Commencement (44 page)

Hours later, when the house had long since fallen silent, April stole out. It was a struggle just to get up the rope ladder, and she realized with some alarm that her body had changed. The muscles around her upper arms and in her calves were gone. She now had the sagging skin of a much older woman, and her legs were dotted with sores from sitting still for so long. It took her several tries to push the loose floorboards up and climb out. She knew that she could not risk making a sound. She needed to talk to Ronnie before anyone else saw her.

Out of breath, she sat on the parlor floor for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the light. The room, which she knew to be average size, looked simply enormous. The air was tinged with liquor and cigarette smoke, but it still smelled so fresh that April tried to suck it in by the barrelful.

She climbed to her feet; her legs wobbled at first, but after a few moments she got her balance. She crept down the hall. Behind one of the bedroom doors she could hear two voices arguing in hushed tones. Behind another, a young girl moaned, “Yes, yes, yes,” in the most bored and sorrowful manner April had ever heard.

When she reached the front door, she held her breath as she pulled it toward her. A moment later, she was outside. The air
smelled crisp. She noticed a tree’s orange leaves in the streetlight and thought about the long walks she and Sally used to take around Paradise Pond in the fall.

There were a few pumpkins rotting out in the trash. Halloween must have passed now, she thought. It was November.

The street was empty, and all but silent. She knew that meant it was sometime after 4:00 a.m., because the girls were usually out until then. She wished she had thought to check the clock on Alexa’s cable box.

When April reached the house, she went to the back door, hoping against hope that Ronnie had left it open, but it was locked.

April knocked gently at first, then harder. She thought she heard footsteps from inside, but a moment later all was still. She inhaled, trying to steady her mind. She didn’t think she should risk going to the front door and ringing the bell.

Then the kitchen light switched on, the door opened, and there was Ronnie, standing before her in her old silk bathrobe, a gun in her hand.

“Jesus fucking Christ, April,” she said. “What are you doing?”

Tears filled April’s eyes. She was happy, relieved, to see Ronnie’s face again, and this made her whole body ache. She hated to be that happy at the sight of someone who had wronged her, but then hadn’t it been that way her whole life—her mother, her father, Gabriel. The only good people who had ever made her happy were Sally, Celia, and Bree.

“Get inside,” Ronnie hissed. “Did anyone see you?”

April stepped into the familiar kitchen—the overhead fan rumbled in its flimsy setting, a half-empty bottle of wine and a few dried-up tomato slices sat on the table.

She began to sob, clutching Ronnie, burying her face in blue silk. Ronnie froze up as she did this, but April did not pull away.

“A girl got killed tonight because of me,” April said. “Do you know what they’re saying? They think they found my fucking body.”

Ronnie didn’t respond.

“What will happen now?” April said. “The police think Redd killed me. We’re going to get in trouble. We might get killed. Why didn’t you tell me any of this yesterday?”

Ronnie sighed, breaking apart from April and sitting down in a kitchen chair. She laid the gun on the table and traced the label on the bottle of wine with her fingers.

“I’ve been trying to decide what we should do next,” Ronnie said. “I wanted to make a plan before I worried you.”

April kept crying. “Ronnie, this isn’t gonna be like the other times. We’re in real trouble,” she said. “We’re going to have to turn ourselves in.”

Ronnie shook her head. “I think we need to leave, and start over. Pretend none of this ever happened. In a day or two, they’ll know that body they found wasn’t yours. After a few months, they’ll give up the search altogether.”

“And what will happen to me?” April said. “You expect me to just run off and start some new life without even telling my friends?”

“They’re not your friends anymore anyway,” Ronnie said sharply. “Or they won’t be after this.”

“You never told them, did you?” April said.

Ronnie was silent.

“Why?” April said. “Why the fuck did you do this to me?”

“I couldn’t risk compromising all this,” Ronnie said plainly.

“All this
what
?” April shouted. She looked down the hallway that led to the foyer and upstairs. Four suitcases were lined up at the bottom of the staircase.

“You were going to leave me here to deal by myself,” April said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Ronnie said. “I’d never leave you.”

April started moving down the hall and toward the front door.

Ronnie’s chair screeched across the floor behind her. She got to her feet and pushed past April, shoving her into the wall as she got in front of the door.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Ronnie said, spreading her arms out over the doorframe.

“I’m going to tell the police what happened,” April said.

“Like hell you are,” Ronnie said. “Look, you’re not thinking clearly. Let’s just get a good night’s sleep and we’ll figure it all out in the morning.” She cupped April’s chin in the palm of her hand, holding on tight.

“Please,” she said. “I’m begging you.”

