The Herd(73)
And at first, it was. The CEO, a charismatic fortysomething named Bill, was an ideal antihero: witty, outrageous, totally unapologetic in his pursuit of profit. His little brother, Ben, was CTO, and though he lacked Bill’s charm, he seemed to be the more sympathetic of the two, glad to be making Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth for the first time in his life, but tormented by the implications of their creation. Bill’s taciturn wife handled the bookkeeping, and she made my life easy—scheduling interviews, ushering me into investor meetings, inviting me along on extracurricular activities, fishing trips and boating days and picnics and ATV outings, the kind of scenes she correctly assumed I’d need to add some color to the narrative. She was small and striking, brilliant in an unsung, under-the-radar way, married to her high school sweetheart and quietly fulfilling about four hundred roles.
And we became friends. How could we not? I was so lonely, not eager to leave their small headquarters and see Mom in her frailty, and so she and I stayed late some nights, or even drove together to her pinewood home, sipping beer and chatting. She wanted to know everything about New York, every detail, and then in gummy tones I told her how good she had it—this husband, this house, this unexpected windfall, making money from the social-media scramble without having to compete in the twenty-four-hour beauty pageant herself.
And we were deep into one such conversation early in the fall, sitting on her plump, floral-patterned sofa, on a Monday night when her husband, Bill, and brother-in-law, Ben, were down in Chicago for an expo. I’d brought over some brandy and we were talking about high school, comparing our experiences—her with twenty-eight other kids in her graduating class, Bill among them, and me just an hour away with close to two hundred classmates. And how we’d both found others to serve as armor: her BMOC boyfriend, now husband. And my sister and her cool friends at Harvard, the ones who loved when I visited, who saw past my bad skin and braces and made me feel less invisible.
“But everyone who meets you sees you,” Chris said, slurring a bit. “You can’t…you’re unmissable.”
I smiled, then looked away. “Except I feel like nobody really misses me right now.” I finished my glass, the golden liquid no longer burning. “I miss other people, but they don’t miss me.”
Half the brandy was gone. Chris topped off our glasses.
I took another swallow. “There’s no way I can drive home now,” I said, my concern like something scampering off into the woods.
She looked at me a long time. She had the widest brown eyes, a smattering of freckles. The thickest, most beautiful hair.
Her voice a whisper: “That’s okay.”
She took my glass and set it on the coffee table. The world had that wobbling, churning quality, a vortex tugging at the corners of my vision. I reached forward and watched, heart pounding, as my fingertips slid up her thigh, around her hip, slowing at her waist just as the other hand reached her cheek.
When I woke up the next morning, I was in love with her. I stared at her hair, wheat-colored in the window’s winter light, and tried not to audibly giggle. That’s what that feeling had been, all along. When I kept thinking of her, whatever quiet but hilarious comment she’d make about a situation. How I kept relating things to her, to things she’d said, so that more than once, Mom had said, Wow, you two certainly have grown close. It hadn’t even occurred to me to touch her, and now that I had, it was all I wanted to do.
So I did. Twice more that day, neither of us sure what we were doing, kissing and giggling—her sweet-smelling hair, her soft neck, her knees. A dreamy week of work, every glance between us like a cymbal crash, smiling into the oatmeal I cooked for Mom in bulk. Then Bill went hunting again, set up camp in the woods, and I drove the hour to Chris’s home after Mom went to sleep, heat building in my hips as I wove through country roads. I fell asleep in her arms, and in the morning she roused me with the subtlest strokes, her fingers skimming inside my elbows, my wrists, my palms, my hip crease.
“I like all your inner corners,” she whispered, and I’d reached for her jaw and kissed her, hard.
I can see it exactly as Bill saw it: a few feet above and away from my body, as if our consciousnesses melded. Sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. Knotted limbs, subtle movement, knees like pyramids and a round flash of buttocks. Chris’s voice like a whimper, as if she were in pain. It’s odd, how similar the sounds we make are when we’re hurt or turned on. Vulnerable, in both cases.
It was a moment before Chris noticed Bill glowering at the door, and she gasped and stiffened, then pushed me away with both hands. He flicked on the lights and leaned against the door.
What are you…what the…how could…His hand found his left shoulder, then his eyes followed, confused, as if something odd were happening there. And then, with the sudden jolt of someone in a dunk tank, he collapsed.
Oh God—just remembering it sent fresh horror through me. I’d moved quickly, sprinting across the room and checking for a pulse, screaming for Chris to call 911 as I lined up my palms on his rib cage and pushed, rhythmically, everything I’d learned years before in a training course flooding back to me. Chris rushed back in, shrieking her address into the phone, and draped a blanket over me as I beat, beat, beat his heart from the outside in. Chris asked if I was getting tired but I ignored her—I was afraid that if I stopped, his death would be my fault, and so I didn’t let up, not even to dress. I remember the wail of distant sirens, red and blue flares silhouetting the trees, all of it growing, intensifying along with the mounting knowledge that they’d be here soon, that my metronomic compressions were a countdown, my ticking death clock. Bangs at the front door and Chris, bawling, took off in her robe, and then a bright, flapping wave of humiliation as the EMTs burst into the room. It was like being in a dream, that moment when you look down and realize you’re not wearing anything.