The Raising

18

It was one of those soul-snatching, deadly dull days at the Chamber Music Society. The offices buzzed with it, literally. A fly caught between the window and the screen in Shelly’s office was tossing itself between the two barriers with exhausted fury. She watched it from her desk, its electrical droning competing with the sound of her dozing computer.

It was the end of September, and the weather was making a concerted effort to change. The sky was closer to lavender now than blue, and there was a smell of leaves sweetening, softening, giving way, shifting into a lower gear. As always, the change from late summer to actual autumn brought back for Shelly every September of her life—the dust swirling around her kindergarten desk, bobby socks and shiny shoes, straight through to her last year of graduate school, lugging an expensive textbook back from the store to her little efficiency over the Beer Depot—along with all the Septembers since then, the years passing one by one outside the window of her office at the university’s Chamber Music Society.

What, she wondered, was September like for people who didn’t work at an educational institution? Did the melancholy reminiscence of September simply skip them?

If so, Shelly thought, it would be a little like skipping one of the Twelve Trials of Hercules: you’d still be stuck with the Christmas despair, but you wouldn’t have to relive the end of every summer vacation of your life, that sad realization of your own mortality, year after year, as the kids swarmed back into your world with their freshly sharpened pencils and new sweaters.

No, she supposed, it wouldn’t be like that. They’d all gotten that calendar engrained on their psyches so early. No one escaped the mortality of autumn.

“God, you depress me,” her ex-husband used to say, and said for the last time on the day she left him, shaking his head sadly—and then, as if some switch had been flipped in his head, charging after her, fists whirling around them both as she stumbled out the back door, and he yanked her back in by her hair.

“Shelly?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think, you know, since we’re all caught up, I—”

“—could leave early?” Shelly tried not to let out an exasperated sigh.

“Yeah,” Josie said. She was twirling a strand of silken black hair around her index finger. She had her face tilted at a right angle, like a sparrow. “It’s Greek Week.”

“You’re in a sorority?” Shelly asked.

“Yeah,” Josie said.

“What house?”

“Omega Theta Tau.” Josie pronounced each Greek letter with irrepressible pride.

Shelly turned around in her chair to face Josie fully in the doorway, and asked, “Isn’t that the sorority Nicole Werner was in, the girl who was killed?”

Josie began to nod slowly and melodramatically with her eyes half closed.

“Did you know her?” Shelly asked. How was it possible that she’d not only not known that Josie was in a sorority but in Nicole Werner’s sorority?

Josie shrugged. She said, “We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time. It’s not one of the bigger houses—sixty girls—so, yeah, sure, I knew her. It was a huge shock.”

Shelly stood up. She said, “Did you know—?”

“—that you were in a sorority?” Josie brightened. “Yeah. You were wearing that Eta Lambda T-shirt the day I ran into you outside the gym, so I looked you up on their Plaque Wall when I was over there for a party, and found your name! That’s so cool. I mean, I’m sure it used to be a better house back when you—”

“No,” Shelly said, shaking her head, dismayed to feel rising the familiar defensive self-consciousness related to sororities you’d fully expect a lesbian in her forties to be far beyond by now. “No. That’s not what I meant. Did you know I was at the scene of the accident? Nicole Werner’s? I was the first one there.”

Josie bit her lip, and seemed to look upward, to scan her brain for this bit of information. Not finding it, she said, “No,” and then, eyes widening, “That was you. The middle-aged lady, the one who didn’t give directions to 911?”

Shelly felt her cheeks redden, burning, and her breath escaping her. She shook her head. She said, “No. I gave perfect directions. I was there when the ambulances arrived. I stayed until they took those kids—”

“Jeeze,” Josie said. “That must’ve been awful. I had no idea.”

Of course she hadn’t.

How could she have?

Shelly’s name had never even made the papers, where not a single detail of the accident had been reported correctly—except, apparently, that Shelly was middle-aged.

“They got the facts wrong,” Shelly said. “I was there when they took the kids away.”

“Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, this is a bummer. Would you mind, can I ask you, you know—”

“If you can leave early?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Shelly said, and in less than a second, the girl was gone. Shelly stood, looking at the threshold, empty now, and listening to the sound of the front door of the Chamber Music Society opening, then closing, and then the sound of Josie tapping down the stairwell in her black flats. Then, she sat back down, opened one of her desk drawers, and pulled out the file with Josie’s name on it.

Her résumé, her application—Shelly scanned them for Omega Theta Tau. These girls never left their sorority affiliations off their applications. They were so impressed with themselves that they assumed everyone else would be, too.

But it wasn’t on any of the paperwork, and Josie had given only her home address in Grosse Isle as her contact information.

Grosse Isle?

How had Shelly missed that detail?

The girl was getting financial aid for the “work” she was doing at the Chamber Music Society. Was there anybody in Grosse Isle who needed work-study funds to attend college? When Shelly herself had been at the university, one of her sorority sisters from Grosse Isle had invited her home for a weekend. The house the girl had grown up in had a helicopter landing pad, and her father’s helicopter, on its roof.

Well, of course, Shelly had no way of knowing the Reillys’ situation, even if they were from the wealthiest suburb in the state. A bitter divorce could have accounted for the need, or a family illness, or parental job loss. It wasn’t Shelly’s job to assess the candidate’s financial situation. That assessment was sent over from the Financial Aid Office to the dean of the music school, who gave it his stamp of approval.

Shelly put the file back in her drawer and looked out the window. A white butterfly, seeming to try to land on the windowsill, was being jostled around by the breeze, buffeted away from the ledge each time it got close.

Shelly watched, feeling nervous for it—unable to look away and hating the spectacle of it. Her eyes focused on it, as her thoughts fluttered around:

Omega Theta Tau.

Those were the Virgin Sisters. Theirs was the house on campus that supposedly advocated chastity and sobriety. The press had made a big deal of that with Nicole Werner. It was another stratum of the tragedy, that she’d been such a good girl.

Back in Shelly’s day, the eighties, there’d been a bit more cynicism than that—strange as it was to think that Americans were getting more innocent as time passed.

Back then, Omega Theta Tau had been the sorority of choice for the girls who wanted to go into politics, or marry into politics. It was the keep-your-record-clean sorority. Shelly was fairly certain the governor’s wife had been an OTT here. And who knew who else? These more powerful houses had connections that crisscrossed the nation’s most important people like telephone lines. Maybe every female judge in the nation had been one. Probably half the female lawyers with ambitions to be judges—or senators, or congresswomen—had been. Most likely some huge percentage of the senators’ and congressmen’s wives in the country could claim Omega Theta Tau sisterhood, and who knew how many First Ladies.

Shelly’s sorority, Eta Lambda, had been nothing like that. Hers had been known as the Friendly Girl’s Sorority. In other words, it was not as cool as the other houses; its sisters not as popular, not as pretty.

You might think that would have made it an easier house to live in—with more laid-back sisters, less pressure of all varieties—but you would be wrong. Being on the lower rung of the Greek ladder made the Eta Lambda sisters even more competitive, even more ruthless, crueler. Shelly’s most vivid memory of those days was of coming down the stairs in her formal gown on Pledge Night, and watching as the girls already assembled below in their own gowns made eye contact with one another and then, in unison, it seemed, rushed their hands to their mouths to stifle their laughter.

Shelly’s heart had begun to pound so hard she was afraid she would pass out. To this day she had no idea what they were laughing about. Maybe she looked fat, or her gown was too revealing. It could have been her hair, her makeup, her shoes, her little sequined purse. She would never know. She wasn’t intended to know. There was not a single girl among all those sisters who would have been kind enough to tell her, or to reassure her. So Shelly simply continued to descend the stairs (what else could she do?) and then to move through Pledge Night in a cloud of shame, dashing away from the activities every chance she got to check herself in the bathroom mirror: Her teeth, the blond hair over her lip, her eyebrows. She sniffed her underarms. She sniffed her underpants. She checked the front of her dress, the back of her dress, her bra straps, and the worst thing of all was that she couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, this thing they could all see on her, she was blind to it.

Shelly had moved through the next two years as an Eta Lambda trying to find it, to see it, to figure it out, unable to and determined, at the same time, to stay and face it, whatever it was, day after day after day.

A complete waste of youthful energy and time, she knew now—although, in truth, she’d made a couple of lifelong friends through Eta Lambda, friends who’d seen her through her graduation, graduate school, an abusive marriage, and a divorce, and who had then accepted her into the new life she’d taken on as a lesbian.

There was a special kind of loyalty born of that strange sisterhood. It wasn’t blood. But it was like some kind of precious body fluid, spent and shared between them.

The butterfly seemed stuck to the windowsill by the force of the breeze now.

Really, it was unbearable to watch. The breeze, which would have been nearly undetectable to anything not made of tissue paper and thread, as that butterfly was, was crushing it into the bricks. Shelly watched for a few more seconds and then decided she had no choice but to open the window and let it in. Luckily she worked in one of the few buildings left on campus that had windows that could actually be opened, although she rarely did so, and she had to push hard and then hold the heavy pane up with one hand while attempting to gently pluck the butterfly up with the other.

She got it. She could have sworn she felt its heart beat (atomic whispering, and dusty little particles of time and terror) and she felt terrified, too, trying to shake it off her fingers and onto her desk, where it lay motionless (had she killed it, had she killed it?)

She was certain, then, that she’d crushed it, scared it to death, injured it past fixing, but after a few seconds the butterfly fluttered its wings, and then it rose into the air, and Shelly stood back, out of its way, as it flew past her and through her office to the door, and then into the outer offices, where it zigzagged from wall to wall, until she opened the office door, and it flew down the stairwell, to the propped-open front door, and disappeared back into the world.

19

It was Putrefaction Day. As they filed into the room, Mira wrote on the board:

Perry Edwards was the first one in, already with his notebook open, jotting down the quote from the board (which was really intended more as a joke than something to include in one’s notes).

He was wearing a somber-looking pair of black trousers and a white button-down shirt, as if he’d just come from a Glee Club concert, or a funeral.

“Perry,” Mira said before the others were in their places, “would you mind working the slide projector?”

“No, Professor Polson.” He rose from his seat and moved to the chair next to the projector.

“Okay,” Mira said. “Today’s the big day. I’m assigning you your first essay, which will be due next week. I didn’t assign it earlier because I don’t believe in giving students, as some professors do, a month to write a paper. The longer you have, in my experience, the longer you’ll put it off. But, at the same time, as I state in the syllabus, I accept no late papers, so my suggestion is that you start working on this assignment today. It can be as long as you need it to be to make your points, but it will be no shorter than ten pages.”

“Ten pages!” Karess Flanagan blurted, and then blushed and looked around as if trying to pretend someone else had said it.

Under what circumstances, Mira wondered, would a parent consider naming a child Karess? Of course, they’d had no way of knowing that their infant daughter would turn into a stunningly sexy dark-haired beauty with C cups and glossy pink lips, did they? Mira could only begin to imagine the jokes and riffs the name and the girl had inspired in boys’ locker rooms over the years.

Karess continued to look shocked, whether by the number of pages of the assignment or by her own outburst, or both.

“Didn’t you read the syllabus?” Mira asked. “Under ‘Requirements’”—she whipped a syllabus out of the folder on her desk—“it says pretty clearly, ‘five papers, ten pages double-spaced or longer, must receive a grade of C or higher to pass the course.’”

Karess managed to nod and shake her head at the same time.

“So, here’s your paper topic,” Mira said.

Out of the same folder, she took her stack of Xeroxed assignments and handed them to Karess to pass out to the class. As the girl stood up with them, every guy in the class except Perry (who was studying the slide projector) looked from her ankles to her breasts, and lingered there until she sat back down.

“I’ll let you read this on your own,” Mira said, “but let me go over the basics. In this essay, which is a Personal Reflection piece, you are to examine your own superstitions—personal and cultural—related to death. You might start with why it is you signed up for this class, but you might also examine your preconceptions regarding burial, cremation, funeral rites, and the other rituals practiced by your family and community. What is your experience with the dead? Have you been in the presence of a dead body, and if so, what was your reaction? What are your fears related to the dead? What are your attractions?”

There was a snort here and there, and a baffled huff. It was the same every year.

“Because,” Mira said, without missing a beat, “you, of all people, can’t tell me there’s no such thing as an attraction to this subject matter, since you have, yourselves, enrolled in a class about death and the dead. You had twenty other classes to choose from. Although I’d like to flatter myself that it’s my reputation as a stellar educator that makes this the most popular class at Godwin Honors College every year, I rather doubt it. There are other reasons, perhaps related to the fascination that, for instance, young women with almost no interest in poetry beyond Hallmark cards have for Sylvia Plath, and why Kurt Cobain, who barely lived long enough to write and sing more than a handful of decent songs, commands so many fans among teenage boys.

“These are the subjects,” Mira continued, looking around, catching the eyes of the students who looked the least impressed, “that I want you to explore, in as much depth, with as much critical analysis and personal reflection as you’re capable of, in this essay.”

She turned and sat back down behind her desk, and said, in a less impassioned tone, “On the class website you’ll find papers from previous years. Questions?”

The students were either looking at Mira or staring at their assignment sheets, some with their mouths hanging open. There were questions regarding font, and quotes, and the width of margins. Mira made it clear that ten pages meant ten pages. The frantic questions subsided when it became obvious that there would be no way around this, whether or not their high school teachers had counted the title page as a page, or allowed them to use two-inch margins and eighteen-point font.

“Okay,” Mira said, exhaling. “Finally. Putrefaction.”

There were titters, and a groan.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m afraid we can’t begin to understand the folklore and superstitions surrounding the dead until we understand the reality of death and decay. In our particular time and place, it’s the rare person who encounters putrefied human remains, but it has been less than a century that the technology and professional services allowing us to avoid this nasty reality have been around, and in most places on earth, they still don’t exist. So, the decay of the dead body remains a powerful psychic and cultural memory.

“I’m assuming you’ve all read the selection in your course packs from W.E.B. Evans’s The Chemistry of Death?”

A few heads nodded. Mira flipped the lights and pulled the screen down over the blackboard. “Okay. Perry, can you turn on the slide projector? First slide.”

The first image was a still from Dawn of the Dead. A “corpse” in ragged clothing was chasing a beautiful young girl across an emerald green lawn.

“You’re probably familiar with this movie. I imagine most of you also know the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ in which a husband comes home to his wife with a monkey’s paw he’s been told will grant him three wishes. The first wish, which is for a sum of cash, results in their son’s death in a mining accident, and a life insurance payoff of that exact sum.

“The wife, several days after the son’s burial, in a state of unbearable grief, makes the second wish: for his return.

“She’s about given up hope when, late at night, the couple hears something slow and heavy and scraping coming up the walk. The wife rushes for the door, but the husband stops her. He seems to understand, in a way his wife doesn’t, what their son, returning after a few days spent in the grave, will be—so he uses the last wish to make his son go away.

“Now, let me ask you—this is your beloved only son, and you are responsible for his death. Would you open the door?”

There was a collective “No!” Karess Flanagan actually put her hands to her rosy cheeks, shaking her head.

“Well, why not?” Mira asked, pretending to be shocked by their callousness. “He’s your son. Your loving child. What are you afraid of?”

“He’s dead!”

“So? He’s back!” Mira imitated their tones, and they laughed.

“He won’t be the same,” Miriam Mason said. “He’s been buried.”

“He’ll be pissed as hell,” Tony Barnstone said.

“Maybe not.” Mira shrugged. “He’d probably understand that you just screwed up with that first wish, and then, after all, you used the next one to get him out of the grave.”

“Dead people are always pissed,” Tony said.

“Well, here’s a question then—why?” Mira asked. “What would turn someone who has been, say, kind and shy before death into this kind of monster after?” She used her pencil to point to the raging zombie in the movie still.

There was no answer.

“Perry? Next slide?”

The next slide was a photograph Mira had taken herself in Bosnia during her Fulbright year. In it, an old woman in a black dress was walking backward out of the doorway of her little cottage on a hillside. She was sweeping the threshold.

“This is a Bosnian woman whose only daughter had died of pneumonia a few days before I took this photo. I’d been in the village and was invited to the funeral, where I saw this woman throw herself onto the casket of her daughter, clawing at it. She eventually had to be pulled away by her sons. During the funeral procession and service, the woman collapsed to her knees in grief five or six times. But what she’s doing here”—Mira pointed with her pencil to the broom—“is sweeping the doorway while walking backward, exactly forty-eight hours after her daughter’s death, to ensure that the girl won’t come back.”

Some of the students were chewing on their pencils.

“Perry?”

He flipped to the next slide, which was as provocative as Mira allowed herself to get this early in the semester—a black-and-white morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe, laid out on a gurney, covered to the neck with a sheet. Her face was completely slack, her cheeks sunken and discolored, mottled along the cheekbones and forehead and nose, her hair combed back straight behind her head, her lips a thin grimace.

“This is Marilyn Monroe’s last photo,” Mira said.

There were the expected oh my gods and muffled cries of horror as the students started to recognize in the corpse’s distorted features the icon of sex and beauty with which they were familiar. Several students sat up and leaned over their desks to get a closer look. No one turned away.

“Perry?”

The next image was the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grate, pretending to try to hold down the pleated skirt of her white dress.

“Thanks, Perry. You can turn the projector off,” Mira said. “So, as you now know from your reading, within twelve to fifteen hours of death, if the corpse is left untreated and unrefrigerated, the following changes take place:

“The corpse changes in color, usually to a kind of pinkish-purple. This is called hypostasis.”

Mira wrote the word on the board.

“Even earlier than twelve hours, depending on the weather, there will be massive swelling due to the build-up of gases in the body, which renders the facial features unrecognizable. Blisters rise on the surface of the skin, and burst, due to the shedding of the epidermis. This is called skin slippage.”

