My fantasies of wish fulfillment do not involve Emily at all. They involve Harris Blanchard, paying for what he’s done.
And at last, I’ve found a group of women who all feel the same.
For the past six hours, these other nameless women and I described the deaths of those who killed our children in as much imaginative detail as we could: the drunk driver, forced into the middle of a highway and run over by an eighteen-wheeler. The druggie boyfriend, injected with bleach. A bully who drove a young girl to suicide, beaten to death by a mob in the school gym. For Harris Blanchard, I chose to have him led out into the middle of the woods in the dead of winter, beaten up within an inch of his life, then tied to a tree and left to freeze.
These women were supportive. They didn’t act as though it was unhealthy to have such violent thoughts. And while I know there’s no direct connection between this page and what happened to Gerard Krakowski, I almost feel as though this group is powerful enough to have wished it into reality.
The hope that grief counselors and clergy try to make you feel. The phrases well-meaning friends throw at you. She’s out there, watching over you, gazing down at you. She’s with you, every day, living again in every memory. . . . It’s all a bunch of crap. Emily is not watching me. She doesn’t exist. Harris Blanchard took her from me five years ago and she can never come back. Don’t tell me that she can, that she has, just to quell my very justified anger. It’s insulting and infantilizing—a Santa Claus type of lie.
The stories we tell in the Kaya chat, though, are different. They’re possible. And the more we put them into words that aren’t judged or shot down or excused away with You don’t really feel like that, honey . . . the more we agree with those words and elaborate on them and give each other respect for having typed them, the closer our stories get to feeling not just possible, but probable. Achievable.
The sun is starting to rise, and I still haven’t slept. I pop a Xanax. Set the alarm on my phone for nine a.m. so I don’t miss my meeting with penny-pinching Glynne. As I fall asleep, I feel strange. I realize that it’s because for the first time in months, I’m smiling.
“YOU LOOK GOOD,” Glynne says. “I like your hair.”
She’s lying. We’re in Mount Shady’s one and only place to go out for coffee—a combination restaurant/overpriced antique boutique called Analog, owned by two clearly homesick Brooklynites—and I’ve caught a glimpse of myself in the cracked $790 mirror directly behind our table. I look pale and drawn, even in the forgiving yellow light of this place, and my chopped-off black hair only accentuates it. As Glynne stirs extra milk into her London Fog, I take a sip of my coffee. It’s bitter. “Thanks.” I force a smile. “I wanted a change.”
Glynne gives me a pitying look. “Good for you.” She removes the soft leather messenger bag from the back of her seat and undoes the clasp. Her nails are a shiny conch-shell pink, her skin glowing with the remnants of a vacation tan. I’ve always thought Glynne Barrett effortlessly attractive, but looking at her now, I can see that she does, in fact, put in a considerable amount of effort. The purposefully windblown hair, the peach lipstick that clashes artfully with the purple-and-red Tibetan scarf, the eyes, too vivid a blue to be natural. She reminds me of my old self—the amount of work it took: the manicures and the spray tans and the designer dresses and shoes—just to look “presentable” for a job at a country lifestyle magazine that was mostly coupons, when most of my coworkers usually showed up in sweats. You can take the girl out of the fashion rag . . . Matt used to say. I’d counter that an art director had to look creative and pulled together whether she worked in a glass tower in New York City or an office park in Kingston. But really, I think I was just vain.
Glynne thumbs through a stack of papers in her bag. She removes three color printouts of the designs I’ve sent her, all riddled with Sharpie scrawl. She lays them side by side on the table between us. “So, here’s what I was thinking,” she says, then proceeds to explain each scrawled note. “Just a few tiny tweaks,” she adds at one point. But there are dozens of them. At another point she explains, “What I’m trying to do here is match your designs to my vision.”