Heather(95)

* * *



In the car with Margot she sifts through the emails as they wait at the light on Main. Some are angry, the subject lines in all caps, expletive-laden, urgent. Delete, delete, delete. It doesn’t matter how fast she makes them disappear, they pop back up in a new form an hour later. The tags and the DMs and the texts. It makes her heart race, makes her ribs feel too tight in her chest.

Margot shifts next to her, her winter coat rustling. “Give me that. I’ll be out front to get you at 2:45. If you need me before then borrow someone’s phone or have the office call me, and I’ll come get you. But take a break from these people. They don’t know you, they don’t know her. What they think doesn’t matter.”

Blair holds her phone out to Margot. She doesn’t think about how she will be cut off from her friends, or how she won’t be able to get in touch with Henry. She doesn’t worry about checking her email to see if her early application to Columbia was accepted, or whether Sephora is having a sale she wants to know about. Those questions belong to the Before times. She just passes the little brick of steel and glass and feels the lightness when Margot takes it from her.

“There are the facts of what happened and what the internet thinks about it, which in most cases, are very different. Let’s focus on the facts.”

“I just want to know what’s going to happen to us. To her.” The words come up hard and aching, and Blair starts to cry. The tears turn into open-mouthed sobs, ugly, wracking, closer to vomiting than crying. Her body at war with itself trying to get the toxic thing out of her. Margot pulls over to the side of the road.

“Oh Blair,” Margot says, wiping her eyes. “This is so hard. I’m sure it is especially for you and your brothers, your dad. We all love her so much.”

“You didn’t come over. I thought you were gone from us.”

Margot inhales. “No. No I didn’t. I needed time.”

The footprints. Those little crescents of ink. “But you came back?”

“Yes,” Margot says. “I … yes. I’m here now.”

For the first time Blair is able to put words to this feeling she has. Her mother did something terrible. Everyone on the internet is saying how evil she is, how cruel. She is angry at her mother, but there’s something bigger than the anger, something taken away from her.

“I don’t feel like I’m allowed to love her anymore.”

Margot unbuckles her seatbelt, leans over, wraps Blair in a hug that smells like orange juice and toaster waffles. But that only makes Blair cry harder. Being touched. The smells of the ordinary breakfast Margot fed Blair’s cousins at her house this morning before coming over. “Listen to me. She’s your mother. You are always allowed to love her. No matter what anyone says.”

“But she’s … It’s so awful.”

“I know we are all still sorting out the facts here, and trying to understand what happened all those years ago. But I think … I think the thing is, it is something that she did, but also something that happened to her. A tragedy she made, and one that she’s a victim of. Does that make sense? I don’t think anyone feels more pain over this than she does. She’s not a monster. She was practically a kid herself.”

Blair nods, looks into her lap. That’s not what people on the forums say. I don’t care how old you are, you know the meaning of human life. Unless you’re just sick. Unless you’re broken.



* * *



When she gets home from school Blair climbs the stairs—slowly, slowly—and makes her way down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was released today after her bond hearing, is able to be home with them until the trial. She knocks on the door but doesn’t get an answer. When she creaks the door open, the room is dark, and she makes out the shape of her mother in the bed. Blair tiptoes over, lifts the covers and settles in, the way she used to as a little girl still in the grip of a bad dream. Her leg brushes against something hard: her mother’s GPS ankle monitor.

She doesn’t know if her mother is awake or not. “It’s my fault,” Blair whispers. “It’s all my fault.” Her mother has deep purple circles under her eyes. She looks older and smaller than she did just a few days before.

Iris’s hand finds Blair’s wrist, circles it. Warm and firmer than Blair could have thought.

“No,” Iris says.

“I just wanted to know her. Know who she was.”

“Know who?”

“The girl from the pictures.” She doesn’t want to go any further, to talk about the day she watched Iris moving the cairns. Not now, that it all makes such terrible, horrifying sense.

Iris pushes up onto an elbow. “The film. You have it?”

“I developed it. I’m sorry. I … I was worried. It scared me. Because I couldn’t explain it.”

“But you have the pictures?” Iris’s voice sounds different. Unused. Or maybe this is what she really sounds like. Blair doesn’t know what’s true anymore.

“I can bring them to you?”

Iris waits a long time to respond. “Yes. Can you?”

Blair slips out of the room and takes the packet of pictures from the desk drawer where she’s been hiding them. When she comes back into her parents’ room, Iris inhales like she’s been hit. She sits up against the pillows, pats the space next to her to indicate Blair do the same. The first photo is the one of the two girls. One in the mirror, Iris holding the camera behind.