She stopped before saying “killed him,” but they both knew it was what she was going to say. They’d talked for hours. Never once had she called what had happened to her an “accident,” but the one time she’d spoken the words killed him aloud, she’d had to run from the room to the bathroom, where Craig had heard the water running in the sink for a long time.
“So it was easy to think that every guy about that age, blond, skinny, was him. And every time I saw a guy on a bike. Even still.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Craig reached over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“I didn’t really think it was him,” she went on. “I didn’t think he was haunting me or anything, but it was like what you described tonight. It would just happen. I’d think I’d seen him, and suddenly everything would be different. Like, the whole world. My whole life. In that second. Instead of being horrified, I was happy, and the universe was suddenly operating with these completely different laws, and—”
Craig said, “I know.”
“And all the consequences, they were just nothing. It was like, for those two seconds, I was free, and—”
“I know,” Craig said. He was laughing now, despite himself, but she was shaking her head.
She said, “Except that I’d be wrong. It wasn’t him.”
Craig nodded. He took a sip of the tea. It was minty, green. It tasted to him like something a witch might have come up with to cure a broken heart or a bad case of hives. It tasted like a supernatural garden. He had always hated the herbal teas his mother tried to convince him to drink, but he loved this tea.
He inhaled, looked up from the mug, and said, “Except, Debbie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but this is different. I saw her. I truly saw her. This was Nicole.”
Deb gave him a sad little smile. Not happy, but not surprised.
“I’m going to go back there tonight,” he said. “If I have to sit outside the OTT house for five years, I’m going to talk to her. I’m going to ask her what the hell—”
Then, Perry opened the door, and Craig stood up, went to him, took him by the shoulders, and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, man. Something huge.”
“Yeah,” Perry said, sounding weary. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”
101
“Hey, Perry.”
He could feel it, just like in the clichés, his heart sinking, his heart leaping. Was he ever as aware of that muscle at the center of his body as he was when Nicole Werner stood in front of him?
Now he could feel all four chambers, and the blood traveling in and out of them, and the valves squeezing open and shut.
She was wearing a grungy sweatshirt tonight, like that night he’d found her on the front steps of Godwin Hall feeling homesick, getting ready to cry. Now her hair was in a messy ponytail. Bits of it hadn’t been pulled back and gathered with the rest, and they fell around her face—but not artfully, not the way they would if she had, as he sometimes sensed she must have, spent hours at the mirror loosening just the most golden strands.
She wasn’t wearing her usual pearl earrings, either, and the tiny empty holes in her earlobes looked pretty, he thought, and strange. He looked at them.
Pierced ears: one of the hundreds of the odd customs of girls. He remembered asking Mary if it had hurt, getting her ears pierced, and how she’d rolled her eyes back, fluttered her eyelashes, and said, “Oh, my God, Perry. I can’t even tell you how much it hurt.”
“Can I come in?”
“Why?”
She shrugged.
“Okay,” he said, “come in,” and stepped out of the way. He turned, and sat down at his desk, and sighed. She sat across from him at the edge of Craig’s bed.
“What’s the point of this?” he asked her without looking at her. “Why are we doing this?”
She was silent so long he finally turned around. She was staring at the floor, but he could see that she was smiling.
“Are you sick or something, Nicole?”
She looked up at him then, and seemed to tuck the smile away so he couldn’t see it. She said, “You mean, like, mentally ill or something?”
Perry shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe. Like mentally ill.”
“Or, do you mean like evil?”
“Okay,” he said. “That sounds good, Nicole. Let’s say evil.”
The anger in his voice seemed to make her flinch, and he was immediately sorry, but it was too late to take it back.
She stood up. She took a step toward him. She said, “What about you? Are you? Are you mentally ill, or evil?”
Perry turned his back to her again and put his elbows on his desk, put his head in his hands. As he’d known she would, she came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders.
He could feel the cool, smooth fingers near his neck.
And his heart—that pleasurable pain, all anticipation and dread.
When Mary had forced him into such places, he’d seen those girls at the mall (what was that store called? Claire’s?) having those little pistols held to their earlobes, flinching and crying out, and the stinging tears in their eyes, the smiles on their faces.
He felt her breath on his neck just before he felt her kiss, and when he stood and turned to her, for just a second he thought he saw what it was—in her eyes, in her face. It almost knocked the breath out of him.
He remembered (or was he imagining it?) turning once in the hallway at Bad Axe High. Mary’d had her arm slipped between his elbow and his side, and she was pulling him toward her, but he’d seen a shadow behind them, and for some reason it had made him turn, and he saw Nicole there, holding an armful of books in her arms.
She was just standing there, watching them with what looked like an expression of complete grief on her face, as if she were witnessing her own death, or the death of something she’d loved all her life.
He’d nodded to her, and the expression was instantly gone, replaced with that pretty little smile. Perry had been watching those expressions pass over her face like the moon’s phases for as long as he could remember.
And then she’d turned and walked in the opposite direction, and he realized that Mary had spun around to look at her, too. She huffed. She tugged Perry’s arm closer and leaned over to whisper to him, “That girl’s in love with you. She always has been.”
