The Raising (12 page)
So did half the girls on this campus, especially the sorority girls.
“Yes,” Mira said again, nodding, and handed it back to him.
She continued to nod as she tried to think carefully about what to say next. She’d made mistakes with students in the past, given them too much encouragement. She swallowed, and inhaled, and then said, “You’ve been through a terrible trauma. I understand that. I think, for that reason, this is not a class you should be taking right now. The material is too
relevant
, perhaps, at the moment, and it might be”—she used her hands to try to soften the word before it came out of her mouth, opening the hands on her lap—“
suggesting
things to you.”
Perry Edwards nodded, but he didn’t look away. He seemed to have expected her to say this, and was neither disappointed nor insulted.
He inhaled, bit his lower lip for a second, and then he said, “I understand what you’re saying. But I’ve had this photograph since May. And there are other things.” He looked up to the ceiling, as if searching for the words, and then back at Mira. “Professor Polson, Nicole’s
here.
She’s still on this campus. I was here all summer. I’ve
seen
her.”
Mira sat back in her chair, a kind of recoiling she immediately regretted. The tone of his voice. It was so
certain.
Perry Edwards reached into his backpack again, took out another envelope, and out of it, a second photograph—this one of a slender girl with shoulder-length brown hair emerging from one of the sorority houses on the Row. She was glaring at the camera. She looked ready to sneer an obscenity at the photographer, or raise her middle finger. He held the newspaper—the senior portrait of the blond Nicole Werner—up next to the photograph.
Mira looked from one to the other, and said, “I do see the resemblance, Perry, but, surely, you—”
“I know,” he said. “I know these girls all look alike to people who don’t know them. But, Professor Polson, I went all through school with Nicole Werner. We grew up in the same town. We went to Sunday school together. We were confirmed at the same church. I know what she looks like
.
I see her. She’s
here.
She’s dyed her hair, but it’s her. I don’t know how. And I didn’t expect anyone to tell me anything except that I’m crazy if I told them, so I haven’t told anyone. But, I thought—well, I read your book,
Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins
.” He pronounced the words carefully, as if Mira might not recognize the title of her own book. “And,” he said, “I thought maybe, if you’re working on a new book, a book like it, what could be better than if you had a campus equivalent of
this
?” he held up Melvin’s book again, open to the photograph of Etta. “I mean, even if you just think we’re crazy—”
“
We
?” Mira asked.
“That’s the thing,” Perry said. “There are two other guys who’ve seen her. Lucas Schiff. He’s a fifth-year senior. He was our resident advisor last year—”
“I know Lucas,” Mira said. Lucas Schiff. He’d been in her first-year seminar her first year on campus. He’d been busted for possession of a controlled substance then, but had gotten off on some technicality. He was one of those politically active kids who used their political activism as an excuse not to bathe, and to smoke a lot of dope.
“And also Patrick Wright.”
“I know Patrick, too,” Mira said. Patrick was clean-cut, from a small town in the northern part of the state. Nothing like Lucas Schiff. “He’s a junior?”
“Yeah,” Perry said. “He and Lucas—they’ve both been with her since she died.”
“Excuse me?” Mira asked.
“They’ve had sex with her.”
Mira put her hand over her mouth. She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. Perry seemed not to notice the gesture. He went on.
“What my point is, Professor Polson. I mean, couldn’t you, maybe, write, say, something comparing Etta to—”
“Nicole Werner?”
“Yeah. I mean,
if
you’re working on another book. You wouldn’t have to believe us. Melvin doesn’t believe what the villagers are saying about Etta. He just listens. He analyzes.”
Mira looked at Perry Edwards carefully. For a crazy second she wondered if he’d spoken to the dean of the Honors College about her, if he somehow knew she hadn’t even
begun
the book she was going to have to have
published
in the next eighteen months. That she hadn’t even come up with a solid
idea
for the book.
No, of course not. He was just a bright, passionate, or maybe crazy kid. She inhaled. She said, “Why, Perry? Why do you want me to do that? What’s the point?”
“I need your help. There’s something here. I need”—something seemed to catch in his throat, and he swallowed—“a grown-up.”
“Perry,” Mira said, and then stopped, literally biting her tongue.
Although, later, she would try to tell herself that it was this last appeal to her as a “grown-up” that had brought the two of them together in their search for Nicole, Mira could already see, in her office that September afternoon, the book, published by a major university press, in her hands, the bright, smiling senior portrait of Nicole Werner on the cover, her own name underneath that photo, and the letter to the dean from the department chair, and the recommendation it expressed for her tenure.
What, at this point, did she have to lose? Did she have any better ideas?
“Professor Polson?” Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.
She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, “Okay.”
I
t was one of those soul-snatching, deadly dull days at the Chamber Music Society. The offices buzzed with it, literally. A fly caught between the window and the screen in Shelly’s office was tossing itself between the two barriers with exhausted fury. She watched it from her desk, its electrical droning competing with the sound of her dozing computer.
