The Raising

  “Fish? It’s almost winter.”

  “Yeah, well, there are still fish in the lake, Mira. They don’t migrate.”

  “For God’s sake, Clark, why did you take the twins with you? Why didn’t you leave them home with—”

  “Are you kidding, Mira? Because there’s no one to take care of them at home! They need a mother. I left them with the only mother they have—mine.”

  “Fuck you, Clark. Fuck you. Fuck—”

  But he’d hung up already, and Mira was holding the receiver in her hand, staring straight ahead at her bulletin board, on which a snapshot of the twins—red Kool-Aid smiles shadowing their real smiles, wearing Chicago Cubs caps and bathing trunks with sharks on them, Lake Michigan frothing in the background—was thumbtacked at a terrible slant so that they appeared to be slipping sideways into a pile of ungraded student papers on her desk.

  Mira dropped the receiver and lunged at the photo, tore it off the bulletin board and pressed it to her breasts. She was clinging to it when Jeff Blackhawk pushed open her door, which she’d left unlocked in her hurry to answer the phone, and said, registering the expression on her face, “Mira? Is everything okay?”

  50

  Perry followed Karess Flanagan up the stairs to her dorm room. He hadn’t been on the residence floors of Godwin Hall since he’d moved out last May, and the scent of it (old carpeting and something else that smelled inexplicably of wet straw) brought the whole previous year back to him. Karess’s midthigh boots had clunky heels, and each step she took rang through the stairwell. She talked loudly over the sound of her own footsteps.

  “You never answered my question about why you’re in the class. Did you flunk your own first-year seminar or something?”

  “No,” Perry said, sounding more defensive than he’d intended. “I’m taking it because I find it interesting.”

  “Really?” Karess made no attempt not to sound skeptical. She got to the door at the top of the stairwell first, and held it open for Perry, who hesitated, trying to engineer some way to walk behind her, hold the door open for her, or at least for himself. He wasn’t used to girls holding doors for him, and was not, in fact, sure that a girl ever had. But he couldn’t avoid it without elbowing her out of the way, so he walked through the door as she held it.

  “Why’s death so interesting to you?”

  Perry didn’t answer. He waited in the hallway for Karess to pass over the threshold herself.

  The residence floors of Godwin Honors Hall were divided into halls named after alumni long forgotten except for their associations now with the better bathrooms or the direction the windows faced. Perry and Karess were in Hull House, where Nicole and Josie had lived the year before. All along the hallway, doors were open, and Perry could see girls sitting at desks, staring into computer screens, lying on beds, holding cell phones to their ears. One girl had a towel wrapped in a turban on her head and was standing in front of a wall mirror, holding a pair of tweezers to an eyebrow, seeming to be trying to muster up the courage to pluck. Perry looked away after that, and tried to watch his feet as he walked instead of looking through the open doors.

  “You can wait here, if you want,” Karess said. “Our room’s a pigsty. I just need to grab my wallet and change my shoes.” She nodded down at her boots. They looked like medieval torture devices. Perry felt relieved that she wasn’t going to try to walk across campus to Starbucks in them. He leaned up against the wall and folded his arms.

  Across from him, a bulletin board hung on a closed door. A pink plastic flower was tacked to it, and underneath that, a blurry photograph of a kitten. The kitten appeared to be running—either that or the photographer had been running while snapping the photograph. It was a bad photo, but he could imagine girls crowding around it, oohing over the cute haze of that cat.

  He consciously chose not to look down the hallway in the direction of Nicole and Josie’s old room, but he couldn’t help but wonder who occupied it this year, and if whoever it was knew that it was the room in which the Dead Girl had lived.

  Or, maybe no one lived there. Maybe the college administration did something in these circumstances. Or maybe they scrambled the room numbers so it would be impossible for the incoming class to figure out which room could be the haunted one. Godwin was the oldest dorm on campus. Probably quite a few students had died while living here. Likely, there was a procedure for handling the assigning of their rooms. Even if the residents themselves didn’t mind living in a dead student’s dorm room, parents might object, Perry supposed, to having their kid sleeping on the mattress that had been slept on by the previous year’s Unthinkable Tragedy.

  Then, Perry caught himself wondering if Nicole had come back to this hallway since her death. Had she wanted to get a look at her old room, to see if—

  He was startled by Karess when she stepped out of the door and said, brightly, electrically, “Ready?!”

  She wearing different shoes (an even higher heel, as it happened) and a different top—pale purple, lower cut, a little mesh of lace across her cleavage, which Perry looked away from even as he was noticing it.

  “So,” Karess said, “you were about to tell me what you find so fascinating about the death class. And if you can’t come up with something convincing, I’m going to have to conclude, as most of our classmates have, that it’s actually Professor Polson you find so fascinating.”

  Perry found himself opening and closing his mouth, issuing nothing but exasperated breaths, feeling what he thought must be a kind of hatred for Karess Flanagan.

  Who the hell did she think she was?

