The Raising: A Novel Part 25

"Who is this?" Craig asked. His hand was shaking, but he was managing to hold the phone to his ear. The clock on his dresser said 12:00. Was it midnight? No: The sun was shining weakly outside. It had to be noon. He'd set his alarm for 9:00 a.m., and he remembered it bleating for him to wake up, remembered hearing Perry close the front door behind him as he left for his early cla.s.s, but then he must have turned it off, gone back to sleep.

There was no answer on the other end of the line.

"Who is this?" Craig asked again. He could hear breathing. He listened. He sat up. He put his free hand to his temple and rubbed it. He was trying not to say anything else, just listen, but then, despite himself, under his breath, he asked, "Nicole? Is it you?"

There was a high crazy scream of laughter then: "No, you idiot! This is Alice. Did you forget about Alice?"

And then the phone went dead in his hand, and Craig, heart pounding, was out of bed, bolting through the apartment, into the hallway, and the door was slamming, locked, behind him.

54.

The look on Josie's face, standing in front of the Starbucks counter (slender fingers wrapped around a white paper cup, just turning around) froze Sh.e.l.ly in the threshold, holding the door open with one hand, clutching her shoulder bag to her hip with the other. There was a rush of cold air around her ankles, and it seemed that, in addition to Josie, everyone in the cafe had turned at that moment to look at her, to see where the draft had come from, to scowl at her for holding the door open. (When had it gotten so cold? Sh.e.l.ly had walked all the way here from her house in a thin dress. Was the dampness she felt on her neck that of melting snow?) A woman with a stroller pushed past, and after she'd managed to squeeze by Sh.e.l.ly with her baby and her contraption and her diaper bag, she turned back around and nodded at the door. "Better shut that," she said. There was such gentleness in her tone that Sh.e.l.ly looked at the woman, trying to comprehend not what she'd said but the way she'd said it. "The door," the woman said, nodding at it again. "It's gotten cold out."

Sh.e.l.ly stepped all the way into the coffee shop and let the door swing shut behind her. By then, Josie was on the other side of the room, putting a lid on her cup, glancing furtively around her, and Sh.e.l.ly, despite the warnings of the university bureaucrat, was approaching her, moving her mouth, saying the girl's name loudly enough that other people were turning at their tables to look.

Josie started to back away, but Sh.e.l.ly was ready for it, and reached out, took hold of the slender arm (bare, despite the cold: Josie was wearing a pair of faded jeans with holes in the knees and a little silky black top, a cashmere sweater wrapped casually around her waist, like an afterthought)-and held on.

"Please," Sh.e.l.ly said.

Josie yanked her arm away, looked around, exasperated, and, under her breath, said, "What do you want?"

"I have to talk to you."

"You're not supposed to hara.s.s me."

"I'm not hara.s.sing you. Josie. Please. I'll leave you alone, I swear, I won't"-Josie took a step back as if in antic.i.p.ation of the word touch-"but I have to talk to you. Please."

"No." Josie was shaking her head emphatically, but then she stopped, seemed to think briefly, but seriously, about something, and then, to Sh.e.l.ly's great relief and surprise, she was nodding her head. "Okay," she said, sounding more annoyed than reluctant or frightened. "Okay, okay," she repeated, as if in defeat, and then she lifted her chin and pointed it toward an empty table in the back corner, and Sh.e.l.ly followed her to it.

Josie slid behind the table and leaned back, tossing one leg over the other and crossing her arms over her chest. Sh.e.l.ly sat down hard in the stiff wooden chair across from her, doing everything she could not to slump. (That was something her ex-husband had accused her of: "You don't sit in a chair, Sh.e.l.ly. You slump in it.") Josie didn't hesitate to look her straight in the eyes when she was seated, or to lean forward with her hands folded on the table between them. Sh.e.l.ly had expected an awkward silence, but right away, Josie was talking: "Look, I know you're probably p.i.s.sed as h.e.l.l at me, but I have to tell you this is really not my fault. I can't help it if we had this . . . involvement, and maybe I should have, yeah, kept my pictures where no one else could see them, but you're the older one here, you're the authority figure. You were supposed to-" Here, Josie seemed to search for some word she'd memorized and couldn't find. Instead, she went on with some thoughts about the nature of the student/employer relationship, which seemed both scripted and poorly delivered, and for the first time Sh.e.l.ly began to wonder if it had all been an act.

She reached across the table, put a hand on Josie's wrist to quiet her, and said, "Why?"

"Why what?" Josie said, looking startled to have her monologue interrupted.

"Why any of it?"

"I was just explaining that," Josie said. "There are certain perimeters in student/employer relations at the university-"

"Parameters?" Sh.e.l.ly asked.

