AĞLAYAN KAYA
PRIVATE MESSAGES
January 19, 4:00 a.m.
Participants: 0417, 0001
0417: You never said that the collective targets innocent people.
0001: The collective targets no one who doesn’t deserve to be targeted.
0417: Ashley Shawger didn’t deserve it. He saved a child’s life.
0001: How do you know he was targeted by anyone other than himself?
0417: The timer. I saw it in a picture. One of the articles said two Lux timers were used to make the bomb. And I saw one of the two I bought.
0001: Read this.
https://msn.com/en-news.ny//bombsuicidevictimwasahoarder/ar-byybk
0417: I’ve read everything about him. I know he was a hoarder. You expect me to believe those kitchen timers were his?
0001: I expect you to believe that it’s possible they were. I expect you to take comfort in that and move on.
0417: You sound like my old therapist.
0417: Are you still there?
0417: Hello?
0001: Harris Blanchard just won a humanitarian award at school. Do you feel the good deeds he racked up to win that award outweigh what he did to your daughter?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels when she hears about what a “lifesaver” he was?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: You don’t think someone else would have saved that girl if he hadn’t been there?
0417: What do you mean, his victim?
0001: You buy into this narrative that Shawger was a hero. That he saved that girl out of the goodness in his perfect, self-sacrificing heart. You believe everything you read in the press. Is that right?
0417 is typing . . .
0001: If we only knew each other from press reports, we wouldn’t know each other at all. How is it, 0417, that I have to TELL you that? YOU of all people, who have been so terribly misrepresented and maligned.
0417: Did you know who Ashley Shawger was before you sent me to his store? Did he kill someone’s child? Was this all planned?
0001 has left the private chat.
I KEEP THE private chat window open, even though it’s a blank box and I’m alone in it, the conversation lingering in my mind like a scene out of a fever dream I haven’t completely woken up from.
“I thought the collective was a game,” I whisper.
But did I? Or did I just believe that it was possibly a game? So I could take comfort in that and . . . On the main chat page, a member called 6267 is venting her rage over the loss of her teenage son, shot dead by a woman who claimed self-defense and got away with it. My son was learning disabled, she’s just typed. He knocked on her door to ask directions, and she killed him. Ours is a “stand your ground” state and she said he was trying to break in. He wasn’t. He was lost. He never hurt anyone. Her attorney called my dead son “dangerous” in the courtroom, in front of me. In front of his grandmother.
2223 is the first to respond. I know her story. Her teenage daughter was one of many girls lured into “working” for a fifty-year-old billionaire who had promised her a modeling career. Her first “photo shoot,” 2223 had told us, was in his Mercedes, on a desolate road in Rockaway Beach, twenty miles away from the New York City studio where the fourteen-year-old thought she was going. She was drugged throughout it. There was no crew or photographer.
2223 has never mentioned the billionaire’s name, but I know it. We all do. He was big in the news five or six years ago, accused of running a child sex ring but convicted on much lesser charges—attempting to solicit a minor, as I recall—by a friendly DA. He served a few months in a Club Fed, then went back to his Long Island mansion and his hedge fund business, telling the world that he’d “simply befriended the wrong people” and he just wanted to “lead a quiet life.”
Meanwhile, 2223’s daughter got addicted to drugs, lost thirty pounds, pulled out most of her hair, and jumped out of a twenty-story window.
In a just world, 2223 tells 6267, you could put that murderer’s own gun in her mouth and pull the trigger. In front of her lawyer. Call them both dangerous, because they are.
More numbers join in, agreeing and commiserating, and I’m struck by how many of us there are here, on this one page in the depths of the dark web. It must be one of the most common things in the world—losing your child to a murderer who continues to thrive.
Before I fully realize it, I’m typing too. I read my comment after I’ve posted it and it feels as though it was written not by me but by us, this thing I’m a part of. I want to beat her to death for killing your son, I’ve just typed. I want to break every bone in her body.
I don’t remember typing it.
I’m thinking now about what 0001 told me several days ago, about there being safety and power in numbers, how the poor and disenfranchised can find strength as a large group. She mentioned the military, but doesn’t this concept also apply to cults? Are we being brainwashed? Am I?
