Commencement (35 page)

“What are you doing?” Bree said.

“Food shopping,” he said.

“Mama!” she called outside. “Roger’s taking all your food.”

“So Mom said Doug Anderson paid you a visit last time you were here,” Roger said teasingly.

“Not really,” Bree said. “We sort of just bumped into each other.”

“Bumped into each other on our front stoop as I heard it,” he said. “Sounds like he
lurves
you.”

“Shut up,” she said. “I swear, Mom still thinks he’s the One, even though he’s married with two kids.”

“Well, what do you think?” Roger said.

“I think she’s nuts,” Bree said. “But do you ever feel like Mama has this power over you? Like you just want to make her proud so badly that you’d do anything.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m her oldest son, Biscuit. I don’t have to work that hard. I know what you mean, though. I cried like a baby when I heard about the heart attack. I don’t think I had cried for a decade before that. That’s what Mama will do to you.”

“You hadn’t cried in a decade?” Bree said. This was one of those amazing things about men that made her thankful not to be one of them. Imagine not crying for ten years.

“It’s like I almost want Doug to be the One, because I know how happy Mom would be if he was,” Bree said.

“Sounds pretty romantic,” he said.

She laughed, then said in a hush so her mother wouldn’t hear, “It just makes me so sad to see how much they love Emily. Why couldn’t they have ever loved Lara like that?”

“So you miss her,” he said.

She told him the story of how Lara had left, how devastating it had felt to walk into their empty apartment.

“Why don’t you call her?” he asked.

“I’ve tried. She changed her number. I don’t even know where she is,” Bree said. “Plus, sometimes it just gets so bad that you can’t imagine how it could ever get good again, you know?”

Their mother came in then and removed the ridiculous floppy garden hat she had been wearing.

Bree gave her a hug. “I should hit the road,” she said.

“Wear your seatbelt and pull over and take a nap if you get tired,” her mother said.

“I’m just going to Atlanta.” Bree laughed. “It’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive. How tired can I get?”

“Drowsiness accounts for more accidents than you might think.”

Bree rolled her eyes.

When she stepped outside, the heat hit her like a brick wall.

On the road to Atlanta, she ate the warm molasses cookies her mother had made for the ride. She listened to the radio and tried not to cry when one of April’s favorite Bob Dylan songs came on, but she cried anyway.

She thought about Doug Anderson every time she saw a Volvo on the highway. He had been on her mind more lately than he had in the last nine years combined. Her mother seemed to think it wasn’t too late for the two of them to just pick up where they’d left off in college, despite the fact that the man had a wife and children. For a little while now, Bree allowed herself to imagine it: At night, she’d burrow into him just like her mother burrowed into her dad, clad in a thin cotton nightgown, the color of a seashell. They’d wake up each morning to the sound of two kids pattering down the hall, and then they’d feel the weight of the kids’ bodies on top of their own in bed. She thought about brushing that little cutie pie’s long red hair and pinning it up with butterfly barrettes. (Of course, the hair would always be a reminder of the birth mother who had died in a tragic shark attack, but Bree would manage.) She envisioned flipping pancakes and singing songs in the car and having fights over vegetables and bedtimes. She pictured long, warm evenings on the porch alone with Doug, talking about their parents and their teenage years. Perhaps that sort of common ground was what real togetherness was made of. Not struggle and passion and difference, but just plain and simple,
My mama knows your mama, and I remember what you looked like the summer you got braces and lost all your freckles
.

Finally, there was a blast of a truck horn. Bree took it as a sign to stop thinking this way. She switched the radio to NPR and pretended to be riveted by a debate about ethanol. Of course, she had no one to pretend for but herself, but that seemed like more than enough.

When Bree pulled up to the dingy hotel, April’s mother was standing out front in jeans and a long, flowing top, smoking a cigarette.
Lydia looked like she had aged twenty years since Bree had last seen her. Her face was covered in deep wrinkles, her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. Bree almost didn’t recognize her.

