The Collective(28)

The alarm on my phone goes off: 8:44 p.m. That’s four minutes before the time Dr. Duval has arrived for the past three days—8:48 sharp. And sure enough, as I watch the cluster of people leaving the station at 8:48, there he is—predictable as clockwork and alone as ever as he hurries down the stairs, straight for his usual space, so lean and purposeful, that bounce in his step, a man with somewhere important to be.

Maybe 0001 was right. Maybe names are dangerous. Because as Dr. Edward Duval, plastic surgeon, slides in behind the wheel of his shiny Porsche, I have such a powerful desire to start up my car and follow him that I need to restrain myself. One of the murderers mentioned in the Kaya chat was a plastic surgeon—a man who botched someone’s forty-year-old daughter’s breast reconstruction, succeeding in what cancer had failed to do. Insurance did pay the daughter’s husband an undisclosed sum, but the plastic surgeon did not admit error or guilt and kept his license in good name. “Is that you, Dr. Duval?” I say it out loud in my empty car, only vaguely aware that I’ve turned the ignition, that I’m pressing ahead and tailing him out of the parking lot, making a left shortly after he does. I’ll just follow him a little way. He won’t notice.

The chrome bumper gleams in the streetlamps, the car it’s attached to a sight to behold, the cost of it at least a year of tuition at Brayburn, maybe more. While we’re at it, that suit he’s wearing is probably two months of the mortgage Matt and I were paying, and I can only imagine what his house looks like, or the details of his most recent vacation. But there’s one thing I know for sure: Whether or not he’s truly the same plastic surgeon who killed that woman’s daughter, Dr. Edward Duval is rich enough to have gotten away with it.

With the back of his carefully shaven head in my sights, I feel the same rage that I did a week ago on the Brayburn campus, when I saw the boy who wasn’t Harris Blanchard but may as well have been. I could kill him, I think. I could kill him, and no one would see and the world would be a better place for it. . . . Just a little push on the gas, enough to send him flying across the overpass, that shiny silver Porsche sailing through the air, and it would no longer be role-play. It would be real.

If I were to do that. If I were to live out this fantasy and lean into the accelerator and smash into that Porsche with every ounce of anger inside me, if I were to crush the life out of him in this expensive sarcophagus he bought for himself, would I ever feel bad about it? I don’t think I would.

Shit. I’m following too closely. When he makes a right, I’m less than a car length behind him, and for a few seconds we’re both exposed in the brightness of a streetlight. I can see into the Porsche, his eyes in the rearview, aimed at me.

I ease my foot off the accelerator. He guns his. Zips through a yellow light and then through another. I stop at the red, breathing hard. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He saw me. I know he saw me. I tell myself that this is just a game. A role-play involving driving long distances, tracking the movements of strangers, buying knives . . . Elaborate, yes. But our grief is elaborate, messy, chaotic. It takes a lot to ease minds as damaged as ours. Ask any professional. Ask Joan, who once told me, We’re all going to die someday. Maybe you can at least find some comfort in that.

No. You can’t ask Joan. Nobody can ask Joan. Not anymore.

I pull over to the side of the road. It’s a quiet street, but I put my hazards on anyway, just in case. I click on the dome light, and in the ledger notebook I’ve bought especially for this assignment, I write down the date and the time of Dr. Duval’s arrival in the train station, just as I’ve done the previous three nights. My pulse races. I’m worried my sweaty hands are dampening the page, that when I eventually rip it out and send it to the PO box provided by 0001, the ink will be smeared and she’ll figure out that tonight I did something so wrong, it made me sweat.

I’ll have to keep my distance tomorrow night, that’s all. Tuck my hair under a scarf or a cap, maybe rent a different car. Don’t diverge from the rules. Don’t ever, never again.

I turn off my hazards, make a U-turn, press home on my GPS, and do exactly what it tells me, step by step by step. It isn’t until I’m back on the thruway that my breathing slows down and I’m relaxed enough to turn on the radio.

I press scan and stop at the first NPR I get—the end of some local program, where they’re talking about the best Indian restaurants in Westchester County. I listen without thinking, the smooth tone of the announcer’s voice like a long, warm bath, the melodious sound of the dishes a type of meditation. Saag. Curry. Vindaloo.

By the time the show is over, I’m relaxed again. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Dr. Duval has probably forgotten about me already—and even if he hasn’t, there are only two more nights to this assignment. I’m smart enough to record his arrival time for two nights without being seen.

The regular news starts up—the numbing grate of politics, some climate conference somewhere, designed to make us feel as though we still have control over something. I’m about to click off the radio when another newsreader takes over—a local one, a man, less polished-sounding than the first. Something about his voice makes me want to listen to what he’s saying, and when I do . . .

There are moments in my life—just a few of them—when the present and the future seem to bleed into each other and I see everything from the strangest perspective, understanding before I even know what’s happening that from here on in, nothing will be the same. Matt proposing to me was one—or rather, that moment just before he proposed, when he opened his mouth to speak and time stood suspended. Another was picking up the phone to learn that I was pregnant, my knees buckling before the IVF nurse said a word. The last time I felt it was in those few seconds before the police officer told me that Emily’s body had been found. I’ve always assumed it would never happen again, but I feel it now, as the announcer discusses an ongoing story, about a man in Colonie, New York, who died of an apparent suicide at three a.m. this morning, a homemade bomb strapped to his body. The collective is not role-play. The collective is real. I know it deep within me, even before the announcer identifies the suicide victim, and I bite my lip so hard, it bleeds. “The victim, fifty-five-year-old Ashley Shawger,” he says, “was the manager of Scott Bros. Hunting and Fishing in Troy, New York.”