The Collective(40)
I put the envelope down. Turn to her. “I would like to hear about him.”
She takes a breath. “Okay,” she says. “So first of all, our son Tyler was what we used to call a ‘change-of-life baby.’ I was told I couldn’t have children, but then surprise, surprise . . . I was forty-seven years old.”
“Wow.”
“He was a miracle,” she says. “He was also born a girl.”
I nod.
“He knew from pretty early on that he was different, and so my husband and I . . . Well, Carl wasn’t as on board with it as I was at first, but he came around. We let him live the way he wanted to. He went from Taylor to Tyler. And even though this was some years ago and our town isn’t exactly San Francisco, his elementary school was understanding. He had friends. Played sports with the other boys. It was nice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then came junior high.”
Another thumping noise from the back of the car. Neither one of us pays attention.
“Junior high is hell under the best of circumstances,” I tell her.
“Exactly. And for Tyler, it was the darkest pit of it. The kids there bullied him, emotionally, physically. He’d come home with bruises, pink paint thrown on his clothes, in his hair. It was relentless.”
“Did you talk to the principal?”
“Oh yeah. Repeatedly. We got a lot of lip service, but no action. She seemed to think Tyler brought it on himself.”
“Seriously?”
Wendy shrugs. “What are you gonna do? It’s a small upstate, redneck town.”
“Did you homeschool?”
“Yep. Which would have been fine. But those assholes kept it up online. I’d go into his room. Catch him looking at his laptop, crying.”
“Did he ever show you what they were saying? Talk to you about it?”
She gives me a side-eyed glance. “You had a teenager. What do you think?”
I swallow hard. Emily’s secret Instagram accounts. The photographs. The poses. No fucks left to give. And we never would have known about any of it. Never . . .
“So this one boy. He was the leader, the douchebag in chief, and one time he followed Tyler home from his piano lesson and he . . . God, all these years, I still can’t say it. . . .” A tear trickles down her cheek. She swipes it away. “He . . . Jesus. I can’t . . .”
She brushes off another tear, takes a shuddering breath, and clears her throat. “He took away Tyler’s innocence. How’s that?”
I open my mouth, but I can’t speak. The things they do to our children. Our babies.
“It wasn’t something that our son could easily recover from. But maybe . . . if we’d been able to get him help. The thing is, he never told anybody.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Not until we read it in his suicide note.”
My breath catches. “Oh my God. Oh, Wendy.”
“The police said there were no witnesses. They said Tyler was deeply troubled. He could have lied in the note. . . .”
“No. Awful.”
“King Douchebag never spent a day in court.”
Several seconds pass. I shake my head. I can’t find anything to say. We drive for a while, the Mercedes’s engine soft as a whisper.
Wendy says, “Douchebag must have felt guilty about it, though. Deep down.”
“What happened?”
“He flung himself off a bridge six months ago. Imagine that. Ten years after the fact, the asshole finally finds his conscience.”
I turn and look at her. She’s beaming.
I feel my face flushing. The collective. “Imagine.”
“I am so fucking grateful to those who helped him find that conscience of his.”
“Me too.” I put my hand on hers and squeeze, my energy coming back. I think, I’m ready to do this. For Tyler. For Emily. For whoever it is whose child’s death Wendy and I will soon be avenging. I tear open the envelope, unfold the note. There are two pages—the first consists of a map of the area and an address to plug into the Mercedes’s GPS: 2 Lake Road, Bird Hollow, New York.
On the next page, there are instructions:
Once you reach the dock, remove the lighter and the fully charged burner from the glove compartment. Put the Mercedes in neutral, exit the car, and push it into the lake. You will then take the lighter and safely burn these sets of instructions. When this is all complete, turn on the burner. Go to texts. You will see one text that simply says: READY? Reply YES to receive info as to where to meet your ride.
We are working in unison, Wendy and I. Reading the same words at the same time. (“The burner. That’s the flip phone, right?” I ask. She nods.) And once we’ve made it through the final sentence at the bottom of the page, we turn to each other at the same second, the same look in our eyes, and there is no doubt in my mind that we share the same thoughts.
The sentence reads:
DO NOT OPEN THE TRUNK.
Twelve
We drive in silence for most of the ride, Wendy following the orders of the GPS’s calm female voice, her eyes clear and open and alert as the clock edges closer to four a.m.
My eyes are bleary, my thoughts slow, but my pulse races. I feel as though I’m in a dream. Almost there. The thought chugs through my brain. Almost there, almost there, almost there . . .