The Collective(67)

And here’s something I try very hard not to think about: I was the last person to speak to my therapist, Joan. She had told me a few days earlier that she didn’t think analysis was helping me anymore—that I hadn’t made much progress in the past three years, and she felt it was her fault. She was holding me back by being so available to me, and as a result, she was keeping me from forming meaningful relationships. You’re not my mother, she had said, meaning she didn’t want me to turn into someone like her mother—friendless, joyless, ruined forever by the death of her child. . . .

I didn’t care what she meant. I went off my meds for those three days, and took it worse than I’ve ever taken a breakup. I called Joan at two in the morning like some obsessed, spurned lover, waking her from a deep sleep and begging her to reconsider. You need help, Camille, she had said. And I had replied, That’s why I’m calling you!

I don’t remember exactly how the conversation ended, but I do remember dissolving into tears. She was found at the bottom of her staircase a week later, her phone near her body, mine the last on her recent calls list.

Would she have fallen down her stairs in the middle of the night if my call hadn’t awakened her? Who knows? But I’m wondering if that’s what drew me to the collective in the first place—the idea of forming connections with people I’ll never know well enough to kill.

I check the clock on my dashboard. It’s close to six thirty. My brain is going places I don’t want it to, spinning stories about 0001 finding out about our plan and reading my post on The Bachelor subreddit and siccing the collective on Wendy. . . . Please no, I think, over and over and over again. Please no. And then, fifteen minutes later, when my heart is beating so hard that it hurts to breathe, I see a silver Camry pulling in and its headlights flashing and then Wendy behind the wheel. I’m relieved, of course, but the relief is tinged with dread. It feels too much like the answer to a final wish—one that I’m selfish to have made in the first place.

Wendy pulls into the empty space next to mine, and we both open our windows. “Did they find the car?” she says. “Did the cops—”

I shake my head.

“Then what?”

I say it between my teeth. “It’s not about Kimball.”

I point at the exit to the park and ride, and she nods. I close my window, and she follows me into Kingston, up and down a series of one-way streets until I’m certain no one else is tailing us. I pull into the parking lot of a small strip mall, an open grocery store at one end, the other end much deader, most of the businesses closed for the night.

We park in two spaces between a physical therapy center and a pizza parlor, both of them dark and empty. I unlock my doors and push open the one on the passenger side.

After she’s safely in the passenger seat, both doors closed and locked, I ask Wendy one of the few questions I didn’t ask her during the night we killed Kimball. “How long have you been with the collective?”

“About three years,” she says. “Why?”

“Have you ever played a part in the murder of someone who didn’t deserve it?”

“What? No, they all deserve it. Kimball—”

“I told you. This isn’t about him.”

I turn and face her—the clear-framed glasses, the sensible cap of light brown hair. She’s wearing yoga pants, pink Skechers, and a sweatshirt with a cat on it. She’s holding a drugstore bag in her hand, like she stopped on her way here to pick up a prescription, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone look less threatening. “Then what are you talking about?” she says.

I just say it. “Edward Duval.” Saying the name out loud is like jumping into cold water—a shock at first, but then I’m in.

“Who’s that?” Wendy says.

And I tell her everything.


THE STORY I tell starts with my spur-of-the-moment decision to follow Edward Duval out of the Croton-on-Hudson train station and finishes half an hour ago, with me waiting for Wendy at the park and ride. Throughout it all, Wendy doesn’t say anything—no prompting questions, no expressions of shock, not even a nod. She just stares at me, her arms folded over her chest, like someone watching a movie. When I’m done, she doesn’t speak right away, and I start making bets in my head on what she’ll say first, just to calm myself down.

When she does finally say something, it’s this: “The collective chipped your car?”

“That’s your first question?”

“I thought I’d start small.”

“Okay.”

Neither one of us says anything for a long while.

“It’s weird,” Wendy says finally. “When I first joined, 0001 said that one of the rules of the collective was to tell no one about it. I assumed she just meant that the collective wouldn’t continue to work if anyone talked. That our efforts would be for nothing, that people would get found out. Do you know what I mean? I didn’t take it as a threat.”

“Me neither.”

She lets out a heavy sigh. “You miss a lot of nuance when you’re private messaging.”

“Yep.”

More silence. Then . . . “Camille?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think we can do anything about this.”