This is real. It’s not group therapy or role-play, and I should care about that. I do care about that. 0001 has all but admitted that the group killed Ashley Shawger, and they’ve probably killed many, many more. And yet, here I am. I haven’t left the group, I haven’t told the police, and I know I won’t. I can’t. Why? What is wrong with me?
I think back to my private chat with 0001—how she’d gone silent at the mention of my therapist, then switched lanes, insisting Shawger’s death was somehow justified. How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels when she hears about what a “lifesaver” he was? The specificity of that sentence. The mother. The singular victim. Shawger’s full name.
She wants me to look it up.
“Richard Ashley Shawger.” I say the name out loud as I type it into my search engine, along with “kill” and “victim.”
The search takes me all the way back to 1990. To news reports of a nineteen-year-old named Nathan Langford, shot dead by a hunter.
An accident. That’s the way most of the archived news stories I find describe the death of Nathan Langford of Havenkill, New York, who was killed by twenty-five-year-old Richard A. Shawger, of Cairo, New York, in the upstate town of Roxbury. The two young men had been acquaintances, Nathan a former classmate of Richard’s cousin. They’d gone into the woods to camp out and hunt deer with half a dozen other young men, and Shawger had accidentally shot Langford, mistaking him for a deer. It was all very tragic, according to all of those quoted. An awful miscalculation but all too possible within those dense woods. Richard Shawger was young. He was contrite. No justice could be found in sentencing him to any jail time.
One lengthy article in the Buffalo News included the judge’s brief speech from Shawger’s sentencing, in which he’d described the shooting as “a tragedy, nearly as painful for Richard Shawger and his family as it is for the Langfords.”
“Why should yet another young life be ruined?” the judge said after letting Shawger off with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a year of community service. “This young man has suffered enough for his mistake. He’s clearly traumatized by it.”
Involuntary manslaughter. No jail time. Not a single day.
For someone so traumatized by a hunting accident in his youth, Ashley Shawger had certainly made an odd career choice—not to mention the hunting trips he continued to take, right up until his alleged suicide. That photograph I saw of him and his friends posed around the deer carcass, rifles resting against their sides like drunken prom dates, beer cans raised high . . . According to the caption, it was taken just this past August.
I had a bad tequila night when I was twenty and I still can’t stomach a margarita. Ashley Shawger killed one of his friends while hunting at roughly the same age, yet look at him. Living it up with a dead deer, or as he might have called it, a big juicy buck.
How do you think the mother of Richard Ashley Shawger’s victim feels . . .
I look for more articles about the sentencing until, finally, in the one from the Roxbury paper, I find a picture of the Langford family. In the photo, they’re leaving the courthouse, the mother held upright by two men, one her age, the other much younger and taller and wearing an army dress uniform. I read the caption: Lionel Langford, who read a statement at the sentencing, was accompanied by his wife, Violet, and their older son, Corporal Thomas Langford, twenty-four. The mother’s eyes are closed. She looks as frail as a crushed leaf.
In Lionel Langford’s statement, he reportedly said that as a good Christian, he had no other choice but to forgive Shawger for killing his son. My wife and I asked God for guidance, he told reporters after the sentencing. He showed us the right path.
I look at that mother. Her closed eyes. Her drawn cheeks. According to the article, she said nothing at the sentencing. She had no statement for the press. She let her husband do the talking, but was he really speaking for her?
In the same article, there’s a picture of a group of young men posing in camo, rifles at their sides. It reminds me of the recent photo of Shawger and his buddies, only minus the deer, and there are no beer cans in sight. Half of them look too young to drink legally. From the caption, I learn that Nathan Langford is the one on the far right—a thin boy in a baggy flannel shirt who looks like a gawkier version of his older brother. Next to him stands Shawger, with a thick, dark beard and shaggy Kurt Cobain hair. Shawger is smiling. Nathan Langford is not. Shawger’s got his bulky arm wrapped around Nathan’s neck, fake-strangling him. Good one. My eyes find the photo caption: Courtesy of Violet Langford.
She did make a statement of her own after all.
