The Collective(2)

Waverly says, “The recipient of the Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award this year is a young man who exemplifies public service,” and that’s when I finally catch sight of him, standing in the rear corner of the room, his golden curls slicked down, his parents sentries on either side of him. I’d recognize them anywhere. The father is square-jawed and straight-backed, the mother blond and beaming. He’s quite a bit taller now, the son. Apparently, he had some growing to do, but the parents haven’t changed a bit. The mother especially, in her seasonal wrap dress, big diamond at her throat. Her death didn’t change you.

I say it out loud. “Her death didn’t change you.” The hissing women whip their heads around in unison. I can feel the heat of their glares. I aim my eyes at my empty glass and take a deep breath, but then Waverly says the boy’s name. A punch to my throat. “Harris Blanchard.”

He strides up to the podium, taller Harris with his slicked-down curls, with his expensive suit and shiny shoes, and I hear Emily’s voice again. His name is Harris, Mom. He’s really nice. I remember her Instagram bio, Emily’s motto from an Instagram account I’d only learned of after her death, her words on the lips of a defense lawyer as expensive as the gray suit Harris Blanchard is wearing to accept his Martha L. Koch award. My daughter’s Instagram bio. The defense lawyer’s sneer. “No fucks left to give.” What does that mean to you, Mrs. Gardener?

Harris Blanchard pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it. My gaze pings on his mother, just as she mouths, I love you, sweetie, and I have no fucks left to give. The word bubbles up in my throat and escapes as a shriek. “Murderer!”

I start toward Harris Blanchard. I don’t get far.


I’M NOT ALWAYS this way. That is to say, nine-tenths of the time I’m calm and cool and going about my business. I do website design out of my home, and when I meet with clients—usually at the one coffee shop in town, since my house is halfway up a mountain and hard to get to—I put on a dress or a nice pantsuit and heels and behave in a professional manner. I work hard. I don’t miss deadlines or pull diva fits when someone wants a change to the design, even an ill-advised one. From time to time, I catch up with old friends over lunch. I make jokes, even.

But Emily is always on my mind, a ragged bundle of memories, cocooned in a constant, gnawing pain. To keep the cocoon tight and the pain at bay, I take pills. In my old life, I had no anxiety that couldn’t be cured by my weekly hot yoga class. Obviously, things have changed since then.

The meds I take don’t mix well with alcohol, which has never been much of an issue until tonight, when, after arriving at Penn Station two hours early for Harris Blanchard’s award ceremony, I stopped at a touristy Italian place, where an organist was playing a Doors medley at an ear-shattering volume.

My ex-husband, Matt, loved the Doors. I suppose he still does, but it feels weird to talk about him in the present tense, as we’ve barely spoken in three years. I’d gone into this place solely to get a bite to eat, but by the time the organist had screamed “Mr. Mojo Risin’” into the mic for the tenth or twelfth or maybe the hundred and fiftieth time, I’d downed three vodka rocks, and the cocoon had burst open. Emily was with me. I could smell that fruity bubble gum she used to love, her lily of the valley shampoo. I could hear her laughing along with the girls on the subway, and when I looked at the coat check girl at the Brayburn Club, I could see her face. Get out of here, I wanted to tell her. Get away from him. And then I decided to drink that glass of champagne. . . .

My whole body aches. My throat from screaming, or maybe it’s the man in the cheap suit who did it. The way he’d pinned my arms to my back and wrestled me to the floor, my cheek hot against the smooth wood planks, that smell of pine and old books and his sleazy, spicy cologne. It was an overreaction on his part. A show of force, his forearms pressed between my shoulder blades as though I had any chance of getting away, when he had a hundred pounds on me, easy. I knew it. You didn’t fit in at that place any more than I did. And the way you looked at me. That smile . . . If I’d been sober, if the room hadn’t been spinning and shimmering like something out of a bad dream, I’d have figured that douchebag for the rent-a-cop he was.

“Why would you go to the ceremony in the first place?” Reena says. “I don’t understand why you’d want to be anywhere near that guy.” Reena is one of my two arresting officers, and she is very kind. She knows who I am. She remembers my name from the news five years ago—one of the few people who still do. At the time, she’d been pregnant with her first child, a girl, which made her sympathize with me instead of the rich golden-haired boy with the angelic blue eyes and the premed major. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, she had told me in the squad car, than losing a daughter like that.

Reena and I are in the 13th Precinct house now. I’m being booked, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she talks to me, as though I’m an old friend who’s hit on hard times. When she asks me why I went to the ceremony, her partner, a stoic young man named Officer Ruiz, raises his eyebrows at her and clicks his tongue once, like a warning shot.

Reena says, “Don’t reply.” Both of them have the Miranda warning in mind, I know. But I don’t care.

“I wanted to see him. I wanted to see if he’s changed.”

Reena has large, dark, empathetic eyes, and like me she’s short, which allows her to gaze into my eyes directly.