The Raising: A Novel Part 16

Since long before- She wrapped the fingers of one hand around the door. The fingers were elegant, long, unfamiliar. Her fingernails were also painted red.

"Who's there?" he asked again, this time in a whisper.

A bit of the dress or gown or sheet she was wearing wafted in, and then back out, as if in answer, and then she stepped farther into the room, and Craig could feel his heart pounding in every pulse point-his chest, his wrists, his throat, his temples.

Her long dark hair was swept to one side and her eyes were closed. The lids were painted dark blue. Her lips were pale, but they glistened. He could see straight through the thing-the gown, yes, or drape. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were perfect globes with wide pink nipples, and he could see the dark triangle of pubic hair between her legs. She opened her eyes.

They were gray, or they were hidden in the shadows of her voluminous, shining hair.

She parted her lips and took a slow step, closer to him.

He would have moved-whether to approach her or to flee, he wasn't sure-except that he couldn't. He was in that paralysis part of a nightmare where you want to scream but have no voice, want to run but can't move your limbs.

He managed, however, to whisper again: "What's your name?"

Her voice was like air when she spoke. He was surprised he could even hear it. Or he'd read her lips, which formed the word I'm and then Alice.

"Alice," he repeated.

She nodded as if there were a great weight on her back, as if the sound of her own name reminded her of it.

"Alice who?"

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling then, and he could see them better in the overhead light. They were a blazing blue. Turquoise. Extraordinary. Especially against her white skin, her black hair.

"Meyers," she said in that husky-nothing that was her voice. "Alice Meyers."

"Alice Meyers?" Craig said. He knew the name, but had no idea where he knew it from. He said it again: "Alice Meyers."

"Can I come in?"

At first he could say nothing, but then, knowing that it would be the best answer in a nightmare like this, Craig managed, "No."

Suddenly she was screaming at the top of her lungs, a scream that sounded like a horse being beaten, or something worse, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again she was gone, and he heard the front door of the apartment slam shut, and the sound of someone running down the hallway, and he was sitting up, screaming in the pitch black room, only a bit of moonlight slipping through the crack in the window shade. Help! Help! Help! Finally he managed to silence himself, put his face in the crook of his arm, squeezed his eyes shut, bit his lip until the silence became his own heartbeat, slowing, maybe, slowing down. s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t. f.u.c.k. "Perry?" he finally managed to whimper into the darkness.

As Craig stumbled out of his room and crossed the hallway to Perry's room, he was still in a state of panic, but also shame, turning on the lights as he went, trying not to whimper. (G.o.d, like going to find your Mommy in the middle of the night: I had a bad dream . . .) But surely Perry had heard him, and would be wondering what the f.u.c.k- He opened the door to Perry's room and could see in the light from the hallway that there was no one in Perry's bed.

"Perry?" he called toward the kitchen, the living room. But it was a tiny apartment-if Perry had been there, of course he would have heard him before this.

h.e.l.l, probably everybody in the apartment house had heard him.

Perry wasn't there. Definitely not there.

So, where the h.e.l.l was he? Sleeping over at some girl's he hadn't mentioned to Craig? (Maybe the Mystery Chick from freshman year-the one whose panties Craig had found on the floor at the foot of Perry's bed? Perry had refused to acknowledge those, no matter how much Craig made fun of him.) Just because Perry didn't seem to have a s.e.x life didn't mean he didn't.

He was starting to calm down, to feel more p.i.s.sed and jilted than terrified. He went to the front door and locked it, even hooked the chain. If f.u.c.king Perry came home that night, he could knock his a.s.s off, and if Craig didn't hear him, he could sleep in the hall.

And then he unhooked the chain, because that was stupid. h.e.l.l, Perry was ent.i.tled to a night out. Still, he thought, he'd have liked to have had Perry there-to laugh with, if nothing else, about the ridiculous dream.

I'm Alice Meyers. It would have been funny if-well, if it hadn't scared the s.h.i.t out of him. Craig was back in bed with the lights out and the blankets pulled up over his ear when he realized where he knew that name from.

Of course.

f.u.c.k.

G.o.dwin Hall.

The Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room.

His heart was beating hard again, but he wasn't going to freak out. It had only been a dream. He turned the bedside lamp on, picked up the c.r.a.ppy novel written by his father's best friend and rival, Dave Cain-The Boiling Point-and decided he'd stay up reading until morning.

It could only be a few more hours until it was light outside.

Right?

31.

