The Broken Girls(77)
The next day there was still no sign of her, and again the next. A rumor went around that Sonia’s suitcase had been found, that Mrs. Patton had it in her office. Katie thought about Sonia packing her suitcase, carefully folding her few stockings, her notebook, the copy of Blackie’s Girls’ Annual that Roberta had returned to her. She ground her teeth in helpless anger.
The weather grew bitter cold, though no snow fell yet. The sky was dark in the morning when the girls were roused for morning classes, and it was dark again when they finished supper and left the dining hall, stumbling over the common to their dorm. Roberta went to morning practice in the dark, the girls in their navy uniforms inkblots against the field in the predawn stillness, playing in silence with barely a shout. Katie watched Roberta dress, her skin as pale and gray as she knew her own was, her eyes haunted, her mouth drawn tight. Darkness and silence—those were the two things that dominated the days after Sonia disappeared. Darkness and silence, waking and sleeping. Then darkness and silence again.
After that first night, flashlights were not seen in the woods again, though the girls were kept under strict curfew after supper, roll call taken by the teachers as they sat in their rooms. CeCe was the one who went to Mrs. Patton’s office, pleading for the search to continue—She’s not run away, she said to the headmistress, the woman no girl dared approach. She can’t have run away. She’s hurt. Please, we have to help her. It was hopeless. She’d begged Katie to come with her, but Katie had refused, embalmed in the dark and the stillness, her body numb, her brain hushed, watching everything as if it were a world away. Watching the other Idlewild girls lose the fearful looks on their faces and begin to chatter again.
“She just ran away, that’s all,” Susan Brady said. Susan was riding high on her importance as the dorm monitor, helping the teachers with roll call every night. She heard things the other girls didn’t, things the students weren’t supposed to hear. “That’s what the police say. They say she must have found a boy. She wouldn’t need her suitcase if he bought her all new things, would she? That’s what I think. She was quiet, secretive.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”
The teachers lost their tense, watchful postures, their anger replaced with the usual everyday irritation again. Ladies, ladies. Sportsmanship. Three days, that was all it had taken. Three days, four. Five. Six.
She’s hurt.
The girls didn’t speak of it.
The girls barely spoke at all.
I’m failing her, Katie thought, the words like constant echoes buried deep in her brain. She needs me, and I’m failing her. It was CeCe who had had the courage to go to the headmistress’s office, not Katie. It was Roberta who had left early for field hockey practice to search the woods on her own. Katie was powerless—as powerless as she’d been in the moment Thomas had thrown her down in the playground and yanked her skirt, his breath in her face; as powerless as she’d been the day she’d gotten out of her parents’ car and looked up at the portico of Idlewild. All her bravery, all her bluster, was a fake. At the end of it all, when it came down to what mattered, Katie was a girl, and nothing more.
Each floor of the dorm had a shared bathroom at the end of the hall; aside from regular washing, the girls were allowed a bath once per week, the days allotted on a schedule. On CeCe’s night, seven days after Sonia hadn’t come home, Katie was in their room, lying on her bunk and staring at the slats of the bunk above her, enduring the endless stretch of time between supper and curfew, when she heard screaming from down the hall.
She flew out of bed and fought her way to the bathroom, pushing aside the other girls who crowded the door in curiosity. They gave way easily when they saw who she was; she didn’t even have to kick anyone in the shins. She got to the bathroom to find CeCe still in the bathtub, hunched over her knees, her arms crossed over her ample chest, her hair hanging wet and plastered to her face, her lips blue, her eyes vacant. She was shaking.
Katie whirled to the other girls. “Get out,” she snapped at them, and when they receded back, she slammed the door. Then she turned to CeCe. “What happened?”
CeCe looked up at her, her big eyes pools of terror. Her teeth chattered.
For the first time in a week, everything was so clear in that moment. The puddles of water on the cold, tiled floor. The lip of the big old bathtub that dated back to the day Idlewild was first built. The smell of school-issued soap and shampoo, mixed with a sickly smell of lavender that came from the bath soap Mary Van Woorten’s older sister gave her, which she used religiously. The intestinal coils of the hot radiator against the wall. The grid of the drain against the floor, its wrought iron stark and black against the white tiles. The air was chilled, as if a draft had leaked into the room, and Katie felt as if someone had slapped her awake. “What happened?” she asked CeCe again.
CeCe answered, but Katie was so awake in that moment she already knew what CeCe would say. “She was here.”
“Mary?” Katie demanded. “In this room?”
CeCe looked away, her teeth still chattering. “I was rinsing my hair. I went under the water. I saw a shape . . .” She shuddered, so hard it looked like she’d been shoved with a cattle prod. “Something held me down.”
Katie looked down at her. There was not a whisper of disbelief in her blood, not a twinge of doubt. CeCe’s mother had tried to drown her, had held her down. It was the reason CeCe was here.