"Whatever," Josie said. "But, being your work-study-"

"Why me?" Sh.e.l.ly interrupted. "Is this some kind of hazing thing?"

Josie didn't laugh.

She didn't even blink.

She held Sh.e.l.ly's gaze long and hard enough that Sh.e.l.ly didn't need an answer to the question, and then she finally said, "I told you, Omega Theta Tau doesn't partic.i.p.ate in hazing."

"What about the underwear?" Sh.e.l.ly asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"You told me. You said you had to wear the same panties for a month, and-"

"Oh, that." Josie swatted her hand through the air as if to clear it of an annoying insect. "That's not hazing."

"Well if that's not hazing, maybe this isn't either."

"What's 'this,' " Josie said, making quotation marks in the air around her own face.

"You know," Sh.e.l.ly said, her voice sounding automated even to her, "an affair. With a woman. Photographs. To prove it. Maybe getting someone in trouble, getting someone fired."

"No way. We'd get kicked out of the National Pan-h.e.l.lenic Council if-"

"No," Sh.e.l.ly said. She realized that she was shaking, but her words came out of her pa.s.sionlessly, as if she were reading them, and what she was reading was already familiar to her, had been read and reread a hundred times. "I was in a sorority, too, Josie. We did all the same stuff, knowing full well we'd never get kicked out of the National Pan-h.e.l.lenic Council. We knew, just like you do, that if the National Pan-h.e.l.lenic Council ever heard about it, they'd just help cover it up. People who've never pledged might be fooled by that, but not me."

"You can't prove anything," Josie said, and the way she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair made it clear to Sh.e.l.ly that Josie was right.

55.

Jeff chewed on hard cinnamon candies as he drove, and the sound coming from his closed mouth was so loud and chaotic it occurred to Mira that he was splintering his teeth, but when she looked over at him, and he looked back at her and smiled, she was relieved to see that his teeth were intact. "Would you like some?" he asked, pointing to the bag of candies between them. "Help yourself."

"No, thanks," Mira said.

After they'd left G.o.dwin Hall, and before they'd gone to get Jeff's car from the university parking garage, they'd gone back to Mira's apartment so she could get her credit card. (Despite Clark's protests that she was treating him like a two-year-old, Mira had insisted on keeping their joint card at home, in a box at the bottom of their bureau, since they were already so deeply in debt that it could only, in her opinion, be used in emergencies.) But when she'd gotten to the bureau, to the bottom of the drawer, and then to the bottom of the box, it wasn't there.

Clark had taken that, too?

She'd called to Jeff in the other room, "I'll be right out!" as she pawed through a few other drawers, and even looked under the bed, and went to the closet to check the pockets of Clark's jackets.

Not there.

She could hear Jeff in the living room humming to himself as he paged through some of the books on her shelf.

Now what?

It was two hundred miles, at least a couple of tanks of gas there and back. She'd had the ATM withdrawal maximum lowered to fifty dollars a day (again, so there would be no temptations), and she certainly didn't want to make Jeff stand around in line at the credit union as she tried to get money out of hers and Clark's savings account.

"I'm sorry this is taking so long!" she called, mostly to buy herself some time to think about what to do.

"It's not a problem, Mira," Jeff called back. "I've got forty hours before anyone will notice I'm missing, and that'll just be a dozen relieved undergrads. That's the great thing about being a bachelor. n.o.body files a Missing Person's report for at least a week. Hey, I see you've got a whole shelf of Camille Paglia. Are you a fan?"

Later, Mira thought, she would tell him about her interest in Paglia's popularization of literary criticism, and how she hoped, herself, to emulate something of it in her own anthropological studies-but at the moment she was back on her hands and knees feeling the carpet under the bureau for the credit card. She sat for a few minutes on the floor before she stood, went into the living room, and said to Jeff, because she had to, "I don't have any money. Except what I can get out of the bank. My husband took the credit card."

Jeff was holding s.e.xual Personae in his hands as if it he'd never held an actual book before, as if he had no idea how to open it, both hands wrapped around the edges like a plateful of potluck food. He looked over at Mira, shrugged, and said, "I've got cash and a full tank of gas. And now I know where you live. I have people who can help me get the loan repaid if I have to." He raised and lowered his eyebrows ridiculously, without bothering to smile, and Mira understood instantly, physically (although she couldn't muster the energy to feel it) why, if the rumors were true, so many girls and women allowed themselves to be used by him.

"Thank you," she said to him for the tenth or fifteenth time that morning, and he acknowledged it with another shrug, turning back to the book. She offered him a cup of tea, or a sandwich, but he said he'd rather hit the Wendy's on the freeway if she didn't mind.

"I have a man-size hunger," he said. "I'd like to wait for a Bacon-ator if you don't mind."

