The Collective(13)

We called the police. They told us “don’t worry” and to “sit tight.” But of course we worried. Before I tell more of this story, there’s something you all need to understand. Our daughter may have been sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old, but in our town, all that meant was that she wore a lot of black and colored her hair and listened to music with swear words in it. She didn’t drink or do drugs. She’d never had a boyfriend or even been on a date. She worked hard in her classes and played the piano in the school jazz band. She liked to bake cookies. She was a virgin.

I was furious at my husband for letting her go to that frat party. I yelled and screamed at him, and he yelled back, telling me at least he had been around, that I was never around, always working. At dawn we got into my car and we drove to the campus. We saw some kids coming home from parties, and we asked them if they had seen our girl. Finally we found the frat house. Her winter coat was in the bushes outside the front door. She was found later that day, in the woods behind the school, barely alive. She clung to life in the hospital for three days—enough time to give us a shred of hope. Before she lost consciousness, she said, “He gave me too much to drink. He took me to the woods. He raped me.” She said it to me directly. She said it clearly, as weak as she was, because she needed me to know the truth. And then she said, “I’m sorry, Mom.” For going to the party, I guess. For believing a monster was “very nice.” I don’t know for what exactly, because those were her last words. I’m sorry. She apologized. Her murderer never did. He claimed they had consensual sex at the frat and that afterwards, she refused his offer of a ride home and drunkenly “ran off” with a “stranger” he “never got a look at.”

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Daria Ann (admin): That’s heartbreaking, Camille.

Camille Gardener: There was no stranger. My daughter said his name. She told me her killer’s name, and it was the same boy my husband had allowed her to go to the party with.

Daria Ann (admin): Could you ever forgive him?

Camille Gardener: If you mean my ex-husband, yes. If you mean the boy who raped her and left her to freeze to death? No. Never. Not even after he’s dead himself.

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Five


Emily is buried in Mount Shady Cemetery—a tiny graveyard situated, oddly, next to the town playground. Matt and I had thought about cremating her body, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing any more of her than I already had, and so we bought a simple gravestone, the plot just twenty feet away from the swing set she used to love when she was little. I haven’t been here in months because, to be honest, I don’t feel her presence at the grave site. Not the way I do when I’m listening to Luke’s chest.

But I am here now, nearly twelve hours after telling my story. A few of the women in the Niobe group suggested I do it. They seemed pretty adamant that it would help me “heal” and “get on the road to moving on,” and so I told them I would. I don’t think it will, but I respect them enough to keep my word.

I parked the car up the road, and I’m walking down the icy, pitted sidewalk in snow boots, the hood of my puffy coat pulled over my newly black hair. I bought flowers at the supermarket—pink roses that will surely die fast in this arctic weather—but after last night, and all the memories that came with it, I feel the need to leave something for her, something fresh and new and perfect.

It’s about one in the afternoon, but the sky is such a peaked gray that it feels more like early morning. There are hardly any cars driving up and down the streets, and the air is so cold, it sears my eyes. It’s impossible not to feel déjà vu. It was a record cold winter five years ago, and in the weeks following Emily’s death, I spent most of my waking hours outside, standing in the yard, or more often struggling up the mountain to the spot Emily and I used to picnic in when she was little—a big smooth rock next to a stream we named Unicorn River. Unicorn River was a sheet of ice at that point, and I’d sit on that rock and stare down at it until my feet felt dead and my lips turned blue. Reverse projecting, my therapist, Joan, called it. You’re trying to feel the way she did at the end.

Joan understood. Not because she was a therapist with a medical degree (from Brayburn of all places), but because she’d lost somebody too—her little brother, when she was a teenager—and it turned her hair steel gray forty years too early. Joan was the only one who knew how I felt. A young woman with an older woman’s name and hair and hardship, a psychiatrist who specialized in patients coping with the untimely death of a loved one and knew the feeling intimately. You have to stare it down, Joan would say. You turn away from grief and it will sneak up on you, grab you, smack you to the ground.

Our friends, on the other hand, kept trying to put me to bed. Get some sleep. You need your strength. People always tell the grieving to get some rest, take it easy, go to sleep. They ply us with chamomile tea and sleeping pills and bake us soporific casseroles. They shove us into bedrooms and cover us with heavy blankets and beg us to sleep, to stay out of the way, to remain unconscious so they won’t have to endure the discomfort of having to talk to us.

I found it all so disingenuous back then, but it didn’t really matter, as it turned out. A day after they posted bail, Harris Blanchard and his parents gave an interview to Rolling Stone, and that interview changed things. It was picked up everywhere, posted and tweeted and screenshotted and even discussed by the ladies on The View. And, since it was 2015 and fits of outrage weren’t quite as frequent or as disposable as they are now, it did not pass through the news cycle quickly. The story lingered like a bad storm. Reactions to it were ugly, even among the people who actually knew Matt and me. The awkward visits and casseroles and entreaties to sleep gave way to icy stares in the grocery store, my coworkers at the magazine literally whispering behind my back like third graders. She must’ve known what her daughter was up to. What kind of mother would let a girl run wild like that? Have you taken a good look at Camille, though? Seems genetic to me. Finally the editor in chief suggested I take a leave of absence. I didn’t fight it.