Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  Prokop head-butted her with a soccer player’s intensity. The shock of it loosed Cady’s grip, and Prokop’s arms slipped through Cady’s fingers as she felt herself begin to fall. The roof’s concrete edge came up fast to meet her chin—pain exploded through her jaw and she tasted the metallic tang of blood—but she held on. With her head now below the level of the roof, Cady could no longer see Prokop, but that imminent threat was replaced by the even more terrifying one, the checkerboard courtyard just a few seconds’ fall and more than one hundred feet beneath her. She sputtered blood and saliva in exertion as she struggled in vain to haul herself up, her feet scrambling for purchase on the building’s facade.

  Her toes found a groove barely two inches deep between two concrete slabs, almost enough let her legs hold her up but not enough to climb. Cady ground her right cheek into the rough cement to tilt her head upward. She spotted Prokop leaning over the edge, the wind blowing her hair over a face contorted in rage, then she disappeared from view. Cady knew she had to act fast before Prokop finished the job, but she couldn’t pull herself up in this position, and her strength ebbed with every passing second. Soon she wouldn’t have the strength to hold on at all.

  Then she felt two hands close around her wrists, strong as steel, and a volt of fresh energy shot through her. She wouldn’t waste it looking up again, Cady knew whose hands they were: Prokop’s, trying to pry off her grip and make Cady fall to her death. But certain instincts, long buried, returned to Cady—to fight, to survive, to hope. She would hold on as tight as she could for as long as she could. And if Prokop got her fingers loose, Cady would latch on to her next, either to climb up her body or pull her down with her. She would not give up on herself. Not again.

  But then the hands pulled upward. Cady felt herself rising. Then more sets of hands grabbed her biceps and she rose faster, she had to turn her face from scraping against the wall, and before she knew it, hands were hooked under her arms and lifting her up and over the ledge. She was laid out on her back on the horizontal safety of the roof, panting and alive. She finally got a look at the two police officers when they stepped back and looked down at her, while one of her rescuers refused to let her go.

  “Mom?”

  62

  “I got you, baby, I got you,” her mother repeated through tears as she cradled Cady’s head in her lap. “You’re safe now, I’m here.”

  Cady’s entire body trembled with excess adrenaline as she looked at the faces of the two uniformed campus police officers and her own mother, struggling to make sense of them in her mental fog.

  One officer lifted his hat to wipe his brow before kneeling beside her. “Ma’am, the EMTs are on their way, until then—”

  “Prokop—” Cady sat bolt upright, her voice sounded high, raspy, and raw. “She pushed me, she was trying to kill me! Where is she? You have to get her!”

  The officer placed a hand on her arm. “Okay, okay, we’ve got the suspect in custody, you’re safe now.”

  Cady craned her neck to see past the legs of his partner standing on her other side. By the light of the open stairwell door, she saw two more officers, one speaking into his radio, the other holding Prokop by the elbow—her hands were cuffed behind her back. Cady collapsed back into her mother’s arms with relief.

  “That’s right, take it easy, you got a pretty big welt on your head. The EMTs will be here any minute, they’ll get you cleaned up, and we’ll meet you at the hospital to take your full statement.”

  “I can tell you right now.” Her body still quaked, but her gaze was steady. “Mikaela Prokop tried to kill me because I found out that she’s selling her government-funded research to Russia.”

  The cop furrowed his brow at her, then glanced up at his partner incredulously.

  “Actually, my brother was the one who discovered it,” Cady added. “But he committed suicide before he could report her. I have the evidence he collected. It’s in my mom’s hotel room right in the Square.”

  “It is?” her mom asked.

  The officer took a deep breath and stood up to speak to his partner: “We’re gonna have to loop BPD in on this. Feds, too.” His partner nodded and stepped away, chirping his radio awake as he walked. He started to follow him but stopped briefly to say to Cady, “We’re gonna talk more about this at the hospital. A lot more.”

  Cady shivered again, and her mother took off her coat and draped it over her chest like a blanket. Cady gingerly sat up to look her mother in the eyes.

  “How … how did you know?”

  “My God, I had no idea you were being attacked, but …” She bit her quivering lip and paused to brush Cady’s hair from her face; Cady saw that her hands shook also. “When you didn’t show up for dinner, and you weren’t answering your phone, I went looking for you. I must have just missed you at your room, your roommate said you were very upset about something to do with Leverett. I couldn’t take the chance. I called the police that instant, and then I came straight here.” Her mother looked heavenward and then squeezed her eyes shut. When her gaze returned to Cady, her eyes were awash with tears. “I couldn’t let it happen again.”