  She looked over her shoulder, batted her eyes, and said, “Cat got your tongue?” and Perry put his hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see that he’d balled them into fists.

  “No,” he said, finally, and continued down the stairs behind her.

  Why? Why was he continuing to walk behind her, follow after her? Was it the same reason any guy might?

  Because of those dark curls, and the way her waist tapered into her hips, and the way her ass looked like two solid handfuls of ripe flesh packed into that little miniskirt? Perry had noticed within hours of first laying eyes on her in class that she had such high-arched eyebrows that she always looked surprised—or as if she were flirting, or as if she were experiencing some kind of physical pleasure.

  Sexual pleasure.

  He’d made a conscious effort not to glance over at her. It had always seemed undignified, disrespectful, maybe even dangerous, letting a girl like that know you noticed her—although now, looking down onto her soft shampoo-commercial hair (a few strands lifted away from the rest, shining and amber in the sun that was coming through the little panes of the windows), another possibility occurred to him:

  That Karess Flanagan was actually harmless. That she was just having fun. She wanted him, too, to have harmless fun.

  He felt better, thinking this. She’d simply been teasing him. That was something Mary had always said (“I’m just teasing you, Perry”) and that he’d never understood. The little jabs, the sarcasm. (“Don’t be such an Eagle Scout.”) He’d taken them all wrong, he thought now, hearing Karess Flanagan’s throaty, casual humming under her breath. She was enjoying his company. She wanted him to like her.

  Was this what girls did?

  Long silver earrings twirled down from her lobes, nearly grazing her shoulders, glinting, and he could smell something citrusy, slightly bitter but also spicy and appealing, wafting off of her. She had some kind of leather thong around her neck, some kind of charm dangling from the end of it, but also a gold chain, and a silver chain, and something else that was beaded. She had about twenty bracelets on each wrist.

  Jesus, Perry thought, it must take this girl four hours to get dressed every morning.

  She chatted on and on brightly about what a drag it was to live on the third floor, and how, when her parents moved her in they’d had to lug all her stuff up the stairs because the elevator was broken.

  ?
??The elevator’s always broken,” Perry said.

  “What floor did you live on?” Karess asked him.

  “Fourth,” he said.

  “What house?”

  “Mack.”

  “So, you knew him? Craig Clements-Rabbitt?”

  They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and she was waiting for Perry at the door. There was a sign on it that read, FIRE EXIT, ALARM WILL SOUND, but everyone knew there was no alarm. Karess pushed her way through it, and out into the brisk late-morning air.

  He considered lying, or saying nothing, but what would be the point? Karess was obviously curious enough about everything that she was going to find out one way or another. Perry’s name, Googled along with Craig Clements-Rabbitt, told that whole story. Except for a few things about his making Eagle rank, which had been in the Bad Axe paper, Perry’s Internet claim to fame was that he’d been Craig’s roommate and had said to a reporter for the local paper, “He’s not a murderer.”

  “He was my roommate,” he now said to Karess.

  She whirled around. “What? You lived with him?” Her eyes were so wide he could see the little pinpricks of her pupils pulsing in the startling blue of her irises.

  “Yeah,” Perry said.

  “Well,” she said. She smiled. Her teeth were so white they seemed, like her incredibly blue eyes, more like fashion accessories than body parts. “The plot thickens.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it must have been pretty fucked up, your freshman year, living with a killer—”

  “What?” Perry asked.

  “A fucking murderer.”

  “He’s not a murderer,” Perry said.

  “Jesus,” Karess said. “You’re not still friends with him, are you? I mean, he killed his girlfriend.”

  “He didn’t kill his girlfriend,” Perry said. “He had an accident, and his girlfriend got killed.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” Karess said.

  “Then you heard wrong.”

  “I heard he was stoned and drunk, and he picked her up at her sorority because he was jealous of some older guy there, and even though she was screaming and pleading for him not to take her, he forced her into the car, and then he drove off the road at like a hundred miles an hour, to try to kill them both together. It was like some kind of sick love bond he thought they had. He wanted to die with her—and, so, like, she had no choice. And now she’s dead and he’s back here. Unbelievable.”

  Perry had to hold a hand to his forehead because, now that they were outside, the sun was shining blindingly over Karess’s shining head. They were in the courtyard, and students were passing them, talking on cell phones, stuffing protein bars into their mouths, ears plugged into their iPods. Some pink-cheeked girl squealed when she saw Karess and was about to hug her, but must have seen the serious expression on her face, so just wiggled her fingers, made a face, and kept walking.

  With no leaves on the trees, no clouds, and the sun so distant in the autumn sky, there was nothing to absorb the light, and Perry felt his eyes filling up with tears. He turned around and started to walk away from Karess. “Are you crying?” she called after him, and grabbed his elbow. “God, I’m, like, so sorry.”

