Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “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.

  SALLY

  Sally 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.

  “Sorry, I just saw myself naked again,” she yelled.

  “Okey-dokey,” he said. She could hear him walking back to the TV room.

  She was seven months pregnant. At five months, every part of her had suddenly exploded. She hadn’t known many pregnant women up close and personal, and she had assumed that the only part of a woman that changed was her stomach. But now Sally’s body—which she had always worked so hard to keep under control—had expanded in every direction. Her breasts grew heavy. Her face got full and fat, like those Smith College sophomores who gorged themselves on pudding and pot roast in the dining hall. Her thighs were covered in red stretch marks that wove this way and that like routes on a road
map. Her fingers and feet had swollen up so that her wedding ring no longer fit, and she could only wear flip-flops, even to work (she had no earthly idea what she would do when the weather turned bitter cold in another month).

  Her doctor said he’d never seen someone experience such an intensely physical pregnancy. When she got the slightest chill, her legs and feet turned blue and splotchy. (“It’s normal!” Jake said sunnily. “It’s from all the extra estrogen you’re producing!”) Her back hurt, she felt constipated all the time, she had insane mood swings that came over her with no warning, and she sometimes wanted to murder Jake in his sleep for getting her into this position in the first place.

  Sally had never cared all that much about food, but throughout her pregnancy she felt ravenous. She craved blood oranges and rare steaks and cheeseburgers and Devil Dogs (had she ever even had a Devil Dog before?) and milk shakes and cinnamon buns, the kind they only sold at the mall. Jake kept feeding her, and telling her she looked beautiful, but she had gained forty-eight pounds since she got the news that she was having a baby, which she knew was insane.

  As Rosemary had so gently put it, “Slow down! You may be eating for two, honey, but neither one is a sumo wrestler.”

  “Babies whose mothers gain under twenty pounds are more likely to be premature and suffer retardation in the uterus,” Jake replied. “The sensible and safe pregnancy weight gain is between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds, but Sally’s fine. Our doctor said so. She was so in shape to begin with. Although with a major weight gain like hers, a vaginal birth might become difficult or impossible, and—”

  Sally interrupted him. “Honey, shut up please.”

  Rosemary looked shocked by this, but Sally would not have her vagina talked about in mixed company, just because she was pregnant.

  “He keeps quoting from What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” she said. “And it’s driving me nuts.”

  Rosemary furrowed her brow. “Oh, that is annoying. Jake, keep that stuff to yourself.”

  Jake looked sad. Sally didn’t care. He was so pumped about being a dad that sometimes he made her feel like she didn’t even exist.

  He didn’t want to have sex anymore, because he was afraid they’d hurt the baby, even though all the books said they wouldn’t.

  A week earlier, she had awakened to find him rolling up the rug in the upstairs hall.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m putting skidproof mats down under all the carpets today,” he said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Well, What to Expect says it’s a good idea, you know, because the bigger you get, the more your center of gravity will shift, and the more likely you are to suffer a fall.”

  Sally inhaled deeply. Was this supposed to thrill her? she wondered. Were there women out there who longed for husbands to care this much?

  Later that day, she opened a jar of olives over the kitchen sink, and was about to eat one, when Jake said, “Did that pop?”

  “What?” she said irritably.

  “The jar, I didn’t hear it pop. Those olives might be spoiled, Sal. I think you need to throw them out. The smallest amount of bacteria could be lethal to the baby.”

  Sally lifted the jar to her mouth and shook it hard, until her cheeks were full of olives and the salty juice leaked onto her chin and down the front of her neck. She chewed and chewed, and when she finally swallowed, she screamed, “I’m not your motherfucking baby vessel! I’m your wife!” and stormed out of the room.

  She had read somewhere that women became mothers the moment they found out they were pregnant, while men didn’t become fathers until they saw their babies for the first time. In her marriage, the reverse seemed to be true. Personally, she worried about this. But intellectually, she found it fascinating and wished she had April there to talk to about it—nature versus nurture and gender roles and all of that. When she tried to engage Jake in this conversation, he just said, “Oh, honey, you’re going to be an amazing mom,” which she knew wasn’t true, and anyway, it was beside the point.

  Jake talked to the baby, he sang to the baby, he read to the baby—Family Circus and Peanuts, The Boston Globe music reviews, and Sports Illustrated, cover to cover.

  Sally didn’t talk to the baby at all. She couldn’t quite imagine this blob in her stomach as an actual person. Of course, as Jake pointed out, she had learned about April just two months after she found out she was pregnant. It was impossible to know how each of these things affected the other, or how she would feel about the baby if April were there. This had always been true for Sally—with happy change came surprising despair. What would it have felt like to graduate from high school or start college without having just lost her mother? What would her wedding have been like if she hadn’t gotten into that stupid drunken fight with the girls the night before? Sally would never know.

