He pretended to be walking back to the street, but then veered back through the shadows and managed to find a spot at the side of the house where he was able to crawl between a couple of shrubs and peer through a toaster-size window into the basement. The shrubs were of the thorny variety, and Craig could feel them ripping through the thin material of his T-shirt. He knew he was going to have scratches and welts, but he managed to creep to the little window anyway, put his face up to it, his hands around his face.
Down there, in the basement, they had a strobe light going. It seemed to be hooked up to the throbbing bass of the music they were playing, flashing to the beat. What Craig saw in the spasmodic intervals of light was dancing—girls’ bare arms lifted, girls’ bare midriffs and hipbones swaying, girls with their arms around each other’s necks and shoulders, tossing back their heads, seeming to be howling, or screaming, or laughing, a few girls holding hands and dashing around in a wild circle, falling onto the basement floor, limbs and hair and bra straps and bare skin, and a keg in a corner, and a line of girls at it, and then, in another corner, what looked to him like Nicole (he pressed his face hard enough against the glass that he thought he might crack it in half), holding a plastic cup, taking a sip from it, her arms around the neck of some beefy older-looking guy in a sweat-stained light blue shirt—and then, long before he knew he was doing it, Craig was barging through the back door past the sorority girl, who started swearing into her walkie-talkie, shouting at his back, “You’re not allowed in our house, asshole!”
He took the stairs down to the basement two at a time, finding his way to them by pure instinct, slipping on the last one into a small smoky crowd dancing to some crappy Beyoncé song, and found himself looking straight into the face of a girl with long black tears of sweat and mascara dripping down her face. “What the fu—” she said, and then the sorority sister who’d been chasing him since the back door grabbed his arm and started shouting, and the bruiser from the front door had him by the collar, and in the corner where he’d been sure he’d seen Nicole, there was no one.
“Nicole?! Nicole?! Nicole?!”
He screamed her name over the music, over and over again, in the direction of the empty corner as the bruiser pulled him out of the crowd of girls and toward the basement stairs, at the top of which Nicole stood looking down at him with a shocked expression on her face.
“Craig . . . ?”
“Nicole?”
“Who is this jerk?” the girl with the walkie-talkie asked Nicole, scowling in Craig’s direction. “Do you know him?”
When he reached the top of the stairs, the bouncer behind him gave Craig a shove, and Nicole said, “Yes,” as if she regretted having to admit it. “This is Craig. He’s my friend. I’ll walk him home.”
The girl glared at Craig. Her eyes were too blue to be real. Those had to be contacts, Craig thought.
The girl looked from Craig to Nicole. She was wearing so much lip gloss she looked like she’d recently been kissing an oil slick. She said, “Don’t ever let him come around here again. Ever.”
“Okay,” Nicole said, sounding like someone who’d slipped into shock. “Come on, Craig.”
“Don’t you have a coat or something?” the girl asked Nicole.
“I’ll get it tomorrow,” she said, guiding Craig back out into the cool darkness, where the temperature had dropped since he’d first walked her to the OTT house. Now he could see their breaths puffing into it as they walked in silence, quickly, in the direction of Godwin Hall. Nicole was shivering and shaking her head at the same time. When Craig tried to put his arm around her, she shrugged it off.
“What were you thinking?” she asked, staring straight ahead, not looking at him. She was walking so fast he practically had to jog at her side.
“Nicole, you said you’d be out of that party at—”
“Okay, Craig, but I never told you to pick me up. I told you I was going to walk back with Josie. Why did you come back to the house?”
“Because I was going to make sure you got back to Godwin Hall. I was worried. I was worried about you. Sorry.”
It sounded whiny and pathetic, even to him.
“Well, I was helping with the party. You know, picking up empties, making sure people put their cigarettes out, tossing out cups. Do you know how bad this is Craig, to have a friend crash the party, and make a scene, and—?”
“Is that what I am to you, Nicole? Your friend?”
“Of course,” she said, as she if were consoling him.
