But he hadn’t. As they prepped her for an emergency appendectomy, Maggie assured her that her father loved her, that there was an explanation. Covering for him still.
And her mother’s secret prayer, that Emma had heard her whisper just before the morphine drip sent her into sleep: that if something had to go wrong, please, dear God, let it be her husband and not her daughter.
* * *
Emma woke up; Frank didn’t. She’d come out of surgery, woozy and feverish, and knew just from looking at her mother’s face that her father was dead. She was missing a part of her body and a part of her family, but she felt heavier, a weight on her chest. It was all on her now.
After that, she saw her family as driftwood, too. Three whittled down to two, and two wasn’t enough. Two was a broken triangle; two was a roof without walls. Two was barely holding on.
From that day forward, Em had promised to always let her mother know where she was. She’d seen what it could do to someone, the untethering, the where are they. Even when she went to college, that first few weeks she’d texted her mother every night before bed their shorthand—NILY. Short for Night, I Love You. She’d say it to Maggie, and Maggie would say it back. Even when Emma was shit-faced. Even when she was totally exhausted. Even when someone looked over her shoulder and said, “Oh my God, you are not texting your mom again.”
Their phones autocorrected to NILY the moment they typed in the N. Maggie had even knit Emma a pillow that spelled out NILY in pink and white for her narrow dorm bed.
Emma cried a little when Maggie gave it to her and said, “Mom, if I ever get a tattoo, it’s gonna be NILY.”
And Maggie replied, “Em, if you ever get a tattoo, I’m gonna kill you.”
Later in the fall, when Maggie had stopped by her dorm with two dozen oatmeal chocolate chip cookies she’d probably spent half the night baking and cooling, then drizzling with yellow icing, Emma opened the box and thanked her, then gently told Maggie that a lot of the other girls’ mothers didn’t text them three times a day. That the other local moms didn’t “drop by” on a Sunday because they were in the neighborhood. (No one was ever in Semper University’s neighborhood unless they were lost or buying drugs or heading north to another city.) Also, she added, “No one here really eats cookies.”
Everyone in her dorm knew about the freshman fifteen, which could just as easily turn into thirty if you weren’t careful. Already, there were girls selling their too-small jeans on Poshmark. Some of them drunk ate, but no one ate sugar when they were sober. Emma had seen how boys liked girls who were lean but muscular, how their gazes held when a certain body type walked by. The thought of them looking at her that way, the possibility, tasted sweeter than frosting.
“Maybe girls don’t eat them, but cute boy athletes do,” her mother had said. “Don’t a lot of the football players live next door? In Riordan?”
Her roommates were bent over their phones, but she knew they heard her mother’s chirping. And yes, she’d seen the boys moving in next door, boys so tall and wide, they looked like another species, lifting carefully packed boxes of books effortlessly, palming pillows in one large hand. But Maggie’s gaze had lingered on them a little too long. Cougar-ish, she’d thought. Emma didn’t say anything, but her mother was being totally embarrassing. Boys. Cookies. Jesus, was she twelve?
So even though they were separated by only a dozen or so miles, Emma’s “here” and Maggie’s “here” had to slide away from each other. Emma still missed her mother but forced herself to let go. She’d seen her roommates let their mothers’ phone calls go straight to their vacant voicemail boxes. They didn’t even seem to miss their moms when they were puking and needed ginger ale.
Emma pictured the divide between her and Maggie vividly sometimes, when she had trouble falling asleep, when she worried about a paper she didn’t understand or a party she wasn’t invited to, but didn’t want to rely on her mother’s voice to rock away her problems.
In her mind, where the dangerous edges of campus gave way to the beauty of the city and City Line Avenue held the suburbs from spilling in, she imagined that long boulevard as a kind of border wall, with her happy but clueless childhood pinned to it like a memorial. Turquoise Beanie Babies and red plastic barrettes, pink tutus, Pokémon cards, and Justin Bieber posters. The demarcation of before and after.
