The Raising

61

“I wouldn’t have offered if it was a problem,” Jeff said. “I think your kids are cute, and you’ve got this library full of Camille Paglia. Who wouldn’t want to babysit here?”

“They like you,” Mira said, more out of surprise than as a compliment. Andy and Matty each sat on one of his loafers as he bounced his feet. Jeff was sprawled out on the couch as if the apartment were his, and he’d placed his coffee cup on the floor, where it was sure to be knocked over, but this carelessness somehow made his presence even more beneficent, more welcome. “Thank you,” she said again. “I’ll be back in time for you to get to your class. I swear.”

“Hey, my students never expect me on time anyway, and you can’t run out of the morgue without saying good-bye. Take your time. We’ll just be reading feminist literary theory here and smearing graham crackers all over ourselves.”

“I hope you don’t have to change a diaper,” Mira said. “But—”

“Butt?! Jesus, I hope not too. But, yeah, it’s all fine. Little secret: I took a Red Cross babysitting course when I was in middle school, hoping to make some extra money for dope, and I did great in the class, but somehow no one would hire me to watch their kids. Until now! Still, I remember that whole thing about diaper changing. Not to worry.”

Mira waved good-bye to the boys, who squealed, holding tightly to Jeff’s pale, hairy ankles, exposed between his socks and the frayed cuffs of his khaki trousers.

It was unpleasantly cold out, and the clouds were sinister blue things skimming low over the buildings. The students hurrying past her on the sidewalk on the way to class had their heads buried in their parkas, although a few still mysteriously, or brazenly, wore flip-flops. A bicyclist tore through the damp street, tires making the sound of hissing snakes. A man stood in a front yard pounding a stake into the lawn.

A For Rent sign, Mira supposed.

She supposed, too, that soon she’d have to start reading the classifieds and looking at the posted For Rent signs, looking for an apartment, and the thought of this filled her eyes with tears before she even realized she’d thought it.

Clark.

Jesus Christ.

Up in Petoskey, his mother had actually, physically, tried to keep Mira from leaving the house with the twins.

“Mira, Clark left them with me. He’ll be back tomorrow, I’m sure. What am I going to tell him?”

“You’ll tell him that their mother, his wife, came to get them. That she’s taken them home.”

“But, Mira, you can’t just—”

But by that point Mira already had the diaper bag packed. She’d buttoned the twins’ jackets up over their sweaters, and was carrying one child on each hip like two sweet bags of groceries. They’d been so excited to see her that they’d begun to scream, and now, on either side of her, they were patting her cheeks as if to check that they were the real thing. It stung, the patting, but Mira loved it.

Clark’s mother took hold of the sleeve of her sweater and said, “Don’t go, Mira. I’ll have to—”

“You’ll have to what?” Mira asked. She was careful not to raise her voice, which would have alarmed the twins, who, after all, adored their grandmother. “What will you have to do, Kay? Call the police? Tell them the twins’ mother came and picked them up? Or call Clark? I’ve tried that myself. A hundred times. He doesn’t have the cell phone turned on, or he doesn’t have it with him, and what good would that do, anyway? We’ve all got to go home eventually, and the boys need to be with their mother.”

In defeat, it seemed, Clark’s mother let go of Mira’s sleeve, and Mira felt sorry for her. Her hair was grayer than Mira remembered, and it was all combed to one side of her head, leaving a bare patch of scalp exposed. She was wearing a ratty KEY WEST sweatshirt, a place Mira was certain Kay had never been. It broke Mira’s heart, really. Clark’s mother had never been anything but kind to her, and loving to the twins. But she had to go. She had to have her children with her, and she had to work, so she had to take them home.

“I’m sorry, Kay,” Mira said. “And so grateful to you for keeping them, for taking such good care of them.”

Kay swallowed, nodded solemnly, and then kissed each boy, and then she kissed Mira, too, on the cheek, with the same silly smacking sound she’d used on Andy and Matty.

“I love you all!” she said loudly, voice cracking, chin quivering, and Mira found herself crying then, too, and the twins were looking at her tears, wiping at them, seeming sober and astonished, looking from Mira to their grandmother, who walked Mira to the door then and looked out.

Jeff had stayed in the car so as not to be in the way. He had the engine running, and it was making guttural noises, blowing blue smoke out of the tailpipe. He appeared to be, possibly, singing to himself, or reciting something, while staring at his lap.

“Who is that?” Kay asked Mira. “Who is that man?” She said it as if she’d seen a ghost.

“His name is Jeff Blackhawk,” Mira explained. “He’s my colleague at the college. He offered to drive me because, you know, I don’t have the car. Because Clark has the car.”

Clark’s mother nodded slowly at this, as if that all made a peculiar kind of sense, and then she said under her breath, “Is he an Indian?” as if he might be able to hear her.

“I don’t think so,” Mira whispered back. “I haven’t gotten that impression.”

Clark’s mother nodded as if, at least, there was this bit of good news, and then she grabbed Mira’s sleeve again and said, “Bring the babies back as soon as you can. And be careful getting home. Work things out with Clark. I love you, darling.”

“I love you, too,” Mira said, and she looked at Clark’s mother for a long time before she turned with the twins to the door, to the car.

Back at the apartment, after the long drive home, and after Jeff had helped her carry the twins up the stairs (leaving with the tip of an imaginary cap, and a little bow), Mira was feeling so solaced by their return that she hadn’t even thought of Clark. The relief of having the boys in her arms, nursing them, kissing them, smelling their hair and the napes of their necks, was complete, as if she’d been held hostage those days without them, and had just been released. Tears ran down her cheeks and into their hair as she rocked back and forth on the couch and they sucked greedily until they finally fell asleep. Then, she lifted them, put them in the cribs (a difficult feat with two limp toddlers, but they were sound asleep) and then lingered a long time afterward in the nursery, looking down at them in their cribs. Home.

It wasn’t until she was on her way up the stairs to Godwin Hall to meet her class for their field trip to the morgue that Mira realized, fully, that a new part of her life had started, and would continue to be starting, whether she wanted it to or not.

62

Perry stood in the middle of his apartment and spoke to Craig’s voice mail, leaving him a message (“Where the hell are you, man?”) when he realized that the cell phone he was trying to reach was lying on the coffee table about three feet away from him, turned off. It had been twenty-four hours since he’d seen Craig, and he was going to be late to the class field trip if he didn’t leave that second. “Fuck,” Perry said to the phone, hung it up, grabbed his backpack, and headed for the door.

He was late.

Professor Polson was standing in the foyer with the class already gathered around her. She was giving them some directives—telling them that the university morgue was actually a secured facility, and that it was a special privilege to be allowed to visit it, a privilege granted to them because her research gave her a faculty pass, which she’d managed to have extended to “visiting scholars.” The fact that her “visiting scholars” were actually freshman in a first-year seminar had apparently not been brought to the attention of the morgue director or the hospital security. Yet. And the class needed to provoke no interest or suspicion so it would stay that way. “Okay?” she asked. There were nods all around.

It also happened, she explained, that she was personal friends with the diener (the class snickered at the word, so close to diner, although Professor Polson had defined it for them as “the person responsible for handling and washing bodies”). This morgue’s diener, coincidentally, had worked at a mortuary she’d visited in Yugoslavia, and they’d stayed in touch over the years, and then he had come to the United States.

“If there’s joking, disrespect, theft—God forbid—or any kind of undignified behavior, I will likely never be allowed back with another class. More important, for you, the student or students responsible will fail my course and receive whatever other punishments I can come up with.” She said this lightheartedly, but it was clear from her expression that she wasn’t kidding.

That morning Professor Polson was wearing a black sweater and a deep purple skirt. Her hair was shiny and smooth, and there was color in her cheeks. She looked, Perry thought, as if she’d slept well that night. For the last few weeks there’d been circles under her eyes, but today they looked clear and bright.

She was so lovely to look at. Perry had a hard time taking his eyes off her, although he didn’t want to appear to be staring. Through the gauzy scarf around her neck, he glimpsed what looked like a gold cross dangling near her breast bone. Maybe the slightest hint of a lace-trimmed bra or camisole. He had to will himself to look away, and found his gaze caught by Karess’s.

She held it without smiling.

Perry tried to smile himself, but it felt to him more like a grimace as he did it, and the look on Karess’s face—surprise, annoyance—made it seem even more likely that his own face wasn’t doing what he wanted it to do.

But she also didn’t look away. She seemed to be refusing to look away, so Perry, unnerved, pretended suddenly to notice that he needed to tie his shoe. He crouched down behind Alexandra Robbins’s enormous ass, where he could see no one and no one could see him, until he heard Professor Polson say, “Okay, follow me.”

On the walk to the morgue, Perry kept well behind the rest of the other students, most of whom seemed to be trying as hard as they could to walk next to Professor Polson (an impossible task, since the sidewalk was wide enough for only two people at a time, and there were sixteen of them). Karess was, herself, off on the muddy grass, slogging through it in cowboy boots. She was wearing what looked like two miniskirts—one black lace and, over that one, a denim one with a torn patch at the hip. There were feathers braided into her hair, as well as a couple of beads. She glanced over her shoulder for only a second, and it seemed to Perry that her face sparkled. Not with pleasure, but with that glitter girls sometimes wore. He remembered Mary having some of that on her cheeks at the prom a couple years ago, and how, as they danced, every time he looked at her it appeared as though her cheeks were awash in tears.

Brett Barber was doing his best to keep his position beside Karess. It looked like he was trying to take baby steps so as not to get too far ahead of her. Karess had begun waving her hand around in the air in front of her as if she were trying to explain some important concept to him, and Brett was watching her lavender wool mitten as if it held the key to the universe and he was afraid she might drop it.

The guy must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Perry didn’t remember ever seeing Karess so much as glance in Brett’s direction even once. If Perry’d had more energy, if he hadn’t been up half the night waiting to hear Craig knock (wherever it was he’d gone off to, he’d left his keys behind), he would have tried to hurry ahead and catch up, step between the two of them. But, first of all, his legs wouldn’t move that fast. Second, he didn’t know if he was up for whatever kind of response Karess might have to his approaching her. He was hoping they’d parted yesterday as friends, but he had his doubts.

After Starbucks, after Josie slapped him hard in the face, and he and Karess had stumbled out into a strangely heavy snowfall, Perry had made the mistake of going with her back to her room, where the roommate excused herself the second they arrived (to “go study in the lounge”), as if on cue.

“Let me see you,” Karess had said, and turned to Perry. She approached him with her hands open as if she were carrying a bowl, and she took his face in them—but instead of inspecting him, she kissed him.

The kiss lasted a long time. Karess was about his height, and with her arms wrapped around him and her body pressed against his, he saw no way (or at least so he told himself) to disengage without giving her shoulders a shove. He let her bite his lower lip, and his tongue traveled over her teeth, which tasted both like clove and like mint, but he kept his hands firmly planted on her shoulder bones, and didn’t move them, although her own hands traveled up his back, and down it, and then to his face again. With her index finger she traced a line from his temple to his lips, and then she put her finger to the corner of his mouth and dipped it in.

Perry opened his eyes then, and hers were open, too, looking into his, and she stepped back, shrugging off her jacket, letting it fall to the floor, and took his hand and pulled him toward the bed, which had what looked like some kind of Indian tablecloth on it, along with about a million decorative pillows and a stuffed black cat with creepy green eyes. Perry shook his head.

Karess looked at him, and shook her own head as if in imitation. “What?” she said. It wasn’t exactly a question.

Perry said, trying to sound apologetic, “I’ve got to go.”

“What?”

“I just,” Perry said. “Can’t. I have to go.”

“O-kay,” Karess said, and then glanced at his jeans. He couldn’t hide the erection. She said, “It looks like you can.”

“It’s not. That.” Perry was trying to think of a way to say what it was, without himself knowing.

She was so beautiful. He knew what any roomful of guys hearing this story would have called him.

But Nicole had been beautiful, too.

And it had been awful, being with Nicole.

Whereas with Mary—who was not, by any standard, beautiful like these girls—he had wanted her so badly for so long that he would have died for it. He’d woken up some nights groaning. Some days in the hallway at school, he would take circuitous routes to classes and the cafeteria in order to avoid her, because he couldn’t stand it, seeing her. Seeing her in whatever pretty blouse or silky skirt she was wearing would make him ache all day.

“Well, then, what is it?” Karess asked. “I’m not your type or something? You’re not gay, are you?”

“No,” Perry said. “You’re so beautiful, but I—”

“You have a girlfriend, don’t you?” Karess said. She sighed. “I wondered what the deal was. You never even look at girls except for Professor Polson. I thought you were either a virgin, or a Christian, or you were sleeping with our professor, but you have some girl up there in whatever that town is you’re from—Bad Ass?—waiting for you, wearing a yellow ribbon or something, don’t you?”

Perry hesitated at first, but Karess continued to stare at him, and not knowing what else to do, Perry nodded.

“Is that why that sorority bitch slapped you?”

“Well,” Perry said. “Not exactly. She—”

“Well, thanks for sparing me her fate, anyway. Now, would you get out of here, Mr. Bad Ass? I’ve had just about enough of you for one day.”

It was mostly a joke, but Karess turned away from Perry and went to the window and looked out, and she made a motion with her hand for him to go, and Perry cleared his throat, trying and failing to think of something to say before he unlocked her door and stepped out into the hall, and closed it quietly behind him.

Now Brett Barber was trotting beside her, all but wagging his tail, and whatever Karess was talking to him about, it seemed to require no response on his part. He wasn’t even nodding his head. Professor Polson was taking long strides, in knee-high, shiny black boots, across the parking lot, and the group continued to follow down through an alley, which grew narrower as they walked. Soon it was narrow enough that only one person could pass at a time, so they followed her in single file. A couple of people laughed nervously, looked at the people behind them, raised their eyebrows. “Where the hell are we going?” someone whispered.

It surprised Perry, too. He’d expected the morgue to be its own building, bright and goofy like Dientz Funeral Home back in Bad Axe. Every holiday they decorated the front lawn—ribbons, flowers, wreaths, Easter eggs, Valentine’s hearts—except for Halloween.

But the university’s hospital morgue seemed to be sequestered exactly where you’d expect a place where dead bodies were kept to be hidden away: in a dungeon. Out by the hospital Dumpsters. No sign out front welcoming them with a smiley face. No euphemistic directions to CARE CONCLUSION FACILITY, or MEDICAL OUTSTAY LABORATORY.

