“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?