  “I’m not crying,” Perry said, but kept walking because he wasn’t so sure he wasn’t crying, and if he was crying, he had no idea why he was. He tried to walk fast under the archway to Godwin Avenue. It was always forty degrees colder under that arch than anywhere around it. Even when the temperature was ninety degrees outside, under that archway it was cool and damp. Someone had spray-painted the name Jean at the top of the arch, and Perry found himself stopping, putting his hand flat against the bricks, trying to catch his breath. “I’m not crying,” he said again, although he was even more blind now, having stepped from the sun into this darkness. He rubbed his eyes and said, “But you shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know anything about. Where did you hear all this crap, about him forcing her into the car, and the death bond or whatever?”

  “It’s true,” Karess said. She was standing so close to him that he could smell her breath. Cinnamon. “There was this, like, assembly for first-year women our second day in the dorm, and these sorority types came from Omega Theta Tau, and it was supposedly supposed to be this meeting about how to avoid getting into abusive relationships with guys, but mostly it just scared the shit out of us about living in the dorm where the dead girl had lived. They did this slideshow? Of Nicole? And told us how guilty they all felt because they all knew she was dating this stalker dude, Craig Clements-Rabbitt, who was always waiting for her outside the house and wouldn’t let her have her own life, and then he killed her, and they were all crying, and by then we were all crying, and then we went back to our rooms, and I heard later that these girls who were living in her old room did the Ouija board in there, and then I don’t know what happened, but I guess it scared the shit out of them, and they got a room change.

  “Nobody’s living in that room now. It’s all locked up. And those Goth girls with the Alice Meyers Club thing are always lighting candles outside of it and burning these smudge stick things, and it sets off the fire alarms, and they make little shrines that the housekeeping people throw away. It’s fucked up. And you were that guy’s roommate?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Perry said. A kind of vertigo took over him—the archway seemed to shift, and suddenly he was feeling the weight in that white coffin again. The dead weight of a body sliding around inside.

  Karess looked alarmed. She said, “Are you okay?” She took a step even closer to him, looking carefully at his face, and slid her arm through his. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a hot chocolate. I promise not to talk about this. Don’t cry.”

  He looked at her.

  “I’m not crying,” he said, and having to say it again actually made him laugh.

  She laughed, too.

  “I think you’re a really cool guy,” Karess said, pulling him out of the archway by the arm that she had locked into his. “I thought so the first day I saw you.”

  51

  The walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Shelly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, passing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.

  What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she’d been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?

  What would she have thought if she’d been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair—that she’d allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?

  What would she have thought if she’d looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl—this girl that university officials had warned her not to harass?

  She’d have thought, perhaps, no fool like an old fool?

  Or would it have been something harsher? Much harsher.

  Now, she thought, imagining looking down at herself from the lofty heights she’d once occupied, she was one of them. The fallen.

  She was so lost to these thoughts that, as she approached Starbucks and glimpsed herself in the plate glass window, she was surprised to see her own reflection. She’d expected, she realized, to see herself as a warted hag, a specter, a creature—lecherous and leering, and that much more repulsive because, although she looked sexless, she wasn’t.

  But that’s not how she looked.

  In the window, she looked frantic, even to herself. And pitiable. Harmless. Maybe sad. Her hair was messed but shining in the dim November s
unlight. A man in a black suit and red tie looked her over appreciatively as he held the door for her. She did not, it seemed, appear to be a monster to him. To him, she looked like the reflection in the plate glass window.

  But there was no mistaking the horror on Josie Reilly’s face as she turned at the counter, holding her white cup, and saw Shelly walking through the door.

  52

  Mira had never shared anything about her personal problems with a colleague before. Even in graduate school when her fellow students regularly wept late into the night in one another’s arms over their breakups and their breakdowns, Mira had kept a close check on what she told others about herself.

  One of her best friends, Tessa, another doctoral candidate in anthropology, had told Mira about the years of incest abuse she’d endured as a child by a much older half-brother, and then had reacted with bitterness that seemed to border on rage when Mira told her, many years into their friendship, about her mother’s death.

  “You never told me your mother was dead.”

  “She died years ago,” Mira tried to explain. “I was an undergraduate. You and I hadn’t met.”

  “But we’ve discussed your mother on about five hundred occasions,” Tessa had said as Mira recognized in her friend’s eyes a dawning apprehension, a withdrawal, a dismissal that heralded the end of their friendship, “and you never once indicated that your parents weren’t both still happy and healthy and living in Ohio. I told you all about my father’s death. It seems like that might have been a good time to mention that you, too, had a parent who’d died.”

  Mira hadn’t intended to shrug. She knew that a shrug indicated that either it didn’t matter or she couldn’t comprehend the big fuss. But she’d felt herself doing it anyway—and, as she shrugged, she felt as if something shawl-like (her friendship with Tessa?) was slipping off her shoulders, discarded behind her.

  So it was that much more surprising to find herself now weeping into her hands as Jeff Blackhawk sat across from her, watching, rubbing his knees with his palms. She could not suppress the sobs.