My eyes are welling up. Sometimes in therapy with Joan I would get this feeling—as though I were underwater, but so close to the surface, just about to break through and breathe. . . .
0417: I drowned a man in his own car.
0001: WE did.
0417: I drugged a boy and froze him to death and planted a knife on his body.
0001: WE did. Not you. We did those things and so much more. What does that make us?
The words blur. Tears spill down my cheeks.
0417: It makes us monsters.
0001: YES.
0001 is typing . . .
0001: Think about monsters you’ve seen in movies. Frankenstein’s monster. King Kong. Godzilla.
I blink at the screen.
0417: I’m not sure I’m following.
0001: None of these monsters are evil. It’s the evil of others that makes them powerful. Beaten down by the world, shunned, robbed of what they love, they don’t curl up and die. They don’t apologize. They fight back. They get bigger, stronger, more terrifying. You are a monster. We all are. Be grateful for THAT.
“Yes.” I say it out loud, close as I’ve ever felt to breaking the surface. A gust of wind rattles my bedroom window, then another. I get up from my desk to make sure the window’s locked, and catch sight of the darkening sky, swirling snowflakes. Out of nowhere, as though to punctuate 0001’s point. I move back to my computer and type out the thought as it enters my mind.
0417: But what if I’m a different type of monster? What if I’m more like the monster in Alien?
Her response is so quick, my words barely have the chance to vanish.
0001: She was a mother. That space crew fucked with her kids. She gave them exactly what they deserved.
THE SNOWSTORM IS over in just under an hour, leaving strewn branches in its wake and a light, slippery coat on my walkway, like spray paint. One of those “juvenile delinquent storms,” as Matt used to call them. They show up, vandalize your house, and get out of town. I’m surprised I haven’t lost power—a blessing, considering I haven’t stoked the woodstove.
I put on my coat and gloves, wool scarf and hat. I head outside and salt my walkway. Then I survey the driveway for branches, pulling the bigger ones out of the path of my car and dragging them over to the woodshed out back to saw up later for the stove. Once I’m done, I walk out to the main road and head up the mountain, the cold air biting my face.
Trying to feel the way she did at the end, Joan would say. But this time I’m trying to feel the way he did, stumbling drunk or pumped full of GHB or whatever it was she slipped into his drink, the girl—one of us, a sister—like a ghost beside him, fading in and then out of his line of vision, then multiplying into other girls, other women. Did a group of them drag him? Was there a gun at his back?
I want to know who he thought of in those last moments of consciousness, before the knife I bought was slipped into his pocket, before he passed out in the snow, same as my daughter did. Did he think of Emily? I want to believe he did—that without his parents there to protect him from the truth, he finally understood what he had done to my daughter, to my family. To me. I want to believe he was sorry.
After my private chat with 0001, I switched back to my regular server and checked my email. There were two new ones in my inbox: one from Xenia Hedges, confirming our contract and telling me how much she enjoyed our meeting, and one from Brayburn College. I’m still not sure how I got on their mailing list, but the email is a newsletter, the main story Harris Blanchard’s untimely death and his funeral, tomorrow, on the Brayburn campus. They’re going to bury him next to Tom’s mother, his grandmother. Harris Blanchard was a Brayburn double legacy whose parents had met there during freshman orientation week, whose grandmother had been a Brayburn Angel—meaning she donated more than five hundred thousand dollars a year to the college, right up until her death. And the newsletter had read that way.