It was the second week of October. Until now, the weather had been unseasonably warm-like summer all through September, and like early September at the beginning of October. Then the weather changed, literally, overnight.

Sh.e.l.ly went to bed with the windows wide open because the house was stuffy from having been shut up all day (the morning weather report had predicted rain, so she'd closed everything, although rain never came), and had woken up in the fetal position in one corner of the bed with a sheet and a thin comforter twisted around her. Jeremy was purring, pushed up against her hip as if huddling there for protection from the elements, and the curtains were whipping around in the window frame. The temperature in the room could not have been above fifty degrees.

"s.h.i.t," she said, jumping out of bed, sending Jeremy tearing out of the room as she hurried to the windows to close them. How had she slept through this complete scene change? The clock on her nightstand said 7:02, but it was pitch black outside-huge rolling dark clouds in the sky seemed to be preparing for a battle of epic proportions. Sh.e.l.ly grabbed her robe and wrapped it around her, and followed Jeremy out to the kitchen. Pa.s.sing the thermostat on the way, she twisted the dial to seventy degrees-five degrees higher than she usually kept it even in the dead of winter, and eight degrees higher than her ex-husband had ever allowed her to turn it.

The weather change was going to be a problem. She'd need to find her down jacket and waterproof boots before she walked to work, and she was already running late, and the cat needed feeding, and she needed a shower-and the disconcerting darkness, accompanied as it was by inky rain, and the unappealing prospect of trekking across town, gave her the idea that she might, this being Tuesday and Josie's early-morning day, call in sick.

What could it hurt? She was caught up with all the work she had to do for the next four concerts, and she had no new projects that couldn't wait until tomorrow. She could just call the cell phone Josie kept permanently attached to her ear, say she wasn't feeling well, and then call Security to unlock the doors so Josie could get in and answer the phones. Surely Josie could handle the one or two phone calls she might get while filing her nails in the office and playing around online.

The plan coursed through Sh.e.l.ly like fresh blood.

She'd had no idea, she realized, until this moment, how badly she wanted a weekday away from that place. Had she become one of those people who hated their jobs? Only once before in nineteen years had she consciously, brazenly, called in sick when she was certifiably in the pink of health, and that was the morning she woke up for the first time beside Paula and realized that it would take a lot more than the Chamber Music Society to pull her out of that bed if Paula was going to be in it.

Even given all that had happened, that s.n.a.t.c.hed day had been a good decision: a stolen, sensuous morning, the details of which (coffee spilled on the pillows, eggs grown cold, the sheets twisted around their legs) were seared onto Sh.e.l.ly's memory forever. The memory of that day still filled her with pleasure and contentment, even knowing now, as she did, that Paula would, a few months later, go back to her husband when he was diagnosed with clinical depression and when her grown children told her their father might die if she didn't go back to him and that they would never speak to her again if he did.

True, it had broken Sh.e.l.ly's heart. But even that seemed somehow beautiful, being proof as it was that she'd been capable of that kind of love at least once in her life. She'd walked through the world like a zombie for an entire season-like the beast in the Stephen Crane poem, eating of her heart and enjoying it, because it was so bitter, and because it was her heart. But she carried within her the deep satisfaction that she had thrown everything she had into that love, had done everything humanly possible to persuade Paula to stay with her.

That, Sh.e.l.ly had learned, was the difference between heartbreak and regret: Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren't accompanied by regret.

She watched the storm from the kitchen window and sipped her coffee calmly, even when Jeremy, unnerved by the storm, abandoned his cat food prematurely (usually he licked the bowl until it was shining) and ran back into the bedroom, where, she knew, he would hide under the bed.

It was 8:45, and Sh.e.l.ly decided it was time to call Josie on her cell phone, so she wouldn't arrive at the Chamber Music Society to locked doors-although, with this weather, it seemed unlikely to Sh.e.l.ly that the girl was dutifully making her way to the office.

"Sh.e.l.ly?"

Josie answered on the first ring-or at the first note of some pop star's latest single, whatever Josie's personalized ring tone might be-and Sh.e.l.ly was surprised to think that Josie either knew her phone number by heart, or had her number programmed into her phone. She didn't remember Josie ever calling her at home.

"Josie? h.e.l.lo?"

"Yeah! I'm at Fourth and South U. I'll be there in five minutes."

"Oh," Sh.e.l.ly said, "that's not why I called. You're not late-" (for a change, she thought). "I'm calling because-because I'm not feeling very well, and I-"

"Are you okay?"

