Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Faith’s voice echoed through the wide rooms of the first floor. I believe in Peter Pan and miracles, anything I can to get by.

  The house was too big for just the two of them. It was too big even for the two of them plus a baby, really. Neither of them had ever owned an apartment let alone an entire house before, and the constant upkeep amazed them. While a leaky faucet or a broken pipe had previously meant a call to the landlord, now it was a whole new level of work. They went to Home Depot at least once every weekend.

  “How do you stand it?” Celia had asked her once on the phone, and Sally said, “I honestly don’t know. Believe me, I never thought I’d be pregnant and shopping at Home Depot at the age of twenty-six.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she felt like she had betrayed Jake—she actually enjoyed their Sunday drives to the garden department and the paint center. Afterward they always stopped at Brigham’s for a hot-fudge sundae, and Jake got unduly excited about blasting an old Bruce Springsteen album and singing along.

  Sally’s father loved their house. She saw more of him these days, which wasn’t particularly enjoyable. He never asked about the baby or April, just about their property tax or how much Jake had paid for his golf clubs. He had taken up with a new woman, Barbara, and Sally assumed she was the instigating force behind trying to make them closer. She could not bring herself to refer to Barbara as her father’s girlfriend. She was fat—there was no nice word for it. She had gray stringy hair, and even on her best day she could not hold a candle to Sally’s mother on her worst. She was forty-seven and worked in the accounting office of a suburban nursing home and seemed to have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Sally had no idea what her father saw in Barbara. Maybe, like her mother had said once, men just could not be alone.

  “Women leave their marriages when they can’t take any more,” she had told Sally. “Men leave when they find someone new.”

  Sally took a bite of her sandwich and washed it down with a big gulp of milk. As she swallowed, she felt it—the very first kick from inside. She let out a little squeal. Then, another kick.

  “Oh my God,” she said with a laugh.

  It was the weirdest and greatest thing she had ever felt. Her child, alive inside her.

  For two months, the doctor and nurses had been asking her if she had felt anything. She hated that she grew guilty each time she told them no, as if she was an inadequate mother even when it came to being kicked in the stomach. And now, this. She could not wait to tell them.

  “Do you like bananas?” she asked, and she felt a surge of love and panic and safety all at once.

  The phone rang, and Sally reached for the cordless, hoping it was Jake. Maybe she ought to drag her butt over to his mother’s house after all, though she was glad to have had this moment just for herself.

  “Hello?” she said.

  At first, Sally could only make out a crackling sound at the other end of the line. Then she thought she could hear a whisper.

  “Sal?” came the faint voice.

  “April?” Sally said in disbelief.

  The phone clicked off. Silence.

  She needed to sit down. She went to the kitchen table. The phone sounded again, and she answered it on the first ring. Again, she heard the crackling noise. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes.

  “April, can you hear me?” she shouted.

  “Sweetie, no, it’s Celia. I’m sorry. Did you think—oh, I’m sorry.”

  Sally’s heart sank. “Oh,” she said.

  “I was just calling because Bree and I are in a bar in my neighborhood, and they’re playing your song. That one by the Supremes.”

  “‘You Keep Me Hanging On,’” Sally said.

  “What?” Celia said.

  In the background, Sally could hear faint music, and women chattering and some sort of whirring noise, like a fan.

  “Never mind,” Sally said. “Hey Cee, guess what. The baby just kicked.”

  “What?” Celia said.

  “The baby kicked!” Sally shouted, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh my God,” Celia said, then to someone else she said, “The baby kicked! Bree says ‘Oh my God,’ too.”

  Sally heard the sound of a toilet flushing.

  “Are you calling me from the ladies’ room?” she said.

  “Oh. Yeah. Bree saw that guy Adrian at the bar. We’re trying to get out of here without him seeing us, so we’re hatching an escape plan in the bathroom. Hey, sweetie, my reception is kind of awful in here, can I call you later to—”

  The line went dead.