I think about googling Violet Langford’s name, because there’s something familiar about it. I can’t tell, though, whether I really do know it from somewhere, or if it’s simply one of those names that sounds like I should.
My eyes are so salty, though, the lids heavy. My vision starts to blur, my body telling me that it’s going to sleep, whether I want it to or not. I move away from the computer and collapse onto my bed, the fever dream taking over. I’m floating through the night sky, a sea of stars that’s all milky swirls, like camouflage. And Nathan Langford is out there, beyond my reach. Nathan’s in his flannel hunting shirt and he’s showing Emily his forehead, whispering something I can’t get close enough to hear. . . .
When I open my eyes again, the sun is bright outside my bedroom window and it feels as though I’ve slept for days. When I glance at the phone, though, I see that it’s just six hours later. Ten a.m. I guess that was all I needed. I head into the shower and let the hot water pour over me, the steam clearing out my lungs, my mind.
Violet Langford. It isn’t the sound of the name that’s familiar. It’s the look of it. I’ve seen it in print.
I get out of the shower and dry off, the name still in my head. Violet Langford. As I wipe the fog off the bathroom mirror and brush my teeth, I try to recall where I’ve seen it. The font. The size . . . The color. It’s blue. Facebook blue. “That’s it,” I whisper. That’s where I’ve seen her name. Violet Langford is a member of the Niobe group.
I HAVEN’T BEEN on Niobe in ten days. Compared to the heroin of Kaya, it’s like the weed I used to smoke in high school. But once I’m on Facebook, I’m able to find the group quickly, and it seems as though no time has passed. So many new posts since I’ve been here last, women pouring out their grief, drowning in it, trying—and mostly failing—to help each other to shore.
I click on the member list and scroll through it until, sure enough, I find the name. Violet Langford. I was right.
I click through to her personal page. It’s public, which is a good thing. I can learn about her.
Violet Langford. She supports the Sierra Club. She works full-time at the Havenkill Library. She likes to garden. She has three cats, and she frequently posts pictures of them. The cats’ names are Skip, Elsie, and Coconut, and judging by the number of pictures, Coconut may be her favorite. She posts no pictures of herself, though. Not even in groups.
Violet Langford’s husband and older son are both dead—which makes me choke up when I realize it. On the anniversaries of their passings, she posts old, happy, uncomplicated photos—Lionel in his wedding tuxedo, Thomas as a baby. I scroll back until I can find her talking about the circumstances of their deaths—Lionel of a heart attack twenty-five years ago, when he was only in his early fifties. Thomas in an IED explosion in 2005, during his third tour in Afghanistan.
Violet Langford never remarried. She has only around fifty Facebook friends, most of them female and most of them, like her, use photos of their pets as profile shots. Like me, she leads a solitary life, in a house too big for just one person, a house full of memories of the dead.
How does she do it? I wonder, as so many of my “friends” must wonder about me. How does she go on living like this? I must focus on what’s important, though, and that is just one item of information: Violet Langford lives in Havenkill. And that’s only a forty-five-minute drive from my house.
HAVENKILL IS ONE of those picturesque Hudson Valley towns—full of historic plaques and statues of men on horseback and window boxes and white Colonial buildings with lacquered black shutters. Matt and I used to love to spend long weekends at Havenkill bed-and-breakfasts when we lived in the city, daydreaming about moving to the town (which I believe is technically a hamlet). We can be just like George and Mary Bailey, we’d say. But they really were just daydreams. The truth is, there’s something we both found slightly off-putting about Havenkill—a judgy, insular quality behind the Bedford Falls veneer. The big, unapologetic cross in the town square at Christmastime; the hardness in the eyes of some of the smiling store owners—especially when you’d mention you were visiting from the city; the enormous historic mansions at one end of town and the tiny tract houses on the other, never the twain shall meet. It gave both Matt and me a hinky feeling, so that when we decided to move to this area, we steered clear of Havenkill and the neighboring towns on the east side of the river and opted instead for the more rugged terrain of the west.
