Commencement (40 page)

When she got to the campus, Sally pulled the car to the side of the road and got out, clutching Auden. She had read that Bill was buried in the cemetery at the end of Main Street, though the fact of it surprised her. She couldn’t remember if they had ever discussed it, but he did not seem like the type to want to be buried. Sally wondered if maybe it had been his children’s idea. She remembered how unbearable it had been to think of her mother’s familiar, warm body burned up to ash. Though really, was it any better to bury your parent in the ground, leaving him to decompose like garbage, until he was nothing? She would never want to see Bill like that, memorialized by a cold stone, a heap of dirt, and some wilting flowers. Or worse, one of those stupid miniature Christmas trees that people placed at gravesides this time of year, as if the dead were twenty-somethings living in tiny studio apartments.

It was bitter cold. Sally tried to pull her woolen jacket over her enormous stomach. Even though she was pregnant, she was too vain to buy a maternity coat.

“I’ll never wear it again!” she said to Jake when he told her she needed one on a recent trip to the mall for nursery furniture.

“What about when you’re pregnant with our next kid?” he said.

“Oh, brother,” she had snapped. “Can we get this one out into the light of day before we start talking about the next one, please?”

She pulled her mittens from her pockets now and began to walk the path through Center Campus toward the Quad.

“You okay?” she said to the baby. She hoped she wasn’t slowly freezing her daughter to death. Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.

Sally walked slowly. How many times had she taken this path with the girls, lazily gossiping on the way to class, or trudging arm in arm through the snow, or, on occasion, purposefully marching at a Take Back the Night rally or Celebration of Sisterhood, always with April leading the way. Smith had left its mark on her, so that the place would always feel like home, but she was a stranger here now. In each of her friends, her Smith College self would always live on. Maybe that was why they were all still so important to one another, even though so much had changed.

Two girls came toward her now, holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears. They reminded her of Bree and Lara. Bree had called Sally a few days earlier to tell her how they had reunited in San Francisco. She said it felt magical, like one of the old movies Celia used to make them watch in college. But even so, Bree flew back to New York a day later, as planned.

When Sally asked what would happen next, Bree said, “I just don’t know. Maybe I should move home and take that job my dad offered me. I could do worse, right? I had been dreaming of her for so long, Sal, but I need my family, too.”

“Maybe you can have both,” Sally had said gently.

“No,” Bree said. “I really don’t think so.”

Sally paused in front of the library now, the site of her first conversation with Bill, the first place they ever made love. At her wedding, she had been afraid to go inside, because the passage of time had transformed him in her eyes. The thought of seeing him again, for what he really was, felt like too much. But now Bill was gone, and she could remember him just as he had been in those early days.

She walked inside and the familiar smell filled the air, a mix of leather and old paper and floor polish. She made her way toward Bill’s office.

In the main room, Smithies sat alone at carrels, serious as monks, their faces down in their used copies of Thackeray and Joan Didion. Sally had a ridiculous urge to walk over to them, smooth their hair, and tell them to savor every minute of this. But none of the girls even looked up. Sally was twenty-six, which in college student
years was borderline elderly. When you went to college in a town, you fancied it your own, but you never really knew the place in the way of the permanent residents—the cemeteries and the DMV, the public libraries and elementary schools. You just saw your campus as a world unto itself and thought of the townspeople as adorable extras. Did Harvard kids look at her that way now? Some old married pregnant lady, another nameless part of the safe backdrop that was Cambridge?

She took the stairs at the back of the room, her heart speeding up as she approached his office. She had imagined it many times these past few weeks—cardboard boxes overflowing with his books and papers, here and there a stray Post-it lying on the ground. But when she got there, she found the room completely bare but for his old steel desk and empty bookshelves. Everything familiar and personal—the wing chair, the lambskin rug—had been taken away. By whom? His children? His wife?

Sally stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She sat on the floor and tried to find some trace of him, but even his smell had been erased. She opened up his old copy of Auden and read for nearly an hour—the epic poems, the love poems, the silly two-liners Auden had dashed off to other famous poets. Then she got to the one that reminded her most of Bill. It was one of the poems he had read to her over and over on those early nights in his office while they were cuddling on the rug, drinking wine from plastic cups meant to look like glass. Later, lying alone in her single bed, in a building full of girls lying alone in single beds, she would say the words out loud. She did this again now, reading it in a hushed voice to the empty room around her:

Bill had always said that every poem was different for every reader, because each person injected the poet’s personal thoughts with his or her own, breathing new life into them. When Bill had read her that poem, she had imagined it to mean that he loved her in a way so pure and honest and absolute that it was as if he were a little boy again, running around in short-pants. The part she had ignored was the most important part:
Almost anything will do
.

She realized now, too late, that perhaps the poems he loved were his attempts at confessing. She lingered over this one, letting her finger trace each word slowly. When she finished, she laid the book on his desk and left the room, closing the door behind her.

Outside, it smelled like snow. As she walked toward the Quad and past the frozen pond, she imagined white flakes floating down, burying whatever remained of him.

By the time she reached King House, Sally was out of breath from walking, and she felt like her bladder was about to burst. She glanced around, but there were no students in sight, so she went right up to the back door of the house, prepared to use her old key to get inside and use the bathroom. When she saw the door, she jolted backward a bit—the keyhole had been covered over, and there was now a little cube of plastic in its place with a blinking red light, the sort of thing you would swipe a credit card through.

She thought of an old Joni Mitchell song that April used to play while they were studying.
Nothing lasts for long, nothing lasts for long
.

