The Herd(69)
Would Mikki know what to make of this? It was probably nothing, some simple explanation; Eleanor had gone to camp in grade school, maybe, and she’d moved the story up by a few years to make it more relatable, fudged the dates. I wandered the house, peering in on seating areas scattered every which way. Again, it struck me how cavernous this mansion seemed, how easy it was to lose a person, tangled in the neon-blue tarp stretched like skin over the pool outside. Mikki was nowhere to be found and this just compounded my confusion, a general sense of disorientation, of reality crumbling off in tiny flakes.
I almost walked directly into Karen, who was coming out of the basement, carrying wine.
“I—I wanted to see if you needed help with dinner or anything.”
She looked alarmed. “It’s not even five yet,” she replied.
“Oh. I…I fell asleep.”
She inched toward the kitchen. “Well, speaking of five o’clock, I was just going to open this nice Merlot blend. Can I get you some?”
She chattered nervously as she battled with a corkscrew, and I took in the scene: two empty bottles lined up by the sink, a lipstick-stained glass she’d pulled over next to her. While we visitors had retreated to our quarters, Karen had been drinking. Before today, even at fancy restaurants, I’d never seen her finish a glass.
She carried over two hearty pours and I clinked hers before taking a sip. Her small-talk soliloquy made me nervous; normally Gary was the talker. Finally she ran out of steam and fell silent.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked. “About Eleanor, I mean.” I looked down at the wine, gave it a little spin.
“Of course.”
“She skipped seventh and eighth grade, right?”
“That’s right, yeah. The school psychologist thought she’d be fine jumping three years ahead, but we thought that was a bit much.”
“Right.” I took another sip. “But she seemed okay with two?”
“Oh, she thrived.” Her voice cracked. “She seemed so relieved to be challenged, to not be sitting in class bored out of her skull. That boredom was much harder for her, being so far ahead of the other students. She’d grasp a concept in two seconds and then the class would spend two weeks on it.”
“For sure. That must’ve been awful.” I tapped a nail against the glass, listened to the chime. “How did you know it was bothering her? Was she acting out, or…”
“It wasn’t good for anybody. She was always…almost too smart for her own good, I’d say.” She grimaced. “Certainly smarter than the rest of us here, that much was clear.”
There was discomfort in this, pain in the jokey self-deprecation. Sober, she might have been able to cover it up, but I saw it in the way she recovered, curled herself over her glass.
“This is gonna sound random, but did she ever go to an adventure camp? Like in the summer, before the school year?”
She swallowed and looked up; her eyes made it clear she had no idea what I was talking about. “A what camp? Adventure? That sounds like Eleanor’s nightmare.”
“Okay. So she didn’t…” I wrapped my fingers around the glass’s spine. “It’s just weird, because when she announced she was starting the Herd, she wrote this essay. And…maybe she was just remembering it wrong, or conflating it with something else, but…”
I saw Karen’s eyes, white and round as two sand dollars, and stopped. It was that Oh crap look, equal parts bewildered and defensive.
“I’m getting all mixed up,” she announced, touching her temple. “I haven’t been eating much and then I just went ahead and opened this wine because it’s what we do when Eleanor’s here for the holidays, and usually Gary or someone will say, ‘Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere!’ and so I just…I thought…” Abruptly she pushed both palms onto her face and I watched in alarm as her shoulders shook, her crying somehow both huge and tiny. After a moment I scraped back my chair and put my hand on her back, rubbing gingerly, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you want me to find Gary?”
She shook her head, her hands moving with her face.
“Do you want…should I help you upstairs, do you want to lie down?” This she ignored, too, and I thought suddenly of my mom, what she’d definitely want in that moment: “Would you like to be left alone?”
A little sobbing noise slipped through her fingers and she nodded. I thought about attempting a hug and instead gave her shoulder a final pat, then headed back upstairs, dread building in my lungs with every step.
* * *
—
I’d seen Karen cry like that exactly once before. When I woke up in Eleanor’s bed almost a decade ago, I’d been so hungover my skin hurt, my eyeballs, my bone marrow, every cubic inch of me. I’d lain still while my sludgy brain tried to figure out how much of the night before was a nightmare, a bad dream.
None of it, it turned out. It was all real, too real. In the late hours of May 7, while Jinny’s body leaked blood onto the patio, we rising stars had listened to Eleanor, cocaine coursing through our veins, alcohol gnawing away at our brain cells. We faced her, crying as she decided we couldn’t handle this now, her parents would know what to do, we should move the body inside and then deal with it in the morning, when we were clearer, when her parents could help.