  63

  At the hospital, Cady received medical treatment to get her scrapes cleaned up, was hooked to IV fluids, and had an icepack slapped on her head before the parade of law enforcement—first local Boston police, then FBI agents—arrived to have her repeat her official statement of what happened again and again. She described her confrontation with Prokop at the faculty club, doing her best to name or describe anyone who witnessed their argument, and she gave the play-by-play of Prokop’s surprise attack on the roof. She explained the history between Prokop and her brother, as best she understood it, his record keeping on the academic espionage, the contents of his letter, where this evidence was located in the hotel room, and all the rest. She explained the decoy Eric had set up, and that if they looked at the surveillance footage from Cambridge Savings Bank on the date and time that he had listed in his notebook, they should have footage of the Russian accomplice to whom Prokop was funneling information. The questioning took so long that one of the HUPD officers who rescued her on the roof left and came back to the hospital to bring her and her mom Sicilian pizza from Noch’s.

  Finally the police and federal agents left, and Cady and her mother got their first moment of peace and quiet. Her mother slumped in the crummy chair she had pulled up to the side of the hospital bed, while Cady lay beneath a triple layer of blankets—even hours later, she was still shivering with adrenaline.

  Her mother rubbed her face in exhaustion. “I can’t believe this happened, what that woman did to you. And I knew she was Eric’s adviser, I trusted her, I even met her once, I thanked her. I shook the hand of the person who almost killed my daughter.” She shook her head in disgust. “I didn’t think I could get any more clueless.”

  “Not even Eric knew what she really was, not until he was too sick to ask for help, or at least too sick to be believed. That’s why she picked him.”

  “What about you? Why didn’t you tell me when you found out?”

  “I thought I could take care of it better on my own.” Cady picked at a loose thread on her thin blanket, and asked the next question softly, “Why didn’t you tell me you were with Eric the night he died?”

  Her mother looked surprised before her face crumpled into resignation. “Your father told you.”

  “Dad knows?”

  Her mother’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak; and tears filled her eyes as she saw the hurt in her daughter’s face.

  “Mom, just tell me. I need to know.”

  Tears spilled over her eyes, as she screwed up her trembling lips to keep from crying. “I was trying to bring him home.” She took a long, shuddering breath before she began the story. “I had been trying to get your brother to come home and take time off since Christmas. When he dropped the Bauer project, I thought he would give
in, but he still wanted to finish out the year. Then he stopped taking my calls, texts, emails, everything. I had no way of keeping in touch with him. I was scared. You were away that weekend, your dad and I had a huge fight about it, and I thought, screw it, I’ll go get him myself. I didn’t even tell your father where I was going, I was too mad. I drove up that night.”

  There was no sight more unsettling to a child, even a grown one, than a parent crying. The little girl in Cady wanted to crawl into her mother’s lap and hide her face in her shoulder, but she was too afraid of what her mother was about to say to touch her. So Cady listened, her heart braced for impact.

  “Your brother was not happy at my drop-in visit. ‘An invasion of privacy,’ he said. I demanded he come home, I yelled, he yelled, I begged, we cried. He said he wasn’t going to get better and that he didn’t want to put us through it anymore. I tried to say the right thing but I couldn’t. Then he said goodbye to me. I thought he just wanted me to leave, so I wouldn’t say it back. He said ‘Say goodbye to me, say goodbye,’ and I wouldn’t. I told him I wasn’t leaving until he came home with me, that I’d stay there all night if I had to. And then he hugged me.” A smile briefly crossed her face before it went slack again. “I held him and he said, ‘I love you. I’m sorry.’ I was glad, because I thought he was finally agreeing to come home. I turned to get my coat, and in that second, he was at the window.”

  Her eyes widened with fresh horror. “It happened so fast. He pushed right through, I don’t know how, if it had a screen, if he’d already loosened it, I don’t know, but it happened in an instant. I couldn’t reach him. He was gone.” She paused while the emotion became too much, and began again. “I called the police, I was hysterical, I said that he jumped, that we needed an ambulance. I remember running down the stairs and outside and over to him.” She covered her eyes as if to hide from the memory. “It was the most horrible sight, my beautiful boy, broken.” When she lowered her hands, her tear-streaked face was distorted in anguish.

  “So then what happened?”

  “I heard the siren, I saw the lights coming, but I couldn’t meet them. That would make it real, and it was already too much. Because I knew.”

  “Knew he was dead?”

  “Knew it was my fault. And there was nothing anyone could do to undo it. And the sight, and the awful, irreversible fact of it was so horrible, I panicked, I, and I’m so ashamed of this, but I ran.”

  Cady fell silent as she tried to process it all. After a few moments, “So did you tell Dad then?”

  “No. I found out later that the police called the house shortly after it happened, and he answered. He still didn’t know where I was sleeping, certainly didn’t know I was up here. He kept calling my cell, but I didn’t pick up, I couldn’t. I was driving home like a maniac, in complete shock, I don’t know how I stayed on the road. When I saw it was your dad calling, I had this crazy thought that he was calling to tell me Eric was all right, it was all a big mistake, I was worrying needlessly. I didn’t listen to his voicemail until I pulled into the driveway at home around nine in the morning.” She clutched her chest. “I could hear in his voice he was trying to stay calm, he didn’t want to scare me, but he said it was very important that I come home. I thought about lying to him. I thought he would hate me forever if he knew I was there and I couldn’t stop him. But when I got inside and saw him trying to break it to me gently, I hated myself more. I told him everything.” Her mother paused. “And I made him promise not to tell you.”