“Gee,” he said, “I sort of thought I was more than that.” He felt something behind the bridge of his nose—his sinuses?—fill up with the sarcasm, the self-pity implicit in it, like . . . Jesus Christ, was he getting ready to cry?
“Well, I mean, we’re dating, sure. We’re more than friends. But I think friendship is really valuable, maybe the most important thing in the world next to family. I want to be your friend, Craig. But—”
She’d slowed down and put her cold hand in his. She squeezed his hand. She was shivering, and so he put both arms around her and pulled her to him, and said nothing, just happy to have her close to him.
He couldn’t have argued with her anyway. He already knew from experience not to argue with her when she was dealing in abstractions: friendship, God, love, patriotism, chastity. He loved that about her.
“Okay,” Craig said, happy enough to lose this argument. “Me, too. That’s not what this is about. I saw you dancing with some guy.”
“No, you didn’t!” Nicole shouted, as if she’d just caught him in a brazen lie, jumping backward out of his arms. “I did not dance with any guys. I danced a little with Josie, and with Abby one time, but when guys asked me to dance, I said, ‘Sorry, can’t,’ and held this up.”
It was the ring he’d bought her from Grimoire Gifts two weeks ago—a little globe of amber, with something ancient, some little black bug, trapped in it forever. She wore it on her right hand, because she wore a ring her father had given her on her left. He’d have preferred the left, but Nicole had made it clear that there was no room for debate.
She stopped walking and turned to him with a stony, hurt expression. Her teeth had actually begun to chatter loud enough that he could hear them—like fingernails tapping across a keyboard, or dice being rattled in a can. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, moved by the sound of those teeth, and her shivering, even though he knew she didn’t like him to say Jesus. “Oh, Nicole.” He unbuttoned his shirt—he was wearing a T-shirt underneath—and wrestled the button-down off his arms, draping it over Nicole’s shoulders and then helping her put her arms through the sleeves, as if she were an invalid, or a toddler. She limply accepted his shirt, his help, and he wrapped his arms around her again and hurried her back to Godwin Hall, whispering words of apology desperately in her ear as they walked.
When they finally got into the dorm, and he’d told her he loved her so many times that she finally started laughing, and she wasn’t shivering any longer, she leaned back against the foyer wall and pulled him to her, and they leaned there kissing one another for a very long time, long enough that time seemed to have stopped, and maybe a hundred people had passed them going up or down the stairs—but it wasn’t long enough for Craig, who was always the one who said, “Just another minute or two,” a hundred times, until Nicole, laughing, finally left him, shaking her head at him, throwing him kisses as she went up to her room. Forgiven.
It was the first thing Craig saw when he rounded the corner of Seneca Lane and West University Avenue: the Omega Theta Tau house casting a shadow down on that orchard that hadn’t been there in the winter, the last time Craig had walked by.
There was a stone angel at the center, lifting her concrete wings and bending over at the same time, as if the wings were what had forced her down to earth in the first place.
It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the brass plaque at the feet of that garden statuary said.
Tomorrow, Craig supposed, there would be mou
nds of roses, a teddy bear, that sort of thing.
Tomorrow would have been her nineteenth birthday.
22
Clark was asleep when Mira got home. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but he lay on his back on their bed with his hands folded on his chest, so deeply asleep he never heard her come in the house or the twins’ deafening squealing upon her arrival—the usual tearful reunion, the clinging, the sobbing against her chest. By the time Mira had finally calmed them down enough to stand up from the floor and go looking for Clark, there were two spreading damp circles of their tears on her red silk blouse.
Ruined, she thought. Her mother used to have a trick for getting water stains off silk, but Mira hadn’t been paying attention then, and certainly didn’t remember now what the secret method might have been. Maybe, she thought, as she headed for the bedroom in search of Clark, she could research it on the Internet if she ever found the time—the Internet, which had become the mother lode of folk remedies and feminine advice for those without mothers to consult.
