Twenty minutes later he left the house, as usual kissing her first on her lips: “Good-bye, baby,” he said. Then he kissed her belly: “And good-bye, baby,” he said again.
“Have a good day at work, sweetpea,” Sally said.
A month from now, she would be sending him off with an infant in her arms. She was only planning on taking a three-month maternity leave. Then she’d go right back to work. Jake’s mother could not stop pointing out the obvious. “You don’t need the money,” she said again and again, as if Sally should quit her job and stay home sterilizing bottles and memorizing storybooks all day, just because she could afford to.
“You have a good day at work, too,” Jake said now, and Sally held the door open for him with a smile.
Today would have been Bill’s sixty-second birthday. Sally had been thinking about it, vaguely, for weeks. She wasn’t going to work. She had asked her boss for the time off a full week earlier. She wanted to return—even just for a day—to the time when her love for him was the only thing she had to worry about, an exciting secret instead of a burden. In the weeks to come, everything would change. She would give birth, that petrifying, almost unbelievable prospect, the aftermath of which was even harder to picture. She had never missed her mother so much before. So perhaps that, too, was reason to have one more day alone, one more secret.
Sally remembered an afternoon, years ago; she must have been in middle school. Her mother and brother arrived in the station wagon to pick her up at a friend’s house, and when Sally climbed into the backseat, her brother blurted out, “Guess what I just discovered?”
“What?” Sally pulled her heavy book bag in behind her and slammed the door.
“Mom has a dark secret,” her brother said, dangling it, loving the power of knowing something that she did not.
“What?” Sally said. “What’s he talking about?”
Her mother shrugged as she pulled the car out onto the street and past the rows of neat Colonials perched on sprawling green lawns.
“What is it?” Sally persisted. She was dying to know.
“What will you give me?” her brother said.
“How good is it?” Sally said.
“It’s good,” her brother said. “I mean, really good.”
Sally looked at her mother, who burst out laughing. “He’s not lying,” she said.
“Well, what do you want for it?” Sally asked her brother impatiently.
“You wash the dishes on my nights for a week,” he said.
“Deal,” Sally said, her heart speeding up.
“Mom drinks Dr Pepper,” her brother said. “Like, a lot of it.”
“You drink Dr Pepper?” Sally said with a gasp. It was as if she’d just learned that her mother was a heroin addict.
She had never let them have soda, not even their father was allowed it. When they protested in restaurants or at birthday parties, she would rattle off a long list of its dangers—everything from brown teeth to bone disease. The sugary substance had passed Sally’s lips only three or four times in her life, and on each occasion she was struck with the sort of guilt that she imagined usually afflicted unfaithful husbands or first-time bank robbers.
“When I put my hockey stuff in the trunk after practice, I saw a whole garbage bag full of empty bottles,” her brother said with glee. “She came clean pretty quick.”
“I meant to take them to the recycling center today, but it slipped my mind,” her mother said. She shrugged again, as if they might just let the whole thing go.
“Mom!” Sally said. “I am shocked.”
“Every woman needs secrets,” her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally’s in the rearview mirror. “Remember that when you’re old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of making a woman’s life everyone else’s business—you have to dig out a little place that’s only yours.”
Sally was proud of her mother for this one tiny secret, for being something other than exactly what they always expected her to be. She pictured her mother waiting for them in the wagon outside of school, sneaking sips from a red-and-white straw. She imagined her buying the week’s groceries, her cart piled high with vegetables and chicken breasts and American cheese and apple juice and whole wheat bread. She would stop in the soda aisle, glance around to make sure no one was looking, and slip a six-pack under the rest of her purchases.
They fell silent as she slowed to let an elderly couple cross the street. The couple looked up and waved, and Sally’s mother waved back, though Sally was certain she didn’t know them. In that moment, a switch flipped inside of her, and the mother she knew returned.
“You both need to do your homework right away when we get home, because I have a meeting at the school tonight, and your father will be babysitting you, and I want everything to be settled,” she said, almost absent-mindedly. “Speaking of Daddy, let’s not mention this little discovery of yours, okay?”
Sally had never forgotten her mother’s words: Every woman needs secrets, she had said, though of course she meant something benign, like drinking soda, rather than sneaking off and lying to your husband about it when you were about to drop a baby at any moment.
Secrecy was the thing she most wanted to ask April about now. At Smith, Sally had believed that they shared everything. But April had never told her about being molested as a child—Sally had had to hear it from Bree, who heard it from Ronnie. Why had April kept this to herself? Sally wondered. And what more had she kept? She imagined a young, teenage April learning she was pregnant. Had she taken tests alone at home? Thrown up in gym class? Who besides awful Lydia did she share the news with? Sally imagined going back in time and putting her arms around April, scared and alone. The fact of being pregnant was almost too much to handle now, at the age of twenty-six. How had April made it through?
She spent the morning getting ready: applying a deep-conditioning treatment to her hair, reading Vanity Fair while she let it set in. She shaved her legs slowly, and rubbed cocoa butter into her skin, which she had read eliminated stretch marks. She put on makeup for the first time in weeks.
