“I saw that,” I said, “but I did NOT heart it. Are you out of your mind? Have we met?”
I sat down. The bridge was wet, and the wet soaked through my jeans.
“It’s not just you liking a racist GIF but it’s that you liked it as a response to that thread, like you were agreeing that this woman was only posing.”
“Yes, I can see that, but I did NOT like that post.”
“Go on your Twitter. Go find it.”
I put him on speaker and looked at my recent activity and for fuck’s sake there it was, a red heart. And I saw, to the side, “20+” notifications, which likely meant I had hundreds. I felt a hot panic, a stuck-inside-a-sweater-in-a-dressing-room wave of nausea. I hated everyone and I hated myself and I even hated Lance for calling and most of all I hated being hated.
“Jesus, I was on my phone. You know my thumbs are stupid.”
“Right, sure. I believe you, but the woman who found this, she screenshotted it and posted this thing and she’s got 130 retweets.”
“Literally? On a Saturday? I just unliked it.”
“That might make it worse. Listen, there’s a lot of other stuff, too, people still just flipping out about what you wrote.”
I knew, without looking, what they were saying: I was a hypocrite. I’d spent dozens of episodes digging into the abuse of women in Hollywood, and as soon as my own husband was accused I’d scampered to his defense. It would be one thing if I hosted a knitting podcast, but now I had betrayed the cause, and I was racist, too. Maybe I only believed white women, maybe that was my problem, and also my face looked like a cabbage. Mostly valid points, except that I’d thought Jasmine Wilde was white.
“Should I close my account?”
“Maybe.”
“If I light my computer on fire it deletes Twitter, right?”
He wasn’t in the mood. He told me that we’d lost one of the two podcasts that cross-promoted with ours. We’d lost the hair dye ads. “There’s an email sitting there from Mattress Eden that I don’t want to open.”
I said, “Tell me what to do.” My chest was tightening.
He said, “I haven’t heard from Podtopia. But it’s the weekend.” Lance was the one who handled everything with our production company. Because he was better at it, and because he’d actually started the podcast before I came on board, made ten episodes with a different original cohost.
I said, and heard myself say, “Maybe I should quit the show.” Lance had kids and no other job; Lance’s wife was a first grade teacher.
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m saying it. I’m offering.” It was the only thing that would make this all better, in part because maybe it was an overreaction, and what could people want beyond an overreaction? “If things get worse, I mean. Or if they don’t get better.”
“It’ll die down,” he said. The air was so wet and so cold, and I still wanted to run after Yahav. I wanted to cry on someone, albeit tearlessly, and he was the only one I wanted to cry on.
I said, “But what happens next is they go through everything I ever said on the show. Then they pick apart everything I say next time, and the next time.”
A chipmunk scuttled past me on the bridge rail, darted straight down the post and out of sight. A manifestation of my own racing, fleeing heart.
“Let me see how bad the rest of my inbox is first,” he said. “Let’s get a sense of the damage.”
39
I was down in the ravine, its slopes all mud and ice. I had been there a long time—hours?—trying to cry but letting myself laugh, every few minutes, at how bad it all was.
My pants were soaked, my boots were soaked, my socks were freezing to my ankles. I was sitting on the bank of the creek, on a patch of ice-mud.
If I could freeze myself to the core, I could find some equilibrium between my inner and outer states. Like homeopathy, like hair of the dog, like poison as the antidote to poison.
It was not any one thing stealing my breath; it was everything at once. The sudden atomization of Yahav and Jerome and Lance. Maybe the podcast, too, gone in a puff of smoke. The slow melting of any certainty I’d had about Thalia’s death, a melting I’d been terrified to acknowledge but could no longer ignore. The realization that you, one of the best things about Granby, might have been not only a fraud, not only a predator, but—it was possible, I was finally letting it creep into view—a more violent kind of monster.
I sucked in air, but it was just empty space, no oxygen.
The news story had been getting to me, too, clawing at the edges of my dreams. The way no one would listen to her testimony. The way they mocked her victim impact statement. The way they read her diary aloud.
Somewhere down here lay the rock I’d once thrown. Somewhere down here was the hula hoop circle we’d observed, a quarter century of changes within its circumference.
It was in the other woods, the ones at the bottom of campus—connected to these but drier, flatter, denser—that we’d built the Kurt shrine. Those were the same woods where Barbara Crocker’s body was found in 1975, just outside the Granby property line. Those were the woods where, in the middle of the night, late senior year, I brought my backpack with the half bottle of Absolut Kurant I’d stolen from the Hoffnungs’ liquor cabinet, and I sat under the tree where the magazine photos and notes and flowers had faded to scraps, and I drank straight from the bottle, daring myself to swallow more before the first wave hit me, and then more. And when it did all hit me, it was with the force of a ferocious undertow pulling me far, far out to black waters.
That next morning, I woke up vomiting—my back and neck and head throbbing, my fingers numb. I foggily remembered having fished Tylenol out of my backpack’s side pocket and swallowing the seven that were in the bottle. If there had been more in the bottle, I would have swallowed those, too. I would have. I remembered having drunkenly whispered into the night air, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” It was a kind of rebuke—to the woods, the school, myself. I’d come here to live deliberately, and I’d failed. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but every day was worse. Each morning I woke to heavier air, heavier bones, heavier eyelids, even as my body grew so thin that I was always cold. I had fought with my mother the day before, but that was only one little thing. I’d been coming unraveled for weeks. But what was I going to do, run to the counselor and take a spot away from one of Thalia’s grieving friends?
Now, in the ravine, I felt that time was porous, that the girl from 1995 could somehow reach through, exchange her breath for mine. She had woken up back then by stealing my breath, my heartbeat, from this present moment. In exchange, she’d handed me her asphyxiation, her organ failure, her descending oblivion. Here they came.
The Tigerwhip would be about three feet deep here, plus the ice on top, plus the sludge on top of the ice that made it impossible to tell how solid the ice was. Rabbit tracks crossed it. The rabbits hadn’t fallen through.
I stepped onto it to see if it would hold me, certain it wouldn’t. I waited for everything to crack, waited to fall in, waist-deep. Everything shifted under my feet, the edges of the creek groaned metallically, but I didn’t fall. Maybe there was a lesson in that. I knew I should take my good fortune and leap to safety, but I didn’t move.