Commencement

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  But before they headed outside, she kissed Lara on the mouth and said, “I love you.”

  “She needs to stretch out in the backseat,” Jake instructed as they got into the rental car. Celia sat in back, with Sally’s head in her lap. Her water had broken sometime in the night, without even waking her up, and she was still leaking the sweet-smelling fluid now. Whoever drove this car next would be getting a lot more than they bargained for, Celia thought. She wished she could leave them a note: Wear shoes in this vehicle at all times. Just trust me on this.

  They got lost trying to find the hospital. Bree called her father and woke him up for directions.

  A few minutes later, they pulled up to a red light. Jake looked like he might start hyperventilating at any moment. “Come on, people! My wife is having a baby here!”

  Bree turned around and smiled at Celia.

  “Oh, Bree,” Sally said. “Did you and Lara share a room last night?”

  Bree laughed. “I’ll tell you all the details later.”

  “No, tell us now,” Sally said. “I need something to distract me from the fact that I’m about to push an eight-pound child out of a hole the size of a quarter.”

  Bree grinned. “Okay, then. So you know I went for a walk after the search. I was thinking about April and about how much of life is just out of our control. But this is something I can control. Lara is here. So I asked her to come to my room, and we talked for a long time. It was really nice.”

  “And then,” Celia said.

  Bree rolled her eyes. “And then we slept together.”

  Jake perked up at that. “Can I ask a question?” he asked sheepishly. “What exactly do you mean when you say you slept together? Like, did you—”

  “Oh my God, shut up with that,” Sally said.

  Suddenly Jake pumped his fist in the air. “I am the man!” he shouted.

  “Honey, you just found a hospital with directions from MapQuest,” Sally said. “You didn’t exactly discover the New World.”

  Jake laughed. “I sure am gonna miss all your pregnancy hormones,” he said.

  A nurse with spiky white hair took Sally into a private room to get her ready for the doctors. Celia, Bree, and Jake waited in the hall by the vending machines.

  Celia still felt so young, like a kid. It seemed wrong somehow for the four of them to be here. She wished her mother had come along. She could only imagine how Sally felt. After all this, she would have a child, an actual person to take care of and raise.

  After a while, an orderly approached them. “You can come in now,” he said.

  In the room, Sally was on her feet in her hospital gown, talking sharply to the white-haired nurse: “Listen, I want an enema,” she said. “It’s part of my birthing plan back home in Boston. Call my doctor there if you don’t believe me.”

  The nurse smiled. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, dear,” she said. “It’s just not our policy to give enemas.”

  “Honey, why would you want an enema in the first place?” Bree said, and Celia could not help but laugh—this was a word she had never expected to hear out of either of their mouths.

  “So I don’t take a big poop on the table while I’m giving birth!” Sally snapped.

  Bree and Celia exchanged a look of horror. After this, Celia thought, it was quite possible that neither of them would ever be able to have a child.

  The doctor said the baby’s birth was still hours away. Sally had been right not to hurry. She could have stayed at the nice hotel in her fluffy white robe and painted a miniature replica of the Last Supper on each nail, and she still would have had time to spare. The four of them played cards and walked the halls and ate banana bread from the cafeteria. Sally panicked over not having her “birth bag,” which was apparently a suitcase she had packed with her favorite nightgown, nice towels and lotion, a mix CD she and Jake had burned to listen to during the birth, a pink outfit from Rosemary to take the baby home in, and healthy snacks and water for Jake “so he doesn’t pass out during delivery,” Sally said.

  They watched the rain fall and talked about April, and Sally said she hoped the baby came by Thursday morning, so that all of them could get back outside and search.

  In the hours that followed, Celia got a real education, as her mother put it when Celia called her from the hospital lobby to give her an update at around 10:00 a.m.

  When she got back upstairs, Bree was running toward her like a madwoman. “Her labor’s over!” she said.