“Clark?”
Clark sputtered, blinked, coughed like a man surfacing in shallow water, and then he gasped and sat up fast. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
He rubbed his eyes, and then he scowled at her with half his face. Somehow, the other half of his face still looked familiar. She recognized the blank expression from a photo in their wedding album. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course I’m okay.”
“Well,” Mira said, “you’re in here dead asleep at two o’clock in the afternoon while the twins are hungry and sitting in dirty diapers on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe you were sick.”
“Fuck you, Mira,” he said, and lay back down, staring straight at the ceiling, folding his hands over his chest again, closing his eyes with such finality that Mira almost thought she could hear them click shut with the neat precision of Swiss pocket watches.
She turned around and pulled the bedroom door closed hard behind her.
The poop in the twins’ diapers seemed to have been there a long time. It was hard, and caked into their little butt cracks. Mira changed Matty first because he’d cried the hardest when she got home. He was still hiccupping with it, looking up at her with wide, glassy eyes. She sang the “five little duckies” song to distract him on the changing table, but he whimpered when she had to work too hard with the baby wipes to get the caked-on shit off his tender bottom. It looked red and sore when she was done, but it was clean, and he wasn’t crying. She dusted it with baby powder and tickled his belly before lifting him off the table and placing him back on the floor.
Andy was easier. He’d never much minded a dirty diaper, and as long as she was singing the duckies song, he didn’t seem to mind if she was being a bit rough with his behind. She looked into his eyes as she sang, and he never blinked, as if he were afraid she’d disappear again if he did. As she changed his brother, Matty held on to one of her ankles from his spot on the floor, humming wetly into her shin.
After Andy’s diaper was changed, Mira got back down on the floor and pulled them both to her, and unbuttoned her stained blouse, unclasped her bra, and let her breasts fall out into their mouths.
(“Good Lord, Mira, how long are you going to keep nursing those boys?” Clark’s sister had asked six months earlier, when she’d come to visit from Atlanta. The twins had only just turned two then, but Mira had felt chastised, and stammered something about the boys only nursing once or twice a day. It was more of a habit, she tried to explain, than anything else. A way to calm them, or to get them to sleep on hectic nights. They were eating solid foods, of course. Pretty much anything she and Clark ate, the twins ate, and they ate a lot of it, and since Mira was gone a good part of every day, they certainly did not depend on breast milk for food.
“Jesus,” Rebecca had said, “I quit nursing Ricky at six months when he got his front teeth. I thought he was going to bite my nipple off.”
But Rebecca was married to a packaging engineer. She’d stayed home with Ricky until he went to kindergarten, and even after that she worked only two mornings a week, at a children’s bookstore. She’d never, Mira felt certain, come home and found Ricky wearing a diaper stiff with shit while her husband slept like a dead man in another room.)
As the boys sucked harder, tears sprang into Mira’s eyes. She’d wasted a precious forty-five minutes in her office with Perry Edwards when she should have been home with her babies—and afterward she’d stopped in the doorway of Dean Fleming’s office just to smile and wave, and ended up wasting another half hour. She’d stopped there on purpose, knowing he would ask her how her “work” was going, and for the first time in a long time, she actually had something to say because she was working on something quite promising: a book-length consideration of the folklore of death on the American college campus.
Dean Fleming had raised his eyebrows as if he, too, saw the huge potential in her project. “Interesting,” he said, nodding, clearly pleased and impressed. “I knew you’d zero in on something great in time.” He wished her luck, offered his support. He said, “If you need travel funds or a book allowance, let me know. We’ll see what we can find.”
She left Godwin Hall feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She had a project. Because there’d been a rainstorm that morning, and Clark had grudgingly let her drive the car to campus, she decided to drive by the location of the accident, Nicole Werner’s accident, which she’d begun to think of as material.
Mira had driven by it hundreds of times since the accident because it was on the way to half the places she needed to be (grocery store, drugstore, gas station). Like everyone else in town, she had watched the accumulating expressions of sentimental grief, the mounding of more and more debris at the site. Girlish, and ghoulish.
