“I think you know why I’m here,” Nicole said before she stood up and crossed the room—those bare feet, and the toenails, he tried only to look at those—and knelt down at his feet, looked up at him, directly in his line of vision, so he had to look back, and then she reached up for his face, pulled it gently toward her, and before he really understood what she was going to do, and what was happening, kissed him with her mouth open, her tongue slipping warmly, mintily, over his.
24
Shelly typed Josie Reilly into Google.
It was Monday, and Josie hadn’t made it into work at all. Shelly had come into the office to a raspy message on her machine in the morning:
“Hey, this is Josie (cough, cough) and I’m really sick. I can’t come in. I’m really sorry. I’m going to Health Services now. I’ll be in on Wednesday I’m sure.”
There were an astonishing number of Google hits.
Of course, Josie Reilly wasn’t a completely unique name. One Josefina/Josie Reilly seemed to have been involved somehow in the Salem witch trials. Another Josie Reilly was a CEO of a large, bankrupt corporation. There was also a long list of genealogical connections—Reillys and Rileys and Reileys going back several centuries, traversing the Atlantic, claiming to be related to one another, as if it mattered. (What, Shelly always wondered, did people feel they gained by claiming kinship with strangers, alive or dead?)
But then her Josie Reilly rose to the surface, incontrovertibly the coed sorority sister from Grosse Isle, the one Shelly had hired as a work-study student for the Chamber Music Society:
DEAD FRESHMAN’S ROOMMATE SPEAKS OUT AGAINST DRUNK DRIVER.
There she was—Josie, in all her sloe-eyed Black Irish beauty, holding a microphone on the steps of the Llewellyn Roper Library. The sun shone down on her inky hair, which matched the black halter-top dress she wore. Behind her, the familiar apple tree that seemed to grow out of the foundation of the library (the one they were always threatening to rip out because it was fucking up the plumbing) wasn’t yet in bloom.
The Dead Freshman’s Roommate?
Shelly clearly remembered asking Josie of Nicole Werner, “Did you know her?” And the shrug. We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time, so . . .
Josie had said nothing about being her roommate. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing about standing outside the Llewellyn Roper Library in May, speaking out against drunk driving and about her dead roommate.
Why?
That night, after a distracted glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and a cursory page-through of the New York Times, Shelly called Rosemary.
For over two decades she had spoken to Rosemary on the phone every few days, and a bit more lately, since Rosemary’s eldest son had become a teenager and there was so much to say about this terrifying passage. For the first half of the conversation, Shelly listened to Rosemary rail against the public schools and the fact that they allowed fourteen-year-old children to neck on the benches outside the building during lunch period.
“Can you imagine if we’d tried to get away with that in middle school?” Rosemary asked.
She wasn’t expecting an answer, so Shelly didn’t say that, actually, she could, and that she remembered, herself, the spring of eighth grade, meeting Tony Lipking (ironically named, since he was her first kiss) out in the parking lot every lunch hour it wasn’t raining, and the warm feeling of Tony’s Ford’s grille against her thighs as he held her between himself and that grille with his face locked onto hers for the entire hour, when she should have been eating her mother’s turkey sandwich and carrot sticks.
When Rosemary was done railing, Shelly told her the story of Josie, and how she’d Googled her on the Internet and discovered her as Nicole Werner’s grieving roommate.
“Why wouldn’t she have told me that, when I asked? Why would it be a secret, especially after I told her that I was at the accident?”
Rosemary seemed to consider this for quite a while, although Shelly could also hear a sink running in the background. (Often it seemed that Rosemary was multitasking while they talked.) “Traumatized?” Rosemary finally offered. “Or maybe she thinks it’s controversial? Maybe she doesn’t want to get into it? Trying to get past all that?”
“No,” Shelly said. She didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s not this girl. This girl would be thrilled to get controversial. Believe me.”
Shelly went on to tell Rosemary everything she knew about Josie Reilly—the boys waiting in the office, the early departures, late arrivals, the excuses. She described the spaghetti-strap tops she wore. The little silver sandals and the black flats with frilly bows. Jeremy, Shelly’s cat, was licking his catnip mouse on the braided rug at her feet as Shelly detailed the habits of her work-study student and this odd mystery surrounding her.
“Shelly?” Rosemary asked when Shelly was done. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” Shelly said.
Rosemary lowered her voice, hesitated, and then asked, “Are you, you know, in love with this girl?”
“What?” Shelly was surprised to find her pulse racing, her cheeks and chest prickling with heat. “Why would you ask that?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, hon. I’m not accusing you of anything! I don’t know,” Rosemary said. She laughed nervously. “There’s just something in your voice. You seem so—intrigued.”
“I can be intrigued and not be in love,” Shelly said.
“Well, of course you can,” Rosemary said. “Forget I said anything, okay? Just forget it. But, you know, if you decide you are in love with her, you call me before—”
“Rosemary, Jesus. She’s not even twenty years old. I—”
“Like I said,” Rosemary said, “just forget it. I never said it. You’re right. Ridiculous Rosemary. Tell me a joke or something, okay? Or, like, what did you have for dinner tonight? See any good movies lately?”