  Sally went back to her sandwiches on the counter and took another enormous bite. She laughed, picturing Celia and Bree hiding from some guy in the bathroom of a bar. She was glad to be done with that part of her life, at least.

  She rubbed her belly and texted Jake on his cell phone: Can you come home, honeybun?

  He wrote back right away. Of course. Is everything okay?

  Yes, she wrote. I just want to see you.

  Jake pulled up twenty minutes later, and she met him at the door with a mug of chocolate milk. “Thanks,” he said with a surprised smile. She knew she had been rough on him lately.

  “You seem better,” he said.

  “The baby kicked,” she said.

  His eyes brightened. “What? I can’t believe I missed it.”

  “Well, maybe she will do it again if we wait long enough,” Sally said, taking his hand and drawing him toward the couch.

  “She?” Jake said. At Sally’s urging they had decided not to find out the sex, but now she felt certain that the kicker in her belly was a tiny little girl.

  They sat down on the couch.

  “How was your mom’s, love?” she asked.

  “Fine. Same old, same old. Everyone was asking for you.” Jake wrapped his arm around her. “What’s been going on here?”

  Sally smiled. “I found out the baby likes bananas,” she said.

  She nuzzled in toward him.

  “You know,” he said, “I don’t think you’re just my baby vessel.”

  “I know you don’t,” she said. “I think we’re both just a little bit freaked out.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Can you believe people do this every day? They just keep having kids. I was stuck in traffic yesterday, and I thought to myself, Holy shit. For every person on the expressway right now, some poor innocent woman had to go through what Sal’s going through.”

  Sally laughed. Sometimes she envied the girls their freedom, their bad dates and rented apartments and crazy nights out. Sometimes, but not tonight.

  BREE

  Bree and Celia sat in a booth at the Old Town Bar in Union Square, drinking beers and waiting for Ronnie. She had e-mailed Celia a week before to say that she was coming to town for a taping of the Montel Williams Show and wanted to meet up with them to talk about April. At first, Bree refused to go—she couldn’t bear the sight of that woman. But Celia said that maybe this would help. Yes, Ronnie was a self-serving bitch, but every time she got on TV, they flashed April’s picture. Bree knew that Celia imagined April living somewhere out in Utah, brainwashed or drawn into a cult. All they needed, in Celia’s mind, was for some unsuspecting person to see April on TV and then run into her at the market, wearing a bonnet and buying farm-fresh eggs.

  It had been two months since April disappeared. Bree had known for a long time that she was dead. She felt it in her gut. Of course, she wouldn’t dream of saying so to anyone, but it was as true to her as her own name. She was just waiting for the body to surface.

  Newspaper reporters and TV news shows called them every few days, but Bree’s father had advised the girls not to speak to the press. The story kept getting covered; Ronnie made sure of that. And though eight long weeks had passed, they were all still in shock. When Bree tried to picture herself under bright lights, talking about April—her April—to the world, she knew that she would be unable to say a word, that she would simply moan and thrash about and then they’d
probably have to cut to a commercial break so someone could drag her off to the loony bin.

  It was a Tuesday night, and the long, gleaming oak bar was practically empty but for a few guys watching a football game on the TV in the corner. A dim green lamp hung in the air between them, casting an ethereal glow across Celia’s face. She seemed more like her old college self lately, her face grown soft and full. She had quit wearing her tight black pencil skirts and heels and returned to a wardrobe of jeans and ballet flats. She wrote page upon page on her laptop at night while Bree flipped through magazines on the couch, and occasionally she read passages out loud. Bree was impressed, just as she had been back in college, at Celia’s ability to stir up her emotions with written words. She believed in Celia as a writer, and not just because they were best friends.

  “I had ninety pages of my novel done as of last night, and you know what I did with it this morning?” Celia said now.

  “What?” Bree said.

