Our community is devastated by the loss of senior and Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award–winner Harris Blanchard, it read. An extraordinary student, son, friend, and human being.
If your family gives enough money to a school, that school will defend you to the death, no matter what the facts are behind that death. They’re like cults you pay to be the leader of. And Brayburn, as I learned from Xenia, of all people, has been serving its devotees an especially potent strain of Kool-Aid. “Your daughter—what happened to her—was one of the reasons Glynne and I split,” she had told me. “It wasn’t the first time they’d tried to gloss over the bad actions of a privileged student, and to see her siding with the school, over and over, just because she was an alum and Dean Waverly liked her artwork. . . .”
I’m angry all over again—a monster, created by Brayburn. If anyone from the school had bothered reaching out to Matt and me rather than to the press, if they’d shut up about the dangers of fraternity culture and just once offered us a real apology, treated us like human beings rather than something bad that had happened to their reputation.
At least they invited me to Harris Blanchard’s funeral.
By the time I reach the trail that leads to Unicorn River, my eyes are watering from the cold. My teeth chatter and my fingers are frostbitten, even in my heavy wool gloves. I can’t feel the tip of my nose. But I keep moving until I catch sight of the big smooth rock, the stream frozen solid, just as it was five years ago, after Emily was taken from me.
As I reach the rock, I imagine Emily at six on a sunny spring day, smiling up from the red-checked blanket we used to use for our picnics, cookie crumbs all over her face. Unicorn River wasn’t frozen back then. It was a whooshing stream we pretended we discovered ourselves, and for all we knew, we could have. In all the times I’ve visited this spot, I’ve never encountered another person.
We had a funeral here of our own, for Emily’s goldfish JubJub. It was close to fifteen years ago. But when I kneel beside the rock and brush the light layer of snow away with my glove, the grave marker is still there—a J formed from seashells we picked up from Shelter Island, stuck into the earth by Emily, Matt, and me.
So much has changed since then, so many things caving in and crumbling and falling apart. Yet the universe has chosen to leave a goldfish’s grave unmarred. I run my fingers over the dull shells, remembering the little wooden box Matt had made for JubJub’s body, the prayer Emily wrote on construction paper to bury along with him:
PLEASE BLESS THIS FISH.
I was the gravedigger—a job that I took seriously. When planting bulbs, you want to dig a hole that’s twice as deep as the bulb is tall, but I figured a fish in a wooden box should be buried much deeper than that, to keep it safe from stray cats and forest creatures. I took my garden spade up here early and started digging, so that by the time Emily and Matt arrived, I’d made a hole that was wide enough for a shoebox and four times too deep for an amaryllis. After we buried the late JubJub and paid our respects, we pressed the shells into the moist earth—a sweet, sad family activity. Now God knows where we put him, Emily had said.
Last year, after Joan died, I bought a shotgun from the Walmart at the Hudson Valley Mall—the same place where I bought the hat, notebook, pen, and gloves for my first assignment for the collective, and probably the reason why the store makes me nervous. I bought ammo at a hunting store, loaded the gun, and took it here to Unicorn River one morning at dawn, the goal being to join JubJub.
I sat on this big smooth rock with the safety unlocked and the barrel aimed up, into my mouth, the pink sunrise all around me, begging myself to pull the trigger. But I was unable to do it. I told myself I couldn’t leave this earth as long as Harris Blanchard was still on it; that if I did, it would mean he and his family had won.
I wound up wrapping the gun in a garbage bag and burying it next to JubJub so that I’d never be tempted to do it again. Joan would want me to live, I told myself. She would want me to win.
And now I have won. I’m alive on an earth that no longer sustains my daughter’s murderer. I stand up and stretch and head back down the trail, thinking, Sometimes the monster outlives her creators.