Jim needed to go to the parking garage. He had to see where his daughter had died. He had to know what the building looked like, what his daughter had seen in her final moments, how she could have decided to let go—so literally. “Seeing is believing,” he says. “And I couldn’t believe it, so I had to see everything.”
He did not go alone. His friends went with him to the corner of 15th and Spruce. They walked to the top of the garage: nine flights. Jim stepped into the pain of knowing, of seeing through his daughter’s eyes. He walked to the railing and looked down. He kept looking. He allowed himself to picture what Maddy had seen just hours before. He imagined the fall, but he did not stop there. He imagined the hardness, the crushing stop. He let his mind hold these images for as long as he could, until they imprinted into his memory.
Jim turned to his friends and said: “I could not have done this.”
Ashley Holleran arrived home about the same time as her dad. Jim had with him the crucial items the authorities thought they would want: Maddy’s phone and her computer from her dorm room, as well as everything she had left atop the parking garage.
The house was already filling with people as the news spread through the community, and as Maddy’s high school and college friends began making the pilgrimage to Allendale so they could all be near one another, so they could all try to make sense of the hole that had just been blasted into their hearts.
Nobody understood, Ashley especially, how one of their favorite people in the world had decided, so swiftly and suddenly, to leave them. Ashley had talked to Maddy every day, over text or on Facebook. She told herself that if anybody could have known, she should have. “I talked to her seven hours before she jumped,” she said. “How did that not come up in conversation?”
Ashley wanted to look at Madison’s computer. She was so thirsty for answers that she didn’t allow herself time to feel anxious about what she might find. She felt she was working against a clock; that something could still be done to rewind what had happened. She had to find the thing that had set all this in motion so she could fix it, so she could say or do exactly what Maddy needed.
Ashley opened every message, most e-mails, and searched through the documents. But there was nothing. The only insight came from the absence of clues. Maddy had deleted her Internet history. Whatever she had searched over the previous few weeks, she did not want seen by others. Or maybe it’s possible that she routinely cleared her Internet cache, though that also seems unlikely. More likely, Ashley believed, was that Maddy had been researching methods for suicide and didn’t want her family to know exactly what she had contemplated. Maybe, even at the end, she wanted to control her story. She was sharing some thoughts—in the notes, in the choice of gifts—about why she had made this choice. Her family didn’t need to know the desperate thinking that had gone into what looked like a tidy ending. This thinking was, in a striking way, similar to the concept of the Penn Face, the idea that most students at Penn aimed to project a calm, collected, placid exterior, while beneath the surface they were furiously pedaling to stay afloat. Even in her suicide, which seemed to convey the message that life had overwhelmed her, Maddy apparently still cared about projecting a collected, determined image.
Ashley had launched Maddy’s iMessages, and since the computer had automatically connected to the house’s wireless, and since Maddy’s cell number was still active, the application began processing the text messages that were still coming in. At first the hundreds of texts were asking if she was okay, asking her to please text back, to call, that a horrible rumor was going around.
Then came a different kind of text: searching, heartbroken.
—I love you. God rest your soul.
—I’ll miss you Madison. More than you knew.
—I just don’t get it mad. You had it all.
—I’m sorry if you needed more from me. I had no idea.
—But I loved you like no one else. Just know that.
Part of the grieving process, that’s what these were—the opening days. And this behavior was no different from that exhibited by the brokenhearted over the years. They continued to communicate with Madison the way they always had. Maddy had always been in their phones when she wasn’t there in person, and so for a fleeting moment they could convince themselves that nothing at all had changed. She was just somewhere else, as usual, and they could just write her a text.
Everyone seemed to have a piece, an insight, an anecdote, that illuminated some aspect of their friend that others had never seen. The kids from Penn drove to New Jersey, where they met the kids from Allendale, her lifelong friends. “It was a pretty crazy experience,” says Ashley Montgomery. “It was almost like we were putting together a puzzle of somebody’s full life, like all the pieces were kind of coming together, and I think that was maybe more for me than her high school friends that it felt that way. I had only been with her through the college chapter of our lives, a few months of it, anyway. To actually hear people say, ‘Yeah, this is how she was here,’ was just really interesting. But the fact was, I knew she was a great person when I met her, but I didn’t see as distinct of a change because there hadn’t been the experience with ‘the old her’—the ‘her’ at home.”
Oddly, the transition to college was both the trigger for depression and the reason she could hide her pain so well. Picture Madison walking a bridge connecting Allendale to Philadelphia. She looks down and notices how high she is; she looks across and notices how far there still is to go; she looks back, longingly, but that direction is no longer accessible to her. She takes a deep breath. She stops, rests on her knees, sweat dripping from her brow. This journey is longer and harder than she thought. And when she arrives in Philly, the walk has stripped her of a layer of buoyancy. Yet nobody in Philly notices the change, because they have never before met Maddy—any version at all. And you can only spot the after if you’ve known the before.