Professor Polson kept going, and they kept following, past Dumpsters and chain-link fencing and No Trespassing signs, and on to a point beyond which it seemed they would find no entrance to anything, and certainly past the point where anyone would wish to trespass, and then Professor Polson was descending a long flight of stairs to a dark alcove and a windowless brown fire door on which was stenciled, in large caution-yellow letters, MORGUE.

63

The dean of the music school was leaning back in his upholstered chair, twiddling his thumbs, when Shelly stepped in. He was the picture of calm self-possession, except that he was blushing. His secretary had announced Sherry’s arrival, and then Shelly had been left to sit in the hallway outside his office for fifteen minutes. He’d had ample time to compose this reclining, twiddling façade, but he couldn’t hide his heart rate, which had been raised either by fear of an impending conflict or by simple embarrassment.

“Ms. Lockes,” he said.

Shelly shook her head. She saw no reason to continue to play this game. “You can call me Shelly,” she said sadly, “as always, and if it’s okay, I’m going to keep calling you Alex. I’ve known you for twenty years, Alex. I’m not here to talk about my job.”

The dean’s cheeks flushed an even deeper shade of hot pink. He was a pale, porcine man. Not having met him earlier in his life, Shelly had always assumed he’d reached his portly state with middle age, but, for the first time, she found herself able to picture him as a rotund seventh-grader being hounded by lanky boys on a playground. Panting. Fighting back tears. His cheeks would have been exactly this color.

Alex sighed, and sat up and put his hands under his desk where she could no longer see them.

“I’m sorry, but I’m here to ask you a favor, Alex,” Shelly said. She could see his chin twitch then, nearly imperceptibly, and she raised her hand as if to ward off something he would never have been able to bring himself to say anyway. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Again, it’s not about the job, and I’m certainly not planning to ask you for a reference, or anything that would put you in any kind of an uncomfortable position, ever, Alex. This has to do with something else. University business, you might say. Do you remember the accident last spring? Nicole Werner? The student from Bad Axe. The freshman.”

The dean nodded slowly, without opening his mouth, eyebrows raised as if he feared it might be a trick question. Shelly waited, looking at him, until he finally said, “Yes. Of course.”

“I probably never had any reason to tell you about this. I don’t remember seeing you much last spring at all, and it didn’t concern you—and, despite my efforts, my involvement never even made the newspaper, so you’d have had no way of knowing, but I was the first one on the scene. I was driving home from the gym. I was the woman who called nine-one-one.”

“Oh,” he said, “my.” He seemed intrigued, but also as though he were trying to hide his interest, to make it clear that nothing Shelly said could draw him in, lest she be drawing him in to some legalistic or psychological or academic trap.

“The newspaper reported that I didn’t give directions to the scene, and that I left the scene, and a hundred other erroneous details about the accident—all bogus. Until now, I didn’t understand. I thought it was incompetence. I thought the local newspaper simply couldn’t get their facts straight, that they were such hick reporters and such a slipshod operation that I couldn’t even get a letter to the editor published. But now I understand that that was what they wanted me to believe. Now I know that it’s really quite the opposite. They’re a very well oiled machine, the slickest of the slick, and the university is controlling them. I don’t know how, or why, but—”

Shelly found herself momentarily stalled by the dean’s expression. It would have been an exaggeration to call it horror or repugnance, but the emotion it revealed sprang from the same source as those emotions:

He thought she was crazy.

He thought she was, perhaps, a paranoid schizophrenic.

He was going backward in his mind through all the years he’d known her, and what the early signs of this might have been. There must have been some: The insistence on the superiority of Handel to Mozart. Her lesbianism. The picture of the cat that she kept on her desk. He was no longer blushing. He no longer needed to feel embarrassed, she realized, because he no longer believed he was with a peer, a colleague, or even a former employee. He was in the presence of a lunatic.

Shelly sighed, fighting back tears. She swallowed, and said, “You don’t believe me. But I’m not even asking you to believe me. I’ve been in your employ for a long time, and I’m asking something very simple from you, and it’s something only you can do: I need, very much, for you to ask for an inquiry into the disappearance of a young woman from the university here. She was a student in the music school. A violinist. A member of the Omega Theta Tau sorority. She’s been missing since last winter, and as far as I can tell, from what I’ve read on the Internet, there has been no investigation by either the local police or by the university.

“Surely, as dean of the music school, you must want to know what happened to this girl? We can’t have sophomores from the music school simply disappearing, can we?”

From the look on his face, Shelly could tell that he’d never even heard about the missing violinist, and he didn’t want to be hearing about her now. Still, he’d moved beyond his concerns regarding Shelly’s sanity to far greater concerns regarding his accountability, his reputation, his exposure. He was, to Shelly’s relief, taking a pen out of his pocket, pulling a legal pad from the corner of his desk to the center of it, nodding for her to go on.

“What’s your concern about this girl? And how do you know about it?”

“She was a sorority sister of Nicole Werner’s, and also of Josie Reilly’s, and it just seems too much, to me—just so many coincidences. Where is this girl, and why hasn’t anyone come forward with any information about her?”

“So,” he put down the pen. “You don’t even know if she’s still missing. She might be back in school for all you know, or back home with her folks?”

Shelly nodded. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll look into it, but who knows. I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“Thank you. I’m just asking you to look into it. And, can I ask you”—she started before she realized she’d been planning, all along, to ask the question—“how was it that Josie Reilly was sent to me for the work-study position? She wasn’t a financial aid student, was she? Those positions are for students in need.”

The dean closed his eyes and cleared his throat. He winced then, as if something he’d seen with his closed eyes had given him physical pain. When he opened his eyes again, he sighed and said, “Well, that in itself, Shelly, is part of the whole unfortunate situation. The student wasn’t even being paid. She simply wanted the experience, and was willing to work for free because she knew she couldn’t get the job without the work-study scholarship. So, I saw to it that she was sent your way. First of all, because she was such a lovely, fine student, and also because her mother and my wife are friends from their own college days. Sorority sisters, as it happens.”

64

“You’re kidding, right?” Craig said. He was holding her in his arms. She was wearing a bra with orange daisies on it, and matching cotton panties. It had been her idea to take off her T-shirt and jeans: “I want to feel as much of your skin against mine as I can, without—”

She hadn’t needed to say more.

He knew what she meant.

He’d agreed he’d never press the issue again after a night after winter break when he’d begged and pleaded with her to let him kiss her breasts. Finally, she’d nodded in a manner that had seemed almost ceremonious—the crucifer on the altar nodding to the priest—and Craig’s heart had nearly exploded in his chest.

But when he’d propped himself up on his elbows to unfasten her beautiful pink lace bra, he realized that she was crying, that there were matching tears sliding sideways down each of her cheeks, zigzagging into her golden hair, where they disappeared, and he pulled his trembling hands away from her bra as if they’d been burned. He let them hover in the air over her for a moment before he sagged beside her on the squeaking mattress of his bed, put his head in her neck, and said, “No, Nicole. I’m sorry.”

She said nothing.

“I won’t ask again,” Craig said.

“I love you,” she said—and, as every time she had said it since the first time, something seemed to catch between Craig’s soft palate and his throat. He couldn’t speak. He’d made a thousand declarations of love to her since October, but he could never say it in response to her declaration—because of this sharpness that caught him as quickly as a fishhook every time.

Nicole smiled, seeming to understand. He didn’t have to say it. He loved Nicole. He loved her. Nicole knew how much he loved her.

That had been six weeks ago, and since then he’d held her in his arms in her bra and panties a dozen times, and kept his promise not to ask for more.

“Tell me this is a bad joke,” he said. “Your sorority doesn’t really do this shit, right?”

“It’s not that weird,” Nicole said. “Secret societies have rituals. This happens to be ours.”

Craig couldn’t stop himself from snorting, but then he muttered an apology. He said, “Sorry. I guess I just don’t think of your sorority as a secret society. I mean, I thought it was about formals and decorating floats and making cookies and maybe helping each other clip in hair extensions. I never thought you’d have a coffin in the basement, and—”

“Shhh—be quiet,” Nicole said, and she actually glanced around the room as if someone might have overheard, although they were half-naked and completely alone in his dorm room. Perry was at his afternoon Poli-Sci lecture. Even the curtains were closed.

“Nicole,” Craig said, but didn’t bother to continue. It was cute, really, he thought. It reminded him of the way girls back in elementary school would get all excited about their own meaningless secrets, passing notes to one another, freaking out if some boy grabbed a note out of some girl’s hands, although those notes had never said anything more exciting than Deena likes Bradley!!! Like anyone cared.

“Well, the Pan-Hellenic Society could have our house closed if they found out. This is considered hazing.”

“How often does your sorority have these… raisings?” Craig asked, trying to make it sound like a serious question, trying not to make air quotations around the word.

“Twice a year,” Nicole said. “They did it back in November, but we—the new pledges—had to wait upstairs. They don’t let us attend until the Spring Event.”

Then, Craig couldn’t help it. He laughed out at her calling it the “Spring Event.” Basically they were getting sorority sisters drunk on tequila, having them hyperventilate until they passed out, putting them in a coffin, and “bringing them back from the dead,” all newly risen in the Omega Theta Tau sisterhood. It hardly fit, in Craig’s opinion, under the kind of seasonal “event” classification the Rotary Club might give to an Easter egg hunt or a skating party for kids with Down syndrome.

“Craig,” Nicole said, and punched him softly on the arm. “You said you wanted me to tell you everything. And you swore you wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Craig held his hand over his heart and said, “I swear. I mean it. Your secret society’s secret is safe with me. But don’t go brain dead on me or something, okay? You’re sure this shit is safe?”

“It’s so safe,” Nicole said. “Hundreds of girls have done it since the fifties. Nothing’s ever gone wrong.”

“Yeah, but what if it does? You read about this stuff all the time. People with heart conditions they didn’t know they had, that kind of thing—”

“Well, we have a dozen founding sisters present at the event. And this year I’m just a celebrant. I don’t get to be raised until next year.”

“Well, that’s good,” Craig said, although it still vaguely alarmed him. (For one thing, who were these blue-haired old ladies from the fifties who showed up for this weirdness, and why? Jesus Christ, would Nicole still be doing this stuff when she was eighty years old?) “I love you,” he said, “but the idea of wiping the drool off your bib for the rest of your life is less than sexy. Still, I’d do it.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry. Anyway, we have our own EMT. The sorority pays him to be at the events and—”

“That guy,” Craig said, and propped himself up on his elbow. “That guy. You said you didn’t know who he was.”

“What guy?”

“The one who’s always hanging around your sorority. I pointed him out. I said, ‘He’s got a patch on his pocket that says EMT,’ and you were like, ‘What’s EMT stand for?’”

“Huh?” She pulled Craig back down to her and kissed his temple. “Your eyebrows are all furrowed, Craig. I hate that.”

She’d said that a lot—that she couldn’t stand to look at him when his eyebrows were “furrowed,” and when he’d tried to explain to her that it would be his forehead that was furrowed, because furrows were lines and you couldn’t have furrowed eyebrows, she’d said, “I don’t care. I can’t stand that face you make.”

“You know perfectly well what EMT stands for,” Craig said. “Do you play dumb with me a lot, Nicole?”

“So, like, are you asking if I’m playing dumb or just actually dumb?”

He laughed, and she kissed his forehead.

“Don’t make fun of me,” Nicole said, but she wasn’t angry. She licked his forehead then and nuzzled into his neck, and he let his hands drift around the safe, soft, bare skin of her torso.

65

Kurt embraced Mira in front of the students with all that Eastern European physicality she remembered from her year in that part of the world—smelling strongly of cologne, literally lifting her off her feet.

“Mira!” he said, and set her back down.

When she turned back around to her class, they were staring at her with what could have been alarm, but mostly, she supposed, they were registering their surroundings (the starkness, the coldness) and smelling the lively, corporeal presence of Kurt against the antiseptic smell of the autopsy room on the other side of the sliding doors, from which he’d emerged wearing his white smock, red hair tucked up into a gauzy blue cap, big grin sans one front tooth.

“Mira,” he said again, and then looked at her students looking at him. He raised a hand to them and said, “Welcome to the morgue.”

There was a burst of laughter, followed by nervous silence. The students nodded back with more energy than usual. Mira could already tell which of the girls were hoping to faint—although these were rarely the ones who actually fainted. The actual fainters were usually the tough guys or the serious young women who’d always wanted to be surgeons.

“We’ll be entering the ‘Waiting Mortuary’ in a moment,” Mira said, and gestured for the class to follow her through the sliding glass doors. “This is the part of the morgue that was specifically designed for the purpose of confirming that a dead body was actually deceased. Until very recently, as we’ve already discussed, there were no trusted methods for verifying death, and people had sincere fears of being buried alive. The Waiting Mortuary was designed to house the dead for a period of time during which attendants would be on alert for any sign of life. Right, Kurt?”

Kurt nodded sincerely. He was nothing if not sincere. When Mira had first met him, they had been leaning over a grave full of Serbian dead together, peering down.

Skeletal remains. Some scraps of clothing. A couple of wristwatches. A ring.

Kurt had turned to her, looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and then he’d reached over and put his hand over her eyes.

Since his move to the States, Mira had seen Kurt only during these visits with her classes to the morgue. She’d asked him to have coffee with her once, but he’d said he was busy. She invited him over to dinner once, but he’d declined.

“Your husband wouldn’t like it.”

“No, he would like it,” Mira insisted. “Clark would like to meet you. He’s heard so much about you.”

“No,” Kurt said again. “I am a single man. He looks at me one time. He knows I feel for you. I am a shy man, Mira. Large, yes, but timid. I do not want to fight your husband.”

“Fight?” Mira had exclaimed, and laughed out loud, but Kurt was serious, and she realized that because of this seriousness, there could be no dissuading him without insulting him, without implying that her husband would never have considered him a rival, that there would be no fight. So she hadn’t argued—although, when Clark had laughed and laughed after she told him about Kurt’s fears, so adamantly amused, she’d briefly considered telling him, that, actually, Kurt had been a figure for quite a while in her sexual imagination.

His large Eastern European presence with his scent of cologne and his experience of the world, and war, and hardship, and death.

