The Raising (44 page)
“I
saw her, too,” Perry said, holding out the brush to them. “At the same time. Here. I saw her with my own eyes.”
“Perry,” Professor Polson said, taking a step toward him. “What do you mean?”
“I went back there. I left the car, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled through the Barbers’ backyard, and I found a window with a little crack in the curtain, and I put my hands up to it—”
At first, he could see almost nothing through that crack, but every other window had a shade pulled so tight he could see nothing at all through those. So he’d stood there with his hands pressed against the pane long after his hands had gone numb, staring at a little place between what appeared to be a china hutch and the dangling chains of a cuckoo clock, watching the shadows come and go against it, listening to the muttering of voices, and a few high notes of laughter, but mostly serious-sounding voices.
Now and then Mrs. Werner passed before him—Perry recognized the gray-blue dress she’d been wearing, and then another female form: Mary? Constance?
There was a soft gray sweater.
There was what looked like a plaid skirt.
He saw one pair of female arms bearing what must have been Grouch in her arms, and a few times Mr. Werner came and went in a yellow shirt. Finally, Perry was about to leave. (What the hell am I doing? he’d thought.) The snow had soaked through his jacket all the way to his skin, and he realized that he was standing in the perfect place where, if one of the neighbors decided to turn on their porch light, he’d be illuminated for everyone to see, and there would be no way to get away except by scaling their picket fence, and then—
And then she was leaning over.
She was picking up something she’d dropped on the floor.
Her hair was the flaxen blond he remembered from elementary school—whispering around her face, curling around the curve of her upper arm.
Volleyball. Reaching up with that arm, to serve, to spike.
His bed.
She’d rolled over and swung it over his chest and said, “Craig would just die if he walked in here now.”
And he’d said into the nape of the neck he was staring at now, “And why does that make you laugh?”
And she’d laughed.
Now she laughed. Her familiar laugh. She managed to pick up whatever it was she’d dropped and stick it back into her flossy hair (a comb, a barrette), and just at that moment she turned to the window and fixed him with a look he also knew:
Hide and Seek in the Coxes’ backyard.
I see you.
Her lips were redder than he remembered, and her cheeks were flushed—not that different from the flush on the cheeks of her mother—and her eyes seem to flash in his direction, and she tilted back her head toward the ceiling, and when she laughed he could see her teeth brighten in the overhead light, and he could feel through his whole body the sharp stabbing pain of her laugh.
“A
re you fooling around with Perry or something?”
“What?”
“How many times have I passed you on the stairwell just as I’m headed up to the room, and when I get there Perry’s either asleep or has just left for the shower?”
“I was up there looking for you, Craig.”
They were standing in the stairwell, facing one another, and the late winter twilight from the one little window shone on the linoleum, casting the shadow of its diamond panes across Nicole’s pale feet.
She was wearing flip-flops. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere outside. Her toenails were painted pink. She rested her hand on the wooden rail and began to smooth it with her palm. Craig looked at the hand. Her fingernails were also pink, and the way she was touching that rail—recently varnished, it seemed, so that it shone, while still bearing under that gleaming shellac job all the nicks and scratches and carved initials of about a million students. He wanted to pull her hand away from the railing. Jesus, how many germs from how many hands was she touching as she touched it?
She licked her bottom lip, and suddenly that familiar little tic (when she was nervous or upset or about to cry) seemed almost obscene to him.
Her cheeks looked flushed against the pasty stairwell walls, and her lips were very red. Craig thought he could smell her, too, even though she was standing several feet from him, and it wasn’t her usual baby powder smell, or the smell of her flowery shampoo. She smelled, he thought, like sex.
He looked down again at her hand rubbing the railing, and had to stop himself from grabbing the hand, making her stop.
“I went up there to tell you I’ve got to do laundry tonight. Josie and I are picking out dresses for the Spring Event.”
“But you knew I wasn’t there. You knew I was at the lecture I was assigned to attend.”
