The Raising: A Novel Part 12

"What's hard now?"

"I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of social stuff. The sorority likes it, you know, if your dates are Greek. When I'm living in the house next year, there might be a bit more, I don't know, pressure or something to be dating a frat guy."

"Nicole," Craig said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, humoring her, but, he hoped, radiating affection at the same time. "I'm not going to be one of those a.s.sholes. I mean, I think your whole sorority sister stuff is cute. But you're a girl. It's all about hair and makeup for you, and shaving chocolate onto gelato, and decorating floats. But if I joined one of those things I'd have to, I don't know, wear a beanie propeller or shave my pubic hair or something."

"What? Is that what you think?"

"Okay, not that maybe. But something equally dumb, and obnoxious. Those guys are all about dumb and obnoxious. I'd rather die than live in a houseful of those kinds of guys."

Nicole hadn't said anything. She'd grown quiet.

Sometimes, when she sulked, Craig glimpsed a single dimple at the right corner of her mouth, and he could imagine her as a toddler then, mad about something: A teddy bear. A lollipop. It made him want to give her anything she wanted.

"But I'll think about it," he said. "I understand why you think that would make things easier."

"Really?" she asked, turning to him, taking both his hands in hers, kissing them.

He'd hated having to let go of those hands-soft and white as little cashmere mittens-and watch her walk away from him, sway up the paving stones to the front door of that house in her silver sandals, some meaty frat guy watching her a.s.s from the porch of the frat house next door.

Now he walked across campus as quickly as he could, long strides, without looking up. He had a reason for going to the Omega Theta Tau house today, although the reason was only a half-formed idea in his head, a kind of dreamy inclination that had begun at the Roper Library a few days earlier. He'd gone there to check out a book his Western Mind professor had put on reserve, but the book had already been checked out, so Craig had found himself at a computer instead, plugging Nicole's name into the friendly Google rectangle and coming up with about four hundred and twenty hits-mostly local newspaper accounts of the accident, which he'd read a hundred times already, and a few reports from the Bad Axe Times, including an obituary, and a couple of articles from the school newspaper calling for his blood, and then lamenting his readmittance to the university, all of which he'd also seen and gotten used to.

But then he came upon one with a photograph of the Omega Theta Tau house: an entire orchard of cherry trees being planted in the two acres that stretched between the south end of their property and the Presbyterian church next door.

The Nicole Werner Memorial Cherry Orchard.

How, on his many Google visits, had he missed this?

Fifteen, twenty trees, and a line of sorority sisters in black dresses and black sungla.s.ses holding hands before those trees as if they were worshipping them, their gleaming sorority hair lit up by the sun, their heads bowed.

In the branches of the trees were bright blossoms. In the background, some shining cars.

Craig had zoomed in on the photograph, leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from the screen. With the photo enlarged, he was able to recognize some of the sorority sisters who were holding one another's hands. Nicole had introduced him to some of them while crossing campus, or standing in line at the Bijou, or looking up from their milkshakes at Pizza Bob's.

("Craig, this is my sister Allison. This is Joanne. This is Skye. This is Marrielle.") Back then, they'd all looked the same to him. Whether blond (mostly) or dark-haired, they each appeared to Craig like cheap knockoffs of Nicole-girls who were trying hard but could only dream of being as bright-eyed, as pink-cheeked, as purely beautiful as she was.

Nicole had accused him of being unfriendly. It was December by then, and they'd been together for two months (which to him seemed like a lifetime, by far the longest he'd ever dated a girl), and she'd said, "You don't make eye contact with my sisters. They think you're unfriendly." He agreed to try harder, albeit reluctantly. But the only time he met any of her sorority sisters again after that was when he'd already p.i.s.sed them off by pushing his way into a Greek-only party: Two a.m., and Nicole had said she'd meet him outside the Omega Theta Tau house at midnight. Craig had stood around for what seemed like long enough, and then he'd sat on the front stoop, calling her dorm room over and over. (Like Perry, Nicole didn't own a cell phone. Verizon, it seemed, had not yet made its sales pitch to Bad Axe.) He was thinking that eventually she'd pick up, and explain that she'd waited outside the OTT house but hadn't seen him, and so had walked herself back to G.o.dwin. He was thinking she'd say how sorry she was, and ask if he would come by to give her a good-night kiss. The worst-case scenario would be that Josie would answer and sound p.i.s.sed off to hear his voice, but at least she'd offer some explanation for what had happened to Nicole.