Kurt bowed a little to Mira’s students then and said, “You must be very quiet, although of course the dead cannot hear.” (Again, excited and uneasy laughter.) “But because, you know, the word morgue, it is a French word. It means, at one and same, ‘to look at solemnly,’ and ‘to defy.’” Kurt waited for this to sink in, and then said, “You see, the sameness? And the strangeness?”

They were all nodding by this time. Perhaps they did understand, or maybe they were starting to feel as if their lives depended upon the goodwill of this man, their diener.

They stopped at the sliding glass doors. Mira turned and said, “Here we are in what the Victorians quaintly referred to as the Rose Cottage. At children’s morgues, they called it the Rainbow Room. And though these euphemisms might be charming, and funny, we have to remember that eventually most of us will find ourselves in a morgue, not viewing, but viewed.”

“Too-day,” Kurt said, “we have a man who has had a brain aneurysm. We have a woman of old age. We have a suicide. But I must warn you, because it is disturbing, there are a family, two children, father, grandmother, they were hit by a head-on. It is a busy day at the morgue.”

One or two of the students took a step backward, and began to look around as if in a panic to find the exit.

“As I’ve said,” Mira said (pointlessly, because no one ever left), “this is optional. You can wait for us here, or leave altogether if you need to. No penalties.”

The shock turned to resignation then. In some, it looked like excited anticipation. They might insist that they did not want to see dead bodies, but they did. And each semester this viewing was a turning point in her class. For a while afterward, anyway, they would feel in a way they hadn’t felt before that the living body was a temporary condition. Funereal black would no longer be a fashion statement. They would communicate with one another and with her more carefully.

The glass doors slid open, and Kurt stepped through them, and Mira and all of her students followed.

66

“I love you,” Nicole said again, and squeezed her eyes and kissed him. “I love you, and I love you, and I love you. But now I have to go.”

He watched Nicole’s small, tight, perfectly smooth body as she got out of his bed to slip into the black dress she’d bought to wear that night to her sorority’s ridiculous ritual. Except for the girls who were being raised, who wore white dresses, the others were to wear funeral black. The ones who’d already been raised, and the ones who were yet to be raised, were “mourners.”

It was ridiculous, he thought, even as he admired the dress as Nicole unfurled it from the hanger she’d so carefully put it on when she brought it to his room—and even more ridiculous that the sorority hadn’t been imaginative enough to come up with a name for it that didn’t rhyme with hazing.

Still, he vowed, he would say no more about it. It was the kind of absurdity you had to be outside of to see. Nicole, he knew, would have found absurd the painfully hard slaps on the ass his track teammates gave each other after a meet, and the writers’ conferences he went to with his father (languid poets and novelists wandering around with glasses of wine and little leather-bound diaries), not to mention the tradition among teenage males in Fredonia every winter, just before the ski resort opened, of getting naked in the middle of the night on the slopes, dropping acid, and beating the living shit out of each other.

Briefly it crossed Craig’s mind to call Lucas and ask him to crash the party with him, but he dismissed it instantly. He couldn’t risk the wrath of Nicole’s sisters again. He wasn’t even allowed to step onto the porch to pick her up anymore. And Nicole would hate him for it.

Her black dress was made of something that seemed silkier than silk. Craig sat up with his feet on the floor, and had to will himself not to crawl to her on hands and knees and kiss the hem of it. She’d gotten her hair cut a few weeks before, and although it was still long, there were blunt little ends now that curled up a little around her shoulders. She’d started wearing it loose more often. Sometimes, when she was studying or thinking or standing in front of the mirror, she’d run her fingers through it and it would appear to pour through them like molten gold.

Now she pulled out Perry’s desk chair and started rolling a sheer black stocking up her leg, and Craig stared at her ankle until she started to laugh.

“You’re drooling, Craig,” she said, and he snapped his mouth closed.

Her other foot was still bare.

The toenails were painted pale pink. In the light that shone through the crack in the curtains, those toenails seemed to glow—and then he was on his knees, crawling across the floor, taking the foot in his hands, cradling it, bringing it to his lips, kissing first the top of it, up near the ankle, and then moving down toward the toes, until she was squealing, “Stop! Stop! It tickles!” And then he heard a key flip the lock on the door, and Perry was standing there, looking down at Craig, in his underwear, on his knees in front of Nicole, holding her bare foot to his lips.

“Excuse me,” Perry said, looking up to the ceiling. “But if you could open the door when you’re done. I’ve got to get my food plan ID out of the desk to get some dinner.” The door slammed shut behind him, but not before Craig and Nicole had burst out laughing. How could they not? What must the scene have looked like to Perry? Craig released the foot and took her face in his hands, and pulled her gently toward him for a kiss, and then sat back on his heels to look at her. All that gold hair. Her cheeks flushed.

He tried not to imagine her then, in a basement, in a black dress, a bunch of drunk and stoned sorority girls holding hands and chanting.

“We’d better hurry,” Nicole said. “Perry will be mad.”

“Screw Perry,” Craig said, loudly, toward the dorm room door, as if for Perry’s benefit, although he doubted Perry could hear him through the solid wood of the door, and he really had no great desire to hurt Perry’s feelings or piss him off. Perry had been particularly nice lately, letting Craig go on and on about his parents’ divorce, offering commiserating head shakes. He was gratifyingly appalled by the behavior of Craig’s mother, leaving his father. Once, he’d been in the room when Craig had called home and his mother had said to him, wearily, “Craig, this has nothing to do with you. This is between me, and Dad, and Scar.”

“Between you and Dad and Scar?” Craig had shouted, and then, without waiting for her answer, he’d slapped his phone shut and thrown it against the wall.

Perry had jumped up from his computer and taken Craig by the shoulders and said, in the voice of a really mature guy, “It’s okay, man. It’s okay. You gotta calm down, okay?”

He’d helped Craig duct-tape his cell phone together again. (Perry was great at fixing broken mechanical things, as Craig had learned when Perry’d accidentally stepped on his own calculator.) Afterward, he’d gone to Z’s with Craig, and they’d gotten pretty shitfaced—Craig, albeit, much more shitfaced than Perry.

And Craig found that he had grown oddly fond of the way Perry bleached his socks and rolled them into obsessive little balls lined up in the top drawer of his dresser. When Nicole was off at some sorority function, they’d eat in the cafeteria together, and now and then they’d go down to Winger Lounge and sprawl all over the couch to watch some basketball game neither of them cared about.

“Don’t be mean to Perry,” Nicole said. “He’s like family.”

Craig turned back to Nicole. She wasn’t joking. She was so sweet.

“You’re right,” Craig said. “I lucked out in the roommate department.”

“Yeah, Perry’s true blue.” She was looking at the ceiling as she said this, and her eyes looked oddly blank to him. He stood up so he could see her better, and even from overhead, the expression on her face seemed strange to him. She looked pale, he thought. Even her irises.

“What?” she asked, without looking at him, as if she were blind.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Then don’t be silly.” There was so little intonation in her voice, and her face still looked weird. Could he be having one of those dreaded acid trip flashbacks, even though he hadn’t dropped acid for years?

“Nicole?”

She snapped out of it then, and looked at him. Pure Nicole. Little dimple near the right corner of her lip. He was so relieved, he put a hand on his chest and sighed.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, but suddenly he had a very bad feeling about the Spring Event.

“Nicole,” he said, kneeling down again at her feet, looking up at her. “Can’t you blow this off? This is so fucking stupid, and—”

“Are you crazy, Craig?” She was serious. She looked sincerely shocked, as if he’d suggested they jump off the roof together. He shook his head, to let her know he wasn’t going to push it. Instead, he straightened up, and she slid the stockings all the way on, and slipped her feet into lacy black heels, blew him a kiss, opened the door, and Craig heard her call bye-bye to Perry, musically, as she stepped out of the room, and he stepped in.

“Want to go to dinner?” Perry asked, grabbing his meal card off his desk, as if he hadn’t just walked in while Craig was half-naked kissing Nicole’s little foot, as if it were just any of the other hundreds of times they’d headed down to the cafeteria together.

67

From the Waiting Mortuary, Professor Polson’s friend Kurt took them into a hallway lined with doors.

There were numbers nailed to the doors, but the numbers seemed random. Room 3 was adjacent to 11. Room 1 seemed to be missing altogether. Tacked to the door of Room 4 was a photograph of a white cat standing beside a blue mailbox. Perry wondered about that photo, in a place where there were no others, what the significance of that could be, when someone in a pale green shower cap and matching scrubs opened the door and looked out, white light pouring on him (or her), before shutting it again.

Everything in the hallway was bright, and cold. It wasn’t the outdoor, winter kind of cold, but a dry, artificial cold, as if freeze-dried air were being poured down from the ceiling by the fluorescent lights.

When they reached the end of the hallway, Kurt stopped, turned, and held up a hand.

“Thank you for being so quiet,” he said. “We do not have them today, but this is where sometimes a parent or a wife or husband must come to identify a deceased person. It is not like in the TV show, exactly, because we do not bring them into a room and take off a sheet and show them their loved one’s face. Instead they are shown the effects. Wallet, jewelry, et cetera, and then a Polaroid photograph of the deceased’s face. They know, or do not know, and if they are not sure, they must see. If they are sure, but still wish to see the body, they may request. It is easier, the Polaroid. Luckily for us, today, any families have already been and gone.”

Nicole. Nicole had been here, of course, and it had been Josie Reilly who’d come to identify her—and although it was utterly impossible to imagine Josie Reilly clipping down this hallway in some pair of cute little shoes, it was even harder to imagine Nicole in this cold brilliance, laid out in whatever manner they laid out the dead, which he was about to see, and suddenly did not want to.

But wasn’t this one of the reasons he’d taken this class? To see for himself?

He felt exhausted, dizzy, as if a grave mistake had been made by someone he used to be and no longer was. He put a hand to his head.

Professor Polson, standing off to the side of the hallway, looked over and raised her eyebrows as if to ask him, you okay? But she seemed preoccupied, too, looking at Perry as she also held her cell phone to her ear. After a few seconds, she looked at it in the palm of her hand, and then she seemed to be scrolling through her messages, or her address book. The fluorescent light turned her hair to a reddish gleaming that Perry had never quite noticed before. He watched her until he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Karess was staring at him, again, staring at Professor Polson.

“Today,” Kurt said, “is an autopsy, but it is not yet to begin. I am taking you to autopsy room, where there is one body, which you will see it. This is not someone who has been disfigured, but will look typical of a corpse who has died by strangulation, because it is believed he has hanged himself. If you will faint, or be disturbed, you might wish to not.”

Kurt nodded solemnly then, as if they’d all understood what he meant, and then, whether they did or not, they followed him into Room 42—all except Professor Polson, who was again holding her cell phone to her ear, seeming to be trying to get a connection, which Perry thought pretty unlikely, deep in this basement, a place out of which he imagined very few cell phone calls were intended to be made or received.

“We shall proceed,” Kurt said, “four people at a time. You will wear booties, cap, and gown.” He pointed to a doorless locker where the mint green garb was hanging on hooks, and he shrugged. “We have only so many clothes.” He made clothes a two-syllable word, and tapped four students—one of them Karess—on the shoulder, pointing toward the locker. “You must wear such cloth-es when there is a body.”

Karess looked backward then, directly into Perry’s eyes, seeming to be asking for some kind of guidance.

Stupidly, apologetically, Perry smiled frozenly, and she looked away. Her new friend Brett Barber was another one of the four included in the first group, and he leaned over and whispered something into Karess’s hair. Perry guessed it was a bad joke when he saw Karess lift a shoulder as if to block Brett from saying anything else—a flinch—and then she was stripping off her coat and her ratty, lovely sweater, bearing her long, thin arms for the surgical scrubs, and sliding the pale green of them over her body.

68

Mira couldn’t figure out how to turn up the volume on the cell phone she’d bought to replace the one Clark had taken with him when he left. It was a cheaper model, but it had even more buttons and games and gadgets than the older, more expensive one.

During Kurt’s spiel about the autopsy room, and while the first group of students were putting on their surgical booties and gowns, Mira had noticed a new voice mail—the little cartoon envelope on her cell phone window—although she’d never heard the phone ring. She called for her messages immediately, worried it might be Jeff, that the twins needed something, or he needed to know something, or something worse. (Andy had taken to crawling on the back of the couch, and Mira had taken on terrors that he’d fall off and hit his head on the window behind it.)

At some point, Mira had stopped expecting Clark to call, and she figured that if he came home while Jeff was there, Jeff could handle it. Jeff was far too affable to pose any threat to Clark.

But the message wasn’t from Jeff. The call was from the college (Mira recognized the first three numbers on the caller ID as the university’s prefix), but she could barely hear the message, and couldn’t figure out how to turn the volume up. It seemed miraculous that she was managing to get any reception at all, there in the morgue, deep in the basement of the hospital—all cinderblocks and heavy fire doors—but reception didn’t do any good if she couldn’t make out the message:

“Mira, this is…” (Dean Fleming?) “… after all… within the next couple of… absolutely imperative that…”

It surprised and alarmed her that he already had this new phone number. She’d left it with his secretary only two hours earlier. She didn’t recall his ever dialing her cell or home number before, always casually leaving his messages on the voice mail in her office, or scrawled on sticky notes and left on her office door.

Mira hit Return Call, but as soon as she did, the phone went dead in her hand.

Perry Edwards walked past then, made eye contact with her, and Mira flipped her phone closed, held up a hand for him to stop.

“Perry,” she said. “I’ve got a call I’ve got to return. I’m going out to the alley, or maybe up to street level if I have to, can you—?”

He was nodding before she’d had her request articulated. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll come get you if we need you.”

“Yeah,” Mira said. “If, God forbid, someone faints, or—?”

“We’ll be fine,” Perry said. “You go ahead.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, hurrying out. He was such a good kid. Mira had thought they’d stopped making his kind around 1962.

She’d had an urge to kiss his cheek before she hurried out with her phone, the way she might have kissed Andy or Matty’s cheeks, but she didn’t. She just said thank you again for a fourth time, long after he could have heard her.

69

“Why are you playing games with him?”

“What games?” Nicole asked.

“What games?”

She was pulling on a green silk tank top, no bra, and let it linger over her breasts before she covered them, and then she turned her back on Perry.

