Commencement (33 page)

“He didn’t.”

“He did.”

Bree whistled under her breath. “What a turd,” she said.

“Do you think you’ll see Adrian again while you’re here?” Celia asked.

“He’s taking me out tonight,” Bree said. “I’m gonna take a look-see through your closet for something cute to wear, okay?”

A while later, Bree was trying on outfits in front of the bathroom mirror as Celia dozed on the couch. It was a lazy late morning, and outside the rain began to pour. Celia was half in a dream, and for some reason she kept hearing April’s full name over and over:
April Adams, April Adams, April Adams
.

Suddenly, Bree was standing over her, shaking her awake.

“Oh my God, Celia. Look at this. Oh my God.”

At first, Celia thought Bree was referring to her outfit—a long black halter over a pair of Seven jeans.

“That’s a dress, not a top,” Celia said, closing her eyes again.

“Cee, please wake up!” Bree said. She shook Celia hard, and as Celia came to she saw Bree running toward the television, turning the volume up. A picture of April filled the screen, with the word
MISSING
printed underneath. She was smiling wide and wearing her favorite red dress, the one that used to belong to her mother. Celia remembered the photograph instantly—she had taken it herself at Celebration of Sisterhood their senior year of college.

“The woman police are looking for is named April Adams,” said a too-cheery news anchor with big blonde hair. “She was here in Atlanta to make a documentary about children in prostitution. She did not return home from an early evening walk last night, and no one has heard from her since. Police are worried that in a bizarre twist of fate, Ms. Adams herself may have been trafficked into this city’s illegal sex trade.”

Bree sat down beside Celia on the couch. They looked at each
other for a moment, as if each of them thought this might be a dream.

“What the hell is going on?” Celia said. Her heart pounded.

A moment later, a black woman with short, cropped hair and crooked teeth appeared on the television. She seemed ageless in a way. She could have just as easily been forty or sixty-five.
NEIGHBOR
, it said at the bottom of the screen.

“Ms. Alexa Jones says she had become friendly with April Adams in the months that she lived here on English Avenue.”

“April’s a good, sweet girl,” the woman said. To Celia, the idea that this woman even knew April,
her
April, was bizarre. “She’s always down at the corner store talking to all the little girls. Last night, I seen April being pulled off by one of those young guys, a pimp. He just shoved her into his car and then drove away.”

“Authorities are now looking for the man Ms. Jones saw, known to neighbors only by the name Redd,” the news anchor said. “He may be driving a red Cadillac, and is thought to be just one of many pimps living in the area.”

There were some stock photos of prostitutes walking in the city streets at night.

“Ms. Adams does not fit the typical profile of a sex trafficking victim,” the anchor went on. “She is twenty-six years old, Caucasian, a graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts.”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Celia said. “Is this really happening?”

Bree shook her head. “It must be a mistake. April would never let something like this happen to her.”

“Maybe she didn’t have a choice,” Celia whispered.

“Well, where the hell was Ronnie?” Bree said.

Celia was silent. She thought of how many times Ronnie had left April to fend for herself.

“What do we do?” Celia asked. She was trying not to imagine the worst, but the worst kept coming into her head—April, dead at the hands of some horrible pimp, her body at the bottom of a murky pond or in a dumpster somewhere.

Bree looked composed. “We call the police.”

·   ·   ·

After they had each been questioned by phone (When did they last see April? Hear from her? What was her state of mind? Did she fear anyone?), Bree, Celia, and Sally got on the phone with one another. The police officer they spoke to told Bree that they had conducted a massive search that morning, calling on dozens of local volunteers to comb the area for clues. There was nothing for the girls to do but wait.

Sally sounded hysterical. “I knew this was a terrible idea,” she said, sobbing. “I told her not to do it. Oh God, you guys, I dreamed that April died.”

“Sweetie, you’ve got to calm down,” Celia said. “There’s an explanation for all this, and we’re going to figure it out. The police are doing everything they can.”

“Are you home alone, Sal?” Bree asked.

