But I woke up dry-eyed. I didn’t cry anymore. There was an unpleasant tightness in my chest. Why did everyone in my life disappear?
14
It was the flashing lights that woke me up in the dim light of sunrise. The police had begun a search of the campus, looking for signs of Beck. The news of the online post was just a rumor, I’d learned when I got back last night. I already knew that Beck didn’t have a Fakebook page, and never would.
But some of the other students on campus-you know those students, the ones who are always involved, jumping into the fray for Take Back the Night, or protesting against date rape, or a raise in tuition; those super-involved sorority sisters who are always raising money for Darfur, or running book drives for literacy, or baking for the hungry (let them eat cake!) -they had created a page for Beck (who had never spoken to any of them in all her years on campus): Find Rebecca Miller! There was a catalog of posts from the hundreds of friends Beck didn’t even know she had.
People were bored. That was the problem with our culture. Life, real life, is essentially dull. Even unhappiness is mundane, lacks texture, the hills and valleys of true drama. People love a mystery, a tragedy, a shooting, a disappearance, a gruesome murder. They love to think about dead pregnant women floating in pools, children down wells, a subway bombing, husbands strangling wives and hiding their bodies in the woods. It titillates, excites, makes them a little grateful for their own boring workaday world. Even those that feign compassion, who rain tears and bring teddy bears and bouquets of flowers, sit vigils, are secretly thrilled to be involved in something bigger and more interesting than themselves. And the media just chums the water, but don’t get me started. Let’s come up with a logo and jingle for disaster! Twenty-four-hour coverage, a Dateline special, a made-for-television movie, an instant book! Okay, I’m done.
After I took my shower, I noticed that my prescriptions were running low. Dr. Cooper is a psychologist but not a psychiatrist. She has a colleague, though, who prescribes for me. So before I headed to class, I called the office and told them I needed refills.
“Oh,” said the assistant. I heard her clicking on her keyboard. “Miss Granger, I see here that you should have enough pills left for fifteen more days.”
“No,” I said. “Just five.”
There was silence on the other line. “Let me talk to the doctor,” she said. “And I’ll call you back.”
I tried to figure in my head when I’d gotten the last refill. But I was extremely tired, tired to my core. I was really careful about taking my exact dose of medications. I knew what happened when I went off and it wasn’t pretty. I never messed with the dosage. Some people did, I knew. But not me. If pills were missing, it was because someone had taken them. And I bet I knew who. That would be a serious problem for me. Doctors and insurance companies were very, very strict with the kind of pills I was taking.
But I didn’t have to worry about it with five days to go. I locked the rest of the pills in my desk and headed to class.
The white noise in my head was so loud that I could hardly focus on what Langdon was saying at the lectern. There were a lot of people missing from class. As I had left the suite that morning, Ainsley told me that people were turning out to volunteer for the search. But she wasn’t and neither was I. We’d both been through it with Elizabeth, walking the grid in a cold drizzle. It had been like wading through a mire of fear and dread, hoping that someone would find a sign of her, praying that they wouldn’t. It was too much to go through again.
The media circus had not yet begun. Outside our dorm there had been one local news van, and I’d heard there were a couple of reporters wandering around, asking questions. But Beck was no Elizabeth. She was not the all-American beauty, homecoming queen with straight As and a good relationship with her parents as Elizabeth had been. She was a tattooed, body-pierced, three-time runaway. Her picture, with spiky hair, lots of dark eyeliner, and exuding bad attitude, wasn’t going to arouse the requisite amount of empathy and envy to be truly titillating. The missing or murdered beautiful girl brought up so much emotion. Like the pretty and pure Snow White with the poison apple at her candy lips, or Sleeping Beauty, pale and virginal in her glass vessel, it was innocence fallen into the hands of evil that really brought up the ratings. No one gave a shit about the ugly stepsisters or the wicked queen.
Not that Beck was ugly. In fact, beneath all that dark makeup and wild hair, she was one of the prettiest girls I’d ever known. Her skin was milk, her eyes almond-shaped and glittery green like the sea in summer. She was pretty in the truest sense and beautiful to her core, sensitive and kind (most of the time). But it was almost as if she didn’t want anyone to know it. She was angry, rough around the edges, always looking to make a statement with her appearance and actions, quick to rise to an argument. She didn’t always wash; her nails were bitten to the quick. No one likes a girl like that, a girl who doesn’t mold herself to expectations, who doesn’t work hard to please and attract. And so the national news teams weren’t buzzing around, waiting for things to get interesting. Beck was right to hide her truest self inside. The world didn’t deserve her.
My mother had been a truly beautiful woman. Beautiful and sad, long-suffering, her life ended by the man she loved and to whom she had devoted her life. She came from violence, too, but to all outward appearances, she’d escaped the horror of her past. Until she was condemned to repeat it. Naturally, the narrative of her story was irresistible to news-magazine shows, producers of made-for-TV movies, feature writers, and true-crime authors. There was little that the world didn’t know about my poor mother, her tragic life, and her fucked-up family. The only thing they didn’t know was the truth.
The other students were suddenly gathering their things, getting up, and leaving class. The movement jolted me from my reverie. I stayed seated in my place near the back and waited until Langdon and I were the only ones left.
“Did you even hear a word of that?” he asked when the room was empty. The air was cool, and the lights seemed dimmer than usual. He stooped and wiped the whiteboard clean. Actually, I looked down at my laptop and saw that I had taken pretty decent notes with the one-tenth of my brain I had been using to pay attention to the lesson. It was all about the difficulty in diagnosing troubled children, the implications of leveling a damaging diagnosis on a child who might grow out of his symptoms.
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” he said. “I thought you’d be doing the search.”
I was still wondering why the detective never told me about it. It seemed relevant that he’d keep that information from me. And if I thought about it too long, I started to feel anxious.
“I can’t,” I said. I bit back a swell of emotion. Better not to feel; I’d learned that the hard way. People were always telling you to express your feelings, work through them, explore them, release them. But that’s an abyss, a dark spiral into the self. Better to just repress, ignore, push back, and try to make it through another day. “I can’t go through that again.”
I could still hear that scream, that surprised and horrified cry given by the girl who found Elizabeth. It rang through the afternoon like the calling of a crow. It was so raw, so primal; everyone around me froze in his tracks and looked toward the origin of the sound. It was an ugly moment. It was the moment we all knew.
Langdon packed up his leather messenger bag and then climbed up the aisle toward me. He chose a seat in the same row, but ever appropriate, he left a few spaces between us.
“That’s understandable,” he said. “I’m sorry.”