She wrote the word sacromenos on the board.

“This,” she told them, pointing, “is the Greek word for ‘vampire.’ Literally, it means ‘flesh made by the moon.’ You can imagine such flesh on the dead, can’t you, after skin slippage?”

There were dazed-looking nods all around.

“So,” Mira went on, “a few hours after skin slippage, there begins the escape of bloodstained fluids from the orifices and the liquefaction of the eyeballs. Within twenty-four hours—again, depending on the weather—there will be the presence of maggots, and in another twenty-four hours, the shedding of nails and hair, and then the conversion of tissue into a semi-fluid mass, which, along with the buildup of gasses, will cause the abdomen to burst, often in a noisy explosion.

“It may not surprise you to learn that the number one cause of ‘shell shock’ as we used to call it, among war veterans, or posttraumatic stress disorder as we call it now, is not actually due to the experience of shelling, or the fear of their own deaths, but by encounters had with corpses.

“It’s why the old man in ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ who perhaps lived in a time before the funeral parlor business got so big, and who might have been a war veteran himself, would not have wanted to open the door to find his three-days-dead son on the other side, and why the old woman in Bosnia swept the doorway to make sure her beloved daughter wouldn’t come home. It’s why the fear of the dead, and the conviction that they are evil—our utter aversion to them—has persisted and influenced so many of our rituals and beliefs. And, as with anything so feared, there are corresponding obsessions and fascinations. That will be the focus of our next class.”

There were no questions. The students seemed vaguely disoriented, as they often did on Putrefaction Day, and Mira let them go ten minutes early. They gathered their things in silence. As they filed out past her desk, Perry unplugged the slide projector and wound the cord carefully. As she packed up her things, he asked, “Are we meeting this afternoon, Professor?”

Mira looked at her watch. It was Tuesday, and Clark would be eager to be relieved of the twins, who had been especially cranky that morning—tossing their Cheerios around the kitchen, hollering at Mira in their musical, unintelligible chatter. Clark had said, “Don’t be late,” as Mira hurried out the door.

“Clark,” she’d said, stopping, turning, “I’ll try not to be, but I have a job. I have students, and colleagues, and emails, and phone calls—”

Clark held up a hand, shaking his head. “No need to list all the things you have, Mira. I get it. See you when you can manage it.”

“Clark,” she’d said, holding out her hands—not as if she were reaching for him, she realized, but more as if she were offering him her wrists to slash. She’d said his name again, but he’d gone into the bathroom and shut the door.

She looked now at Perry.

All weekend she’d thought about their project. She had a hundred questions for him, and a strange bright spot of hope about the future. Despite herself (how well she knew the foolishness of putting the cart before the horse), she’d thought of a title: The American Campus: Sex, Superstition, and Death.

It was, she had to admit to herself, the first sense she’d had since the twins were born that she might have another book in her, and a continuing academic career.

“Well,” she said to Perry. “Yes, we should meet. But I’ll need to leave within the hour. Childcare.”

She shrugged, but felt a soggy lump in her throat that she thought must have to do with the twins, and the way, that morning, the boys had looked up from their high chairs as she bent over to kiss them, their faces wet with milk and a few stuck-on Cheerios, and how she’d been too worried about what their reaction would be to her leaving (and what Clark’s reaction to their reaction would be) to actually say good-bye. They were babbling in their sad foreign language, and she had to push down, as she always did, her fear that there was something wrong, that this was not just your routine “delayed language acquisition,” and as perfectly normal as the pediatrician had insisted, but something much larger, much more predictive of future horrors. Clark refused to talk about it except to say, “You blame me, I suppose?”

“Why would I blame you?”

“Because I’m the one raising your kids, I suppose.”

Everything, even the sounds that came out of their toddlers’ mouths, was a minefield between them now.

She couldn’t say good-bye. Instead, she’d waited until they were busy with their plastic airplane spoons again to sneak out the front door, pulling it closed behind her without making a sound.

20

“I’m in love, man.”

Craig was sitting at the edge of his bed. It was a Saturday night, mid-November, and Perry had just finished writing a paper on Socrates’ belief that rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of illusion. He didn’t want to talk to his roommate about Nicole Werner.

“Great, man,” he said.

“I’m serious,” Craig said. “I know you think I’m an asshole, but—”

“Well, who’s to say an asshole can’t fall in love?”

Perry deliberately kept his back turned to Craig’s side of the room, hoping he’d take the hint.

“You’re not fooling me,” Craig said.

Perry couldn’t help it. He turned around. “Okay,” he said. “So, what is it I’m not fooling you about, Craig?”

“You’re in love with her, too. You’ve probably been in love with her since kindergarten or something. It galls you that I’m dating her. You’re going nuts.”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said, leaning back, looking at the ceiling. “You’re so full of shit, Craig. You’d be saying that about anyone you were dating. You think the whole world’s just watching you, burning with envy. But you know what? News flash: We’re not.”

Craig snorted, as if Perry had confirmed his suspicions by denying them. It was one of the many, many infuriating things about his roommate. You could not win with Craig Clements-Rabbitt. You either confessed or you were lying.

“Look,” Perry said, and inhaled. “Even if I’d been madly in love with Nicole Werner since kindergarten, I’d have fallen out of love with her by the time I realized she was stupid enough to date someone like you—not to mention this sorority bullshit, which seems about as stupid as it’s humanly possible to get.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Craig asked.

Perry shook his head.

“Huh?” Craig prodded.

“Forget it,” Perry said.

“So she likes her sorority, Perry. I think it’s cute. You have to admit, she looks incredible in a string of pearls. And that was one helluva float they decorated for Homecoming.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. And you know so.”

“What happened to all your cynicism, man?”

“Well, then I fell in love with Nicole Werner. Just like you did, back in Bad Ass.”

“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. “Why do we have to talk about this? Why do we have to talk at all.”

“Because you won’t admit it to me, or to yourself. You’re in love with Nicole.”

Perry tossed up his hands. “Okay, Craig. Okay. If I ‘admit’ I’m in love with your girlfriend, will you shut the fuck up? Will that make you feel like a Big Man? Like the Big Campus Stud with the girl we’d all die to get our hands on?”

“How about you admit it first, and I’ll decide after that?”

“Okay,” Perry said, and cleared his throat, rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let me see. The first time I saw Nicole Werner in Mrs. Bell’s kindergarten classroom, clutching a crayon in one hand and a piece of construction paper in the other, I thought to myself, There’s the only girl I’ll ever love. I sure as hell hope she doesn’t end up dating my roommate in college, because then I’ll have to kill myself.”

Craig nodded. “I knew it,” he said.

“So, you’re going to shut up now?”

“No,” Craig said, and he went on to tell Perry about their date that night. Pizza at Knockout’s. Hours afterward at Starbucks, holding hands. A long walk across the Commons in a bright, sparkling snow. He’d walked her back to her room, and kissed her outside her door.

“Did I tell you yet that I’m in love?” he asked Perry.

“I think you might have mentioned that,” Perry said.

21

Craig knew it was a bad idea to walk by the sorority. He’d promised Perry he wouldn’t, and his father, and he’d managed to get through the entire month of September without doing so, without visiting any of the old haunts, except that one day he’d stood outside Godwin Honors Hall in September. Now, it was October.

Where had September gone?

Craig had simply sleepwalked through it, it seemed. He woke up in the mornings and realized that, somehow, he’d done his homework. He’d have only the vaguest recollection of doing it, but there it would be on his laptop: an essay on the Ptolemaic strategy waiting to be taken to the lab to be printed up. The notes he took in his classes were in his own handwriting, so he had to have taken them himself, but it was like that story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Craig just woke up and found all the work had been done, as if by elves, or some other self.

That morning he woke to hear Perry running water in the kitchen, nuking something. Through the other wall he could hear a thudding bass from the neighbor’s stereo. Outside, the masses of blackbirds that had taken to roosting in the trees outside their apartment windows were already cawing and squawking. The black arrow of one’s shadow passed over his window shade. He was going to have to get out of bed, he knew, and he knew that once he did that, he was going to walk by the Omega Theta Tau house.

“Pal,” his father had said on Saturday when he’d called. “You don’t sound right. Are you depressed? Are they harassing you there? Any problems? Memory? Et cetera?”

“No, Dad. No one’s harassing me. And, yeah, I guess I’m a little depressed. I wouldn’t be any less depressed anywhere else, though. And I think I’m okay in the head. As good as I’m going to be again, I guess.”

“You’re sure no one’s giving you a hard time?”

“No one,” Craig said, realizing, not for the first time, that maybe he’d hoped they would. Maybe he’d come back here hoping to be hounded off campus, ridiculed, killed. Where were the outraged sorority sisters? Why hadn’t they chased him down on the Commons and ripped him limb from limb? Had they forgotten about Nicole? Shouldn’t there be daily protests outside the administration building?

How could they have let Nicole Werner’s killer back in?

But Nicole’s death, it seemed, was last year’s news. He hadn’t overheard a word about it anywhere. If people recognized him, they didn’t show it. If his professors made the connection between Nicole’s death and his name, they kept it to themselves. Maybe back at Godwin Honors Hall there were still some flyers posted to the bulletin boards, or a memorial in the lobby or something, but there wasn’t anything else anywhere else on campus.

He dragged himself out of bed. He was packing up his laptop, pulling a sweatshirt over his grungy T-shirt, saying, “See ya later,” to Perry, and trying to get out of the apartment quickly enough that Perry couldn’t ask him where he was headed.

He was headed there. He hadn’t even glimpsed it, he realized, since that last night in March. Back then.

Back then, Craig had hated the Omega Theta Tau house and the way, each time he walked across campus to it, the front door would open for Nicole and swallow her whole. There was always some blonde standing in the shadows beyond the threshold, and the door would swing closed, and Craig knew he wouldn’t get her back until whatever party, or pledging, or tea, or secret meeting, or special election of floral arrangement committee members, or selection of the menu for the next Founders Formal that night was over.

How many times had he walked by the Omega Theta Tau house (its brooding brown and blond bricks, the wraparound porch, the long windows, the eaves crawling with ivy) after he’d started dating Nicole, just to see if the candles were still flickering in the rooms beyond the windows?

And the guys hanging around.

Those frat guys with their handshakes and their collars turned up. Tossing a football, hard. The smack of it hitting their hands.

“Maybe you could think about a house, you know, for next year? It’s not too late. Plenty of guys rush their sophomore years,” Nicole said one night as he was walking her from Godwin Honors Hall to the Omega Theta Tau house.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, sweet and pouty. “It would just, maybe, make things easier, you know.”

“What’s hard now?”

“I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of social stuff. The sorority likes it, you know, if your dates are Greek. When I’m living in the house next year, there might be a bit more, I don’t know, pressure or something to be dating a frat guy.”

“Nicole,” Craig said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, humoring her, but, he hoped, radiating affection at the same time. “I’m not going to be one of those assholes. I mean, I think your whole sorority sister stuff is cute. But you’re a girl. It’s all about hair and makeup for you, and shaving chocolate onto gelato, and decorating floats. But if I joined one of those things I’d have to, I don’t know, wear a beanie propeller or shave my pubic hair or something.”

“What? Is that what you think?”

“Okay, not that maybe. But something equally dumb, and obnoxious. Those guys are all about dumb and obnoxious. I’d rather die than live in a houseful of those kinds of guys.”

Nicole hadn’t said anything. She’d grown quiet.

Sometimes, when she sulked, Craig glimpsed a single dimple at the right corner of her mouth, and he could imagine her as a toddler then, mad about something: A teddy bear. A lollipop. It made him want to give her anything she wanted.

“But I’ll think about it,” he said. “I understand why you think that would make things easier.”

“Really?” she asked, turning to him, taking both his hands in hers, kissing them.

He’d hated having to let go of those hands—soft and white as little cashmere mittens—and watch her walk away from him, sway up the paving stones to the front door of that house in her silver sandals, some meaty frat guy watching her ass from the porch of the frat house next door.

Now he walked across campus as quickly as he could, long strides, without looking up. He had a reason for going to the Omega Theta Tau house today, although the reason was only a half-formed idea in his head, a kind of dreamy inclination that had begun at the Roper Library a few days earlier. He’d gone there to check out a book his Western Mind professor had put on reserve, but the book had already been checked out, so Craig had found himself at a computer instead, plugging Nicole’s name into the friendly Google rectangle and coming up with about four hundred and twenty hits—mostly local newspaper accounts of the accident, which he’d read a hundred times already, and a few reports from the Bad Axe Times, including an obituary, and a couple of articles from the school newspaper calling for his blood, and then lamenting his readmittance to the university, all of which he’d also seen and gotten used to.

But then he came upon one with a photograph of the Omega Theta Tau house: an entire orchard of cherry trees being planted in the two acres that stretched between the south end of their property and the Presbyterian church next door.

The Nicole Werner Memorial Cherry Orchard.

How, on his many Google visits, had he missed this?

Fifteen, twenty trees, and a line of sorority sisters in black dresses and black sunglasses holding hands before those trees as if they were worshipping them, their gleaming sorority hair lit up by the sun, their heads bowed.

In the branches of the trees were bright blossoms. In the background, some shining cars.

Craig had zoomed in on the photograph, leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from the screen. With the photo enlarged, he was able to recognize some of the sorority sisters who were holding one another’s hands. Nicole had introduced him to some of them while crossing campus, or standing in line at the Bijou, or looking up from their milkshakes at Pizza Bob’s.

(“Craig, this is my sister Allison. This is Joanne. This is Skye. This is Marrielle.”)

Back then, they’d all looked the same to him. Whether blond (mostly) or dark-haired, they each appeared to Craig like cheap knockoffs of Nicole—girls who were trying hard but could only dream of being as bright-eyed, as pink-cheeked, as purely beautiful as she was.

Nicole had accused him of being unfriendly. It was December by then, and they’d been together for two months (which to him seemed like a lifetime, by far the longest he’d ever dated a girl), and she’d said, “You don’t make eye contact with my sisters. They think you’re unfriendly.” He agreed to try harder, albeit reluctantly. But the only time he met any of her sorority sisters again after that was when he’d already pissed them off by pushing his way into a Greek-only party:

Two a.m., and Nicole had said she’d meet him outside the Omega Theta Tau house at midnight. Craig had stood around for what seemed like long enough, and then he’d sat on the front stoop, calling her dorm room over and over. (Like Perry, Nicole didn’t own a cell phone. Verizon, it seemed, had not yet made its sales pitch to Bad Axe.) He was thinking that eventually she’d pick up, and explain that she’d waited outside the OTT house but hadn’t seen him, and so had walked herself back to Godwin. He was thinking she’d say how sorry she was, and ask if he would come by to give her a good-night kiss. The worst-case scenario would be that Josie would answer and sound pissed off to hear his voice, but at least she’d offer some explanation for what had happened to Nicole.

But there was no answer at all in Nicole’s dorm room, and not a single girl came out the front door of the sorority house. Craig could hear the music thumping away inside, along with the occasional burst of wild laughter, the occasional girlish scream, sounding as if someone was being tickled with something surprisingly sharp. He’d already tried to look in the windows a few times, but they were high, tall windows, and the party seemed to be taking place in the basement, out of sight. The only partiers he’d managed to glimpse were some guy passed out on a couch and two girls appearing to be trying to read each other’s palms.

There was a hired thug at the door: some hulking guy in a black shirt and black pants, holding a walkie-talkie in his hand, who did not look as if he were now or had ever been a college student. The thug would stand up and shrug his shoulders menacingly each time Craig came around the front door, and then shake his head, looking at Craig. When Craig went to the back door, there was always a sorority sister there—a different one each time—who would cross her arms over her breasts as if Craig were about to grab them, and, in this pretzel shape, manage to say something into a walkie-talkie while watching Craig warily until he went away.

He pretended to be walking back to the street, but then veered back through the shadows and managed to find a spot at the side of the house where he was able to crawl between a couple of shrubs and peer through a toaster-size window into the basement. The shrubs were of the thorny variety, and Craig could feel them ripping through the thin material of his T-shirt. He knew he was going to have scratches and welts, but he managed to creep to the little window anyway, put his face up to it, his hands around his face.

Down there, in the basement, they had a strobe light going. It seemed to be hooked up to the throbbing bass of the music they were playing, flashing to the beat. What Craig saw in the spasmodic intervals of light was dancing—girls’ bare arms lifted, girls’ bare midriffs and hipbones swaying, girls with their arms around each other’s necks and shoulders, tossing back their heads, seeming to be howling, or screaming, or laughing, a few girls holding hands and dashing around in a wild circle, falling onto the basement floor, limbs and hair and bra straps and bare skin, and a keg in a corner, and a line of girls at it, and then, in another corner, what looked to him like Nicole (he pressed his face hard enough against the glass that he thought he might crack it in half), holding a plastic cup, taking a sip from it, her arms around the neck of some beefy older-looking guy in a sweat-stained light blue shirt—and then, long before he knew he was doing it, Craig was barging through the back door past the sorority girl, who started swearing into her walkie-talkie, shouting at his back, “You’re not allowed in our house, asshole!”

He took the stairs down to the basement two at a time, finding his way to them by pure instinct, slipping on the last one into a small smoky crowd dancing to some crappy Beyoncé song, and found himself looking straight into the face of a girl with long black tears of sweat and mascara dripping down her face. “What the fu—” she said, and then the sorority sister who’d been chasing him since the back door grabbed his arm and started shouting, and the bruiser from the front door had him by the collar, and in the corner where he’d been sure he’d seen Nicole, there was no one.

“Nicole?! Nicole?! Nicole?!”

He screamed her name over the music, over and over again, in the direction of the empty corner as the bruiser pulled him out of the crowd of girls and toward the basement stairs, at the top of which Nicole stood looking down at him with a shocked expression on her face.

“Craig…?”

“Nicole?”