It was exactly the cream white expanse he’d imagined with his eyes closed and his hands running down it, but he winced and turned his face away when he realized what it reminded him of: Mary. Her backless prom dress. Slow-dancing to some dumb song while she whispered to him about how in love with him she was. His hand on the bare expanse of soft skin between her shoulder blades.

Nicole came over, wearing the tank top and nothing else, and sat down on the bed beside him. She ran her hand up his chest, to his neck, let it linger there, and then lifted it to his cheek, and then up to his eyes, the lids of which she gently closed with her fingertips before leaning over him and kissing them.

Perry felt the staticky gossamer wisps of her blond hair around his face, her breath (licorice, Mountain Dew) near his ear. She ran her hand down his side, to his hip. She moved her mouth down to his Adam’s apple, kissed it, licked it, and then bit it hard enough to make him flinch, and then she sat back and laughed.

He opened his eyes. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“No,” Nicole said. “You didn’t answer mine.”

Perry put a hand over his eyes so he was no longer looking at the delicate curve of her breast beneath the silk top, or the cool shoulder bone, the startlingly perfect flesh of her upper arm. If he looked further, he could have found the perfect golden triangle between her legs. Who was he, to be doing this with her? Who was she?

With a hand over his eyes, he said, “Craig thinks you’re a virgin, Nicole. He thinks you’re a Christian, and some kind of white-bread Midwestern milkmaid.”

“Well, he thinks you’re a great roommate, and a true-blue Boy Scout. He thinks you’re a virgin, too.”

“Yeah. I’m a shithead, and I admit it. A shitty friend. A shitty roommate. But he just tolerates me. He thinks he’s going to marry you. He thinks you’re the future mother of his children. Pure angel. He thinks it’s his duty to preserve your innocence in this filthy world.”

Nicole laughed again, and said, “Well, I’d say he’s the one playing the game, in that case.”

Perry waited for her to go on. She didn’t, and eventually he asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, why does he want to believe those things? And if that’s what he wants to believe, why shouldn’t he?”

“Because it’s not true.”

“But he doesn’t want the truth. The kind of girl he thinks I am, he’s never going to find anyway.”

“So, you just figured out what kind of girl Craig wanted, and decided you’d pretend to be that?”

“Isn’t that what everyone does?”

“What? No!”

“No? What was all that class-ring crap with you and Mary about? Seems to me like you had her game all figured out, and played it pretty well for a nice long time.”

Perry sat up. He put his hand to his Adam’s apple, where she’d bit him. It was damp, and when he looked at his fingers, he was surprised to see a drop of blood on them. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Mary’s the one who had me figured out.”

“No,” Nicole said, shaking her head, still smiling. “You knew she wanted that whole Eagle Scout thing. Small-town boy. Good daddy someday. Gonna work at the Edwards and Son Lawn Mower Shop in Bad Axe and tinker with the minivan on weekends. She thought all that ambition—the scholarships and the grades and the SAT scores—was all about making sure you could buy her a nice little house on the outskirts of town and an engagement ring a year or two after you got your high school diploma, and started with the babies. And that game worked out really well for you, didn’t it? You had the sweetest girl at Bad Axe High for three years, and then you ditched her. Did you ever once tell her the real story—that your actual plan was to go to a fancy university, maybe study something like philosophy? Go to school for about ten more years, and then maybe travel around Europe with a backpack for a few more? Jesus Christ. Poor Mary must still be lying awake at night wondering what the hell happened, who the hell she was actually dating all that time she was dating you.”

Perry’s heart was pounding—not just in his chest, but in his throat, throbbing against his Adam’s apple. It was pounding in his wrists, his legs, his temples. He was out of the bed without knowing he’d stood up, looking down at Nicole, who was looking up at him, still with that fucking little smile—and he wanted to say something horrible to her, something that would change her life, something that would scare her, something—but he couldn’t. He never would. Looking down on her smiling up at him, he couldn’t even maintain the desire to say it.

Jesus.

No wonder Craig was such a dupe and he himself was such a chump, a backstabber, a lying asshole.

She was so beautiful. Plato’s ideal, as he now knew from Philosophy 101. She always had been, but now he could see it for what it was, even knowing that it wasn’t what it appeared to be:

Her face was tilted sweetly, like that of a sparrow or a kitten, and she wore that ludicrously girlish smile, and Perry was suddenly reminded of what must have been her second-grade school photograph. Pigtails. No front teeth. Frozen in black and white wearing a little bit of lace around her collar and a silver cross, and then he remembered with perfect clarity sitting behind her in fourth grade, Mr. Garrison’s class. They were talking about sanitation, and Nicole had raised her hand and asked Mr. Garrison, “What happens to the poop after it’s flushed down the toilet?” and all the other kids, especially the boys, were doubled over with laughter at the sound of the word poop coming out of the pretty little mouth of Nicole Werner, who turned around to Perry then, horrified, blushing two bright spots on her cheeks, looking straight at him, as if for help, and Perry was incredibly relieved that he’d reacted, himself, too slowly to laugh, and was able now to look her in the eyes, shrug his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows what these idiots are laughing about? Who cares?

Now he was looking at her, lying half-naked on his bed, the strap of her silky top slipping over her beautiful, womanly shoulder, and Perry couldn’t open his mouth, but he knew by her expression that he was asking her with his eyes to tell him, Is that who I was? Is that who Mary thought I was? Is that what I did? How did you know when even I didn’t?

Instead of answering, she stood, gathered her jeans off the floor, slid them up, and he watched, remembering only a few months before, when he’d found her standing on the front steps of Godwin Hall wearing that bulky sweatshirt—homesick and sad—and how she’d put her head on his shoulder and cried, and the helpless way his mouth had opened, and nothing had come out. Had she really been homesick and sad? Or had that, too, been some kind of test?

Now Nicole put her arms on either side of his face and kissed him (a quick, sweet, nonsexual parting kiss) and said, “Hey. It’s okay. We come from the same place, Perry. I know who you are, and you know who I am. I’ll see you around, okay?”

70

Shelly found them on the Internet with no trouble: the parents of Denise Graham, the Omega Theta Tau “runaway.” As the desperate tended to do in a computer age, they’d created a website: BringBackDenise.com.

There she was on Shelly’s computer screen—a blond beauty with big blue eyes. If it hadn’t been for the coloring, she could have served as Josie Reilly’s stunt double. The same straight, shiny, shoulder-length hair. The smoky eye makeup. The perfect gleaming teeth.

In this photograph, Denise Graham was wearing a lacy tank top. She was sitting in a plaid armchair that had the look of family room furniture. There was a longhaired cat in her lap. Denise Graham was petting it, smiling.

The bright red capital letters went on to scroll out the details. The time and date of her last contact with her parents. Her height and weight (5’5” and only 115 pounds). Also, her favorite foods (nachos, Dr. Pepper) and various nicknames (Shiny, Sweeties, Neecey)—as if she, like the cat in her lap, might need to be coaxed out from under a porch or a vehicle with these pet names.

The Grahams’ phone number was there, too—how many prank phone calls, Shelly wondered, had this inspired?—along with their address, their email addresses. They lived only thirty miles from the university town where their daughter had disappeared.

Twice Shelly picked up the phone to call them, and twice she composed emails to them, and then she decided she would simply drive to Pinckney and introduce herself, because, really, what did she have to offer them, or to ask them? Better that they should see her standing there humbled on the doorstep by their grief.

Or so she’d thought until she pulled up in front of their house.

It was one of those lavish new subdivision homes, the type built to appeal to people who, Shelly imagined, wanted a kind of English country life without the country. It had a winding cobblestone path through some bright green bushes bearing red ornamental berries. A light snow had begun to fall, and everything about the place looked like an advertisement for a lifestyle, the lifestyle being lived in nearly identical houses all throughout the subdivision, except that here the lawn hadn’t been mown or the hedges trimmed, and the mailbox at the end of the driveway appeared to have been struck by a car (little black door hanging open, side dented). And every window in the house had drawn shades or curtains pulled across it. Although there were two cars parked at crooked angles to each other outside the closed garage, it looked, from the outside, as if no one had been home for many months.

Shelly was about to back up, turn around, when the front door flew open and a woman in a hot pink bathrobe hurried, barefoot, onto the front steps and began to wave her arms wildly in the air, as if flagging down an ambulance or trying to help land a plane.

There was no doubt who she was.

The resemblance was uncanny. Here was Denise Graham, the runaway sorority girl, aged thirty years. Frantic, exhausted, maybe medicated or a little drunk. Having spent the last eight months in the desperate hope that every time the phone rang, the mail came, or a car pulled into the driveway it would bring her lost daughter home to her. “Who are you?” Denise Graham’s mother called out to Shelly, and Shelly had no choice now but to park the car and get out.

The living room was a gracious shambles. Newspapers were piled up on the leather sofa. Mail was scattered across the antique coffee table. There was a stain (coffee? Pepsi?) in the center of the plush white carpet. The cat Shelly recognized from the website was sitting in front of the cold fireplace, stone still. Only its eyes moved when Shelly sat down in the only chair that wasn’t piled with papers.

“I want to tell you right away, Mrs. Graham,” Shelly said, “that I don’t—”

“Call me Ellen,” the woman said, as if the interruption, the intimacy of a first name, might change the course of this conversation and lead her to her daughter. She took a place on the couch across from Shelly without bothering to clear a place for herself, sitting down on a newspaper, a few pieces of junk mail. Her robe spilled open over her chapped-looking knees, and she didn’t bother to pull it back into place. Out of respect, Shelly looked away, but the only other thing to look at in the room besides Ellen Graham or a messy pile of something was the cat, unnerving in its calm return of Shelly’s gaze.

“Okay, yes,” Shelly said, “and you can call me Shelly. But I want you to know that I don’t have any information about your daughter. I’m with the university, but I work—or, worked—at the Chamber Music Society. The only connection I have here is to one of your daughter’s sorority sisters, and I’ve been reading about your daughter, and about another incident at the sorority—”

“Nicole Werner,” Ellen Graham said. “That accident happened the night my daughter disappeared.”

Shelly nodded, although the accounts she’d read put the disappearance of Denise Graham at least a week before Nicole’s death.

“I’m not a professional in any way,” Shelly continued, “and I probably have no business—”

Ellen began shaking her head. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I don’t care about anything except finding Denise. Who cares about being professional or even polite? That’s gotten us nothing. We don’t care if you’re just plain nosy, if it’s morbid curiosity. We just want someone to help us.”

Ellen Graham’s hands went to her knees then. She began to scratch at them absently, rocking back and forth.

Shelly paused, trying to decide where to go from here. She took a breath and said, “I was the first person at the scene of the accident. Nicole Werner’s accident. I saw what happened, and I know that what they’re saying happened didn’t happen. I’m trying to find out what actually did happen. I don’t know if it had anything to do with your daughter—”

“Denise,” the woman said, as if she’d been waiting for an excuse to say the name.

“Yes,” Shelly continued, “with Denise. But I know, now, that either the university, or the police, or the newspaper, or the sorority, or all of them together are willing to lie. They’re covering something up. They’ve got something to hide. They’re—”

“Who is this girl, the one you know from the sorority? Is her name Josie Reilly?” There was no mistaking the tone of Ellen Graham’s voice when she said the name: bitter hatred. Fury, and anger, and derision.

“Yes,” Shelly said, astonished. “How did you know?”

“I’ll show you how I know,” Ellen Graham said.

Although she stood up, her body seemed to retain the shape of the sofa, the posture of someone who’d been sitting in it, slumped, so long that she had become it. Shelly followed her to the stairway, where there was more plush carpet and piled-up debris—magazines, paperbacks, unopened envelopes. Ellen Graham simply stepped over the piles and around them, so Shelly did as well, and then they were in a long hallway hung with photographs of a girl who had to be Denise: Denise in a bassinet, zipped into what looked like a lacy pink envelope. Denise with pigtails, riding a tricycle. Denise in a startlingly low-cut blue satin gown, hand tucked under the arm of a boy in a tuxedo. Denise squinting into sunlight, wearing a mortar board.

They stopped in front of an open door.

“This is Denise’s room,” Ellen Graham said, as if Shelly could have mistaken it for anything else.

There were piles of stuffed animals on the bed—the prized, expensive kind of stuffed animals (endangered species with personalized name tags and hand-painted glass eyes), not the dragged-through-the-mud-since-preschool kind. There was a complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia on the bookshelf, ceramic cats holding the volumes in place. The only mess in this room was on the bulletin board, which was three layers thick with snapshots of adolescents in bikinis, or on bicycles, or driving boats, or singing into microphones, and glossy pages torn out of magazines, greeting cards emblazoned with YOU’RE THE BEST and WAY TO GO, GIRL, and small, dried-up things that must have been mementos from parties and dances and dates.

The girl’s violin was out of its case, lying on its side on top of her dresser.

“I haven’t changed anything,” Ellen Graham said. “Before the police came, I made a chart of everything, where everything had been, so that everything would be exactly the way she left it, for when she comes back.” She looked with unnerving ferocity into Shelly’s eyes, seeming to be making sure Shelly understood that Denise would come back. “The only difference is that I put her clothes and things from her room at the sorority away, in her closet, when those girls brought me her things. “See?”

Ellen Graham led Shelly to a closet and slid the door open. A row of white lights blazed on without any switch being flipped, and Ellen Graham stepped into it—into that light, and into that closet—turned a corner, and seemed to disappear before Shelly’s eyes.

Shelly followed, but hesitated, and then she realized that this closet was the size of most rooms. A closet the size of a small apartment, or a trailer. It could not have been called, even, really, a walk-in closet. It was a space that could have been lived in. The only thing closetlike about it was the row after row of garments crammed together along the walls, and the fact that there were no windows.

Ellen Graham turned to look at Shelly and then tossed her arms up in the air, as if either to reveal something miraculous or to try to express the total futility of some unending task, and then she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled down a small black-enameled box, opened it, and turned it toward Shelly, as if to present her with the contents.

Black satin, bearing jewelry.

A pair of earrings.

Two grapelike clusters of opals and rubies dangling from elaborate Victorian-scrolled gold settings. These were the kinds of jewels that were kept under glass at Holyrood or Buckingham Palace. When Denise had worn them, they must have hung down to her shoulders. They must have weighed a ton, cost a fortune.

Ellen Graham picked one of them up and said, “They were my grandmother’s. She was Italian. A countess. You don’t have to believe me. You can look it up on the Internet.”

