Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  As soon as the plane landed in Oakland she started thinking about flights she and Lara had taken together into this airport, holding hands during takeoff and landing, but she warned herself to knock it off, or else. Even so, on the way to the old apartment, she remembered the time they had spent there together—painting the living room walls a pale blue, assembling the bookshelves and the coffee table.

  Her parents were relieved that she was finally giving the place up.

  “It’s just an unnecessary drain on your finances, love,” her mother said, though Bree suspected there was more to it than that. This was her last connection to Lara, the only physical proof of what they had shared.

  When she told them that she was going back to collect her belongings, her father said he wanted her to call someone in San Francisco to keep her company, one of her old colleagues or a friend from the soccer team.

  “I’m fine, Daddy,” she had told him. “I’ll have my cell phone.”

  “That cell phone won’t be worth a plug nickel if you get mugged,” he said. “I know you’re an independent lady, but it’s dangerous for a woman to be completely alone in a strange city.”

  Bree didn’t think of San Francisco as strange. The steep inclines around Russian Hill, the Marina with its noisy tourists and snoozing sea lions, the tiny Mexican restaurants, and vendors selling Italian ices and fresh fried doughnuts were home to her in a way that no other place ever had been. The first home that she had chosen for herself. That she and Lara had chosen together. Bree didn’t want company, for safety or any other reason. She wanted to walk through their old life like a ghost, without remembering that all of it—the apartment and the firm and, most of all, Lara—was still here, moving forward, without her.

  Bree looked out the cab window at the familiar streets, streets she had walked with Lara so many times that it was a wonder their footprints weren’t there in the cement.

  The cab pulled onto Vallejo Street and right up in front of their old building. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun shone brightly through the trees. Bree paid the driver and stepped out. Here it was, just like she had never left. She climbed the steps and inserted her key into the door. It gave its old familiar creak as she pushed it open.

  She took the stairs to the second floor, and as she entered the apartment, she half expected Lara to be sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, listening to NPR and reading the paper. But the place was empty.

  It looked exactly the same—their old furniture, Bree’s cereal bowl and coffee cup in the dish drainer where she’d left them to dry back at the end of July, thinking she’d only be gone for the week to visit Celia. That was before April went missing. Before everything changed. The clock on the wall, left over from an old tenant, read 11:11 as it had ever since the battery died the same week they moved in. (Lara said it was good luck and they shouldn’t touch it.)

  Bree wandered from room to room, opening windows and letting the air in. The bed was still made, the sofa still covered in tissues from her crying fit upon returning from Savannah to find Lara gone. The water in the bathroom sink ran brown for a minute before turning clear, but otherwise it looked as if they had never left. Of course, Lara’s things were missing. Her clothing from the closet and the mountain bike that was once wedged behind the couch. (Bree had always complained it was an eyesore.) All of it taken someplace new, wherever that was.

  Lara had left their pictures fastened to the fridge with magnets, as if she didn’t care to remember Bree at all. Black-and-white photo-booth shots taken at the Marina; Polaroids snapped on their holiday visits to Lara’s family; old, curling color photos from their Smith days, both of them looking drunk and over the moon with happiness.

  “How could you?” Bree said out loud, and then she laughed at herself for sounding like a bad TV movie. She could feel Celia’s eyes roll from three thousand miles away.

  Bree had to get out. She grabbed her keys and ran to the sidewalk, running, running, until she hit the end of the block. She walked quickly past the familiar row houses and neatly trimmed lawns. She walked past two-hundred-year-old oak trees and down the hill to the water, through neighborhoods she did not know, down streets full of children shouting on bicycles, where the smell of dinner cooking wafted out through open windows.

  Darkness fell and the air grew heavy with moisture. Bree kept walking. Sally’s wedding could have been a century ago for everything that had changed since. April was gone to them forever, though they now knew more about her than they ever had before. Sally would soon be a mother, responsible for a life besides her own. And Lara had vanished, like April, leaving no clue behind.

  I have to let her go now, Bree thought.

  Returning from her walk around nine o’clock that night, she passed the mailboxes by the old front gate, and then turned back. She had had the post office forward her mail to Celia’s place in New York, but only her cell phone and electric bills and a subscription to Runner’s World ever made it through.

  Bree struggled to get the tiny door open. The box was stuffed full of flyers, for nail salons and the local sushi place and the gym down the block. She almost closed the door, but then she saw it—a small blue envelope, addressed to her, and in the upper-left corner, written so small that you could barely make it out, was the name Lara Matthews and a return address in Novato that seemed familiar, though Bree wasn’t sure why.

  She walked back to the apartment and poured herself a glass of water from the sink. She sat down at the kitchen table, and her hands shook as she ripped open the envelope. It had been postmarked the week April went missing.

  It was a blue greeting card with a picture of Wonder Woman flying across the front. Inside, Lara had written:

  I just heard about April, B. I am so sorry. But you are the strongest woman I know, and it will work out. I am here for you always if you want me. I love you, L.

  Bree picked up the phone and called Celia.

  “You’ll never believe this,” she said.