“It’s fucking over,” April said.

“You owe me this,” Ronnie said.

April was filled with rage. “I owe you nothing,” she said. “I believed in you, I thought that you cared about all of it. But you only ever cared about yourself. God, Ronnie, you used to stand for something so good, and now look at you.”

Ronnie’s gaze turned icy. She grabbed April by the arms.

“You’re a child,” Ronnie said. “Do what you want, but know this: If you go to the police, you’ll spend your life in jail. And I will tell them that I had nothing to do with any of it, that you tricked me just like you tricked everyone else. You try to point them to one bit of evidence that I knew. You won’t find it.”

April shook out of her grip and ran up to Ronnie’s bedroom, her legs burning beneath her. The room had been emptied of all Ronnie’s belongings, but April pulled open the drawer in the night-stand, and there it was—her old cell phone. When she switched it on, the phone was almost out of power. She called Sally’s home number, her whole body shaking.

A man answered on the second ring, sounding half asleep. In the background, April could hear the chirpy sounds of a sitcom on television, the soothing wave of a laugh track. Sally’s house seemed to exist on a different planet from the one she was on here, and April longed to go there.

“Jake?” she said.

“No,” the man said. “Who’s this?”

“I’m a friend of Sally’s,” April said.

“Oh, this is her brother,” he said. “They asked me to hang at the house and do phone duty from here, in case anyone called about the baby.”

“The baby,” April said, her head swarming.

“Yes,” he said. “She had her baby yesterday. Seven pounds, four ounces. A little girl.”

“Oh my God,” April said. “Is she in the hospital now? Can I call her there?”

“Umm, yeah,” he said. “It’s the Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. Hold on, I can give you the number.”

“She’s at the Piedmont?” April said in disbelief.

“Yes,” he said. “They were out there looking for a friend of hers when Sal went into labor.”

April lost her signal then, the phone going dead.

Below her, she could hear Ronnie dragging her luggage onto the porch. She would be gone by dawn, and who knew where. April sat on the bed. She waited until she heard Ronnie’s car pull out of the driveway and down the block before she left the house.

When April arrived at the hospital, the sun was rising over Atlanta, casting an orange glow across the lawn and over the heads of the orderlies smoking cigarettes by the entrance, making them look like angels in blue scrubs. It was the first sunrise she had seen in months. She wondered how long it would be before she saw another.

Her heart was thumping in her chest, and her hands shook as she made her way inside.

After so long underground, everything seemed brighter now, more crisp: the glossy magazines scattered around the hospital’s main lounge, the giant silver doors of the elevator, gaping open so she could step inside. The maternity ward was on the fourth floor. April pressed the elevator button, and took a deep breath.

A man in a fancy suit got in on two and gave her a puzzled look, as though he knew her but couldn’t say from where. She had gotten many of these looks this morning—from the bus driver who picked her up on the other side of town, from the woman out on the side-walk selling carnations from a large plastic tub.

Soon it would all be over. She would go to the police and tell them everything and face whatever punishment might come. April had always thought that working with Ronnie was her ticket to the exact sort of life she had dreamed of in college. Now she saw, quite clearly, that she had given all of that away.

The scariest part was knowing that the girls might not forgive her; that perhaps she had gone too far this time and lost them for good. Sally had always said that it was the modern woman’s joy and
her burden to be given choices, endless choices. But she never said anything about what would happen if one of them made the wrong choice.

When the elevator opened on the fourth floor, April stepped out.

“Have a nice day,” said the man in the suit.

“You too,” she said.

The hallway smelled slightly sour. A baby cried somewhere in the distance. At a desk decorated with pink and blue teddy bears, a white-haired woman in scrubs sat alone playing poker online.

“Excuse me,” April said. “I’m looking for Sally Werner’s room. I’m sorry, Sally Brown.”

The woman didn’t look up from her computer screen.

“Seven B,” she said.

April made her way past several open doors. She saw a young mother nursing an infant by the window in one room, a couple holding hands under a burst of blue balloons in another.

And then she heard them—Celia, Bree, and Sally, the sound of their laughter unmistakable, just as it had been from the hallway of the Autumn Inn when she arrived there for Sally’s wedding. She stood just outside the door for a moment, taking in their conversation, remembering that first year when they lived in maids’ quarters and the air was always alive with the noise of their chatter. She had never been so happy and so terrified at once.

A moment later, she stood in front of the open door and knocked on its frame.

The girls looked up. Sally’s eyes grew so wide that April wished it were another time, another reality. She wished that she could make a joke.

“Is it you?” Sally said at last.

“It’s me.”