After she leaves, the panic attack revs up. I spend several minutes doubled over on the macadam, my veins throbbing, threatening to explode.
Nineteen
We’re everywhere, Camille, Wendy had said to me when we were leaving the Wild Rose, just after we got the send-off from the bartender, that virgin-serving sister in the sparkly dress, our alibis achieved. At the time, it thrilled me, the idea of being part of something so big and effective and strong. But now I find it terrifying, like an impenetrable dome over my head that I’m only just discovering.
When I reach Exit 19, which is my exit, I’m still shivering from my encounter with the cop. My hands have been gripping the wheel so hard, they ache, and I haven’t been able to think of anything but those mirrored glasses, the sound of her gun’s safety, the dry calm of her voice.
We’ll find out if you’re lying.
As I pull off at the exit, I catch a glimpse of a shadow in the tollbooth, and I could swear the woman in the Prius is standing there in her enormous sunglasses, grinning at me through her painted red lips. We’re everywhere. . . .
My breath sticks in my throat, and I tell myself to calm down, keep it together. It’s not her. It’s an elderly man. . . . I think about skipping the park and ride, driving home, barring the doors to my house, and never leaving. But then I remind myself: They’re not everywhere. How can they be? They just want me to believe they are so they can scare me into submission.
Not they. We.
Past the tollbooth is a traffic circle, the park and ride just off the second exit. Once I reach the park and ride, I head in slowly, my gaze darting from space to space, checking for stationary drivers who might be staking me out the way the woman in the Prius did, the way I staked out Edward Duval for a solid week at the Croton-on-Hudson train station.
I complete a full sweep of the lot, passing every empty car and satisfying myself that no one is waiting here for me. Then I find a space close to the entrance, with an empty one next to it, and wait. It’s six p.m., and this park and ride is about an hour away from Wendy’s town of Jefferville. I’ll give her an hour, and if she doesn’t show by then, I can assume she isn’t going to. Probably best for her if she doesn’t. If I allow myself to need certain people in my life, bad things happen to them. My mother died too young, of cancer. And then of course there was Emily. Matt changed so much as a person, he no longer became necessary, and thus got out of “us” alive. What’s saved Luke, I’m convinced, is the distance between us—the fact that we live more than two hours apart, and his life is too busy and full for me to rely on him the way I’d like to. . . .
And here’s something I try very hard not to think about: I was the last person to speak to my therapist, Joan. She had told me a few days earlier that she didn’t think analysis was helping me anymore—that I hadn’t made much progress in the past three years, and she felt it was her fault. She was holding me back by being so available to me, and as a result, she was keeping me from forming meaningful relationships. You’re not my mother, she had said, meaning she didn’t want me to turn into someone like her mother—friendless, joyless, ruined forever by the death of her child. . . .
I didn’t care what she meant. I went off my meds for those three days, and took it worse than I’ve ever taken a breakup. I called Joan at two in the morning like some obsessed, spurned lover, waking her from a deep sleep and begging her to reconsider. You need help, Camille, she had said. And I had replied, That’s why I’m calling you!
I don’t remember exactly how the conversation ended, but I do remember dissolving into tears. She was found at the bottom of her staircase a week later, her phone near her body, mine the last on her recent calls list.
Would she have fallen down her stairs in the middle of the night if my call hadn’t awakened her? Who knows? But I’m wondering if that’s what drew me to the collective in the first place—the idea of forming connections with people I’ll never know well enough to kill.