Now he was back, and wondering if she’d been right.
He shouldn’t be here.
They’d let him back in, but that didn’t mean he belonged here.
Even Dr. Truby had seemed worried, and Dr. Truby had been, from the beginning, all about self-empowerment and complete recovery.
“You may . . . begin . . . to have frightening recall,” he’d said. “Please phone me if you do.”
The last time Craig had met with the shrink it was a hundred degrees outside and the air-conditioning in the office was blowing in the smell of an overheated refrigerator. He knew Dr. Truby was about to ask him, for the ten millionth time, the same question:
“Tell me, Craig, anything you can recall at this time about the accident.”
Craig had looked down at his lap, as he always did, and then rubbed his eyes where he saw, against his lids, a woman’s face.
Unfamiliar.
It was round as a moon. She was speaking to him in a foreign language, but somehow he understood what she was saying:
Don’t move the girl.
Craig looked up at Dr. Truby. He said, “I think there was a lady there.”
Dr. Truby nodded. His head was shaved, and so perfectly shaped it seemed to have been made with the idea of shaving it in mind.
“And this lady . . . ?” Dr. Truby moved his hand through the air, churning it in his own direction.
Craig thought for a minute, and then said, “She told me not to move Nicole.”
“And then you . . . ?” Again, the paddling. Pulling him in.
Craig had looked down at Dr. Truby’s shoes. Slippers? Loafers. They looked soft and suede, not like something you could wear to walk on pavement.
“And then . . . ?”
But Craig had no words for what came after that.
After that, there were hands on him. A blow to the stomach. His head and ears were ringing. And water. Was he being baptized? There was a needle in his arm. A man in a blue uniform shouting at some flashing lights. Someone kicked him hard in the ass, and then he was stumbling. And all the time, he was trying to ask about Nicole, but the words came out so garbled he knew no one could understand him. Someone wanted to know if Craig knew his own name, and where he was, but when Craig tried to form, in his mouth, the shape of the words of her name, someone said, in a soothing voice, “You shouldn’t think about that now. You should rest. Nicole is dead.”
“I don’t know,” Craig had said, and Dr. Truby, who must have been waiting for a long time for Craig to say more than this, leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.
9
Mira always started the semester with the story of Peter Plogojowitz:
In 1725, in the village of Kisilova, a peasant by the name of Peter Plogojowitz died of natural causes and was buried. Within a week, nine other villagers died, and Peter Plogojowitz appeared to his wife demanding his shoes. It was widely assumed that the dead man was “walking,” and that he was the cause of the other deaths, so his grave was dug up and the corpse examined.
Except for his nose having fallen away, Peter looked as good as new in his grave. His hair and beard and nails had grown. His skin had peeled away, and what looked like new, pink skin had grown beneath it. There was fresh blood in his mouth. The crowd that had gathered at the grave became enraged. A stake was driven through the peasant’s heart, whereupon he shouted, bled from the ears and mouth, and acquired an erection. After that, the corpse was burned and the ashes scattered.
Peter Plogojowitz walked no more.
Several of the girls in the back row covered their mouths. One, a dark-haired beauty with nearly translucent skin, covered her whole face. A couple of boys began to laugh nervously, and some others chuckled loudly. A few of the more serious students were taking notes. Perry Edwards, the only student whose name Mira knew already, since she’d had to sign his override form, was nodding, looking at her so fixedly she felt as if he were looking through her.
“So,” Mira said. She clapped her hands together, turned to the blackboard, and picked up a piece of chalk. Holding it up, she said to the class, “What do we learn from this anecdote about the Serbian burial practices and superstitions of the eighteenth century?”
She wrote the number one on the board, a pale wisp of white dust rising from it.
Usually, no one had a word to say at this point. Perry Edwards had his hand raised.
“Yes?” she said, nodding at him to speak.
“Apparently they believed that a dead person could get out of his grave and back into it.”