The alarm in the girl's voice was, frankly, touching. Sh.e.l.ly could imagine Josie holding the phone to her ear inside the hood of one of her black or gray cashmere hoodies, bent over, wind in her face, black ballet flats exposing the pale tops of her feet to the elements, stopping to hear Sh.e.l.ly more clearly.

"Oh, sure, I'm okay," Sh.e.l.ly said. "I'm perfectly fine. Just under the weather, I guess. I was going to see if you could take calls in the office this morning without-"

"Oh, no problem," Josie said. "I can stay all day if you need me to. I only have one cla.s.s, and it's-"

"That's not necessary. You can leave when you were supposed to, at noon, but if, when you do, you could leave a note on the door and . . . ?"

Sh.e.l.ly went on with the instructions, including Security, who would need to come and let Josie in and lock up when she left, and Josie enthusiastically agreed to everything Sh.e.l.ly said, and by the end of the phone call Sh.e.l.ly felt both relieved and confident about choosing that day to call in. Maybe Josie was starting to settle into the semester, and into the routine of the job, and her att.i.tude was changing accordingly. Maybe Sh.e.l.ly wouldn't need to fire her after all.

She put the phone back in its cradle and looked around the dark kitchenette for a minute, and then turned and peered into the living room (coffee table, overstuffed couch, braided mat for Jeremy next to Sh.e.l.ly's reading lamp), feeling a little confused about what she was supposed to do next (shower? get dressed? check email?) until she realized it was okay, it was perfectly fine, to go back to bed, and she did.

The pillowcases smelled fresh, and like lavender. The sheets had cooled pleasantly, and the staticky pummeling of the rain on the roof was both calming and deafening, and Jeremy came out from under the bed and found his place at her hip, and Sh.e.l.ly was asleep within seconds.

It must have been about two hours later, in Sh.e.l.ly's dreams, that the doorbell rang-a pale blue bird opening and closing its mouth in a cage at a mall she used to shop at with her mother as a child. That dream bird was making the m.u.f.fled chiming noise of a doorbell instead of a whistle. It sounded maybe three or four times before Sh.e.l.ly realized that she was sleeping, and that the doorbell actually was ringing outside of her dream as well as in it, and she swung her legs off the side of the bed. Jeremy, sensing her alarm, jumped off and raced under it, his claws making a desperate scratching noise on the wooden floorboards as he did.

Sh.e.l.ly wasn't yet sure what time it was, or when the rain had stopped, or even what she was wearing, or why she was in bed instead of at work-and was only slightly less confused by the time she got to the door, got on her tiptoes, pressed her eye to the peephole, and looked out to see Josie Reilly standing there, outside her door.

Josie was wearing one of her skimpy tank tops with a pink hoodie halfway zipped up over it, holding two large Starbucks cups with white lids, and she was looking up at the peephole with a faint little smile on her lip-glossed lips, as if she could see Sh.e.l.ly's eye peering out at her through it.

32.

Professor Polson's apartment house looked like a place a student would live, Perry thought, not a professor with a family. In fact, last winter he'd met a guy from his International Human Rights seminar who'd lived in this same building. Around midterms the guy had asked Perry to come over to study with him, but when Perry had shown up the guy had been drunk and didn't seem to remember that he'd wanted to study, or even who Perry was.

Then, and now, the building's stairwell smelled like old beer soaked into carpet. Lucas climbed the stairs ahead of him, taking each step as if it were much higher than it was. Perry had to slow down so he wouldn't charge over him. Lucas looked like an old man, holding tightly to the railing, shoulders hunched and bony in his threadbare T-shirt. There was stenciling on the back of the shirt, but it was so faded Perry couldn't tell if it read, THE FINAL TOUR or SHE FINDS OUT.

"What's the number?" Lucas asked for the second or third time when they stepped out into the hallway.

"Two thirty-three," Perry said, and gave Lucas a gentle push in the direction of the door with 233 on it.

Professor Polson opened it before they knocked (she'd had to buzz them in, so she knew they were in the building, coming up the stairs, and then she must have heard them in the hallway) wearing a ruffly purple blouse, long-sleeved and flowered, and faded jeans with a patch on one knee. This outfit was, Perry realized, exactly what he'd imagined she might wear when she wasn't wearing professor clothes. To cla.s.s, Professor Polson always wore black-black dresses, black skirts, black jackets-but it looked to him as if she were playing a role that required these costumes, and that in fact she'd be a lot more comfortable in some kind of hippie dress or skirt, some T-shirt with a Monet painting on it. He could easily picture her in a floppy hat and strappy sandals, some kind of bright silk skirt.

