The cat continued to regard her. Not even blinking.
This cat was nothing like Jeremy. This cat had none of Jeremy’s scruffy skittishness. Jeremy’s fur had been rough, and his eyes, unlike this cat’s eyes, had been a mottled olive, not this blazing marble green.
But here Shelly was, looking at this cat looking at her, and she felt certain of something she’d once or twice had an inkling of in the past: that each cat is part of some larger cat soul.
That this cat and Jeremy had come from the same place—whatever cat nothingness that was.
Shelly and the cat held that gaze in a trance of that certainty between them, and the incredible comfort it offered, and Shelly didn’t even startle and the cat didn’t move when Ellen called from the top of the stairs, “Are you decent? I was going to come down and make coffee.”
“Thank you,” Shelly called.
She would drink Ellen’s coffee, and then she would head back to town, find Craig Clements-Rabbitt, tell him this new plan, ask for his help.
105
The campus was empty. The sidewalks were slippery, lonely. The sun had come up on the horizon and turned the untrodden snow—the great mounds and blankets of it—into a blinding moonscape. Now, this was a perfect campus for ghosts, Mira thought. For the invisible. The gone. No one would be able to see them strolling along through this snow. There was no one to see them. The students were all in their beds, asleep. She thought of Perry, dreaming. She imagined his eyes moving rapidly behind his lids—that frantic dancing that was actually complete peace.
It was hard to walk through this much snow, and Mira tried to think but could remember no November snowfall like it in all the years she’d lived in this town. Luckily she’d worn flat leather boots. Although they were cold, with a bad tread, she could march through the snow on the sidewalks, trudge through the slush in the streets. It seemed that a few trucks and cars must have passed already through town, because she could see the tracks of their tires, but she didn’t see any vehicles now. At the corner she didn’t bother to stop for the Don’t Walk sign.
“Professor Polson,” the man said, standing as she stepped into Dean Fleming’s office. She had never seen him in person before, but she knew who he was from the photo on the university website, the photo that came up right next to the gold seal bearing the university’s dates and the Latin motto under its name (Utraque Unum: “Both and One”) every time she double-clicked on Home.
“President Yancey,” Mira said.
The dean was standing in the corner, as if he’d been banished to it. He didn’t meet Mira’s eyes.
“Sit down, Professor Polson,” the president said, gesturing to the seat across from him. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “This is very serious. Very serious indeed. Serious complaints have been filed against you by your students—” She sank into the chair across from him. He handed her the piece of paper he’d been holding, which she could only glance at before feeling as if she might faint, recognizing a few names and signatures beside them:
Karess Flanagan. Brett Barber. Michael Curley. Jim Bouwers.
“But the real news of the day,” President Yancey said—and there was no mistaking the hysterical little laugh in the way he said it—“is that one of your students has been killed. Shot. After a B-and-E at the OTT house—”
Mira was swimming through the initials, and found herself moving her arms at the same time that she stood up. “Who?” she said.
“Sit down,” the president said, pointing at the chair she’d just stood up from. “Sit down, now, Professor. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing from the police soon enough, but in the meantime you’re to clean out your office. In the meantime, you’re to tell me in all the detail you can come up with why it is that this student of yours, this Perry Edwards, this student with whom you were working closely, might have broken into a sorority at three o’clock in the morning and managed to walk straight into a terrified young lady with a weapon, and gotten himself shot.”
“Oh, my God,” Mira said, and fell back into her chair.
“Oh, my God is fucking right,” President Yancey said. “Do you have any fucking idea what this will mean, Professor Polson, for this fucking university?”
Part Six
106
On the drive back to her apartment (snow giving the world the appearance of a moon, another world, an empty, perfect one) Shelly drove by the site of the accident.
Of course, she’d driven by it hundreds of times over the months since, and watched the changes to the shrine it had become to Nicole Werner. The teddy bears were occasionally replaced, the flowers rearranged. The crosses continued to accumulate. There must have been fifty of them out there by now, spread across the spot where the accident had been, lined up along the ditch. At least a dozen had been organized into the shape of an N at the edge of the field.
Eventually, Shelly thought as she approached the shrine, the sorority girls who saw to all this would graduate. Things would dissipate, decay. Maybe every year or two a relative would make the trip to town on Memorial Day, leave behind a bouquet.
She would, herself, Shelly thought, try to avoid this spot from now on. She would leave this town, but when and if she returned to it again, she would arrive from the other direction.
She wouldn’t even drive by.
Her eyes watered in the snow glare.
She hadn’t expected to slow down as she passed. She hadn’t even wanted to see it—but she also hadn’t expected to see someone out there wading through snow four feet deep, wearing no coat, at eight o’clock in the morning, staring straight ahead as he made his way toward the snowed-over photo of Nicole Werner nailed to that tree.
No car was pulled over anywhere on the road that Shelly could see. How had he gotten here?
His shirt was white, and her eyes were watery, and Shelly wondered if maybe she was seeing things. Maybe this was the kind of hallucination people had in Antarctica when there was so little of anything real left to see. She rubbed her eyes.
