Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  The bedroom window was open, and Cady pressed her fingertips to the screen, but it didn’t give. Eric had removed the screws from his window screen in advance, the police found them and the screwdriver tucked neatly in his desk drawer, that was how they knew it wasn’t an accident. Though she supposed that no one really thought it was an accident.

  Cady looked out at the busy Yard below. Every new student was acting happy, but no one was at ease. There was all the normal first-day-of-college stuff, living away from home, meeting roommates, and the rest, but Harvard was more than a school. It was validation. It was history. It was expectation. The place crackled with potential energy. She could see the crowd around the John Harvard statue, a reminder that the college was founded in 1636, before the country itself. The legacy of the past and the onus of the future freighted the present moment, like time collapsing inward. It was saying, This is the launch pad for your extraordinary future, if only you don’t blow it. Behind the smiles and hugs and introductions, the self-doubt: Am I smart enough, talented enough, driven enough to deserve my place here? Will I make good on this golden ticket, or will I crack under the pressure? They were questions for every student here, but only Cady knew the stakes: If I crack, will I survive?

  Only the parents seemed unequivocally happy, basking in the proof of their parenting job well done, a sharp contrast to the pall over Cady’s family. She thought of her mother with a twinge; Cady missed her today, but didn’t blame her for not coming. She knew how her going to Harvard so soon after Eric’s death looked from the outside: bizarre, callous, unhealthy, morbid. And the last thing she wanted to do was hurt her parents. They had been through too much, she knew that. But she wished they could see she had her reasons.

  Cady thought back to the weeks following Eric’s death, when college admissions had been the last thing on her mind. It had been impossible for her to think of her future when he no longer had one. If he was going to stay a twenty-year-old college junior forever, then it seemed that she should stay a seventeen-year-old high school senior for the rest of her life. She and her brother were three years apart, she was never supposed to catch up to him. But when the letter of acceptance arrived, it was as though the decision had been made for her. To go anywhere but Harvard was to willfully not know, to stick her head in the sand. She had done plenty of that when Eric was alive, and she regretted it keenly. She had learned that unasked questions were more dangerous than unanswered ones.

  Cady had tried keeping the why questions locked away, but most of the time, not thinking about Eric was like pushing a beach ball underwater. She had trained herself to run through a series of questions with very specific and unchanging answers—a pilot’s checklist against emotional nosedive. Why did Eric change? Because he was schizophrenic. Why did Eric choose to die? It wasn’t a choice, it was his mental illness. Was it because she, his only sibling, had let him down? It was nobody’s fault.

  But did she believe that?

  Every single day she woke with the same questions, and every night she struggled to fall asleep in the misery of not knowing. If any answers existed, they would be here, at Harvard.

  It would be cowardly not to go, and she had been a coward long enough. She owed it to Eric. It was the least she could do.

  She didn’t want to be here. She needed to.

  Cady looked again at Eric’s freshman dorm, catercorner across the green. He had been happy that first year, so excited and hopeful. Cady recalled helping him move in three years ago with fondness. She tried to recall his exact room, her eyes traced the building’s facade to find it—there, the fourth floor, leftmost room on the center section, his bedroom faced the Yard. Now the window was dark, save for the places where the panes of glass reflected the bright green, yellow, and orange elm leaves, dancing back and forth in the wind. A gust blew, and the colors swept aside to reveal a figure behind the glass.

  Cady felt a shiver down her spine.

  She had thought she’d seen his red hair, but it was only a reflection from another tree.

  Cady stood there looking, wanting it to happen again.

  2

  FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, Cady was sitting between her parents at Eric’s funeral. It had been four days since Eric’s death, and she was still in shock. He had been at college when it happened, so she hadn’t seen him in person since that January, and it was April. He should’ve been coming home soon for spring break, she’d have seen him again then. But he wasn’t, and she wouldn’t. It seemed impossible. Only the surroundings made a convincing case: the church she hadn’t been inside since she was a girl, now filled with familiar people dressed in uncharacteristic black, the scent of white lilies, the murmuring of sadness. Perhaps this was the purpose of funeral ceremonies, to signal to those minds numbed by grief that this was for real.

