The Collective(8)

I spring away from Luke, my face flushing. “What time is it?”

“Huh?”

The sun’s pressing through the windows, and the door to Luke’s bedroom is open, Nora having left for work. I yank my phone from the nearby charger, power it up, and look at the screen. Eight a.m. My screen is striped with texts, three of them from women I used to know, mothers of Emily’s closest friends. Their names are Lisa, Denise, and Sylvie, and when I read their texts, it’s hard not to picture the three of them clustered around a cauldron.


Camille!! Are you okay?

Saw what happened at the Brayburn club. If you need someone to talk to, I’m here. . . .

Honey, you need help. Please seek it. I’m begging you, as a caring friend.



The final text is from Glynne Barrett, the Woodstock artist. It’s the only one I don’t delete: Does 2 p.m. work for you?

I text back quickly: Yes!

“I need to get home.”

Luke says something about giving me a ride to Penn, but I tell him the subway’s faster—I’ll probably make it there before he’s able to get his car out of the garage. I kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you,” I tell him. Even though he hates it when I thank him for anything. “And please thank Nora for me. It can’t be easy, sleeping alone while you’re out there on the couch . . .” I decide not to finish the thought. “Anyway. I wish you guys would come up and visit me sometime. I have a big house. Lots of room. I’d like to return the favor.”

“Thanks, Cam. We just might do that.”

Once we’ve said our goodbyes and my hand is on the doorknob, Luke touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into his eyes and know exactly what’s on his mind. Luke is so easy to read. I often wonder if it’s because of his acting training—that Stanislavskian tearing down of walls over years and years and years—or if it’s simply me, the connection we share. “I’ll be okay,” I tell him.

“Can you promise me something?”

“Depends.”

“The next time you plan on doing something like you did last night, can you call me first?”

Interesting choice of words. I never planned on doing what I did last night. I’m not that crazy, and I tell him so.

He says nothing.

“Come on, Luke. You know me.” I start out the door, but he blocks my way.

“There’s this one director on Protect and Serve. He meets the leads privately once a week, shows us our worst takes.”

“He sounds like an asshole.”

“Most people think so. But I find it helpful.”

“Like a ‘scared straight’ thing? Only it’s bad acting instead of drugs?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I’m not going to show you the video. But . . . I took a look at it last night, after you fell asleep. And I think you need to watch it. On your own. When you get home.”

“To scare myself straight.”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

He’s serious. I can’t believe this.

“I had some drinks to calm my nerves. They didn’t mix well with my antianxiety meds, which . . . I guess is kind of ironic, really. When it comes to calming a person down, two rights can make one hell of a wrong.”

“Camille.”

“That wasn’t me at the Brayburn Club, Luke. It was a bad chemical reaction.”

He sighs heavily. Says it again. “Camille.” It makes me hate my own name, that tone of his. It annoys me nearly as much as the concern-trolling of Lisa, Denise, and Sylvie, who, by the way, I haven’t spoken to in probably a year.

Luke isn’t like them. He has a good heart, in every sense. He just doesn’t know me quite as well as he believes he does. I give him a forced smile, a hug goodbye. “Your concerns are duly noted, Sarge.”

I say it because I know it will piss him off.


WHEN I GET back to the Rhinecliff station, there’s a ticket on my car. I parked in the short-term lot rather than the overnight one and thus overstayed my welcome; I hadn’t expected, after all, to spend the night in jail. But the car hasn’t been towed, and I choose to take that as a positive.

It’s twenty degrees colder up here than it was in the city—a bracing cold that bites at my cheeks and makes my eyes water. And as I drive over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, over the frozen tundra of the Hudson River, the crumbling piles of ice blending into the dull sky, I think about how I used to love the winter when Emily was alive. I was in a poetry workshop back then, and I wrote some terrible haikus about the “kindest season,” how it buried the dead leaves and blown-down branches of fall beneath a blanket of white and put everything to sleep. Winter was, I believed, a chance to hide all the year’s mistakes, to freeze them dry. It was a chance at rebirth.

What a load of crap that was.

My phone dings. An incoming text, but I don’t even glance at it. After an arrest and a parking ticket, the last thing I need is to get pulled over for texting and driving. It dings again and then, when I’m over the bridge and heading up Route 209, it rings into the Bluetooth and I answer it.

“Oh, hello, Camille.” It’s Glynne Barrett, and she sounds strange—as though she’s surprised to hear from me, even though she’s the one who called. “I just texted you.”