Mira nodded. Next to the number one, she wrote, The dead can escape and reenter their graves.
“Two?” she asked.
There was a moment of polite silence before, again, Perry Edwards raised his hand.
“The dead who can do this don’t decay?” he asked.
Mira wrote on the board: 2. The “walking dead” do not decay as expected.
“And they cause other deaths,” Perry said without raising his hand this time. As Mira was writing this down, he continued. “They drink blood? They can be killed a second time, more completely?”
Mira wrote these down as well, and then: 6. These creatures are sexual in nature.
As Mira knew they would, the girls in the back with their hands over their mouths giggled, and the boys who’d chuckled before chuckled again. But Perry Edwards just held her gaze so long that, finally, Mira was the one who had to look away.
10
Craig tried hard not to stare at Nicole Werner while she studied, but the way her hair slipped over her face when she cast her eyes down on her History of the English Language textbook, and the way the highlighter in her right hand flashed over the pages, and even the way her foot seemed to tap out some rhythm for four or five seconds, then stop, was so much more riveting than the book he was reading that he couldn’t look away.
If she knew he was watching her, she was pretending she didn’t.
Perry had found a study room for them in the basement of Godwin Hall—an old lounge tucked away behind a storage room, with dust-covered chairs and maroon carpeting. There was a brass plaque on the door that read, THE ALICE MEYERS MEMORIAL STUDENT STUDY ROOM, and although it looked like no one had used the room for years for anything but furtive sex (empty condom wrappers were stuffed into a glass vase that was otherwise full of plastic flowers), it was really a very comfortable room.
There were no light bulbs in any of the lamps, so they’d brought down their own desk lamps from their dorm rooms and set them up on the end tables. The dim, focused light was intense and relaxing at the same time. Perry sat at a table in the corner, one elbow on each side of an open book. Nicole was curled up in a cushioned chair with a battered ottoman. Her roommate, Josie Reilly, sat on the floor with her back to the wall, legs folded in the lotus position as if her body were made of clay. Craig lay on the couch, watching Nicole over the edge of his book as she flipped a page and bit her lower lip.
He had thought a study group would entail talking. Quizzing. The sharing of test-taking tips. Maybe flash cards. He’d never been in a study group before so had no way of knowing that it meant, simply, a circle of companionable silence, concentration—except for the occasional yawn, the clearing of a throat, Nicole’s dainty sneeze, Josie’s distracted “Bless you.” It crossed Craig’s mind, when the silence grew so thick that you could have reached into the air and grabbed a handful of it, to crack a joke. But he didn’t know what the joke would be. It would have to be incredibly funny to warrant the interruption, and he wasn’t really that funny unless there was something to be made fun of, and nothing here seemed stupid enough to make the kind of joke Craig usually got a good laugh out of—the kind of comment that got him in trouble in high school or had Scar snorting chocolate milk out of his nose at the dinner table.
Now and then, their desk lamps flickered. (Maybe one of the washing machines in the laundry room next to the lounge had started its spin cycle and sucked up all th
e electricity in the basement for a minute.) Briefly, Nicole looked up to the ceiling, and then back down. She highlighted something else on the page she was reading, and then she took the pencil out of the place in her hair where she’d tucked it and wrote something quickly in the margin.
“You make me sick!”
Randa Matheson had screamed that at him in her parents’ bedroom one afternoon after school. She was naked, standing at the edge of the bed, screaming down at Craig, who was lying on his back with a hard-on, wondering, What? What? Where did this come from?
“Huh?” he finally managed to ask.
“I said,” Randa shouted, “that you make me sick.” She enunciated each word as if she were shouting to a foreigner, a retard. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her lips, bloated and red from all the kissing they’d been doing, made her look exactly like her mother, whose face was well known to anyone who watched reruns of a very stupid sitcom from the late seventies.
“What? What did I do?”