She opened the door wide and motioned for them to come in, and then said, "Sit down, boys. I'll get some tea."

Perry wandered in behind Lucas, not sure where to go. Lucas was moving toward a chair in one room, and Professor Polson had disappeared into what must have been a kitchen. He could smell that the tea was already brewing-either that or she'd had a candle burning before they'd gotten there, and had just blown it out. The apartment was what his mother would have called a mess. There were books on the floor, some of them open, and a little pile of what looked like sweaters and dishrags next to the couch. The rug was a bright, Oriental embroidered thing, all blazing reds and yellows where it wasn't worn away in thready gray patches.

Lucas sat down heavily on a green velvet recliner, and it squeaked when he did, and he made a little face, like maybe something had jabbed him in the back. Perry sat on the couch, which looked old and tired, too, but was comfortable, and had a fancy lamp beside it shedding a warm golden light through a lacy lampshade. It seemed to Perry that everything in the apartment could have been either bought at a garage sale for fifty cents or an expensive heirloom-or both. It was, he thought, about the most interesting place he'd ever seen outside of a movie. He had never been able to picture Professor Polson in her apartment, but now that he was here, he knew this is what he would have imagined. When she came in carrying three mugs, he said, "I like your apartment."

Professor Polson rolled her eyes a little, handed him a mug. "Be careful," she said, "it's hot." Lucas looked up at the cup as she held it down to him as if he had never seen a mug of tea before. Eventually, he reached up and took it.

Since Perry had gone by his place to pick him up, Lucas had been doing everything this way, in slow motion, and Perry had finally just come out and asked him, after Lucas spent about twenty minutes trying to zip up his jacket, seeming unable to fit the two ends of the zipping apparatus together to save his life, "Are you stoned, man?"

"No," Lucas said, struggling, albeit languidly, with the zipper. "I'm not doing that anymore. I quit. Bad sleep."

Perry had been about to offer to zip Lucas's jacket for him when he'd finally managed to do it himself.

"Thanks for coming over, guys," Professor Polson said. She sat down beside Perry on the couch and rested her mug of tea on the flowered patch on the knee of her jeans. "How are you, Lucas? I haven't seen you yet this year, have I? Was your summer okay?"

"It was okay," Lucas said. He was staring into the swirling steam over his cup with some apprehension. "Yeah."

"Perry told you we wanted to talk to you about-?"

"Yeah," Lucas said again, and looked up. "He told me."

"That's okay with you?"

"Sure," Lucas said.

For the first time Perry noticed that there was what looked like a perfectly round quarter-size circle of hair missing just over Lucas's temple. It looked like someone (Lucas himself?) had grabbed a handful of the hair there and yanked.

"Lucas?" Professor Polson said, leaning forward so that, from the angle at which he observed her, Perry could see a silver charm dangling in the neckline of her blouse, there in the dark shadows between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He looked away, looked over at Lucas, who was now staring at one of the worn-away patches on the Oriental rug.

"Is everything okay?" Professor Polson asked. She was studying him. "You look tired. Are you sleeping? Are you smoking dope, or taking something harder?"

Lucas shook his head, and told her the same thing he'd told Perry, that he'd quit smoking dope "and everything else," hoping it would help with the sleep. "But I don't sleep. Not since this thing with-"

There was a long pause as Professor Polson waited for him to finish the sentence, before she finally finished it for him.

"Nicole?"

Lucas brought his hands to his temples and began to rub with his index and forefingers, and Perry saw that he was rubbing in a circular motion at the exact spot where the quarter-size circle of hair was missing.

"Are you really ready to talk about this?" Professor Polson asked. "You know, you don't have to. I'm not acting with the university in any way. I'm only inquiring into this as a scholar, and my interest in these kinds of things relates to the tradition of these kinds of things. I don't want to mislead you into thinking I'm a supernaturalist-you understand that? I'm a folklorist.

"I mean, I'll listen to what you have to say," she went on. "And I'll believe you, that you're telling the truth as you've experienced it. But I have some ideas of my own about how these things happen-and eventually, maybe, those ideas might help you, but I don't know." She hesitated for a moment, shrugging her shoulders, which Perry thought looked fragile, thin, like the shoulders of a little girl.

When he didn't say anything, she said, "They might help you feel better, make sense of things, but you might also want to get some professional help, and I'll give you some references for that. For the sleep problems, if nothing else?"

Lucas took his hands away from his temples, put them in his lap, and looked up at Professor Polson. He nodded.