“Who is this jerk?” the girl with the walkie-talkie asked Nicole, scowling in Craig’s direction. “Do you know him?”

When he reached the top of the stairs, the bouncer behind him gave Craig a shove, and Nicole said, “Yes,” as if she regretted having to admit it. “This is Craig. He’s my friend. I’ll walk him home.”

The girl glared at Craig. Her eyes were too blue to be real. Those had to be contacts, Craig thought.

The girl looked from Craig to Nicole. She was wearing so much lip gloss she looked like she’d recently been kissing an oil slick. She said, “Don’t ever let him come around here again. Ever.”

“Okay,” Nicole said, sounding like someone who’d slipped into shock. “Come on, Craig.”

“Don’t you have a coat or something?” the girl asked Nicole.

“I’ll get it tomorrow,” she said, guiding Craig back out into the cool darkness, where the temperature had dropped since he’d first walked her to the OTT house. Now he could see their breaths puffing into it as they walked in silence, quickly, in the direction of Godwin Hall. Nicole was shivering and shaking her head at the same time. When Craig tried to put his arm around her, she shrugged it off.

“What were you thinking?” she asked, staring straight ahead, not looking at him. She was walking so fast he practically had to jog at her side.

“Nicole, you said you’d be out of that party at—”

“Okay, Craig, but I never told you to pick me up. I told you I was going to walk back with Josie. Why did you come back to the house?”

“Because I was going to make sure you got back to Godwin Hall. I was worried. I was worried about you. Sorry.”

It sounded whiny and pathetic, even to him.

“Well, I was helping with the party. You know, picking up empties, making sure people put their cigarettes out, tossing out cups. Do you know how bad this is Craig, to have a friend crash the party, and make a scene, and—?”

“Is that what I am to you, Nicole? Your friend?”

“Of course,” she said, as she if were consoling him.

“Gee,” he said, “I sort of thought I was more than that.” He felt something behind the bridge of his nose—his sinuses?—fill up with the sarcasm, the self-pity implicit in it, like… Jesus Christ, was he getting ready to cry?

“Well, I mean, we’re dating, sure. We’re more than friends. But I think friendship is really valuable, maybe the most important thing in the world next to family. I want to be your friend, Craig. But—”

She’d slowed down and put her cold hand in his. She squeezed his hand. She was shivering, and so he put both arms around her and pulled her to him, and said nothing, just happy to have her close to him.

He couldn’t have argued with her anyway. He already knew from experience not to argue with her when she was dealing in abstractions: friendship, God, love, patriotism, chastity. He loved that about her.

“Okay,” Craig said, happy enough to lose this argument. “Me, too. That’s not what this is about. I saw you dancing with some guy.”

“No, you didn’t!” Nicole shouted, as if she’d just caught him in a brazen lie, jumping backward out of his arms. “I did not dance with any guys. I danced a little with Josie, and with Abby one time, but when guys asked me to dance, I said, ‘Sorry, can’t,’ and held this up.”

It was the ring he’d bought her from Grimoire Gifts two weeks ago—a little globe of amber, with something ancient, some little black bug, trapped in it forever. She wore it on her right hand, because she wore a ring her father had given her on her left. He’d have preferred the left, but Nicole had made it clear that there was no room for debate.

She stopped walking and turned to him with a stony, hurt expression. Her teeth had actually begun to chatter loud enough that he could hear them—like fingernails tapping across a keyboard, or dice being rattled in a can. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, moved by the sound of those teeth, and her shivering, even though he knew she didn’t like him to say Jesus. “Oh, Nicole.” He unbuttoned his shirt—he was wearing a T-shirt underneath—and wrestled the button-down off his arms, draping it over Nicole’s shoulders and then helping her put her arms through the sleeves, as if she were an invalid, or a toddler. She limply accepted his shirt, his help, and he wrapped his arms around her again and hurried her back to Godwin Hall, whispering words of apology desperately in her ear as they walked.

When they finally got into the dorm, and he’d told her he loved her so many times that she finally started laughing, and she wasn’t shivering any longer, she leaned back against the foyer wall and pulled him to her, and they leaned there kissing one another for a very long time, long enough that time seemed to have stopped, and maybe a hundred people had passed them going up or down the stairs—but it wasn’t long enough for Craig, who was always the one who said, “Just another minute or two,” a hundred times, until Nicole, laughing, finally left him, shaking her head at him, throwing him kisses as she went up to her room. Forgiven.

It was the first thing Craig saw when he rounded the corner of Seneca Lane and West University Avenue: the Omega Theta Tau house casting a shadow down on that orchard that hadn’t been there in the winter, the last time Craig had walked by.

There was a stone angel at the center, lifting her concrete wings and bending over at the same time, as if the wings were what had forced her down to earth in the first place.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the brass plaque at the feet of that garden statuary said.

Tomorrow, Craig supposed, there would be mounds of roses, a teddy bear, that sort of thing.

Tomorrow would have been her nineteenth birthday.

22

Clark was asleep when Mira got home. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but he lay on his back on their bed with his hands folded on his chest, so deeply asleep he never heard her come in the house or the twins’ deafening squealing upon her arrival—the usual tearful reunion, the clinging, the sobbing against her chest. By the time Mira had finally calmed them down enough to stand up from the floor and go looking for Clark, there were two spreading damp circles of their tears on her red silk blouse.

Ruined, she thought. Her mother used to have a trick for getting water stains off silk, but Mira hadn’t been paying attention then, and certainly didn’t remember now what the secret method might have been. Maybe, she thought, as she headed for the bedroom in search of Clark, she could research it on the Internet if she ever found the time—the Internet, which had become the mother lode of folk remedies and feminine advice for those without mothers to consult.

“Clark?”

Clark sputtered, blinked, coughed like a man surfacing in shallow water, and then he gasped and sat up fast. “What?”

“Are you okay?”

He rubbed his eyes, and then he scowled at her with half his face. Somehow, the other half of his face still looked familiar. She recognized the blank expression from a photo in their wedding album. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course I’m okay.”

“Well,” Mira said, “you’re in here dead asleep at two o’clock in the afternoon while the twins are hungry and sitting in dirty diapers on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe you were sick.”

“Fuck you, Mira,” he said, and lay back down, staring straight at the ceiling, folding his hands over his chest again, closing his eyes with such finality that Mira almost thought she could hear them click shut with the neat precision of Swiss pocket watches.

She turned around and pulled the bedroom door closed hard behind her.

The poop in the twins’ diapers seemed to have been there a long time. It was hard, and caked into their little butt cracks. Mira changed Matty first because he’d cried the hardest when she got home. He was still hiccupping with it, looking up at her with wide, glassy eyes. She sang the “five little duckies” song to distract him on the changing table, but he whimpered when she had to work too hard with the baby wipes to get the caked-on shit off his tender bottom. It looked red and sore when she was done, but it was clean, and he wasn’t crying. She dusted it with baby powder and tickled his belly before lifting him off the table and placing him back on the floor.

Andy was easier. He’d never much minded a dirty diaper, and as long as she was singing the duckies song, he didn’t seem to mind if she was being a bit rough with his behind. She looked into his eyes as she sang, and he never blinked, as if he were afraid she’d disappear again if he did. As she changed his brother, Matty held on to one of her ankles from his spot on the floor, humming wetly into her shin.

After Andy’s diaper was changed, Mira got back down on the floor and pulled them both to her, and unbuttoned her stained blouse, unclasped her bra, and let her breasts fall out into their mouths.

(“Good Lord, Mira, how long are you going to keep nursing those boys?” Clark’s sister had asked six months earlier, when she’d come to visit from Atlanta. The twins had only just turned two then, but Mira had felt chastised, and stammered something about the boys only nursing once or twice a day. It was more of a habit, she tried to explain, than anything else. A way to calm them, or to get them to sleep on hectic nights. They were eating solid foods, of course. Pretty much anything she and Clark ate, the twins ate, and they ate a lot of it, and since Mira was gone a good part of every day, they certainly did not depend on breast milk for food.

“Jesus,” Rebecca had said, “I quit nursing Ricky at six months when he got his front teeth. I thought he was going to bite my nipple off.”

But Rebecca was married to a packaging engineer. She’d stayed home with Ricky until he went to kindergarten, and even after that she worked only two mornings a week, at a children’s bookstore. She’d never, Mira felt certain, come home and found Ricky wearing a diaper stiff with shit while her husband slept like a dead man in another room.)

As the boys sucked harder, tears sprang into Mira’s eyes. She’d wasted a precious forty-five minutes in her office with Perry Edwards when she should have been home with her babies—and afterward she’d stopped in the doorway of Dean Fleming’s office just to smile and wave, and ended up wasting another half hour. She’d stopped there on purpose, knowing he would ask her how her “work” was going, and for the first time in a long time, she actually had something to say because she was working on something quite promising: a book-length consideration of the folklore of death on the American college campus.

Dean Fleming had raised his eyebrows as if he, too, saw the huge potential in her project. “Interesting,” he said, nodding, clearly pleased and impressed. “I knew you’d zero in on something great in time.” He wished her luck, offered his support. He said, “If you need travel funds or a book allowance, let me know. We’ll see what we can find.”

She left Godwin Hall feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She had a project. Because there’d been a rainstorm that morning, and Clark had grudgingly let her drive the car to campus, she decided to drive by the location of the accident, Nicole Werner’s accident, which she’d begun to think of as material.

Mira had driven by it hundreds of times since the accident because it was on the way to half the places she needed to be (grocery store, drugstore, gas station). Like everyone else in town, she had watched the accumulating expressions of sentimental grief, the mounding of more and more debris at the site. Girlish, and ghoulish.

It had begun with a white cross with the victim’s name on it, and then a few stuffed animals were added, along with some wreaths of pink and white flowers—and then, within a few weeks, it had grown to a full-scale folk monument: A wisteria was planted. A banner was wound around the branches of the tree at the site. Some ornaments were hung in the branches. (Angels? Fairies? Mira couldn’t tell from the road.) More stuffed animals and some baby dolls accumulated around the tree’s trunk, and a laminated blowup of that senior portrait of Nicole Werner leaned against it, staring at the place where she’d lost her life. There were mounds of fresh flowers, and an unfathomable number of silk and plastic bouquets, ever replenishing, although Mira had never actually seen anyone tending to these items or dropping them off. (Did they come under cover of darkness?) Floral wreaths stretched from the side of the road across the drainage ditch to the electric fence, beyond which there were always a few sheep looking dazed and doomed.

Mira slowed down as she drove past. The next sunny morning, she thought, she would bring her best camera out here, and take photos.

The twins had fallen asleep as they sucked, and when Clark came out of the bedroom, he looked down at Mira for a moment, at the two flushed and dreaming twins still clinging to her nipples by their teeth. He must have realized that she was crying—there were tears running down her neck and onto her bare chest—but the expression on his face was unreadable, and far above her.

“I’m going for a run,” he said, and was gone.

23

It was the second week of January. She was lying on Craig’s bed when Perry got back to the dorm room after the first winter semester meeting of his International Human Rights seminar. She was on top of Craig’s comforter (Craig had started making his bed since he’d started dating Nicole) in a T-shirt. Her legs were bare. Perry thought, with a jolt that felt a bit like panic, that he’d caught a glimpse of pale blue underpants when she crossed her ankles. She was wearing a silver ankle bracelet. It had what looked like a bell, or an anchor, or a crucifix, hanging from it. She had a book in her hands.

Perry looked away. He strode purposefully to his desk, sat down with his back to her, and said, “What are you doing here, Nicole? Craig’s not going to be back until after dinner.”

“I’m just reading,” she said. “It’s quieter here than in my room. Josie’s always got Norah Jones playing. Drives me nuts. Whine-whine-whine.”

Perry could hear the springs on Craig’s bed squeak. She must have shifted her weight, rolled onto her side. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking over. He turned his computer on, and there was the usual sound of an angelic choir starting up—one discordant but celestial note, which hung in the air.

“No offense, Nicole,” Perry finally managed to say, “but when my roommate’s not here, I actually enjoy my solitude.”

“Well, Craig said you wouldn’t mind,” Nicole said casually. “He gave me his key.”

Perry’s screen saver came up then (comets shooting through a blue-black sky) and, at the same time, something hit his shoulder, sharp and surprising, and it took him only a second or two to realize that it was Craig’s room key clattering on the floor behind him. Before he could stop himself, he was turned around in his chair, glaring at Nicole.

She was, as he’d thought, lying on her side. One leg was slung over the other. One of her bare feet (toenails painted shell pink) was pointed, swinging like a pendulum over the side of Craig’s bed.

“Come on, Nicole,” Perry said. “Why are you here?” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to seem more exhausted than agitated. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming as unnerved by her presence as he was. Since she and Craig had taken up full time, she was, like Craig himself, a constant irritation, mainly because Craig never shut up about her, was in an endless cycle of manic ecstasy and despair about her. When he wasn’t frantically trying to call her, or find her, he was on the phone with her, or in their room with her. They couldn’t hang out in Nicole’s room because Josie hated Craig’s guts, so they were here, or in the hallway waiting for Perry to get dressed so they could get in. Whenever Perry said something to Craig about it, Craig just said, “You’re jealous, man. You’re in love with my girlfriend. The sooner you face it, the better off we’ll all be.” It seemed like a joke now, with Craig, but it was still exasperating.

“I think you know why I’m here,” Nicole said before she stood up and crossed the room—those bare feet, and the toenails, he tried only to look at those—and knelt down at his feet, looked up at him, directly in his line of vision, so he had to look back, and then she reached up for his face, pulled it gently toward her, and before he really understood what she was going to do, and what was happening, kissed him with her mouth open, her tongue slipping warmly, mintily, over his.

24

Shelly typed Josie Reilly into Google.

It was Monday, and Josie hadn’t made it into work at all. Shelly had come into the office to a raspy message on her machine in the morning:

“Hey, this is Josie (cough, cough) and I’m really sick. I can’t come in. I’m really sorry. I’m going to Health Services now. I’ll be in on Wednesday I’m sure.”

There were an astonishing number of Google hits.

Of course, Josie Reilly wasn’t a completely unique name. One Josefina/Josie Reilly seemed to have been involved somehow in the Salem witch trials. Another Josie Reilly was a CEO of a large, bankrupt corporation. There was also a long list of genealogical connections—Reillys and Rileys and Reileys going back several centuries, traversing the Atlantic, claiming to be related to one another, as if it mattered. (What, Shelly always wondered, did people feel they gained by claiming kinship with strangers, alive or dead?)

But then her Josie Reilly rose to the surface, incontrovertibly the coed sorority sister from Grosse Isle, the one Shelly had hired as a work-study student for the Chamber Music Society:

DEAD FRESHMAN’S ROOMMATE SPEAKS OUT AGAINST DRUNK DRIVER.

There she was—Josie, in all her sloe-eyed Black Irish beauty, holding a microphone on the steps of the Llewellyn Roper Library. The sun shone down on her inky hair, which matched the black halter-top dress she wore. Behind her, the familiar apple tree that seemed to grow out of the foundation of the library (the one they were always threatening to rip out because it was fucking up the plumbing) wasn’t yet in bloom.

The Dead Freshman’s Roommate?

Shelly clearly remembered asking Josie of Nicole Werner, “Did you know her?” And the shrug. We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time, so…

Josie had said nothing about being her roommate. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing about standing outside the Llewellyn Roper Library in May, speaking out against drunk driving and about her dead roommate.

Why?

That night, after a distracted glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and a cursory page-through of the New York Times, Shelly called Rosemary.

For over two decades she had spoken to Rosemary on the phone every few days, and a bit more lately, since Rosemary’s eldest son had become a teenager and there was so much to say about this terrifying passage. For the first half of the conversation, Shelly listened to Rosemary rail against the public schools and the fact that they allowed fourteen-year-old children to neck on the benches outside the building during lunch period.

“Can you imagine if we’d tried to get away with that in middle school?” Rosemary asked.

She wasn’t expecting an answer, so Shelly didn’t say that, actually, she could, and that she remembered, herself, the spring of eighth grade, meeting Tony Lipking (ironically named, since he was her first kiss) out in the parking lot every lunch hour it wasn’t raining, and the warm feeling of Tony’s Ford’s grille against her thighs as he held her between himself and that grille with his face locked onto hers for the entire hour, when she should have been eating her mother’s turkey sandwich and carrot sticks.

When Rosemary was done railing, Shelly told her the story of Josie, and how she’d Googled her on the Internet and discovered her as Nicole Werner’s grieving roommate.

“Why wouldn’t she have told me that, when I asked? Why would it be a secret, especially after I told her that I was at the accident?”

Rosemary seemed to consider this for quite a while, although Shelly could also hear a sink running in the background. (Often it seemed that Rosemary was multitasking while they talked.) “Traumatized?” Rosemary finally offered. “Or maybe she thinks it’s controversial? Maybe she doesn’t want to get into it? Trying to get past all that?”

“No,” Shelly said. She didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s not this girl. This girl would be thrilled to get controversial. Believe me.”

Shelly went on to tell Rosemary everything she knew about Josie Reilly—the boys waiting in the office, the early departures, late arrivals, the excuses. She described the spaghetti-strap tops she wore. The little silver sandals and the black flats with frilly bows. Jeremy, Shelly’s cat, was licking his catnip mouse on the braided rug at her feet as Shelly detailed the habits of her work-study student and this odd mystery surrounding her.

“Shelly?” Rosemary asked when Shelly was done. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Shelly said.

Rosemary lowered her voice, hesitated, and then asked, “Are you, you know, in love with this girl?”

“What?” Shelly was surprised to find her pulse racing, her cheeks and chest prickling with heat. “Why would you ask that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, hon. I’m not accusing you of anything! I don’t know,” Rosemary said. She laughed nervously. “There’s just something in your voice. You seem so—intrigued.”