  “Oh my God, she had the baby?” Celia said.

  Bree laughed. “No, honey, she still has to deliver the baby. This is when the gore hits the fan. Didn’t you ever take a health class in junior high?”

  Celia shook her head. “Catholic school. They told us that babies were dropped into their cribs by teams of angels carrying fluffy pink or blue blankets.”

  When they reached Sally’s room, the nurse was injecting the epidural into her spine. Celia had never seen such a huge needle in her life.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said to Bree under her breath.

  Sally was a trouper. She didn’t scream as much as women in the movies usually did, because she said her doctor back home had told her it was a waste of energy and would make the birth longer than it needed to be. She squeezed Jake’s hand with one of hers, and Celia’s with the other.

  “What was the first song on that mix CD you made?” Bree asked when Sally began to fade.

  Between grunts, Sally said, “Supremes. ‘Can’t Hurry Love.’”

  Celia, Bree, and Jake sang her the whole CD—“Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, “Manic Monday” by the Bangles—as the nurses looked on with a combination of annoyance and amusement.

  There was more blood than Celia could have imagined. It was everywhere, and she was relieved that Sally didn’t actually have to see it. She had always wondered why women gave birth lying down, with a sheet over their legs. This, evidently, was the reason.

  After four hours of pushing, Sally was exhausted. She pushed and pushed until the blood vessels in her face popped, and she looked like she was bleeding from every pore. Celia and Bree were aghast; they couldn’t help it. Here was their impeccable Sally—who never had a hair out of place, never so much as a wrinkle in her dress or a scuff on her shoe—looking like she’d just walked out of a boxing ring.

  “What is it?” Sally said, squeezing hard, nearly crushing Celia’s palm.

  “Nothing,” Celia said.

  She turned to Jake. “Oh God, what happened? I look like shit, right?”

  “You look beautiful. Honest,” Jake said, and Celia almost burst into tears.

  When the baby’s head crowned, Sally screamed bloody murder.

  Doctor’s orders be damned, Celia thought. Had Sally’s obstetrician back home, a man named Dr. Finkle, ever given birth? No. So what the hell did he know about screaming?

  “Sally, we’re having a little trouble getting the baby’s shoulders out,” the doctor said. “We’re going to have to do a small episiotomy.”

  “How small?” she said.

  “Small,” the doctor said. “I promise. Seven stitches, max.”

  Stitches? Celia reminded herself to get on the waiting list for a couple of Romanian orphans as soon as she got home.

  “No,” Sally said, shaking her head. “I don’t want it done.”

  Celia was about to speak up, about to say that these damn people needed to listen to Sally, and really, hadn’t the poor girl been through enough without slicing her open?

  “Babe,” Jake said gently. “I know you didn’t want one, but it will heal so much better than a jagged tear.”

  Bree’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.

  The doctor grinned. “I see Daddy here has been reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting. He’s right, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh okay,” Sally said. “Just get this thing out of me.” She put her head back, resigned.

  The final pushes looked and sounded like agony,
but moments later, there she was—Sally’s daughter, April Eleanor Brown, with a shock of dark hair, just like her mother’s. She was covered in goop, and Celia was surprised when the doctor laid her right on Sally’s chest. Sally beamed, the most radiant smile Celia had ever seen, and that was really saying something when Sal’s entire face was covered in bloody, red splotches.

  Celia and Bree left Sally and Jake alone with the baby for a while and went to the cafeteria again to get some dinner.

  Bree picked at her soggy Caesar salad. “So much has happened in the last two days that I feel like it’s going to take a year to process all of it.”

  “Did Lara go back to San Francisco?” Celia asked.

  “No, she’s staying for the next round of searching,” Bree said.

  “And then what will you do?” Celia said.

  “These past few weeks I’ve really believed that I’m going to end up back home in Savannah where I belong,” Bree said. “But now—”

  Celia grinned. “I think you’re going to move back out to California,” she said.

