by Ann Hood
At “home,” they felt no need to fake it. Their housemate Sam was an environmental studies concentrator and an aspiring documentary filmmaker (working on something about how gas drilling in Wyoming was poisoning local aquifers), and this meant he was almost never home. The other housemate was April. April was practically an ecoterrorist. Forget absentmindedly tossing a Chobani container in the garbage and not in the recycling bin (Marla) or trying to slip nonorganic blueberries into the compost (Sussannah) or using paper towels (Sri). April, when she wasn’t yelling at them, was stomping out the door with this or that MassPIRG clean-water petition on her clipboard; her VW Golf was held together by rust and bumper stickers: Save the Whales, Greenpeace, Coexist, and the Don’t Tread on Me flag that the Tea Partiers were now using for their illogical statementing (was there something ironic Sussannah was missing?).
April was also in her thirties (they guessed), a Resumed Undergraduate Education student. During Sussannah’s first year, budding journalist that she was, she had done an article on RUE students and therefore knew the biggest majority were former professional ballet dancers who’d needed those years to dance. There was also an Amish guy who’d decided to become un-Amish (there was some name for doing that, which she couldn’t recall), an Iraq vet who’d become a super-pacifist Buddhist. But it was a tiny, self-selecting program and you had to have a compelling reason why you delayed your education. All the RUEs she’d interviewed lived off campus, being kind of beyond the dorm thing, especially the Amish guy who had three kids and also worked at the Job Lot. But what April’s deal was and why as a thirtyish (most of the RUEs were still twentyish) adult she was living in a house with undergrads were questions that no one wanted to ask. The best they’d ever gotten was, “I got into Brown because I have a terminal disease.” Were they supposed to politely laugh? Was this more irony or what?
“April said you came in at 4:53 this morn, Soo-JZAH-nah, you hussy.”
“Yes, I was bedding the Brown Daily Herald,” she said quickly, a bit breathlessly, even though it was true. “Um, that’s accurate but übercreepy—does April sit at the door with a little clicker or something?” April was mysterious like Sri, but in an erratic way that felt ominous to Sussannah.
“So you saw Sri at dinner, but then he didn’t come in last night—”
“It’s barely lunchtime,” she said. “I really think he’s okay.” Saying it was so was going to make it so, right? The gears in her head were whirring. There was “missing,” as in temporarily (if not salubriously) self-extracted from the stream of undergraduate life, versus “missing missing”—Amber Alerts and all that. She had to believe Sri was off somewhere writing and didn’t want to be disturbed. Maybe he was even in some weird place in the house, like that roof cupola that was being refurbished and had yellow Danger No Entry tape across the doorway, that would be irresistible to him. “I think that lady at Brown security wanted to kill all of us when she saw Sri come out of the Rock basically okay except for his massive hangover. Can you imagine if we came in again like three days later?”
But then she considered: the first twenty-four hours of a crime with a missing person were the most crucial. What if . . . “Oh, man,” she said, suddenly emotional.
Brent made his empathy-eyes at her, inviting her to step into his ursine arms. She wasn’t going to fall into that trap. She’d been very aware that Brent had had a crush on her from their days in the first-year unit. His dark good looks made him the object of interest to some of the other girls, but not her.
He looked the tiniest bit disappointed. “Hey, isn’t Sri’s playwriting class today?”
“Yes, it’s at four.”
“So you’ve memorized his schedule, like April.”
“Shut up,” she said, hitting his arm. “I just know because . . . Marla has her orgo lab in Arnold at the same time. And you know what? I think today his piece is up in workshop. He won’t miss it.”
“Okay, okay. If he misses that, we’ll know—”
“We’ll know he still wants to be a writer and piss his parents off. No worries, Brent, okay?”
“Okay,” Brent said. But his eyes were dark, watchful. He was worried. It was touching how close those two unlikelies were, the South Asian kid rebelling against his physician parents by taking mostly writing classes that were graded only Satisfactory/No Credit—bye bye, medical school—paired with the goofball “Portagee from Pawtucket,” as Brent Duarte called himself. He’d grown up just a few miles from here, never flown on an airplane, and was one of the smartest people she knew.
She accepted a goodbye hug. Brent was occasionally hooking up with Naran, a girl from Mongolia who nonetheless looked strikingly Korean. He didn’t try to hide it: “She reminds me of you.” Sussannah found this both touching and stupid. With the guileless Brent, the Asian fetish was a lukewarm annoyance, never approaching the level of creepy. But the move to Environmental House had had unexpected benefits: one of the house rules was, Residents shall maintain a strict gender-neutral space at all times, i.e., they were supposed to eliminate housemates as potential sexual partners so as to promote an easeful “sibling-like atmosphere.”
* * *
They texted Sri their plans to meet at Nice Slice for dinner after his workshop (as if he would ever see such a message) and arranged for Marla to drop by the classroom and pick him up. Sussannah looked forward to fighting over the hot pepper shaker with him, each of them coating their pieces with flakes. “Who’s hotter?” he’d say with a wink.
* * *
“According to that sign, they have gluten-free pizzas now,” Brent said listlessly. “What the hell is gluten?”