  She read the card to Celia ten or twelve times, so they could parse it out, word by word. Lara had said she still loved her. She had said she would always be there. But if she really felt that way, why had she changed her phone number? Why hadn’t she called?

  “Maybe she needed to know that you’d come after her,” Celia said.

  “But what if I’ve waited too long now?” Bree said. “What if she’s already engaged to some hot thing from her soccer team?”

  “Umm, I’m gonna go ahead and doubt that she’s engaged,” Celia said. “Obviously, she was making a little gesture in the hopes that you would then make the grand gesture.”

  “Do you think I should make the grand gesture?” Bree asked.

  “Well, what do you think?” Celia said.

  “I don’t know what I think,” Bree said. “When I saw that card with her handwriting on it—I can’t remember the last time I was so happy.”

  “That’s gotta tell you something,” Celia said.

  “Yes, but it’s not that simple.”

  “Sweetie, why do you think you even went out there, if not to get her back?” Celia asked.

  “I came to clean out the apartment,” Bree said. “You know that.”

  “Okay,” Celia said.

  “Okay, what?” Bree said. “Come on, Miss Psych 101, don’t hold back your analysis now, when I need it most of all.”

  Celia laughed. “Do you have any liquor there? I think a shot of something might serve you well.”

  They talked for three hours, pausing only once so Celia could pee and take the dog outside for same.

  Eventually, having reached no conclusion whatsoever, they said good night.

  Bree couldn’t sleep. She got out of bed and went to the kitchen, where she boiled water in the old teapot and pulled a bag of Earl Grey from the cupboard.

  She took her tea and sat on the kitchen floor, looking up at the room. Had she ever seen it from this angle before?

  Why now? Why th
e hell hadn’t Lara just picked up the phone and called her? Why hadn’t the card been forwarded to Celia’s apartment with the rest of her mail? Had she gotten it sooner, would things be any different? Maybe she’d be living here now, in her same old life. Was it a blessing the way things had turned out? Or was the blessing the fact that she had found Lara’s note and could still change her mind?

  Bree looked over at the fridge, at one picture in particular: Lara laughing hysterically as she and a little boy named Devon Samuels from the after-school center crossed the finish line in a three-legged race.

  Suddenly, Bree realized why she knew the return address on Lara’s card—it was Nora and Roseanna’s place out in the suburbs. She was surprised by how relieved she felt to know that Lara wasn’t off with some hot single friend but instead in the home of her boss, her boss’s wife, and their young son.

  She drank down the rest of her tea and wished for morning to come quick.

  Around 9:00 a.m. the next day, Bree showered and blew her hair dry in front of the bathroom mirror, where one Valentine’s Day Lara had written her a dirty letter in red lipstick. She applied her makeup as carefully as she once had for her high school prom and spritzed her wrists with the Burberry perfume Lara liked, though she herself thought it was a bit too lemony. She hadn’t brought anything terribly nice to wear, so she pulled an old sundress from college out of the closet, one of Lara’s favorites.

  Half an hour later, she was climbing into a taxi, her palms sweaty. The weather had changed, and now the sky was a pure blue, the unseasonable heat so strong that it made the sidewalk smell like a bread oven.

  “Can you take me all the way out to Novato?” she asked the driver.

  He eyed her in the rearview mirror. “For you, gorgeous, anything.”

  The row houses and sloping streets gave way to a highway lined with palm trees. Bree didn’t know what she would say or even whether Lara was still staying there. No doubt, Nora and Roseanna saw her as the villain in all of this. She closed her eyes and took a series of long, deep breaths. She considered calling Celia, but decided against it: The decision needed to be all hers now.

  Soon enough, they were surrounded by enormous homes, perched on the greenest lawns Bree had ever seen. And then Nora and Roseanna’s place came into view, the rainbow flag billowing in the slight breeze.

  “That’s the one,” she said, pointing.

  She paid the driver, the price of the twenty-minute ride amounting to more than a quarter of what it had cost her to fly across the country. She knew she should have taken the train out, that perhaps it was a touch dramatic, but she did not want to wait any longer than she absolutely had to.

  Bree walked slowly up the flagstone path. A few moments later, she stood at the front door and rang the bell. She smoothed her dress and counted to ten as she tried to keep from passing out or turning around and running down the driveway.

  When the door opened, six-year-old Dylan stood on the other side in blue medical scrubs, a stethoscope hanging around his neck.

  “Dylan!” Bree said happily.

  He didn’t seem to recognize her. “Dr. Dylan, yes,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Who is it, sweetness?” Nora’s voice came from close behind, and then she stood there in her red one-piece bathing suit, wiping her hands on a flowered dish towel.

  She patted Dylan on the head. “Go out back and get Auntie Lara,” she whispered.

  “You mean Nurse Lara,” he hissed.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Go.”

  Nora didn’t invite Bree inside. Instead, she opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. She gave Bree an awkward hug.

  “This is a surprise,” she said. “How have you been?”

  “I’m okay,” Bree said. She looked inside the house. She could feel Lara’s presence and wondered why Nora hadn’t let her run straight to her side.

  “I’ve been staying in New York with a friend,” Bree said.

  “Oh.”

  “I tried calling Lara so many times, but—” Bree trailed off. Why was she defending herself to this woman?

