“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said without a shred of sarcasm, and held her hands up as if he’d tried to slap her. She was one of those infuriating middle-aged Midwestern women who used her friendliness like a weapon. Already she’d complimented everything about the two of them before she’d bothered to take their orders—I love your coat, I love your sweater, I love your hair thing, I love your ring, I love your boots. Craig had stared at the menu, imagining his mother shooing this woman away: Thanks, we love you, too . . .
But Nicole engaged the waitress exuberantly, told her that the sweater was from the Gap, that Craig’s coat was from the Salvation Army (!), that the hair thing was just a scrunchie of her sister’s, that the boots were Uggs, and the ring—Craig had given her the ring.
Here, at least, Craig quit grimacing at his menu and looked up at the waitress looking at the ring on Nicole’s right hand. Nicole held it up to her like a queen waiting for it to be kissed.
“Wow,” the waitress said, taking Nicole’s little fingertips in her own, twisting her hand so she could see the ring in better light. “Wow. It’s sap, isn’t it? There’s . . . something in it.” She bent down to look at it closely.
“A little fruit fly,” Nicole said proudly. “It could be forty million years old.”
Craig had told her this.
His science teacher in sixth grade at Fredonia Middle had kept a little collection of things stuck in amber—a spider, a frog, some mosquitoes. He’d even had a piece of amber with what looked like a long black hair floating in it, and another with two sad little ants scrambling over each other to get out before they were trapped in the stuff forever. Craig had been horrified and thrilled by the idea that, as Mr. Barfield had explained it, they’d probably stumbled in there in the first place because they were attracted to the whole sticky mess. Imagine, he’d thought, having the evidence of your fuck-up preserved for millions of years in amber.
“It’s not sap,” Craig told the waitress. “It’s resin.”
The waitress nodded then as if that were the most interesting thing she’d ever heard in her life, left their table finally, tossed the piece of paper with their order at the cook, and then disappeared, later leaving their sandwiches under the red lamps on the counter between the kitchen and the restaurant for a good ten minutes. When she finally brought them over to the table, they were stone-cold.
“Why do you have to be so negative?” Nicole asked after the waitress was gone. “What difference does it make? If you were a Greek, you’d be doing something like this, and I’d understand.”
“Look, Nicole. Hell Week, whatever. Do what you have to do—but, like, don’t expect me not to be unhappy that I’m not going to see you for a week. I mean, if you were going to Spain or something, I’d get it, but sewing doilies in a basement?”
The tears that had been pricking at the inner corners of Nicole’s eyes ever since he’d waved the waitress away turned into the real thing. When they started to run pathetically down the side of her nose, one of them even spilling over her upper lip, Craig jumped up from his seat and came around to her side of the booth, and put his arms around her, and kissed it away.
“Never mind, never mind. I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” he said, kissing and kissing. “Do your damn doilies. Just come back to me. I can’t survive without you.” He took her face in his hands and looked at it.
Nicole inhaled a wavering, aborted laugh before she put her head on his shoulder and started to cry even harder:
“But you’re never going to understand. It’ll always be this thing between us. You’ll always be laughing at me. I just—”
“Are you saying you want to break up?” Craig asked, stiffening, trying not to shout it. He was painfully aware of the waitress hovering around behind him now, and knew she wasn’t going to go anywhere until she’d caught enough of this conversation to figure out what the problem was. He lowered his voice, and said, “So, you want to dump me for some frat asshole? Is that what this is about?” He started to pull away, and then Nicole reached out and grabbed the lapel of his corduroy jacket, bunched it up in her fist, the way a baby would, and it made him want to start sobbing, too, looking at her small soft hand clutching at his Salvation Army jacket. (She’d bought it for him. She and her sorority sisters had gone to the thrift shop to buy costumes for some carnival they were planning, and she’d seen it there. “I knew you’d look so cute in it! And it was your size!”)