  “I erased it,” Celia said. “I realized that the reason it sucked so much was because I was making it all up. So I’ve decided to try something new—a book about a crazy Irish Catholic family in Boston. Totally fictional, of course.”

  Bree smiled. “I love it,” she said. “Ooh, can Gwyneth Paltrow play the main character’s best friend in the movie version?”

  “I’m sure that could be arranged,” Celia said.

  Bree knew that she would soon have to leave New York. The city was dirty and crowded, unfriendly and cold. It had nothing to offer her, other than Celia. And she worried that perhaps she was asking too much of her—Celia hardly spent time with her other friends these days, instead coming straight home to Bree as if they were the sort of codependent couple that neither of them could stand in real life. The leaves were off the trees now, and a freeze had set in. Bree’s bank account balance was dwindling, her days blurred one into the next, and she realized it was time to do something new—conquer an unknown city, or move home to Savannah and start the life she had always intended to have. As it stood, her mother had already set up two dates for Bree for the next time she came home, with the sons of friends from her country club.

  “I’m gonna miss you when I go,” Bree said now.

  “Who says you have to go?” Celia said.

  She looked over Bree’s shoulder toward the entrance to the bar. Her face turned serious.

  “That’s Ronnie,” Celia hissed.

  Bree turned around in her seat. Out of all of them, she knew and cared the least about Ronnie Munro. Back in college, she knew that Ronnie was the sort of icon you loved if you were a militant, and loathed if you were just your average run-of-the-mill feminist. (Bree herself was neither.) She had seen the woman on television since April vanished, but she had never seen her in person. She avoided Ronnie on her trips to Atlanta, afraid of what she might say if they ever came face-to-face.

  Ronnie looked much smaller than she had imagined—thin and almost frail, like a bird. Her hair was the color of an overripe eggplant. She wore jeans and Converse All Stars and a black T-shirt.

  “Over here,” Celia called out to her.

  Ronnie walked toward them, and as she came closer Bree saw that her face was etched with deep lines.

  “Give me a minute,” Ronnie said.

  She went to the bar and ordered a whole bottle of red wine for herself. She didn’t ask them if they wanted anything, even though their glasses were empty. She drank almost a full glass of wine standing there, before coming over to the table.

  “Now,” she said, scooting in beside Bree. “We meet at last.”

  Ronnie made her uneasy. She didn’t ask them a thing about themselves, just jumped right into her theories about April—perhaps she had gotten into a fight with one of the pimps and he’d kidnapped her to teach her a lesson. She certainly wouldn’t have gone off with one of them voluntarily, or even at gunpoint.

  “April’s distrust of men started early, of course,” Ronnie said. “It wasn’t just the father. Oh, I’m sure it started there, it always does. But I think that she learned what can be expected from men even more from Gabriel.”

  “Who’s Gabriel?” Celia asked. Any stranger would think she was just curious, but Bree could tell she wanted to throttle this woman for holding on to information about April as if it belonged to her.

  “This bastard friend of her mother’s who molested her when she was a kid,” Ronnie said casually. She took an enormous sip of wine. “He got her pregnant and ran off.”

  Bree was speechless. She could not have been more relieved to have Celia there. Celia, who never said the wrong thing at a moment like this.

  “Did Lydia tell you that?” Celia said.

  “No. Poor April told me. I did ask Lydia about it in Atlanta, though. She was very forthcoming.”

  “How so?” Celia asked.

  “Well, she was just very honest. Said she fell head over heels for the prick herself. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this story. She suspected, of course, like they always do, but she wanted to believe that the guy was a knight in shining armor, so—” She threw up her hands as if to say That explains it.

  Celia cleared her throat. “So you’re saying Lydia told you that she knew this guy molested her daughter but she didn’t do anything?” Her voice was fiery, as if she thought the whole thing was just an ugly lie. Bree wasn’t so sure.

