The Raising

by Laura Kasischke

  “How drunk are you?” Craig asked.

  “Just a”—she held her thumb and index finger an inch apart—“drunk,” and then she held her arms up to him like a little kid wanting to be picked up.

  “Josie,” Craig said. “I’m wearing a towel.”

  “Take off the towel!”

  “I think you’re more than a little drunk,” he said.

  “I flunked,” she said. “I know it. Didn’t even study.” She made the motion of erasing something on a blackboard in front of her. “Shupe.”

  “Probably you didn’t,” he said. “You probably did better than you think you did.” He had no idea if this was true or not, but what else was he going to say?

  She started moving toward him on her knees then, and he backed up a couple of steps, but then she got on her hands, too, and scrambled toward him, grabbing his ankles.

  “Shit, Josie,” Craig said, sort of dancing away from her, but she was holding on tight. “Cut it out. It tickles. Shit.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. It really did tickle. She was laughing, too, and spidering her way up his legs to his towel, and then she was standing with her whole clothed body pressed against his whole naked one, with her tongue in his mouth and his hair in her hands, and despite his reservations (honestly, he just wanted to find Lucas and get stoned), his dick was fully into it within half a second of the kiss, and then she had her hand on that and her mouth on his neck, and she was pulling him backward onto his bed.

  14

  Perry saw her coming out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand, and he ducked around the corner. The last person he wanted to see right now was Josie Reilly. The last time he’d seen her was in May, the end of the semester, at a memorial tree-planting ceremony for Nicole.

  An entire orchard of cherry trees paid for by Omega Theta Tau had been planted around the sorority in Nicole’s honor. A backhoe dug the holes, and then dropped the trees one by one into the soft earth. A crowd gathered to sing and pray all day, and then there was a candlelight vigil all night. There were eighteen trees, one for each of Nicole Werner’s years. Their branches were actually in bloom.

  (“Do you know how expensive it is to plant an orchard of almost full-grown trees in bloom?” he’d overheard one student at Godwin Hall say to another over soggy pancakes that morning. There were a few bad jokes made about cherries, and the whole virgin rumor, with regard to the Omega Theta Tau house in general, and Nicole in particular.)

  Somehow, in the crowd during the candlelight vigil, Josie had found him, snuggled up to him, and whispered dramatically, “She’s still with us, Perry. Can you feel it? She isn’t dead.”

  He’d backed away.

  “What’s with you?” she’d asked, offended, but he just shook his head, and she moved on to someone else. The candle some sorority girl had handed him in a waxed cup sputtered out. A few minutes later, when they started singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” he tossed the waxed cup into a trash can and headed back to Godwin Hall.

  Josie had hardly known Nicole, but you wouldn’t have known that from all the mileage she got out of having been the dead girl’s roommate and sorority sister for six months. She’d read a putrid poem at the memorial service, been interviewed for the newspaper, worn a tight T-shirt with Nicole’s photo on it and a black armband all through April and into May, and managed to be excused not only from finals but also from having to turn in her essay for Classical Sources of Modern Culture because she was organizing the petition to expel Craig Clements-Rabbitt from the university:

  “Drunk + Driver + Death = Murder.”

  She went to Houston, Perry learned from the school newspaper, to speak to the annual SADD convention “in memory of my best friend, who was murdered by a drunk driver.”

  To Perry, she apologized for whoever had splashed his and Craig’s door with red paint and plastered that sad senior portrait of Nicole at the center of it:

  “Nobody blames you for anything, Perry,” she’d said. “We all know you just had the bad luck of being his roommate.”

  “He’s not even here,” Perry said. “Why are people messing with my door?”

  “It’s symbolic. You have to understand that.”

  When it happened again, the university housing department arranged for Perry to finish the semester in a vacant room on the other side of the dorm.