  She went into the bedroom and lay down naked, pulling a sheet up over herself so she didn’t have to look at her revolting body. They were due at Jake’s parents’ house for dinner in an hour, and Sally wondered if she might be able to get out of it, just this once. It would be fabulous to have the house all to herself for the evening. She could watch a bad Lifetime movie and have a little bit of red wine. (Jake would flip, but she knew for a fact that pregnant women in Paris drank two glasses of Cabernet a day, and their babies turned out fine.) She could call Bree and Celia and talk for as long as she wanted, without Jake giving her that puppy-dog stare he always developed when she ignored him for too long.

  Bree’s and Celia’s lives had changed more in these past two months than in all the years since they left Smith. She believed that April’s disappearance had had a strange effect on them both, different than she would have imagined. Of course they were all sad and on edge, dreading the inevitable news each time the phone rang. But it was more than just that. It was as if Celia and Bree now saw the entire world through the prism of this single event—April had disappeared and everything else followed from that.

  Bree had gone back to New York, a city she didn’t even like, to live with Celia. She had told Sally in an e-mail about her horrible breakfast with April’s mother. “I understand the importance of family now more than ever,” she wrote. “And so for that reason, I actually feel blessed by things that have happened in my life that might otherwise make me upset.” Did she mean her mother’s heart attack? Or April? Or Lara? Sally suspected it was some combination of the three.

  She was shocked that Bree had quit her job. As much as Bree seemed perfectly content to flush all her hard work down the toilet, Sally thought it was criminal and wondered if perhaps Bree was having a nervous breakdown. The Bree she had known back at school once wept when she got an A minus on a final exam, claiming that it would derail her entire career.

  Celia had changed, too, and Sally couldn’t tell whether the change was for the better. Her reaction to April’s disappearance was understandable. Realizing the randomness and brevity of life, Celia had decided to do away with everything that didn’t make her happy and satisfied in the here and now. She said she was working harder on her novel than she ever had before. She had stopped dieting and gained ten pounds. She cooked roasted chicken stuffed with lemon and garlic, or beef stew, or spaghetti and meatballs. She bought a Maltese, an adorable little ball of white fluff that had already eaten four pairs of heels, a Marc Jacobs purse, and a fifty-dollar bill, as well as pissing all over her couch. She was taking a man hiatus for at least six months, and she refused to clean her bathroom, the chore she dreaded above all others (though Sally suspected Bree was probably doing it for her).

  Some nights Sally got into bed beside Jake and wanted to be with her friends instead. All of their lives had changed so quickly in so many ways, and she couldn’t help but feel a bit jealous that Bree and Celia had been able to form a little shell around themselves to brace them against whatever might come.

  The only person who seemed not to have changed in the weeks since April’s disappearan
ce was Ronnie. She was still the same self-promoting conniver she always had been. She had taken her sex-trafficking show on the road—appearing on Charlie Rose and Larry King and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She had a book coming out on the topic, too. And then there was the movie they had planned from the start.

  Sally knew it was a good thing that child prostitution and sex trafficking were finally getting covered in the news—April would have been proud of that. But the way Ronnie used April’s disappearance as her vehicle for getting the word out sickened Sally. Every story started in the same way: “April Adams wasn’t your typical sex-trafficking victim. She was white, well educated, and yadda yadda yadda.” It made Sally cringe, because in truth there was no proof that April had been kidnapped by a pimp, other than the testimony of some old woman. She could be anywhere, with anyone.

  Thinking it over as she pulled the sheets up to her chin, Sally felt overcome with anger—at that fucking Ronnie for taking advantage of April’s idealism and making April yet another casualty of her mission. At April herself for being so naïve (wasn’t she lucky enough to have made it through all of Ronnie’s other stupid projects?). Sally was irrationally enraged at her mother, too, for leaving her alone before she had time to ask any of the important questions. For the first few years after her death, Sally could always predict exactly what she might have said in response to any given problem. Now she really had no clue. Would she have been delighted to become a grandmother so soon, or disappointed in Sally for not following through on her dreams of med school? Would she know what to do about April? Would she understand how guilty Sally felt for letting a year pass between them without so much as a word?

  Jake pouted a little, but ultimately he agreed to tell his mother that Sally felt too sick to go out. Ten minutes after she heard his car pull out of the driveway, she went down to the kitchen in her bathrobe to forage for food. She felt giddy, like the first time her parents left her home alone when she was eleven. She could do whatever she wanted! Which for the moment only entailed putting on a Faith Hill CD, making two peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, pouring a huge glass of chocolate milk, and eating standing up at the counter. But even so.