They'd headed together to the parking garage closest to G.o.dwin Hall then. It was a short walk, but the sky was spitting a damp snow, and they had to keep their heads down. It would have been impossible to carry on an easy conversation, even if Mira had been in a state of mind that allowed for small talk.

Jeff was parked on the first floor, under a sign that read, NO PARKING. He pulled the ticket off his windshield and tossed it into the backseat without saying a word about it.

His car was a mess.

Mira had, she supposed, expected a Porsche. Although she knew Jeff couldn't make much more money than she did, she also found herself so continually surprised by the opulent houses and the exotic vacations of her colleagues (who had the same salaries that, for Mira and Clark, barely covered the rent) that she'd grown used to a.s.suming that most academics had secret sources of income-trust funds, inheritances, law suit settlements. If Jeff were one of those, with that kind of money, Mira had imagined he would spend it on something flashy, something women would be impressed by, like a sports car.

But not only wasn't this a sports car, it was even rustier and more exhausted-looking than Mira and Clark's car: The door of the glove compartment had been torn off somehow, and Jeff had stuffed it with candy wrappers, many of which had fallen on the floor. The backseat was a pond of memos and flyers and Wendy's bags. (Where, Mira wondered, looking back there, would she put the twins? Clark had their car seats, too, she realized. But she'd have to worry about that later.) It took Jeff several tries to start the car-and once he did, the motor made a sound like a s.p.a.ceship taking off, only to grow disconcertingly silent as he started to drive. It crossed Mira's mind that they were actually coasting out of the parking ramp, with no engine at all, but Jeff seemed in control of things, and the confidence he exuded-popping candies into his mouth, fiddling with the ancient-looking radio dial-was rea.s.suring. He said, "I know she doesn't look like much, but she's as reliable as they get. We'll be the fastest thing on the freeway, sweetheart."

The little endearment did not seem to Mira to be a come-on, or even overly familiar. It seemed, instead, to be an attempt to comfort her-and, again, for the hundredth time that day, tears sprang to her eyes, and she vowed to herself that she would buy that slim collection of his poems she'd seen at the bookstore on the shelf of Local Authors as soon as they got back: The Blind Horizon. She would read them carefully, and ask him about his influences, his inspirations and aspirations. She would treat him with more respect. She was sorry, so sorry, that she hadn't done so before now.

Jeff flashed his U-Parking pa.s.s at the attendant in the booth. Then they were winding their way through campus.

The day was getting colder. The sky, darker. It would be a matter of minutes, Mira felt certain, before the first blizzard of the year began in earnest-and, still, there were boys crossing the street in short sleeves, girls in mini-dresses and tank tops. Was this vanity, ill-preparedness, or did their youth give them some sort of metabolic advantage in the cold?

Mira herself was shivering as Jeff's car's heating system blew cool air smelling of dust through the vents and into her face.

Jeff slowed down at an intersection full of pedestrians and bicyclists, and at the corner of State and Seymour, Mira saw Dean Fleming standing under the crosswalk sign, waiting for the signal to change. His red tie had blown over his shoulder, and he had his tweed cap pulled down low on his head of bushy gray hair. He looked, it seemed, right at Mira as they pa.s.sed-but if he registered who she was and that she was a pa.s.senger in Jeff Blackhawk's junker, it didn't show on his face. An enormous snowflake landed on the windshield right in front of Mira, and made no sign of melting.

"Freeway? Wendy's?" Jeff asked.

"Sure, yes," Mira said. "And, Jeff, I'm so, so grateful for this."

"I know," he said, and ground his molars down on the piece of candy in his mouth, turned to her, and winked without smiling.

56.

Craig was in his boxer shorts and an old, soft SKI FREDONIA! T-shirt, no shoes. He knew he'd locked himself out as soon as he heard the inner workings of the k.n.o.b and the doorjamb click into position, but he was too freaked out to care.

He was bathed in sweat, and the sweat was cold, but instead of shivering (it was always a lot colder in the hallway than in the apartment because people were always propping the front door open so their friends could come in without having to be buzzed in) he was burning. He felt the way he used to when he was running track in middle school, before he started smoking dope instead of running track: that feeling, after a long run, that somebody was giving you a bear hug from behind, and it was crushing your lungs, and you were desperate for air, but that the temperature of the air was seven hundred degrees, and breathing it in short little gasps was going to set your insides on fire.

He leaned over in the hallway, trying to stop the gasping, the way the coach had showed them back in Fredonia, and then he put his hands on his knees and tried to count to four as he inhaled through his mouth, hold it for four, exhale to four, but he was panting about ten times faster than that.

He'd thought it was Nicole. He'd been sure of it. That Nicole was calling him from . . .