  Now, glimpsing Josie Reilly, who was clipping purposefully out of Starbucks, Perry imagined she knew that Craig was back (it had been in the paper, after all), but he had no idea if she knew that Perry was living with him again, and didn’t want to find out. He was on the way back to their apartment from the bookstore, where he’d bought the book Professor Polson had assigned for them to read that week: The Body After Death. The cover was white, the letters black, and on the back there was a quote from Professor Polson herself, saying that this book was the definitive text on folklore and the funereal sciences. Except for a four-subject notebook, it was the only thing in his backpack, which slipped around loosely between his shoulder blades as he turned the corner at State Street and Liberty as quickly as he could, ducking around a bagel place before Josie could see him and maybe try to talk to him about Nicole, or Craig.

  By the time of the memorial service in April, Nicole had already been buried for two weeks. Four hundred people had crammed into Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe for the funeral, and another hundred had spilled out the front doors and into the parking lot, where a late March blizzard was doing its best to bury them inch by inch. Some of the women were wearing open-toed shoes. Some of the men wore only their suit coats. A few people had put up umbrellas to keep the snow from soaking them. One of those umbrellas was decorated with smiley faces, and Perry found it hard to take his eyes off of it as he and the other three pallbearers passed it carrying Nicole’s white coffin between them.

  It wasn’t so much the irony of the smiley faces as the banality. The simplicity.

  And it wasn’t just the umbrella. It was everything:

  The shiny coffin. The white, cheap-looking cloth that had been spread over it near the altar, and Nicole’s smiling senior portrait propped up on the lid. The coffin, of course, was closed. As the paper had reported over and over, Nicole had been identified only by the jewelry and clothes she’d been wearing because there was nothing left about her that was identifiable as her.

  Not that perfect smile. Not that blond ponytail. Not those pink cheeks.

  The last time Perry had seen her was two nights before the accident, when she’d passed him on the sidewalk on Campus Ave. She’d been holding on to some older guy’s arm, wobbling in her high heels back to his frat, Perry supposed, hair soaking wet and plastered to her face, although it was a completely clear night and hadn’t, in fact, rained or snowed for days. She had a red plastic cup in her hand.

  Perry hadn’t recognized her at first. She could have been any drunk sorority girl. When finally he did recognize her, he was shocked by how drunk she looked. The guy who was holding her up seemed both very pleased with himself and stone-cold sober.

  Perry stopped in front of the two of them and said, “Nicole. Are you okay?”

  It seemed to take her several seconds to realize she’d been spoken to, and then even longer for her eyes to focus on him. Finally, she hiccupped a little and said, “Oh, hi, Perry.”

  “You want me to walk you back to the dorm?” he asked. “You’re looking like you need some help.”

  “Get lost, man,” her frat guy said. “We’re doing just fine here.”

  Nicole leaned into the guy’s arm, tripped on the heel of her shoe, giggling, and the guy caught her, propped her up on his shoulder again. She raised up her red plastic cup to Perry. “No, I’m doing great. But thanks for being such a Boy Scout,” she said, and the frat guy snorted, and Nicole stumbled away with him.

  Perry had turned and watched them go, feeling uneasy, but what could he do?

  At her funeral, in the photograph on her coffin, Nicole was wearing the dress Perry
remembered from the Senior Class Awards Ceremony: pale blue with ruffles down the front. As she’d accepted the Ramsey Luke Scholarship with a little curtsy, that dress had shimmered under the gym lights. In the front pew of Trinity Lutheran Church in Bad Axe, as the funeral was coming to an end with weeping and prayers and organ music and the blowing of noses, Perry was thinking about that little curtsy—how it had infuriated him—and then Pastor Heine plucked the photo off the coffin and nodded at the pallbearers to come forward, to take Nicole Werner in her coffin out to the hearse that was waiting in the parking lot.

