The Collective(11)

I open the box, grab Matt’s old hair clipper and the scissors I used to cut Emily’s hair with when she was a little girl. Within the hour, my waist-length dirty-blond, gray-streaked hair is shiny black and barely reaches my chin. I examine my face in the mirror, the way the cut accentuates the sharpness of my jaw, the dark circles under my eyes, and my eye color, which the black dye seems to have brought out—a vivid, shattered green. I didn’t think a new hairstyle could make me look angrier, but that is what I seem to have accomplished. If I saw me walking down the street, I’d cross to the other side. Not a bad thing, really. And I do look different.

I run the blow-dryer over my hair, then go to the kitchen and heat up a can of soup, which I eat in silence, then grab a few slices of bread and eat those too. I’m hungrier than I thought. I wash it all down with a bottle of seltzer, then a glass of wine. By the time I head back upstairs to my office, the sun is setting.

Twitter is still up on my laptop screen. When I left the room, I’d been exploring the #MarthaMeltdown hashtag, and I see there are several more entries if I choose to refresh. I choose not to.


I’M EMAILING MY designs to Glynne when I notice another email, this one from Facebook. Invitation to Join a Group, it’s titled. I open it up, recalling the silver-haired woman outside the police station. The card she’d given me: Niobe.

It’s a group, she had said. For people like us.

Unlike Luke, I’ve never heard of the Niobe myth. Outside of my art classes, I was never much of a student—more interested in socializing. I did have a Greek mythology class sophomore year of college, but it was at nine a.m., so I was either dozing in my seat or back in my dorm room, nursing an Everclear hangover. I took the class pass/fail and barely passed. I learned nothing.

So I google Niobe now, and read her sad story, how she bragged about her dozen children so much, she enraged the Titan Leto, who sent her kids Apollo and Artemis down from Mount Olympus to kill all twelve of them.

It’s the price you pay for being dumb enough to feel secure in your life.

After her children were taken from her, Niobe was so destroyed by grief that she turned to stone and became part of a mountain herself, the face of Mount Sipylus, known in Turkish as A?layan Kaya (“the Weeping Rock”). Niobe’s tears turned to waterfalls that have never stopped rushing.

People like us.

I log in to Facebook, which is a kinder, gentler place than Twitter. At least, it is for me because I have very few friends and haven’t posted on it in five years. If anybody’s posted my viral video, they haven’t tagged me. But even if they have, that’s not why I’m here. I click on my messages. I’ve gotten a few—“inspirational” chain letters from people who honestly believe they’re “paying it forward” by clogging up people’s inboxes, plus some “are you okays” from Mount Shady acquaintances. I don’t open any of them. But I do click on one—the same invitation to join the private group Niobe. I accept.

The banner at the top of the group’s page is black, the word printed across it in simple white letters. Just the black box and the word. And a slogan at the side of the page. There are 132 members in this private group, which frightens me. It’s bigger than I thought. But maybe there’s safety in numbers.

At the right of the page is this description: Don’t let your pain turn you to stone.

I scroll through the page and start to read the posts. Tales of heartache and sleeplessness and agonizing grief, all from women. All from mothers. A retired high school teacher in Washington, D.C., awakened at three a.m. by a phone call—her only daughter, dead from a fentanyl overdose, administered by a rich druggie boyfriend who subsequently checked into rehab and spent no time behind bars. A nurse from Texas, her unarmed teenage son shot in the back by a man who successfully claimed in court that the boy “was behaving suspiciously” by walking through his neighborhood. A stay-at-home mom from Connecticut, her kindergartner the victim of a hit-and-run driver, never caught . . . Women from Miami and Los Angeles and rural Wyoming and the Boston suburbs, all of them robbed of their children by the actions of others—drunk drivers, incompetent doctors, and, yes, murderers with intent—all of whom, like Harris Blanchard, never got what they deserved. Women trying to accept their losses when their losses are unforgivable, unimaginable, unacceptable . . .

And here’s what I notice: None of these stories are told in the context of time. The deaths could have happened yesterday or last month or twenty years ago; no one specifies how much time has elapsed since the death of their child because they all understand that time doesn’t matter. The hurt’s the same. The wound never heals. The details never fade.


My son was wearing his varsity jacket. He was carrying his gym bag. He cut through that neighborhood coming home from a game. He had a calculus final the next morning. He texted me, asking if there was any ice cream left.



I keep reading as night falls outside my window and the room goes dark and cold. And as I read, I think again about that silver-haired woman—how she and her friend had watched me at the Brayburn event, the hiss of their whispers (had they said, That’s her?). I think about how she’d somehow known to find me outside the police station, at the exact moment I left with Luke, before we’d gotten into our cab. I think about how strange that was, yet somehow comforting, too, not so much the actions of a stalker as those of a guardian angel.