“I can be intrigued and not be in love,” Shelly said.

“Well, of course you can,” Rosemary said. “Forget I said anything, okay? Just forget it. But, you know, if you decide you are in love with her, you call me before—”

“Rosemary, Jesus. She’s not even twenty years old. I—”

“Like I said,” Rosemary said, “just forget it. I never said it. You’re right. Ridiculous Rosemary. Tell me a joke or something, okay? Or, like, what did you have for dinner tonight? See any good movies lately?”

25

Dr. Truby asked Craig, solemnly, as if speaking in his lowest voice and leaning forward might seduce it out of Craig’s subconscious, “And that evening—earlier—you don’t even remember how you ended up in the car, how Nicole got there with you, where you were going when the accident occurred?”

Craig bit his bottom lip and looked at the ceiling. Swallowed. Closed his eyes. He wanted to remember. He wanted to deliver some tidbit to Dr. Truby, something for all the man’s hard work. But what? He’d already gone over what he could remember with the guy, and it wasn’t much:

By now he remembered well enough that he’d been driving Lucas’s old Taurus. He hazily remembered Lucas, stoned in his dorm room, handing him the keys, and saying, “Good luck, man.” But he had no recollection of what it was he might have needed luck for. Craig had been told by his lawyer that, questioned later by detectives, Lucas had said, “I didn’t know what was going on. He came into my room saying, ‘I gotta borrow your car,’ so I tossed him the keys, told him where it was parked, and said, ‘Good luck, man.’ He was in way too much of a hurry to ask him what the problem was. Frankly, I thought it might be, you know, Nicole—some female thing. Like, she was having a hemorrhage, you know. I knew a girl that happened to once, and she almost died. It was like a coptic pregnancy or something like that—I don’t know what you call it.”

The police also reported Lucas as saying that Craig had seemed stone-cold sober when he came to get the keys. But, coming from Lucas, that might not have meant much, both because of Lucas’s own substance abuse track record and because he was the one who’d loaned someone a car in which a fatal accident had taken place.

Craig looked from the ceiling to his lap to Dr. Truby and said, “Well, I remember a cell phone call. She needed me. I was pissed off about the party. There was someone there I didn’t want her to be with, but I can’t remember who.” He closed his eyes. He saw a blue shirt. Some flash of an insignia. Not a Boy Scout, surely. Not a cop. “A paramedic?” Craig asked, looking up at Dr. Truby, as if he might remember. “You know, some kind of ambulance driver?”

Dr. Truby nodded, motioned in the air between them, coaxing. “You were jealous?”

“I… guess so. Even though she never gave me any reason to be. Nicole was really specific about monogamy. She told me that if she ever, even for a second, thought she was going to be attracted to someone else, she would tell me, and she asked me to do the same. We were really clear on that. Really honest. There was no reason not to be. Nicole was a big believer in courting. She only wanted to date in order to find someone to marry. She wore this ring her dad had given her, on her left hand, like a wedding ring—this promise ring.”

Dr. Truby shrugged a little with one shoulder, still nodding, not seeming surprised. Maybe he’d heard of promise rings before. But it had been a real eye-opener for Craig, finding out that there were girls whose fathers got involved in their sex lives to the degree that they gave them rings and had them take pledges that they wouldn’t have sex until they were married. Nicole’s ring looked just like an engagement ring: a gold band with a little diamond.

“She took that stuff seriously, but I knew there were a lot of guys interested in her, and I’d been totally banned from parties at her sorority because of that incident I told you about. I was always afraid, you know, that something might happen when I wasn’t there. I mean, I didn’t think she’d cheat on me, but I thought she might meet somebody, get interested in some other guy.”

Dr. Truby was still nodding (Jesus, Craig thought, he could get a job as one of those dogs on a dashboard), but then he looked at his watch, so Craig knew it was time for him to go. The therapist cleared his throat and said in his “conclusion” voice, “You’ve come a long way, Craig, for someone with the kind of brain damage you sustained. Just a bit more, a bit longer, and we’ll have this sorted out.”

“Right,” Craig said, trying to make it not sound as sarcastic as he meant it, as if there would ever be anything that would sort out his having killed Nicole.

His dad was there in the Subaru, waiting outside Dr. Truby’s office, which was in a sort of segregated part of the hospital campus, as if the shrinks and their patients really shouldn’t be glimpsed by people who were genuinely sick—cancer, heart problems, diabetes.

“Hey, pal,” his father said when Craig sat down and pulled the car door closed. He reached over and patted his son’s knee hard enough that Craig probably would have flinched if he were feeling more energetic—but, as it was, he just looked over and nodded. “How’d it go, son?”

“Okay,” Craig said. “I guess.”

“Well, you don’t have to tell me anything,” his dad said, holding his hands up over the steering wheel. (How many times had he said this by now? Was he getting so used to Craig being a zombie that he was just going to keep saying it forever?) “But if you want to, I want you to know I’m happy to listen, and I won’t say a word if you’d rather I didn’t.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Craig said, and then he turned to the window to let his father know that he wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything at that particular moment, and that they could just drive home.

“Home,” now, was Craig’s father’s apartment in a complex called the Alpines, on the outskirts of Fredonia. Scar and his mother had stayed in the house. Having been at college while the finer details of his parents’ separation were being worked out, Craig wasn’t sure how it had happened that Scar had stayed with his mother in the house—except that it was no secret to anyone that Scar and their mother were far closer to each other than either of them was with Craig or his father—and since, after the accident, when he found himself back in New Hampshire, Craig was in a kind of coma, he also didn’t know how it had been decided that he would move in to the Alpines with his father.

Not that he minded.

He didn’t even mind, anymore, that his parents were getting divorced. It was like whatever happened that made him lose his memory of the accident had also wiped out all the rage and despair he’d felt about that, too.

His parents’ separation had been in the works for months before the accident, taking place all through the most beautiful early months of his relationship with Nicole, like a bad and blurry backdrop.

“What the hell is going on there?!” Craig had shouted over the phone to Scar one Saturday afternoon in January. He’d called home to demand more answers from anyone who would give them. He had actually been calling for days by then, nonstop, but no one answered the fucking land line or any one of their cell phones since his father had called to give him the news:

“Your mom’s leaving me, son. She thinks life’s too short to spend it with me.”

A few hours after that, his mother had called, either to try to soften it (“We’ll just take things a day at a time, and see what happens”) or to deny responsibility (“I know your father says this was my decision, but I’m sure it’s no surprise to you, or any one else, that this has been coming for a long time, and it’s no one’s decision”).

Well, it had come as a Big Fucking Surprise to Craig, who’d been planning to spend the weekend in a blissful state of sleepy love with Nicole in his room, since Perry was going back to Bad Axe for somebody’s baptism. The last thing in the world Craig had considered was that he’d get news like this from home. Home was supposed to just stay home.

“How the fucking hell did this happen?!” Craig screamed at his little brother over the phone.

“I don’t know,” Scar said, sounding stoned—although, before Craig had left for college in the fall, at least, Scar had been vehemently opposed to smoking weed. (“Why would anyone want to get stupider?”) But Craig also knew that their mother was pretty excited about all the new psychopharmaceutical miracles taking place in the world, and she was always suggesting to her friends some cure for malaise, or annoyance, or mild anxiety. Maybe now she had Scar on something for his mild anxieties, which Craig thought were pretty normal for a kid that age and would go away on their own in time, like his scar, which, in its fading, had begun to look like only the vaguest shadow of a crucifix dug into the skin on his back.

He’d been in sixth grade when he’d gotten that. It was after school, and he was walking home along Mill Creek, probably listening to Nirvana on his iPod, when a kid a year older jumped out of the bushes, wrestled Scar to the ground, pinning his face into the grass between the sidewalk, and, without saying a word about anything, let alone why, lifted up the back of Scar’s SKI PURPLE MOUNTAIN T-shirt, and cut a crucifix into his back. Then the kid jumped off Scar, ran into the road, and flagged down a passing motorist—a hippie lady in a van, lost off the freeway, looking for a coffee shop.

The kid (Remco Nolens) had pointed over to Scar and said to the woman, “He needs help!” before sprinting back to his house, where the cops came and picked him up an hour later.

Apparently, Remco had been tripping on bad acid when he did it, and couldn’t tell anyone why he’d been hiding in the bushes, or why he’d jumped out with the knife, why he’d cut a crucifix into Scar’s back. Remco was sent to live with his grandparents in Florida after that, and part of his punishment was that he had to send Scar an apologetic letter every year.

These letters were cause for general hilarity at the Clements-Rabbitt household, as they were so stiff, and so clearly unapologetic: “I wish to tell you again that I am sorry for scratching your back with my pocket knife.”

In the end, the wound wasn’t life threatening—although it was also more than a “scratch.” The nickname had been an attempt to make the kind of light of it Remco had made—as if by calling him Scar they could pretend that what had happened wasn’t much worse than having a tooth knocked out by a Frisbee.

But to Craig, it had seemed much worse; for months afterward he’d woken from dreams in which he was wrestling his little brother’s limp body away from some winged black thing he recognized as Remco. Still, if it bothered Scar, he never said so.

“You better talk to Mom or Dad about that,” Scar said on the phone. “It’s not really any of my business if they’re splitting up.”

“Not any of your business? Huh? Last time I checked, they were your parents too, pal.”

“Don’t call me pal when you’re yelling at me. It’s just like Dad.”

“What? What are you talking about? Since when does Dad yell at you?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Craig couldn’t figure out whether that was a validation of his point that their father never yelled at Scar (never yelled at any of them), or something else—some hint that there was a new family dynamic now, that their father was yelling, that their father had something to yell about.

“Just don’t ask me about Mom and Dad,” Scar finally said. “Ask them if you have to—but personally I think you should just forget it.”

“Forget it? Just, like, forget that my parents are getting divorced?”

“Come on, Craig,” Scar said, still sounding dopey, far away. “You’re a big boy now, get—”

Craig hung up on his brother then, and didn’t speak to him again until he was brought back to New Hampshire in March, with only a vague idea of who the boy with the shaggy hair in his eyes was. And then it was weeks before Craig could spontaneously remember the kid’s name, and another week before he really understood what it meant that Scar was his brother.

26

“Lucas!”

Perry recognized the ponytail and the long lopsided gait from a block away, and he jogged up behind Lucas on the sidewalk, and then next to him. “Hey.”

Lucas jumped and spun around. He had apparently not heard Perry calling his name until he was right next to him. “Jesus Christ, Perry,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry. I thought you heard me.”

“I didn’t,” Lucas said. He was panting. His face, in the bright autumn sunlight, looked strangely haggard, much paler than it had even the week before, when Perry had last seen him. He looked like he’d been stoned for days, and maybe like he hadn’t slept more than a few hours the night before, and maybe like he was losing weight, rapidly.

“I wanted to tell you something,” Perry said.

Lucas stopped. He turned to Perry, although he was glancing to his left and right at the same time, as if looking for someone, or wondering who might be nearby to overhear them. But there was no one on their side of the street. All the students were flooding in the direction of Main Campus, hurrying to make their morning classes on time.

Lucas was carrying a bag. It looked like maybe he’d just come out to go to the store and buy a six-pack, and was headed back to his apartment.

“Is it about her?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Perry said. “It’s about my professor. Professor Polson. I’m taking her seminar.”

“The Death one?”

“Yes.”

“I thought that was for freshmen.”

“Yeah, well, she let me in.”

“Why?” Lucas asked. He looked expressionless and suspicious at the same time.

“Because I asked her to make an exception. I wanted—”

“Because of her?”

“Partly,” Perry said. Lucas had made it sound like some kind of accusation, and Perry felt defensive. “Also, Professor Polson is working on a book about—”

“Why are you talking to me about this?” Lucas asked, suddenly animated, waving his free hand as if to shoo Perry away. “I don’t want to hear about this.”

“Because she wants to talk to you, Lucas. Professor Polson wants to ask you some questions. About Nicole. I told her what you told me. And about Patrick, too. And what I’ve seen. She’ll believe you. She needs to interview you, though.”

“You talked to a professor about this? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Lucas, it’s important. She can help.”

“Help? What’s she going to do to help?”

Perry opened his mouth to answer, but could think of nothing to say.

It was raining when Perry and Professor Polson had met, after class, at Espresso Royale. They sat at a table near the back, far from the windows that faced the street, but Perry could hear rain on the roof—hard, fast rain, like a lot of small feet running furiously overhead—and Professor Polson’s dark hair was curled in damp ringlets that clung to her neck and the sides of her face. She looked cold, wearing only a silk dress and a cardigan, and she’d gotten soaked, it seemed, on her walk over from Godwin Honors Hall. Perry had gone ahead when she’d told him she had to stop by the library and drop off a book before meeting him. Now, looking across the table at her, he felt bad. He’d had an umbrella. If he’d known she didn’t, he would have given her his own, or walked with her to the library and then to the café. She wrapped her hands around the white paper cup and brought it to her mouth to breathe in the steam before she sipped from it. It was the kind of thing Perry had seen women do in movies—drink a cup of coffee like this, with both hands, sipping and peering up over the rims of their cups at the same time, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone do it in real life. Professor Polson’s hands were very white and thin, with a few pale blue veins crisscrossing them.

“I’d like to interview Lucas,” she said. “Have you told him that you shared his information with me?”

“No,” Perry said. “But he never told me I couldn’t tell anyone. I’ll find him. I’ll bring him to your office. I think he’d be willing.”

“Maybe not the office,” Professor Polson said. “I’d like to record it. I don’t want him to be inhibited by the office. Let’s meet off campus. Perhaps you could bring him to my apartment.”

“Sure,” Perry said.

“After that, we’ll see. Maybe Patrick Wright, too. What do you think?”

Patrick had been, it seemed, avoiding Perry since the night he’d spoken about Nicole. He’d been drinking when he called Perry. They barely knew each other—Patrick had been a sophomore on Perry’s and Craig’s hall at Godwin the year before—but he knew that Perry had gone to high school with Nicole, and he knew that Perry’s roommate had been the one who’d had the accident that had killed her. (“I just wondered,” Patrick had slurred, “you know. Have you seen her? Am I losing my mind, Perry? Whass happening here?”) Perry’d had no idea what to say to Patrick, so he had stammered something about sobering up and calling back in the morning, but Patrick never called, and Perry didn’t run into him. He’d heard the details from Lucas.

“But, let’s see how it goes with Lucas first. And, Perry?” She put the cup down on the table between them and tucked her hands somewhere inside her sweater. “Have you told anyone else—for instance, anyone else on the faculty—about any of this?”

Perry had no idea why he was unable to hold her gaze. He hadn’t told anyone, and he had no reason to lie to Professor Polson, but he glanced down at her cup instead of at her. There was something about her eyes. She had crow’s feet—something he knew women worried about, because his mother had about a hundred different potions to combat those and was always complaining that they didn’t do a thing—but around Professor Polson’s eyes, they were crinkly and intriguing. They made her look both sexy and wise.

“Perry?” she asked again.

“No,” he said. “No, ma’am. I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not even Craig. Not even my parents. You’re the only one I’ve talked to about any of this.”

Professor Polson removed a hand from the place she’d had it tucked between her sweater and her dress, and raised it over her cup, and said, “I’m not asking you not to. I’m just curious what the rumors might be, if any.”

“I understand,” Perry said, nodding.

“And I don’t want to mislead you, Perry. My angle on this might not be exactly what you’re hoping for. I believe what you’re telling me, that you believe it, and that what you’re hearing from others, like Lucas—I believe you’re each telling the truth as you see it. But I also know that death is a deep, potent, incomprehensible force on the psyche—especially for the young. In other words, I’m not necessarily on a hunt with you for Nicole Werner, Perry.”

“I understand that,” Perry said.

“But I also believe you. I believe in your sincerity, and also in your intelligence,” she said. “I have no reason not to. Based on what I’ve seen so far, you’re an impressive person, Perry. I’m proud to take on this project with you.”

“Why would she believe me?” Lucas asked. He lifted one shoulder, let it fall again, and it seemed to Perry that his shirt shifted oddly on his back, as if he might be even thinner under his clothes than he appeared to be.

“She believes me,” Perry said. “She’s open-minded. I mean, I don’t think you have anything to lose, Lucas. She’s not going to have us both committed, or—”

Lucas shrugged again, and said, shaking his head and starting to walk away, as if the conversation were over, “I’ve definitely got nothing to lose.”

27

“Who is that guy?” Craig asked. Nicole was wrapping and wrapping a long red scarf around her face. Only her eyes were showing by the time she was done.

Hard little bits of snow flew at their faces as they walked across campus. Craig held onto her hand, but between his insulated ski glove and her fat wool mitten, he might as well have been holding anything—the university mascot’s paw, a tree branch swathed in bandages. She said something into the scarf, but he couldn’t hear it.

“What?”

Nicole shook her head. She looked over at him. There were little heartbreaking flecks of snow on her black eyelashes. He couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell by her eyes that she was smiling, and he decided to drop the subject.

But, a few days later, Craig saw the guy again: thick-shouldered, blond buzz-cut, slushing in black boots through the snow across the yard of the Omega Theta Tau house only seconds before Nicole appeared on the front porch, wrapping the scarf around and around her face again, raising a mittened hand to Craig.

“That was him again,” Craig said.

“Who?”

“That guy, Nicole. Don’t play dumb. He had to have just left the house. Again. That’s the third time this week I’ve seen that guy coming or going from the house. He leaves just before you do. Those are his footprints.” Craig pointed to the melting impressions on the lawn.

Nicole squinted at the footprints, and then looked in the direction of the blue-jacketed man on the other side of the street. She shrugged her shoulders, shook her head, looked up at Craig, and raised her eyebrows as if the mystery intrigued her as much as it did him.