25
Dr. Truby asked Craig, solemnly, as if speaking in his lowest voice and leaning forward might seduce it out of Craig’s subconscious, “And that evening—earlier—you don’t even remember how you ended up in the car, how Nicole got there with you, where you were going when the accident occurred?”
Craig bit his bottom lip and looked at the ceiling. Swallowed. Closed his eyes. He wanted to remember. He wanted to deliver some tidbit to Dr. Truby, something for all the man’s hard work. But what? He’d already gone over what he could remember with the guy, and it wasn’t much:
By now he remembered well enough that he’d been driving Lucas’s old Taurus. He hazily remembered Lucas, stoned in his dorm room, handing him the keys, and saying, “Good luck, man.” But he had no recollection of what it was he might have needed luck for. Craig had been told by his lawyer that, questioned later by detectives, Lucas had said, “I didn’t know what was going on. He came into my room saying, ‘I gotta borrow your car,’ so I tossed him the keys, told him where it was parked, and said, ‘Good luck, man.’ He was in way too much of a hurry to ask him what the problem was. Frankly, I thought it might be, you know, Nicole—some female thing. Like, she was having a hemorrhage, you know. I knew a girl that happened to once, and she almost died. It was like a coptic pregnancy or something like that—I don’t know what you call it.”
The police also reported Lucas as saying that Craig had seemed stone-cold sober when he came to get the keys. But, coming from Lucas, that might not have meant much, both because of Lucas’s own substance abuse track record and because he was the one who’d loaned someone a car in which a fatal accident had taken place.
Craig looked from the ceiling to his lap to Dr. Truby and said, “Well, I remember a cell phone call. She needed me. I was pissed off about the party. There was someone there I didn’t want her to be with, but I can’t remember who.” He closed his eyes. He saw a blue shirt. Some flash of an insignia. Not a Boy Scout, surely. Not a cop. “A paramedic?” Craig asked, looking up at Dr. Truby, as if he might remember. “You know, some kind of ambulance driver?”
Dr. Truby nodded, motioned in the air between them, coaxing. “You were jealous?”
“I . . . guess so. Even though she never gave me any reason to be. Nicole was really specific about monogamy. She told me that if she ever, even for a second, thought she was going to be attracted to someone else, she would tell me, and she asked me to do the same. We were really clear on that. Really honest. There was no reason not to be. Nicole was a big believer in courting. She only wanted to date in order to find someone to marry. She wore this ring her dad had given her, on her left hand, like a wedding ring—this promise ring.”
Dr. Truby shrugged a little with one shoulder, still nodding, not seeming surprised. Maybe he’d heard of promise rings before. But it had been a real eye-opener for Craig, finding out that there were girls whose fathers got involved in their sex lives to the degree that they gave them rings and had them take pledges that they wouldn’t have sex until they were married. Nicole’s ring looked just like an engagement ring: a gold band with a little diamond.
“She took that stuff seriously, but I knew there were a lot of guys interested in her, and I’d been totally banned from parties at her sorority because of that incident I told you about. I was always afraid, you know, that something might happen when I wasn’t there. I mean, I didn’t think she’d cheat on me, but I thought she might meet somebody, get interested in some other guy.”
Dr. Truby was still nodding (Jesus, Craig thought, he could get a job as one of those dogs on a dashboard), but then he looked at his watch, so Craig knew it was time for him to go. The therapist cleared his throat and said in his “conclusion” voice, “You’ve come a long way, Craig, for someone with the kind of brain damage you sustained. Just a bit more, a bit longer, and we’ll have this sorted out.”
“Right,” Craig said, trying to make it not sound as sarcastic as he meant it, as if there would ever be anything that would sort out his having killed Nicole.
His dad was there in the Subaru, waiting outside Dr. Truby’s office, which was in a sort of segregated part of the hospital campus, as if the shrinks and their patients really shouldn’t be glimpsed by people who were genuinely sick—cancer, heart problems, diabetes.
“Hey, pal,” his father said when Craig sat down and pulled the car door closed. He reached over and patted his son’s knee hard enough that Craig probably would have flinched if he were feeling more energetic—but, as it was, he just looked over and nodded. “How’d it go, son?”
“Okay,” Craig said. “I guess.”
“Well, you don’t have to tell me anything,” his dad said, holding his hands up over the steering wheel. (How many times had he said this by now? Was he getting so used to Craig being a zombie that he was just going to keep saying it forever?) “But if you want to, I want you to know I’m happy to listen, and I won’t say a word if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Craig said, and then he turned to the window to let his father know that he wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything at that particular moment, and that they could just drive home.
“Home,” now, was Craig’s father’s apartment in a complex called the Alpines, on the outskirts of Fredonia. Scar and his mother had stayed in the house. Having been at college while the finer details of his parents’ separation were being worked out, Craig wasn’t sure how it had happened that Scar had stayed with his mother in the house—except that it was no secret to anyone that Scar and their mother were far closer to each other than either of them was with Craig or his father—and since, after the accident, when he found himself back in New Hampshire, Craig was in a kind of coma, he also didn’t know how it had been decided that he would move in to the Alpines with his father.
