“You liked her first, didn’t you?” she asked, a little sob in her voice. “She’s why you were in the study group, and then you found out that she’s got that boyfriend from Grosse Isle. That Princeton guy.”
Craig took a trembling breath, trying not to explode with relief. It was like watching in the rearview mirror as the tanker that had been barreling down on you flipped straight into a ditch. “No!” he said, finding that he could blink again because now he was actually telling the truth. “No! My God! Nicole, I was knocked out by you the first time I saw you. You were the only reason I joined that group. I hadn’t even seen your roommate. I’ve never felt this way about any girl. Josie? Jesus. No . . .”
“Craig,” Nicole said. “I know you love me now. But I also know that there are other girls, girls who are prettier, and—”
This time Craig did explode, with laughter. He put his hands in his hair, as if to keep his head on his neck, and then he rushed at her, lifted her off her feet, laughing and kissing her and twirling her around in his arms as the after-dinner crowd started pouring out of the cafeteria, which had just closed—all those faceless others splitting around him and Nicole, not even glancing at them, and Craig thought he could just hold her and kiss her there forever. She was laughing, too, and he hoped she thought he was so sweaty and his heart was beating so hard because it was so warm in the hallway, and because he was so in love.
That afternoon he didn’t say anything more about the paper roses, or the amount of her time they were going to take away from him between now and her formal (which she couldn’t even invite him to because he wasn’t in a frat: “I’m just going to go with a sister,” she’d assured him when he’d asked).
They kept walking, past their Starbucks, back to the dorm so she could start on the roses. They’d changed the topic to how crazy it was that someone had spray-painted a different word under every Stop sign in town, so the signs read, STOP WAR, STOP SHRUBBERY, STOP STOPPING, STOP UP, STOP OVER, STOP DIAPER RASH, etc. They speculated about which campus group would have done it, or if it was just one weird guy, or maybe high school students—who knew? Craig had his arms wrapped around her, and his mouth and nose were full of the smell and taste of her red wool scarf. His hands were so numb he had to look at them every few feet to make sure the trig book was still in them.
Then Craig saw him again: up ahead, that same guy who’d come out of the Omega Theta Tau house just before Nicole. He was walking out of the bank in his blue jacket, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his khaki pants.
“There he is again,” Craig said, pointing.
“Who?” Nicole asked absently. She wasn’t even looking in the direction he was pointing.
“That guy who was in your house. That man.”
Nicole looked around this time, seeming to scan the horizon, not finding anything of interest. “So?”
“I just want to know who he is,” Craig said. “Who is he, Nicole?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t even see who you’re pointing at.” She was looking in the exact opposite direction. The guy turned around then, and Craig was sure he looked right at them, as if he’d known they were there, as if he were looking for them.
There was a patch on the guy’s jacket pocket. Craig could see it clearly now: “EMT.”
“He’s an ambulance driver or something,” Craig said, more to himself than Nicole.
“So?” she said.
“Why does he hang out at your sorority? Why is he always there?”
Nicole held a hand up to her forehead and looked in the wrong direction again, and then said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about Craig. There’s no EMT hanging out at the sorority.”
Craig looked at her and said, “How did you know he was an EMT?”
“You just said it,” she said, and seemed to stomp her foot a little in frustration. “Sheesh!”
“No, I didn’t,” Craig said. “I said ‘ambulance driver,’ after I saw there was an EMT patch on his pocket.”
“Same thing,” she said.
“It’s not,” he said.
She continued looking around, exactly where the guy was not standing, and then the guy turned his back and stepped into the street, and a white truck pulled into the intersection, blocking Craig’s view, and by the time it had passed, the man was gone and Craig was staring at nothing but a brick wall.
Nicole got on her tiptoes and kissed his cheeks. “Okay, I guess this is where we say good-bye,” she said. “You’re going back to Starbucks?”
“Without you?”
“Why not?” she asked. “You’ll study better without me there anyway. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” Craig said, feeling a little bit like he’d been duped in some kind of card trick—not an unpleasant one, just confusing—and then she was half-walking, half-skipping away from him in the direction of Godwin Hall.
28
Professor Polson’s lecture that day concerned the soul.
“In some cultures, you can never speak the name of the deceased person again because the soul might hear its name and come looking for its body. Or, worse, the body might come looking for its soul.
“In fact, the tradition of cremation, which seems to us one of the most modern means for dealing with human remains, has its origins in this impulse. If the body is burned to ashes, there can be no reinhabiting, no return.
“Some anthropologists believe that many mourning customs originally served the purpose of keeping the dead at bay. Schneerweiss—you read the translation of the article, right?—hypothesized that the reason widows were instructed to wear black for at least a year and to change their hairstyle was so as to be unrecognizable when their dead husbands came looking for them.
“Why,” Professor Polson asked, “might this be? Why would any self-respecting widow not be thrilled to have her dead husband return to her?”
Most of the class responded in unison, “Putrefaction!”