Shelly nodded, and immediately regretted it, thinking the nod might make it appear that checking out Ellen Graham’s grandmother’s pedigree on the Internet was something she planned to do.

“I let Denise borrow these for the Spring Event. She was wearing a white dress we bought together in Chicago. She was so excited. I’d never even let her touch these before.

“My daughter is an angel, Shelly, but no one could claim that, when it comes to material things, she’s overly responsible. She lost four cell phones between her senior year in high school and when she disappeared.

“Still, she knew what these were worth, and what they meant.”

The Spring Event. Josie’s description of it. The tequila. The coffin. Shelly wondered if Denise disappeared before or after.

“And that fucking little bitch,” Ellen Graham said, her voice cracking on the last word before she snapped the enameled box shut and tossed it back on the shelf above her daughter’s sweaters and dresses. “Josie Reilly! That fucking little bitch who came here with one of those other little Omega Theta Tau brats with a trunk full of my beautiful daughter’s things. But no earrings. No white dress. ‘Where are those?’ I asked. How stupid was I?”

Ellen Graham was acting out a scene now, reading from a script.

“‘Have you seen, by any chance,’ I asked, ‘a white dress and a pair of beautiful Italian earrings worth about twenty thousand dollars?’

“‘Oh, no, Mrs. Graham. Golly. We went all through Denise’s stuff. We brought you everything! We never saw a white dress or any Italian earrings. Denise was long gone before the Spring Event. Maybe she was wearing them when she left?’”

Shelly watched, waited for the scene to play itself out.

“Well, that didn’t make sense, did it, Shelly? Why would Denise be wearing her Spring Event outfit if that was still three nights away? But, you know, I was confused. I was desperate. The police and the university and the Pan-Hellenic Society—everyone was looking into this. Everyone was working so hard. Wearing ribbons. Making phone calls. I just felt grateful not to be Nicole Werner’s mother by that time. That mother had it worse than I did, I thought. I felt lucky anyone cared at all about Denise’s disappearance with that on top of it.

“And, of course, these girls were so sweet. And so beautiful. Josie, and this other girl, Amanda Something. They could have been Denise. Their hair, and their clothes, and their ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’ and the little mannerisms, their pretty manicures. I thought, Okay, my daughter wore her grandmother’s earrings and her Winter Event dress and got on a bus, and—and what?

“And by the time these girls brought me her things, it had been six weeks already. Six unbearable, sleepless weeks. And then the summer was over and the police told me they were ‘working’ on the case.

“So I sat down at the computer and looked her up—Nicole Werner—mostly because her parents were the only parents on earth I could think of who had it worse than I did. Maybe there was some kind of perverse satisfaction in that. I read every word I could find about the accident, and the funeral, and the memorial service, and the sorority and their fucking cherry trees, and then I came across one very, very interesting item.

“I came upon a photograph of that pretty dark-haired girl who’d brought Denise’s belongings home. She’d been, it seemed, Nicole Werner’s roommate. And there she was in this photograph, standing at a lectern giving a little speech during the dedication of the cherry orchard, supposedly two weeks after my daughter disappeared, and that little fucking slut was wearing my goddamned Italian countess grandmother’s earrings.”

Shelly saw it, herself, then—the Googled image—suddenly before her: Josie Reilly in a sweet, tiny, black dress, gripping the sides of a lectern with both hands, wearing sunglasses, a branch full of blossoms lit up behind her head, and the bright glinting blur of Ellen Graham’s grandmother’s earrings dangling from her ears.

Those earrings hadn’t even registered on Shelly until now. If she’d noticed them at all she’d have assumed they were some kind of costume jewelry, something Josie had bought at the mall—at Claire’s, or Daisy’s, one of those places where sorority girls love to stock up on baubles.

“It was September by then,” Ellen Graham went on, despite the shaking of not only her voice but her whole body, “and I called in my baby brother, who’s a bouncer at a bar in Ypsilanti—six feet tall and two hundred pounds of solid muscle—and we went straight to the Omega Theta Tau house and sacked the place. When we found them in her room, Josie Reilly pretended to be astonished that the earrings were my grandmother’s. She claimed Denise had given them to her, told her they were costume jewelry. When I pointed out that I hadn’t let Denise borrow them until just before she disappeared—well, it didn’t make any difference. Those girls have a story and they’re sticking to it. But I know for a fact that my daughter wasn’t gone before the Spring Event. She was there, and she wore her dress, and she wore those earrings. I just don’t know what happened after that.”

“What about her phone? Did the police check the cell phone records?” Shelly asked. “And her attendance in her classes?”

“She’d lost her cell phone the week before. One of the four. We were getting her another one. And the only class she had from Monday until Wednesday was a lecture with three hundred students in it. Her violin lesson had been canceled because the professor was sick. It’s a huge place, as you know. No one was keeping a record of where she was or wasn’t.

“And those sorority bitches. Those lying little bitches. Denise was a girl who was Twittering and Facebooking and texting all day, and so are those other girls. They’ve got messages flying from one end of town to the other twenty-four/seven. So if they had no idea where my daughter was, why wasn’t there one single message left on her Facebook page after the day she disappeared? How come I can’t find one single girl who posted a word on the Internet saying, Gosh, I haven’t see my sorority sister in six months, anyone know where she is?”

The light in the closet was so bright that Shelly’s eyes had begun to tear. She put a hand to her forehead, like a visor. She looked at Ellen Graham, whose own eyes were so red-rimmed it appeared as if she’d lined them with lipstick.

She swallowed, and then asked, “What do you think, Ellen? What happened to your daughter?”

“You think we didn’t try to contact the newspaper? You think we didn’t make about a hundred trips to the police, to university security, to the administrators? I know the layout of the University Administration building like the back of my own hand. We hired a private detective. We tried to involve the FBI. We aren’t perfect, but our daughter had no reason to run away from us.”

Shelly believed her. Completely. Implicitly. Maybe Shelly had spent the last three decades of her life in academia, where no one really believed that anyone outside of it could actually be intelligent, but she knew otherwise. There was the hard, glittering force of pure intelligence in Ellen Graham’s eyes. She could be anywhere, doing anything. She was smarter than Shelly, smarter than all of them.

Ellen Graham put a hand to her own throat, and said, “I know what happened to Denise, but I don’t know why, and I can know it without accepting it. I knew it that night, the night of that Spring Event.” She spat the word event. “Somebody killed my daughter. Her dad and I were on a jet, on our way home from our vacation. It was the middle of the night. We were over the clouds. I was planning to call the sorority the second we touched down, to see how her special night had gone, but when I looked out the window, there she was, wearing her white dress and my grandmother’s earrings. She was kind of peering in at me, like she wondered if I could see her, and there were tears running down her face, and when I put my hand to the window it was burning hot, and then she was gone, and now I’ll never see my daughter alive again.”

There was no self-pity in it. No whining. Just finality, factual clarity. Denise, Shelly realized, would have grown up to be just like her mother: The mother the slacker teachers in the public school would hate to see coming. The woman on the school board who actually made things change. The kind of person who lived the good, fulfilling life, who paid the taxes that made it possible for so many of Shelly’s academic colleagues to spend their lives feeling superior. Denise Graham, like her mother, would have married intelligently, maybe stayed home with her children, seen to it that they ate a hearty breakfast every morning, been there to pick them up after school, to supervise their homework, to drive them to their music lessons. She’d have enjoyed her home, her town, her parents as they slid from vital presences into old age. She’d have been at their bedsides when they died.

Shelly had to will herself to hold Ellen Graham’s gaze, and then the only thing she could think to say was, “But, you’re still looking for her…”

Ellen Graham snorted, tossed her head like a horse with an uncomfortable bit in its mouth. “What else?” she said. “What else would you have me do now?”

71

Karess came out of the autopsy room looking bleached of color and flushed at the same time. She had her hair tucked up into the shower cap, and when she took the cap off her head, the hair came tumbling down around her shoulders.

She tossed the scrubs to Perry and then tossed the cap in his direction, too, although it landed at his feet. She kicked the booties off with some difficulty, stumbling backward and managing not to fall down only because Brett Barber was standing behind her. She slammed into him, and he caught her awkwardly under the arms. Karess shook her head and looked back at Brett, appearing more annoyed by his presence than grateful. She hurried past Perry, and he could smell her, both in the gown she’d tossed to him and in the breeze she left as she ran: Formaldehyde. Sweat. Shampoo. Powdered flowers.

She smelled, he thought for a horrible moment as he slipped the gown she’d tossed to him over his arms, like the church on the morning of Nicole Werner’s funeral.

“It’s fucked up in there,” Brett said, leaning in to Perry. “I’m just warning you. This whole thing is fucked up. Professor Polson should get her ass fired for bringing us here.”

Perry did not even dignify Brett Barber, who was sweating profusely and breathing hard, with a nod. After he got his scrubs on, Perry followed the other three students and Kurt through the doors to the autopsy room. The doors closed behind him with a pneumatic hush, and the effect was like being teletransported onto another planet, with an entirely different kind of atmosphere: thin, and dustless, and tinged with a terrible sweetness. The walls were white, but everything else was made of gleaming stainless steel, even the floor, at the center of which there was a drain hole. Perry found himself in the center of the room, following Kurt and the other students, with that drain hole at his feet.

In it, there was a nestlike tangle of tawny-colored hair.

Perry took a step back and felt a cold pulsing at his right temple, as if someone were tapping at it with an index finger inside a cold latex glove. He put his hand to the temple.

“Are you okay?” Kurt asked. “You are okay?”

It took Perry a moment to realize that Kurt was talking to him, and that the other three students were staring. He swallowed and said, “Yeah,” and made a conscious effort not to look at the drain hole again, or speculate about its contents.

“Here we have the cabinet of the instruments needed for autopsy,” Kurt said, pointing at a brilliantly shining silver cabinet. He reached into a metal bin and briefly held up what looked like a large, thick needle before tossing it back down.

“Here,” Kurt said, “is chalkboard for recording data.” Perry looked in the direction Kurt had pointed. It was the kind of blackboard Perry remembered from his first-grade classroom in Bad Axe, before the whiteboards and the Magic Markers. What looked like a crude drawing of a torso was on it. A few dots were drawn around the neck. A–17–00 Wt NTD DB was underlined several times beside the drawing. Beside that was a list, checkmarks next to each word:

Apparently, the last autopsy had been completed.

“The word autopsy”—Kurt pronounced the word as if it were one long vowel—“means ‘see for yourself.’”

The students giggled a little at the colloquial quality of this. The simplicity.

“So…” Kurt said. (There was no overlooking the showman in him now. He had been waiting for this part. Back in Yugoslavia, he’d probably been an amateur actor, or a magician.) “See for yourself.”

He pulled out a drawer by a handle that Perry hadn’t even noticed was in the wall. It made a slippery tinny sound, and suddenly it was rolling into the room so quickly that the little group of them had to part to make room for it. And then the smell was exactly as he remembered it from Nicole Werner’s funeral—Karess’s sweetness as he slipped the gown over his head—and it took Perry several seconds to realize that there was a sixth person in the room suddenly:

A person on a gurney.

A naked guy with bluish fingers and toes and a sheet thrown casually over his stomach, and what looked like some kind of crude embroidery over his throat, and Perry had to stop himself from saying anything, because the first thing that came to his mind to say was, “Lucas. What are you doing here?”

72

The cafeteria was steamy, a runny fog of it on the windows that looked out onto the Godwin Hall courtyard, a wavering cloud of it hovering above the stainless-steel bins of pasta and Mystery Meat and soggy broccoli.

As always, Perry went straight to the salad bar with a little brown plastic bowl on his tray.

(“How do I know how much dinner I want until I have my salad?” he’d say when Craig asked him why he didn’t just get everything at once.)

Craig got a pile of manicotti with a couple of slices of garlic bread tossed on top, a big cup of the broccoli, and a plastic glass of Coke without ice, and took it to the table he and Perry always occupied when they ate together.

“Sorry, again,” Craig said when Perry sat down across from him with his pale lettuce and a little stack of baby carrots drizzled with something one shade of orange darker than the carrots. “I hope you didn’t sustain any emotional damage, witnessing me kissing Nicole’s sweet little feet.”

Perry sighed and picked up his fork. He seemed to be purposely avoiding Craig’s eyes. Even though they’d been getting along so much better since the start of the semester, it still seemed to piss Perry off royally when he found some article of Nicole’s lying around the room. One time he’d whipped a pair of her pantyhose (admittedly, they’d been lying under his desk chair) at Craig so hard that, if they’d been made of anything other than that airy pantyhose stuff, Craig might have gotten hurt. He wouldn’t have liked it any better, Craig knew, stumbling in on the half-naked foot-kissing scene.

“But you’ll get over it, right? Okay, man?” Craig asked, stabbing his fork into the manicotti, which gave way like clay, some of it spilling off the plate and onto the table. “You hear me, Perry? I’m genuinely sorry about—”

“Drop it,” Perry said.

Craig shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “But, you know, if you had a girlfriend, I think I’d—”

“Drop it,” Perry said again.

Craig nodded, but he was trying to think of something else to say, something to change Perry’s mind about being all pissy. He had a hard time dropping things, he knew. He used to overhear conversations like this between his mom and dad, and it was always his dad who was saying, “For God’s sake, can you just let it go?” and Craig would be thinking to himself, Yeah, why the hell doesn’t she just shut up?, as his mom went on and on and on with her grievance or apology or explanation. Now Craig realized how hard it was to just drop something when you had something left to explain.

He said, after a few moments of silence, “I wish you’d loosen up about Nicole, man. She’s my life. I’m your roommate, so it’s sort of like—”

Perry put his fork down loudly on the table. It startled Craig, but he couldn’t stop.

“I’m going to marry her, man,” Craig said, looking up from the fork to Perry’s stony expression. “This isn’t just any college fucking-around kind of thing. This is love, and I—”

Perry pushed his salad bowl away, and it slid toward Craig. It might have landed in his lap if Craig hadn’t put a hand up to stop it.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Perry?”

Perry leaned across the table then. Maybe it was just the humidity in the cafeteria, but his cheeks looked strangely flushed, and there seemed to be a light film of sweat at his temples and on his forehead—and then, as if he’d been thinking about it for a long, long time, Perry said, “Look, Craig, if you’re not going to drop it you’re going to have to hear something you don’t want to hear, okay? I’ve been keeping my mouth shut, but if every time we have dinner you’re going to start in on me about how uptight I am, and how Nicole’s this innocent virgin, and how you two are so madly in love, I’m warning you, man, I’m going to tell you something you do not want to hear.”