(Awful: An old professor who mumbled into a microphone for over an hour about the Post-Copernican Double Bind and the epistemological consequences of the Cartesian cogito
—
whatever the hell all that was. The undergraduates had started to file out at the same moment, like a timer had gone off or something in the middle of the lecture, and Craig had followed them, as the professor droned on. He’d hurried back to the dorm, imagining the poor guy still going on and on back there for the benefit of the two graduate students in the front row.)
“I just happened to be back early. You had no reason to think I’d be back in the room yet.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know your schedule well enough, Craig.”
“But this isn’t the first time.”
“You’re saying you think I’m—?”
Was he? Was that what he was saying? Did he really think she was—what? Fucking Perry? Was he really looking at Nicole and thinking to himself that there was even the remotest possibility that all this sweet virginity business, the promise ring she wore on her left hand—the amber ring, he noticed now, was not on her right hand tonight, but she said she had to take it off sometimes when she did a lot of typing—that it was all a joke? That not only wasn’t she a virgin, but she was screwing his roommate?
Perry?
He knew Perry wasn’t crazy about him, but they’d been getting along a lot better lately. Perry, the Boy Scout. Even if Nicole would do it, Perry wouldn’t.
Still, there was one thing Craig remembered from the lecture that night, and it bothered him at the moment, just as Nicole took a step toward him, and he could see that her eyes were filled with tears, and her blazingly red lips were trembling, and he knew that she was about to put her head on his shoulder, or press her face into his chest—something about Kant. How the human mind orders reality subjectively. The geezer had called it the “relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge.”
It was the only thing Craig had bothered to write down.
It was stuck now in his mind like a disturbing image, a catchy song.
But when Nicole lifted her tear-streaked face to his, he shook his head and took her in his arms.
F
or miles hers seemed to be the only vehicle on the freeway. Now and then a truck passed in the opposite direction, its wipers sloshing snow off the windshield with what looked like elaborate, sloppy showgirl boas and sweeps. Shelly imagined the drivers in those cabs. They would be hypnotized by the sound of their own wipers. They might be listening to talk shows, to the voices of strangers phoning in from other corners of the country, asking personal questions or expressing heartfelt convictions. Those truckers might be nearing sleep, or jangled up with caffeine and those energy pills they sold at the counters of gas stations. The snow seemed frenzied, suicidal, tossing itself into her path, but Shelly herself wasn’t lulled into any kind of sleep by the sound of the wipers.
She was more awake and alert than she had ever been in her life.
And although she realized that, really, she’d spent all of her adult years alone (or maybe every year of her life since her brother had died and her parents had fallen apart), this was the first night that she was acutely, completely, aware of how utterly alone she was.
She thought of Jeremy.
She thought of the James Joyce story.
The snow falling on the living and the dead.
There was no sense listening to the radio.
It was just more living and dying.
A few more miles, and she passed a truck jackknifed in the center median, surrounded by orange flares, and could see, heading toward it on the opposite side of the freeway, a police car’s flashing red and blue lights beyond the heavy veil of what now could only be described as a nearly total whiteout.
She should get off the freeway. If she could have stood to listen to the radio, she knew that was the advice she would have heard. She had just seen a sign for a Motel 6, a Cracker Barrel, a Quik Mart (Exit 49), and although she did not recall ever having pulled over on this particular exit, or being at this particular town (Brighton), she took comfort in knowing exactly what it would be like.
How many hundreds of Motel 6’s had she experienced in her life?
How many Cracker Barrels? Quik Marts?
Unlike many of her fellow academics, Shelly actually went to these places. She stayed in them. Ate in them. Purchased her snacks and beverages in them. She loved them for the very things for which her colleagues disdained them. Their kitschy sameness, and the way the girls at the cash registers always said something like, “Hi there! What’s up? Find everything okay?”
Shelly could pull off at this exit she’d never pulled off at before in her life, step out of her car blindfolded, and find her way to everything. The laminated menu. The check-in counter. The Slushy machine.
No. She wouldn’t pull over yet. Not at Exit 49. She would keep driving, and she did. Exit 49 blurred right past, and then Shelly realized where she’d wanted to go all along—and although she hated other people who scrolled through the addresses in their cell phones while driving in perilous conditions, she did it herself until she’d found Ellen Graham’s phone number, and then was hearing herself ask this poor woman, this nearly perfect stranger, if it would be okay if she stopped by (in the dark, in a blizzard) for the second time in a day.
