The Raising (34 page)

67

F
rom the Waiting Mortuary, Professor Polson’s friend Kurt took them into a hallway lined with doors.

There were numbers nailed to the doors, but the numbers seemed random. Room 3 was adjacent to 11. Room 1 seemed to be missing altogether. Tacked to the door of Room 4 was a photograph of a white cat standing beside a blue mailbox. Perry wondered about that photo, in a place where there were no others, what the significance of that could be, when someone in a pale green shower cap and matching scrubs opened the door and looked out, white light pouring on him (or her), before shutting it again.

Everything in the hallway was bright, and cold. It wasn’t the outdoor, winter kind of cold, but a dry, artificial cold, as if freeze-dried air were being poured down from the ceiling by the fluorescent lights.

When they reached the end of the hallway, Kurt stopped, turned, and held up a hand.

“Thank you for being so quiet,” he said. “We do not have them today, but this is where sometimes a parent or a wife or husband must come to identify a deceased person. It is not like in the TV show, exactly, because we do not bring them into a room and take off a sheet and show them their loved one’s face. Instead they are shown the effects. Wallet, jewelry, et cetera, and then a Polaroid photograph of the deceased’s face. They know, or do not know, and if they are not sure, they must see. If they are sure, but still wish to see the body, they may request. It is easier, the Polaroid. Luckily for us, today, any families have already been and gone.”

Nicole. Nicole had been here, of course, and it had been Josie Reilly who’d come to identify her—and although it was utterly impossible to imagine Josie Reilly clipping down this hallway in some pair of cute little shoes, it was even harder to imagine Nicole in this cold brilliance, laid out in whatever manner they laid out the dead, which he was about to see, and suddenly did not want to.

But wasn’t this one of the reasons he’d taken this class? To see for himself?

He felt exhausted, dizzy, as if a grave mistake had been made by someone he used to be and no longer was. He put a hand to his head.

Professor Polson, standing off to the side of the hallway, looked over and raised her eyebrows as if to ask him,
you okay?
But she seemed preoccupied, too, looking at Perry as she also held her cell phone to her ear. After a few seconds, she looked at it in the palm of her hand, and then she seemed to be scrolling through her messages, or her address book. The fluorescent light turned her hair to a reddish gleaming that Perry had never quite noticed before. He watched her until he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Karess was staring at him, again, staring at Professor Polson.

“Today,” Kurt said, “is an autopsy, but it is not yet to begin. I am taking you to autopsy room, where there is one body, which you will see it. This is not someone who has been disfigured, but will look typical of a corpse who has died by strangulation, because it is believed he has hanged himself. If you will faint, or be disturbed, you might wish to not.”

Kurt nodded solemnly then, as if they’d all understood what he meant, and then, whether they did or not, they followed him into Room 42—all except Professor Polson, who was again holding her cell phone to her ear, seeming to be trying to get a connection, which Perry thought pretty unlikely, deep in this basement, a place out of which he imagined very few cell phone calls were intended to be made or received.

“We shall proceed,” Kurt said, “four people at a time. You will wear booties, cap, and gown.” He pointed to a doorless locker where the mint green garb was hanging on hooks, and he shrugged. “We have only so many clothes.” He made
clothes
a two-syllable word, and tapped four students—one of them Karess—on the shoulder, pointing toward the locker. “You must wear such cloth-es when there is a body.”

Karess looked backward then, directly into Perry’s eyes, seeming to be asking for some kind of guidance.

Stupidly, apologetically, Perry smiled frozenly, and she looked away. Her new friend Brett Barber was another one of the four included in the first group, and he leaned over and whispered something into Karess’s hair. Perry guessed it was a bad joke when he saw Karess lift a shoulder as if to block Brett from saying anything else—a flinch—and then she was stripping off her coat and her ratty, lovely sweater, bearing her long, thin arms for the surgical scrubs, and sliding the pale green of them over her body.

68

M
ira couldn’t figure out how to turn up the volume on the cell phone she’d bought to replace the one Clark had taken with him when he left. It was a cheaper model, but it had even more buttons and games and gadgets than the older, more expensive one.

