The Raising: A Novel Part 5

"Um, Nicole . . ." he said. But she didn't say anything or take her hands away from her face. He could see now that a lot of tears were leaking out from between her fingers, and his heart began to hammer in alarm. He'd never been around a girl really crying before. Mary had never cried except a kind of teary nervousness the day she dumped him, handing him his cla.s.s ring with an awful little shove. Even his mother only cried when she'd been laughing too hard, too long. Desperately, he patted his pockets, although he already knew he had no tissue.

The girls who'd been smoking were still staring at him, waiting. Perry looked around, as if someone else might be able to step in for him, but no one was going to-so, although his arm felt like it weighed five hundred pounds, he managed to raise it in Nicole's direction, and to put a hand on her shoulder. She seemed to sag a little when he did this, and then sort of hopped toward him and buried her head in his chest, and then Perry had no choice but to put his hands on her back and pat it.

8.

How long had he been standing there in front of G.o.dwin Honors Hall, staring up at the room that had been Nicole's the year before?

Had he been talking to himself?

Craig was walking fast back toward his and Perry's apartment now, staring at his Converse, trying not to look around him at the people he felt pretty sure were looking at him.

On the phone, his father had said from back in New Hampshire, "You call me, bud, the second you feel like you're losing it, you hear me? I'll get there, and if I can't get there fast enough, I'll find someone who can."

Losing it.

Even his father, the famous writer, had never been able to find the right words for it-that madness, or confusion, or fog that had enveloped Craig after the accident, and had lasted for months, only to mysteriously evaporate in July when Craig simply woke up one morning, looked around, and understood, perfectly, who and where he was again.

Who was that other person who had inhabited him during those months? Had he really believed that the rehab nurse, Becky, was his grandmother, raised from the dead and fifty years younger?

"Closed head injuries can take years to heal," Dr. Truby had said when Craig was Craig again. "You got lucky. A few months."

Lucky.

Was he?

Craig knew where he was now, but would he ever be able to shake the sense that the other world, the one he'd spent months living in, was still there? That back in that world, animals could talk, just not with their mouths? That if you stared at the gra.s.s, it spelled messages to you in the breeze? That every blond female was some perverted version of Nicole-face twisted, or wrinkled, or made insipid to torment him?

"Synapses," Dr. Trudy said. "Misfiring."

"You were bonkers," Scar had said. "You were livin' in Creepyville, man. Welcome back."

His mother had been horrified when she discovered that his plan was to go back to school in September if they'd let him back in. She'd said the words relapse and what if about five thousand times.

"No one in this family cares what I think, but I am stating for the record that he should not go back to that horrible school," she'd said to Craig's father. She was standing in the street talking loudly to the side of the Subaru as if no one were in it. "What if . . . relapse . . . or something worse?"

"What could be worse?" Craig asked from the pa.s.senger seat. "I killed my girlfriend." He even managed a laugh. Beyond his mother, he could see her new boyfriend's shadow moving around behind the curtains of his parents' bedroom.

"Lynette, you're right about one thing," Craig's father had said, rolling the car window up as he said it. "No one gives a flying f.u.c.k what you think."

Craig's mother started screaming at the Subaru as they pulled away from the curb, but his father had turned up his Vivaldi, and Craig didn't hear from her again until the next week, just before they headed back out to the Midwest, when she came by his father's apartment and said-subdued, choked with emotion, spilling tears all over the place-"Just come back the second you can't stand it anymore," as if it were a foregone conclusion that it would come to that. "If . . . relapse."

"And do what?" Craig had asked. "Come back and live with you and Scar and 'Uncle Doug,' work at the ski resort?"

His mother turned her back then, and walked out the front door, down the stairs, and crisply back to her car, sobbing openly the whole way, as other apartment dwellers pa.s.sed her in the parking lot and Craig watched from the balcony. For a second it had crossed his mind to run out there after her, tackle her, press his face into her chest, and sob, too, but she was already driving away in her Lexus before he could.

Now he was back, and wondering if she'd been right.

He shouldn't be here.

They'd let him back in, but that didn't mean he belonged here.

Even Dr. Truby had seemed worried, and Dr. Truby had been, from the beginning, all about self-empowerment and complete recovery.

"You may . . . begin . . . to have frightening recall," he'd said. "Please phone me if you do."

The last time Craig had met with the shrink it was a hundred degrees outside and the air-conditioning in the office was blowing in the smell of an overheated refrigerator. He knew Dr. Truby was about to ask him, for the ten millionth time, the same question: "Tell me, Craig, anything you can recall at this time about the accident."

Craig had looked down at his lap, as he always did, and then rubbed his eyes where he saw, against his lids, a woman's face.

Unfamiliar.

It was round as a moon. She was speaking to him in a foreign language, but somehow he understood what she was saying: Don't move the girl.

Craig looked up at Dr. Truby. He said, "I think there was a lady there."

Dr. Truby nodded. His head was shaved, and so perfectly shaped it seemed to have been made with the idea of shaving it in mind.