“That’s not a frat guy,” Craig said. “That’s not some sorority sister’s boyfriend. That’s a man.”

“Well,” Nicole said. “Some of the sisters date men, you know. We’re not all strictly into boys.”

“You know what I mean,” Craig said. He took her trigonometry text out of her hands and tucked it under his arm. He’d lost his gloves by then, maybe left them in the cafeteria, and the tips of his fingers were completely numb, but he knew enough from watching sitcoms that you didn’t let your girlfriend haul a book this heavy around without helping.

“What I mean is,” he went on, “that guy doesn’t look like he belongs around here.”

Nicole slipped her hand through his free arm and leaned against him. Even through the layers of nylon and down feathers between them he thought he could feel the little thrill of her heart beating against his side. It was a Thursday afternoon, the time of the week they usually headed straight to Starbucks to linger, holding hands, with their cappuccinos and their unopened textbooks between them. He’d looked forward to it since going to bed the night before. But when they got to the corner of State and Campus Boulevard, Nicole stopped and said, “Craig, I can’t do Starbucks this afternoon. I told Josie I’d meet her back at our room. We have to start making tissue roses for the formal. We—”

“You have to start today?” (Whining. He wished he weren’t, but he was whining.) “I thought the formal was in, like, three weeks.”

“No, it’s in four weeks, but you have no idea how many of these things we have to make. And Josie and I are it. We’re the only ones assigned to the roses, and there have to be at least five thousand.”

“What?” Craig literally stopped in his tracks at the absurdity of this. “Five thousand tissue roses?”

Nicole laughed and nodded. They’d gotten to the edge of campus, and the arm Craig was using to carry her textbook was cramped. He shifted the book to the other, and then stepped around Nicole, put his stiff arm around her shoulders, exposing his bare hand to the cold again—but who cared, since it was already completely numb?

“Five thousand?”

“Yeah!” Nicole said, seeming to share his astonishment. “And it takes us like an hour to make a hundred. So far, we’ve only got, like, a hundred and ten.”

“What the hell is this?” Craig asked. “Some kind of indentured servitude? I mean, it’s not like they’re paying you to be in this sorority. Don’t they think you have a life?”

He was sincerely outraged, but Nicole laughed pleasantly, and Craig heard the sound of it echo off the brick wall of the Engineering Building a few feet ahead of them, like a lot of little bells.

“Craig, they think Omega Theta Tau should be my life!”

“Well, is that what you want, Nicole? I mean, do you want to be locked in a room making paper roses with Josie for the next four years?”

“Well, it’s always the new pledges who make the roses, actually, so next year—”

“Okay, not roses. Next year you’ll be baking crumpets or something. It’ll always be something.”

“Sorry, Craig.” He looked at the side of her face. The scarf was down around her chin now, and she was doing that pouty thing with her lips. At the bridge of her nose was the faintest bump—an adorable little glitch there that made it possible, Craig thought, to tell her apart from the two or three other completely perfect girls in the world. He was about to apologize for getting all worked up, but she brightened suddenly and turned to him. “You could help!” she said. “Josie would be fine with that. She suggested it anyway—getting some guys to come and work on it, if, like, we got some beer to pay them with or something. You could bring, like, Lucas.”

Craig felt the familiar sensation of sweat breaking out in a fine film under his arms, which happened each time Nicole brought up the subject of Josie, of his doing anything that might involve Josie—Josie joining them for a pizza, for instance. Or even when Nicole just said something like “Josie says to say hi.” Or the one time he almost lost his dinner as he and Nicole were stepping out of the cafeteria and there was Josie with her arm hooked through Lucas’s, both of them clearly stoned out of their minds:

“Hey, big boy,” Josie had said, waving at Craig with all her fingers up near her mouth.

“Josie,” Nicole had blurted out, laughing. “You’re totally stoned!”

“Yup,” Josie said. “Be careful, or I’ll jump your boyfriend’s bones.”

Nicole had playfully slapped Josie’s arm, while Craig started walking away as fast as he could. Nicole followed him, still laughing, and Josie called something else in their direction, but it was slurred, and Craig couldn’t hear it over his pounding heart, and after they’d rounded the corner, Nicole had stopped him, turned him to face her, and looked at him carefully.

Outside, the sun was setting behind the glittering lead-paned windows that looked out onto the Godwin Hall courtyard, and her eyes in that light seemed nearly fluorescent in their blueness—like the ocean in Belize, like the sky from the top of Mount Washington. “What’s with you, Craig?” she asked, suddenly terrifyingly serious. “And Josie?”

For a second, Craig couldn’t breathe, but he worked hard to hold her eyes as if he had nothing to hide. All these weeks he’d held on to some glimmer of hope (false, he could see now) that maybe Josie had told Nicole all about it, and Nicole didn’t care—or, at least, that she understood. He’d never had any evidence of that, he realized, and he had no reason whatsoever to believe that if and when Nicole heard about what had happened between him and Josie she wouldn’t dump him in a heartbeat. Especially now that they’d been seeing each other for two months and he hadn’t said a word.

“Nothing,” Craig said. It sounded ridiculous. His voice actually squeaked when he said it.

“Then why does she hate you?”

“What?” Craig tried to make his expression look like one of surprise.

“Why does Josie hate you?”

He tried to open his eyes even wider. “She hates me?”

Nicole burst out laughing. “Uh, yeah. You haven’t noticed?”

Craig shrugged.

“Well, you avoid her like the plague, so you know something. You quit coming to the study group even though you seemed so into it for a while. You never even walk by our room if she might be in there. Practically every time I even say her name you change the subject as quick as you can.”

His mind was blank. His mouth was open. Over the weeks, Craig had tried to think of a few things he might possibly be able say if this subject came up. Excuses. Lies. Or at least some kind of spin-doctoring. He’d tried to come up with some way to make it sound like Josie had been so drunk and insistent that night that Craig felt he had to do something or it would have hurt her feelings, which was pretty much true, except that he’d been completely happy to fuck her; it had nothing to do with being polite. But maybe if he could find the right words? Nicole, Craig knew, was pretty naive when it came to people and their secret sex lives. She was always astonished to find out that some unmarried celebrity was pregnant, or that Craig had seen some girl from her hall slip out of the room of some boy on his hall in the morning. (“They were probably studying,” she’d say in total seriousness, and then punch him hard in the bicep when he laughed.) It was possible, wasn’t it, that she’d believe whatever he said?

But here, now, actually confronted this way in the hallway near the cafeteria with Nicole’s beautiful eyes lit up in the sunset—all that pink and mauve pouring through the window panes, and her little half-smile, her head cocked like a chickadee, waiting—not only his mind but his soul went completely blank. She waited another long second or two, and then she shook her head. “O-kay,” she said. “Uh, just forget I asked.”

He tried as hard as he could to read her face as it was closing down before him. Did she know? Did she know and not care? Did she not know, and if she did know, would she slap him as hard as she could and never speak to him again?

He had no idea, he realized, and remembered fifth grade. Map reading. He couldn’t do it. He tried to fake it (“Mongolia?”), which resulted in gales of laughter. This was what it would be like in Limbo, he realized. It could go either way—everything that mattered.

“Nicole, I—” he blurted with no idea what he was going to say. Luckily, she held up a hand to stop him.

“You’re probably right,” she said. “I probably don’t want to know. Or, actually, I think I probably do know.”

Craig took a step back. He was afraid to look at anything but the place directly between Nicole’s eyes. He was wearing an army green T-shirt, and he was sure there must be spreading triangles of sweat at his pits. Nicole wrapped her arms around herself, holding on to her own arms hard. Her knuckles went white.

“You liked her first, didn’t you?” she asked, a little sob in her voice. “She’s why you were in the study group, and then you found out that she’s got that boyfriend from Grosse Isle. That Princeton guy.”

Craig took a trembling breath, trying not to explode with relief. It was like watching in the rearview mirror as the tanker that had been barreling down on you flipped straight into a ditch. “No!” he said, finding that he could blink again because now he was actually telling the truth. “No! My God! Nicole, I was knocked out by you the first time I saw you. You were the only reason I joined that group. I hadn’t even seen your roommate. I’ve never felt this way about any girl. Josie? Jesus. No…”

“Craig,” Nicole said. “I know you love me now. But I also know that there are other girls, girls who are prettier, and—”

This time Craig did explode, with laughter. He put his hands in his hair, as if to keep his head on his neck, and then he rushed at her, lifted her off her feet, laughing and kissing her and twirling her around in his arms as the after-dinner crowd started pouring out of the cafeteria, which had just closed—all those faceless others splitting around him and Nicole, not even glancing at them, and Craig thought he could just hold her and kiss her there forever. She was laughing, too, and he hoped she thought he was so sweaty and his heart was beating so hard because it was so warm in the hallway, and because he was so in love.

That afternoon he didn’t say anything more about the paper roses, or the amount of her time they were going to take away from him between now and her formal (which she couldn’t even invite him to because he wasn’t in a frat: “I’m just going to go with a sister,” she’d assured him when he’d asked).

They kept walking, past their Starbucks, back to the dorm so she could start on the roses. They’d changed the topic to how crazy it was that someone had spray-painted a different word under every Stop sign in town, so the signs read, STOP WAR, STOP SHRUBBERY, STOP STOPPING, STOP UP, STOP OVER, STOP DIAPER RASH, etc. They speculated about which campus group would have done it, or if it was just one weird guy, or maybe high school students—who knew? Craig had his arms wrapped around her, and his mouth and nose were full of the smell and taste of her red wool scarf. His hands were so numb he had to look at them every few feet to make sure the trig book was still in them.

Then Craig saw him again: up ahead, that same guy who’d come out of the Omega Theta Tau house just before Nicole. He was walking out of the bank in his blue jacket, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his khaki pants.

“There he is again,” Craig said, pointing.

“Who?” Nicole asked absently. She wasn’t even looking in the direction he was pointing.

“That guy who was in your house. That man.”

Nicole looked around this time, seeming to scan the horizon, not finding anything of interest. “So?”

“I just want to know who he is,” Craig said. “Who is he, Nicole?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t even see who you’re pointing at.” She was looking in the exact opposite direction. The guy turned around then, and Craig was sure he looked right at them, as if he’d known they were there, as if he were looking for them.

There was a patch on the guy’s jacket pocket. Craig could see it clearly now: “EMT.”

“He’s an ambulance driver or something,” Craig said, more to himself than Nicole.

“So?” she said.

“Why does he hang out at your sorority? Why is he always there?”

Nicole held a hand up to her forehead and looked in the wrong direction again, and then said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about Craig. There’s no EMT hanging out at the sorority.”

Craig looked at her and said, “How did you know he was an EMT?”

“You just said it,” she said, and seemed to stomp her foot a little in frustration. “Sheesh!”

“No, I didn’t,” Craig said. “I said ‘ambulance driver,’ after I saw there was an EMT patch on his pocket.”

“Same thing,” she said.

“It’s not,” he said.

She continued looking around, exactly where the guy was not standing, and then the guy turned his back and stepped into the street, and a white truck pulled into the intersection, blocking Craig’s view, and by the time it had passed, the man was gone and Craig was staring at nothing but a brick wall.

Nicole got on her tiptoes and kissed his cheeks. “Okay, I guess this is where we say good-bye,” she said. “You’re going back to Starbucks?”

“Without you?”

“Why not?” she asked. “You’ll study better without me there anyway. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”

“Okay,” Craig said, feeling a little bit like he’d been duped in some kind of card trick—not an unpleasant one, just confusing—and then she was half-walking, half-skipping away from him in the direction of Godwin Hall.

28

Professor Polson’s lecture that day concerned the soul.

“In some cultures, you can never speak the name of the deceased person again because the soul might hear its name and come looking for its body. Or, worse, the body might come looking for its soul.

“In fact, the tradition of cremation, which seems to us one of the most modern means for dealing with human remains, has its origins in this impulse. If the body is burned to ashes, there can be no reinhabiting, no return.

“Some anthropologists believe that many mourning customs originally served the purpose of keeping the dead at bay. Schneerweiss—you read the translation of the article, right?—hypothesized that the reason widows were instructed to wear black for at least a year and to change their hairstyle was so as to be unrecognizable when their dead husbands came looking for them.

“Why,” Professor Polson asked, “might this be? Why would any self-respecting widow not be thrilled to have her dead husband return to her?”

Most of the class responded in unison, “Putrefaction!”

“Exactly. The fear, the aversion, that we think of as superstitious or religious is, in fact, based on physical reality. It’s based on experience. Difficult experience. So, primitive people, we see, cannot be so easily dismissed as the sort of fools we tend to think of them as. In actuality, they had a much closer, much more intimate experience with the dead than most of us will ever have—unless we go to war or into the mortuary arts. They knew what they were trying to avoid.”

She turned to the chalkboard, on which she’d written a quote from Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain:

Perry tapped his pencil over a sentence from that day’s reading:

He wanted to ask Professor Polson there in class, instead of in her office (where she often seemed too preoccupied about childcare to talk about the subject at any length), if she had any thoughts on this, if she thought that this idea of seeing the dead one’s body, and recognizing that his or her soul was no longer animating it, was the basis of even more superstition and folklore. He had, himself, some ideas about this.

But she was answering some bland question presented to her by Elwood Campbell about why, given the horrors of putrefaction, so many people were not repulsed by the dead, but fascinated by them, wanted to see pictures of them. “What about people who love to look at gore?” he asked, and snickered. Perry suspected Elwood was speaking for himself. He’d been one of the students who hadn’t lunged forward to get a closer look at Marilyn Monroe’s morgue photograph, and Perry had the impression it was because Elwood was already familiar with it, that he was probably one of those guys trolling the gore.com-type websites, or posting things on them.

“How about necrophilia types? Right?” Elwood prompted. “You know, people who want to have sex with corpses?”

A few of the girls shook their heads and glanced at one another uncomfortably, but Professor Polson didn’t bat an eye.

“‘And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride / In the sepulchre there by the sea…’ Poe,” she said, “was only one of many poets and philosophers who has described the death of a young woman as one of the most beautiful sights one could behold.”

“Yeah,” Elwood said, seeming to take this as affirmation of his opinion.

“Kind of puts the ‘fun’ back into funeral,” Brett Barber said, and almost everyone burst out laughing, but none laughed as hard as Elwood.

“On that note,” Professor Polson said, shaking her head, “we’re done for today. See you Tuesday.”

She didn’t wait for the students to leave before she herself left, and she wasn’t in her office when Perry passed by it a little later.

“Sweetheart,” Perry’s mother said when he talked to her on the phone that evening. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course, Mom. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry so much, okay?”

“Is Craig okay?”

“Craig’s okay. Not great. But he’s definitely okay.”

“You’re a good friend, Perry. I’m proud of you for sticking by him. That poor boy. Tell him we said hello, okay? Bring him to visit, if—”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Perry said.

“No, of course not. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wish we could do something to—”

Despite the outpouring of animosity toward Craig in Bad Axe (someone had actually put up a Wanted poster in Leazenby Park with Craig’s photograph and “For Murder” scrawled in red Magic Marker underneath, and this had made the papers all over the state), Perry’s mother believed absolutely that the accident that had killed Nicole had not been Craig’s fault. Even before the blood tests came back and showed conclusively that Craig hadn’t been drinking, hadn’t been smoking dope, she’d believed Perry that driving drunk wasn’t something Craig would have done.

“How are things there?” Perry asked. “With you guys? Is business good?”

“Oh,” his mother said. “You know your dad. He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. We could be billionaires or in debt to our eyeballs for all I know. But he’s making enough money to pay for that boat of his. And I got a new winter coat.” (It was a game his mother always played, and they both knew it was a game. She was, after all, the one who kept the books for Edwards and Son. She probably made 90 percent of their business decisions without bothering to let Perry’s father in on them.) “Yesterday,” she said, her tone becoming lower, more somber. “I saw the Werner sisters.”

“Oh,” Perry said. “Where?”

“At the cemetery.”

“Why were you at the cemetery, Mom?”

“I was just driving by. I could see them from the road. They were putting flowers on Nicole’s grave. So I pulled over. It was her birthday, Perry. Her nineteenth.”

“Jesus,” Perry said.

His mother didn’t bother to scold him for taking the Lord’s name in vain. She said, “I know.”

It surprised him that he hadn’t realized, hadn’t remembered, that it was Nicole’s birthday. Now, he recalled all those early-October cupcakes in elementary school and, during middle school, all the girls getting excited about some slumber party Nicole was having. There was a lot of hoopla every year surrounding her birthday. Her locker decorated, singing in the cafeteria, that sort of thing. (She’d always been the most popular girl in every class.)

Now her sisters were gathering in the cemetery to decorate her grave.

“How did they seem?” Perry asked. “Her sisters?”

“Well, about like you’d imagine,” his mother said, and then said no more, as if he could imagine. But he couldn’t. He really could not imagine them in a cemetery. Those perky blondes, and all that laughter. He couldn’t imagine them bent over any grave at all, let alone their little sister’s. “They didn’t have anything good to say about Craig,” she said, “as you’d imagine. I didn’t tell them he was your roommate again. I don’t think they know you even know him, and I think that’s just as well.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, and then thought, Shit.

Had Craig known it was Nicole’s birthday?

Surely, he had.

Was that why he’d hurried out of the apartment so early that morning and Perry hadn’t seen him all day?

Who knew how many anniversaries of this or that thing—her birthday, their first date, their first kiss, the day he’d given her that amber ring—Craig was living through, and would live through? He wasn’t going to tell Perry about them, Perry was pretty sure, but he still felt like a bad friend for not knowing.

“They told me that their parents aren’t doing so well, Perry,” his mother said. He waited for her to go on, but she said nothing more about Mr. and Mrs. Werner. They talked, instead, about the Bad Axe football team—the worst season in a decade, although they never had been very good.