It was the end of September, and the weather was making a concerted effort to change. The sky was closer to lavender now than blue, and there was a smell of leaves sweetening, softening, giving way, shifting into a lower gear. As always, the change from late summer to actual autumn brought back for Shelly every September of her life—the dust swirling around her kindergarten desk, bobby socks and shiny shoes, straight through to her last year of graduate school, lugging an expensive textbook back from the store to her little efficiency over the Beer Depot—along with all the Septembers since then, the years passing one by one outside the window of her office at the university’s Chamber Music Society.
What, she wondered, was September like for people who didn’t work at an educational institution? Did the melancholy reminiscence of September simply skip them?
If so, Shelly thought, it would be a little like skipping one of the Twelve Trials of Hercules: you’d still be stuck with the Christmas despair, but you wouldn’t have to relive the end of every summer vacation of your life, that sad realization of your own mortality, year after year, as the kids swarmed back into your world with their freshly sharpened pencils and new sweaters.
No, she supposed, it wouldn’t be like that. They’d all gotten that calendar engrained on their psyches so early. No one escaped the mortality of autumn.
“God, you depress me,” her ex-husband used to say, and said for the last time on the day she left him, shaking his head sadly—and then, as if some switch had been flipped in his head, charging after her, fists whirling around them both as she stumbled out the back door, and he yanked her back in by her hair.
“S
helly?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think, you know, since we’re all caught up, I—”
“—could leave early?” Shelly tried not to let out an exasperated sigh.
“Yeah,” Josie said. She was twirling a strand of silken black hair around her index finger. She had her face tilted at a right angle, like a sparrow. “It’s Greek Week.”
“You’re in a sorority?” Shelly asked.
“Yeah,” Josie said.
“What house?”
“Omega Theta Tau.” Josie pronounced each Greek letter with irrepressible pride.
Shelly turned around in her chair to face Josie fully in the doorway, and asked, “Isn’t that the sorority Nicole Werner was in, the girl who was killed?”
Josie began to nod slowly and melodramatically with her eyes half closed.
“Did you know her?” Shelly asked. How was it possible that she’d not only not known that Josie was in a sorority but in Nicole Werner’s sorority?
Josie shrugged. She said, “We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time. It’s not one of the bigger houses—sixty girls—so, yeah, sure, I knew her. It was a huge shock.”
Shelly stood up. She said, “Did you know—?”
“—that you were in a sorority?” Josie brightened. “Yeah. You were wearing that Eta Lambda T-shirt the day I ran into you outside the gym, so I looked you up on their Plaque Wall when I was over there for a party, and found your name! That’s so cool. I mean, I’m sure it used to be a better house back when you—”
“No,” Shelly said, shaking her head, dismayed to feel rising the familiar defensive self-consciousness related to sororities you’d fully expect a lesbian in her forties to be far beyond by now. “No. That’s not what I meant. Did you know I was at the scene of the accident? Nicole Werner’s? I was the first one there.”
Josie bit her lip, and seemed to look upward, to scan her brain for this bit of information. Not finding it, she said, “No,” and then, eyes widening, “That was
you.
The middle-aged lady, the one who didn’t give directions to 911?”
Shelly felt her cheeks redden, burning, and her breath escaping her. She shook her head. She said, “No. I gave perfect directions. I was there when the ambulances arrived. I stayed until they took those kids—”
“Jeeze,” Josie said. “That must’ve been awful. I had no idea.”
Of course she hadn’t.
How could she have?
Shelly’s name had never even made the papers, where not a single detail of the accident had been reported correctly—except, apparently, that Shelly was middle-aged.
“They got the facts wrong,” Shelly said. “I was there when they took the kids away.”
“Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, this is a bummer. Would you mind, can I ask you, you know—”
“If you can leave early?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Shelly said, and in less than a second, the girl was gone. Shelly stood, looking at the threshold, empty now, and listening to the sound of the front door of the Chamber Music Society opening, then closing, and then the sound of Josie tapping down the stairwell in her black flats. Then, she sat back down, opened one of her desk drawers, and pulled out the file with Josie’s name on it.
Her résumé, her application—Shelly scanned them for Omega Theta Tau. These girls never left their sorority affiliations off their applications. They were so impressed with themselves that they assumed everyone else would be, too.
But it wasn’t on any of the paperwork, and Josie had given only her home address in Grosse Isle as her contact information.
Grosse Isle?
How had Shelly missed
that
detail?
The girl was getting financial aid for the “work” she was doing at the Chamber Music Society. Was there anybody in Grosse Isle who needed work-study funds to attend college? When Shelly herself had been at the university, one of her sorority sisters from Grosse Isle had invited her home for a weekend. The house the girl had grown up in had a helicopter landing pad, and her father’s helicopter, on its roof.