“No, Craig. No. I want you, but I just wish—”
“I told you, Nicole, I’ll think about it. I can’t join this year anyway. Next year, okay? I’ll think about next year, okay?” She didn’t nod or say anything, just continued to clutch the jacket with her face against his shoulder. “Okay?”
She whimpered a little, and then she said, “No. You won’t. You’d hate it.”
Craig was about to try to deny it, but then she looked up at him and she had a little smile on her face—a wistful, regretful little smile like nothing he’d ever seen on her face before, maybe never before seen on anyone’s face.
She said it again, “You’d hate it,” and started to laugh. “I can just see you.” She was laughing really hard now, and he started to laugh, too, looking at her, looking at him, regarding him, and he realized what it was, that expression—that she was recognizing him, that she knew him for exactly what he was, and it amused her:
Despite herself, she liked what she saw.
She maybe loved what she saw.
He could see it in her eyes.
Had anyone ever looked at him that way?
Craig felt as if he were made of glass, that a note played now on a violin or a flute could shatter him into a thousand pieces. He was trembling, he realized, and he had her hair in his hands, and he was trying to keep himself from sobbing out loud, and he vowed in that moment, not for the first time, that whatever she wanted, whatever it took to keep her, for the rest of his life, for the rest of her life, he would do it.
A bitterly cold wind blew through their booth at that moment, and he instinctively turned to look at the door of the diner. Someone had come in—a silhouetted figure in the doorway, blurred in Craig’s teary eyes—and the figure stood in the threshold for a second or two before Craig, blinking, looking more closely, recognized him just as he turned quickly and walked back out the door.
Craig pulled away from Nicole, and nodded toward the door. “That was him,” he said.
“Who?”
“That guy. The EMT guy, Nicole. The fucking ambulance driver. He saw us, and he left.”
“What EMT guy?” Nicole asked, bringing her napkin to her eyes to wipe them. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen him, that guy, like five times at your sorority. I told you already. Remember? I told you that I keep seeing him around there. Who is he?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Craig. I don’t even know what EMT stands for.”
Craig didn’t bother to argue with her, or to tell her what EMT stood for. He watched the plate glass window to see if the guy would walk past it, but he must have gone the other way: To avoid the window? To avoid being seen by Craig?
Craig stood up, as if to follow, although he had no idea what he’d do if he caught up with the guy—and, anyway, Nicole took the sleeve of his jacket in her hand and tugged him back down to her, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed him so sweetly, and for so long, that even the waitress, who’d been watching them, must have felt embarrassed, and went away.
44
“Let me get the mail,” Perry said, trying to grab Craig’s elbow as he turned from the window to the door, but Craig was already gone before Perry could stop him.
They’d been watching from the window together, waiting. Below, the mailman was finally crossing the street, his face down against what must have been a pretty stiff wind (a bright end-of-October day, not a cloud in the sky, but the bare branches of the trees were being whipped around mercilessly, and the wind blowing through the ga
ps between the window frames and the glass panes felt frigid to Perry). The mailman disappeared from view for a few minutes, presumably standing in the foyer of their apartment house, sorting and distributing. Then they saw him emerge and start to walk across the grass to the apartment house next door, a bright red leaf stuck to his blue cap, scores of other leaves catching to his black boots as he trampled through them.
Perry stayed behind in the apartment and listened to the stairs make their familiar groaning and rattling sounds as Craig slammed down them in his sneakers on his way to the mailbox. He could even hear the missed beat of Craig skipping over the seventh step.
A week earlier, someone’s foot had punched through that one, and there was a hole in it now that you had to avoid if you didn’t want to end up knee-deep in the stairwell on your way up or down. No one in the building seemed to know who it was who’d gone through it first, but since then, one of the girls next door had twisted her ankle, and she was on crutches, so Perry had left the landlord a message about the problem. When there was no response to that, he left a note at the top and bottom of the stairs himself (“CAUTION, HOLE IN SEVENTH STEP”), and when the girl on crutches found out that Perry was the one who’d put up the sign, she hobbled over with some cookies she’d baked, to thank him for his concern.