No.
This was a young man, and he was talking to himself, or to Nicole Werner’s photo, holding out his hands as he drew closer to it, not even glancing up as Shelly’s car came closer—although certainly he must also have noticed her slowing down, approaching, as she was the only thing on the road.
When she did slow down, she found herself nearly letting out a little cry, thinking, looking out at him, Richie, her brother, he was—
No, God.
Of course not. What was wrong with her?
Of course not.
It was that boy who reminded her of her brother, the roommate.
The buzz cut. The nicely pressed white shirt. What was his name?
Shelly braked. She pulled over as far as she could near the bank of snow that was now the shoulder of the road. Like the first time, the last time, like the accident, she unrolled her window, called out, knowing he would never be able to hear her in the great white space between them—the snow and the white annihilating everything, especially the sound of her voice.
Still, he must have heard her pull over, because he turned around. He looked at her. She opened her mouth as he began to shake his head—a slow back-and-forth no, no that made Shelly close her mouth, and put her hand to it. She didn’t need for him to say a word to know what he was telling her:
No.
There was nothing she could do for him.
He was telling her to go.
Shelly lifted a hand before she rolled her window up again, and watched him walk away until she could no longer see him at all in his white shirt in the snow.
107
Ellen had aged. There was no denying it.
But, of course, so had she. How old must Shelly have looked to Ellen? It had been fourteen years since they���d last seen each other. Still, they managed to recognize one another instantly and simultaneously, and rushed toward one another there in the Las Vegas airport between the escalators and the baggage carousel, with no h
esitation.
Ellen tossed down the black leather bag that was slung over her shoulder and threw her arms around Shelly, and said, “I told you so,” into Shelly’s gray hair. They both began to weep—no sobbing, just quiet tears dampening their cheeks.
Shelly nodded at Ellen. It was true. Ellen had always promised she’d come to visit Shelly in Vegas before either of them managed to die. She’d say it at the end of every phone conversation, jot it at the bottom of every email—and there’d been a million of those phone calls, emails, postcards, notes over the years. Time had seemed to create itself out of those exchanges across space.
It was a short drive from the airport to Shelly’s apartment. They were only awkward in the moments of silence, so they kept talking. They talked about Ellen’s flight—four hours beside a woman who stopped blabbing only when she was chewing the cuticles of her fingernails. (“I got up to go to the bathroom three or four times, hoping she’d bother the guy on the other side of her, but she was just waiting for me when I got back.”)
They talked about Las Vegas. Ellen had never been, and Shelly had lived there so long by then that she didn’t even notice how strange it might seem to someone who’d never been out of the Midwest except to go to Manhattan, or France.
It was like moving to Mars, Shelly had told Rosemary on the phone when she first moved. When the plane had landed on the tarmac in Vegas, Shelly had looked through the little plastic window at the desert, and said to herself, I have moved to Mars.
“Good,” Rosemary had said. “In Las Vegas, everyone’s in hiding. And you have to consider yourself in hiding, Shelly. Don’t do anything stupid, like start a Facebook page, okay?”
After that first phone call from her new life, Shelly had hung up, crossed the floor of her fourth-floor apartment, and looked out:
Forever, she’d thought. As in the song, she could see it from the window of her apartment. Forever reached as far as the red-dirt mound of Sunrise Mountain before it abruptly disappeared from view.
And, in all the years, Shelly had never considered moving. Not from Las Vegas (which had become the home she’d never known she hadn’t had—sometimes shabby, consistently inconsistent, but full of a beauty that was that much more lovely because you had to go looking for it) and not from the apartment.
She loved the view from her apartment. At night, the moon hovered over Sunrise Mountain as if it were completely empty up there in the sky, shining light down on light, not seeming to be reflecting anything, but holding its own spot tenaciously up there—a gleaming checkpoint, long ago abandoned.
Directly below Shelly’s balcony, a prickly pear cactus spread its flowering menace between her view and the parking lot.
Once, years before, some member of the maintenance crew had tried to chop it down, swearing as the cactus ripped its barbs through his flimsy windbreaker. Shelly had hurried and called the landlord, who’d agreed to stop the worker, and no one had touched that cactus since.
Now every spring it bloomed as if it were some sort of simple-minded florist’s offering to God. The rest of the year it didn’t try to fool anyone. You knew, if you got close, it was going to rip you to pieces.
In Las Vegas, they said, you never saw the same person twice. And it was true, in its way. Not at the library, not at the gym, not the shopping mall. Even the people Shelly worked with at the hospital kept moving and rotating, coming and going, always keeping their distances so well that it felt, even if it wasn’t strictly true, that she was surrounded by strangers, new strangers every day. And the people in the apartments around hers never lasted more than a few seasons, were easily replaced by brand-new people completely foreign to her, who also left. Every summer, the heat scoured the streets clean of the past.