“Yes,” Sally said, choking on her tears. “Jake’s away for a week for work. He just left an hour ago.” Then, as if she thought they might question this, she added, “It’s been on the calendar for months.”

“Do you want to come out here for the weekend?” Celia asked. It was already four o’clock on Saturday, so there wasn’t much weekend left.

“Yes,” Sally said. She took a deep breath, but then started sobbing again. “Oh God, I don’t think I can drive. And I don’t want to be that crazy lady weeping on the Acela Express.”

“Do you want us to come to you?” Celia asked, and Bree shot her a look of surprise.

“Could you?” Sally said.

“Fuck it, my boss is going to be on vacation all week,” Celia said. “And Bree’s here until next Sunday.”

“And Jake’s away!” Sally said.

“Yup. The three of us can be together for the week, maybe get down to Georgia if we have to and help search for her,” Celia said. She thought of the dozens of news shows about missing girls she had watched over the years. Each time the search parties went out
hopeful and came up with nothing at all or, worse, a body. “But I’m sure we won’t get to that point,” she said, trying to shake off the thought. “She’ll be home soon.”

Sally and Jake lived in a gorgeous old three-story Victorian that reminded Celia of her childhood dollhouse. It was the kind of home, Celia thought, that even her mother would look at with terrible envy. The outside was painted a pale yellow, and there was an actual swing on the front porch. Inside, the shiny hardwood floors were covered by thick Oriental rugs in shades of deep cranberry and inky blue. (“My mom’s,” Sally said proudly.) Their furniture was solid wood, with soft pillows thrown here and there, and long heavy curtains in every room.

“So I guess you guys skipped that whole Ikea phase of life, huh?” Celia said, as they drank lemonade in the kitchen late on Saturday night. The room was full of sleek, brand-new appliances—a stainless-steel fridge, marble countertops, the works.

Sally kept crying.

Celia wondered if Sally was more emotional because she knew what it was like to lose someone you loved, or because she and April had always been so close but had stubbornly ignored each other this past year. Or maybe her hormones were already going crazy from the pregnancy and the additional stress was just too much. (Even as she considered this, Celia thought of how April would have called it sexist. “A woman can’t express any emotions without being asked, ‘Do you have your period?’” she always said when she had her period and felt enraged.)

Sally’s house had five bedrooms, and she had turned down the beds in her two favorite guest rooms for Celia and Bree. But in the end, none of them could sleep that first night, and they huddled in Sally and Jake’s bed and talked about April instead.

“I missed her so much all year, but I couldn’t bring myself to make the first call,” Sally said. “I kept thinking about what she said about Jake, and I just couldn’t forgive her.”

“I missed her, too,” Bree said. “I always felt like she was one person
who really stood behind my choices, no matter what. And I always thought we would make up eventually, put that stupid fight behind us.”

“You will,” Celia said. “As soon as they find her.”

Later, they talked about Lara leaving Bree, and Bree (too tired for self-censorship, Celia thought) said, “I think she was the love of my life, and I just pushed her away.” They talked about Sally’s marriage, how it was exactly and not at all what she had expected. She admitted that Jake had wanted to cancel his business trip and stay home with her after they found out about April, but Sally had forced him to go. “Ever since I got pregnant, he treats me like I’m made of glass,” she said. “If he said ‘Everything will be okay, babe’ one more time I might have exploded.”

“He’s just worried about you, sweetie,” Bree said. “You have to let the people who love you take care of you.”

“It’s weird not having four of us in the bed,” Sally said.

“I know,” Bree said. “And even weirder that there
are
four of us.” She pointed at Sally’s round tummy.

They fell silent for a while before starting up the conversation again. Celia didn’t tell the other two, but in her head she prayed to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, for April to call them now and just say the whole thing had been a big misunderstanding.

The phone didn’t ring.

As soon as the sun came up, Bree called the Atlanta police department. She kept calling, at least once an hour. The detectives liked her familiar accent, so they didn’t seem to mind, but each time they said the same thing: “Nothing new to report.” Sally tried calling April’s mother on her home phone, but it just rang and rang without ever going to a machine. A detective said she knew what had happened and was on her way to Atlanta. He would tell her they were looking for her when she arrived.