The cookies had tasted like cardboard, but she was a pretty girl—bright red cheeks and dyed black hair cut in a kind of bowl shape around her head. If she’d told him her name, Perry had forgotten it. A couple days after Perry taped up the warning, someone had written on the bottom of it, “Signed, Rumpelstiltskin.”
Craig must have fished the mail out of their little metal box by now. Perry could hear him coming back up, taking the stairs two at a time. Maybe three at a time. He could hear what sounded like panting, and then Craig shoved the door open and stood there in the threshold holding another fluttering white postcard out to Perry in one hand, a handful of glossy pizza and sub sandwich flyers in the other.
“It’s her. It’s really her,” Craig said. “It’s another postcard from her.”
Perry took a step carefully toward him and took the postcard from Craig’s hand. It looked the same as the last one—one of those prestamped post office cards made of thin, pulpy paper. Perry looked at the address, reading Craig’s name there, and then he flipped it over.
He had to rub his eyes, and look again, and then rub his eyes again:
The handwriting.
Perry had been seeing that handwriting for years. Soft fat pencil on lined paper. Crayon signatures at the bottom of art projects. Invitations, exclamations pinned to lockers, notes he’d had to borrow, to copy, in Global Studies, in AP English, for classes he’d missed, and poems written out in this handwriting in a poetry workshop he’d taken with her in eleventh grade.
He rubbed his eyes again, but Perry would have recognized those loopy lowercase consonants anywhere, even if he didn’t know exactly the kind of poem she would have written to Craig on a postcard. Mr. Brenner had taught them about slant rhyme. He’d been especially harsh with Nicole (whose poems always rhymed: “What’s the point otherwise?!” she’d said) regarding her “moon/June predilections.”
She’d been a good student. She’d absorbed the lesson completely by the end of the quarter, and gone on to critique her classmates’ poems for exactly the same thing Mr. Brenner had said about hers.
I cannot tell you who I am now
I cannot say how sorry
You did not kill me, Craig, please know
My soul they cannot bury
“Jesus Christ,” Perry said, “Jesus Christ,” as he sank onto the couch, the postcard still in his hand. His heart was slamming against his ribs. He hadn’t been sure before, despite what he himself believed about Nicole and despite all Craig’s insistence. The last postcard had only said, I miss you. N. It could have been from anyone. It could have been a sick prank. Perry had said this to Craig, who’d seemed to take it in, but for the past two days, the way he’d been waiting for the mail, it was obvious he’d only been humoring Perry while waiting for another postcard from Nicole.
“Fuck,” Perry said, and he handed it back to Craig, and then he turned around, heart still slamming, and hands shaking. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Until now, he hadn’t believed anything, had he? He’d been unable to believe anything. He’d been on a search for something, but he hadn’t expected to find it.
Now, Perry’s hands were trembling, and he felt his throat all but close in a kind of panicked voicelessness when Craig said, as soberly as Craig had ever said anything, “She’s not dead, Perry. Or. She’s—she’s something.”
Perry looked up at him, and found himself both shocked and not even surprised to see what he saw:
Craig was happy.
Craig didn’t even seem confused.
Craig had a bright look on his face that Perry hadn’t seen there since before the accident. He looked, Perry thought, like the girls at Confirmation Camp right after the Final Acceptance of Christ into Our Hearts ceremony: shiny-eyed, full of faith, seeing beyond this world and its flimsy trappings. Ecstasy. That look was ecstasy.
He had to tell him. He had to show him the photograph. He had to tell Craig about Lucas, and Patrick Wright, and Professor Polson. Until this, it had seemed too crazy, too cruel. But now—now Craig had to know.
But first, Perry had to call Professor Polson. He had to ask her advice. He had to tell her about this.
“I have to go for a walk,” he said. “I have to clear my head. And I need to call someone. Give me your cell phone.”