Only once in all those years did Shelly gasp and turn around, feeling she’d recognized someone. She’d been walking a sand trail through Death Valley in the shadow of the Funeral Mountains, and five girls were walking toward her, coming from the opposite direction. They were swinging their empty water bottles, and stupidly wearing flip-flops through the tough desert terrain, and little spaghetti strap tops under the blasting sun, Greek letters stenciled against the pastel cloth, bare shoulders turning red. It was ninety-five degrees out. (“But it’s a dry heat,” everyone in Las Vegas always joked, “like an oven”).
They will die out here, Shelly thought. Just by being silly, they will die.
She considered saying something, but as those girls passed, they didn’t even acknowledge her—except for one with shining black hair who flipped it over her shoulder and looked at Shelly without smiling.
That girl, in truth, looked nothing like Josie Reilly, except that she was a type. Still, it took all the restraint Shelly had to keep walking, not to stop and say something to this girl, to the whole group of them:
Something about the stupidity of thinking you were bigger than death. That you could walk in the valley of it without even bothering to bring enough water or wear hiking shoes.
But these girls would just turn around and walk right out, Shelly knew. They would survive it. They could, and they knew it, and, after all, that girl was not Josie. Like so many others who had passed through her life over the many years (she was, after all, sixty-three years old), Shelly would be haunted by Josie Reilly forever, and would never see her again.
Shelly had made up the couch in her apartment living room for herself so Ellen could have the bed, but of course Ellen would have none of the bed. “You slept on my couch,” she said. “And you put the fight back in me, Shelly.”
“I gave you a dead end to follow for the rest of your life,” Shelly said. It was something they’d talked about hundreds of times over the years—how much and how little difference Shelly’s bits of information had given Ellen. Had they been worth the trouble in the end, since they’d never brought her daughter back?
“No,” Ellen said. “It was the only thing anyone gave me. The only thing better would have been if you’d given me Denise.”
They talked about Denise, of course, as they so often did. Marveling that she’d have been thirty-five years old now, if she were alive.
“I don’t see her anymore,” Ellen said. “I still look for her, but I can’t imagine her now. She can’t be twenty years old to me anymore, but I don’t know who she would be if she were thirty-five.”
“She’d be like you,” Shelly said. “She’d be a mother by now. And a friend. A good one. The best.”
108
It didn’t matter how many times she wrote it on the board (lie, lay, laid), they always got it wrong.
The students at South Plains College thought Mira was a crazy lady anyway, or just plain misinformed, herself, on the basics of good grammar. She sometimes considered going all the way—writing letters to newspapers and politicians insisting that it was simply time to change the verb tenses. (I laid down last night. Tomorrow, since it’s Saturday, I plan to just be laying around all day. I lied on the couch until noon drinking Budweiser.) It would be so much easier to change the grammar than to continue trying to teach these kids to get it right.
She erased the board, and closed the classroom door behind her, headed for the parking lot, got in her car, and drove back to her trailer.
It was September, and the sky was blue and uncluttered by clouds, or anything else. In West Texas you really could see forever. You could have rolled a coin on the ground, and there would be nothing to stop the rolling for a thousand miles.
Mira tossed her bag on the couch, grabbed a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, sat down, and booted up the computer. As she’d hoped, there was an email message from Matty, and one just under it from Andy.
The usual sweet things:
Classes were great. They needed money. Matty was in love with a girl, and Andy was just breaking up with one, and that night they were having pizza in the cafeteria, not to worry. They’d be home in a couple of weekends.
She smiled as she opened the photo that Matty had emailed of himself with
his arm around the new love object. He was wearing sunglasses and a UT-AUSTIN T-shirt. He was taller, thinner, but there was no way to overlook his resemblance to his father. Somewhere, Mira suspected, she still had a picture like this one of her ex-husband in a T-shirt and sunglasses: Clark with shaggy dark hair, needing a shave, smiling crookedly, an arm tossed over Mira’s shoulder the way Matty had his arm tossed over the shoulder of this girl.
The girl was blond. A little chubby. Familiar-looking in the way of so many girls that age.
Or everyone, of every age, Mira thought.
That afternoon, as always, she’d strolled across the quiet campus from her office and to the library, raising a hand to Tom Trammer, who looked to her so much like Jeff Blackhawk (especially in the mornings, before her eyes were clearer and before he looked more haggard than he did later in the day, and older) that she almost called him by Jeff’s name as he passed.
And then she said hello to the dean, Ed Friedlander, a nice enough man, doing what he could at a low-budget community college to keep the faculty—a few with serious drinking problems, and the others with a variety of personality disorders—teaching their classes, and the students from killing one another. His resemblance to Dean Fleming was all in the age and the suit, she thought, but the sight of him never failed to unnerve Mira, start up the heart, fight or flight, although she always managed to conceal it, and to smile.
Clark was everywhere, too—although he was always the young husband and father who’d smiled so sadly at her in divorce court, and then, later, nodding solemnly on porch steps as he picked up or dropped off their sons. A depressed man, growing older, seeming to have been expecting something to come, now knowing it wasn’t going to.
He’d gotten married again. And that also hadn’t worked out. Last Mira had heard, he was in Dallas working in some kind of sports equipment shop. They had no reason to keep in touch now that the twins were old enough to drive themselves from one parent to the other.