“Exactly. The fear, the aversion, that we think of as superstitious or religious is, in fact, based on physical reality. It’s based on experience. Difficult experience. So, primitive people, we see, cannot be so easily dismissed as the sort of fools we tend to think of them as. In actuality, they had a much closer, much more intimate experience with the dead than most of us will ever have—unless we go to war or into the mortuary arts. They knew what they were trying to avoid.”
She turned to the chalkboard, on which she’d written a quote from Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain:
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
Perry tapped his pencil over a sentence from that day’s reading:
H. Guntert: Larve (Ger. Mask) is etymologically connected with the hidden spirits of the Kingdom of the Dead, the Lares (Lat.), and their name is cognate with latere (to be hidden or to keep oneself hidden) and Latona, the goddess of death (Leto in Greek), and gives expression to human’s immediate feeling about the corpse—the visible presence of the body, and the deepest concealment of the person.
He wanted to ask Professor Polson there in class, instead of in her office (where she often seemed too preoccupied about childcare to talk about the subject at any length), if she had any thoughts on this, if she thought that this idea of seeing the dead one’s body, and recognizing that his or her soul was no longer animating it, was the basis of even more superstition and folklore. He had, himself, some ideas about this.
But she was answering some bland question presented to her by Elwood Campbell about why, given the horrors of putrefaction, so many people were not repulsed by the dead, but fascinated by them, wanted to see pictures of them. “What about people who love to look at gore?” he asked, and snickered. Perry suspected Elwood was speaking for himself. He’d been one of the students who hadn’t lunged forward to get a closer look at Marilyn Monroe’s morgue photograph, and Perry had the impressi
on it was because Elwood was already familiar with it, that he was probably one of those guys trolling the gore.com-type websites, or posting things on them.
“How about necrophilia types? Right?” Elwood prompted. “You know, people who want to have sex with corpses?”
A few of the girls shook their heads and glanced at one another uncomfortably, but Professor Polson didn’t bat an eye.
“ ‘And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride / In the sepulchre there by the sea . . .’ Poe,” she said, “was only one of many poets and philosophers who has described the death of a young woman as one of the most beautiful sights one could behold.”
“Yeah,” Elwood said, seeming to take this as affirmation of his opinion.
“Kind of puts the ‘fun’ back into funeral,” Brett Barber said, and almost everyone burst out laughing, but none laughed as hard as Elwood.
“On that note,” Professor Polson said, shaking her head, “we’re done for today. See you Tuesday.”
She didn’t wait for the students to leave before she herself left, and she wasn’t in her office when Perry passed by it a little later.
“Sweetheart,” Perry’s mother said when he talked to her on the phone that evening. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course, Mom. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry so much, okay?”
“Is Craig okay?”
“Craig’s okay. Not great. But he’s definitely okay.”
“You’re a good friend, Perry. I’m proud of you for sticking by him. That poor boy. Tell him we said hello, okay? Bring him to visit, if—”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Perry said.
“No, of course not. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wish we could do something to—”
Despite the outpouring of animosity toward Craig in Bad Axe (someone had actually put up a Wanted poster in Leazenby Park with Craig’s photograph and “For Murder” scrawled in red Magic Marker underneath, and this had made the papers all over the state), Perry’s mother believed absolutely that the accident that had killed Nicole had not been Craig’s fault. Even before the blood tests came back and showed conclusively that Craig hadn’t been drinking, hadn’t been smoking dope, she’d believed Perry that driving drunk wasn’t something Craig would have done.
“How are things there?” Perry asked. “With you guys? Is business good?”
“Oh,” his mother said. “You know your dad. He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. We could be billionaires or in debt to our eyeballs for all I know. But he’s making enough money to pay for that boat of his. And I got a new winter coat.” (It was a game his mother always played, and they both knew it was a game. She was, after all, the one who kept the books for Edwards and Son. She probably made 90 percent of their business decisions without bothering to let Perry’s father in on them.) “Yesterday,” she said, her tone becoming lower, more somber. “I saw the Werner sisters.”
“Oh,” Perry said. “Where?”
“At the cemetery.”
“Why were you at the cemetery, Mom?”
“I was just driving by. I could see them from the road. They were putting flowers on Nicole’s grave. So I pulled over. It was her birthday, Perry. Her nineteenth.”
“Jesus,” Perry said.
His mother didn’t bother to scold him for taking the Lord’s name in vain. She said, “I know.”
It surprised him that he hadn’t realized, hadn’t remembered, that it was Nicole’s birthday. Now, he recalled all those early-October cupcakes in elementary school and, during middle school, all the girls getting excited about some slumber party Nicole was having. There was a lot of hoopla every year surrounding her birthday. Her locker decorated, singing in the cafeteria, that sort of thing. (She’d always been the most popular girl in every class.)
Now her sisters were gathering in the cemetery to decorate her grave.
“How did they seem?” Perry asked. “Her sisters?”
“Well, about like you’d imagine,” his mother said, and then said no more, as if he could imagine. But he couldn’t. He really could not imagine them in a cemetery. Those perky blondes, and all that laughter. He couldn’t imagine them bent over any grave at all, let alone their little sister’s. “They didn’t have anything good to say about Craig,” she said, “as you’d imagine. I didn’t tell them he was your roommate again. I don’t think they know you even know him, and I think that’s just as well.”