He didn't hear the Cookie Girl come out of her room, and didn't know she was there until she cleared her throat beside him, and then he jumped back about a foot, standing up straight, clutching his chest. Her eyes sprang wide open in alarm, and she said, "What's the matter?"

It didn't even occur to Craig, yet, that he was half-naked, crazed looking, and that he didn't know this girl. He said, "I don't know. Someone's f.u.c.king with me. Someone's haunting me."

A sad look crossed the Cookie Girl's face, as if he'd told her something she'd dreaded hearing but had fully expected to hear. Her small, pale face in the dim hallway light looked, he thought, anguished. It was the same expression she'd had on her face just before she'd told him, at the mailbox, in a monotone, "Killed a guy on a bike. I was sixteen." Now, in a sad, calm voice, she asked, "Is your roommate home?"

Craig shook his head.

"Did you lock yourself out?" She looked toward his closed door. All Craig could do was nod.

"Look," she said. "Come in here." She gestured for him to follow her to her apartment. "My roommates are out. You can sit on the couch and cover up with a blanket, and I'll call the landlord to let you back in."

The Cookie Girl hopped, then, on her one good foot, to the door, and turned to look behind her to make sure he was following. She pointed at the couch for him to sit on, and hopped around a corner, out of sight. "I'll get the phone," she said as she hopped.

The air inside the Cookie Girl's apartment smelled closed and flowery to Craig. It reminded him-painfully, suddenly, completely-of Josie and Nicole's dorm room: that smell of girls' foreign products, perfumes, toilet waters, conditioners, clean clothes, floral soaps. And also chemicals, like nail polish and nail polish remover, and witch hazel, maybe-that's what his mother used to clean her face with, wasn't it? And creams and lotions with honey and b.u.t.termilk in them.

He sat on the Cookie Girl's couch and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and in a few seconds she'd hopped back out with the phone and a soft, pink blanket. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and held out the phone to him. When he just stared at it blankly, she said, "Okay. I'll call him."

But apparently the landlord didn't answer. The Cookie Girl had gone back into the other room, and Craig could hear her say to a machine, "This is Deb Richards? 326? Um, my neighbor is locked out? Can you call me back so I can let him know if you'll come and let him back in?"-followed by a string of numbers: land lines, cell phone numbers, Craig's apartment number, her apartment number. She came back into the living room, this time leaning on her crutch, and said, "I'm going to make you a cup of tea."

Craig nodded.

"Look," she said when she came back out of her kitchenette holding a microwaved mug from which a cloud of steam swirled, a string with a little Lipton flag hanging off the rim. "Look. I know you don't know me, but I have to talk to you. I think I know what's going on here-but first I have to ask you not to tell anyone that I talked to you about this. And that other thing? That I told you in the hallway? n.o.body here knows about that, okay? I purposely came to a school two thousand miles away from where that happened, and I only told you because I've been listening to what people are saying about you, and I looked up this stuff about you on the Internet, and I feel like I can-relate, and now I have to tell you something else."

Craig nodded again. He sipped from the tea without bothering to take the bag out or even bounce it around in the water the way he knew he was supposed to. The tea tasted like very hot water, and burned his tongue, but it also seemed like the best thing he'd ever put to his lips. The mug said FIELD DAY on the side. There was a little hockey stick under the words.

"They're f.u.c.king with you," the Cookie Girl (Deb?) said. "I know some of these girls. My roommate from Woodson Hall freshman year is an Omega Theta Tau, and whenever she has more than a couple of margaritas she starts to blab. Those girls have a plan to get you off this campus."

Craig sipped from the mug again. He felt strangely and entirely at peace. Wrapped in this nice girl's pink blanket. Sipping her tea. Her voice reminded him of his mother's-his mother's voice back when he was a child, when she used to speak to him quietly, enunciating every syllable. Deb Richards didn't seem to understand that Craig already knew how much Nicole's sorority sisters hated him, how they wanted him off campus. She seemed to think she would shock him if she spoke too quickly-either that or this was simply the most natural way to speak to someone you'd just found panting in his boxer shorts in your hallway, doubled over, flipping out.

Deb went on about how she'd overheard this or that, and how the father of the boy she had killed had stopped in his tracks at her hometown supermarket and shouted, pointing, "That f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h, that f.u.c.king little b.i.t.c.h, that f.u.c.king little b.i.t.c.h killed my little boy," so loudly and frantically that she couldn't even leave the store because people were staring at her, and also screaming at her, and how a cashier even stood in front of her to block her way to the exit, turning all red, saying something about how she, Deb Richards, was the one who should be dead and, "You're gonna rot in h.e.l.l you negligent spoiled brat, you're gonna rot in h.e.l.l every night of your rotten life and then for all of eternity in h.e.l.l . . ."