"And this lady . . . ?" Dr. Truby moved his hand through the air, churning it in his own direction.

Craig thought for a minute, and then said, "She told me not to move Nicole."

"And then you . . . ?" Again, the paddling. Pulling him in.

Craig had looked down at Dr. Truby's shoes. Slippers? Loafers. They looked soft and suede, not like something you could wear to walk on pavement.

"And then . . . ?"

But Craig had no words for what came after that.

After that, there were hands on him. A blow to the stomach. His head and ears were ringing. And water. Was he being baptized? There was a needle in his arm. A man in a blue uniform shouting at some flashing lights. Someone kicked him hard in the a.s.s, and then he was stumbling. And all the time, he was trying to ask about Nicole, but the words came out so garbled he knew no one could understand him. Someone wanted to know if Craig knew his own name, and where he was, but when Craig tried to form, in his mouth, the shape of the words of her name, someone said, in a soothing voice, "You shouldn't think about that now. You should rest. Nicole is dead."

"I don't know," Craig had said, and Dr. Truby, who must have been waiting for a long time for Craig to say more than this, leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and sighed.

9.

Mira always started the semester with the story of Peter Plogojowitz: In 1725, in the village of Kisilova, a peasant by the name of Peter Plogojowitz died of natural causes and was buried. Within a week, nine other villagers died, and Peter Plogojowitz appeared to his wife demanding his shoes. It was widely a.s.sumed that the dead man was "walking," and that he was the cause of the other deaths, so his grave was dug up and the corpse examined.

Except for his nose having fallen away, Peter looked as good as new in his grave. His hair and beard and nails had grown. His skin had peeled away, and what looked like new, pink skin had grown beneath it. There was fresh blood in his mouth. The crowd that had gathered at the grave became enraged. A stake was driven through the peasant's heart, whereupon he shouted, bled from the ears and mouth, and acquired an erection. After that, the corpse was burned and the ashes scattered.

Peter Plogojowitz walked no more.

Several of the girls in the back row covered their mouths. One, a dark-haired beauty with nearly translucent skin, covered her whole face. A couple of boys began to laugh nervously, and some others chuckled loudly. A few of the more serious students were taking notes. Perry Edwards, the only student whose name Mira knew already, since she'd had to sign his override form, was nodding, looking at her so fixedly she felt as if he were looking through her.

"So," Mira said. She clapped her hands together, turned to the blackboard, and picked up a piece of chalk. Holding it up, she said to the cla.s.s, "What do we learn from this anecdote about the Serbian burial practices and superst.i.tions of the eighteenth century?"

She wrote the number one on the board, a pale wisp of white dust rising from it.

Usually, no one had a word to say at this point. Perry Edwards had his hand raised.

"Yes?" she said, nodding at him to speak.

"Apparently they believed that a dead person could get out of his grave and back into it."

Mira nodded. Next to the number one, she wrote, The dead can escape and reenter their graves.

"Two?" she asked.

There was a moment of polite silence before, again, Perry Edwards raised his hand.

"The dead who can do this don't decay?" he asked.

Mira wrote on the board: 2. The "walking dead" do not decay as expected.

"And they cause other deaths," Perry said without raising his hand this time. As Mira was writing this down, he continued. "They drink blood? They can be killed a second time, more completely?"

Mira wrote these down as well, and then: 6. These creatures are s.e.xual in nature.

As Mira knew they would, the girls in the back with their hands over their mouths giggled, and the boys who'd chuckled before chuckled again. But Perry Edwards just held her gaze so long that, finally, Mira was the one who had to look away.

10.

Craig tried hard not to stare at Nicole Werner while she studied, but the way her hair slipped over her face when she cast her eyes down on her History of the English Language textbook, and the way the highlighter in her right hand flashed over the pages, and even the way her foot seemed to tap out some rhythm for four or five seconds, then stop, was so much more riveting than the book he was reading that he couldn't look away.

If she knew he was watching her, she was pretending she didn't.

Perry had found a study room for them in the bas.e.m.e.nt of G.o.dwin Hall-an old lounge tucked away behind a storage room, with dust-covered chairs and maroon carpeting. There was a bra.s.s plaque on the door that read, THE ALICE MEYERS MEMORIAL STUDENT STUDY ROOM, and although it looked like no one had used the room for years for anything but furtive s.e.x (empty condom wrappers were stuffed into a gla.s.s vase that was otherwise full of plastic flowers), it was really a very comfortable room.

There were no light bulbs in any of the lamps, so they'd brought down their own desk lamps from their dorm rooms and set them up on the end tables. The dim, focused light was intense and relaxing at the same time. Perry sat at a table in the corner, one elbow on each side of an open book. Nicole was curled up in a cushioned chair with a battered ottoman. Her roommate, Josie Reilly, sat on the floor with her back to the wall, legs folded in the lotus position as if her body were made of clay. Craig lay on the couch, watching Nicole over the edge of his book as she flipped a page and bit her lower lip.

