The Collective(4)

I’m screaming now, trapped in that dream I’ll never wake up from. The nightmare I’ve been living for the past five years, where the rich boy takes my daughter from me and smiles and thrives and wins awards.

I scream until I have no voice left and my throat is raw and bloody-feeling. I scream until I’ve screamed every thought out of my head, and I no longer care about the nightmare, or anything.

I curl up on the floor, the concrete cold of it, my forehead smashed into my knees. You’re a mess, I tell myself. More of an observation than a judgment.

When Emily was seven years old, she caught a bad case of the stomach flu. Matt and I were up all night with her, presumably taking turns, though I couldn’t sleep during my supposed downtimes. I was so concerned about Emily getting dehydrated. Between trips to the bathroom, I was trying to feed her tiny sips of ginger ale from a plastic cup with a teaspoon, the way my own mother used to do when I got sick. Finally the fever broke. She fell asleep with her little head on my shoulder, the spoon to her lips. Because you’re my mommy, she said as she was drifting off. Because it’s your job to keep me okay.

It’s strange, being this alone, without my phone or my laptop or even the TV to interrupt my thoughts. City girl in the country, Matt used to call me. But it isn’t technology I crave; it’s the way it numbs me.

Matt lives in Colorado now, atop a mountain. He skis and works at a marijuana dispensary, a twentysomething free spirit trapped in a fifty-year-old body. He’s been aging backward since I first met him, but Emily’s death accelerated the process. Come with me, Cammy, Matt begged me three years ago, when our marriage was still hanging by the spindliest of threads. Come with me and let’s start all over. I said no, and he got angry. Blamed Luke. The way you sneak out to see him, to be near him. You’re attached to him, and it’s sick, Camille. You’re sick.

I’m relaxed now, the fight screamed out of me. I stretch my legs and close my eyes for what feels like hours. I drift off, and come back and drift off again, waiting for whatever it is that’s going to happen next.

As it turns out, what happens next is Luke.





Two


When we’re outside the police station, Luke tells me I look like shit. He asks if I’ve eaten or slept since the last time I saw him, and even though the last time I saw him was five and a half months ago, he makes it sound like that’s a serious question.

I force out a laugh. “Of course I have.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Stop it.”

“Well, I’m taking you out for pancakes, whether you want them or not.”

Luke says it like a tough guy. Well, as tough as any guy can sound when saying I’m taking you out for pancakes. I can’t help but smile at him. “Whatever you say, Sarge.”

I know it’ll make him roll his eyes, and it does. Luke Charlebois is a successful character actor with a master’s degree from NYU. He’s played Falstaff in a Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry IV, Part 1 and understudied Lennie in Of Mice and Men on Broadway. He’s been singled out in The New Yorker for his turn as a dying high school football coach in an Indie Spirit–nominated film, and he’s won three Obie Awards and received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Run Series. But it’s his current TV role, as tough-as-nails Sergeant Edwin “Sarge” Barkley on the network crime show Protect and Serve, that’s put Luke on the map. When he came to pick me up at the police station, no fewer than half a dozen cops asked him for his autograph.

“That line can and will be held against you,” says Luke, who is far too highbrow to be anything other than embarrassed by his cop-show fame, and far too sensitive to badger me for answers regarding my drunk and disorderly arrest. He knows me well enough to guess the reasons, and for him, I suppose, that’s enough.

I put a hand on each of his big shoulders and gaze up into his broad, dimpled face in the purple glow of the Manhattan night. It is the kindest face I’ve ever known. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Well . . . for one thing, dragging you out of your home at . . . what time is it, anyway?”

“I’m a New Yorker. We never sleep.”

“I think the saying is about the city. Not the people who live there.”

He kisses me on the forehead, and I’m aware of someone watching us. A fan of his, probably. They’re everywhere. “You know I love you,” he says, and I don’t care who’s watching.

“Luke?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I?”

He holds out his arms. I rest my face against his chest. Press my ear to his thick sweater and wind my arms around him, pulling his body close enough so I can hear the heartbeat. We stay like that for a long time, my head pressed against him, Luke tolerating my embrace in the gentlest of ways until finally I get it together enough to pull away. “Thank you.”

Maybe I am sick. Maybe something inside me got broken when Emily died, and it will always be there, rattling around, hurting me. I accept that. I’d rather be hurting forever over Emily than living the way Matt does, as though she never happened.

Luke brushes a lock of hair out of my eyes. “When are you going to stop all this stuff?”

“With the Blanchards?”

He nods.