  “Me too,” Bree said. She whistled under her breath. “Oh man, this is gonna go over real big at my mom’s house. Isn’t it kind of funny that she’d prefer for me to break up Doug Anderson’s marriage than for me to be a lesbian?”

  They laughed.

  “You never know, your parents might come around,” Celia said. “Life is long.”

  It was a favorite phrase of her grandmother’s, which she was only just beginning to understand.

  They went to the gift shop for champagne and flowers and a dozen pink balloons. Celia knew that all of them felt strange celebrating, but she thought it was right that they should honor new life, now more than ever.

  When they returned, each of them got to hold the baby. Celia felt like she might melt as she rocked the little thing in her arms.

  “I’m your Auntie Celia,” she whispered.

  Jake opened the champagne, and they toasted. Sally had a few sips, but then handed the rest of her glass to Jake because she was breastfeeding. Celia thought that if she were in Sally’s place, she’d ask to have the entire bottle fed into her IV. Or perhaps they should have started with the booze instead of ending with it.

  “That was amazing to watch,” Celia said of the birth, though she knew there were many other adjectives to describe it.

  “And you two thought my wedding was painful,” Sally said with a smile.

  Bree laughed. “Oh my God, Sal. You’re a mother.”

  “I’m a mother,” Sally said. “I wish my mom was here to see this. And April, too.”

  Celia didn’t know how to respond. If her mother were there, she’d say something like: They are here, Sally; they’re watching over you always. But that felt about as unnatural to Celia as Sally saying the word “enema.”

  Finally, Bree said, “The baby has your mom’s eyes.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” Sally said.

  Celia gave Bree a smile. It was the perfect thing to say, she thought, though she had no idea whether or not it was true.

  “So,” Celia said, after their glasses had been emptied, the baby taken to the nursery to sleep. “Now what?”

  “Now we all get a good night’s rest so we can be bright and alert tomorrow, and find April,” Sally said.

  “Not you, though, right, honey?” Jake said nervously. “You’re staying here, right?”

  “We’ll see how I feel,” Sally said. “I’m not lugging around as much weight as I was yesterday. I should be much quicker on my feet by morning.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking,” Bree said.

  “Or that it’s the drugs talking,” Celia said.

  “Nope,” Jake said. “That’s just our Sally.”

  Celia and Bree exchanged a look.

  “You’re okay, Jake,” Bree said. “You may even be the first male to earn the title of ‘honorary Smithie.’”

  “My husband, the Smithie.” Sally beamed. A moment later, she closed her eyes and began to snore.

  Jake ducked into the bathroom, and Bree turned to Celia.

  “Is there any chance we might find her alive tomorrow?” she asked.

  Celia shook her head sadly. “I think she’s gone.”

  “So do I,” Bree said. “And I hate that life just keeps going anyway.”

  APRIL

  Ronnie’s plan was simple.

  All over the country, little black girls left home each morning and never returned. They got killed by gang members or kidnapped by strangers and forced into prostitution. Yet no one ever issued an Amber Alert for them. The Today show never splashed their smiling photographs across America’s TV screens. When an educated white girl went missing, the media couldn’t get enough of the details.

  Ronnie had a real gift for changing people’s visions by using their own failings against them. She said she wanted to raise awareness about American child sex trafficking while also showing how little the country cares about anyone who’s not privileged and white.

  That was how April ended up telling her friends that they were making a documentary but leaving out the rest. And how she came to pack up her belongings and live with Ronnie in that shit hole on English Avenue.

  After a year, just when April began to wonder whether they were doing the right thing, Ronnie announced that they were finally going to put the plan into action.