As his mother spoke, Perry walked over to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out a folder. He slid the photograph out, laid it on his desk, pulled the chain on his desk lamp, and bent over it, looking straight down into the glossy image, where, in the corner, blurred but familiar, he saw the fleeing form of the girl he knew—he knew—was Nicole Werner.

He stared until his eyes went dry, and he had to blink as his mother told him more of the details of the family business, of her days, of how much she loved and missed him.

“I love you, too,” Perry said.

“You be good. Stay safe. Eat vegetables. Get enough sleep. Don’t—”

He closed his eyes and flipped the photograph over on his desk so he could focus.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Tell Dad I love him. I’ll see you soon.”

29

“What is this?” Mira asked. She was trying to control the alarm in her voice, so the question came out breathy, hoarse, as if she were doing an imitation of Marilyn Monroe.

“Obviously, it’s a duffel bag full of clothes,” Clark said. “I’m sure you won’t remember my having told you I’m taking the twins to visit my mother.”

“What?”

“Twins? You know, those two kids who run around here? I think you gave birth to them?”

“Clark, can you quit with the sarcasm? What are you talking about?”

“I told you weeks ago, Mira. It’s my mother’s birthday. I’m taking the twins to visit her for two days. What do you care? It’ll give you time to work.”

Mira stared at Clark. She’d been preoccupied, she knew, but she would never have forgotten something like this. Clark had never taken the twins anywhere without her, certainly not to visit his mother. Mira herself was the one who had to plan and organize every visit to Clark’s mother, for whom Clark seemed to have nothing but a terrible cocktail of pity and contempt that made it nearly impossible for him to carry on a conversation with the poor old woman without it ending in an argument.

Visiting? With the twins? “No,” Mira said, and shook her head.

Clark let his jaw drop theatrically. For a flash of a second, Mira saw his molars—a little mountain range of bone in the dark. He shut his mouth before she could look more closely, but it had seemed possible to her in that quick glimpse that his teeth looked unhealthy.

A dark spot in the back?

Maybe, she thought, it was why his breath had begun to smell strangely—not bad, exactly, but organic. On the rare occasions they kissed, she thought she could taste clover on him, or the paper of an old book.

“Uh, no?” Clark asked. “Did you just say no, I can’t take my sons to visit my mother for two days? I’m sorry, Mira, but I’m not sure you have the right to grant or deny that permission, especially since if I go without them there will be no one here to take care of them.”

“I could have made arrangements to go to if you’d told me,” Mira said. “I would have.” Even as she said it, she wondered how she could have, whether she actually would have.

“And cancel your classes? Postpone your research? God forbid, Mira! I mean, the way you go on and on about the importance of those classes, and how the whole world hinges on your student evaluations, and how if you lose a research day, the fall of Rome is sure to follow, it certainly never crossed my mind that you ‘would have made arrangements’ to go with us.”

Mira stepped away from him. She tried to imagine herself as the director of this scene. Or as its literary critic. Clark, the main character here, was far too agitated for this to be about his mother’s birthday, or even his bitterness about his wife’s work schedule.

“Why now?” she asked, attempting the dispassionate tone she took with students, with colleagues, although every nerve ending in her was vibrating with emotion. “Why are you going now? In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never once—”

“Because my fucking mother is turning seventy, for God’s sake. I don’t want to be like you, Mira, and just show up finally for the fucking funeral.”

Mira looked at her stinging hand to find that she had just slapped Clark hard on the side of his face without realizing it, without realizing that she was even capable of it.

Then she looked to up to see that he was reeling backward, swearing.

It took a few more heartbeats before she could focus enough on her surroundings again to understand that the twins, awakened from their nap in the other room by Clark’s shouting, had begun to scream and cry. And a few more heartbeats passed before Mira realized that there were tears streaking down her own face, that she was sobbing.

Clark had been the only person to whom she’d ever spoken of it, and it had been the hardest confession she’d ever made, and she remembered him cradling her head in his lap as she wept, years ago, when finally she’d told someone, and the relief that someone knew: “I didn’t go home when my father told me that my mother was dying because I was afraid I would flunk my exam…”

And the way he’d kissed and consoled her, and stroked her hair, and how he had kissed her tears—how she’d known then that she would marry him, that he was answer to all the prayers she’d never even said, the prayer for forgiveness.

The prayer for self-forgiveness.

“You were just a kid, Mira, really,” Clark had said. “How could you have known? You loved your mother. She knew that. She understood…”

Now Clark was holding a hand to his cheek, staring at her with narrowed eyes.

“Fuck you, Mira,” he said. “Fuck you.”

30

“Who’s there? Perry?”

Craig sat up in bed. He was still sleeping, wasn’t he? That was it. That was why someone was standing just outside his door, which was open a crack—a bare leg in the dark hallway, the fluttering of some airy material. A girl. This was a dream.

A girl.

She nudged the door open with her foot. A silver sandal. Toenails painted red.

It was going to be a sex dream.

How long since he’d had one of those?

Since long before—

She wrapped the fingers of one hand around the door. The fingers were elegant, long, unfamiliar. Her fingernails were also painted red.

“Who’s there?” he asked again, this time in a whisper.

A bit of the dress or gown or sheet she was wearing wafted in, and then back out, as if in answer, and then she stepped farther into the room, and Craig could feel his heart pounding in every pulse point—his chest, his wrists, his throat, his temples.

Her long dark hair was swept to one side and her eyes were closed. The lids were painted dark blue. Her lips were pale, but they glistened. He could see straight through the thing—the gown, yes, or drape. Her breasts were perfect globes with wide pink nipples, and he could see the dark triangle of pubic hair between her legs. She opened her eyes.

They were gray, or they were hidden in the shadows of her voluminous, shining hair.

She parted her lips and took a slow step, closer to him.

He would have moved—whether to approach her or to flee, he wasn’t sure—except that he couldn’t. He was in that paralysis part of a nightmare where you want to scream but have no voice, want to run but can’t move your limbs.

He managed, however, to whisper again: “What’s your name?”

Her voice was like air when she spoke. He was surprised he could even hear it. Or he’d read her lips, which formed the word I’m and then Alice.

“Alice,” he repeated.

She nodded as if there were a great weight on her back, as if the sound of her own name reminded her of it.

“Alice who?”

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling then, and he could see them better in the overhead light. They were a blazing blue. Turquoise. Extraordinary. Especially against her white skin, her black hair.

“Meyers,” she said in that husky-nothing that was her voice. “Alice Meyers.”

“Alice Meyers?” Craig said. He knew the name, but had no idea where he knew it from. He said it again: “Alice Meyers.”

“Can I come in?”

At first he could say nothing, but then, knowing that it would be the best answer in a nightmare like this, Craig managed, “No.”

Suddenly she was screaming at the top of her lungs, a scream that sounded like a horse being beaten, or something worse, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again she was gone, and he heard the front door of the apartment slam shut, and the sound of someone running down the hallway, and he was sitting up, screaming in the pitch black room, only a bit of moonlight slipping through the crack in the window shade. Help! Help! Help! Finally he managed to silence himself, put his face in the crook of his arm, squeezed his eyes shut, bit his lip until the silence became his own heartbeat, slowing, maybe, slowing down. Shit. Shit. Fuck. “Perry?” he finally managed to whimper into the darkness.

As Craig stumbled out of his room and crossed the hallway to Perry’s room, he was still in a state of panic, but also shame, turning on the lights as he went, trying not to whimper. (God, like going to find your Mommy in the middle of the night: I had a bad dream…)

But surely Perry had heard him, and would be wondering what the fuck—

He opened the door to Perry’s room and could see in the light from the hallway that there was no one in Perry’s bed.

“Perry?” he called toward the kitchen, the living room. But it was a tiny apartment—if Perry had been there, of course he would have heard him before this.

Hell, probably everybody in the apartment house had heard him.

Perry wasn’t there. Definitely not there.

So, where the hell was he? Sleeping over at some girl’s he hadn’t mentioned to Craig? (Maybe the Mystery Chick from freshman year—the one whose panties Craig had found on the floor at the foot of Perry’s bed? Perry had refused to acknowledge those, no matter how much Craig made fun of him.) Just because Perry didn’t seem to have a sex life didn’t mean he didn’t.

He was starting to calm down, to feel more pissed and jilted than terrified. He went to the front door and locked it, even hooked the chain. If fucking Perry came home that night, he could knock his ass off, and if Craig didn’t hear him, he could sleep in the hall.

And then he unhooked the chain, because that was stupid. Hell, Perry was entitled to a night out. Still, he thought, he’d have liked to have had Perry there—to laugh with, if nothing else, about the ridiculous dream.

I’m Alice Meyers. It would have been funny if—well, if it hadn’t scared the shit out of him. Craig was back in bed with the lights out and the blankets pulled up over his ear when he realized where he knew that name from.

Of course.

Fuck.

Godwin Hall.

The Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room.

His heart was beating hard again, but he wasn’t going to freak out. It had only been a dream. He turned the bedside lamp on, picked up the crappy novel written by his father’s best friend and rival, Dave Cain—The Boiling Point—and decided he’d stay up reading until morning.

It could only be a few more hours until it was light outside.

Right?

31

It was the second week of October. Until now, the weather had been unseasonably warm—like summer all through September, and like early September at the beginning of October. Then the weather changed, literally, overnight.

Shelly went to bed with the windows wide open because the house was stuffy from having been shut up all day (the morning weather report had predicted rain, so she’d closed everything, although rain never came), and had woken up in the fetal position in one corner of the bed with a sheet and a thin comforter twisted around her. Jeremy was purring, pushed up against her hip as if huddling there for protection from the elements, and the curtains were whipping around in the window frame. The temperature in the room could not have been above fifty degrees.

“Shit,” she said, jumping out of bed, sending Jeremy tearing out of the room as she hurried to the windows to close them. How had she slept through this complete scene change? The clock on her nightstand said 7:02, but it was pitch black outside—huge rolling dark clouds in the sky seemed to be preparing for a battle of epic proportions. Shelly grabbed her robe and wrapped it around her, and followed Jeremy out to the kitchen. Passing the thermostat on the way, she twisted the dial to seventy degrees—five degrees higher than she usually kept it even in the dead of winter, and eight degrees higher than her ex-husband had ever allowed her to turn it.

The weather change was going to be a problem. She’d need to find her down jacket and waterproof boots before she walked to work, and she was already running late, and the cat needed feeding, and she needed a shower—and the disconcerting darkness, accompanied as it was by inky rain, and the unappealing prospect of trekking across town, gave her the idea that she might, this being Tuesday and Josie’s early-morning day, call in sick.

What could it hurt? She was caught up with all the work she had to do for the next four concerts, and she had no new projects that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. She could just call the cell phone Josie kept permanently attached to her ear, say she wasn’t feeling well, and then call Security to unlock the doors so Josie could get in and answer the phones. Surely Josie could handle the one or two phone calls she might get while filing her nails in the office and playing around online.

The plan coursed through Shelly like fresh blood.

She’d had no idea, she realized, until this moment, how badly she wanted a weekday away from that place. Had she become one of those people who hated their jobs? Only once before in nineteen years had she consciously, brazenly, called in sick when she was certifiably in the pink of health, and that was the morning she woke up for the first time beside Paula and realized that it would take a lot more than the Chamber Music Society to pull her out of that bed if Paula was going to be in it.

Even given all that had happened, that snatched day had been a good decision: a stolen, sensuous morning, the details of which (coffee spilled on the pillows, eggs grown cold, the sheets twisted around their legs) were seared onto Shelly’s memory forever. The memory of that day still filled her with pleasure and contentment, even knowing now, as she did, that Paula would, a few months later, go back to her husband when he was diagnosed with clinical depression and when her grown children told her their father might die if she didn’t go back to him and that they would never speak to her again if he did.

True, it had broken Shelly’s heart. But even that seemed somehow beautiful, being proof as it was that she’d been capable of that kind of love at least once in her life. She’d walked through the world like a zombie for an entire season—like the beast in the Stephen Crane poem, eating of her heart and enjoying it, because it was so bitter, and because it was her heart. But she carried within her the deep satisfaction that she had thrown everything she had into that love, had done everything humanly possible to persuade Paula to stay with her.

That, Shelly had learned, was the difference between heartbreak and regret:

Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren’t accompanied by regret.

She watched the storm from the kitchen window and sipped her coffee calmly, even when Jeremy, unnerved by the storm, abandoned his cat food prematurely (usually he licked the bowl until it was shining) and ran back into the bedroom, where, she knew, he would hide under the bed.

It was 8:45, and Shelly decided it was time to call Josie on her cell phone, so she wouldn’t arrive at the Chamber Music Society to locked doors—although, with this weather, it seemed unlikely to Shelly that the girl was dutifully making her way to the office.

“Shelly?”

Josie answered on the first ring—or at the first note of some pop star’s latest single, whatever Josie’s personalized ring tone might be—and Shelly was surprised to think that Josie either knew her phone number by heart, or had her number programmed into her phone. She didn’t remember Josie ever calling her at home.

“Josie? Hello?”

“Yeah! I’m at Fourth and South U. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Oh,” Shelly said, “that’s not why I called. You’re not late—” (for a change, she thought). “I’m calling because—because I’m not feeling very well, and I—”

“Are you okay?”

The alarm in the girl’s voice was, frankly, touching. Shelly could imagine Josie holding the phone to her ear inside the hood of one of her black or gray cashmere hoodies, bent over, wind in her face, black ballet flats exposing the pale tops of her feet to the elements, stopping to hear Shelly more clearly.

“Oh, sure, I’m okay,” Shelly said. “I’m perfectly fine. Just under the weather, I guess. I was going to see if you could take calls in the office this morning without—”

“Oh, no problem,” Josie said. “I can stay all day if you need me to. I only have one class, and it’s—”

“That’s not necessary. You can leave when you were supposed to, at noon, but if, when you do, you could leave a note on the door and…?”

Shelly went on with the instructions, including Security, who would need to come and let Josie in and lock up when she left, and Josie enthusiastically agreed to everything Shelly said, and by the end of the phone call Shelly felt both relieved and confident about choosing that day to call in. Maybe Josie was starting to settle into the semester, and into the routine of the job, and her attitude was changing accordingly. Maybe Shelly wouldn’t need to fire her after all.

She put the phone back in its cradle and looked around the dark kitchenette for a minute, and then turned and peered into the living room (coffee table, overstuffed couch, braided mat for Jeremy next to Shelly’s reading lamp), feeling a little confused about what she was supposed to do next (shower? get dressed? check email?) until she realized it was okay, it was perfectly fine, to go back to bed, and she did.

The pillowcases smelled fresh, and like lavender. The sheets had cooled pleasantly, and the staticky pummeling of the rain on the roof was both calming and deafening, and Jeremy came out from under the bed and found his place at her hip, and Shelly was asleep within seconds.

It must have been about two hours later, in Shelly’s dreams, that the doorbell rang—a pale blue bird opening and closing its mouth in a cage at a mall she used to shop at with her mother as a child. That dream bird was making the muffled chiming noise of a doorbell instead of a whistle. It sounded maybe three or four times before Shelly realized that she was sleeping, and that the doorbell actually was ringing outside of her dream as well as in it, and she swung her legs off the side of the bed. Jeremy, sensing her alarm, jumped off and raced under it, his claws making a desperate scratching noise on the wooden floorboards as he did.

Shelly wasn’t yet sure what time it was, or when the rain had stopped, or even what she was wearing, or why she was in bed instead of at work—and was only slightly less confused by the time she got to the door, got on her tiptoes, pressed her eye to the peephole, and looked out to see Josie Reilly standing there, outside her door.

Josie was wearing one of her skimpy tank tops with a pink hoodie halfway zipped up over it, holding two large Starbucks cups with white lids, and she was looking up at the peephole with a faint little smile on her lip-glossed lips, as if she could see Shelly’s eye peering out at her through it.

32

Professor Polson’s apartment house looked like a place a student would live, Perry thought, not a professor with a family. In fact, last winter he’d met a guy from his International Human Rights seminar who’d lived in this same building. Around midterms the guy had asked Perry to come over to study with him, but when Perry had shown up the guy had been drunk and didn’t seem to remember that he’d wanted to study, or even who Perry was.

Then, and now, the building’s stairwell smelled like old beer soaked into carpet. Lucas climbed the stairs ahead of him, taking each step as if it were much higher than it was. Perry had to slow down so he wouldn’t charge over him. Lucas looked like an old man, holding tightly to the railing, shoulders hunched and bony in his threadbare T-shirt. There was stenciling on the back of the shirt, but it was so faded Perry couldn’t tell if it read, THE FINAL TOUR or SHE FINDS OUT.

“What’s the number?” Lucas asked for the second or third time when they stepped out into the hallway.

“Two thirty-three,” Perry said, and gave Lucas a gentle push in the direction of the door with 233 on it.

Professor Polson opened it before they knocked (she’d had to buzz them in, so she knew they were in the building, coming up the stairs, and then she must have heard them in the hallway) wearing a ruffly purple blouse, long-sleeved and flowered, and faded jeans with a patch on one knee. This outfit was, Perry realized, exactly what he’d imagined she might wear when she wasn’t wearing professor clothes. To class, Professor Polson always wore black—black dresses, black skirts, black jackets—but it looked to him as if she were playing a role that required these costumes, and that in fact she’d be a lot more comfortable in some kind of hippie dress or skirt, some T-shirt with a Monet painting on it. He could easily picture her in a floppy hat and strappy sandals, some kind of bright silk skirt.

She opened the door wide and motioned for them to come in, and then said, “Sit down, boys. I’ll get some tea.”

