The Collective(45)

“You know me too well.”

“Well . . . what are you keeping from me?”

“I’ll tell you when we get to your place,” he says. “It’s good news, I promise.”

“Okay . . .”

“We can’t keep secrets from each other, can we?” His voice is so warm, like arms wrapped around me. Or heated seats in a Mercedes S-Class. “Not even good ones.”

I wince. “You have my heart.” It’s a bad pun and one I use with him a lot. It also happens to be true.

“I know I do,” Luke says. “See you soon.”

When we finally hang up, I put my hand on Emily’s doorknob. I don’t want to open it, but I have to—the couch downstairs doesn’t pull out, and so this is my one guest room. I have to get it ready.

To give myself strength, I remember Wendy and me, side by side, pushing the car into the lake.

I am capable. I am capable. I am capable.

I turn the knob, push open Emily’s door, and switch the light on. The last time I was in here, it was daylight, and with the sun streaming in, the dust motes were so thick in the air, they looked like a solid path to the sky. I had dusted then. Cleaned the whole room. But that was more than a year ago. I haven’t been in since.

In one of the support groups I tried going to following Emily’s death, a lot of the parents spoke of their children’s bedrooms, how they’d closed them off for years and turned them into time capsules, the teenage posters still on the wall, baby clothes hanging from puffy pink satin hangers, stuffed animals lined up on the bed, endlessly waiting for their owners’ returns.

You’d think I’d be one of those parents—a time-capsule creator. But I’m not. Emily’s room holds nothing of hers. Nothing at all of anyone’s, save for a full-sized mattress on a box spring at the center of the room—the last piece of furniture I bought for this house, if you can call a mattress furniture. I ordered it after Emily’s death but before the trial, to replace the old one.

A year ago, when I came into this room and dusted it, my goal had been to turn it into something else—a guest room/office space that would be wholly mine and memory-free. I had all sorts of decor ideas. I’d bought potted plants, a mid-century floor lamp, and some framed pulp fiction covers I’d found at a yard sale. I planned to move my desk out of the bedroom and into this one, order some build-it-yourself bookshelves for the window-facing wall, maybe even paint the walls a new color—robin’s-egg blue, I was thinking. But I never even got as far as making the bed.

Maybe I can put a few things in this room by the time Luke and Nora get here—a bouquet of flowers on one of my nightstands, the lamp I bought for it, which now resides in the living room downstairs. A little something to make it feel less like an interrogation chamber.

I walk over to the closet, grab the packages of bedding to bring down to the wash—a sheet set, pillowcases, and a down-filled comforter, all of it cream-colored, as neutral as it gets. Emily’s comforter had been black, dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. She’d wanted to paint the walls black too—black suddenly became her favorite color when she turned fourteen—but Matt and I had said no, not now, you don’t understand how small and sad the room will feel. (I’m small and sad, so that works. She’d said it without a hint of a smile, yet I still convinced myself she was just pulling my chain. It’s her dark sense of humor.) Forced to keep the walls the pale yellow of her childhood, Emily had covered them in posters of her favorite band, My Chemical Romance. The posters bore ghoulish illustrations, and from the little I heard of their gothic, melodramatic music, I didn’t understand their appeal. How had she shifted loyalties from the adorable One Direction to these creeps in less than two years? I had wondered. But puberty is a powerful thing, and parents aren’t supposed to understand what their teenagers listen to. That’s how I reasoned it back then, and it still makes sense. A kid’s music should be her own. I just wish Matt and I hadn’t given her the privacy that we did. . . .

I sit down on the bare mattress. After she died, Matt wanted to go the time-capsule route. “We don’t need the room anyway,” he said. “We never have guests.”

But I protested. Told Matt he could—and should—move his office up there, even though the one he’d created in the basement was spacious, soundproofed, more suited to his telecommuting needs. Plus, he said, he didn’t want to clean out Emily’s room. He thought getting rid of her things felt like another violation, and he didn’t want to hurt her any more than she’d already been hurt. Just leave her be, he pleaded, his eyes glistening. Leave her be. . . .

But as consuming as his need may have been to keep that room the same, mine bordered on obsession—the need to clean it. So I went into the room myself, threw open the door early one morning while Matt was still snoring in our bed. Dusting was what I told myself I wanted to do, but before I knew it, I’d ripped all the My Chemical Romance posters off her walls and ceiling, and there was no turning back. I cleared the knickknacks off her desk, emptied her drawers and shelves into black plastic garbage bags—her clothes, her books, her jewelry. The more I got rid of, the better I felt. And so I moved fast. I didn’t think. I saved nothing.

The whole time, I told myself that I was doing something therapeutic. But deep down, I knew where this urge was coming from, why it trumped Matt’s very valid feelings.