  In the middle of the night one sticky Friday in August, April crept over to Alexa’s house and silently crawled down a handmade rope ladder into a space under the parlor floorboards, about the size of the small walk-in closet she had at Smith. There was no light, the space smelled like mildew, and the floor was made of stone. Alexa had tried to make it nice. She filled it with pillows and a soft baby blanket. She told April not to worry—she had hidden girls there before, she said, when they were running from the police or their pimps. None of them had ever seen any roaches or mice, and Alexa said it was impossible to hear the girls from up above, even when one of them accidentally sneezed or coughed. Still, April had to press her palm hard against her mouth to keep from crying. She had never liked tight spaces, but she knew this was the only way.

  The following morning, Ronnie told her that she had called April’s mother and the Smith girls as planned to tell them what had happened. This way, Ronnie said, no one would be able to talk April out of the plan, but April would have her wish—those who loved her most would know she was safe.

  Later that day, Ronnie reported April missing, and Alexa came forward to say that she had seen Redd shoving April into a car the night before. The last part was a flat-out lie like the rest of it, of course, but Ronnie and Alexa had decided that punishing Redd could be a special bonus of the project. He was the worst of the worst in Atlanta, notorious in the neighborhood for beating his girls with a baseball bat, allowing them to be raped by dozens of men in a single night as part of a gang initiation, and once punishing a fifteen-year-old who refused to have sex with a drunk businessman by shoving a broken glass bottle into her vagina and biting a hole in her bottom lip. He was arrested on charges of aggravated assault and mayhem, but released on bail after just one month. No one seemed to know what had happened to the girl, but Alexa said Redd had been bragging to everyone that his friends finished her off.

  The police saw these young girls as criminals, inhabiting the same vulgar world as their pimps, asking for what they got. What the cops and most people failed to recognize was that the pimps had made a choice, while the girls had been forced. Ronnie hoped the project would bring this to the attention of the general public. She referenced domestic violence, how forty years earlier no one talked about it—there was no movement, not even a name. But pioneering women had brought the issue to the forefront, and now they would do the same with sexual exploitation.

  Sometimes April wondered if this project was Ronnie’s final attempt at rehabilitating her reputation in the feminist community. Despite all the good she had done over the last three decades, she was usual
ly thought of as a fringe figure, an outsider. Maybe she saw all this as her last best chance.

  April was only supposed to be under Alexa’s floor for a month. That was their agreement. In the beginning, Alexa would slip her a sandwich and a piece of fruit, or cookies and bottled water, during the day. If she had to pee, Alexa would bring a bedpan, though April tried with all her might not to put either of them in this position. She knew that Alexa believed in the cause as much as she and Ronnie did, and she knew that Ronnie was paying Alexa an ungodly amount to hide her, but even so.

  After midnight, once everyone else in the house was behind closed doors, Alexa would let her out for a while, sneaking her up to her private quarters. There, April would shower and use the bathroom, stretch her legs, and eat a warm dinner at Alexa’s little sewing table: fried chicken and red wine, spaghetti with garlic bread. It pained her to have to go back underground after an hour or so upstairs, but Alexa would always soothe her, saying, “Tomorrow night’s gonna come so fast, you’ll see.”

  Ronnie was insistent that even when it seemed like the pressure was off and no one was watching, April must never sleep upstairs. “Too risky,” she insisted, and April thought this sounded accurate. Alexa gave her a bottle of prescription sleeping pills that some girl had left behind in the medicine cabinet, and April started taking one each night. They’d expired six months earlier, but they still worked just fine.

  For the first four weeks, Ronnie brought an update every Monday night. At month’s end, she said, they would tell everyone the truth—that April was alive and safe, that the whole thing was a work of art, a way of showing the world how ignorant people were about sexual exploitation and whom they chose to highlight in the press. Ronnie hoped some news outlets would report the disappearance. They never expected it would become such a major story.

  When that first month came to an end, April sat across from Ronnie in Alexa’s bedroom, and Ronnie took her hand.

  “Listen, kiddo,” she said. “I know I said it would only be a month, but it’s all going better than I ever could have hoped. I need you to do this just a little while longer.”