“Calm down, he’s just late,” Sussannah said, toying with the squat hot pepper dispenser.
Brent glanced at his phone, then put it down. Then picked it up again.
“Would you cut it out?”
He put it down. He picked it back up. He bent his head to stare at the screen.
He looked up, mozzarella-pale. “No,” he said. “He didn’t show.”
The two pushed through the hungry dinnertime crowd. They left a wake of surprised students and locals behind, almost upended a stroller in their haste, but didn’t hear all the people yelling, “Hey!” and, “Watch it!” behind them.
* * *
Sri could disappear like a magician. He could secret himself in his room, writing for hours, and they wouldn’t even know he was home. But his playwriting class would always flush him out. Your work only came up twice a semester, and there’s no way he would miss it, short of—
Sussannah, Marla, and Brent burst into his room, a complete breach of house rules (No house member shall enter the room of another for any reason without the permission of the inhabitant) because they knew he wasn’t going to be there.
On his desk, laid out like a still life: ID, keys, his wallet, some wooden coins that you could use at the campus farmers’ market, a wristband from last week’s Thursday Night Fishco outing, a few dollar bills, his phone.
“Shit,” said Brent, and Sussannah knew what he was thinking: Marla’s first-year roommate (that ill-fated Ophelia named Ethel) had left a similar tableau, a runic pattern that screamed (in retrospect): I now need nothing. For a full twenty-four hours, Brown security had told them not to panic: “Left her ID and wallet behind? Maybe she’s just gone for a jog.” By the time they started looking for her seriously, she’d been dead for a day.
But was Sri a suicide risk? Ethel (what kind of parents name their daughter Ethel?) had been ill-suited to college life from the start. She’d come in all prim and proper, a little gold cross around her neck, giving Marla the fish-eye when she walked around in just her bra, seeming aghast at the candy-colored condoms given out during study break by an older lady who may have been a professor. But then Ethel started disappearing, staying out all night—this was just during orientation week—kept coming in looking like hell, wouldn’t talk to anyone (granted, Marla didn’t try too hard). And then she’d disappear again.<
br />
* * *
“Are you sure he hasn’t just gone off for a jog or something?”
Marla snorted in anger and tried too late to turn it into a cough. Sussannah didn’t dare look at her. Also, was this the same security lady from Friday? Regulation, middle-aged-lady pageboy, those navy-blue uniforms with work pants (universally unflattering to all women, even the young one with the blond ponytail) . . . she couldn’t tell.
“He’s been missing for more than twenty-four hours now,” Marla said.
Sussannah bit her lip. Okay, not quite, but now was not the time to bring that up.
“We can’t violate this student’s privacy, looking into his ID trail unnecessarily,” said the lady. She gave them both the stink-eye. Same lady. On Friday, they’d found Sri, simply enough, by tracing his ID swipes to the Rock. Sussannah had visions of him bound and gagged in the stacks, but he had stumbled out, reeking like a still, just as they arrived there with the Brown rent-a-cops.
“But that might be the easiest thing to do, to eliminate foul play. We’ve already called his parents. And the BDH—” Marla pointed to Sussannah. “She’s one of their top investigative reporters.”
The lady sighed, disappeared into the room marked Chief. She soon returned, wordlessly typed into the computer, her fingers slamming the keys, repeating on several, 0-0-0-0-1-1-1-0-0-0, as if she were playing a ragtime piece on the piano. “Do you have any reason to think your friend’s met with foul play?”
“It’s really impossible to know.” Sussannah found herself tearing up unexpectedly. She didn’t look toward Brent, because she already had a feeling he was watching her face very, very closely.
“Well, here’s his ID trail.” They all craned their heads forward.
“Last night he entered the Sciences Library at 10:15 and left at 10:56.”
Sussannah thought he was going to stay up there and write. But he’d left not long after she had. She found herself blushing.
“That’s it. No meals swiped. So no one’s seen him since you, Miss Park, at dinner at the Sharpe Refectory?”
She nodded.
* * *
“No,” April said, in her robot monotone. “He hasn’t come by. But you guys might want to do something about those little kids. I keep telling them to leave, but they won’t.”
“Little kids?” said Brent.
“There,” she said impatiently. She pointed to a corner of the living room where there was nothing but an Earth Day 2011 poster and the phone, an actual landline tethered to the wall by its jack.
“April,” he laughed, “are you mainlining shrooms or something?”
“There,” she repeated, then added, “I’d never do drugs. Plus, you don’t mainline shrooms, that’s heroin. You eat shrooms.” On her heavy feet, she swayed a bit, started to dance around as if she were at a Grateful Dead concert. Without the music, however, it just looked weird.
The three housemates looked at each other. What do you do with a housemate like April Blaine? Sussannah recalled her chewing out Sri: “Do you have any idea how many trees were murdered for that stupid little paper towel you’re using?” “But it’s a Seventh Generation paper towel!” he’d yelped. “It’s recycled!” Sussannah couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
“So, April,” said Brent, “you’re sure he never came in last night?”
“I said I was sure.”
“So you were, like, up all night?”