  Still, her brain rebelled against that reality and bounced everywhere but the present. Cady’s parents hadn’t called her right away when Eric died, and she held that against them. She had spent the weekend in Myrtle Beach for a choral competition. The drive was so long, the buses didn’t get them back until Monday after the school day was over. Cady drove herself home from the parking lot, thinking only of how lucky she was to have missed class. She should have known something was wrong when her father greeted her at the door, but he said he was working from home that day. He should have told her the truth right then. Instead, he let her sit and babble for fifteen minutes about the crazy bus driver and Liz’s graduation party. And that was after he let Cady make her usual after-school snack, a package of Top Ramen, so add five minutes for the water to boil and three minutes to cook.

  Not once did Cady think to ask where her mother was, she assumed she was out showing a house. She didn’t know her mother was in bed upstairs, having been there since the campus police called at four in the morning. Later, the medical examiner said Eric died at 3:17 a.m. It was already 4:36 in the afternoon when the hot soup burned Cady’s tongue and her father broke down and told her everything. Thirteen hours and nineteen minutes went by that Cady still thought she had a big brother, but didn’t.

  She dwelled on this as she sat in the pew. It disturbed her that she hadn’t known the instant he passed. He was her only brother, after all. It didn’t make logical sense that she would know; she was in a hotel room in South Carolina, he was on the ground outside his dormitory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But still, she thought, she should have felt the earth shift or the sky crack, at the very least a tiny sting or snap or click, even a hiccup, some signal that he had died, that she had lost someone irreplaceable.

  But even knowing that instant would have been too late. She’d have to retrace her steps farther back to find the moment when their paths diverged and she could no longer pull him back. She had lost him sooner than that.

  Cady had never known life without Eric. It was one of her family’s favorite stories that the surefire way to get Cady to stop crying when she was a baby was to bring in Eric. Growing up, she wanted to be just like him, to the point that when Eric came home with lice in fourth grade, she scratched at her head until her mother agreed to use the smelly shampoo on her, too. There was an old photo from one Halloween in which both Eric and Cady were dressed as the purple Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle because Cady couldn’t bear to be a different color Turtle than Eric. She must have been an awful nuisance, but Eric was always patient with her, happy to be her hero. He had been happy once.

  She remembered when they went to see an exhibit on King Tut and the ancient Egyptians at the museum. The golden sarcophagi, the sculpture of Queen Nefertiti’s egg-shaped head, at once elegant and alien, the scale model of the Sphinx, or “Spinks” as she said then—she felt she was meeting history for the first time, and it was love at first sight. Eric’s favorite part of the exhibit was the hieroglyphics, which gave birth to one of their favorite games. Eric created an alphabet code with symbols for each letter, and he taught it to Cady so that t
hey could leave each other secret notes. Cady would take a flashlight under her covers and try to memorize their new alphabet, but still she had to carry with her the crumpled cheat sheet he had made her. Eric memorized it right away. She would leave him stupid, short little notes that translated into minor revelations such as “Halloween candy behind coffee can,” or “Dad farted at breakfast.” But Eric would leave her long ones with real missions, complicated step-by-step directions for childhood adventures, and without fail, when she had completed the final step, Eric would be there waiting for her with a proud smile.

  Cady’s favorite was the one he titled “Mission: Mantis Mommy Revenge.” The week before, Cady had found a praying mantis in the driveway whose abdomen was hugely swollen, and Eric told her it was pregnant. Deciding that the driveway was no place to raise a family, they constructed a praying mantis birthing suite out of a cardboard box, complete with a twig jungle gym, a bowl of water, and a bed of grass and leaves. Eric went around back to catch some grasshoppers for the mantis to eat, while Cady watched it explore its new home. She liked the way the green bug held its hands, as if she was knitting hundreds of tiny socks for her hundred tiny babies. While Cady was alone, their next door neighbor Jeremy and his friend walked over.

  “What the hell are you doing?” was his greeting. Jeremy was a sour, pimply thirteen-year-old, with dark curly hair that was tamped down on his sweaty temples. He scared Cady. She looked around without answering to see if Eric was coming back.

