The Collective(34)

So that’s what they are calling it now—the time before and after he stood trial for the rape of my daughter. A gap year.

I grit my teeth. Stand up. I head downstairs to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of wine. Toward the end of our conversation, Violet Langford had taken out her phone and shown me an article online that will be appearing in tomorrow’s print edition of the Colonie Herald, detailing a suicide note emailed to the newspaper by Ashley Shawger half an hour before the bomb exploded. The newspaper hadn’t released its contents until they’d been able to confirm that it had, in fact, come from Shawger’s computer, and Violet had peered over my shoulder, reading the words along with me: I killed a young man thirty years ago. I destroyed a family in the process. In detonating this bomb, I am simply doing to my own body what I did to the Langfords’ lives. Since the explosion had taken place at three a.m., Shawger had died on January 18—the thirtieth anniversary, to the day, of Nathan Langford’s death. “Karma,” I had whispered.

And she had replied, “Took the damn thing long enough.”

I think about Violet’s face, her green eyes clear and sparkling, her movements so light, as though she’d been dragging a weight behind her for years and had just cut it loose. She deserves that feeling, that lightness, the ability to move, to live again. We deserve it. I raise my glass to karma—which, I’m realizing, is sometimes a group effort.

I take a long swallow, and then I drink again, to the woman who typed out the note on Shawger’s laptop and sent it to the paper, to the ones who built the bomb, and to the others, myself included, who purchased its parts. To those who confronted Shawger in his home, who looked into his eyes as they attached the collar and the belt and set the timers and experienced his remorse—thirty years too late—and forced on him, the same way he had forced an early death on a woman’s son. To you who saw it. Who felt it.

I toast to those who drove the bomb makers to Shawger’s home and to those who picked them up and to 0001, who had so efficiently sent me to Shawger’s store to purchase what will no doubt be a murder weapon in another incidence of karma, eliminating a potential future witness in the process. Most of all, though, I toast Violet Langford, who has managed to live in this cold, chaotic world long enough to see justice served, at last.

After I’ve drained my glass, I go back upstairs, back to the dark web and back again to Kaya, where I send a private message to 0001.


0417: I was wrong to doubt the intentions of the collective. I never will again.



It’s all I write. The words disappear, but she doesn’t respond. I stand up. Walk downstairs. Pour myself another glass of wine. “Please answer.” I take a huge gulp, and then another, and before long I find myself pacing the kitchen in increasingly tight circles, finishing the glass but tasting nothing. “Please answer.”

I shouldn’t drink anymore. The room is starting to shimmer, and the meds/wine combination is making me weave on my feet.

When I look at the clock, I see that it’s been fifteen minutes, so I hurry back upstairs. Check the screen.

Still nothing.

This isn’t at all like 0001. She always answers private messages immediately. “No. Please. I want in. Please.” I start for the stairs. Turn back around. I can’t leave the room. I feel shaky, desperate. I turn back to my laptop, my eyes starting to fog. “Please don’t do this to me. I want in.” My voice cracks.

And then it comes. My answer. A faint beep, letting me know I have a new private message from 0001. “Please.” I open it, my hands trembling. . . .


0001: Do you watch The Bachelor?





Eleven


Weird that 0001 would bring up The Bachelor. When Emily was eleven, I caught her watching the dating reality show on her iPad and got so angry with her, I took her device away for a week. An overreaction, I know—particularly since I’d never watched The Bachelor myself and was basing everything on preconceptions. But somehow the idea of all these intelligent young women competing pageant-style for the love of some blandly handsome pharmaceutical sales rep who kept talking about his “journey.” . . . It seemed to me like the ultimate wrong lesson for a girl her age to be learning. (If she wanted to watch reality TV, I reasoned, why not something like Survivor or The Amazing Race or even American Idol, where winning was based on real skills?) I suppose deep down, I was afraid of her growing up with the priorities I’d had as a young woman in Southern California, when I spent a year and a half saving eight thousand dollars for a boob job because, college education or not, design skills or not, my dream, as taught to me by my own mother, was to be the final destination of a man’s journey.

Anyway, as far as I know, Emily stopped watching. And I didn’t think of The Bachelor again until one time a few years ago, when Luke and I were talking about the Harris Blanchard trial, and he said to me, “You got the villain edit.”

When I asked him to explain, he somewhat sheepishly told me that it’s a “Bachelor Nation term” for how one’s words and expressions can get spliced together to turn even the most reasonable person into the bad guy (or girl, as it were), all for the purpose of creating the most compelling narrative.

I said, “Did you really just use the phrase Bachelor Nation term?” And he confessed: Not only were he and Nora card-carrying citizens of Bachelor Nation who faithfully watched the show and all its incarnations, from Bachelor Pad to Winter Games, he also had a personal connection. Years before he met Nora, Luke had actually auditioned for The Bachelorette. “Ali’s season,” he told me. “I got a callback, but I didn’t make the final cut.”