People LIke Her(54)

I’ve just read Coco her bedtime story (one from Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, of which we have about twelve or so copies around the house, all presents from various people, including my mother) and wished her sweet dreams and came downstairs to grab a beer from the fridge before sitting down at the kitchen island with my laptop.

Emmy came in a few hours ago and told me her news, and I said if she was down to the last two she’s bound to get it. A TV show. Not just a talking head slot, not just being part of a panel, but her own TV show. Would she have her name in the title? I asked. She said not to get ahead of ourselves; the title wasn’t settled yet. We exchanged a look. Her eyes were gleaming. “I think we both know you’re going to get it,” I said. She smiled coyly. “All I can say,” she said, “is that I have given it my best shot.” While I’ve been sitting here, I’ve googled the producer’s name and googled the person who commissioned it and now I am basically googling everyone involved in the whole thing. There are some serious people on board, from the looks of things. People who’ve worked with big names. Who have made programs even I have heard of, or at least read reviews of in the Guardian. It’s only after Emmy has gone upstairs to check on the kids that I realize I forgot to ask what the program is actually going to be about.

Emmy is upstairs when her phone buzzes, and I glance over.

And for a moment, it feels like the bottom has dropped out of my world.

Of all the weird, disgusting, horrible stuff that happens on the internet, Instagram role-players—#babyrp is the hashtag they sometimes use, although they do it subtly, burying it toward the end of a block of hashtags so no one sees—have always seemed to me right up there. Not only in the sense that what they do strikes me as gross and insensitive and morally questionable, but in that I am wholly incapable of imagining myself into the mindset of someone who would do something like that. It’s like those people who post videos of themselves doing stupid, unfunny, dangerous pranks on YouTube (drinking a bucket of puke, say, or throwing water balloons at strangers on a mall escalator and then getting beaten up). It’s like deciding to troll the parents of a teen suicide or the survivors of a school shooting or spending your whole day sending hate messages to an actress of color you thought was miscast in a Star Wars movie. I just don’t get the point. To steal pictures of other people’s kids and post them on Instagram under a different name. To make up stories about them, their family situations, what they’re like. Real pictures. Real children. Even if I didn’t have a kid of my own, I think I’d find it unsettling in the same visceral way.

What Suzy has texted to tell Emmy is that she’s stumbled across an Instagram feed that is all pictures of Coco.

Of course I unlock Emmy’s phone—yes, I know her pass code; it is the date on which Coco was born—and click on the link.

In the very first picture I see, Coco is holding my hand, looking back over her shoulder at the camera. I remember that day. It was one of those late summer days, dry, bright, when there was just a hint of autumn in the air. The leaves had started falling, had started piling up along the edges of the sidewalks, because I remember Coco romping through them as we were walking down the road, laughing. We waited at the crossing next to the nursery for the cars to stop, Coco waving a chubby paw at the drivers, and I was telling Coco to be good and trying to get her excited about all the new people she was going to meet on her first day in her new room at nursery. I waited until she was playing and made a discreet exit and then sat in the Starbucks around the corner in case someone from the nursery called, in case she was upset and they needed me to come back and calm her down. She wasn’t, of course. I didn’t. She was not fazed by her new teacher, a whole new set of classmates, at all. I think when I came back to collect her that afternoon she was a little amazed that it was home time already.

The caption is all about little Rosie (“our DD—Darling Daughter”) having trouble sleeping, and the mad thing is that all sorts of people have written comments sympathizing and offering suggestions for what got their baby to sleep.

The thought of someone making all this stuff up about our daughter, using her real pictures, giving her some made-up name, preying on people’s gullibility, violating my daughter’s privacy, makes me feel almost sick with anger.

I’m very tempted to write something under the picture myself. Something brutal, something threatening. Not physically threatening. Not really. The kind of threat I have in mind this time involves the police, and letters from lawyers.

I can hear Emmy padding around upstairs. She descends to the ground floor in her pajamas, with a face mask on, her hair piled on top of her head in a knot. She crosses to the sink, gets herself a glass of water, comes through to where I am sitting.

“How you doing?” she says.

I am not really sure how to answer. I jut my chin at the screen.

“What?” she asks.

“That,” I say.

“What’s that?” she asks, taking the phone from me with one hand as she rearranges her towel with the other.

“Suzy Wao found it and messaged to let you know,” I tell her.

“Uh-huh,” she says.

Emmy’s face as she reads is expressionless. After she has clicked a few images, scrolled down a little ways, she passes me back the phone.

“I’ll call Irene now,” she says.