“Just forget it,” Randa snapped, pulling her thong up over her narrow hips, hiding her perfectly trimmed pussy, which made his hard-on throb even harder, before she turned and ran from the room, holding her jeans and her shirt against her breasts. Behind her, the door slammed so loudly Craig flinched and closed his eyes, thinking for a split second that maybe he’d been shot.
After a while, he got dressed and let himself out.
The Mathesons’ house was immaculate, and enormous, and he got lost on his way out, finding himself in some kind of sunroom with no door. Randa herself was nowhere to be seen.
For months afterward Craig wondered what he had done, although it didn’t really occur to him to call Randa or to stop her in the hallway and ask. The day after the “incident,” his mother pulled her car up next to Randa’s empty Jeep in the parking lot of the Trading Post. Craig slumped down in the passenger seat. “What’s the matter with you?” his mother asked. Luckily, she realized then that she’d forgotten her purse, so they didn’t stay.
But it was impossible not to cross Randa’s path. In school. At parties. At the video store. At first, Craig tried not to look directly at her, hoping to avoid her eyes, but after a while it became clear that she was treating him as if he were invisible, so it wouldn’t have mattered what he did anyway. In the stairwell one day between classes, just the two of them passed each other (she was going up, he was going down) and, stupidly, he sputtered out, “Hey.”
She looked right at him, seeming to register nothing. Not the vaguest hint of an expression crossed her face. She was looking through his head, seeing nothing but the wall behind it.
He tried, now and then, to think about what could have happened, what he’d done or failed to do.
They’d been kissing, he was clear on that, and the shirts had come off, and then the jeans—around their thighs at first, and then around their ankles, and then on the floor—and then he’d eased that thong down her silky legs while she ran her fingers over one of his eyebrows. He’d stood up and pulled his own underwear off, and she’d sort of propped herself up to look at him, and asked, “Do you like me?”
Craig was fairly certain that his answer to the question had been yes (why wouldn’t it have been?), but the question was followed by a long, fast series of other questions, and he was less sure of what his answers to those had been.
Do you think Michelle has better tits, who’s the skinniest girl you ever had sex with, have you ever had sex with Melody, when did you first notice me, is Tess the one you really want, are you using me to get to her, did you just come over here this afternoon because you were hoping you were going to have sex with me?
Craig had gotten back into bed beside her and lay there with his throbbing hard-on, until finally he interrupted her, and said, “Are we going to fuck or what?” And that’s when she’d leapt out of bed and screamed at him.
Craig had hardly been within a few feet of a girl since that day with Randa. The whole summer after graduation had passed without a flirtation, let alone a kiss.
Now he closed his eyes and let the image of Nicole Werner—only two feet away from him—linger on his lids for a minute. He tried to picture her in Fredonia, carrying on a conversation with someone’s actress turned mother or millionaire father strutting around in a suit with nowhere to go but the Trading Post.
No.
He could not picture Nicole Werner anywhere he’d ever been before this minute.
Nicole Werner belonged here, now, in the lounge of Godwin Honors College.
Virgin valedictorian, daughter of the Dumplings’s owners.
Probably that gold chain around her neck held a crucifix dangling somewhere down between her perfect, untouched breasts, in the powder-scented shadows of her plain cotton bra and flowery blouse. At night, she probably said prayers and probably cuddled up to her stuffed monkey. Maybe back in eleventh grade she’d let some asshole grope her ass and stick his tongue in her mouth, but she’d never sauntered out of her parents’ hot tub stark raving nude, stoked up on Ecstasy, and invited every guy from Fredonia High at the party to stick his dick in her—a not-uncommon event back home.
Nicole Werner had never even been to a party like that. She’d never heard of a party like that. They did not, Craig felt certain, have parties like that in Bad Axe.
She sneezed again—a dainty sneeze, all consonants and wheee!—and Craig opened his eyes.
She was looking back at him with a tissue held to her nose.
I’m sorry, she mouthed.
God bless you, he mouthed back.