  It was amazingly heavy, that coffin, even with the four of them balancing the weight of it between them. Perry was on the right side, at her head. As they passed down the aisle of the church, he stared in a straight line into the distance, having to work especially hard not to look at Nicole’s sisters, who were tossed together in the first pew in a dark lacy heap of blond grief, or to glance in the direction of his own mother, although he could feel her red eyes on the side of his face.

  Then they were stepping out of the church and into that cold rain beyond the doors, and the ushers motioned for the mourners to move off the church steps in order to clear a path to the hearse. The crowd parted for the pallbearers and the coffin, and that’s when Perry saw the umbrella with the smiley faces. Maybe the other pallbearers saw it, too. They all hesitated at the same time at the top of the stairs, preparing for the precarious journey down. Nicole’s uncle—in the front, across the coffin from Perry—seemed to be having trouble bearing the weight and weeping uncontrollably at the same time, but they took the stairs one at a time, slowly, until, on the last one, Tony Werner, Nicole’s cousin and the guy who’d once punched Perry in the stomach for refusing to give him a ball on the playground, stumbled. Some salt had been thrown on the snow, but it had only made the cement slushier, more dangerous.

  Nothing ridiculous happened, thank God. The other three pallbearers compensated by leaning backward, and Tony managed to regain his footing and get right back in sync with the others within a few seconds, and they crossed the parking lot and guided the coffin into the back of the hearse without further incident. Still, in those seconds, Perry had felt Nicole’s weight shift to his shoulder before settling down between them all again—and, now, he thought of that weight often.

  On the other side of Bagels and Bites, he waited until he was sure Josie would be down the block, across the street, and then he turned around and headed back in the direction of his and Craig’s apartment.

  15

  The night Shelly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.

  Et tu, Brute?

  It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Shelly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.

  Her arms and back ached. She’d overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn’t overdo it, and then she’d start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.

  Why?

  She wasn’t trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.

  She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.

  Often, she did.

  Shelly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman made of muscle. “Whoa,” some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. “You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?”

  Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”

  She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”

  Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.

  Lesbian.

  She didn’t do men.

  She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she’d ever make.

  Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.

  And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.

  “Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”

  No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.

  Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.

  She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.

  He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.

  Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.

  Gone.

  16

  Nicole Werner was standing outside the library shivering. She had a book pressed to her chest. She was wearing a sleeveless white shirt over a pair of khaki shorts. It was the last week in October, but it had been a weirdly hot, hazy day—the sky pu
rple and fuzzy-looking behind the changed leaves—and although the sun had seemed far away, it had still managed to turn Craig and Perry’s dorm room into a sauna by two o’clock in the afternoon. They had a west-facing window.

  Because it had seemed so much like summer, Craig, too, had left Godwin that afternoon in shorts and a T-shirt, but he’d been back to his room since then and gotten his jacket, which he was glad about, because as soon as the sun set, it felt like late autumn again. Obviously, Nicole Werner hadn’t been out of the library since the temperature had dropped.

  “Hey, Nicole. What are you doing?” Craig asked when he reached her at the top of the steps. He’d already told Lucas to get lost.

  (“Aw, man,” Lucas had said as Craig veered away from him, a clear diagonal cut across the Commons toward the column Nicole was leaning against. “You gonna dump me for that bitch?”)

  Nicole looked up, and the light from inside the library fell on her flossy hair, which was pulled back in the usual ponytail but also looked mussed, as if she’d been rolling around in a stack of hay, or studying philosophy all night. Midterms had been over since the week before. Could she already be cramming for something else?

  “I was waiting for Josie,” she said.

  “Oh,” Craig said, trying not to display any particular reaction to the name Josie, but he couldn’t help taking a quick look over both shoulders to make sure she wasn’t there. “Here,” he said to Nicole. He took off his jean jacket and handed it to her. He would have preferred to step around and drape it over her shoulders (a gesture he felt certain he must have seen made by men in movies, since it wasn’t the kind of thing his father would have done for his mother), but he found himself unable to step into the circle of light in which Nicole Werner stood.