“Yeah,” Perry said, and then thought, Shit.
Had Craig known it was Nicole’s birthday?
Surely, he had.
Was that why he’d hurried out of the apartment so early that morning and Perry hadn’t seen him all day?
Who knew how many anniversaries of this or that thing—her birthday, their first date, their first kiss, the day he’d given her that amber ring—Craig was living through, and would live through? He wasn’t going to tell Perry about them, Perry was pretty sure, but he still felt like a bad friend for not knowing.
“They told me that their parents aren’t doing so well, Perry,” his mother said. He waited for her to go on, but she said nothing more about Mr. and Mrs. Werner. They talked, instead, about the Bad Axe football team—the worst season in a decade, although they never had been very good.
As his mother spoke, Perry walked over to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out a folder. He slid the photograph out, laid it on his desk, pulled the chain on his desk lamp, and bent over it, looking straight down into the glossy image, where, in the corner, blurred but familiar, he saw the fleeing form of the girl he knew—he knew—was Nicole Werner.
He stared until his eyes went dry, and he had to blink as his mother told him more of the details of the family business, of her days, of how much she loved and missed him.
“I love you, too,” Perry said.
“You be good. Stay safe. Eat vegetables. Get enough sleep. Don’t—”
He closed his eyes and flipped the photograph over on his desk so he could focus.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Tell Dad I love him. I’ll see you soon.”
29
“What is this?” Mira asked. She was trying to control the alarm in her voice, so the question came out breathy, hoarse, as if she were doing an imitation of Marilyn Monroe.
“Obviously, it’s a duffel bag full of clothes,” Clark said. “I’m sure you won’t remember my having told you I’m taking the twins to visit my mother.”
“What?”
“Twins? You know, those two kids who run around here? I think you gave birth to them?”
“Clark, can you quit with the sarcasm? What are you talking about?”
“I told you weeks ago, Mira. It’s my mother’s birthday. I’m taking the twins to visit her for two days. What do you care? It’ll give you time to work.”
Mira stared at Clark. She’d been preoccupied, she knew, but she would never have forgotten something like this. Clark had never taken the twins anywhere without her, certainly not to visit his mother. Mira herself was the one who had to plan and organize every visit to Clark’s mother, for whom Clark seemed to have nothing but a terrible cocktail of pity and contempt that made it nearly impossible for him to carry on a conversation with the poor old woman without it ending in an argument.
Visiting? With the twins? “No,” Mira said, and shook her head.
Clark let his jaw drop theatrically. For a flash of a second, Mira saw his molars—a little mountain range of bone in the dark. He shut his mouth before she could look more closely, but it had seemed possible to her in that quick glimpse that his teeth looked unhealthy.
A dark spot in the back?
Maybe, she thought, it was why his breath had begun to smell strangely—not bad, exactly, but organic. On the rare occasions they kissed, she thought she could taste clover on him, or the paper of an old book.
“Uh, no?” Clark asked. “Did you just say no, I can’t take my
sons to visit my mother for two days? I’m sorry, Mira, but I’m not sure you have the right to grant or deny that permission, especially since if I go without them there will be no one here to take care of them.”
“I could have made arrangements to go to if you’d told me,” Mira said. “I would have.” Even as she said it, she wondered how she could have, whether she actually would have.
“And cancel your classes? Postpone your research? God forbid, Mira! I mean, the way you go on and on about the importance of those classes, and how the whole world hinges on your student evaluations, and how if you lose a research day, the fall of Rome is sure to follow, it certainly never crossed my mind that you ‘would have made arrangements’ to go with us.”
Mira stepped away from him. She tried to imagine herself as the director of this scene. Or as its literary critic. Clark, the main character here, was far too agitated for this to be about his mother’s birthday, or even his bitterness about his wife’s work schedule.
“Why now?” she asked, attempting the dispassionate tone she took with students, with colleagues, although every nerve ending in her was vibrating with emotion. “Why are you going now? In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never once—”
“Because my fucking mother is turning seventy, for God’s sake. I don’t want to be like you, Mira, and just show up finally for the fucking funeral.”
Mira looked at her stinging hand to find that she had just slapped Clark hard on the side of his face without realizing it, without realizing that she was even capable of it.
Then she looked to up to see that he was reeling backward, swearing.
It took a few more heartbeats before she could focus enough on her surroundings again to understand that the twins, awakened from their nap in the other room by Clark’s shouting, had begun to scream and cry. And a few more heartbeats passed before Mira realized that there were tears streaking down her own face, that she was sobbing.
Clark had been the only person to whom she’d ever spoken of it, and it had been the hardest confession she’d ever made, and she remembered him cradling her head in his lap as she wept, years ago, when finally she’d told someone, and the relief that someone knew: “I didn’t go home when my father told me that my mother was dying because I was afraid I would flunk my exam . . .”