My stomach churns. You were part of this. YOU are part of US. We killed your brother. We killed your sister-in-law.
A question is on my mind—the question I’ve come here intending to ask. But now I’m not sure the answer matters. “People change. Kids grow up. Life tosses them around and wears them down and sometimes they learn from it and don’t need to be punished any more than they’ve already punished themselves.”
Olivia is giving me a strange look. “What?”
I didn’t mean to say any of that out loud. “Oh . . . I was just thinking about . . . Okay, to tell the truth,” I try, “I was a mean girl in school. A bully. There was a girl we used to tease relentlessly. And I didn’t just join in. I was the ringleader.”
“Yeah?” There’s no spark in Olivia’s eyes, no nod of recognition. If her brother was a bully who chased a boy to his death, she’s either in denial about it, or she didn’t know him as well as she claims to.
“Sometimes I think about that girl, and whether what’s happened in my life might be some kind of karma.”
I watch Olivia’s face. It still doesn’t change.
“I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I was thinking out loud.”
“I get it,” she says. “But I don’t believe in karma.”
“You don’t?”
“Nope,” she says. “My brother was a very sad, very sick kid. Leukemia. He was eventually cured, but once he got out of the hospital, he had a weakened immune system, and my mom was so scared he might catch something, she homeschooled him till he was eighteen.”
“He didn’t play with other kids, ever?”
“Camille,” she says. “He hardly ever left the house.”
He wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t a ringleader. He didn’t chase a boy to his death. 0001 lied.
“He was awkward in college. Never had any friends. Not until Natalie. And look at what happened to both of them.”
My heart sinks. “They didn’t deserve it.”
“If you’re a karma person, then Ed and Natalie deserved nothing but sunshine and rainbows for the next hundred years. But all they got was enough happiness to know how awful it is to lose it.” She polishes off the rest of her wine, then lifts her glass to me. “It’s like you said, Camille. Nothing’s guaranteed.”
Eighteen
Nothing’s guaranteed—not future plans or justice or love or goodwill or the integrity of groups to whom you swear your allegiance. Not the good guys winning or the truth prevailing and certainly not life, the least guaranteed thing of all. As I walk up the street to my car, I’m crumbling, these thoughts a swirling storm cloud in my head. . . .
The collective killed the Duvals. We killed the Duvals. Innocent grieving parents, one of whom was a member of our group. We didn’t kill them to avenge a child’s murder from more than forty years ago. We killed them because 1219 told her husband about us and he was probably going to talk. This is the organization I’ve entrusted with my life, my conscience, my daughter’s memory.
I start up my car and pull away from the curb, a parked black Prius starting up as I pass it, its headlights blinking on like an animal waking up. I listen to my phone’s GPS as I drive—it’s a little tricky, getting back to the thruway—but my mind isn’t on the road. In my head, I’m flicking through my options, all of them bad: I can confront 0001 with what I know. But what good would that do? She’ll either come up with some other clever lie I can’t refute, or set the other numbers against me and I’ll wind up like the Duvals. I can’t go to the police—I’m a murderer. And even if I were willing to turn myself in, spend the rest of my life in jail, and get Wendy charged as well （which I’m not）， what evidence do I have that I killed Gary Kimball as part of a group, beyond a site on the dark web that can be taken down on a dime?