Sally left for Northampton that afternoon, with Bill’s copy of the Collected Poems of W. H. Auden beside her on the passenger seat. There was a black-and-white photo of the poet on the book’s cover. His face was lined with wrinkles; his eyes were small and sad. He had the look of a man who had seen much, felt much, said much. How different it was from Bill’s jacket photo—that handsome, vain smile, betraying nothing.
In the car, she sang along to the oldies station, belting out songs by the Beatles and Elton John. She thought of their Smith days, when a gentle knock on her dorm-room door might turn into Celia sliding across the floor in her underwear, singing Cher into a hairbrush microphone and starting a ridiculous sing-a-long that would usually draw in a few other girls from the hall. Sally never sang like that anymore, unless she was alone. Why not? It wasn’t that Jake would have discouraged such behavior but rather that she was unable to behave that way in front of him. Wives didn’t do hairbrush serenades or jump up and down in bed in their underwear singing “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Sally ran a palm over her belly and smiled. Mothers could be like that, though, she thought. Goofy and silly and bizarre, doing barnyard impressions and renditions of Broadway musicals, setting their children’s heads tipping backward in delighted laughter. Whom had she ever laughed with the way she laughed with the Smithies? Her mother, and that was all.
Since feeling the baby’s first kick, Sally had fallen in love. It seemed real; she was actually going to have a child. Her fears now centered on the agony of giving birth, and on who her child would be. There was something thrilling about the idea of a person made up of half of her stuff and half of Jake’s. Sally hoped their baby would get the best of them both—Jake’s sunny disposition and good sense and athletic ability. Her dark hair and cleanliness and that weird wild-card quality that made her who she was. But sometimes, especially when she was alone in the car like this, Sall
y imagined horrifying scenarios. What if their kid became a criminal, or a teen mother, or a Scientologist? What if she wanted to join the military?
Though Jake begged her not to, Sally had watched a rerun of Stone Phillips interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother on TV a few nights earlier.
“What was he like as a boy?” Stone asked, in his concerned, rugged voice.
“Just like any other boy,” she said. “I thought he was wonderful.”
That was the problem, Sally told Jake. You would never know your own child was a cannibalistic serial killer until it was too late.
When she reached exit 18 and saw the familiar sign for Smith College, she rolled down her window. The mountain air was cool and sharp. She had come to think about Bill, and to remember April, not one last time, she decided, because one last time was bullshit. No one could ever say for sure whether they were doing something for the last time, unless they were dead. The day her mother died, they had stood in the hospital hall, by a too-familiar window that overlooked the Jamaicaway. Sally’s brother was huddled up on the floor by the windowsill, his headphones blaring. Her father was talking to the doctor in hushed tones, signing papers on a clipboard. All of a sudden, a nurse with string-thin lips approached. Sally eyed her as she glanced from one of them to the next. When her eyes met Sally’s, she smiled sadly and held out a plastic Baggie.
“Her effects,” the nurse said in a thick Irish accent.
Sally gasped as she glanced down at her mother’s engagement ring and watch, her house keys on that ugly Cape Cod key chain, her red wallet still bulging with Stop & Shop coupons. How many times had Sally looked at all this junk without a second thought? And now it was all she had left of her.
How could a person have and do all these stupid things—clip coupons and double lock the front door—and then one day just cease to exist? If April was dead, who would be the one to get her belongings? What on earth would she even have to show for her short, brave life?
When she got to the campus, Sally pulled the car to the side of the road and got out, clutching Auden. She had read that Bill was buried in the cemetery at the end of Main Street, though the fact of it surprised her. She couldn’t remember if they had ever discussed it, but he did not seem like the type to want to be buried. Sally wondered if maybe it had been his children’s idea. She remembered how unbearable it had been to think of her mother’s familiar, warm body burned up to ash. Though really, was it any better to bury your parent in the ground, leaving him to decompose like garbage, until he was nothing? She would never want to see Bill like that, memorialized by a cold stone, a heap of dirt, and some wilting flowers. Or worse, one of those stupid miniature Christmas trees that people placed at gravesides this time of year, as if the dead were twenty-somethings living in tiny studio apartments.
It was bitter cold. Sally tried to pull her woolen jacket over her enormous stomach. Even though she was pregnant, she was too vain to buy a maternity coat.
“I’ll never wear it again!” she said to Jake when he told her she needed one on a recent trip to the mall for nursery furniture.
“What about when you’re pregnant with our next kid?” he said.
“Oh, brother,” she had snapped. “Can we get this one out into the light of day before we start talking about the next one, please?”
She pulled her mittens from her pockets now and began to walk the path through Center Campus toward the Quad.
“You okay?” she said to the baby. She hoped she wasn’t slowly freezing her daughter to death. Once this kid came into the world, Sally knew, she would live in constant terror of somehow injuring or losing her. Having her tucked deep inside her belly was the safest she would ever feel about the child, and even that was scary.