  “Why?” Cady asked, anguished.

  “We both agreed it would only make it worse. It had to be a secret.”

  “It’s not a secret, it’s a lie.”

  “I was afraid if I told you the truth, I would lose you, too. You’d just lost your brother, you needed a mother.”

  “But, Mom.” All of her mother’s decisions Cady could accept or understand, except for this one. This was a punch to the gut. “All this time. All this time I’ve wondered why Eric did it, what was he thinking, every unanswered question about his last minutes. And all this time, the only answer I could come up with was me. It was my fault.”

  “What? No, never. How could you think that?”

  “How could I not?” Cady’s hands shook as she finally said it out loud. “Ever since that night he cut my hair, when we were at the hospital and I said I was afraid of him so he’d have to stay. I was just mad. And you said it would break his heart, and you were right, it did. I did.”

  “God knows what I said that night, none of that matters.”

  “It did matter.” Cady’s throat tightened as if her guilt was choking her. “When he needed me to have his back, I turned on him. I betrayed him. He was never the same after that.”

  “He had been struggling long before that.”

  “The hospital stay was the final straw.”

  “Stop.” Her mother got up from the chair and grabbed Cady by the hand. “Look at me. The months following that stay were some of the most stable he had that year, okay? That’s the truth. I gave into him too much, I enabled him to work around his illness instead of treat it. I found him psychiatrists outside the university healthcare system, I helped him stay in school and avoid an involuntary leave of absence. And then, when he got worse instead of better, I had none of the institutional support to get him out. That’s why Eric and I were in that position that night. It was me. I did everything wrong, up to the very last minute of his life, I made every decision wrong. If you’re going to blame anyone, blame me.”

  Cady heard her mother trace a path through her own actions that led to Eric’s suicide, just as she had done herself, and neither of them was talking about Prokop and that stress, or the stress of school, or his private experience of mental illness that neither of them could ever know, and suddenly it was so obvious that there were a hundred such paths crisscrossing one another.

  The line drawn by Cady’s guilty conscience from that hospital stay to Eric’s death had seemed so direct, and yet, as Robert said and her mother demonstrated, her memory of that night was volatile. She was scared that night. She was scared that her brother was so out of his mind that he could hurt her. She was scared all the time when Eric was sick, scared for him, for herself, for her family. She was scared by her helplessness, scared of how trying to make him better was tearing her family apart. She did want professionals to help so she didn’t have to take it all on, and that wasn’t inherently wrong, or cruel, or selfish. It had been easier to make herself the villain than accept that she had no control over her brother’s actions.

  Her mother went on, “I’ve gone over every word I said that night, thinking of how I could have arranged them differently, found the right order, the right combination that would have kept him from doing it.”

  “There wasn’t any.” For the first time, Cady felt the truth of it. “There was no one moment where you could’ve changed things. Time doesn’t work that way. We only think it does.”

  “He’s my kid. It was my job to keep him safe.”

  “He was his own person, separate from you. You couldn’t control him. With the schizophrenia, he had limited control over himself. You couldn’t have saved him.”

  Her mother nodded solemnly. “That’s kind of you, but I will never believe that. When you become a mother, you’ll understand.”

  Cady felt a deeper empathy for her mother than she had ever known. She had always thought she’d disappointed her mother by being so different from her, when it turned out that at heart they were deeply similar. They both felt enormous, unspeakable guilt for something beyond their control. They had swallowed the same drop of poison—naïveté or narcissism or codependency—that made them believe they could be responsible for another’s happiness. They couldn’t.

  Her mother had endured the worst possible torture in seeing her child suffer and die in front of her. It had to feel like condemnation. But Cady hoped that in
time her mother could see that she had no hand in Eric’s illness, nor could she have guided his recovery if he wouldn’t let her. And as gruesome as that night must have been, as much as she wished her mother hadn’t had to witness it, on some level, Cady felt grateful that Eric had had her there. In his moment of greatest desperation, he was not alone. He knew that his mother and his whole family loved him, that in the last moment of his life, even during his most hurtful act, he was loved. They love him still.

  “I’m his sister. And I understand because I felt the same way.”

  Her mother met her gaze, and it was as though they were seeing each other clearly for the first time.

  Then the door to the room swung open and her father appeared, breathless, and pale as a ghost.

  64

  Her father had left the retreat in Bolton Landing again to drive back to Cambridge as soon as her mother called him to say Cady hadn’t turned up for dinner, just in case. One case he hadn’t considered was his daughter’s barely surviving attempted murder; he nearly drove off the road on I-90 when he received the second call saying they were headed to the ER. He had driven from Albany back to Cambridge in record time.

  Now he stood beside Cady’s hospital bed, on the far side from his estranged wife, and held Cady’s hand protectively as she and her mother filled him in on the details of the last three hours.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” he said when they were finished. “And this espionage plot Eric said he got caught up in, it’s true?”

  “If it had been fake, would she have tried to kill me after I told her I had proof?” Cady answered.