  Ronnie stared at Celia. “There’s knowing and then there’s knowing,” she said. “This culture has created a myth that once a woman becomes a mother she loses her right to herself—she can’t have sexual desires or passions or dreams anymore. And it’s simply not true. Motherhood doesn’t transform the soul. It doesn’t move molecules.”

  Celia was saying something about how in theory she agreed with Ronnie, but that certainly we could expect mothers to protect their children at the very least. Bree couldn’t focus. Her anger was a physical thing now, making her whole body tense up. What was all this? This goddamn conversation. It wasn’t about April, she thought. It was about Ronnie, her theories, her stupid feminist bullshit. As far as Bree had ever seen, motherhood might as well move molecules for how it changed a woman. She thought of her own mother, at home in Savannah. She would do anything for her children, absolutely anything. To call Lydia a mother and have it mean the same thing seemed absurd.

  Then Bree thought of Lara, and of her mother’s face on the day she told her they were in love. It sent a shiver up her neck. A mother’s approval could chart the course of a lifetime if you let it.

  Finally, she interrupted the debate. “Why did you want to see us?” she asked.

  Ronnie shrugged. “I know how important you all are to April,” she said. “So I wondered if you knew anything that might help us find her.”

  Whom did she mean by us? It was as if April was Ronnie’s, not theirs, to worry about.

  “Don’t you think if we knew anything we would have told the police right away?” Celia said.

  “I don’t know you people from Adam,” Ronnie snapped. She took a deep breath. “I’m just trying to do everything I can for April, and since I was going to be in town anyway, I thought it would be best to see you and find out what you know, and just clear the air between us.”

  “Consider it clear,” Celia said, in the curt voice she reserved for special occasions such as this.

  “April joined me because she wanted to, you know,” Ronnie said. “She wanted to make a real difference in the world. This didn’t happen because of me. I didn’t do this to her.”

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Celia said abruptly. “Let’s go, Bree.”

  Bree’s heart fluttered as they got to their feet and made their way toward the door. She could never be that forceful, and furthermore, neither could Celia before coming to New York.

  When they got out into the icy air, Celia let out a scream, her breath forming a white cotton-candy cloud in front of her face.

  “I’ve never seen a guilty person try to explain her blame away so
blatantly before, have you?” she said, as they made their way to the subway.

  Bree shook her head, knowing that now was no time to argue with Celia. But secretly she wondered whether Ronnie had made a fair point—they’d all known that April was heading into dangerous territory, but she had done so anyway, against their advice. Had they been firm enough? Had they taken enough time to fight April, or had they just been distracted by their own silly drama?

  Maybe April’s death wasn’t Ronnie’s fault after all, but theirs.

  The following weekend, Bree flew to San Francisco to empty out the old apartment. After two and a half months of living with her parents and then with Celia, she had continued to pay the rent. But now, finally, she had given her notice to Eddie, the landlord, and decided to take one final look.

  She left at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, with a return ticket for the red-eye back two days later. On the flight, Bree did everything she could to avoid thinking. It had been a tough summer, followed by an almost unbearable fall. She had decided that long stretches of time spent rolling it all over never did her any good. So she read the in-flight magazine and even bought her mother a ridiculous silk scarf from the shopping section. (Did people actually do this? she wondered. Shop while flying across the country at thirty-six thousand feet?) She watched two romantic comedies, both of which she’d seen with Celia on HBO the previous month. They had decided that these films were mediocre at best, and discussed at some length why it was so difficult for screenwriters to get it right. Why couldn’t every romantic comedy be When Harry Met Sally? Was it really so hard? And wasn’t that just like love itself, Celia had said philosophically after half a bottle of sauvignon blanc. It seemed like it should be effortless, a no-brainer, but it was all so much more complicated than that.

  For the duration of the flight—six hours—Bree refused to let her thoughts take over. After the movies, she chatted with the elderly couple beside her. She read back issues of Vogue. She listened to Tom Petty on her iPod. She drank three sugary Cokes, calories be damned.