Maggie got the message. Emma didn’t have to spell it out, didn’t have to break her heart completely. And she’d just begun to back off. At Halloween, no decorations and frosted pumpkin cookies arrived at Emma’s door. Two days passed, sometimes three, before a heart emoji popped up in her text alerts. Emma had suggested a Sunday afternoon phone call, trying to anchor things, instead of FaceTiming every time they each saw something that reminded them of the other—a funny episode of Friends, a macaron decorated like a flower, a dog wearing goggles on the back of a motorcycle. Her mother had to learn to enjoy those things on her own for a while.
And Emma was seeing other things, new things. More differences between her and these party girls than just how often they spoke to their mothers. They drank like boys and danced like strippers. Shotgunning and twerking, skills Emma hadn’t mastered during her time on the high school yearbook staff. And some boys wanted more than cookies after parties, a lot more. There was shit going down in the dark stairways and cramped bathrooms she not only wouldn’t share with her mother but couldn’t.
Because Emma wanted to figure it all out on her own. Because after what had happened to her father, Emma would have to be a complete bitch to make her mother worry about the small crimes of college. The in-between offenses, the misdemeanors of he wanted, she didn’t; of he filmed and they laughed and she cried.
No, she couldn’t worry her mother.
But wow, yeah. Look how well that had worked out.
Three
Maggie
Maggie hadn’t gone to college, but she had a picture of it in her head, and the day she’d moved Emma in, everything she had imagined in her mind, she saw on campus. Yellow Frisbees sailed in the air; boys in long shorts ran across clipped green lawns. Clusters of girls sat in the shade of trees, their nervous giggles absorbed by the low, weeping branches that brushed the shoulders and collarbones peeking out from their carefully chosen shirts. Burgers grilling, balloons waving. And table after table of older kids offering instant friendship in exchange for signing up for something. It was like a street carnival filled with clean-cut teenagers performing the roles of clean-cut teenagers. And the dorm rooms! Brightly decorated with photo boards and fuzzy throw pillows and colorful desk lamps blinking on and off, a friendly coded hello.
How could anything but fun happen in a place like this?
On her subsequent visits, fueled by episodes of crime shows on Investigation Discovery, she was slightly more aware of the fringe-y neighborhoods she drove past before she reached the waving banners that trumpeted Semper’s accomplishments. The yellow-and-gray flags flapped their welcome in the wind, like the United Nations, like an Olympic village. She supposed they were designed to assuage the realization that you’d driven through the most economically depressed, drug-torn part of Philadelphia to get there.
The campus itself was a mix of new, towering buildings named after generous alumni (once a Semper, always a Semper, at least if you had money) and old stone structures meant to signify tradition. There were unusual sculptures like the fifteen-foot-tall light bulb outside the liberal arts building and modern pulsing fountains scattered throughout, to remind you of the prestigious college of art. Decades ago, Maggie remembered they had dyed the water in the fountains yellow to celebrate a football victory, and they’d been widely mocked, with kids posing for photos, pretending to pee into them.
Many of those yellow canvas banners used photos and quotes from famous alumni. Emma hadn’t known who half the people were, but Maggie did, and that, she supposed, was the point. To impress parents, who paid
the bills, and not kids, who wanted to know whether the food was good and the other kids were attractive.
But college looked amazing to someone who had never been, whether that someone was eighteen or forty-six. Some of Maggie’s friends and Maggie’s own sister, Kate, had mocked higher education as a rip-off, thought it unnecessary. Go to a trade school! But Maggie had always wondered what it would have been like to be young and free but still safe. Half in, half out of adulthood, instead of being thrust into the work world at eighteen.
The fact that Maggie had wanted to be part of it, to share it with her daughter, wasn’t all that surprising. But what surprised her more deeply was how she’d glossed over all of it with optimism, how much she’d bought into the brochures, the videos, the campus tour led by a perky brunette. How a smart, savvy working mother could be blinded by a campus tour guide who could walk backward and answer questions at the same time.
It wasn’t till the day in November when she arrived with an entourage that Maggie saw things differently, through another lens. Walking with Carla and Kaplan, a policeman from the district, the RA—Tim somebody or other—and a burly campus security guard whose name badge simply read J was like cutting a swath with the grim reaper. The way the crowds parted and kids ducked away guiltily. For that was college too, she realized. What rule or law or mother’s promise should I break today? What can I get away with and try to hide?