We might have been over-suspicious, but I do recall one incident, years after we moved to Mount Shady. Matt and I were having dinner in Havenkill when a couple of burly young cops rousted a drunk from outside a neighboring bar in the middle of a rainstorm, one of them using so much force that I thought he might dislocate the guy’s arm. It was around the same time as the town made headlines over a high school hit-and-run case, in which the rich people involved behaved just as disturbingly as those cops. I don’t recall the details, but I do know that Matt and I spoke then about having made the right decision in putting the river between us. And I still feel that way as I stop at a red light on Havenkill’s main drag, allowing a picture-perfect family to pass in their matching Canada Goose coats.
The library is located at the end of a side street, in one of the more modest areas of town. It’s a boxy brick building with ionic columns out front that seem a little too important for such an unassuming-looking place, and when I see it, I remember that I’ve been here before, with nine-year-old Emily, when she was researching a paper about the Hudson Valley and the Revolutionary War. Violet Langford could have easily been there that day, but if she was, we didn’t speak to her. Emily didn’t like to ask for help, even back then. She preferred to discover things on her own.
I park my car and walk into the building. As mentioned on its website, the Havenkill Library is open seven days a week, but it isn’t a large library at all—just two small wings, the adult one to the left, children’s to the right, and a small bank of computers at the center, in the area in front of the checkout desk. I start toward the adult area, but then I hear a young voice saying, “Thank you, Mrs. Langford,” and I spot her in the children’s section, replacing a picture book on one of the higher shelves and then turning. “Of course, Charlie.” She smiles at the boy, and I’m surprised at how strong she looks, how healthy. She’s wearing a fuzzy red sweater and pressed jeans, and when she dusts her hands off on them and says goodbye to Charlie and his two friends, I’m aware of how much taller she is than I thought. Her posture is perfect.
She goes back to the shelves, and I head over to her, aware of my surroundings, my steps light and unobtrusive. When I speak to her, it’s in a voice that’s barely above a whisper. Libraries intimidate me. They always have. “Excuse me, Mrs. Langford? Can I speak to you for a few minutes?”
Violet turns. Looks me up and down. She wears her reddish hair in the same short, curly style as she had at the courthouse thirty years ago, and she doesn’t seem to have aged much since then. Of course, that’s hardly saying anything, frail and spent as she’d looked in the black-and-white photo. Violet Langford in the flesh is quite vibrant, her eyes a striking pale green, like sea glass. Her smile is tentative, but still warm and inviting. She smells faintly of vanilla cookies. I imagine she must be a hit at story hour. “Are you looking for a book?” she says.
“No, ma’am. I wanted to talk to you for a few minutes.”
Her smile fades a little. “About what?” she says.
I force the name out of my mouth. “Ashley Shawger.”
“I see.” The smile disappears. “Are you a reporter?”
“No. I swear.”
“Who are you, then?”
I take a step closer. She’s easily five inches taller than I am, and her ramrod posture gives her something of a military look. I think of her son Thomas. There is a strong resemblance. “I’m a mother,” I tell her. “Like you.”
She stares at me, pink circles forming high on her cheekbones. “You look familiar.”
“I’m Camille Gardener. We’re both in the Niobe group.”
She narrows her gaze on me, then lets out a long sigh. “Oh yes.” She smiles again and puts a hand on my shoulder, as though I’m an old friend she hasn’t seen in years. “I remember you now.”
THE LIBRARY COURTYARD is small and probably charming in the spring. But right now it feels like something in mid-hibernation, the fruit trees skeletal, the rosebushes as gray and threatening as balled-up barbed wire. Violet says, though, once we’re out here, that it’s the perfect place for a private conversation. “It may not be comfortable,” she explains, “but it’s a small price to pay for no surveillance cameras.”
Violet has brought out two hot coffees, and she hands one to me. “To thaw you out a little,” she says, and the heat of it through the paper cup and the warm steam in my face couldn’t be more welcome. She gestures to one of the stone benches and I sit down, Violet sitting beside me, the cold of the concrete biting through my jeans, the back of my puffy coat. My nose is starting to go numb. “What do you want to know?” she asks.
Between the cold and the subject I want to discuss, there’s no point in taking time for formalities. I jump right in. “How did you feel when Ashley Shawger died?”