102
Deb said, “This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard, you guys. You can’t go sneaking into a sorority looking for a dead girl. You already know they’ve got an EMT living there. Who knows what else? I mean, if they’re hiding dead girls there, there’s got to be, like, a rent-a-cop there, too. There’s going to be weapons and alarms and—”
“Yeah,” Perry said. “I heard somebody crack a rifle on the porch the other night.”
Craig looked at him, but Perry didn’t say anything more.
“You mean you’ve gone sneaking around there in the dark before?” Deb asked.
Perry didn’t answer. He was sitting on the edge of the couch beside her, staring into his hands. Craig’s heart was beating so hard he was afraid to sit back down. He paced back and forth in front of Perry and Deb, and felt that if he sat back down on the couch, his heart might actually explode from the pressure of trying to slow it down.
“Something’s going on here,” Perry said, more to himself than to either of them.
“We’ve got to go to the house,” Craig said. “We’ve got to go to the house.”
“You guys are crazy!” Deb said. She leapt up and grabbed Craig’s arm. “She’s not there! She’s not in Bad Axe! She’s not on this earth because she’s dead!”
“She’s not dead,” Perry said with complete calm. “I know. She’s not dead. I saw her in Bad Axe.”
“No. She’s here,” Craig said. “You gotta trust me, man. I saw her, too. She’s—”
“Let’s go, then,” Perry said, and stood up, and Craig did not wait even the length of a heartbeat before grabbing his coat.
“Jesus Christ,” De
b said, and sat back down, defeated. “Please, just—”
Craig tried to turn and smile at her apologetically—she was such a sweet girl—but Perry was pulling him out the door.
The town, the streets, the lawns, the roofs: it was like a moonscape. As if the thing hanging over them in the now-clear sky had projected its surface onto the earth. No one was outside but the two of them, and the snow had swallowed up all the subtleties, all the edges, all the sounds. The branches of the trees looked heavy, but not exactly burdened, with all the snow with which they were loaded down. They appeared renewed, rejuvenated, by their white cloaks. The shadows they cast were smooth and very still on the ground.
Neither Craig nor Perry said a word until they came around the corner of Greek Row and saw it there on the hill:
Not a single light was on in the Omega Theta Tau house. It seemed to swallow up the light of the snow and the moon, casting no shadow, looking, instead, like a shadow of itself. Something scissored out of the air. A house made of outer space, of silhouette, of time past. They stopped walking and stood looking up at it, and Craig said, “You remember the first time we were here?”
Perry looked over at him, and Craig could see that he didn’t.
“Remember? We were here with Lucas? Lucas and I were drunk and screaming and shit, and you were all pissed?”
“No,” Perry said. “But that sounds like the way it would have been.”
Craig meant to laugh, but it came out sounding like a sob. “I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole for a friend, Perry,” he said, and Perry just looked at him, shook his head.
“You’re not,” Perry said. “You never really were. Let’s go.”
Craig and Perry walked on the side of the street opposite to the house, then crossed and trudged uphill along the tree line between the frat next door at the sorority’s rear entrance. Craig walked ahead of Perry because he knew the way. He’d been at this back door before, tossed out of it.
Once or twice Craig turned to look at Perry, and saw that his own footprints in the deep snow seemed to be making a ghostly path for Perry to follow. Perry wasn’t looking up at Craig, though. He was staring straight ahead, at the house beyond them. Still no lights. Maybe only a tiny glow from one room. Maybe the face of an electric clock, an iPod glowing in its dock, a sleeping computer’s screen saver light pulsing.
Craig reached the door and turned the knob, not really expecting anything—or maybe expecting the lights to flash on and sirens and alarms to begin wailing.
The knob turned easily in his hand, and the door opened silently toward him.
God, he thought. All that trouble they went to when they had parties—the bouncers, the girls stationed at every entrance—and now, in the middle of the night, a houseful of beautiful dreamers, and the door was unlocked, like an invitation.
The darkness inside was total. How stupid, he thought, not even to bring a flashlight—and then a bright zero of light shone on the kitchen floor, and he gasped before he realized that it was Perry. Perry had a flashlight. Of course. Eagle Scout. Craig turned, smiled, gave him a thumbs-up, but Perry just walked past him into the OTT kitchen.
It smelled like cookies to Craig. The kind his mother used to bake before she went back to work, sort of, and quit baking. Vanilla, he guessed. Maybe some kind of spice. Nutmeg?
Perry moved the flashlight around on the counters, scanning, and Craig caught glimpses of white china behind glass cupboards—institutional, heavy-looking cups and plates. He could imagine the heft of those. The sound of silverware on the hard, shiny surfaces in a roomful of girls eating salads or noodles or whatever skinny, pretty girls ate when they had meals together. He pictured Nicole—not Nicole as he’d known her then, but this new dark-haired Nicole of now—at the heavy wooden table in the center of the room, sitting down to dinner with her sisters. As Perry’s flashlight skimmed over the clean, bare surface of that table, Craig imagined her bright-white empty plate. Would Nicole, now, need to eat? And if she ate, what would she eat? Snow? Petals? The breath of her sisters?