  “Speak English, dummy?” Jeremy asked. His friend snickered.

  Cady leaned protectively over the box. “We found a praying mantis, and she’s going to have babies, so we’re making her a house.”

  Jeremy’s expression softened. “Shit, really? That’s awesome, can I see it?”

  The next second, Jeremy was stomping his foot into the box. Cady screamed as the insect skittered from corner to corner before being crushed beneath his dirty sneaker. When Eric ran around to the front yard, the older boys bolted and left Cady crying, the poor praying mantis curling slowly into its death pose, like a clenching fist.

  That memory swirled so vividly—a more palatable, childhood trauma to mix with the grief and anguish she felt now. At this moment, like that one, she felt ashamed that this had happened on her watch, ashamed by her helplessness, and most of all, ashamed that she had let her brother down. Surely, Cady thought, she had disappointed him as a sister, or else he would still be here. But that day with the mantis, Eric didn’t blame her; when he reached her, he hugged her tight until she stopped crying. He was always too good to her. They buried the praying mantis in the flowerbed with a smooth rock as a headstone.

  Eric wasn’t having a headstone; he wasn’t being buried at all.

  A small sound escaped from her mother’s mouth before she covered it with a tissue, which brought Cady’s attention back to the funeral. She watched as her mother pulled the tissue from her mouth, leaving small particles of white paper on her wet lips, before cramming the tissue back into the crumpled ball. Cady had never seen her mother look so stricken. Her face looked wet with some amalgamation of tears, sweat, saliva, and snot. Her chin-length blond hair looked greasy at the roots and disheveled, a result of her compulsively raking her fingers through it, her eye makeup was smeared around her red-rimmed eyes like bruising, and her cheeks were red, from rubbing or embarrassment. Cady had learned that the family of a suicide victim doesn’t get straight sympathy. Every “I’m sorry for your loss” that they received came with a look of curious judgment, the unsaid “How could you let this happen?”

  Cady wanted to touch her mother, rub her back, do something to help, but she felt frozen. She was afraid that anything she tried to do to comfort her would be so inadequate, she would only make things worse. Eric had been her mother’s favorite, but Cady couldn’t hold it against her—Eric was her favorite, too. When Cady didn’t get as much attention from her mother, Eric made up for it through his secret eye-rolls and exaggerated obliging smiles that he knew only she would catch. They were the co-conspirators, and their parents were the marks.

  While Cady and her mother were still in shock, her father stepped in and took over the business of her brother’s death—notifying their relatives, contacting the funeral home, making arrangements for Eric’s cremation. Her mother was upset about the cremation, and Cady privately felt the same but didn’t want to come between her parents. There was a horror in imagining Eric being burned in some oven and then pulverized, especially because it was so difficult for Cady to imagine him as a dead person.

  Cady was upstairs in her bedroom when her father told her mother the decision to cremate had been made; she heard her mother in the kitchen banging pots and slamming cabinet doors and shouting at her father, “How could you? I wanted to see him, I wanted to kiss his face one last time, one last time, to kiss him goodbye. Wasn’t that my right as his mother, or did I have to give that up, too? Was that my punishment?” Cady couldn’t make out her father’s muffled responses, but she could tell he had remained calm, enraging her mother further. Cady normally took her father’s side when eavesdropping on her parents’ arguments, but even she hated him a little that night.

  She imagined her father had set his mouth that day much the way he was now, his bottom lip pulled up and inward, creating little craggy dimples on his chin. His temples had long since gone gray, but now cold glints of silver shone throughout his dark hair. The slack skin on his neck pressed against his shirt collar, and a plum-colored bubble of blood had dried where he must have cut himself shaving. He was only fifty-six years old, but today it seemed everything on him was graying, aging, drying out. Whereas her mother’s grief rendered her preternaturally vivified, her father’s did the opposite. He had turned to stone.

  The regular rhythm of the preacher’s monotone speech broke, and Cady looked up in time to see him drop his head and say “Let us pray.”