But there was no answer at all in Nicole's dorm room, and not a single girl came out the front door of the sorority house. Craig could hear the music thumping away inside, along with the occasional burst of wild laughter, the occasional girlish scream, sounding as if someone was being tickled with something surprisingly sharp. He'd already tried to look in the windows a few times, but they were high, tall windows, and the party seemed to be taking place in the bas.e.m.e.nt, out of sight. The only partiers he'd managed to glimpse were some guy pa.s.sed out on a couch and two girls appearing to be trying to read each other's palms.

There was a hired thug at the door: some hulking guy in a black shirt and black pants, holding a walkie-talkie in his hand, who did not look as if he were now or had ever been a college student. The thug would stand up and shrug his shoulders menacingly each time Craig came around the front door, and then shake his head, looking at Craig. When Craig went to the back door, there was always a sorority sister there-a different one each time-who would cross her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as if Craig were about to grab them, and, in this pretzel shape, manage to say something into a walkie-talkie while watching Craig warily until he went away.

He pretended to be walking back to the street, but then veered back through the shadows and managed to find a spot at the side of the house where he was able to crawl between a couple of shrubs and peer through a toaster-size window into the bas.e.m.e.nt. The shrubs were of the th.o.r.n.y variety, and Craig could feel them ripping through the thin material of his T-shirt. He knew he was going to have scratches and welts, but he managed to creep to the little window anyway, put his face up to it, his hands around his face.

Down there, in the bas.e.m.e.nt, they had a strobe light going. It seemed to be hooked up to the throbbing ba.s.s of the music they were playing, flashing to the beat. What Craig saw in the spasmodic intervals of light was dancing-girls' bare arms lifted, girls' bare midriffs and hipbones swaying, girls with their arms around each other's necks and shoulders, tossing back their heads, seeming to be howling, or screaming, or laughing, a few girls holding hands and dashing around in a wild circle, falling onto the bas.e.m.e.nt floor, limbs and hair and bra straps and bare skin, and a keg in a corner, and a line of girls at it, and then, in another corner, what looked to him like Nicole (he pressed his face hard enough against the gla.s.s that he thought he might crack it in half), holding a plastic cup, taking a sip from it, her arms around the neck of some beefy older-looking guy in a sweat-stained light blue shirt-and then, long before he knew he was doing it, Craig was barging through the back door past the sorority girl, who started swearing into her walkie-talkie, shouting at his back, "You're not allowed in our house, a.s.shole!"

He took the stairs down to the bas.e.m.e.nt two at a time, finding his way to them by pure instinct, slipping on the last one into a small smoky crowd dancing to some c.r.a.ppy Beyonce song, and found himself looking straight into the face of a girl with long black tears of sweat and mascara dripping down her face. "What the fu-" she said, and then the sorority sister who'd been chasing him since the back door grabbed his arm and started shouting, and the bruiser from the front door had him by the collar, and in the corner where he'd been sure he'd seen Nicole, there was no one.

"Nicole?! Nicole?! Nicole?!"

He screamed her name over the music, over and over again, in the direction of the empty corner as the bruiser pulled him out of the crowd of girls and toward the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs, at the top of which Nicole stood looking down at him with a shocked expression on her face.

"Craig . . . ?"

"Nicole?"

"Who is this jerk?" the girl with the walkie-talkie asked Nicole, scowling in Craig's direction. "Do you know him?"

When he reached the top of the stairs, the bouncer behind him gave Craig a shove, and Nicole said, "Yes," as if she regretted having to admit it. "This is Craig. He's my friend. I'll walk him home."

The girl glared at Craig. Her eyes were too blue to be real. Those had to be contacts, Craig thought.

The girl looked from Craig to Nicole. She was wearing so much lip gloss she looked like she'd recently been kissing an oil slick. She said, "Don't ever let him come around here again. Ever."

"Okay," Nicole said, sounding like someone who'd slipped into shock. "Come on, Craig."

"Don't you have a coat or something?" the girl asked Nicole.

"I'll get it tomorrow," she said, guiding Craig back out into the cool darkness, where the temperature had dropped since he'd first walked her to the OTT house. Now he could see their breaths puffing into it as they walked in silence, quickly, in the direction of G.o.dwin Hall. Nicole was shivering and shaking her head at the same time. When Craig tried to put his arm around her, she shrugged it off.