She didn’t smile as she climbed into the passenger seat. Bree wondered if Lydia knew how things had been between her and April this past year. Had April told her mother about their stupid fight at Sally’s wedding, about the way their friendship had fallen apart?

She decided not to wonder.

“It’s good to see you,” Bree said.

“Jesus, could it be any damn hotter outside?” Lydia said. “I’m sweating in places I didn’t even know I had.”

She sounded drunk. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning.

“I’m starving,” Lydia said. “That hotel food is just rotgut crap. There’s a diner by the highway that’s not too bad.”

They drove to the diner in near silence and took a booth by the window. A fluorescent lightbulb over their heads flickered on and off every minute or so. The red plastic seat stuck to the back of Bree’s bare legs.

After she’d ordered her coffee and taken a few sips, Lydia seemed to soften.

“It was good of you to come out here and keep me company for the day,” she said. “I really don’t even know what I’m doing in Atlanta. There’s no real way to help. But what was I gonna do? Sit and chain-smoke in my apartment at home?”

Bree gave her a sad smile. Despite how odd she had always found Lydia, she pitied her now. Her only child was missing, and she was powerless to do anything about it.

“My mother says you’re welcome to come stay with us in Savannah,” Bree said.

Lydia waved her hand in the air, dismissing the invitation. “Believe me, that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”

They ordered pancakes and bacon from a bored-looking teenager in a pink uniform that was about three sizes too big.

Lydia pulled two tiny white bottles from her purse and shook out a few pills from each, downing the whole handful with one gulp from her water glass.

“That Ronnie Munro is a hot ticket,” Lydia said. “She met me for coffee yesterday. I would have killed for a job like hers, to have turned out as a real, serious woman artist. Making a difference, you know?”

Bree nodded, although she thought it was an incredibly strange thing to say. If it weren’t for Ronnie, April would probably be safe and sound in some Teach for America classroom full of disobedient little monsters right now.

“Wow, does she love April,” Lydia said. “It made me proud to hear Ronnie talk about what a fighter April is. My little girl.” She gazed off into space for a moment, before looking Bree straight in the eye. “You know, that call I got from the police saying she was missing—that was the first I’d heard of April being in Atlanta. As far as I knew, she was still living with Ronnie in Chicago. I guess that shows you how close we’ve been in recent years.”

Bree was stunned. Hadn’t April said her mother thought the Atlanta project was a great idea? Was it really possible that she hadn’t spoken to her mother in a year, either?

“Have you talked to the police yet today?” Bree said.

Lydia nodded sadly. “Nothing new. You heard they drained a few local ponds?”

Bree gasped. “No,” she said, and with that thought, it finally hit her—April was dead.

“I did get an alarming call from April’s father, or whatever you want to call him,” Lydia said. “He asked how he could help. How do you like that? He wanted to hire special detectives and offer more money for information. I told him to go fuck himself.”

Bree tried to disguise how shocked she felt. She wished Celia were there. She would know exactly what to say.

The waitress arrived with the pancakes and a sticky pitcher of syrup on a tray in one hand and the coffeepot in the other.

“Breakfast is served,” she said as she slid the plates onto the tabletop.

After they left the diner, Bree drove Lydia around the city, helping her talk to the police and taking her to the grocery store to stock up. On the way home to Savannah, she wept, thinking about how
unfair it all was—why had something like this happened to April, someone who always wanted only the best for the world?

Bree stayed in Georgia through the rest of August and all of September. Everyone at her office back in San Francisco knew what had happened, and for a time they were sympathetic. Bree’s parents’ house became her cocoon, and she spent her days helping her mother in the garden, reading thick novels, driving over to her father’s office to drop off his lunch when he accidentally left it at home.

Sally kept saying this wasn’t healthy, that Bree needed to get back into a routine. She knew Sal was right, but when her boss finally called and gave her the ultimatum she’d been expecting ever since she left—get back to work immediately, or they’d have to replace her—she told him she understood completely, and that she’d have one of the paralegals clean out her desk.