“Sure,” Craig said. “Sure. Sure.” Nodding like a lunatic. Smiling like a little kid. He’d have given Perry anything at that moment. If they’d been standing on a rooftop, Craig could have flown right off of it. Not only had he been expiated from the worst crime imaginable—killing the person you love the most in the world—he’d also learned that the dead could come back to life. He handed his cell phone to Perry as he continued to cradle the flimsy postcard in his hands, the way he might an injured bird. He wandered out of the living room with it like a zombie, back to his room, seeming to be laughing and crying at the same time.
Perry didn’t bother to put on his coat. He just turned up the collar of his shirt against the wind and dialed Professor Polson’s phone number as soon as he was out of the apartment house.
Her office phone rang and rang, and finally he hung up before her voice mail clicked in. He’d have to call her at home. He didn’t want to, but he had to know what to do next. Whom else could he ask? Still, he hesitated. The last time he’d called, a couple of days before, Professor Polson’s husband had answered and said she was in the shower, and then hung up without saying good-bye, as if he were pissed that Perry had called.
“Hello?”
It was the husband again.
“Hello. This is Perry Edwards, Professor Polson’s—”
“Work-study,” the husband said. “As usual, she’s not available. I’ll tell her you called again, pal.”
He hung up with what sounded like the receiver slamming against a wall.
45
Mira hadn’t slept or eaten for a day and a half. For the first half hour, she tried to fake it for her class, but that eventually proved impossible. Every time she stood up from the desk with a piece of chalk and headed for the blackboard, the blackboard telescoped away from her. She wrote the same thing on it twice without realizing that she had:
Bachlabend Perchtennacht
Bachlebend Perchtennacht
She only noticed it when Karess Flanagan pointed out that she’d spelled it differently the second time. Then, Mira had turned around, and, indeed, there it was, misspelled the second time. She had no memory of having written it on the board the first time.
She was trying to conduct a class on the subject of Frau Holle-Percht, the German Death Demon, the “Hidden One.” It was usually one of her favorite classes to teach. The students had been assigned to read the translation o
f a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript from Tegemsee condemning the pagan practice of decorating houses in December to appease the Death Demon and the leaving of little cakes on the hearth for “Frau Holle and her seven lads.”
It was an epiphany for eighteen-year olds, making the connection between Santa Claus and the fear of death. There was always at least one student in every class who’d been afraid of Santa Claus as a child, and told a story of lying awake on Christmas Eve terrified.
But that day Mira got only as far as the custom of tossing little swaddled dolls into the darkness on December 24 (still practiced in a village in the Harz Mountains that Mira had visited her Fulbright year) to try to trick Frau Holle into believing she was being given the families’ actual “dead” babies, and she began to tear up. Where were her own fucking babies right now?
She’d come home from an Honors College curriculum committee meeting later than she’d said she would Tuesday night because there’d been an unexpected challenge to the syllabus for her proposed upper-level seminar on Death and the Cultural Landscape. The chair of the committee wanted to know why Mira had chosen to substitute “field study” for one of the two required theses, and Mira had found herself having to explain that the field study was a precursor to the thesis, that the field study would be the foundation upon which a thesis would be written, and that it would be impossible to accomplish both in a meaningful way in fifteen weeks if she had to assign two papers.
Even Dean Fleming, who’d urged her to propose the course in the first place, had seemed skeptical, and the meeting ended with nothing more than an agreement to revisit the proposal at the next meeting, although it also managed to run an hour over.
It was raining when Mira finally got out of Godwin Hall, and she had no umbrella. She was ruining her shoes, she knew—nice Italian leather pumps she’d bought on sale a few years before—but she couldn’t risk calling Clark for a ride. He’d have had to bring the twins out with him in the rain, and all the car seat stuff, and he’d specifically asked Mira to get home as early as she could because he wanted to go to a meeting of the Armchair Philosophers, a book group recommended by one of the mothers from the regular Espresso Royale play dates. This mother, too, had been on her way to a degree in philosophy (“The real thing,” Clark had said of her, “studying with Kurdak at Princeton”), which had been derailed by a baby. The group she’d talked Clark into joining sounded to Mira like exactly the kind of thing Clark would despise, but he seemed to want to go.
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