He looked up then. He must have stared at the kitchen table too long because now Perry was gone, already slipped through a doorway and into a dark room. Somehow he’d gotten far enough ahead that Craig could see only the distant zero of the flashlight against the wooden railing of the stairway, and hear the first few stairs make a muffled groaning under Perry’s steps before he saw something else there on the stairs ahead of him.
Perry must have seen it, too.
He stopped climbing.
The flashlight froze on it.
Something so pale and lacy it seemed to have been created by the light of the flashlight itself—like something crocheted out of a bit of light there on the air. A nightie sewing itself in complicated patterns around a pale form. The pale form of a dark-haired ghost on the stairway.
A ghost holding something trembling into the beam of light. Holding it up, pointing it. Saying something Craig couldn’t hear. A whisper. And then the explosion.
And then the only thing Craig could see was the beam of the flashlight as it bumped down the stairs to the landing, where it blinked out just before all the lights in the house came on at once and Craig could see that Perry was there on the floor in a spreading puddle of his own blood, and the girl with the gun was screaming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, I shot him, I shot him, I killed the burglar!” as a hundred other girls swarmed down the stairs and through the house and all around Craig in their white nightgowns crying and calling to each other as if they didn’t even see him, as if they didn’t even notice that Craig was there.
103
Jeff Blackhawk was asleep on her couch when Mira got back to the apartment. His socks were off, tossed on her floor. He had his jacket pulled over him as a blanket. She passed him without stopping on the way to the twins, who were just where she’d hoped they would be: in their cribs, asleep. Matty had his cow down at the bottom of the crib, by his feet. Andy’s rested against his cheek. She kissed their heads, breathed in the sweet sweaty scent of them. She closed their door softly behind her.
In the hallway, she hesitated, looking toward the couch. Should she wake him? Let him know she was back and he could go home?
But no one should be driving in this storm anyway, she thought. And, surely, if her opening the door, crossing the room, and clearing her throat hadn’t woken him up, he needed his sleep.
She would not, she decided, wake him.
She changed into a T-shirt of Clark’s and, after brushing her teeth quickly, got into bed.
“Jesus, Jeff,” Mira said to him in the morning. Her hand was trembling as she put the phone back on its cradle. “I can’t believe this. You’re never going to speak to me again. I’m the friend from hell.”
“No.” Jeff was shaking his head, rubbing his eyes. “It’s fine.”
“I’ll tell him twenty minutes. That’s it. I’ll be back before the twins wake up.”
“Believe me, if Fleming hadn’t called, I’d still be asleep until then myself. I may never have mentioned this, Mira, but I sleep like the dead.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, and put her hands over her face. “What does he want, Jeff? Why did he call me in the morning, at seven o’clock? What’s he even doing in his office at this hour? Didn’t he think I got enough of a reprimand yesterday? He’s hauling me back in already?”
Dean Fleming had said, “I need you to be in my office as soon as possible. I would prefer that it be within the hour,” and the tone had taken her breath away. She’d started to shake—although, in truth, she’d woken up shaking when the phone rang, with no idea where she was, and only the vaguest awareness that she had run out of bed to answer it.
“The man’s an administrator, Mira. He probably sleeps in his office. Or he doesn’t sleep. Who knows where administrators go when the lights go out?”
She liked that Jeff was making light of it without trying to make her feel stupid for being worried. Clark would have dismissed it, been annoyed by her
“overreaction to every little thing,” but Jeff told her he’d be worried, too. “It’s creepy.”
But he didn’t seem to have any guesses, either, about what the dean could want.
Mira did what she could with her hair, her face. She pulled on a white blouse, black skirt, and a sweater. Jeff was asleep on the couch again by the time she closed, and locked, the door behind her.
104
Shelly woke in the morning on Ellen Graham’s couch. Outside, the sun had risen fully, and it was as if the volume on the whole idea of light had been turned up. There was so much sun on the snow out there that the curtains couldn’t keep it out. In the living room, everything seemed to be shining. The white carpeting, the knobs on drawers, the down comforter Ellen had given her when she made up the couch—and the cat.
That cat.
Had he (she?) simply come back to the chair and sat on it through the night, watching Shelly as calmly and nonjudgmentally as it seemed to be observing her now?
Shelly made the little kissing noise that always brought Jeremy to her side, but this cat didn’t move. This cat, Shelly thought, was as still as the Sphinx. She had an urge to ask it a question but was afraid Ellen might be awake, already up and around in another room, and if Ellen overheard she’d think she’d let a truly crazy woman spend the night in her house.
Shelly knew she would have to get up soon and use the bathroom, but for now she felt as if she’d entered some kind of eternity. With that sun reflecting so whitely on the snow outside, Shelly felt it wouldn’t surprise her to pull the curtains fully apart and find that everything was gone.
Erased.
Nothing left of the world but herself, and this white cat, and the brightness shining on some motes of dust between them.
The Raising Page 46