  “It’s really not my place, but I’ll just say this,” Nora started, glancing over her shoulder before she went on. “You have to be really certain, Bree. Don’t do this to her if you’re not sure.”

  Bree began to respond, but then the door opened, and Lara stood there. Lara! Tanned and toned, in an impossibly small navy-blue bikini, a beach towel wrapped around her waist. Bree stopped breathing for a moment as their eyes locked.

  “I’ll just give you two some space,” Nora said. On her way back into the house, she touched Lara’s arm. “There’s coffee on the kitchen counter and fruit salad in the fridge if you want it.”

  “Thanks,” Lara said.

  And then it was just the two of them, at last.

  “Hi,” Bree said sheepishly.

  A huge grin spread over Lara’s face. “Hey there.”

  “You look amazing,” Bree said. “You look more beautiful than ever.”

  Slowly, Lara wrapped her arms around Bree’s back and buried her face in Bree’s neck, her wet hair dripping onto both their shoulders.

  “I missed you,” Lara said.

  “Me too,” Bree said.

  Across the street, a dad in khaki shorts and a T-shirt started up his lawn mower.

  “How long have you been staying here?” Bree asked.

  “Since I left,” Lara said. “How’s the old place?”

  Bree shook her head. “I just saw it again for the first time yesterday,” she said. “I’m giving it up, since neither of us has been living there.”

  “Where have you been?” Lara asked.

  “With Celia.”

  “In New York?” Lara sounded surprised. “But you hate New York.”

  Bree laughed. “I know.”

  “I’m so sorry about April,” Lara said. “I wanted to call you, but—”

  “But what?” Bree asked.

  “Oh, never mind.”

  “Okay, now you have to tell me.”

  “When this all started, way back when you were home with your mom, Nora and I had this long talk one night. She said she and Roseanna went through something really similar years ago. She said the best thing for both of us was for me to cut off all ties.”

  “Why would that be good for me?” Bree said. She had started to cry, realizing all at once how much she had missed this.

  “Good for you because we both know how I feel, but you still needed to figure out your own feelings, without any help from me,” Lara said.

  Bree swallowed. Had she figured anything out? Was she wrong to have come?

  Lara got dressed, and they took the train back into the city, holding hands and catching up the entire way, confessing to each other like little girls: Roseanna had set Lara up on a date with a woman who looked just like Bree, in the hopes of helping her move on, but Lara just wanted to cry each time she looked at her. Bree talked about how her mother had wanted her to get back together with her married high school boyfriend. Lara laughed, the entire ugly story underneath going unspoken, at least for now. They spent the day together curled up on the couch and went for a long dinner at a new Thai restaurant in the Trocadero.

  It wasn’t until late that night, when they were lying naked in their old familiar bed, that Lara said, “What happens now?”

  “I’m flying back to New York in the morning,” Bree whispered.

  “Do you have to?” Lara said. She sounded stricken, and Bree thought of Nora’s words to her earlier that day: Don’t do this to her if you’re not sure.

  “I want you to come home,” Lara said. “I want us both to come home.”

  “I think I need some time to sort this out,” Bree said finally. “Yesterday I didn’t know if I would ever even see you again.”

  “Well, here I am,” Lara said, not unkindly. “I’m here now, Bree.”

  SALLY

  As usual, Sally was awakened by Jake singing in
the shower. It was only the first week of November, but already he was singing Christmas carols with operatic gusto.

  “We wish you a merry Christmas! We wish you a merry Christmas! We wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!”

  His voice echoed through the master bath and into their bedroom, where Sally lay on her back in bed, with a pillow over her face.

  “Honey!” she called, laughing. “I’m begging you to stop.”

  He went on, launching into the midpoint of “Jingle Bells”: “Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh, o’er the fields we go, laughing all the way—ha! ha! ha!”

  Sally groaned, but she couldn’t help but smile. How on earth had she managed to attract a man who loved life and never seemed to worry? A man who started each day off with glee, as if he were a kindergartener on his way to the poster-paints table rather than a banker and a husband and a soon-to-be-father.

  Early on in their dating life, when it had seemed like Jake might just be another one in a long line of men they talked about and nicknamed and then forgot, Celia had said he sounded like a golden retriever—always happy, friendly to everyone. Cee had meant it as a joke, but Sally thought it was actually a fairly apt description. She hoped she never forced that purity out of him.

  Sally still had fifteen minutes left before her alarm went off, but she rolled out of bed and got to her feet—no small task, as her belly seemed roughly the size of a three-year-old child. She padded downstairs and started the coffee. Jake was drinking decaf with her in solidarity these days.

  Sally opened the fridge and considered making him a big breakfast—eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice. But a second later, she felt exhausted from the mere thought of it, and unwrapped two of his Pop-Tarts instead.

  When he came into the kitchen and saw what she’d done, Jake beamed. “You made me Pop-Tarts!” he said. “Thank you, baby.”

  This made Sally wish she had gone for the big breakfast. It was so easy to make Jake happy. Too easy. Sometimes she wanted to tell him that if he just complained a bit more, he could probably get a hell of a lot more out of this whole marriage situation.