"What were you thinking?" she asked, staring straight ahead, not looking at him. She was walking so fast he practically had to jog at her side.

"Nicole, you said you'd be out of that party at-"

"Okay, Craig, but I never told you to pick me up. I told you I was going to walk back with Josie. Why did you come back to the house?"

"Because I was going to make sure you got back to G.o.dwin Hall. I was worried. I was worried about you. Sorry."

It sounded whiny and pathetic, even to him.

"Well, I was helping with the party. You know, picking up empties, making sure people put their cigarettes out, tossing out cups. Do you know how bad this is Craig, to have a friend crash the party, and make a scene, and-?"

"Is that what I am to you, Nicole? Your friend?"

"Of course," she said, as she if were consoling him.

"Gee," he said, "I sort of thought I was more than that." He felt something behind the bridge of his nose-his sinuses?-fill up with the sarcasm, the self-pity implicit in it, like . . . Jesus Christ, was he getting ready to cry?

"Well, I mean, we're dating, sure. We're more than friends. But I think friendship is really valuable, maybe the most important thing in the world next to family. I want to be your friend, Craig. But-"

She'd slowed down and put her cold hand in his. She squeezed his hand. She was shivering, and so he put both arms around her and pulled her to him, and said nothing, just happy to have her close to him.

He couldn't have argued with her anyway. He already knew from experience not to argue with her when she was dealing in abstractions: friendship, G.o.d, love, patriotism, chast.i.ty. He loved that about her.

"Okay," Craig said, happy enough to lose this argument. "Me, too. That's not what this is about. I saw you dancing with some guy."

"No, you didn't!" Nicole shouted, as if she'd just caught him in a brazen lie, jumping backward out of his arms. "I did not dance with any guys. I danced a little with Josie, and with Abby one time, but when guys asked me to dance, I said, 'Sorry, can't,' and held this up."

It was the ring he'd bought her from Grimoire Gifts two weeks ago-a little globe of amber, with something ancient, some little black bug, trapped in it forever. She wore it on her right hand, because she wore a ring her father had given her on her left. He'd have preferred the left, but Nicole had made it clear that there was no room for debate.

She stopped walking and turned to him with a stony, hurt expression. Her teeth had actually begun to chatter loud enough that he could hear them-like fingernails tapping across a keyboard, or dice being rattled in a can. "Oh, Jesus," he said, moved by the sound of those teeth, and her shivering, even though he knew she didn't like him to say Jesus. "Oh, Nicole." He unb.u.t.toned his shirt-he was wearing a T-shirt underneath-and wrestled the b.u.t.ton-down off his arms, draping it over Nicole's shoulders and then helping her put her arms through the sleeves, as if she were an invalid, or a toddler. She limply accepted his shirt, his help, and he wrapped his arms around her again and hurried her back to G.o.dwin Hall, whispering words of apology desperately in her ear as they walked.

When they finally got into the dorm, and he'd told her he loved her so many times that she finally started laughing, and she wasn't shivering any longer, she leaned back against the foyer wall and pulled him to her, and they leaned there kissing one another for a very long time, long enough that time seemed to have stopped, and maybe a hundred people had pa.s.sed them going up or down the stairs-but it wasn't long enough for Craig, who was always the one who said, "Just another minute or two," a hundred times, until Nicole, laughing, finally left him, shaking her head at him, throwing him kisses as she went up to her room. Forgiven.

It was the first thing Craig saw when he rounded the corner of Seneca Lane and West University Avenue: the Omega Theta Tau house casting a shadow down on that orchard that hadn't been there in the winter, the last time Craig had walked by.

There was a stone angel at the center, lifting her concrete wings and bending over at the same time, as if the wings were what had forced her down to earth in the first place.

It didn't take much imagination to guess what the bra.s.s plaque at the feet of that garden statuary said.

Tomorrow, Craig supposed, there would be mounds of roses, a teddy bear, that sort of thing.

Tomorrow would have been her nineteenth birthday.

22.

Clark was asleep when Mira got home. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, but he lay on his back on their bed with his hands folded on his chest, so deeply asleep he never heard her come in the house or the twins' deafening squealing upon her arrival-the usual tearful reunion, the clinging, the sobbing against her chest. By the time Mira had finally calmed them down enough to stand up from the floor and go looking for Clark, there were two spreading damp circles of their tears on her red silk blouse.

