Grace fiddled with a button on her dress.
“Duncan,” she said, “can you give us a minute?”
My dad didn’t protest. He turned around and looked out over the preserve, taking it all in.
“Have you told your father yet?” Grace asked.
“Told him what?”
“How bad things really were that day?”
“How bad were they?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Grace. “Only you can answer that....”
I looked at her face, and beneath the tan and the freckles, there were rings under her eyes.
“...but it seemed pretty bad.”
“Really? And what would you know about it?” I asked. “Are you a high school guidance counselor? Have you readsome really good self-help books that you want to recommend to me?”
“No,” said Grace. “Nothing like that.”
For a moment it seemed like this was maybe going to be the end of our conversation. Then she spoke again.
“But I have been so depressed that I didn’t leave my house for a month. So there’s that. And I’ve ruined a marriage because of my own personal misery. And I’ve thought of doing things much more irrational than jumping off a dock. It’s okay if you don’t want to hear this from me. I get it. But the reason I know about you, Tess, is that I’vebeenyou.”
I wanted to yell at her, to flip her off and leave. But I was rooted in place.
“I’m sorry I lied,” she said. “I didn’t know your father was the competition. If you ever want to talk to me when you’re not so angry, you can contact me here.”
She handed me a card, and I held it between my thumb and forefinger. My instinct was to drop it on the ground, let it biodegrade the way it was probably meant to. But, I didn’t do that. Instead, I slipped it into the pocket of my real pants, and then I walked back to the car and drove home with my sulking father.
14
I saw this news story a couple years ago about a guy who loved someone for ten years and then discovered she didn’t exist. For an entire decade he thought he was dating a fitness model in LA, this spandex-clad girl next door with a blond ponytail and perky boobs. In reality, he was being duped by a bored housewife in West Virginia. His true love was just a digital collage of images from posters and videos, fused into a Facebook Frankenstein’s monster.
In the news segment I watched, they showed all his e-mails: thousands of pages piled on his desk like the longest romance novel ever written. There were boxes, too, stacked crates of gifts, photos, and tokens from their relationship. He even had a tattoo of her face on his right shoulder.
I still remember the look on his face when the reporter asked him how he could have possibly fallen for the scam. How could he reallynot have knownit was a hoax all thattime? Ten years! His face had turned red at first, but then he looked defiant, his wet eyes full of life.
“I was in love,” he said.
And what could the reporter really say after that?
I understand that look now.
Since my contact with Daniel the fake, I’d pretty much felt all of the feelings there are to feel. Rage and self-pity? Check. Astonishment with a hint of denial? Check. Short bouts of hopelessness ending with the occasional manic laughing fit? Yep.
There was so much that I had to rethink. So many moments that weren’t what I thought they were. It felt like I was living them all over again. Memories came back and I had to completely reevaluate them.
The video of the starlings, for instance. Even something small like that. Just a snippet of footage with tiny black birds flying in pulsing patterns over a pastel sky. A “murmuration” it’s called. Along with this video file, there was accompanying text.
This is what my body feels like when I think about you.
Who sent it? It had arrived in my in-box right around the three-month mark.
No-man’s-land.