Sally rang the bell, but no one came, so she walked to the stone steps leading back down to the Quad and sat on the cold concrete. Where was April? she wondered for what felt like the millionth time. When would they ever know what really happened to her?

Sally felt the baby kick, and she let out a little laugh. “This is where I married your daddy,” she said. Someday she would bring her little girl here. She thought of introducing her daughter to Celia and Bree, and to April, once she came back to them.

“Excuse me! Ma’am?” came a tinny voice from behind. Sally swiveled her head to see a young smiling girl with a backpack holding the door to the house open. She looked about eleven years old. “Did you want to come inside?” she asked, in a helpful, Girl Scout–like tone.

Sally thought about this for a moment. She imagined walking into King House, which was nothing without the girls by her side.

Finally, she shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m fine where I am.”

I
t was a brilliant, sunny Saturday in New York when they first heard the news. According to the television, the Atlanta police had been tipped off by an unidentified source that there were human remains—a woman’s arm and calf—buried in the backyard of the pimp everyone thought had kidnapped April. The pimp himself had vanished. It would take a week or more to be certain it was her, but Celia had no doubt.

Celia and Bree sat side by side on the couch and cried all weekend.

Celia couldn’t sleep, and on Monday she had to get Ambien from her doctor, a wiry guy who looked at her suspiciously, as if she had asked him for heroin. He eventually wrote the prescription (and gave her the number for a good shrink with an office right by her apartment) when she began to sob uncontrollably into his lab coat. Bree was leaving her soon, most likely returning home to Savannah to work in her father’s firm, and the thought of being alone at night haunted Celia.

On Monday evening, their contact in the Atlanta police department called to say that the following afternoon they would conduct one final search.

“A search for what?” Celia asked.

“Whenever we come up with major evidence, such as remains, our search unit takes another look over the neighborhood where
the evidence was found, and any outlying natural areas, just in case. We want to take every step we can to make sure this guy is put away, and sometimes that’s as simple as finding a shell casing or a scrap of fabric.”

The police were looking for civilian volunteers to help, so Celia and Bree bought two tickets for the first flight out in the morning. Celia’s parents and sister planned to come down to Atlanta as well, and Bree’s entire family did the same.

Celia kept thinking about the day just before Sally’s wedding weekend, when April called to say that she had been beaten up, while Ronnie simply ran off.

She just needed to protect herself
, April had said in Ronnie’s defense.

What would have been different if Celia had said,
Oh yeah? Well, I just need to protect you and I demand that you quit
.

April probably would have laughed. But now, Celia would never know.

“What should we pack?” Bree asked. She was congested from crying, and her voice sounded foggy.

Celia knew what she was thinking, but could not bring herself to say out loud: that they were, in fact, going to Georgia for April’s funeral.

Sally’s doctor had told her she absolutely could not fly this late in her pregnancy, but she was joining them in Atlanta anyway. Jake was panicked about this, but she hadn’t given him any choice.

“He’s freaking out because I’ve already fucking dropped,” she said to Celia over the phone.

Now that she was pregnant, Sally swore as much as April ever had.

“What the hell does ‘dropped’ mean?” Celia asked.

“It just means the baby has descended down to my pelvis or something,” Sally said. “Jake will tell you all about it when he sees you, I’m sure. But it could still be four weeks before I go into labor.”

“Does it hurt when it drops?” Celia asked, cringing. When Sally talked about the specifics of her pregnancy, Celia always felt physically ill, which in turn made her feel like a bad female, but what could you do?

“Oh no,” Sally said. “My stomach’s just lower. Now I can breathe better, but I have to pee every ten minutes. Literally, Cee. Every ten freaking minutes.”

“Eww,” Celia said.

“Yeah, and that’s not the half of it,” Sally said. “I also have hemorrhoids. I’m twenty-six, and I have hemorrhoids. My gums are bleeding, my legs ache, my butt hurts. I am telling you right now, Celia. If you’re smart, you’ll just adopt.”

It was pouring rain when they gathered outside the police station the next day. The search had been announced on television all across the country, and dozens of Smithies came to help, people Celia hadn’t thought about in years and people she’d never even heard of, who had all been touched by April in some way or another. There was Jenna the Monster Truck, who had heralded them into Smith on their very first day. And Toby Jones, April’s trans friend, who was now devastatingly handsome, good-looking enough to make Celia wonder whether any of the guys she had slept with in New York had once been a Lucy or a Tina.

Lara came, too. She and Bree had been talking by phone every night since Bree’s return from California, and Celia wondered why they didn’t just make it official already. Yes, there were complications. Of course. But she knew Bree well enough to know what would make her happy.

Outside the station, Lara stood by Bree’s side, and the two of them held hands.

Celia looked over at Bree’s parents, who were watching them.

“You’re under surveillance,” she said to Bree and Lara.

“I don’t care,” Bree said.

Lara’s eyes grew wide.

“Well, maybe I care a little, but I’m trying not to,” Bree said, and they laughed.

The search had also drawn locals and church and women’s groups from all over the country, seventy people in all. April’s mother was there, but there was no sign of Ronnie. The police captain
brought them out to the parking lot and separated them into groups of ten.

“Thank you all for being here,” he hollered into a sea of black umbrellas. “This kind of search needs to be exhaustive, and the police force just doesn’t have the manpower to handle it alone. That’s why we look to civilians like you to help us in times like this.”

Volunteers handed out flyers printed with April’s picture and a description of what she was wearing the last time she was seen. Celia stared down at the picture, wondering who had provided it-Ronnie?