He had thought a study group would entail talking. Quizzing. The sharing of test-taking tips. Maybe flash cards. He'd never been in a study group before so had no way of knowing that it meant, simply, a circle of companionable silence, concentration-except for the occasional yawn, the clearing of a throat, Nicole's dainty sneeze, Josie's distracted "Bless you." It crossed Craig's mind, when the silence grew so thick that you could have reached into the air and grabbed a handful of it, to crack a joke. But he didn't know what the joke would be. It would have to be incredibly funny to warrant the interruption, and he wasn't really that funny unless there was something to be made fun of, and nothing here seemed stupid enough to make the kind of joke Craig usually got a good laugh out of-the kind of comment that got him in trouble in high school or had Scar snorting chocolate milk out of his nose at the dinner table.

Now and then, their desk lamps flickered. (Maybe one of the washing machines in the laundry room next to the lounge had started its spin cycle and sucked up all the electricity in the bas.e.m.e.nt for a minute.) Briefly, Nicole looked up to the ceiling, and then back down. She highlighted something else on the page she was reading, and then she took the pencil out of the place in her hair where she'd tucked it and wrote something quickly in the margin.

"You make me sick!"

Randa Matheson had screamed that at him in her parents' bedroom one afternoon after school. She was naked, standing at the edge of the bed, screaming down at Craig, who was lying on his back with a hard-on, wondering, What? What? Where did this come from?

"Huh?" he finally managed to ask.

"I said," Randa shouted, "that you make me sick." She enunciated each word as if she were shouting to a foreigner, a r.e.t.a.r.d. Her dark eyes were narrowed, and her lips, bloated and red from all the kissing they'd been doing, made her look exactly like her mother, whose face was well known to anyone who watched reruns of a very stupid sitcom from the late seventies.

"What? What did I do?"

"Just forget it," Randa snapped, pulling her thong up over her narrow hips, hiding her perfectly trimmed p.u.s.s.y, which made his hard-on throb even harder, before she turned and ran from the room, holding her jeans and her shirt against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Behind her, the door slammed so loudly Craig flinched and closed his eyes, thinking for a split second that maybe he'd been shot.

After a while, he got dressed and let himself out.

The Mathesons' house was immaculate, and enormous, and he got lost on his way out, finding himself in some kind of sunroom with no door. Randa herself was nowhere to be seen.

For months afterward Craig wondered what he had done, although it didn't really occur to him to call Randa or to stop her in the hallway and ask. The day after the "incident," his mother pulled her car up next to Randa's empty Jeep in the parking lot of the Trading Post. Craig slumped down in the pa.s.senger seat. "What's the matter with you?" his mother asked. Luckily, she realized then that she'd forgotten her purse, so they didn't stay.

But it was impossible not to cross Randa's path. In school. At parties. At the video store. At first, Craig tried not to look directly at her, hoping to avoid her eyes, but after a while it became clear that she was treating him as if he were invisible, so it wouldn't have mattered what he did anyway. In the stairwell one day between cla.s.ses, just the two of them pa.s.sed each other (she was going up, he was going down) and, stupidly, he sputtered out, "Hey."

She looked right at him, seeming to register nothing. Not the vaguest hint of an expression crossed her face. She was looking through his head, seeing nothing but the wall behind it.

He tried, now and then, to think about what could have happened, what he'd done or failed to do.

They'd been kissing, he was clear on that, and the shirts had come off, and then the jeans-around their thighs at first, and then around their ankles, and then on the floor-and then he'd eased that thong down her silky legs while she ran her fingers over one of his eyebrows. He'd stood up and pulled his own underwear off, and she'd sort of propped herself up to look at him, and asked, "Do you like me?"

Craig was fairly certain that his answer to the question had been yes (why wouldn't it have been?), but the question was followed by a long, fast series of other questions, and he was less sure of what his answers to those had been.

Do you think Mich.e.l.le has better t.i.ts, who's the skinniest girl you ever had s.e.x with, have you ever had s.e.x with Melody, when did you first notice me, is Tess the one you really want, are you using me to get to her, did you just come over here this afternoon because you were hoping you were going to have s.e.x with me?

Craig had gotten back into bed beside her and lay there with his throbbing hard-on, until finally he interrupted her, and said, "Are we going to f.u.c.k or what?" And that's when she'd leapt out of bed and screamed at him.

Craig had hardly been within a few feet of a girl since that day with Randa. The whole summer after graduation had pa.s.sed without a flirtation, let alone a kiss.

Now he closed his eyes and let the image of Nicole Werner-only two feet away from him-linger on his lids for a minute. He tried to picture her in Fredonia, carrying on a conversation with someone's actress turned mother or millionaire father strutting around in a suit with nowhere to go but the Trading Post.

No.

He could not picture Nicole Werner anywhere he'd ever been before this minute.

Nicole Werner belonged here, now, in the lounge of G.o.dwin Honors College.