73

“Did you get my message?” Mira said, bursting into the apartment. “I’m so—”

Jeff raised a hand to silence her. He was sitting cross-legged on the shabby Oriental rug on the floor of the apartment. Andy was at one of his knees, Matty at the other. They glanced at Mira, and then back at Jeff. “Listen,” Jeff said, and Mira could hear the intensity in his voice, so she stopped, although what she had to tell him hardly felt like something that could wait.

Slowly Jeff lifted one finger of the hand that was raised, and moved it in front of the twins’ eyes.

“One,” Andy said.

Matty nodded. “One.”

Jeff didn’t look up at her. If he had, he’d have seen her stagger backward, a hand to her mouth. Mira had never heard either twin speak a recognizable word. Not Mama, not Papa, not one single word.

Then, like a magician preparing for a trick, Jeff put the hand behind his back and brought it around again with two fingers raised.

“Two!” the twins shouted in unison.

“Oh, my God!” Mira cried, holding her face in both hands.

This time there was no goofing around. Jeff raised the third finger, and before they even saw it, they screamed out, “Three!” and he turned to Mira, laughing. “Mira, they can get up to ten, no problem. I don’t know what language you guys have been teaching them, but they have no problem with mine.”

It took Mira a long time, a lot of hugging of the twins on her knees, and the repetition of the trick over and over, up to five, up to eight, up to ten, before she had the heart to set the blocks out for them and say, “Mama will be right back.”

Jeff stood up, grunting a little as he did (clearly he’d been sitting crossed-legged on the living room floor for a long time) and followed her into the kitchen, where, as soon as she was sure the twins couldn’t see, Mira turned and threw her arms around his remarkably large, soft torso (how was it she’d always thought he’d looked so solid? In her arms he felt plump and pliable) and hugged him with her face pressed into his over-warm chest as he patted her sweetly between her shoulder blades. Mira could have stayed like that forever, breathing in the tavern and car and fast-food cologne of him. She would have liked to stay like that, and maybe have wept, and maybe taken him afterward to her bed, where she would have slept for hours in his arms, but she had to tell him what had happened. Still with an arm around him, she led him to the table, sat down, and began:

First, the morgue.

She had been trying to reach the office of the dean, to return his call, in a panic about what his indecipherable voice mail message to her could possibly have been about. She’d been pacing in the alley, punching numbers, holding the fucking phone to her ear, and every time his secretary answered, either the secretary couldn’t hear Mira or Mira couldn’t hear the secretary, or they were simply, abruptly, cut off. Mira had been inching away from the building, closer to the street, hoping to get better reception, but also afraid to stray too far from her class, when she heard the morgue door open, and turned to see Perry running into the alley in his mint green booties and scrubs, ashen-faced.

“Professor Polson, Professor Polson, Lucas is in the—”

She’d been alarmed by his expression, although she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. She’d dropped the phone into her bag and followed Perry back, and hadn’t bothered with the booties and scrubs, just burst through the doors, passing Kurt, who said to her as she passed, “You knew of this student?”

And, indeed, there he was—poor, sad, scroungy, familiar Lucas laid out under a sheet up to his shoulders, with what might have been a rope burn around his neck, his eyes closed.

“You knew of him,” Kurt repeated, and Mira, fighting the urge to bolt from the room, could not even manage to nod. She put a hand to her mouth, and stifled what might have turned into an actual scream if she hadn’t. Except for Perry, the other students had already left the room, thank God, but they were still out there stripping off scrubs, putting scrubs on, some still waiting to get their chance to see the autopsy room.

“Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Lucas?”

They talked for a while about Lucas and how, if there had been a most-likely-to-hang-himself award on campus, Lucas might have won it. The drugs. The posture. The delusions. The nihilistic books and music. All that world weariness carried around in his hemp backpack. Still, Mira couldn’t help but ask, “Do you think it had to do with Nicole Werner, with—”

“Shit yes,” Jeff said. “A kid thinks he’s had sex with a dead girl? Either he was mentally ill beforehand or he would have been after.”

Mira told him then about the cryptic, urgent call from the dean.

“I haven’t called him back yet,” she said. “It’s something urgent. What do you think he wants?”

“Nothing,” Jeff said. “Staples—you’re missing a couple. Or he wants to know if you need more. I know you don’t have tenure yet, Mira, and I’m familiar with all the fantasies a person without tenure has, but, believe me, Dean Fleming is just calling to ask you if you like his new tie or something. Go in and see him. The sooner you get it over with the better.”

Mira felt such a rush of warmth again she was afraid she’d melt into tears. She’d desperately missed—without even knowing it—having an adult male tell her that everything would be okay. How direly she’d needed a man who, despite the obvious flaws in his personality, seemed competent, and sane, and full of goodwill toward her. All Mira could manage was to stare at him in wonder, and gratitude, and then Jeff was standing up, handing Mira the purse she’d dropped on the table.

“Go,” he said. “Get thee to the dean. I have two hours before your little urchins destroy me with the secret linguistic and mathematical knowledge I was so foolish as to impart to them.”

“Oh, Jeff.”

“‘Oh, Jeff’ nothing. Go.”

He pulled her up from her chair by the arm and pointed her toward the door.

74

“Well, go ahead and fucking tell me, man. You think I can’t handle it? What? Are you having regular wet dreams about my girlfriend? You think I don’t know you have a hard-on five miles long for Nicole?”

“Fuck you, Craig.”

“No, fuck you, Perry. Just tell me. You know you’ve been just shitting your pants and swimming in your own piss since I started dating Nicole, so why don’t you just get it over with, you jealous fuck? Spew your guts. You and your fucking Boy Scouts back in Bad Ass—did you used to sit around in your tents and jerk off to her yearbook picture or something? Nicole told me all about how some other dude knocked up your hometown girlfriend, so maybe you couldn’t get it up, or—”

Perry shoved the table into Craig, and the salad he’d been eating and the manicotti that had been congealing on Craig’s plate splashed over the edge of the table, splattering onto the linoleum with a sick wet-crap sound, and then Perry was over the table, not knowing how he’d gotten there, and his left hand was full of Craig’s T-shirt and the other one was a fist making contact with Craig’s nose, and then they were down on the ground, Craig’s back slapping onto the manicotti and salad, and then Perry was staring into his roommate’s bloody nose and hearing himself shout, “I’ve fucked Nicole, you fucking fool. Half of fucking Godwin Hall has fucked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, fucking idiot.”

With each of the last six words, Perry lifted Craig off the floor by his T-shirt and pushed him back down, and then they were panting and bleeding and staring into one another’s eyes, and something so horrible and honest and intimate passed between them at that moment (even worse than Perry’s sudden realization that they had become, somehow, at some point, friends) that, for a horrible moment Perry felt that he was Craig, looking up, seeing his own face looking down—that they had switched places, switched faces, and bodies, and selves, and become each other.

Then some beefy guy in a steamy white apron hauled Perry up by the back of his shirt and shoved him toward the cafeteria exit.

75

“I think,” Dean Fleming said, making a motion in the air in front of his face as if trying to coax the words out of his own mouth, “some of this is, at best, questionable. Or, I should say”—more coaxing—“it raises questions. Or, at least, one could see how questions might be raised.”

Mira nodded. She had no idea what he was trying to say.

She was having a hard time concentrating on his face, which seemed oddly distorted by the pale sun shining through his window, directly onto him, as if he were standing in headlights. She tried to appear as if she were carefully considering his words as she glanced around his office. For some reason, which she felt sure was not intended to be ironic and also had nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe poem, Dean Fleming kept a taxidermied raven on his bookshelf, just over his left shoulder. It had the beady eye of Poe’s bird, and Mira could easily have imagined it squawking, “Nevermore!” except that part of its beak had crumbled away and one of its wings was mostly sawdust. Mira couldn’t keep herself from staring at it. Dean Fleming had pulled a copy of her first-year seminar syllabus out of a file drawer and placed it on his desk between them. Now he was directing his comments to the syllabus, as if those six stapled pages could hear him.

“I’ve received a number of such questions from parents, which is, of course, of less concern to me than the concerns raised by the students themselves—”

Mira recognized instantly the reference, the deference, the dean was making to a recent Honors College meeting, during which numerous professors had excitedly, resentfully called for a moratorium on what was called “parental meddling.” Implications had been made that the dean was passively encouraging this meddling by not actively putting a stop to it. It had been generally agreed upon by Honors College faculty that this generation of college students had parents who were over-involved. That the students were “adults,” and that when it came to issues of curriculum, grading, et cetera, the faculty should not have to answer to parents, was the subject of several long monologues during that meeting, during which Mira had watched the clock with a rising sense of despair and panic because she had told Clark she’d be home a half hour ago.

Now she nodded to the raven, and Dean Fleming continued to speak to her syllabus on his desk.

“I think we need to reconsider,” he said, “not only the direction your teaching is taking, but also your research.”

This time Mira was surprised enough that she looked straight at him, hard enough that he had to look up and meet her eyes. The light was pouring down baptismally on his head, and she noticed that either he had a bald spot that was just sprouting new growth or the cold November light was somehow singeing away a round place in his full head of hair. She tried to think about how to say what she was about to say before she said it, but her heart had started to race, and she simply blurted out, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “I felt that you seemed quite supportive of my new project when we last—”

Dean Fleming waved his hand. Mira noticed, for the first time, a small dark ruby on his pinky. He seemed to notice her noticing it, and he tucked the hand away beneath his desk.

“I was laboring,” the dean said, “under a false impression.”

Mira leaned forward. “Which was…?”

“I didn’t realize it was so, so, so—death-laden, so popularist. Of course this sort of thing can work in some cases, but those cases are rare. We’re a research institution, Professor Polson, one of the most formidable in the country” (how many times had Mira heard this since her first on-campus interview here?) “and the field of anthropology is not, it seems to me, particularly well suited to the, the, the…”

Mira wiped her sweating palms on her knees, feeling the heat through the black tights she was wearing, as if her hands could burn straight through her clothes, melt her flesh into her flesh.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s beside the point. The point is we can’t have you teaching Death Studies in our college, or doing ‘exposés’ concerning university tragedies of the magnitude of the Nicole Werner incident. I’m sure you see, yourself, how unseemly it is. How, how, how…”

“Dangerous?” Mira sputtered, unable to help herself.

“Yes,” Dean Fleming said defensively. “Yes, well, dangerous. But also unseemly. As I said. It isn’t done. For one thing, this fascination of yours is not material for a serious academic project. The sort of research you’re doing, and the teaching is, is—”

“—is what I was hired to teach, and to research. You were on my hiring committee, sir. Except for some improvements, the class I’m teaching follows the exact syllabus I presented at my interview, the one I recall you praising for its rigor. You said, and I believe it’s in my evaluation from last semester, that I brought something both to the college and to my research that was ‘dynamically different.’”

“That was prior to the Nicole Werner work.”

“The Nicole Werner work? What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about the suicide of one of our students, Professor Polson. You must certainly understand the seriousness of this, that—”

Suddenly, she understood:

Lucas.

He was already getting heat for Lucas. After every suicide, there was a witch hunt. Mira had been on college campuses long enough to understand that.

She swallowed. At least now she knew what she was dealing with. At least now she could address it head on. Blame had to be laid.

She looked from the bright spot on the dean’s head to the raven, and then down to the syllabus on his desk, and then back into Dean Fleming’s small, piercing eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I certainly understand the seriousness of suicide, sir. It’s one of the things I try to bring to full light for my students. My major purpose in teaching the courses I teach is to deromanticize death, and to effectively convince a disbelieving segment of the population, youth, as to its permanence. Believe me, there were no students at the morgue today who don’t understand that now.”

“I’ve been informed that he was working with you. Lucas. That he’d—”

“He wasn’t working with me. I interviewed him about Nicole Werner, yes, and—”

“And he says as much in his goddamned suicide note, Professor Polson. Do you have any idea what this means?”

Mira shook her head. She could feel her blood beating at her temples and behind her knees. His suicide note. She said, nearly spluttering the words, “He didn’t commit suicide because of me.” Then she took a moment to think about it, and actually laughed out loud. “There were reasons that boy killed himself, and there was plenty the college could have done, but none of that had anything to do with me.”

“Well, maybe that’s true, but you were a faculty member aware of his problems, and—”

“And I informed Mental Health Services after the interview. I spoke with three therapists. I spoke with Lucas himself. I made an appointment for him. I did everything except walk him over there myself.”

“Well, you didn’t inform his parents, who, as you can imagine, are—”

Mira laughed again, involuntarily, in amazement. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Dean Fleming, I have a statement in my contract specifying that, under the Confidentiality of Academic Information Act, I can under no circumstances contact my students’ parents. The university is a closed system. Remember? I’m not to contact police, medical professionals, and surely not parents. Those were your exact words when I was hired. A closed system.”

He cleared his throat. He licked his lips. He paused for what seemed like a long time, and then he said, “You misunderstood. And this course of yours, it’s encouraging a death cult in our college.”

This time it was so funny Mira couldn’t even laugh. “I’m encouraging a death cult?” she asked.

“Yes. There are girls directly influenced by your class who have started a club devoted to trying to contact Nicole Werner and some other dead girl. They claim to be seeing ghosts. They’ve done some serious injury to themselves, and to the facility. Cutting. That sort of thing. Their candles caused a fire.”

Mira felt all the breath inside her leave. She waited for the dean to go on, but neither of them spoke, and finally she shook her head and said to the silence between them, “There are always crazy college girls. Those aren’t my students. You can’t blame me for what crazy coeds do in a dorm.”

Dean Fleming looked around him then, as if he’d lost his raven and was trying to locate it, and then he put his hands on his desk, folded, looked back at Mira, and said, “Believe it or not, there’s more.” He leaned a little closer, as if there were someone else in the room who might overhear. He said, “There’s the question of your relationships, Mira, which have been called to my attention. Your husband has informed me that you’re involved in a… situation. With a student. An extracurricular situation.”

Mira had then the sensation of having been hit by a blunt object, a blow to the head, and she remembered, suddenly, once, in the dark, getting out of bed and stumbling into a bookshelf, jarring a solid brass bookend off of it, and the blank, dull feeling when it smacked her just above her left temple.