Maggie’s heart pounded as the security guard swiped his badge and held the door, letting them in to the first floor of Hoden House. Four stories high, a simple brick building that had always been a dorm, unlike some of the others that had been retrofitted over the years as Semper grew. Horowitz Hall, which used to be the English department, had a soaring room on the third floor the kids called the Ballroom and a parapet on top that was only available for study by reservation. Hoden House was nothing like that, no-nonsense, each floor precisely the same, stacked like pancakes, smelling like beer.
They went in single file, past the check-in desk where a security guard who couldn’t be older than college age himself nodded at them. As they waited for the elevator, kids made a quick detour for the stairs; no one wanted to be trapped in a small space with the official-looking entourage. Three badges, two passkeys, and a mom? No thank you. Not with tequila breath or red eyes or stolen bananas from the salad bar.
“Did, like, something happen?” a passing girl asked the RA.
“No,” he said. “Just a precaution, Robin. Don’t you worry.”
The girl’s face lit up at the sound of her name. He remembered her!
“Is Robin on Emma’s floor?” Maggie asked, and he shrugged. “You don’t know?”
“I have three floors. It’s hard to keep everyone straight.”
Upstairs, the north corner. A passkey swipe and they were inside Emma’s suite. Two double rooms and a single, plus a bathroom, small kitchen, and living room. Empty. Quiet. All three bedroom doors shut. So different from the bustle of that first week of class. Maggie had met all these girls at move-in, memorized everything she could about them. She repeated their names to herself: Annie and Morgan, first door to right. Taylor, the end of the hall. And straight ahead, the minute you walked in the entry, Emma and Fiona, the roommate her daughter didn’t know, the lottery she’d chosen to play. How happy Maggie had been, hearing the Irish name and seeing the tiny cross around the girl’s neck; how relieved Emma had seemed when she’d seen how clean Fiona’s side of the room was and how pretty her clothes. Fiona was taller, but they were the same size. They could borrow. They could share. What had they shared now?
The door of Emma’s room had paper still taped to its door—a colorful Magic Marker rendering of the girls’ names, drawn by the orientation team on the first day of school. A childlike contrast to the way the girls—who’d all moved in before Emma—had decorated their small living room. Two fuzzy white throw pillows. A blue butterfly chair by the window. An end table shoved up against the wall that held nothing but a blender and ten shot glasses, each from a different college. Painted wooden plaques from T.J.Maxx mounted above it, announcing It’s wine o’clock and #TequilaTuesday. And although Maggie had been shocked by the alcohol shrine, she’d been calmed by the art on the door, a kindergarten teacher’s kind of welcome.
As the RA unlocked the door with his key, Maggie noticed the paper curled at the edges, and the ink had run down the F in Fiona, bubbling the fibers, blurring the word.
“No crime tape?” Maggie’s voice was as authoritative as she could make it.
“No crime,” Kaplan said, and the word yet hung in the air.
“Where are her roommates?” Maggie asked, their memorized names a chorus waiting in her throat.
“Still trying to locate,” he replied.
“All of them?” she said, eyes widening.
“Yes. Along with her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Maggie spat it out like a stone in fruit. “Emma doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
The glance exchanged by the four others made Maggie feel sick inside.
“Using the term loosely, from the looks of things, Mrs. O’Farrell, I think she does.”
The door swung open, heavy, banging against the wall. It hurt Maggie, that banging. It felt like a bruise.
On the left side of the room, messy, tangled sheets, an odd woodsy smell in the air. A pair of handcuffs on the pillow, unlocked, beckoning. A condom wrapper on the floor, opened, spent. The bright blue of the package calling to Maggie, signaling her own naivete, her own stupidity. It was the same brand as the five-pack she’d tucked into her daughter’s suitcase with a note: Semper means always…be safe! A smiley face below. A heart. Astroglide on the nightstand, squeezed in the middle grotesquely, violently, like someone in a huge hurry.
But all of that, added together, multiplied, divided, and symbolically rendered in any way imaginable, wasn’t the part that would stay with Maggie.