Perry wandered in behind Lucas, not sure where to go. Lucas was moving toward a chair in one room, and Professor Polson had disappeared into what must have been a kitchen. He could smell that the tea was already brewing—either that or she’d had a candle burning before they’d gotten there, and had just blown it out. The apartment was what his mother would have called a mess. There were books on the floor, some of them open, and a little pile of what looked like sweaters and dishrags next to the couch. The rug was a bright, Oriental embroidered thing, all blazing reds and yellows where it wasn’t worn away in thready gray patches.

Lucas sat down heavily on a green velvet recliner, and it squeaked when he did, and he made a little face, like maybe something had jabbed him in the back. Perry sat on the couch, which looked old and tired, too, but was comfortable, and had a fancy lamp beside it shedding a warm golden light through a lacy lampshade. It seemed to Perry that everything in the apartment could have been either bought at a garage sale for fifty cents or an expensive heirloom—or both. It was, he thought, about the most interesting place he’d ever seen outside of a movie. He had never been able to picture Professor Polson in her apartment, but now that he was here, he knew this is what he would have imagined. When she came in carrying three mugs, he said, “I like your apartment.”

Professor Polson rolled her eyes a little, handed him a mug. “Be careful,” she said, “it’s hot.” Lucas looked up at the cup as she held it down to him as if he had never seen a mug of tea before. Eventually, he reached up and took it.

Since Perry had gone by his place to pick him up, Lucas had been doing everything this way, in slow motion, and Perry had finally just come out and asked him, after Lucas spent about twenty minutes trying to zip up his jacket, seeming unable to fit the two ends of the zipping apparatus together to save his life, “Are you stoned, man?”

“No,” Lucas said, struggling, albeit languidly, with the zipper. “I’m not doing that anymore. I quit. Bad sleep.”

Perry had been about to offer to zip Lucas’s jacket for him when he’d finally managed to do it himself.

“Thanks for coming over, guys,” Professor Polson said. She sat down beside Perry on the couch and rested her mug of tea on the flowered patch on the knee of her jeans. “How are you, Lucas? I haven’t seen you yet this year, have I? Was your summer okay?”

“It was okay,” Lucas said. He was staring into the swirling steam over his cup with some apprehension. “Yeah.”

“Perry told you we wanted to talk to you about—?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said again, and looked up. “He told me.”

“That’s okay with you?”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

For the first time Perry noticed that there was what looked like a perfectly round quarter-size circle of hair missing just over Lucas’s temple. It looked like someone (Lucas himself?) had grabbed a handful of the hair there and yanked.

“Lucas?” Professor Polson said, leaning forward so that, from the angle at which he observed her, Perry could see a silver charm dangling in the neckline of her blouse, there in the dark shadows between her breasts. He looked away, looked over at Lucas, who was now staring at one of the worn-away patches on the Oriental rug.

“Is everything okay?” Professor Polson asked. She was studying him. “You look tired. Are you sleeping? Are you smoking dope, or taking something harder?”

Lucas shook his head, and told her the same thing he’d told Perry, that he’d quit smoking dope “and everything else,” hoping it would help with the sleep. “But I don’t sleep. Not since this thing with—”

There was a long pause as Professor Polson waited for him to finish the sentence, before she finally finished it for him.

“Nicole?”

Lucas brought his hands to his temples and began to rub with his index and forefingers, and Perry saw that he was rubbing in a circular motion at the exact spot where the quarter-size circle of hair was missing.

“Are you really ready to talk about this?” Professor Polson asked. “You know, you don’t have to. I’m not acting with the university in any way. I’m only inquiring into this as a scholar, and my interest in these kinds of things relates to the tradition of these kinds of things. I don’t want to mislead you into thinking I’m a supernaturalist—you understand that? I’m a folklorist.

“I mean, I’ll listen to what you have to say,” she went on. “And I’ll believe you, that you’re telling the truth as you’ve experienced it. But I have some ideas of my own about how these things happen—and eventually, maybe, those ideas might help you, but I don’t know.” She hesitated for a moment, shrugging her shoulders, which Perry thought looked fragile, thin, like the shoulders of a little girl.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, “They might help you feel better, make sense of things, but you might also want to get some professional help, and I’ll give you some references for that. For the sleep problems, if nothing else?”

Lucas took his hands away from his temples, put them in his lap, and looked up at Professor Polson. He nodded.

“So, then, do you mind, Lucas, if I tape-record our conversation? Do you trust me when I say I’ll share this with no one without your written permission? And, in fact, I’d like to give you this, to ask you to read and sign.” She stood and went over to the bookshelf, where a piece of paper lay on top of a row of hardback books. “It states for the record that I won’t share what you’ve shared here with anyone without first obtaining your written permission.”

Lucas took the piece of paper, which fluttered loosely in his hand, and looked at it for a few seconds, nodding again, and when Professor Polson handed him a pen, he signed what seemed to be his name across the bottom of it.

“Okay,” she said, taking the paper from him and putting it back on the shelf. “I’ll make a copy of this and give you the original. So, is it all right if I record what you have to say?”

Lucas said, “Sure, whatever,” and inhaled.

He did not, to Perry, look or sound like someone who would have the ability to speak loud or long enough to tell any kind of story, lucid or otherwise, truth or fiction, but when Professor Polson took out her little recorder—a shining, silver thing, sleek and glinting like the charm between her breasts—pressed a button, and set it on the table, Lucas began, as if he’d been waiting a long time, holding his breath, to speak:

“Lucas,” Professor Polson said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really have to do something now. I’m going to pick up the phone now and call Mental Health Services, and make an appointment for you.”

Lucas nodded, as if he’d seen this coming.

Professor Polson was in the kitchen, on her phone, for what seemed to Perry like a long time, and finally came out with a scrap of paper and the name of a therapist and an appointment time for Lucas in the morning. Lucas looked at Perry, as if questioning whether he should take the scrap, and Perry nodded at him, feeling sad and relieved at the same time.

33

Mira put a tiny drop of dishwashing liquid into the dead center of each of the three mugs and then let the hot water pour into them, watching as they overflowed with suds.

It was 3:00 a.m.

After the boys had left, she’d walked around the apartment for half an hour—paced, really, a kind of back-and-forth followed by intervals of standing in place, wondering if she was standing in the middle of a particular room for a reason and, if so, what that reason could be. Finally, she’d noticed the three mugs—two on an end table, and one (hers) on the floor in front of the sofa, and was relieved to have a chore, a reason not to be in bed yet.

When the bubbles in the mugs stopped flowing, Mira turned the water off, tipped the cups over, poured the clear water out, and set them upside down on the dish drainer. She turned the lights off and then stood staring toward the sink for quite a while before she leaned against the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor.

When was the last night she’d been at home alone?

Certainly it had been before the twins. But going back even further, it had been, she supposed, only a few times in the early days of her marriage—only in hotel rooms (conferences, job interviews). This was different. This was the place the twins were supposed to be, asleep with their blankets pulled up to their chins (they both did this, rosy fingers grasping the satin edges, lying on their backs, pink-cheeked, eyes moving around in their dreams beneath their vaguely light blue lids).

And Clark.

Mira was supposed to go into the bedroom now and find him asleep on his side, the bed torn to pieces by his shifting and rolling, shirtless. The silver St. Christopher medal she’d given him would catch the light from the hallway.

She’d brought that medal back with her from Romania when Clark was only a fantasy—after having spent only about a week in bed with him before she’d left for her fellowship year—just an intriguing and sexy guy she hoped very much she might be seeing more of. Back then, it had been a gesture that surprised her even as she made it, sliding the paper-wrapped medal into her bag. She could not have called what she had with Clark when she’d left for Eastern Europe a “relationship.” (And what were “relationships” during those graduate school years when the most important virtue was negative capability, when you knew better than to even dare ask—such anxious grasping—“Will I be seeing you again?”) She’d bought the St. Christopher at a little wooden stall outside of a church near the shore of the Black Sea, knowing as she bought it that it was for Clark. When the old man who’d sold it to her put it in the palm of her hand, he wrapped her fingers around it for her and then he kissed her fist.

If Clark were there, in bed, in their apartment, he’d grumble when she came in and lay down beside him, and Mira wouldn’t know if he was asleep and annoyed to have been awakened, or awake and simply annoyed that she had entered the room. It had been a long time (a year? two?) since he’d rolled over and put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her hair.

Was this what it was like when you found yourself sliding, impossibly and inevitably, toward a divorce?

And what then?

Would she and Clark and the beautiful miracle of the twins be turned, as seemed the custom now, into one of those joint-custody arrangements? An elaborate plan sketched out, and signed by a judge? Thursday through Monday with Mira. Monday through Thursday with Clark. Or every other week? Or every two weeks? Vacations numbered, accounted for? Holidays divided up like so many shiny pennies?

Back in the days of Mira’s childhood, when there was a divorce, the fathers generally just slipped away to California and were replaced by the mothers’ new husbands. But Clark was not the kind of father who would slip away. He might very well be, in fact, the kind of father who would fight her for full custody. He might very well be the kind of father who would be granted full custody by a left-leaning judge who wanted to show that she valued the role of the stay-at-home father as dearly as that of a housewife.

Mira was, she realized, crying.

There were tears running down her neck. There were tears pooling around her lips. She wiped them away. She held her breath to try to make the hiccupping sobs subside. She was being ridiculous, getting way ahead of herself. Clark had said nothing about divorce, had he? He’d only taken the twins to visit his mother. It was his mother’s birthday. His mother’s seventieth. He would be back. He’d been right—she couldn’t have come along in the middle of the week.

Mira took her hands away from her face and forced herself to think of something else.

The interview.

She would think about that. Lucas. Her research. Her book. When the boys had first arrived, Mira had been certain that she’d know what to make of Lucas and his account of events. He’d slouched into the apartment looking quite a bit worse for wear than she remembered him—but drugs tended to do that, even to the very young. Jeff Blackhawk had told her that Lucas was in his poetry workshop that semester, and was an interesting writer but seemed unable to speak. Mira remembered him as a terrible writer—all adjectives and unsubstantiated opinions—who could not be dissuaded from dominating every class discussion with his opinions. Halfway through the term with her he’d had that trouble with a drug bust, and after that he had gotten quieter, although his papers became even more opinionated and full of purple prose. She remembered one essay he’d written that had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever assignment he’d been given, and had become, instead, a rant against oppressive drug laws:

Why does the United States, perhaps the earth’s most variegated garden, feel it must oppress the very youth it purports to wish to nurture into blossom?

And she also remembered reading this first line to Clark while grading papers at the kitchen table. It was supposed to make Clark laugh, give him an idea of the mind-numbing work she was doing at the kitchen table as he bounced the newborn twins to sleep in the chair across from her, but Clark had just snorted and said, “Really,” in agreement with Lucas’s sentiment.

But the Lucas in her apartment that evening had appeared drained of his saccharine passions. There was a strange quarter-size patch of hair missing just above his left temple, and repeatedly during the interview he’d pressed his fingers to that spot and rubbed it as if he were experiencing sharp pain there. He must have managed to rub the hair away, and then continued to rub enough to prevent it from growing back.

His monologue had been chilling, baffling, incredible. Unless he was a future Academy Award winner, this could not have been an act. Mira had the impression he’d not told a soul the story until then, and that perhaps he’d even managed not to think about it in detail until he’d opened his mouth to speak to her.

But what had actually happened?

Mira knew what she wanted to believe—the thing that would fit the thesis she knew she shouldn’t have already developed, but had.

There were thousands of accounts of ghosts reported on college campuses. Murdered coeds thumbing rides to the cemeteries where they were buried. Suicides still weeping in dormitory shower stalls, drunken fraternity brothers still prowling around under the balconies they’d drunkenly fallen from. The youthful dead were particularly inspiring when it came to such stories, and the living youth seemed particularly inspired by their dead peers. And Nicole Werner was the perfect campus ghost. The beautiful virgin with that already ghostly senior portrait. The evil boyfriend. The grieving sorority sisters. The dark, cold night of her violent death. Her roommate had to identify her by the jewelry she was wearing because the gorgeous sorority girl had been unrecognizable.

In a graduate seminar Mira had been invited to take her senior year in college (because Professor Niro had said he thought she was the most serious undergraduate student of anthropology he’d ever encountered), they’d read Charles Mackay’s classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The book had impressed Mira deeply—probably more than it impressed the other students, because she was so young. The professor had expressed some contempt for the shoddy research, the slapdash psychoanalysis, the exaggerations in the book, but Mira had carried the impressions of that text with her through all the years of her education that had followed, and she still felt them. There had been no chapter on ghost sightings on college campuses, but Mira remembered very well Mackay’s chapter on haunted houses, and his conclusion that the weak and credulous people who were drawn to them would be the very sort of people who would see ghosts in them.

Lucas might certainly be one of Mackay’s weak and credulous. Lucas was easy. But what about Perry? Could both boys be suffering from the same overstimulation of the imagination?

Mira looked down at the watch glowing green on her wrist: 4:02. She had to teach her class in five hours. And somehow it didn’t even startle her (a movie camera would have captured her only casually looking up from her wristwatch as if she’d been expecting the sound all along) when there was a tentative-sounding knock on the door and a whisper she’d never have heard if she had been in bed: “Professor Polson? It’s just Perry Edwards again, if you’re there.”

34

Nicole was down to her bra, her panties. They matched. Pink. He hadn’t been able to look closely, but Craig thought he’d glimpsed a little heart, or maybe a bird, sewn onto the right-hand corner of the panties. And he was pretty sure he’d glimpsed the palest bit of downy hair between the panties and the high bikini spot of her inner thigh. Her cheeks had gone from a pink that matched the underwear to a deeper shade of pink in the course of their two hours in his bed. God only knew what color his own cheeks were. He was bathed in sweat. His hair was matted against his forehead. His heart had been beating so hard for so long in every part of his body that at least he knew for certain that he had no undetected heart defects. He’d never have lived through this if he did.

Perry was at home in Bad Axe for the weekend, so Nicole had spent the weekend rising from and returning to Craig’s bed in their dorm room.

“No, Craig, not yet. But it feels so good. Oh my God. No, stop. O—”

It was like a refrain now to the loveliest song he’d ever heard. He would have done anything she’d said. He felt certain that if she’d have let him, he could have levitated with her in his arms and they could have made love on the ceiling. He could have unzipped his body and wrapped her in his skin. He could have buried himself in her neck and slipped into the place between her shoulder and her throat, and been soldered by passion to her forever.

But she wouldn’t let him.

“No, oh, Craig, it’s so hard to say no. I want. But, no. Please. I’m not ready. If I were, it would be you, and it would be now. But—”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I know.” He breathed the words into her mouth. “I just want to press against you. Just let me hold you. Can I touch you—”

“There. Yes. Oh my God. O—”

35

It was one of those October days during which it seemed like the middle of the night all day, and that, Shelly supposed, was why she was waking up so disoriented. That, and the bottle of wine.

Where was she? What time was it? Who was sleeping beside her?

Two bottles of wine?

They’d started drinking after lunch—some tuna filets in olive oil, some tomato slices. First, they’d split the expensive bottle of white, and then the cheap red stuff Shelly kept on hand for cooking. Had they finished both of them?

Truly, Shelly had no idea how much they’d had to drink, but she could still feel the wonderful muscle exhaustion of the sex. Of the hours of sex. Her lips were swollen with it, and she licked them, and there was the taste of it on her lips and tongue—salty, sweet. Her breasts felt heavy. Her nipples were still hard as little nails. Between her legs she felt bruised and wet.

How, exactly, had she come to be sleeping in this bed beside Shelly?

How, exactly, had they gotten from there to here?

A full moon was shining through the window (Shelly hadn’t bothered to pull the shades), and after she finally managed to open her eyes fully and to rub them into focus, she could see clearly and deliciously that Josie Reilly was asleep on her side, the sheet pulled up only to her naked hip, pale and white, her black hair spilling over Shelly’s rosebud pillowcases. In the corner something with green eyes blinked, and it took Shelly a breathless second to realize that it was Jeremy, standing stock-still, as if on high alert or turned to stone. Confused. Disapproving. Displaced. She remembered Josie saying in the sweetest, most apologetic voice, “Can you please get the cat off the bed? I really don’t like cats.”

Now, Josie Reilly sighed and opened her eyes, and smiled when she saw Shelly looking down at her. She reached up one elegant arm—the one with the silver vein of a bracelet around it—and placed her fingertips against Shelly’s throat before propping herself up slowly on one elbow and kissing the place she’d touched as she slid her hand from Shelly’s neck to her breast, and her lips moved up from Shelly’s neck to her lips.

It had been just past noon when Josie had stepped into Shelly’s house bearing two Starbucks cups, shivering in her soaked cashmere hoodie.

“Can I come in?” she’d asked, and Shelly had said, of course, of course, although she was incredibly annoyed to find Josie there, when she was supposed to be minding the office, and to have been woken up from her nap.

Josie’s cheeks were crimson, mottled, and there were tiny raindrops on her forehead. Shelly must not have been able to hide the annoyance on her face, because Josie had bitten her lip and then said, “Oops. Should I not have come over? I thought you might need some cheering up.”

“No,” Shelly said. “It’s fine. It’s… nice. Thank you, Josie. How thoughtful.” She took the cup Josie was holding out to her with one hand, and pulled her bathrobe closed around her chest with the other. “Come in. Sit down, and give me your hoodie. I’ll toss it in the dryer—on the delicate cycle.”

Josie blinked, looking pleased, and the raindrops fell from her eyelashes onto her cheeks. She handed her own Starbucks cup to Shelly so that she could unzip her hoodie.

“Thank you. I’m soaked.”

The zipper made a sound that made Shelly think of a comet—something traveling at an incredible speed, very far away—and then Josie Reilly was standing before her wearing what she knew girls now called “camis,” or “tanks,” but which, when Shelly was this girl’s age, had been lingerie. The kind of thing you might wear on your wedding night.