During Kurt’s spiel about the autopsy room, and while the first group of students were putting on their surgical booties and gowns, Mira had noticed a new voice mail—the little cartoon envelope on her cell phone window—although she’d never heard the phone ring. She called for her messages immediately, worried it might be Jeff, that the twins needed something, or he needed to know something, or something worse. (Andy had taken to crawling on the back of the couch, and Mira had taken on terrors that he’d fall off and hit his head on the window behind it.)

At some point, Mira had stopped expecting Clark to call, and she figured that if he came home while Jeff was there, Jeff could handle it. Jeff was far too affable to pose any threat to Clark.

But the message wasn’t from Jeff. The call was from the college (Mira recognized the first three numbers on the caller ID as the university’s prefix), but she could barely hear the message, and couldn’t figure out how to turn the volume up. It seemed miraculous that she was managing to get any reception at all, there in the morgue, deep in the basement of the hospital—all cinderblocks and heavy fire doors—but reception didn’t do any good if she couldn’t make out the message:

“Mira, this is . . .” (Dean Fleming?) “. . . after all . . . within the next couple of . . . absolutely imperative that . . .”

It surprised and alarmed her that he already had this new phone number. She’d left it with his secretary only two hours earlier. She didn’t recall his ever dialing her cell or home number before, always casually leaving his messages on the voice mail in her office, or scrawled on sticky notes and left on her office door.

Mira hit Return Call, but as soon as she did, the phone went dead in her hand.

Perry Edwards walked past then, made eye contact with her, and Mira flipped her phone closed, held up a hand for him to stop.

“Perry,” she said. “I’ve got a call I’ve got to return. I’m going out to the alley, or maybe up to street level if I have to, can you—?”

He was nodding before she’d had her request articulated. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll come get you if we need you.”

“Yeah,” Mira said. “If, God forbid, someone faints, or—?”

“We’ll be fine,” Perry said. “You go ahead.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, hurrying out. He was such a good kid. Mira had thought they’d stopped making his kind around 1962.

She’d had an urge to kiss his cheek before she hurried out with her phone, the way she might have kissed Andy or Matty’s cheeks, but she didn’t. She just said thank you again for a fourth time, long after he could have heard her.

69

“W
hy are you playing games with him?”

“What games?” Nicole asked.

“What
games?
”

She was pulling on a green silk tank top, no bra, and let it linger over her breasts before she covered them, and then she turned her back on Perry.

It was exactly the cream white expanse he’d imagined with his eyes closed and his hands running down it, but he winced and turned his face away when he realized what it reminded him of: Mary. Her backless prom dress. Slow-dancing to some dumb song while she whispered to him about how in love with him she was. His hand on the bare expanse of soft skin between her shoulder blades.

Nicole came over, wearing the tank top and nothing else, and sat down on the bed beside him. She ran her hand up his chest, to his neck, let it linger there, and then lifted it to his cheek, and then up to his eyes, the lids of which she gently closed with her fingertips before leaning over him and kissing them.

Perry felt the staticky gossamer wisps of her blond hair around his face, her breath (licorice, Mountain Dew) near his ear. She ran her hand down his side, to his hip. She moved her mouth down to his Adam’s apple, kissed it, licked it, and then bit it hard enough to make him flinch, and then she sat back and laughed.

He opened his eyes. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“No,” Nicole said. “You didn’t answer
mine
.”

Perry put a hand over his eyes so he was no longer looking at the delicate curve of her breast beneath the silk top, or the cool shoulder bone, the startlingly perfect flesh of her upper arm. If he looked further, he could have found the perfect golden triangle between her legs. Who was he, to be doing this with her? Who was
she
?

With a hand over his eyes, he said, “Craig thinks you’re a virgin, Nicole. He thinks you’re a Christian, and some kind of white-bread Midwestern milkmaid.”

“Well, he thinks you’re a great roommate, and a true-blue Boy Scout. He thinks
you’re
a virgin, too.”

“Yeah. I’m a shithead, and I admit it. A shitty friend. A shitty roommate. But he just tolerates me. He thinks he’s going to
marry
you. He thinks you’re the future mother of his children. Pure angel. He thinks it’s his duty to preserve your innocence in this filthy world.”

Nicole laughed again, and said, “Well, I’d say he’s the one playing the game, in that case.”