11
Shelly went over it again every morning in her mind, and every night before she went to bed. She thought about it as she drove to work and as she sat behind her desk. When the telephone rang, the sound sometimes startled her. She forgot she was in her office, that she had a phone on her desk that might ring.
First, she’d remember the car, solidifying her own description of it in her mind:
Dark colored. Two door.
Then, the familiar road:
A semirural highway. Two lanes, north and south, just on the outskirts of town. She’d driven that road a million times before, and had driven it a hundred times since.
That time, she’d been listening to a country station—a guilty pleasure. (If anyone she worked with at the Chamber Music Society knew her secret, she might not actually be fired, but she’d be chastised so relentlessly she’d eventually have to quit. Sure, it was a free country, but not when it came to certain aesthetic preferences or political opinions and you happened to work at the Chamber Music Society at the university.) One of her favorite country stars was singing about how great it was to live in the U.S.A., and Shelly was singing along.
She remembered the yellow line down the middle of the road.
She remembered noting the small, dark-colored car that was just far enough ahead of her that she didn’t need to pay much attention to it. It wasn’t going fast. There were no other cars on the road.
As she sang the words to the country song along with the radio, she realized for the first time (although she’d heard the song a hundred times) that the subtext of it was that if you didn’t like it in the U.S.A., you should leave.
Personally, Shelly Lockes more or less agreed. Her big brother had been killed in Vietnam. Her parents had never gotten over it and had died young of the kind of diseases the grief-stricken die of: heart attack for her father, stomach cancer for her mother.
Still, Shelly was wondering to herself even as she sang the catchy lyrics at the top of her lungs, if you did decide to leave the U.S.A., where would you go? If you were able to think of a country that appealed to you more, would they be willing to let you in? What if, afterward, you wanted to come back?
Then the red lights of the car ahead of her swerved, and blinked, and seemed to dance in the air for a few wild seconds. And then they vanished.
How many hundreds of hours had she logged on Google by now, searching for information on the accident? The gi
rl. The boy. The “investigation,” which seemed to have ended before it ever began.
But every hit Shelly came across that wasn’t the local paper’s colorful misinformation had something to do with the cherry trees in the memorial orchard at the dead girl’s sorority, or quoted sappy things her sorority sisters had to say about her purity. Shelly plugged in her own name, and found nothing. She plugged in the date and accident and, on a whim, the truth. Nothing. She plugged in the truth and the name of Nicole Werner’s sorority, and came up with one surprising detail about a music school student, a violinist named Denise Graham, who’d disappeared in the spring, right around the time of the accident—and many of the same sorority sisters who were quoted as saying that Nicole was “the sweetest girl who ever lived” said of the disappeared violinist, “She was really aloof and strange. No one ever got to know her.”
It almost seemed staged, this juxtaposition, as if to prove that Nicole had, indeed, been an angel in the guise of a sorority girl—the proof being that this other one’s life was of such little concern to anyone. If she’d ever been located, there was nothing about it on the Internet that Shelly could find.
“Shelly?”
Josie was standing in the threshold, wearing her usual surprised expression. It had taken Shelly three months of working with this girl before she realized that Josie wasn’t actually surprised by anything, ever. That the expression was some kind of amusement—perhaps at someone else’s expense. Perhaps Shelly’s.
“Yes?”
“Would it be okay with you if I went down to Starbucks? Espresso fix? I could get you something?”
“That’s fine. Go ahead. But I don’t need anything.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
After Josie had clipped away in her little hard-soled shoes, Shelly went back to the file she’d opened on her computer—numbers surging electrically, shimmering, seeming for the moment to be unrecognizable as anything but shapes and dots. She rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, and after she thought it had been long enough for Josie to get down the stairs and out to the street, she looked out the window, found Josie among the hundreds of other students passing (between classes) on the sidewalk, and then watched her sway along the sidewalk with her hands tucked into the pockets of her cashmere hoodie, threading her elegant way toward Starbucks.