Such surprise, it wasn’t even painful. The pain was somewhere so deep inside her it did not register on any physical scale. It took her several seconds to open her eyes again, blinking, and recover enough to say, “What? My husband? You heard from my husband?”

“Yes. But that’s only part of this. A part of it. I have my own concerns, my own reservations, about your relationship with Professor Blackhawk.”

“Jeff?”

“Yes.”

Yes.

The drive out of town to get her twins, passing, on the way, Dean Fleming, who was standing at a crosswalk.

Now, Mira understood that the blank expression on the dean’s face as they drove by had been his way of registering the two of them together, maybe adding it up with other things he’d suspected. Idle gossip in the faculty lounge. Hunches, glimpses. “Jeff?” she asked again. It was the only thing she could think to ask.

“In truth, it’s none of my business,” the dean said, “although it’s another delicate matter, and relationships between colleagues in a program as intimate as ours have to be discouraged. But I’m less concerned about Jeff Blackhawk than I am about Perry Edwards, who is a student. I know you know how seriously this university takes the crossing of the line between a student and a teacher, and I have to warn you, Mira, these are puritanical times we’re living in. You can’t expect to remain employed here and behave in a manner that is, that is, that is…”

Mira put her hand to her temple, feeling it again—that dull ache in the dark at the back of her head—and managed to say, again, “My husband called you? Clark called?”

Was it possible? Was that why he’d left? Was that why he’d seemed not to feel any guilt about taking her children away from her, and then not even calling to tell her where they’d gone?

Dean Fleming lifted a shoulder as if he weren’t sure what his answer should be.

“Where is he?” Mira asked. “Where did Clark call you from?”

“Mira, this was some time ago, and your marital problems, although regrettable, aren’t the reason why—”

She stood up, although she could not feel her legs beneath her. She said, looking down on his bright spot, his bald spot, his soft spot, “What is the reason, then, Dean Fleming? Because all of this, whatever this is, has been—no offense, Dean Fleming—utter bullshit.”

She felt the shock of her own words register in the look on his face, but didn’t wait for him to react. She held up a hand, and said, “I’m sorry. Forgive me. But there’s something else happening here. This has nothing to do with Jeff Blackhawk, and certainly nothing to do with Perry Edwards. This has to do with Nicole Werner, and the sorority, doesn’t it? It has to do with Nicole Werner, and my research, and my class, and Lucas and Perry, yes—but it’s not what you’re saying it is.”

But what was it? She found herself saying it before she’d even thought it:

“The runaway.”

Jeff’s story was coming back to her now.

A new sense was being made of everything.

She said, as if in a trance, “The girl from the music school. The other sorority girl. No one’s looking for her. Why is that, Dean Fleming? Why would the university so quickly drop—?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Mira. Don’t become a conspiracy theorist now on top of everything else. Frankly, and I’m sorry to be so blunt here, you were always a wild card. When we hired you we didn’t know, really, what we were hiring. We had no way of knowing. I’ll admit I, like your students, was intrigued by the material and your passion for it, but this simply can’t be allowed to go on. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you here that you don’t have tenure, so if you’re interested in keeping your position, Professor Polson, I suggest you take what I’ve had to say here very seriously, and, and, and…”

But Mira had left his office before finding out whether this time the word for which he was so desperately searching ever found its way to him.

76

People laughed as they passed him in the hallway, but when they saw the expression on his face and the blood smeared across it, they stopped. Only Megan Brenner spoke:

“You okay, Craig? Did someone punch you in the face or something? What’s on the back of your shirt? That’s not blood, too, is it?”

Craig said nothing to her. Megan was perhaps the most petite fully grown human being he’d ever known. He could have wrapped his arms around her waist twice. He could have carried her across the Sahara and not even gotten thirsty or winded. He and Perry had taken to calling her Mega, because it was so absurd. He looked at her—that face peering up at him, the size of a cat’s—and all he could do was nod.

He went to the boys’ bathroom. No one else was in there. Just the slick, bright, urine-colored tiles (Perry had suggested they’d once been white; Craig had said the tile people had simply been thinking ahead) vaguely reflecting him at the sink as he washed the blood off his face, careful to avoid the actual mirror and his actual reflection in it, and tossed the T-shirt with the manicotti on it into the garbage can, and headed to his room to put on a new one.

Perry was back from the cafeteria himself, sitting at his desk chair with his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when Craig came in, but he cleared his throat. For a terrible second Craig thought maybe Perry was going to say something, that maybe he’d even try to apologize, or explain, and if that happened, there was no way Craig was going to be able to take it:

He would have to kill Perry, or die trying.

But that wasn’t what he wanted to do, not at all.

Perry had been on top of him, straddling him, not that different, really, from the way what’s-her-name, the girl in the hot tub (what was her name?) had straddled him in the MacGuirres’ pool house back in Fredonia, looking down on him, staring him in the eyes, except that he’d been inside that girl, and she’d been looking into him, pretending that fucking was some big spiritual experience.

He doubted it was, since she had the same experience every Saturday night in Fredonia with a different guy. She’d been stoned as hell, and so was he, but Craig remembered her saying as she stared into his eyes, “I know what you’re thinking. You and I are one…”

And how she’d slapped him hard when he started to laugh.

Even then, with his dick seven inches into her, Craig couldn’t remember her name, and he’d told her that.

But Perry.

Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-shirt in Perry’s fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it was a spiritual experience.

“Fucker. Asshole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot.”

Perry was his friend. His first real friend.

He didn’t want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining shit in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.

But what he had to do was see Nicole.

That had nothing to do with Perry.

Luckily, Perry didn’t speak.

Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him—not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.

He headed for Lucas’s room.

He didn’t have time to walk to the OTT house.

He needed a car.

77

Jeremy purred in her lap as Shelly sat at the computer and scrolled through the articles. There were a hundred of them, and she was familiar with all of them, but they were cast in a new light now.

The lake of blood, the beyond recognition, the burned over ninety-percent of her body, the driver of the car fleeing the scene on foot, and herself: the middle-aged woman who was the first to arrive on the scene, and who failed to give the emergency operator enough information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to locate it in time to save the victim.

According to the articles, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the victim had been abandoned, lying in a lake of her own blood, burned beyond recognition, in the backseat of the vehicle for over an hour.

No.

Not even close.

Shelly remembered one EMT hurrying out of the ambulance. He had a large black satchel in one hand and a fire extinguisher under his arm. Shelly had stood up from where she’d been kneeling beside the girl and the boy, on the other side of the ditch of water she’d had to wade through to get there.

She’d waved her arms to get his attention.

Naturally enough, he’d gone first to the car, and he was peering in the window. He had no way of knowing that the victim had been thrown from the vehicle, and how far.

“Over here,” Shelly had called out, and he’d turned, looking confused.

Where, she’d wondered then, were the others? Surely, there was someone with him—following, driving, on the way.

“Ma’am,” the EMT had shouted. “Don’t touch her! Step back! Please return to your own vehicle immediately.”

Reluctantly, Shelly had followed his directions. She made her way back through the ditch of cold water, passing him as she did so. He didn’t even look at her. He’d tossed the fire extinguisher onto the ground, and he seemed to be muttering under his breath.

When she stumbled up on the other side, she’d looked behind her again:

The couple in the moonlight.

The boy with his arms wrapped around the girl.

Shelly had seen the girl up close. She’d seen and touched both of them. They were warm. They were alive. She’d been grateful to feel that warmth. The girl was wearing a black dress, and it made her bright gold hair shine even more brightly in the moonlight. When Shelly put her hand on the girl’s neck to feel for a pulse (and she had felt it, that little insistent throbbing of some artery beneath the skin), her eyelids had fluttered. The boy had kissed her forehead then, and then he’d sobbed with relief. He’d said her name. Nicole. And at the sound of her name, Nicole had opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling and wincing at the same time.

Fine, Shelly had thought. She’s fine. Bruised and shocked and disoriented, but utterly alive.

Shelly opened the next, familiar Google result, and there was Josie in her black dress, black sunglasses, a wristful of black bracelets. The sun shone down on her black hair and those elaborate, exotic earrings she was wearing, which were Denise Graham’s dead great-grandmother’s. Beyond her, a fresh orchard was in bloom.

Shelly enlarged the photo.

She looked more closely.

They were all wearing the same black dress.

Every single sorority sister.

The same V neck, the ruffle at the hem. The sleevelessness and drape of the dresses identical. The small satin ribbon around the waist. Shelly remembered saying to Josie one afternoon in bed, “The thing I hated about being in a sorority was that we were all supposed to look and act alike.” And how Josie had snorted. “Like that’s not how it is with everybody? Like all the lesbians your age aren’t all trying to look and act alike? Like all the counter-culture kids, or all the conservatives, or all the professors or librarians or bookstore clerks around here aren’t, every one of them, completely interchangeable?”

Interchangeable.

The word, frankly, had surprised Shelly.

It had seemed beyond Josie, somehow, that word, as if she’d been thinking about sameness, about sororities, about the human condition or something for a long time, trying to find just the right word to describe it. Thumbing through the thesaurus. The effect of hearing Josie use this word, so perfect, was not unlike the way it might have felt if Jeremy had suddenly turned to her and expressed a dislike for a certain brand of cat food. (I would prefer no more Fancy Feast, if you don’t mind.) It seemed somehow to change the rules of the game she thought they’d been playing, if only for a second or two.

In this photograph, there were at least thirty girls, and every one wore the exact same dress. Where had they gotten so many at once, especially since nearly every one of these girls would have been the same size? What store, what catalog, what warehouse, could possibly have held them all?

And the black sunglasses. The black bracelets. Some with straight blond hair, shoulder length, and the rest with straight black hair, shoulder length. Not one of them was smiling, but neither were any of them crying.

Shelly enlarged the image once more, and then again, and when she leaned farther forward, with more urgency this time, Jeremy jumped off her lap and went scrambling across the wood floors, sliding on his claws into the hallway.

“Jeremy? Baby?” Shelly called after him, still intent on her computer screen, but he didn’t come back. She’d scared him.

One more double click, and the central thing in this image became something she had only peripherally registered until now:

A single blurred girl behind the scenes, moving with what looked like genuine swiftness through the parking lot behind them all. Her arms were swinging at her sides as if she were moving quickly. One foot was an inch above the ground. Her blond hair was blowing around behind her, either because of the swiftness with which she was traveling or because of a stiff breeze. There was a purposeful expression on her face. She was looking straight ahead. A few nice cars glinted in the sunlight around her.

There were still a couple of branches of blossoms framing the screen.

Shelly touched one of those without taking her eyes off the girl’s face.

The multiple enlargements had obscured her features, but even through this veil of haze and distorted pixels, Shelly felt she knew exactly who this was, and where she’d seen her before.

With a trembling hand, she hit the left-hand arrow a few times until she was back at the article attached to the image, and the little box to the left of Josie’s pretty feet.

“Craig Clements-Rabbitt has not yet been accused of a crime, inspiring outrage within the grief-stricken Omega Theta Tau community.”

Shelly sat back, put a hand to her forehead, and then over her eyes. She had to find him. Why hadn’t she done it already? What had she been waiting for? There were things this boy needed to know that only she could tell him. Her hand was still trembling as she typed in the Internet address of the university directory, and realized with some chagrin how incredibly easy he was to find. Like the Grahams, like all of them, he was captured there in the Web—his address and phone number and all the public and personal details of his life. Shelly jotted down the address and grabbed her purse, hurrying out the door.

78

“Professor Polson’s on her way over.”

“Our professor is on her way to your apartment?” Karess asked. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest. Since they’d left the morgue and come back to the apartment, she’d never stopped shaking. She and Perry had walked so quickly they might as well have been running, and he was, himself, sweating in his jacket, but when they got to the front door and he saw how pale she was, and how much she was trembling, he took her in his arms and held her as she muttered, “Oh, God, Oh, my God, I remember that guy. Me and my roommate bought weed from him during Orientation. Oh, my God, Perry, that was his dead body.”

Perry had pulled her into the hallway and pressed her up against the mailboxes, trying to warm her, hold her close enough to calm her—or maybe himself—but it hadn’t worked at all. Hours and many cups of hot coffee later, Karess was still shaking, standing against the window with her legs pressed to the radiator. She’d barely spoken until now, except to say hello to Craig when Perry introduced them to each other, and to say no when he asked her if she wanted something to eat.

“Does Professor Polson spend a lot of time here?”

“We’re working together on—”

“Yeah,” Karess said.

“Look,” Perry said. “She’s never been here before, but this thing, with Lucas—I could tell on the phone, she’s really upset.”

“Fuck her,” Karess said, suddenly completely animated. The jewels and feathers she was wearing started to swing and flutter around her. She stomped the heel of her boot hard enough that Perry felt pretty sure that if anyone had been sleeping in the apartment below them, they weren’t anymore. “She was upset? She had us all set up, Perry. Couldn’t you tell? That’s why she left us all there, and went out in the alley. She knew there was a body in there, that it was a guy our age. I mean, that was her other boyfriend in there, that diener. You didn’t notice the big hug and all that? You think he didn’t bother to tell her there was a dead college kid in the morgue today? Professor Polson’s been trying to scare the shit out of us since day one, and I for one plan to file a complaint about it. This class has been a freak show from the beginning. My parents are not going to be amused.”

“She didn’t know,” Perry said. “I’m telling you, she had no way of knowing. She was as shocked as the rest of us. I was there when she recognized Lucas. I thought she was going to pass out.”

“Yeah. Right,” Karess said, and turned her back to him. He could see her shoulder blades under her sweater and the tank top and sheer blouse she was wearing. It crossed his mind that, undressed, she might be either impossibly beautiful or a skeleton. She was always decorated in so many layers of flowing clothes he could never have begun to guess how much she weighed, but it couldn’t have been much.

From the bathroom, he could hear the shower running, and Craig in there bumping around in the tiny shower stall, and then the intercom buzzed through the apartment, and Perry hit the button to open the apartment house door. Karess snorted out of her nose, and Perry went to stand in the hallway, listening to the sound of what he thought were Professor Polson’s black boots on the stairwell (solid, steady steps in sharp heels, as if she were tired or trying to figure out if she was in the right building, heading toward the right apartment), so he was surprised when the woman turned at the top of the stairwell, and she wasn’t Professor Polson. At first he thought somehow that she was his aunt Rachel. Same coloring. Reddish-blond hair. Pale skin. Maybe forty years old. Pretty, but not trying to be. This woman was wearing a silk dress and a very large black down parka. “Are you Craig?” she asked.

