right to her, and it made enough sense that I didn’t question it.

  But just in case she had left to make a delivery, I took her extra key. Whenever she went away, she left me in charge of feeding her fat old cat, Baldrick, paying me with a pancake breakfast and a week’s worth of Nintendo rentals, which still wasn’t enough time for me to beat Legend of Zelda II. But that’s how things were done around here—cash was seen as a vulgar necessity, something strangers exchanged because they didn’t trust you to come through with the offer to fix their laptop or babysit on their anniversary. Even Egg School, where a table on Sunday had more trade value than a vintage British bicycle, seemed reluctant to take actual, real payment, and every so often held pledge drives where food was traded for services at a later date. The system had taken a little getting used to, but now there were times I had to remind myself that the subway’s MetroCard machine didn’t take album reviews as payment for goods rendered.

  Outside her apartment, I could hear Baldrick yowling through the door and I panicked, wondering if she’d gone away and I had forgotten to feed him. For a while, it had seemed like she was going out of town every weekend, but she hadn’t asked me to watch him in a few weeks. Or had she? How long had he been down here alone?

  “KitKat?” I called, knocking. “KitKat, I’ve got some of your mail.”

  When she didn’t answer, I unlocked the door. Baldrick got out of my way and ran into the kitchen. I followed him, and there was KitKat, sprawled out on the linoleum, blood splattered across her cabinets and pink oven like gory spin art. She was still wearing the David Bowie T-shirt apron I’d traded to her for baking a red velvet birthday cake for my friend Sid, but someone had done a hard job on her face. Her marble rolling pin was sticking up in the sink, the water stained pink with her blood. I choked back sick, shuddering hard. This couldn’t be real. This had to be a dream brought on by a cop show marathon with Sid, too much red wine, and work anxiety all jumbled into one terrible nightmare I was going to wake up from any second. . . .

  But the acrid smoke billowing out of the oven told me it was anything but a bad dream. She’d long ago disabled her smoke detector; it could have been days—or a fire—before anyone found her down here. If I was going to turn it off, I was going to have to step over her.

  “Sorry, KitKat,” I muttered. “I’ll call the cops soon, I promise.”

  I took two deep breaths, counted to five, and made my way to the stove. I turned off the heat and opened the door, coughing. Waving the smoke away, I saw a burned pan of brownies. Whoever had come for KitKat had left without her stash.

  I put on an oven mitt and gathered up the pan like I was collecting a dish after a potluck. Baldrick was howling from the living room in a way that broke my heart. I couldn’t just leave him there, crying next to the body of his cat-momma, possibly to step all over her crime scene more than he already had. I took him up under my other arm, cooing as best I could to comfort him. I carried the cat and the pan upstairs, Baldrick howling, the halls filling with the pungent scent of weed and scorched chocolate. Inside my apartment, I set Baldrick down and double-bolted the door. I took the pan to the window and tossed the brownies into the alley.

  Then I ran to the bathroom and threw up everything I’d eaten possibly ever.

  Baldrick wandered in and perched on the edge of the bathtub to watch me retch.

  “Next time, hold back my hair,” I gasped, slamming the lid closed and flushing. “What the hell happened to her?”

  Baldrick told me everything, but unfortunately, I didn’t speak Cat. I finally managed to stand on shaking legs, wobbled around until I found my phone, and called the police. It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized I still had her tape in the back pocket of my skinny black jeans.

  Chapter 2

  THE TOUGHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD

  When the cops swarmed the building to take statements, Linda in 2B got the cute, spiky-haired blond in the sharply pressed uniform. I got interviewed by a thick, balding detective with a doughnut gut and a bad tie knotted so tightly his neck had a muffin top. He asked about the body. I told him how I’d found her. He asked about her visitors. I hadn’t seen any since her boyfriend, Bronco, left this morning. He asked about the oven. I wove him a tale of flaming cupcakes I bravely doused in the sink and threw out the window so as not to endanger the other residents. He asked about the smell of weed. I told him I knew nothing.

  A woman from Animal Control checked Baldrick for injuries and wiped blood from his paws. Detective Muffin Top took my fingerprints for crime scene elimination. “Did you hear anything that sounded like a struggle?” he asked.

  “I just got home from work,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Where do you work?” He tried to make it sound like a casual conversation, but I knew better.

  Still, I wasn’t going to dick around. “I’m a temp with MetroReaders,” I said. “I can give you their number, if you want.”

  That answer seemed to satisfy him. “Any idea who might have done this?” he tried. “Did she have any ex-boyfriends, bad neighbors . . . ?”

  I shook my head. “Everyone loved KitKat,” I said. The sad truth was that I didn’t know that for sure. She had lots of friends, plenty on Facebook, a thousand or so Twitter followers, but we’d never exchanged anything beyond neighborly laughs and the occasional cup of tea. For all I knew, she had a stalker or a customer who felt screwed, deep gambling debts, or a side business selling goods a lot harder than grass and gluten.

  He flipped his notebook closed and flattened his lips in something between concern and an attempt at comfort. “You got someplace safe to stay tonight?”

  “I’ve got some people I can call,” I said. “You need that phone number?”

  He nodded and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. I hoped he wouldn’t call. The last thing I needed was to lose this job because the dispatcher at MetroReaders got skittish. He gave me his card and put on his coat and was gone.

  But I
didn’t call anyone. I wasn’t ready to explain what I’d seen. I didn’t want to be the one to set off the chain of information: KitKat’s dead. OMG, KitKat was murdered. Did you hear about KitKat?

  I took a walk down to the Key Food and bought cat food and some litter. I bought a foil turkey pan to use as a cat box. I bought some Doritos because, fuck, I deserved them. I started to buy chocolate cupcakes, but just that word on the package reminded me of her bloody face. I put them back on the rack. My hands were shaking as I counted out the bills at the register, and as I approached my building, I had to force myself to go inside. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Crying required breath, and I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs.

  At home I set up Baldrick and put Warren Zevon on my suitcase record player. Normally, the opening notes of “Frank and Jesse James” were narcotic enough to send me into a blissful music coma, but today I couldn’t sit still long enough to let Zevon’s deceptively simple piano tranquilize me. I let the record play out the A-side and paced around the apartment in spinning silence, trying to sort out my head.

  What are the stages of grief when you hardly knew a person? KitKat and I were friends enough to chat, sure, but the most intimate moment we’d shared was one she hadn’t been alive to experience. I had the honor and the horror of finding her body. Not the cleaning lady or the cops, just a neighbor with a mistaken piece of mail. Maybe I’d spared Bronco or KitKat’s sister, Hillary, from seeing her like that, but in sparing them, I was assured that I’d never forget what I saw.

  I finally called Sid. I didn’t tell him anything, just asked if we could meet. He suggested a burger at the Happy Days Diner in Brooklyn Heights. I agreed even though I didn’t feel like eating. The Doritos still sat, unopened, on my kitchen table.

  By the time I got to the subway, word of KitKat’s death had already gotten out. Girls in floral-print dresses and Laura Ingalls boots were sobbing over her Tumblr, and guys in bright cardigans were faking their grief to try to get laid. I dug my fingers into the plastic seat, choking back a scream. In the fashion show that was the L train, I was wearing my laundry-day T-shirt from the “Save Our Bluths”–themed run last fall for Habitat for Humanity, meaning that I was completely invisible in a surging tide of seafoam Toms and ModCloth skirts.