It was pale green, raw silk, hemmed with a paler green lace. It was also wet, and it clung to Josie’s breasts, making the perfect outline of them visible, no imagination needed. Her nipples were hard. There were goose bumps on her arms.

“Is it okay, I mean, if I hang out for a bit? I can’t go out like this.” She opened her arms as if to display herself fully in her camisole to Shelly, as if to invite her, incite her, to look at her body, and Shelly did—she couldn’t help but look—and then she looked at Josie’s face, and it was impossible not to interpret the expression on it as flirtation.

Flirtation verging on seductive invitation:

Her lips were pressed together. She was batting her eyelashes. A small smirk played at the corners of her lips. Her weight rested on one leg, and the hipbone of the other was bare, a blinding inch of pale exposed flesh.

Shelly’s breath felt ragged when she inhaled, and she raised her eyebrows, opening her mouth before exhaling and saying, holding up the hoodie, trying to sound casual, “I’ll take this downstairs.”

“Thanks, Shelly,” Josie said, and then, “Is it okay if I sit down? I don’t think I’m so wet I’ll ruin your couch or anything.”

“Of course,” Shelly said, and even to herself she sounded like someone in a trance, under a spell, like someone who had just stepped off a treadmill onto unshifting ground. She was almost surprised, when she got to the basement, to find the washer and dryer where they had always been. She pulled out the limp previous load of her own socks and panties, tossed them into the plastic basket waiting in the corner, and then ran her hand through the lint trap before putting Josie’s hoodie on the delicate cycle and turning back toward the stairs.

“I love your house,” Josie said.

She’d taken off her shoes and left them by the front door. Her feet were bare. Her toenails were painted silver, like her fingernails. She had one leg crossed over and under the other in a position that was impossibly dexterous and casual at the same time. Her elbow was propped up on the back of the couch, and her fingers were playing through her hair, lifting and pulling and twirling the black strands as, with her other hand, she lifted the Starbucks cup to her lips, sipped, licked them, and then said, looking around, “It’s so cool. Do you live alone?”

“Yes,” Shelly said. “Except for my cat.”

“Oh,” Josie said. “What’s its name?” She looked around, as though worried that Jeremy would show himself.

“Jeremy,” Shelly said.

“Why Jeremy?” Josie asked. “Isn’t that a little odd for a cat name?”

“I guess,” Shelly said.

She had, she realized, no clever story to tell about Jeremy’s name. She’d simply wanted to avoid giving the cat the kind of name all of her single, academic, lesbian friends had given theirs: Plato. Sexton. Amadeus. Sappho.

She’d pulled the name Jeremy out of thin air, thinking it had no baggage whatsoever, that she’d never known a single person named Jeremy. It was only months later that she remembered the one Jeremy she’d forgotten: a retarded boy who’d lived in her neighborhood, who’d fallen down a flight of stairs in his house and been killed.

“I’m not wild for cats,” Josie said. “I’m a dog person. Cats seem a little creepy. No offense.”

Shelly sat down in the chair across from Josie, pulling her robe over her knees as she did. She’d forgotten her Starbucks cup on the kitchen table, and by now it was probably cold. She thought she’d just leave it. She had no idea what treacly beverage Josie might have brought her today.

“Wow,” Josie said, looking around again. “I’m so used to living with a ton of other people—it would be weird, but really awesome, to have a whole house to yourself.” There was a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were actually imagining herself in the rooms of Shelly’s house, ambling between them on her own, considering what it would be like if they were hers.

“Well,” Shelly said. “It’s definitely better than—”

“A fucking sorority,” Josie said, and took another sip of her drink, looking demurely away from Shelly. She’d never said the word fucking in front of Shelly before—although, once, when the printer made three times the number of a long document than it was supposed to, Shelly had heard Josie shout, “Shit!”

Shelly cleared her throat. “Well, do you have to live at the sorority?” She hated the sound of her own voice, and the frumpy way she was holding her robe around her.

At the gym, lifting weights, looking at herself in the mirror, Shelly felt physical, powerful, beautiful. She flushed easily, and knew that men were looking at her. But in the presence of Josie Reilly—in the presence of a girl whose body had been through only nineteen, twenty years—she knew that the kind of admiration she got from men at the gym meant nothing. Here before her, in the form of Josie Reilly, was the embodiment of beauty and youth. This girl had just barely emerged from the cocoon of childhood. In fact, Shelly thought she could see a film of something like dew on Josie’s neck, on her chest, and she even thought she could smell something wafting off of her limbs like pond water—rank and sweet at the same time, so potent.

Why, Shelly thought soberly then, was she letting this happen?

Was this happening?

Never once had she thought of herself as the kind of old dyke who would sleep with a student, a girl. The only women she’d ever found herself attracted to in the past had been her own age, or older. She’d disliked the lesbians she knew who kept women half their ages, and paid their rent. It was so obviously nothing but physical—and wasn’t part of the point, the point of being a woman who’d chosen women over men, to reject that kind of objectification? To reject that abuse of power?

She was, after all, Josie Reilly’s boss. And the girl was less than half her age. But she was also radiating, indisputably, on Shelly’s couch, her own inalienable power:

She’d stretched out. One leg was extended luxuriously on the couch. Her fingers continued to move through her silky black hair. Her short top had made its way higher, and two lovely inches of white, flat stomach had been exposed. Under her arms was the downiest bit of unshaven hair. One of the straps of her tank top had slipped over her shoulder bone, and now the top of her right breast was exposed. It was painful to look at, and impossible not to stare. Josie rested her coffee cup on her crotch, and looked at Shelly and asked, “Do you have anything to eat? Like, a sandwich or something?”

36

It was impossible not to stare at Professor Polson as she cooked. Like Perry’s mother, she cracked the eggs with one hand, and then tossed the shells into the sink. She didn’t measure anything. Two burners were glowing blue on the stove at the same time. She grated cheese straight into the pan of scrambled eggs.

Professor Polson reminded him of his mother, but she was also like a girl Perry’s own age—hair uncombed, falling around her face in a mass of curls and tangles. Her hands were full, so she used her shoulder to push the hair out of the way as she leaned over the stove. In her jeans and Indian-print shirt, she could easily have passed for a college girl. She was thin. Even a little bony. You would not have known she’d given birth to twins. He imagined that she didn’t eat a lot, because she also didn’t look athletic. In Bad Axe the only women he knew who were mothers and weren’t overweight were the athletes: the hikers and bikers and swimmers. Or the smokers. The alcoholics. Professor Polson looked healthy, but she did not look like someone who worked out at a gym or who spent much time outdoors. She looked, Perry supposed, exactly like what she was: a reader, a writer, a teacher. Someone who’d spent her life studying something very particular and obscure, and who’d become an expert on it because she was more interested in it than anyone else had ever been or might ever be again.

And at the same time that Professor Polson reminded him of women like his mother, his aunts, the mothers of his friends—and also girls like Mary, Nicole, Josie Reilly, even Karess Flanagan—she was also nothing like them.

She was neither young nor old, fashionable nor out of touch. Professor Polson existed somewhere in between the worlds of the mothers he knew and the girls he knew, and he could not take his eyes off of her as she peeled slices of ham out of a plastic package and dropped them onto a skillet, where they shriveled up quickly and filled the kitchen with the smell of meat and maple. He was, he realized, ravenous.

They’d talked for hours since he’d come back to the apartment, he guessed. He’d lost track of time. But it was pitch-black night when he’d returned, and now the sun was shining through her apartment windows. Hours had to have passed.

After the interview, when they’d left Professor Polson’s apartment, Perry had walked Lucas back to his place, and then he’d turned around, intending to go back to his own apartment. But he’d found himself instead walking directly toward the Omega Theta Tau house.

The rain had stopped at some point during Lucas’s interview, and now the streets were shining with dampness in the moonlight. The sky was completely clear, looking as if some kind of blue-black satin had been rolled in enormous bolts all through the town. The moon was somewhere close to full, but not quite, and it turned the branches of the trees to a kind of parody of October—spooky, damp. Leaves had blown out of the trees during the storm and lay in tatters in the streets, and on the sidewalk, on the lawns. They caught at the toes of Perry’s shoes.

He couldn’t help himself.

He had to go there.

He had to stand outside the house.

He had a feeling, and when he’d had that feeling before, she had appeared, or seemed to appear.

Perry had already known, more or less, the story Lucas was going to tell Professor Polson, but it had terrified him anyway. The matter-of-factness of the account. The mundane details. Lucas’s plainspoken, shamed recounting of events. It had required self-restraint for Perry to keep himself seated, listening. More than once, he’d had the urge to flee. He’d seen himself in his dark suit again, pictured himself in Bad Axe at the funeral, walking with the coffin on his shoulder, the terrible, solid, indisputable shifting of weight inside the coffin when Nicole’s cousin stumbled as they carried her out of the church and into the hearse.

And there were other things he remembered.

Back in his dorm room, in Godwin Hall, just those few weeks before the accident.

Told you, didn’t I?

Nicole had kissed him afterward, and stood up, and, as she was buttoning her shirt, had said, “Told you, didn’t I? I knew you wanted to fuck me, and that you would.” Then, she put on her clothes, closed the door behind her—somehow managing to leave her panties at the foot of the bed for Craig to find (although Craig didn’t recognize them, and instead teased Perry mercilessly, pitifully, about his “mystery slut”). Why had she done that? It could not have been a mistake. He’d known Nicole most of his life. She wasn’t ever sloppy. Even in kindergarten she’d been the first one to throw her empty milk carton away, or fold up her nap mat.

At first, Perry had thought she might have been sending a message for Craig—but, later, he wondered if it had been something else, a way to discredit Perry, cast suspicion on him. Surely she could tell that he and Craig were starting to become friends.

He could see the light on the porch of the Omega Theta Tau house, but Perry couldn’t tell, from where he stood on the sidewalk looking up at it, whether anyone was on the porch.

It was a flat town, a flat state, so it was that much stranger, eerier, that the sorority house was perched on a hill above the rest of the block.

Behind it, the memorial orchard sloped down to the wall between the sorority property and the smaller yard of the frat house next door. There were no leaves at all left on those cherry trees as far as Perry could tell—two skeletal rows of shiny, wet black branches and moonlight. From inside the house, there seemed to be only one light: a dim flickering in one of the upstairs windows. Perry couldn’t tell if it was a candle doing the flickering or some shadowy figure pacing around by the window. There seemed to be lacy curtains, and they seemed to be closed. He supposed it wasn’t so odd that all the lights were out at this time of night—or morning—in the middle of the week before exams. Omega Theta Tau was supposed to be one of the studious sororities.

Perry stood staring up at the house until he was sure there was no one on the porch, and then he stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass. He wanted to get closer, but he thought it was a bad idea to go straight up the front walk, which was bathed in porch light. He didn’t know why. He had no idea yet what he thought. Did he think Nicole was in there? And, if so, how? And if she wasn’t, what was he afraid of? And if she was, what then?

He stayed in the shadows, and made his way up the side of the lawn. The ground was soggy, slippery, carpeted with fallen leaves. He walked slowly, with no idea what he planned to do when he reached the porch. (Knock on the back door and ask to see Nicole? Peer in the windows to try to catch a glimpse of her?)

He stopped. Looked behind him. Looked in front of him. He looked toward the porch, and just before he saw what he thought was a man in some kind of dark suit or uniform, the light switched off and Perry was left standing on the lawn in the dark, and then he heard what sounded to him (so out of place here that it took him more than a few seconds to recall it from duck hunting with his dad at Lake Durand, or deer hunting in the national forest with his grandfather, from the hundred or so Boy Scout rifle competitions he’d attended at the Bad Axe Rod and Gun Club) like the slide of a shotgun being racked, and he crouched down and, holding his breath, made his way back across the lawn, away from the house, as quickly and as quietly as humanly possible.

It was blocks later that he realized that he’d run all the way back to Professor Polson’s apartment, the outside entrance of which had been propped open so that he didn’t have to buzz her, and that he’d run up to the stairs to her door, and he was knocking on it.

She opened the door as if she’d been expecting him.

Clearly, he hadn’t woken her. She was still in the same top and jeans she’d been wearing during Lucas’s interview. Her eyes looked watery, as if she had been either crying or coughing. Her hair was a little more mussed. (Perhaps she’d been lying down?) But when she saw that Perry was nearly doubled over, out of breath, standing in her doorway, Professor Polson pulled him into the apartment without asking any questions, and led him to the couch.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said. “Try square breathing. You know what square breathing is?”

He knew what square breathing was only because she’d told them about it in class, in preparation for their trip to the morgue—had told them that if they began to feel faint during the visit, or to feel as if they might be sick, or hyperventilate, they should close their eyes and do square breathing.

(“Breathe in through your nose to the count of four. Hold the breath to the count of four. Exhale to the count of four.” She’d had the whole class practice. “I used to lose at least three students to the linoleum every field trip until I taught square breathing.”)

As Perry sat panting on her couch, and Professor Polson went into the kitchen, he tried it:

One. Two.

The apartment looked different in the dark.

Three. Four.

She came back to the living room with a sweater draped over her shoulders and a glass of water for him, three ice cubes bobbing in it. She turned on the light beside the couch and handed him the glass, and then sat down on the chair across from him, perching on the edge of it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, and asked in a soft, concerned voice, “What is it, Perry? Can you tell me?”

The square breathing, or something, had worked. He was calm now. He didn’t even feel winded. He told her what had happened. The darkness. The candle. The man he thought he saw in the shadows, and the sound of a shotgun being racked up, and how he’d run, not realizing he was here again until he was.

Professor Polson had seemed to think for a long time about what she was going to say before she spoke, and then said, “Perry, I think maybe we’ve already taken this too far. I think I’ve encouraged you in some—” she pulled the sweater off her shoulders and onto her lap, and then gathered it in her hands, brought it to her face, seemed to breathe it in for a minute before she continued, “unproductive thinking. When the imagination—and I’m not talking here about your imagination per se. I’m talking the collective imagination, the occult imagination—when it’s stimulated, many things that aren’t real can come to seem to be real. Perfectly sane people, people who—”

“No,” Perry said.

Professor Polson nodded as if she’d expected him to object, but she went on:

“Let me tell you something,” she said, and she told him, then, a story about her childhood. Her mother. A kind of transformation in a pantry. A white coffin, and her own realization, staring into it, of what the unconscious was capable of. The imagery that informed this life, this culture.

“You can pretend you aren’t superstitious,” Professor Polson said. “You can imagine that you are not religious. You can be certain that you don’t believe in life after death, if that’s what you want. But, Perry, it doesn’t stop the fact that we are in a very strange position here. We humans. With such a clear knowledge of how it will end, and no idea what will happen afterward—just some symbols, some music, some stories to show us the way.

“Of course you believe your friend is alive. That she lurks around every corner. That her death could be something as alive as her sexuality was, as your own. You’re nineteen years old. Who dies, Perry? Who believes in death at your age? People with a lot more life experience than you have believed stranger things. Have seen stranger things. Folklore is full of—”

“I’m sorry, Professor Polson, I know what you’re saying. But it isn’t folklore. This. It—it isn’t.”

There was a kind of sad understanding in her eyes, but she was shaking her head at the same time.

“Perry, folklore doesn’t mean something doesn’t make sense. Or doesn’t seem real. Truly, it’s the opposite. Beliefs—traditional and superstitious beliefs—arise and are passed down for coherent, substantial reasons. They’re based on psychological and physical data, real or not. Shared experiences. In the field we call this elegant rationale. There’s often an elegant rationality to even the strangest beliefs. But it doesn’t make them real. Being based on fear, inspired by hope, they can be dangerous, Perry, and I think we’re headed in that direction, and that we need to stop what we’re doing now, before it leads to something—”

“Please,” Perry said. “No. Please. I’ll talk about it any way you want me to. We can call it elegant rationale and campus folklore if you want to. But, please. Don’t stop… listening to me. Professor Polson—”

She reached across the coffee table and took his hand. She held it in her own for a few seconds, and he could feel for himself how cold his own hand was. She squeezed it before she let go, and said, “I know. I know. Okay.”

“Thank you. I—”

But she held up a hand to stop him from saying anything more. She stood up then and gestured for him to follow her into the kitchen, where he leaned against the wall as she made him a cup of tea, and they talked about class, about the article on apotropaic magic they had been assigned for the next week and which Perry had already read. She told him about her travels during her Fulbright year, the village in which she’d stayed a few nights, where every house and every inn, every restaurant and church, kept nailed to its door a piece of a broken mirror that had once hung in the ladies’ room of the local cathedral, until the cathedral had been bombed.

There had been only one woman in the cathedral at the time—an old deaf lady who hadn’t heard the air raid sirens. She’d been blown into too many pieces to gather and properly bury. The mirrors were nailed to the doors to keep her from stopping by.

They discussed the section of the essay on the motif of harmful sensations. The Sirens. The Lorelei. The Harp of Dagda. The Hungarian Suicide Song—a song, it was believed, that to hear would cause the person who heard it to commit suicide.

He told her that when he was in high school, a rumor had gone around that there was a YouTube video posted on the Internet—a body swinging from a rope tied to a tree—that, if you watched it, would cause you to hang yourself within three days. Girls had gone around Bad Axe High School frantically whispering about who had been reckless enough to watch it at the last slumber party. He’d even witnessed some tears in the hallways, and the principal eventually wrote a note home to parents letting them know about the rumor, urging them to talk to their children about it.

“Yes,” Professor Polson said, smiling, excited. “This is exactly the kind of thing we want for our study, Perry. Exactly.”

Perry was still hearing her words our study in his head, and the little thrill of that, when she said, “I think it’s time for breakfast. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to get to the class your parents are paying me to teach, and teach it.” They both looked at their watches at the same time, and then they sat down to eat the eggs that had grown cold on the table as they’d talked, but which were still delicious.