“I’m a very, very light sleeper.” Her voice creaked, like a door opening.
* * *
The next day, Sri’s parents arrived from California. They set up a war room in their hotel downtown, having brought dozens of flyers (the vivid color photo of Sri in a Brown sweatshirt, joyously smiling, was painful to look at). They spent the day plastering the entire College Hill. But no Sri. More posters (Amtrak station, the seedier areas of downtown, one friend brought them as far away as Boston), a Facebook page was set up, the posts and shares multiplied as they watched. People were shocked and interested. His disappearance made the Boston news.
But.
“We haven’t even gotten any hoax calls,” Brent complained.
How could there not even be a trace? Sussannah wondered. Could he, in this connected age, somehow just disappear?
One week, then two. While each day made them more frantic, other bits of shiny and urgent news had come in, and the outside world loosened its grip. The digital photo stopped replicating, the virus went dormant. He was no longer of interest as the missing Ivy League student. His clueless PoliSci TA even called to say he was going to flunk the class if he didn’t show up soon.
Sri had become yesterday’s news. It would be a mighty fight to keep him in the today, to not become accustomed to the idea that he was missing, that this was simply his new state of being.
Then Brent texted Sussannah: A fucking bomb went off at the Boston Marathon.
And: All the cell phone towers are down.
She didn’t have to think as she typed back: Marla . . .
Marla had gone to Boston to watch her cousin run his first Boston Marathon.
Sussannah could hardly stay still as Brent drove.
“Look, I’m sure she’s all right,” he said.
“How the hell can you say that? Like you know anything.” She glared at him. She was mad at him. Well, not him exactly. But she was mad at a world where Sri and Marla could both disappear. She should apologize.
Brent didn’t say anything. He reached over and put his hand, warm and comforting as a worn-in softball mitt, on her knee. As a form of apology, she allowed it to remain.
“Her cell working yet?” asked Brent.
“No.”
“Call her parents.”
“Do you think she’d somehow call her parents and not us?”
“Uh, yeah?”
She dialed.
Marla’s northern Alabama parents had syrup-sweet accents. “We can’t get through either,” her mother Janelle explained. “But she said she was planning to watch Jimmy run at the girls’ school, Websley?”
“Wellesley,” Sussannah said with relief.
* * *
Wellesley was so far away from Boston, you couldn’t tell anything was amiss. The only sign today was different was the sea of trampled Dixie cups on the road where the runners had gone by. The campus was beautiful.
“You guys came!” Marla cried when she saw them. “Did you hear about the bombing—”
“Of course, you silly,” said Sussannah, hugging her friend for extra long. “What, were we just going to sit around while you were in the middle of this? They still don’t really know what’s going on. I’ll feel better when we’re all back in Providence.”
“Yeah, but I wish . . .” she said. “I wish . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” said Brent. “I wish Sri was coming home with us too.”
* * *
Some crazy person had detonated several crude bombs right at the finish line. Apparently spectators and runners alike were blown to pieces, limbs and blood flying everywhere; the bombs were particularly cruel, designed to destroy at leg-level. In the paper, Sussannah had seen a picture of a man rushing an ashen-faced runner out in a wheelchair. If you looked closer, in place of the runner’s lower leg, all you saw were some ribbons of flesh maypoling a broken-off tibia, the one long, white bone splinter looking sharp as a shiv.
Brown canceled classes so they could have a day to work through what had happened. But how do you work through something like that?
“How can this be happening on top of Sri missing?” Marla wailed. Her cousin had been close enough to the finish line to be knocked down by the blast, but he was okay (except that his ears were still ringing). Thank God for that.
Sri’s parents had now moved to a B&B near campus; the owner had declared she’d keep the room open as long as they needed it. The Patils were, like everyone else, horrified by the Boston bombing. But Sussannah could tell they felt a little bit like she did: the bombing was an
expression on a massive scale of how their tiny group suffered; and maybe now the whole world needed to pay attention to the fact that Sri was missing, that things in this world could actually break.
* * *
Environmental House had a tiny TV in the common room. On the news, the Boston police were saying they probably had photos of the bomber.
“I told you, the government is always watching us,” said April. “Even while we sleep.” Sussannah rolled her eyes—April was still ranting about the kids playing in the living room. She claimed they made a lot of noise at night.
“They said it was some kind of bomb made with a rice cooker, like the one you have, Soo-JZAH-nah,” said Brent.
“Did it have pink flowers on it?” She rolled her eyes again. “How’s a rice cooker going to kill someone?”
“That’s what the FBI says.” He click-clacked into Google. “Oh, wait, it was a pressure cooker that had a detonator. I guess that makes more sense. Remember that movie we saw, The Hurt Locker? How they activated the bombs with a cell phone?”
“Vaguely.” She imagined the police having to tackle every single person carrying a cell phone in Copley Square.
“And here are the first pictures of the suspect.” Brent swiveled his laptop screen toward her.
Sussannah leaned, squinted. Young guy, track suit, a baseball cap with its bill obscuring most of his face, a bit of dark hair peeking out. “He looks like a generic marathoner, or someone in the lacrosse frat.”