Perry waited for her to go on. She didn’t, and eventually he asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, why does he want to believe those things? And if that’s what he wants to believe, why shouldn’t he?”

“Because it’s not true.”

“But he doesn’t want the truth. The kind of girl he thinks I am, he’s never going to find anyway.”

“So, you just figured out what kind of girl Craig wanted, and decided you’d pretend to be that?”

“Isn’t that what everyone does?”

“What? No!”

“No? What was all that class-ring crap with you and Mary about? Seems to me like you had her game all figured out, and played it pretty well for a nice long time.”

Perry sat up. He put his hand to his Adam’s apple, where she’d bit him. It was damp, and when he looked at his fingers, he was surprised to see a drop of blood on them. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “
Mary’s
the one who had
me
figured out.”

“No,” Nicole said, shaking her head, still smiling. “You knew she wanted that whole Eagle Scout thing. Small-town boy. Good daddy someday. Gonna work at the Edwards and Son Lawn Mower Shop in Bad Axe and tinker with the minivan on weekends. She thought all that ambition—the scholarships and the grades and the SAT scores—was all about making sure you could buy her a nice little house on the outskirts of town and an engagement ring a year or two after you got your high school diploma, and started with the babies. And that game worked out really well for
you
, didn’t it? You had the sweetest girl at Bad Axe High for three years, and then you ditched her. Did you ever once tell her the real story—that your actual plan was to go to a fancy university, maybe study something like philosophy? Go to school for about ten more years, and then maybe travel around Europe with a backpack for a few more? Jesus Christ. Poor Mary must still be lying awake at night wondering what the hell happened, who the hell she was actually dating all that time she was dating you.”

Perry’s heart was pounding—not just in his chest, but in his throat, throbbing against his Adam’s apple. It was pounding in his wrists, his legs, his temples. He was out of the bed without knowing he’d stood up, looking down at Nicole, who was looking up at him, still with that fucking little smile—and he wanted to say something horrible to her, something that would change her life, something that would scare her, something—but he couldn’t. He never would. Looking down on her smiling up at him, he couldn’t even maintain the desire to say it.

Jesus.

No wonder Craig was such a dupe and he himself was such a chump, a backstabber, a lying asshole.

She was
so
beautiful. Plato’s ideal, as he now knew from Philosophy 101. She always had been, but now he could see it for what it was, even knowing that it wasn’t what it appeared to be:

Her face was tilted sweetly, like that of a sparrow or a kitten, and she wore that ludicrously girlish smile, and Perry was suddenly reminded of what must have been her second-grade school photograph. Pigtails. No front teeth. Frozen in black and white wearing a little bit of lace around her collar and a silver cross, and then he remembered with perfect clarity sitting behind her in fourth grade, Mr. Garrison’s class. They were talking about sanitation, and Nicole had raised her hand and asked Mr. Garrison, “What
happens
to the poop after it’s flushed down the toilet?” and all the other kids, especially the boys, were doubled over with laughter at the sound of the word
poop
coming out of the pretty little mouth of Nicole Werner, who turned around to Perry then, horrified, blushing two bright spots on her cheeks, looking straight at him, as if for help, and Perry was incredibly relieved that he’d reacted, himself, too slowly to laugh, and was able now to look her in the eyes, shrug his shoulders, as if to say,
Who knows what these idiots are laughing about? Who cares?

Now he was looking at her, lying half-naked on his bed, the strap of her silky top slipping over her beautiful, womanly shoulder, and Perry couldn’t open his mouth, but he knew by her expression that he was asking her with his eyes to tell him,
Is that who I was? Is that who Mary thought I was? Is that what I did? How did you know when even I didn’t?

Instead of answering, she stood, gathered her jeans off the floor, slid them up, and he watched, remembering only a few months before, when he’d found her standing on the front steps of Godwin Hall wearing that bulky sweatshirt—homesick and sad—and how she’d put her head on his shoulder and cried, and the helpless way his mouth had opened, and nothing had come out. Had she really been homesick and sad? Or had that, too, been some kind of test?

Now Nicole put her arms on either side of his face and kissed him (a quick, sweet, nonsexual parting kiss) and said, “Hey. It’s okay. We come from the same place, Perry. I know who you are, and you know who I am. I’ll see you around, okay?”