Not that he minded.
He didn’t even mind, anymore, that his parents were getting divorced. It was like whatever happened that made him lose his memory of the accident had also wiped out all the rage and despair he’d felt about that, too.
His parents’ separation had been in the works for months before the accident, taking place all through the most beautiful early months of his relationship with Nicole, like a bad and blurry backdrop.
“What the hell is going on there?!” Craig had shouted over the phone to Scar one Saturday afternoon in January. He’d called home to demand more answers from anyone who would give them. He had actually been calling for days by then, nonstop, but no one answered the fucking land line or any one of their cell phones since his father had called to give him the news:
“Your mom’s leaving me, son. She thinks life’s too short to spend it with me.”
A few hours after that, his mother had called, either to try to soften it (“We’ll just take things a day at a time, and see what happens”) or to deny responsibility (“I know your father says this was my decision, but I’m sure it’s no surprise to you, or any one else, that this has been coming for a long time, and it’s no one’s decision”).
Well, it had come as a Big Fucking Surprise to Craig, who’d been planning to spend the weekend in a blissful state of sleepy love with Nicole in his room, since Perry was going back to Bad Axe for somebody’s baptism. The last thing in the world Craig had considered was that he’d get news like this from home. Home was supposed to just stay home.
“How the fucking hell did this happen?!” Craig screamed at his little brother over the phone.
“I don’t know,” Scar said, sounding stoned—although, before Craig had left for college in the fall, at least, Scar had been vehemently opposed to smoking weed. (“Why would anyone want to get stupider?”) But Craig also knew that their mother was pretty excited about all the new psychopharmaceutical miracles taking place in the world, and she was always suggesting to her friends some cure for malaise, or annoyance, or mild anxiety. Maybe now she had Scar on something for his mild anxieties, which Craig thought were pretty normal for a kid that age and would go away on their own in time, like his scar, which, in its fading, had begun to look like only the vaguest shadow of a crucifix dug into the skin on his back.
He’d been in sixth grade when he’d gotten that. It was after school, and he was walking home along Mill Creek, probably listening to Nirvana on his iPod, when a kid a year older jumped out of the bushes, wrestled Scar to the ground, pinning his face into the grass between the sidewalk, and, without saying a word about anything, let alone why, lifted up the back of Scar’s SKI PURPLE MOUNTAIN T-shirt, and cut a crucifix into his back. Then the kid jumped off Scar, ran into the road, and flagged down a passing motorist—a hippie lady in a van, lost off the freeway, looking for a coffee shop.
The kid (Remco Nolens) had pointed over to Scar and said to the woman, “He needs help!” before sprinting back to his house, where the cops came and picked him up an hour later.
Apparently, Remco had been tripping on bad acid when he did it, and couldn’t tell anyone why he’d been hiding in the bushes, or why he’d jumped out with the knife, why he’d cut a crucifix into Scar’s back. Remco was sent to live with his grandparents in Florida after that, and part of his punishment was that he had to send Scar an apologetic letter every year.
These letters were cause for general hilarity at the Clements-Rabbitt household, as they were so stiff, and so clearly unapologetic: “I wish to tell you again that I am sorry for scratching your back with my pocket knife.”
In the end, the wound wasn’t life threatening—although it was also more than a “scratch.” The nickname had been an attempt to make the kind of light of it Remco had made—as if by calling him Scar they could pretend that what had happened wasn’t much worse than having a tooth knocked out by a Frisbee.
But to Craig, it had seemed much worse; for months afterward he’d woken from dreams in which he was wrestling his little brother’s limp body away from some winged black thing he recognized as Remco. Still, if it bothered Scar, he never said so.
“You better talk to Mom or Dad about that,” Scar said on the phone. “It’s not really any of my business if they’re splitting up
.”
“Not any of your business? Huh? Last time I checked, they were your parents too, pal.”
“Don’t call me pal when you’re yelling at me. It’s just like Dad.”
“What? What are you talking about? Since when does Dad yell at you?”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Craig couldn’t figure out whether that was a validation of his point that their father never yelled at Scar (never yelled at any of them), or something else—some hint that there was a new family dynamic now, that their father was yelling, that their father had something to yell about.
“Just don’t ask me about Mom and Dad,” Scar finally said. “Ask them if you have to—but personally I think you should just forget it.”
“Forget it? Just, like, forget that my parents are getting divorced?”
“Come on, Craig,” Scar said, still sounding dopey, far away. “You’re a big boy now, get—”
Craig hung up on his brother then, and didn’t speak to him again until he was brought back to New Hampshire in March, with only a vague idea of who the boy with the shaggy hair in his eyes was. And then it was weeks before Craig could spontaneously remember the kid’s name, and another week before he really understood what it meant that Scar was his brother.