Sally walked slowly. How many times had she taken this path with the girls, lazily gossiping on the way to class, or trudging arm in arm through the snow, or, on occasion, purposefully marching at a Take Back the Night rally or Celebration of Sisterhood, always with April leading the way. Smith had left its mark on her, so that the place would always feel like home, but she was a stranger here now. In each of her friends, her Smith College self would always live on. Maybe that was why they were all still so important to one another, even though so much had changed.
Two girls came toward her now, holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears. They reminded her of Bree and Lara. Bree had called Sally a few days earlier to tell her how they had reunited in San Francisco. She said it felt magical, like one of the old movies Celia used to make them watch in college. But even so, Bree flew back to New York a day later, as planned.
When Sally asked what would happen next, Bree said, “I just don’t know. Maybe I should move home and take that job my dad offered me. I could do worse, right? I had been dreaming of her for so long, Sal, but I need my family, too.”
“Maybe you can have both,” Sally had said gently.
“No,” Bree said. “I really don’t think so.”
Sally paused in front of the library now, the site of her first conversation with Bill, the first place they ever made love. At her wedding, she had been afraid to go inside, because the passage of time had transformed him in her eyes. The thought of seeing him again, for what he really was, felt like too much. But now Bill was gone, and she could remember him just as he had been in those early days.
She walked inside and the familiar smell filled the air, a mix of leather and old paper and floor polish. She made her way toward Bill’s office.
In the main room, Smithies sat alone at carrels, serious as monks, their faces down in their used copies of Thackeray and Joan Didion. Sally had a ridiculous urge to walk over to them, smooth their hair, and tell them to savor every minute of this. But none of the girls even looked up. Sally was twenty-six, which in college student years was borderline elderly. When you went to college in a town, you fancied it your own, but you never really knew the place in the way of the permanent residents—the cemeteries and the DMV, the public libraries and elementary schools. You just saw your campus as a world unto itself and thought of the townspeople as adorable extras. Did Harvard kids look at her that way now? Some old married pregnant lady, another nameless part of the safe backdrop that was Cambridge?
She took the stairs at the back of the room, her heart speeding up as she approached his office. She had imagined it many times these past few weeks—cardboard boxes overflowing with his books and papers, here and there a stray Post-it lying on the ground. But when she got there, she found the room completely bare but for his old steel desk and empty bookshelves. Everything familiar and personal—the wing chair, the lambskin rug—had been taken away. By whom? His children? His wife?
Sally stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She sat on the floor and tried to find some trace of him, but even his smell had been erased. She opened up his old copy of Auden and read for nearly an hour—the epic poems, the love poems, the silly two-liners Auden had dashed off to other famous poets. Then she got to the one that reminded her most of Bill. It was one of the poems he had read to her over and over on those early nights in his office while they were cuddling on the rug, drinking wine from plastic cups meant to look like glass. Later, lying alone in her single bed, in a building full of girls lying alone in single beds, she would say the words out loud. She did this again now, reading it in a hushed voice to the empty room around her:
Love like Matter is much
odder than we thought.
Love requires an Object,
But this varies so much
Almost, I imagine,
Anything will do:
When I was a child, I
Loved a pumping-engine,
Thought it every bit as
Beautiful as you.
Bill had always said that every poem was different for every reader, because each person injected the poet’s personal thoughts with his or her own, breathing new life into them. When Bill had read her that poem, she had imagined it to mean that he love
d her in a way so pure and honest and absolute that it was as if he were a little boy again, running around in short-pants. The part she had ignored was the most important part: Almost anything will do.
She realized now, too late, that perhaps the poems he loved were his attempts at confessing. She lingered over this one, letting her finger trace each word slowly. When she finished, she laid the book on his desk and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Outside, it smelled like snow. As she walked toward the Quad and past the frozen pond, she imagined white flakes floating down, burying whatever remained of him.
By the time she reached King House, Sally was out of breath from walking, and she felt like her bladder was about to burst. She glanced around, but there were no students in sight, so she went right up to the back door of the house, prepared to use her old key to get inside and use the bathroom. When she saw the door, she jolted backward a bit—the keyhole had been covered over, and there was now a little cube of plastic in its place with a blinking red light, the sort of thing you would swipe a credit card through.
She thought of an old Joni Mitchell song that April used to play while they were studying. Nothing lasts for long, nothing lasts for long.
Sally rang the bell, but no one came, so she walked to the stone steps leading back down to the Quad and sat on the cold concrete. Where was April? she wondered for what felt like the millionth time. When would they ever know what really happened to her?
Sally felt the baby kick, and she let out a little laugh. “This is where I married your daddy,” she said. Someday she would bring her little girl here. She thought of introducing her daughter to Celia and Bree, and to April, once she came back to them.
“Excuse me! Ma’am?” came a tinny voice from behind. Sally swiveled her head to see a young smiling girl with a backpack holding the door to the house open. She looked about eleven years old. “Did you want to come inside?” she asked, in a helpful, Girl Scout–like tone.
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