What haunted her was the right side of the room. The side of the room that was completely empty.
Four
Emma
Emma didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She just wanted to grow up.
She’d always been the youngest in her class—born in September but not held back a year in kindergarten like so many others. Perennially a little smaller, more naive. Coming up short, always running after a piece of knowledge the others had first. Not school, but other things. Personal things. She’d pretended to have her period for a whole year before she’d gotten it, carrying tampons in her backpack, complaining about cramps and PMS based on symptoms she’d Googled, without any real understanding of how bad, how devastating it could be. When she’d finally gotten it, on a Thursday afternoon that was stained into memory, she’d wept like a child in her mother’s arms, in disbelief that it could be this gruesome, this painful, and last for forty years! Like a prison sentence! How do you stand it, Mom? Every month? she’d cried. She couldn’t believe every woman in the world she’d ever met, seen, or known had endured this, had carried this secret. Her friends, their teachers and neighbors, strangers on the bus, her mother, her aunt Kate, her freaking grandmother who still had it, all walking around like the cool girls at school, as if it was nothing. And it wasn’t nothing.
That was the first lesson she’d learned, that you had to push those feelings down. Her mother stood on her feet for nine hours a day, every day, no matter what, just to keep things together. Her mother’s mother had worked every day except Sunday in her grandfather’s Irish Isle store—correction, their store, she’d told Emma once, declaratively—for the same reasons. Grandma, who worked so hard that she’d had a little breakdown that no one ever talked about, who had gone off someplace to rest for a week. They’d never thrown this in Emma’s face, but Emma knew. Women worked. They worked hard, harder than men. But men like Frank got the gold stars, the Purple Hearts, the mayor’s commendations, the sobriety chips, the
whatevers. No one would give her mother a medal for washing hair and paying her bills while enduring cramps. No freaking way. Women had to do more.
As she grew older and the age-related differences between her and her classmates grew smaller, she was convinced these striations would all be gone by the time she went to college. Everyone had a driver’s license, had tried pot and drank beer. Everyone had some level of sexual experience and survived the singular trauma known as high school. Every time she liked a boy who didn’t like her back, every time a teacher redlined a paper for using the wrong word, every time she saw another girl’s outfit in a store and gasped at the price tag—she’d think, College. This will all be erased at college.
After her mom left on the first day, she looked around her suite at the four other girls. Annie and Morgan, who met each other in summer camp but laughingly said they hated each other then, were both in the CGP, College of General Prep, which encompassed most of the education-oriented majors but was widely known as the school with the lowest standards. CGP: crayon, glue, pencils.
Taylor, who was enrolled in the business school but planned to minor in theater, wore vintage glasses and had a sideways smile. Fiona, like Emma, was in the College of Arts and Sciences with an undeclared major. She was pretty and polite and organized, quick to loan out her scissors, lint roller, thumbtacks. We’re all freshmen, Emma thought. We’re all equals. Those first few nights, laughing and passing around a bottle of cheap pinot grigio, she actually thought she’d found some BFFs.
The cracks began to show a few days later, when girls in other dorms invited some of them to pregames but not all of them. Fiona claimed she’d tried to include them but that it was a “whole different squad.” That made sense. The rooms were so freaking small—you couldn’t squeeze everyone in. Even at the big frat houses, you had to have your name on a list to get in.
Annie and Morgan had met other girls from their camp and hung out separately with them, doing nothing but singing campfire songs and drinking s’mores shots (or so it appeared on Instagram). Fiona spent a lot of time doing laundry; she had Shout wipes and a steamer and a lamb’s-wool buffer she kept next to her shoes. Emma had heard her coming in late at night, heard the light clang of the hanger as she put away her dress and the soft swoosh of wool going over her shoes. She’d started looking at her own shoes differently, seeing the road dust, the edges of mud, errant blades of grass. Did Fiona pay such close attention to everything or just her own things? Emma had known girls like that in high school, who asked things like Who does your eyebrows? As if they didn’t already know: No one. God does my eyebrows. But so far, Fiona hadn’t said anything like that. But then again, Fiona didn’t say much.
Where She Went Page 2