79

“Are you Craig?” Shelly asked the boy who stood near the open door in the hallway, although he didn’t look like the boy she remembered. He was handsome, in that buzz-cut, face-chiseled-from-marble kind of way—the kind of All-American boy she used to fantasize about when she was a teenager, but whom she never actually met. The closest she’d come was Chip Chase, who’d taken her to her senior prom, and he’d had longer hair than her own, which Shelly had pretended to like—running her fingers through the long, dark brown locks—when, in truth, she’d hated it.

This boy didn’t look like the long-haired boy she’d seen at the accident. He looked, instead, like Shelly’s brother. He could have been Shelly’s brother, had Richie lived to be nineteen. If Richie had been a college student instead of a Marine. Josie’s word interchangeable came to mind.

“No,” the boy said. “Craig’s in the shower.”

“Oh. I was hoping to speak to him,” Shelly said to this ghost of her brother, and he opened the door to let her in.

80

When Craig got out of the shower—dried and dressed—he was surprised to find Perry’s professor already in the apartment. She was sitting on their couch. And a slender red-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair that Perry had pulled out for her. Perry and Karess stood next to each other at the window.

“I’m Shelly Lockes,” the red-haired woman said. “I was at the accident. I was the first one there. I’m the one they said didn’t give directions to nine-one-one. I saw you and Nicole the night—”

“The night she died,” Craig said, sinking onto the couch beside the professor. It surprised him how easily he was able to say “she died.” It had taken Dr. Truby four appointments to get those two words out of him, and that first time he’d said them aloud, when his memory had finally started to come back to him, he’d had to stand up fast, feeling as if his own words had somehow slugged him in the stomach. Then he’d collapsed again and wept into his hands until his session with Dr. Truby was over.

Now he could say the words over and over, as if they weren’t the truth.

Shelly Lockes shook her head, as if to contradict him, but she didn’t say anything else. It was like she was waiting for permission to speak again.

There was something familiar about her. She was beautiful. She looked the way he thought angels painted on Christmas cards would look if Christmas card makers had more imagination. She was feminine, but without makeup, and although she was petite and very pretty, she also looked incredibly strong. She looked like the kind of angel who could very easily pick you up from the hundredth story of a burning building and fly you back down to the ground.

He’d seen her before, he realized.

He’d seen her everywhere, he thought.

Again, she shook her head.

Beside him, Professor Polson was shivering. Perry’s friend Karess had been shivering all along, as well. Perry looked cold, too. He had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. But Craig felt, himself, like he was burning up. Maybe he was sick. He’d slept so solidly (twelve hours?) in the Cookie Girl Deb’s bed, and still he felt sure that if he put his head down now for one second, he would fall straight back into that exhausted, dreamless state. If she hadn’t woken him up to let him back into the apartment with the key the landlord had dropped off, Craig might still be there in her bed.

He might never have woken up at all.

Shelly Lockes looked flushed, too, he thought. Overwarm. A thin film of perspiration shone on her forehead, although she was wearing only a silky-looking dress, black tights, boots that looked more like fashion stuff than winter stuff. She was staring at him intently, as though either trying to read his mind or willing him to read hers

“You were there,” he asked, “the night of the accident? You saw Nicole? The night she died?”

The woman looked around as if the question had been asked of someone else in the room, but everyone in the room was looking at her. She cleared her throat and then touched it, and then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and looked down at her boots.

How many millions of times had Craig seen Nicole tuck a strand of hair like that behind her ears, thinking before she spoke? This woman could have been Nicole, if Nicole had lived long enough to become her. Or Josie. Or any of the other sorority girls Craig had seen or known.

She licked her lips, and then bit them, and then she said, “She wasn’t dead.”

81

Shelly had begun to think that perhaps in the months since the accident she had reinvented the boy in her imagination. There’d been only that one night, and it had been dark except for the moon. Afterward, photographs of Nicole Werner had been everywhere, so she’d had an image of the girl to compare to her memory. But Craig Clements-Rabbitt had appeared again only in her dreams.

Now, looking at him sitting across from her on the low, sagging couch—his knees practically pressed against his chest—Shelly realized she would have recognized him anywhere.

The dark, shaggy hair. The pained expression she felt certain he’d spent all his adolescence attempting to turn into a rock star sneer. She’d known boys like him in high school, in college, and since. They were the ones who managed to turn into poets, or elementary school art teachers, if someone finally helped them shrug off that persona. If not, they just passed through this world with that sneer, drinking far too much, fucking things up.

The night of the accident, he’d looked at her and understood; she’d never doubted that. He couldn’t have heard her, but he’d known what she was saying. He was looking at her that same way now, and Shelly felt sure, again, that something was rising up in him: memory, understanding.

Now, she understood, too:

He really didn’t remember what had happened. That’s why he’d never contacted anyone to set the record straight himself. Amnesia, she thought. Confabulation. Fugue. So many pretty words for forgetting, like names for gray flowers. Still, she felt sure that if she looked at him long enough, as deeply into his eyes as she could, he would see past her, and remember that night. Remember her. Finally, he seemed to, and said, “You were there.”

“Yes,” she said. “I was there. I was there, and it’s not what they said happened.”

He nodded. He understood. It was coming back to him, wasn’t it? She was coming back to him.

“You were there,” he said again. “You know what happened?”

Shelly nodded. “I was the first one there,” she said again.

“What happened?” the boy asked.

Shelly felt a small sob start in her throat, and touched it. It was warm in the apartment, though everyone except Craig Clements-Rabbitt looked cold. The girl by the radiator was shivering, and the professor was blowing on her own hands, seeming to be trying to warm them up—but Shelly was either having another one of her hot flashes, or she had a fever, or it was a hundred degrees in here. She was sweating through her silk dress. She could feel that her feet were wet from the snow and slush she’d walked through to get here, but they weren’t cold. She was thirsty. As if she’d walked through the desert as well as the snow. But none of that mattered. Finally, finally, she had this little gathered group of listeners to whom she could tell the story, and she was going to tell it. She cleared her throat and began at the beginning:

The tail lights on the two-lane road. How she’d been singing along to the radio, watching them up ahead in the distance, and how they’d disappeared.

The couple in the moonlight, and how she’d seen them from the other side of the ditch of cold water. She told Craig that she’d known she had to tell him not to move the girl, but that she was never sure whether or not she’d actually said the words. He’d been so far away, but—

“I heard you,” he said.

She nodded.

But then he shook his head and said, “But Nicole was in the backseat. It would have been burning.”

“No,” Shelly said. “That’s not what happened. She was thrown from the car. There was no fire. I called nine-one-one. I waded through the ditch, and I was right there. You had your arms around her. There was no blood. She was hurt; she’d been thrown. But you said her name, and she opened her eyes. She was going to be fine. I stayed until the ambulance came, and they told me I needed to get stitches for my hand.”

Shelly held it up so he could see the scar. The professor leaned forward, too. She had hair as black and shining as Josie’s, and a sharp, serious expression. She looked troubled, and very smart.

“So I left. I went to the university outpatient clinic when the ambulance left with you and Nicole. There was never any blood. There was never any fire. You never left the scene except with them. They don’t want us to remember. They want us off this campus. They have something to hide.”

“I told you,” Craig said, looking over at his roommate. “The postcards. You convinced me, especially after they quit coming, that they weren’t from her, that it was a hoax.”

“You got postcards from Nicole Werner?” the girl by the window asked. She let her mouth hang open, looking at each of them in the room in turn.

“The Cookie Girl,” Craig said. “She told me, too.”

No one said anything until the girl near the radiator closed her mouth and then sputtered, as if she’d been listening so long to such a ludicrous story that she couldn’t contain herself any longer, “Who’s the Cookie Girl?”

“Our neighbor,” Craig’s roommate said.

Craig said, “She told me that, too. She said, ‘They’re trying to get rid of you. They don’t want you here.’ She told me there isn’t a ghost.”

He went silent then. Shelly waited for him to go on.

“Alice Meyers,” he finally said. “I thought there was this girl. This dead girl. She calls. One night, she came here, into the apartment. She stood in the doorway and asked if she could come in.”

The girl near the radiator huffed loudly this time, and swept a small, cold-looking hand through her tangled dark hair. “That’s a bunch of crap,” she said. “I live in the dorm. There’s these ‘Alice Meyers girls.’ They’re crazies. Cutters. They’re obsessed with Nicole. They go around saying they’ve seen her—”

“Seen Nicole?” Craig asked, looking at the girl as if he hadn’t noticed her until then. “They think they’ve seen Nicole?”

The girl shrugged elaborately, rolled her eyes, and said, “Her or Alice Meyers. Who cares? They’re crazy.”

Craig’s roommate looked at the professor and said, “We have to tell him now.”

The professor nodded, and Craig leapt to his feet, stepped toward his roommate and said, “Tell me what?”

“Craig,” the professor said, also standing. She took a step toward him and touched his arm. “Other people have seen her, too. Or they think they’ve seen her.”

“Jesus Christ,” the girl by the radiator said. “I’m leaving here. This is crazy.” She raised a hand as if she might slap the professor, but then put the hand into the pocket of her sweater. “You’re crazy, Professor Polson. You’re supposed to be teaching us, not fucking with us. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’m done with it. I’m dropping your class, and I’m—” She shook her head, and then she looked from Shelly to Craig to Craig’s roommate, as if trying to find the sane one, and, not finding it, walked quickly to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut behind her.

They all listened to the sound of her heels on the stairs until it was clear she was long gone, and then Shelly said, “I think someone died that night. But I don’t think it was Nicole.”

She reached into her bag and took out the little snapshot of Denise Graham that Denise’s mother had given her earlier that day.

82

Craig parked the Taurus at the side of the street outside the sorority, but he stayed in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, looking out.

The sky was clear, and the snow had melted into a wavering, wet carpet on the sidewalks and the street. From where he’d parked, the Omega Theta Tau House seemed to cast its own extra darkness onto the lawn around it. He couldn’t see even a single candle flickering inside. It was as if the house had been abandoned, or never built. Craig shoved Lucas’s car keys in his pocket, got out. Nicole was in there, and he had to see Nicole.

He crossed the lawn, purposely walking slowly, deliberately, upright, in full view of the house and anyone who might have been watching him from within it.

Why shouldn’t he?

He wasn’t a criminal. He was there to see his girlfriend. This was a sorority, not a secret society, not a high-security prison facility. Jesus Christ. He just wanted to see Nicole. Why should he have to crawl on his belly to do it?

Still, it made him nervous. He could feel his heart racing in his chest. Although the house was dark, and Craig heard nothing but silence emanating from it, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He tried to maintain the slow, determined gait, but he was walking faster the closer he got. His hands were sweating, and when he reached the side of the house, he crouched down in the shadows, hiding.

He should have worn his jacket. It was that kind of late winter cold that was damp, not solid anymore. Back in Fredonia, you’d be able to feel the thaw in things. But this was a long way from thaw. This was going to be cold like soiled sheets or something. Like sleeping in your own wet laundry.

Suddenly, crouching in the dark at the side of the OTT house, he felt sadder than he’d ever felt in his life. On his knees. In the dirt. He found himself remembering, stupidly, his mother of all people:

Her ankles.

Traveling toward those ankles at high speed on his hands and knees because he couldn’t walk. Because every time he tried to walk he fell on his fucking ass. Because he was a baby. Why wouldn’t she pick him up? He was her baby.

He shook his head. How idiotic was that? Thinking about his mother? Right now?

(“I’ve fucked Nicole,” Perry had said. “Half of fucking Godwin Hall has fucked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, fucking idiot.”)

He was behind familiar shrubbery, he realized—right where he’d been that other night, when he’d gotten tossed out of OTT. He put his face to the little window and looked down (blinking, blinking) at the whole tableau of the basement again.

This time, he hadn’t really expected to see anyone.

There was no music. No strobe light. He’d convinced himself that he was right, that the whole house was either an illusion, or empty. There was no way a whole house full of girls all dressed up for their Spring Event could be so still, and silent.

It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness well enough to make out the scene:

They were standing so motionless they’d blended into the atoms around them, it seemed. They were as gray as the air.

Sorority girls made of air, made of shadows. They were all in black, with their heads bowed, and the only bright thing Craig could see at all was the glinting silver handles on the coffin they were standing around. In the darkness.

But then he pressed his face closer to the window, and he could see that, in the coffin, there was girl. She must have been wearing white, because she was brighter than anything around her, but the darkness was so complete that she seemed to absorb it. She must have been the one they were raising from the dead. (Ridiculous. Pathetic.) He was about to stand up, just leave, when he heard what sounded like vague, dull, stupidly girlish chanting under him.

Girlish monks.

He snorted, hearing that.

Stupid game. Stupid hazing. Stupid him for being here, for caring so much, for crouching down behind a bush trying to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, who was standing around a coffin in a basement pretending to raise some sorority sister from the dead.

And then, there that guy was:

The omnipresent EMT.

He was standing in a corner, in the shadows, the way he always was.

Craig remembered Nicole saying, “What’s EMT stand for?” Denying she’d ever even seen the guy before. He heard Perry say it again: “You fucking idiot. You blind asshole.”

He wanted to walk away, but it was mesmerizing, too—the sound of their voices. It was like music bubbling out of the ground. It was the coldness seeping through his jeans. It sounded ancient, and completely new. He could see it very clearly now, the whole thing in the basement. This was no game. The girl in that coffin was dead. The silky inner lining of the casket they’d placed her in was the same color as her blue-gray, blue-white skin. Yes, she was wearing white, but the white had turned to a deathly nothingness, a bluish absence. Craig stared, and stared, and held his breath. Shit. Had they killed her? Did they know she was dead? Was he the only one who could see clearly from where he looked down at her through the basement window that the girl was actually dead?

Did they have their eyes closed? Why was the fucking EMT just sitting there in the corner? Were they so caught up in their chanting that they couldn’t see the girl was dead?

Before he even knew what he was doing, Craig was slamming his fists against the flimsy glass until he’d broken it, and was falling into it, and the girls were all screaming and running and shrieking, just like the time before when he’d run down the basement steps, except this time the screaming had nothing to do with him.