Well, of course, Shelly had no way of knowing the Reillys’ situation, even if they were from the wealthiest suburb in the state. A bitter divorce could have accounted for the need, or a family illness, or parental job loss. It wasn’t Shelly’s job to assess the candidate’s financial situation. That assessment was sent over from the Financial Aid Office to the dean of the music school, who gave it his stamp of approval.
Shelly put the file back in her drawer and looked out the window. A white butterfly, seeming to try to land on the windowsill, was being jostled around by the breeze, buffeted away from the ledge each time it got close.
Shelly watched, feeling nervous for it—unable to look away and hating the spectacle of it. Her eyes focused on it, as her thoughts fluttered around:
Omega Theta Tau.
Those were the Virgin Sisters. Theirs was the house on campus that supposedly advocated chastity and sobriety. The press had made a big deal of that with Nicole Werner. It was another stratum of the tragedy, that she’d been such a good girl.
Back in Shelly’s day, the eighties, there’d been a bit more cynicism than that—strange as it was to think that Americans were getting
more
innocent as time passed.
Back then, Omega Theta Tau had been the sorority of choice for the girls who wanted to go into politics, or marry into politics. It was the keep-your-record-clean sorority. Shelly was fairly certain the governor’s wife had been an OTT here. And who knew who else? These more powerful houses had connections that crisscrossed the nation’s most important people like telephone lines. Maybe every female judge in the nation had been one. Probably half the female lawyers with ambitions to be judges—or senators, or congresswomen—had been. Most likely some huge percentage of the senators’ and congressmen’s wives in the country could claim Omega Theta Tau sisterhood, and who knew how many First Ladies.
Shelly’s sorority, Eta Lambda, had been nothing like that. Hers had been known as the Friendly Girl’s Sorority. In other words, it was not as cool as the other houses; its sisters not as popular, not as pretty.
You might think that would have made it an easier house to live in—with more laid-back sisters, less pressure of all varieties—but you would be wrong. Being on the lower rung of the Greek ladder made the Eta Lambda sisters even more competitive, even more ruthless, crueler. Shelly’s most vivid memory of those days was of coming down the stairs in her formal gown on Pledge Night, and watching as the girls already assembled below in their own gowns made eye contact with one another and then, in unison, it seemed, rushed their hands to their mouths to stifle their laughter.
Shelly’s heart had begun to pound so hard she was afraid she would pass out. To this day she had no idea what they were laughing about. Maybe she looked fat, or her gown was too revealing. It could have been her hair, her makeup, her shoes, her little sequined purse. She would never know. She wasn’t intended to know. There was not a single girl among all those sisters who would have been kind enough to tell her, or to reassure her. So Shelly simply continued to descend the stairs (what else could she do?) and then to move through Pledge Night in a cloud of shame, dashing away from the activities every chance she got to check herself in the bathroom mirror: Her teeth, the blond hair over her lip, her eyebrows. She sniffed her underarms. She sniffed her
underpants.
She checked the front of her dress, the back of her dress, her bra straps, and the worst thing of all was that she couldn’t
find
it. Whatever it was, this thing they could all see on her, she was blind to it.
Shelly had moved through the next two years as an Eta Lambda
trying
to find it, to see it, to figure it out, unable to and determined, at the same time, to stay and face it, whatever it was, day after day after day.
A complete waste of youthful energy and time, she knew now—although, in truth, she’d made a couple of lifelong friends through Eta Lambda, friends who’d seen her through her graduation, graduate school, an abusive marriage, and a divorce, and who had then accepted her into the new life she’d taken on as a lesbian.
There was a special kind of loyalty born of that strange sisterhood. It wasn’t blood. But it was like
some
kind of precious body fluid, spent and shared between them.
T
he butterfly seemed stuck to the windowsill by the force of the breeze now.
Really, it was unbearable to watch. The breeze, which would have been nearly undetectable to anything not made of tissue paper and thread, as that butterfly was, was crushing it into the bricks. Shelly watched for a few more seconds and then decided she had no choice but to open the window and let it in. Luckily she worked in one of the few buildings left on campus that had windows that could actually be opened, although she rarely did so, and she had to push hard and then hold the heavy pane up with one hand while attempting to gently pluck the butterfly up with the other.
She got it. She could have sworn she felt its heart beat (atomic whispering, and dusty little particles of time and terror) and
she
felt terrified, too, trying to shake it off her fingers and onto her desk, where it lay motionless (had she killed it, had she
killed
it?)
She was certain, then, that she’d crushed it, scared it to death, injured it past fixing, but after a few seconds the butterfly fluttered its wings, and then it rose into the air, and Shelly stood back, out of its way, as it flew past her and through her office to the door, and then into the outer offices, where it zigzagged from wall to wall, until she opened the office door, and it flew down the stairwell, to the propped-open front door, and disappeared back into the world.