Chapter 7 #2
The texts came from unknown numbers, every one of them similar in language and in detail, as if a script had been copied from a master.
You fucking bitch, who the fuck do you think you are.
Anna Plummer, watch your back. But they weren’t identical.
A few contained details about her kids. One offered up her address, another the address of the house where she had lived before, on Long Island.
Still another: I hope Denny has a good life insurance policy on you, little sister.
She googled a few of them, but they were cell phones and led to dead ends, and she gave up after a few tries.
It all felt futile, because the messages kept coming, furiously, stacks of them.
She was overwhelmed by the onslaught. So she stopped.
Fuck it. She wasn’t going to get to the bottom of these mysteries, not one by one, anyway.
Looking up phone numbers wasn’t going to stop them from barreling forth.
She slid into the hot water, moving the phone to the corner of the tub, where she had room for it.
Clearing the phone took time, but she scrolled through the offenses, taking screenshots of the worst of it.
She sent a series to Di. No heads-up. Not a simple text with a “whaddya think” preceding it.
It was too exhausting. Let her friend see what it meant, all of these messages, tumbling over one another, tripping into the next.
What the fucking fuck is this, Di wrote back.
About a fraction of what has been spamming my phone since 6pm
I mean I think we both know what this is
But Anna didn’t know anything. Outside, she could hear a high-pitched whistle, probably a fisher cat; they were deep chocolate brown and larger than a fox, a variety of weasel, she found out when she moved.
They could take down a full-size dog. She had learned to identify the noise, but when they had first come here, to these woods, she had thought that sound was something else, someone calling for a dog, maybe even a far-off train whistling in the distance.
I have no idea what this is Di
You do know what this is, Anna, a noise inside her said. Somewhere, little kids were rolling in from their dance, taking off shoes that pinched, wiping their faces clean from spaghetti and ice cream.
To send a person this kind of shit—that was a campaign.
You had to organize it. You had to have power behind you.
You had to be some kind of, well, organization.
Say you were, oh, the president of the PTO and in anticipation of a hotly contested dance you had organized your minions to harass a member.
This—this was the kind of thing that might result from such an event.
Yes, it was a theory. A wild theory. But Anna knew it could be exactly what had happened.
She could picture Mimi getting people on board, telling friends and conspirators what time, what number, what email to use.
Of course, this was all very far-fetched.
More likely was Denny’s initial suggestion that the messages were from neighborhood kids fucking around.
She could picture her husband now. Stop twisting yourself into a pretzel, Anna.
This is all in your head. No, the PTO isn’t coming after you. You sound like an insane person.
There had, though, been just that one flash: Mimi’s face, for just one second, an inkling of what was possible.
Was it ridiculous? Maybe. Mimi, for all of her peccadilloes and annoying Hamilton mommy traits, was just another mom.
She picked her kid up just like everyone else, made sandwiches with the crusts cut off and wiped tears away and brushed hair and stacked pajamas into little squares so that they fit into cabinets and made lunches before anyone else in the house was awake and lived by the same mom promise that they all did: that they would serve their kids first, even when it hurt, even when it broke them, even when it meant that they would have to live a life that was a little less meaningful, or a little forgotten.
Mimi wasn’t on the other side of some looking glass; she was right there, a slightly altered version of Anna.
Well, that was what she had thought, but now, as messages continued to pour in, another and another and another, Anna had a less generous reading.
She pictured a snake, she pictured something insidious, she pictured the spread of a virus that could not be stopped.
She could not stop the febrile rush, spiders of fire crawling beneath her skin and outward as she contemplated the possible, if improbable truth of it.
The water in the bath looked like a tidal wave, the vibration from her phone was unforgiving, the sound outside—the fisher cat—did not stop, and Anna Plummer closed her eyes and pulled beneath the surface, with her hair loose around her in waves, and the phone pinging incessantly until her submersion finally silenced it, and the drowned-out sound of a wild animal, muted and still in the thick, black night.