Ruined, she thought. Her mother used to have a trick for getting water stains off silk, but Mira hadn't been paying attention then, and certainly didn't remember now what the secret method might have been. Maybe, she thought, as she headed for the bedroom in search of Clark, she could research it on the Internet if she ever found the time-the Internet, which had become the mother lode of folk remedies and feminine advice for those without mothers to consult.

"Clark?"

Clark sputtered, blinked, coughed like a man surfacing in shallow water, and then he gasped and sat up fast. "What?"

"Are you okay?"

He rubbed his eyes, and then he scowled at her with half his face. Somehow, the other half of his face still looked familiar. She recognized the blank expression from a photo in their wedding alb.u.m. "What the h.e.l.l is that supposed to mean? Of course I'm okay."

"Well," Mira said, "you're in here dead asleep at two o'clock in the afternoon while the twins are hungry and sitting in dirty diapers on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe you were sick."

"f.u.c.k you, Mira," he said, and lay back down, staring straight at the ceiling, folding his hands over his chest again, closing his eyes with such finality that Mira almost thought she could hear them click shut with the neat precision of Swiss pocket watches.

She turned around and pulled the bedroom door closed hard behind her.

The p.o.o.p in the twins' diapers seemed to have been there a long time. It was hard, and caked into their little b.u.t.t cracks. Mira changed Matty first because he'd cried the hardest when she got home. He was still hiccupping with it, looking up at her with wide, gla.s.sy eyes. She sang the "five little duckies" song to distract him on the changing table, but he whimpered when she had to work too hard with the baby wipes to get the caked-on s.h.i.t off his tender bottom. It looked red and sore when she was done, but it was clean, and he wasn't crying. She dusted it with baby powder and tickled his belly before lifting him off the table and placing him back on the floor.

Andy was easier. He'd never much minded a dirty diaper, and as long as she was singing the duckies song, he didn't seem to mind if she was being a bit rough with his behind. She looked into his eyes as she sang, and he never blinked, as if he were afraid she'd disappear again if he did. As she changed his brother, Matty held on to one of her ankles from his spot on the floor, humming wetly into her shin.

After Andy's diaper was changed, Mira got back down on the floor and pulled them both to her, and unb.u.t.toned her stained blouse, unclasped her bra, and let her b.r.e.a.s.t.s fall out into their mouths.

("Good Lord, Mira, how long are you going to keep nursing those boys?" Clark's sister had asked six months earlier, when she'd come to visit from Atlanta. The twins had only just turned two then, but Mira had felt chastised, and stammered something about the boys only nursing once or twice a day. It was more of a habit, she tried to explain, than anything else. A way to calm them, or to get them to sleep on hectic nights. They were eating solid foods, of course. Pretty much anything she and Clark ate, the twins ate, and they ate a lot of it, and since Mira was gone a good part of every day, they certainly did not depend on breast milk for food.

"Jesus," Rebecca had said, "I quit nursing Ricky at six months when he got his front teeth. I thought he was going to bite my nipple off."

But Rebecca was married to a packaging engineer. She'd stayed home with Ricky until he went to kindergarten, and even after that she worked only two mornings a week, at a children's bookstore. She'd never, Mira felt certain, come home and found Ricky wearing a diaper stiff with s.h.i.t while her husband slept like a dead man in another room.) As the boys sucked harder, tears sprang into Mira's eyes. She'd wasted a precious forty-five minutes in her office with Perry Edwards when she should have been home with her babies-and afterward she'd stopped in the doorway of Dean Fleming's office just to smile and wave, and ended up wasting another half hour. She'd stopped there on purpose, knowing he would ask her how her "work" was going, and for the first time in a long time, she actually had something to say because she was working on something quite promising: a book-length consideration of the folklore of death on the American college campus.

Dean Fleming had raised his eyebrows as if he, too, saw the huge potential in her project. "Interesting," he said, nodding, clearly pleased and impressed. "I knew you'd zero in on something great in time." He wished her luck, offered his support. He said, "If you need travel funds or a book allowance, let me know. We'll see what we can find."

She left G.o.dwin Hall feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She had a project. Because there'd been a rainstorm that morning, and Clark had grudgingly let her drive the car to campus, she decided to drive by the location of the accident, Nicole Werner's accident, which she'd begun to think of as material.