It had begun with a white cross with the victim’s name on it, and then a few stuffed animals were added, along with some wreaths of pink and white flowers—and then, within a few weeks, it had grown to a full-scale folk monument: A wisteria was planted. A banner was wound around the branches of the tree at the site. Some ornaments were hung in the branches. (Angels? Fairies? Mira couldn’t tell from the road.) More stuffed animals and some baby dolls accumulated around the tree’s trunk, and a laminated blowup of that senior portrait of Nicole Werner leaned against it, staring at the place where she’d lost her life. There were mounds of fresh flowers, and an unfathomable number of silk and plastic bouquets, ever replenishing, although Mira had never actually seen anyone tending to these items or dropping them off. (Did they come under cover of darkness?) Floral wreaths stretched from the side of the road across the drainage ditch to the electric fence, beyond which there were always a few sheep looking dazed and doomed.
Mira slowed down as she drove past. The next sunny morning, she thought, she would bring her best camera out here, and take photos.
The twins had fallen asleep as they sucked, and when Clark came out of the bedroom, he looked down at Mira for a moment, at the two flushed and dreaming twins still clinging to her nipples by their teeth. He must have realized that she was crying—there were tears running down her neck and onto her bare chest—but the expression on his face was unreadable, and far above her.
“I’m going for a run,” he said, and was gone.
23
It was the second week of January. She was lying on Craig’s bed when Perry got back to the dorm room after the first winter semester meeting of his International Human Rights seminar. She was on top of Craig’s comforter (Craig had started making his bed since he’d started dating Nicole) in a T-shirt. Her legs were bare. Perry thought, with a jolt that felt a bit like panic, that he’d caught a glimpse of pale blue underpants when she crossed her ankles. She was wearing a silver ankle bracelet. It had what looked like a bell, or an anchor, or a crucifix, hanging from it. She had a book in her hands.
Perry looked away. He strode purposefully to his desk, sat down with his back to her, and said, “What are you doing here,
Nicole? Craig’s not going to be back until after dinner.”
“I’m just reading,” she said. “It’s quieter here than in my room. Josie’s always got Norah Jones playing. Drives me nuts. Whine-whine-whine.”
Perry could hear the springs on Craig’s bed squeak. She must have shifted her weight, rolled onto her side. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking over. He turned his computer on, and there was the usual sound of an angelic choir starting up—one discordant but celestial note, which hung in the air.
“No offense, Nicole,” Perry finally managed to say, “but when my roommate’s not here, I actually enjoy my solitude.”
“Well, Craig said you wouldn’t mind,” Nicole said casually. “He gave me his key.”
Perry’s screen saver came up then (comets shooting through a blue-black sky) and, at the same time, something hit his shoulder, sharp and surprising, and it took him only a second or two to realize that it was Craig’s room key clattering on the floor behind him. Before he could stop himself, he was turned around in his chair, glaring at Nicole.
She was, as he’d thought, lying on her side. One leg was slung over the other. One of her bare feet (toenails painted shell pink) was pointed, swinging like a pendulum over the side of Craig’s bed.
“Come on, Nicole,” Perry said. “Why are you here?” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to seem more exhausted than agitated. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming as unnerved by her presence as he was. Since she and Craig had taken up full time, she was, like Craig himself, a constant irritation, mainly because Craig never shut up about her, was in an endless cycle of manic ecstasy and despair about her. When he wasn’t frantically trying to call her, or find her, he was on the phone with her, or in their room with her. They couldn’t hang out in Nicole’s room because Josie hated Craig’s guts, so they were here, or in the hallway waiting for Perry to get dressed so they could get in. Whenever Perry said something to Craig about it, Craig just said, “You’re jealous, man. You’re in love with my girlfriend. The sooner you face it, the better off we’ll all be.” It seemed like a joke now, with Craig, but it was still exasperating.