The Collective(3)

I keep talking. “He’s taller now. Isn’t that interesting? Someone growing that much between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two? You know how tall Emily was when it happened? Four foot eleven. She was a late bloomer. I bet she’d be a lot taller than me now, if he’d given her the chance to grow up.”

Reena starts to say something, then stops.

“I know,” I say. “I know. Anything I say can and will. Go ahead. Hold it against me. I don’t give a crap.”

My head has cleared considerably. Enough to know that I’ve been charged with disturbing the peace, a violation, and drunk and disorderly conduct, a violation. When Reena initially told me this, I almost corrected her to add “violating an order of protection,” but stopped myself just in time. That order expired a year ago. Until tonight, I’ve done an excellent job of leaving the Blanchards alone.

Reena has removed something from my purse. She replaces it, quick and matter-of-fact, but I’m still able to get a glimpse. A fork from the Italian place. The memory comes to me in stabs, sharp and fleeting. Sliding it into my purse, my palms slippery on the handle. Kill him. Kill them all . . . I had thought it was a knife.

Reena hands me a voucher. “You’ll get all your possessions back once you’re released. You can make up to three phone calls. I’m going to take you to the holding cell now. My hunch is, you’ll get a DAT, so you won’t have to go through central booking. With any luck, you should be out of here and on your way home within a few hours. You’ll get your stuff back then; just give Officer Johnson the voucher. She’s the desk sergeant.”

She says all of this with a calm assurance, and in that sliver of time I feel protected, as though there’s a secret order in this world of which I am a member, and Reena is as well, and that secret, special sisterhood transcends her uniform and my handcuffs and binds us tighter than anything, even the air that keeps us alive.

We are mothers of girls.


I MAKE TWO phone calls. The first is to a client—an artist from Woodstock whose website I’m designing—telling her I probably won’t be able to make our eight thirty meeting tomorrow morning. The second is to Luke. Both go straight to voicemail.

The holding cell is empty and quiet. It’s located in the building’s basement, away from the bustle of the precinct house, but with a sad, restless energy of its own. There is no natural light here. The floor is rough concrete, and the bars are gray under the fluorescent lights. The air is thick with the smell of sweat and with something else I can’t name.

There is a metal bench against the wall, a metal toilet in the center of the room. I sit on the concrete floor and close my eyes and try to escape the ghosts, the voices. Why do you do these things, Camille? Why do you insist on opening wounds?

My heart is starting to pound. I put my head between my knees and take deep, deep breaths and imagine I’m on the beach, atop a mountain, my feet soaking in a stream. I picture myself at home, at my laptop, out of trouble. None of it works. My pulse is speeding up. I can feel it in my neck, expanding and contracting, the room swelling around me, my breath short and ineffectual. Panic attack. Great. I think of my pills at home in my medicine cabinet. More than 120 miles away. Don’t scream. My old therapist’s voice in my head again. Don’t scream, Camille; find your calming place.

“Bitch, don’t you think that’s what I’m trying to do?” I say it out loud. My voice pitches up and quavers, and I actually start to laugh. Thank God I’m alone in the holding cell, or they’d cart me off. Maybe I should be carted off; maybe that would be an act of kindness. . . .

I put my hands to my face. I feel the cool of my palms, focus on it, as Joan would have advised if she were here. Joan, my old therapist, with her red-framed glasses, her wild steel-colored hair, jasmine incense burning in the corner of the dimly lit office. The soft leather couch. Joan’s dry hands on my shoulders and the sound of wind chimes, like children laughing in another room. Find your calming place. I can see her face in my mind, the smooth young skin incongruous with the prematurely gray hair, hazel eyes magnified by thick lenses, the gentle scold in them. Breathe deep, in and out. Feel the weight and substance of your own body. She died a year ago, Joan. A late-night fall from the top of a staircase, and she was gone, at thirty-five years old. Like me, she lived alone and secluded. No one heard her cries for help. It was over a week before her body was found, glasses broken, back broken.

I shut my eyes tighter, and Joan’s face becomes the face of Lisette Blanchard, Harris’s mother, with her chemically smoothed brow and unnaturally bright smile. Her hair highlighted like mine used to be. She was wearing a red velvet dress at the ceremony. A wrap dress. Emily used to call wrap dresses Mom Uniforms, and she wasn’t wrong. There’s something so safe about them. Basic, as Emily would have said, how they flatter every shape in such a demure, dull, predictable way.

Lisette Blanchard has the same eyes as her son—blue and twinkling and completely untroubled. Before the rent-a-cop wrestled me to the floor of the Brayburn Club library, I caught a glimpse of the two of them: Lisette and Harris Blanchard staring at me with those wide blue eyes, delicate mouths dropped open. Identical masks of pity.

Find your calming place, Joan would say if she were here, if she were alive. They don’t matter. Their pity doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but the sound of the chimes. The sound of wind chimes. The laughter of a child I no longer have.