Mira had driven by it hundreds of times since the accident because it was on the way to half the places she needed to be (grocery store, drugstore, gas station). Like everyone else in town, she had watched the acc.u.mulating expressions of sentimental grief, the mounding of more and more debris at the site. Girlish, and ghoulish.

It had begun with a white cross with the victim's name on it, and then a few stuffed animals were added, along with some wreaths of pink and white flowers-and then, within a few weeks, it had grown to a full-scale folk monument: A wisteria was planted. A banner was wound around the branches of the tree at the site. Some ornaments were hung in the branches. (Angels? Fairies? Mira couldn't tell from the road.) More stuffed animals and some baby dolls acc.u.mulated around the tree's trunk, and a laminated blowup of that senior portrait of Nicole Werner leaned against it, staring at the place where she'd lost her life. There were mounds of fresh flowers, and an unfathomable number of silk and plastic bouquets, ever replenishing, although Mira had never actually seen anyone tending to these items or dropping them off. (Did they come under cover of darkness?) Floral wreaths stretched from the side of the road across the drainage ditch to the electric fence, beyond which there were always a few sheep looking dazed and doomed.

Mira slowed down as she drove past. The next sunny morning, she thought, she would bring her best camera out here, and take photos.

The twins had fallen asleep as they sucked, and when Clark came out of the bedroom, he looked down at Mira for a moment, at the two flushed and dreaming twins still clinging to her nipples by their teeth. He must have realized that she was crying-there were tears running down her neck and onto her bare chest-but the expression on his face was unreadable, and far above her.

"I'm going for a run," he said, and was gone.

23.

It was the second week of January. She was lying on Craig's bed when Perry got back to the dorm room after the first winter semester meeting of his International Human Rights seminar. She was on top of Craig's comforter (Craig had started making his bed since he'd started dating Nicole) in a T-shirt. Her legs were bare. Perry thought, with a jolt that felt a bit like panic, that he'd caught a glimpse of pale blue underpants when she crossed her ankles. She was wearing a silver ankle bracelet. It had what looked like a bell, or an anchor, or a crucifix, hanging from it. She had a book in her hands.

Perry looked away. He strode purposefully to his desk, sat down with his back to her, and said, "What are you doing here, Nicole? Craig's not going to be back until after dinner."

"I'm just reading," she said. "It's quieter here than in my room. Josie's always got Norah Jones playing. Drives me nuts. Whine-whine-whine."

Perry could hear the springs on Craig's bed squeak. She must have shifted her weight, rolled onto her side. He wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of looking over. He turned his computer on, and there was the usual sound of an angelic choir starting up-one discordant but celestial note, which hung in the air.

"No offense, Nicole," Perry finally managed to say, "but when my roommate's not here, I actually enjoy my solitude."

"Well, Craig said you wouldn't mind," Nicole said casually. "He gave me his key."

Perry's screen saver came up then (comets shooting through a blue-black sky) and, at the same time, something hit his shoulder, sharp and surprising, and it took him only a second or two to realize that it was Craig's room key clattering on the floor behind him. Before he could stop himself, he was turned around in his chair, glaring at Nicole.

She was, as he'd thought, lying on her side. One leg was slung over the other. One of her bare feet (toenails painted sh.e.l.l pink) was pointed, swinging like a pendulum over the side of Craig's bed.

"Come on, Nicole," Perry said. "Why are you here?" He rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to seem more exhausted than agitated. He didn't want to give her the satisfaction of seeming as unnerved by her presence as he was. Since she and Craig had taken up full time, she was, like Craig himself, a constant irritation, mainly because Craig never shut up about her, was in an endless cycle of manic ecstasy and despair about her. When he wasn't frantically trying to call her, or find her, he was on the phone with her, or in their room with her. They couldn't hang out in Nicole's room because Josie hated Craig's guts, so they were here, or in the hallway waiting for Perry to get dressed so they could get in. Whenever Perry said something to Craig about it, Craig just said, "You're jealous, man. You're in love with my girlfriend. The sooner you face it, the better off we'll all be." It seemed like a joke now, with Craig, but it was still exasperating.

"I think you know why I'm here," Nicole said before she stood up and crossed the room-those bare feet, and the toenails, he tried only to look at those-and knelt down at his feet, looked up at him, directly in his line of vision, so he had to look back, and then she reached up for his face, pulled it gently toward her, and before he really understood what she was going to do, and what was happening, kissed him with her mouth open, her tongue slipping warmly, mintily, over his.