“Should we be coming, too? To help look?” Bree asked hopefully.

“No, ma’am. I already told you, there’s no point in that,” the detective said. “We’ve conducted a very thorough search already.”

Everything definitive they heard, they got from the Georgia newspapers online or from Bree’s parents, who read to them from
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
over the phone. No one could find
the pimp that Alexa Jones had mentioned the day before. His house had been raided, and cops had found cocaine and weed, as well as two eighteen-year-old girls beaten, bloodied, and tied to a radiator. This last fact scared them more than anything.

“Jesus, look what he’s capable of,” Celia whispered.

“Why wasn’t this psychopath arrested sooner?” Bree said.

Sally was silent. At noon, she made grilled chicken sandwiches with pesto mayo and her mom’s potato salad. None of them ate a bite.

It began to rain. The three of them huddled under a blanket on the couch, even though it was ninety degrees outside and not particularly cold in the house. If they had been here under any other circumstances, Celia thought, it would be a near-perfect way to spend the day. Instead, she felt nauseous and kept wishing that she might open her eyes and discover that the past two days had all been a dream.

Celia’s parents stopped by that afternoon, and Celia felt a little guilty for not staying with them, since they only lived a few miles away. Violet had finished her senior year at UVM and stayed in Vermont with friends for the summer, and Celia knew they sometimes got lonely with no children left at home.

“We understand,” her mother said. “You need to be with your friends now.”

They had brought enough food for an army—a stuffed turkey, clam chowder, a Crock-Pot full of chili and corn bread, roast beef sandwiches, and a chocolate Entenmann’s cake.

“In our family, when we’re stressed out, we eat,” Celia overheard her mother saying to Sally, as if it were an entirely novel concept.

The phone rang, and Sally hurried to answer it.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I don’t think so, well—hold on please.”

She laid the receiver on the counter and hissed at them, “Oh my God, it’s someone from
Nancy Grace
. They want the three of us on the show tonight.”

“No,” Bree and Celia said simultaneously.

“I know, I know,” Sally said. “But what do I tell
them?”
She pointed at the phone.

Celia’s mother reached for it. “Hello,” she said. “Listen, these
girls are not going to talk to you at this time. They are going through something simply awful, and I know you’ll understand when I now hang up on you. Good-bye.”

The girls stood back, impressed. Celia felt proud. Sometimes she forgot what a hard-ass her mother could be; that in addition to hosting bake sales and teaching Sunday school and listening to her daughters’ man problems, she was also vice president of the second-largest ad agency in Boston.

When Celia got home from work most nights, it was all she could do to flop onto the couch, switch on the television, and order sushi from the place downstairs, all the while feeling awash in Catholic guilt for not turning on the computer and writing something. How had her mother gone through all those long days at the office only to spend her nights cooking dinner and making school lunches and breaking up squabbles and correcting math homework?

She had once said that she believed the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more.

“I make as much money as your father, and I still do about ninety percent of the housework,” she said. “Which one of us has a higher quality of life because I work? I’ll give you a clue: It’s not me.”

After a while, her parents started packing up to leave.

“You girls let me know if you need anything,” her mother said to Sally and Bree as they said good-bye at the door.

Celia had the strongest urge to crawl into her raincoat and hide, like she had on the first day of kindergarten in 1986. Instead she just said, “Thanks, Mommy.”

“My legion from church is going to pray for April every day, okay?” her mother said as Celia walked them out to their car.

Celia smiled. “Thank you.”

Her mother took her hand and whispered, “Just so you know, miracles can happen.”

Celia nodded, though she didn’t believe it for a second.

“I feel weird leaving you,” her mother said. “Are you girls going to be okay?”

“Of course,” Celia said. “Sally’s practically a grown up, after all.”

“I can’t believe she is going to have a baby,” her mother said.

“Neither can I,” Celia said.