She opens her mouth, then closes it again. “Richard Shawger,” she says. “The night he died, I was at an all-night bingo game at a church in Pleasantville. Proceeds went to a children’s literacy organization, and I’m proud to say, I won. Just ask anybody who was there. I was elated.”
“Did it . . . did it take away your pain?”
“Winning at bingo?”
I just look at her.
Violet blows on her coffee, takes a tentative sip. “It’s interesting,” she says. “After Nathan was killed, our pastor told us we could find comfort in our suffering. He pointed out how, after you’ve wept really long and hard, you’re flooded by this sense of calm and peace. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Sort of. I always thought it was exhaustion.”
“Well, the pastor told us that it’s God. Literally. ‘What you’re feeling is God.’”
I have no idea what to say. “That’s . . . interesting.”
“He also said that God only gives you as much as you can take, and that the Lord bestows the most suffering on His favorite children. Lionel loved all that. I thought it was a load of horseshit.”
I smile.
“I mean, really. I wept more than I ever have when I found out about Nathan. I cried myself hoarse when Richard copped a plea and when the judge gave him a sentence that would have been better suited to a jaywalker. For that year and easily several times a year following, throughout all the years since it happened, after my husband drank himself into a heart attack, during and after all those tours Thomas insisted on going on in Afghanistan, all of them suicide missions and he knew it . . . After all of that suffering, I would come home from this job and cry and cry until I had no tears left. I’ve cried more than any person has a right to, and I have felt a hell of a lot of things while doing it. None of them have been remotely close to God. I’ve walked through fire, Camille.”
I take a sip of my coffee and watch her face, those eyes, flashing. I ask, “Do you feel God now that Shawger is dead?”
“Yes.”
“He saved a life, you know, about five years ago. A little kid.”
She gives me a small, sad smile. “I know. I read about it in the paper. And if all I knew of him was what I read in the paper, or what that judge said about him, I’d think he was quite the little hero.”
“What don’t I know?”
“A lot.”
“Tell me.”
She exhales, condensation floating from her lips. “Nathan was different,” she says. “Sensitive. Artistic.” She gives me a look.
“He was gay?”
“Maybe. We didn’t talk about those things back then. Not in our town. In our church . . .”
“Okay . . .”
“Anyway, even though they were a good deal older than Nathan, Richard Shawger and his friends used to tease him mercilessly. They did since he was a boy. I was shocked when Richard invited him on that hunting trip. I tried to convince him not to go, but Nathan was old enough to make his own decisions, and for whatever reason, he wanted to be their friend. I think he was thrilled to have been included.”
I stare at her.
“I think it was a setup.”
My eyes widen more. “They said it was an accident.”
“I’m not saying Richard Shawger shot Nathan on purpose. He may have just been trying to scare him,” Violet says. “But just as I know that he did not invite my son on that trip in the spirit of friendship, I don’t believe for an instant that he confused him for a deer.”
I close my eyes, remembering it in frames. Harris Blanchard outside the courthouse. His friends and parents embracing him as the photographers snapped away. Lisette taking the microphone. As the mother of an only boy, I feel so very grateful to the jury for seeing the truth.
Violet says, “A few years ago, I bought a gun. I’m not going to tell you how often I drove by that awful store where he worked. I didn’t care if I was caught. But I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t bring myself to . . . I’m too weak. I couldn’t do it alone.”
“I know exactly how you feel.”
“I know you do, Camille. I saw your video.”
I move closer to her, the words rushing out of me. “I used to think, maybe someday, when he’s older, he will understand what he did. If I shout loud enough, he’ll hear me. He’ll really hear me and he’ll see how much he’s hurt me, how he’s destroyed my life, my family. . . .”
Violet sets her coffee down on the bench, places a warm hand over mine. “I used to feel that way, too, my dear. But it’s a pipe dream. Your child’s murderer. Mine. They’re all the same. They believe what their defense lawyers say about them. They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they’re never punished, so they never do. We suffer and we weep and they don’t care. They never learn. They never understand. Not until . . .”
“Until what?”
“Until their last sentient moments on this earth. Then they get it. All of it.”
“How do you know?”