Bree did not think about how much it had taken to get the job, or about how the firm had been her first choice from the start. She did not think about the long hours she had spent with Lara, trying on suits for her interview, as Lara pored over Web sites to try to glean any information she could about the partners—eventually discovering that Peter Morris had an
Amazon.com
wish list that revealed his love of books about golf, dogs, and true crime; that Katherine White had run the Big Sur half marathon the previous fall and had once sued her landlord. She did not think about the days and nights she had spent busting her butt at that office, feeling her blood pumping as she ripped into a new case.

When she told her parents that she wasn’t going back to work, her father gasped.

“Bree,” he said. “Sweetheart, do you want to come work with me?”

She smiled, thinking this over, imagining what it would be like to settle back into Savannah for good, taking a little apartment downtown, walking to the office every day, arguing cases side by side with her father. Tim wanted to go on to law school after graduation,
and she pictured him coming on board, too. What would they call themselves? Miller, Miller, and Miller? Miller & Sons?

But Bree had made her decision. “I think I’m going to go back to New York and visit Celia for a while,” she said.

To her surprise, neither of them protested.

Instead, her mother said, “When my dear grandma died, I went and stayed with your aunt Kitty for two weeks straight, and she fed me a steady diet of whiskey and grilled cheese sandwiches until I stopped crying. Sometimes a girl just needs her best friend.”

And so, Bree returned to New York. The autumn set in. Cool breezes came, and the leaves turned bright shades of orange and yellow, reminding her of the falls they had spent at Smith, having leaf fights in the Quad, greeting trick-or-treaters at the front door of King House with Milky Ways and lollipops.

For weeks, Bree and Celia cooked dinners together out of Celia’s copy of
The Silver Spoon
cookbook and played Scrabble in bed. They tried to train Celia’s new puppy, Lola, and they drank so many bottles of wine that Celia decided to make a giant kitchen bulletin board out of the corks. During the day, Bree picked up groceries, took the dog to the park, and cleaned the parts of Celia’s apartment that Celia herself would have never even noticed were dirty. She scrubbed the windowsills and polished the oven dials and rinsed the toothbrush holder. Celia said she loved having Bree there, but Bree knew that any houseguest who stayed indefinitely could begin to grate on a girl. She hadn’t really given Celia a choice—Celia was the person Bree needed to be with now, and so she made an effort to earn her keep.

On brisk afternoons, Bree wandered around Brooklyn alone, chatting with lonely old ladies in cafés, touching every glass bottle in an antique shop on Montague Street, trying to put the events of the summer from her mind. But when Celia came home from work, they’d curl up on the sofa and talk about April and Lara.

“Are you missing Lara?” Celia said one night as they sat there with a bowl of popcorn between them, and the puppy gnawed away at a pig’s ear on the floor.

Bree shrugged. “Can you believe she still hasn’t called me? I’m sure she’s heard about April.”

“I saw a girl who looked just like April in the street today,” Celia said. “She had long red hair, and she was wearing a very April-looking corduroy jumper, and just sort of bopping along, the way April would. And even though I knew it wasn’t her—I mean, April doesn’t even have that red hair anymore—I
wanted
it to be her so badly.”

“That’s happened to me, too,” Bree said. “I keep thinking I’m seeing her everywhere I go.”

Celia started to respond, but Bree wasn’t listening. She was looking out through the window at the Watchtower, the world headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which had been erected so that they might be the first to see Christ coming at the Apocalypse.

There were dozens of them in the neighborhood, always walking around in their Sunday best—the men in pressed suits, the women wearing long flowing skirts and hats. Bree had asked Celia once why they were always so dressed up.

“When you think today might be the day you meet your Maker, you put in a little extra effort,” Celia said with a grin.

Bree had laughed at this, but now she was thinking of how in some ways, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had it right. You never really knew what God or life had in store, and when it hit you without warning, without any preparation on your part, perhaps it stung you all the more for that.

S
ally let the towel drop to the bathroom floor and looked at her body in the mirror. She screamed at the top of her lungs, like some teenager in a horror film who’s just seen an ax murderer emerge from the basement.

“Babe?” Jake called up the stairs, sounding only mildly concerned.