  Her mind reverted again to the praying mantis. In the aftermath of its cruel death, Eric produced his longest coded note to Cady, a plot for vengeance he titled “Mission: Mantis Mommy Revenge.” The directions, translated, ordered her to first cut open all of their old cat Bootie’s toys and empty the catnip into a Ziploc bag, then wait until three in the morning (she had to set her Shark watch alarm), sneak down to the basement to get the ladder, and, without waking anyone up, take it to Jeremy’s house and climb on top of his garage. Cady never felt as nervous and important as she did that night. Sure enough, when she had completed everything and reached the top rung of the ladder, there on the garage roof was Eric, sitting Indian-style, waiting for her. Cady remembered that he was pleased to see her, but not surprised—that was the best part about Eric, he was always confident his little sister would come through for him.

  She was frozen, crouching on her hands and knees on the roof of the garage; she could see the cedar shingles shine in the moonlight, slick from a recent rainfall. Eric walked on the slanted roof as if it were nothing. He told her not to worry, he had seen Jeremy sneak out on the roof plenty of times, but Cady yelped when his Converse sneaker squeaked and slipped an inch. She watched as he quickly scaled the incline to the roof’s apex, then walked along the ridgeline until he reached the wall of the main house. There he bent down and pulled on the last shingle before the wall. It lifted easily, and he revealed a hidden plastic baggie whose contents looked identical to the catnip. When Eric asked her if she knew what it was, she nodded so as not to disappoint him. He laughed and switched the two bags.

  Cady could still hear Eric’s laughter in her ears, and it joined with the sounds filling the church—Jenny Park chuckled sadly as she stood at the lectern, giving the rest of the mourners permission to follow suit. She had been Eric’s high school girlfriend. They had been the academic power couple of Dixon Porter High, valedictorian and salutatorian, nerd royalty—until she dumped him the summer before they went to college, after she didn’t get into Harvard but Stanfo
rd instead and he wouldn’t go to Caltech to stay close to her. Cady had been sad when they broke up, but now she was glad Jenny had known Eric only at his best, before his mind turned on him.

  Jenny’s silky hair, blue-black like a raven’s wing, fell forward as she read from a crumpled sheet of notebook paper. “Eric was the sweetest, smartest guy I’d ever met, but romance was never his best subject,” Jenny said—more gentle laughter from the audience. “I told him months before prom that my dress was red, and I kept reminding him that he was going to have to get me flowers, a corsage or a bouquet or something that would match. So the big day rolls around, and there’s Eric standing in my doorway with…nothing. But he has this big grin on his face, and he leads me to his old VW Golf parked out front, runs around the back of it, and ta-da! ‘Here are your flowers!’ he says. And inside the car were three large clay pots with green, leafy, shrub-type things in each of them. Not a bloom in sight.”

  Cady remembered this well. Their mother had warned him it was a terrible idea, but he was stubborn.

  “And he goes, ‘They’re hydrangeas! Blue hydrangeas. Or they should be. By mid-June, at least one of them will be the perfect color.’ I remember looking at his face all bright-eyed with excitement and then watching it slowly fall as he registered my less-than-ideal reaction. I was furious. What was I going to do with three huge potted plants? I practically threw his perfect red rose boutonnière at him. The entire vehicle smelled like peat moss, and we drove to the prom in silence.”

  Jenny looked at Cady and smiled. “Regretfully, I didn’t realize at the time the effort and heartfelt intention behind Eric’s gesture. I found out later, through various unnamed sources, that Eric was hell-bent on getting me a blue corsage because blue is my favorite color. But true blue flowers are very hard to find, so Eric decided to make some. He learned that the color of a hydrangea is determined by the pH balance in the soil, and specifically that a high acid content yields blue blossoms. He bought three hydrangea plants, repotted them in peat moss and conifer needles, and watered them daily with a special solution of aluminum sulfate and iron sulfate. To make sure he got the balance right, he made three attempts, hence the three pots. He had to have been planning it for over a month.” Jenny took a long breath before continuing. She wiped her eyes and tucked her hair behind her ears. Her voice was trembling, but she was smiling. “So, I didn’t have any flowers on my prom night. But right now, on our back patio, I have three glorious hydrangea plants, and they flower every June. And Eric, I hope you can see that each one blooms the perfect blue. Thank you.”