She squeezes my hand tightly and leans in close, her lips to my ear. “You can see it in their eyes, and all over their faces as they’re begging and pleading,” she whispers. “You can feel it. You can feel it, sister.”
IT’S NEARLY FOUR p.m. by the time I get home. The sky is tinged with coral—the start of sunset, but it feels as though several days of sunsets have passed. I’ve been driving around for hours, a mess of questions in my head, Violet Langford’s voice drowning them all out. They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they’re never punished, so they never do.
Once I’m in my house, I head upstairs and do something I haven’t done in a while. I find Brayburn College’s public Instagram account on my laptop, and then I find him. He’s in the far right picture in the top row, wearing his navy-blue sports coat and crimson tie, and he’s standing in front of that Brayburn Christmas tree, smiling next to his parents and Dean Waverly, the Martha L. Koch Humanitarian Award clutched in his hands. I read the cheery caption, about how award-recipient Harris Blanchard “took a gap year, but is certainly making up for it!”
So that’s what they are calling it now—the time before and after he stood trial for the rape of my daughter. A gap year.
I grit my teeth. Stand up. I head downstairs to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of wine. Toward the end of our conversation, Violet Langford had taken out her phone and shown me an article online that will be appearing in tomorrow’s print edition of the Colonie Herald, detailing a suicide note emailed to the newspaper by Ashley Shawger half an hour before the bomb exploded. The newspaper hadn’t released its contents until they’d been able to confirm that it had, in fact, come from Shawger’s computer, and Violet had peered over my shoulder, reading the words along with me: I killed a young man thirty years ago. I destroyed a family in the process. In detonating this bomb, I am simply doing to my own body what I did to the Langfords’ lives. Since the explosion had taken place at three a.m., Shawger had died on January 18—the thirtieth anniversary, to the day, of Nathan Langford’s death. “Karma,” I had whispered.
And she had replied, “Took the damn thing long enough.”
I think about Violet’s face, her green eyes clear and sparkling, her movements so light, as though she’d been dragging a weight behind her for years and had just cut it loose. She deserves that feeling, that lightness, the ability to move, to live again. We deserve it. I raise my glass to karma—which, I’m realizing, is sometimes a group effort.
I take a long swallow, and then I drink again, to the woman who typed out the note on Shawger’s laptop and sent it to the paper, to the ones who built the bomb, and to the others, myself included, who purchased its parts. To those who confronted Shawger in his home, who looked into his eyes as they attached the collar and the belt and set the timers and experienced his remorse—thirty years too late—and forced on him, the same way he had forced an early death on a woman’s son. To you who saw it. Who felt it.
I toast to those who drove the bomb makers to Shawger’s home and to those who picked them up and to 0001, who had so efficiently sent me to Shawger’s store to purchase what will no doubt be a murder weapon in another incidence of karma, eliminating a potential future witness in the process. Most of all, though, I toast Violet Langford, who has managed to live in this cold, chaotic world long enough to see justice served, at last.
After I’ve drained my glass, I go back upstairs, back to the dark web and back again to Kaya, where I send a private message to 0001.
0417: I was wrong to doubt the intentions of the collective. I never will again.
It’s all I write. The words disappear, but she doesn’t respond. I stand up. Walk downstairs. Pour myself another glass of wine. “Please answer.” I take a huge gulp, and then another, and before long I find myself pacing the kitchen in increasingly tight circles, finishing the glass but tasting nothing. “Please answer.”
I shouldn’t drink anymore. The room is starting to shimmer, and the meds/wine combination is making me weave on my feet.
When I look at the clock, I see that it’s been fifteen minutes, so I hurry back upstairs. Check the screen.
Still nothing.
This isn’t at all like 0001. She always answers private messages immediately. “No. Please. I want in. Please.” I start for the stairs. Turn back around. I can’t leave the room. I feel shaky, desperate. I turn back to my laptop, my eyes starting to fog. “Please don’t do this to me. I want in.” My voice cracks.
And then it comes. My answer. A faint beep, letting me know I have a new private message from 0001. “Please.” I open it, my hands trembling. . . .
0001: Do you watch The Bachelor?