“A
re you okay, Perry?”
Perry nodded. Again, he had his hands against the fan, blowing its feeble attempt at heat on the dashboard of Jeff’s car. They should stop and buy him gloves, Mira thought, before leaving Bad Axe. There was a stillness to the air that made the snow seem even colder and more enveloping than it ordinarily would—and of course there was so little heat coming out of the vents that it seemed pointless to be idling in the funeral home parking lot, letting the car “warm up.” The car seemed only to grow colder as they sat in it, engine rumbling around them, interior lit up by the white electric Dientz Funeral Parlor sign, as if that pale light were lowering the temperature of everything it touched.
Still, Mira wasn’t ready to drive, and Perry had yet to speak since he’d said good-bye to Mr. Dientz.
W
hen he’d first come back from the Werners’, he’d spoken so quickly, been so flushed and breathless, that he reminded Mira of the ranting “preacher” who sometimes stood on a bench on campus and shouted at the students as they passed. On every campus she’d ever studied or visited, there had been such a preacher. Always a cheap-looking suit, a good haircut, eyes so pale they seemed to be lacking irises. What this particular ranting man said usually made sense, sentence to sentence, but no sense at all when put together: Lightning was striking cell phone towers. The producers of television shows were trying to read our minds. People in gray coats were hard to see, and could sneak up on you.
Perry had seemed to be trying to hold back that same ranting passion, bordering on mania, insanity, when he came back saying he’d seen Nicole.
He’d seen Nicole, he said.
He’d seen her teeth.
But there was also something about a cat, and Mrs. Werner’s hair—how it was more beautiful than it used to be—and a Hammond organ and a game of Hide and Seek, and then he just quit talking altogether, and Mira knew she had to get him out of there. She’d said to Mr. Dientz, “It’s time for us to leave.”
It had been a day full of shock and awe, and Mira regretted the toll it had obviously taken on Perry—beginning with the horror of Lucas at the morgue, and then the discussion with the woman from the Chamber Music Society, and then the photographs on Mr. Dientz’s computer.
It was no wonder it had ended with Perry seeing a dead girl in her parents’ house.
Mira looked over at him and thought of the cliché “you look like you’ve seen a ghost”—but didn’t say it. She reached over and took one of the hands that was pressed to the heater and brought it to her cheek.
Poor dear, she was thinking, surprised by how cold the hand was to her touch.
“H
ey there, Perry. It’s me.”
“Yeah, Nicole.”
“You alone?”
“Well, since you know my roommate’s every move, and you know he went to try to score some weed in Ohio with Lucas, I suppose you know I am.”
There was a click then, and a hum.
The hum was nothing.
It was the very song of what nothing was, Perry thought, holding the receiver to his ear long enough that he was still holding it when she knocked on his door, and when he opened it, she said, “Can I come in?” and he was breathing into her hair before saying yes, before he’d even taken a breath.
E
llen Graham was wearing the same hot pink bathrobe she’d been wearing earlier that day—although she seemed to have tidied the house a little, perhaps because she’d had some warning this time that Shelly was on her way. The piles of catalogs and envelopes that had been lying on the stairs were now stacked in a few loose piles by the front door. The white cat was lying in a pale patch of porch light that was somehow shining through a crack in the closed curtain. Eerily this cat looked a little like the kind of cat who would have avoided sunlight, anyway, in favor of this reflected winter light. Shelly felt a stab of longing, of grief, for Jeremy, poor Jeremy, who had so loved to bask in a pool of sunlight on the bed or on the kitchen floor.
“Sit down,” Ellen said, and motioned Shelly to the couch. “I’m glad you came back. I thought about you all day. I wondered if you’d had any ideas since you left, since our talk. Ideas about my daughter, where—”
“Again,” Shelly said, shaking her head a little, “I don’t want to mislead you, Ellen. I have no proof of anything. But I
have
had some more thoughts.”
“You look terrible,” Ellen said. “Has something happened?”
Not now, Shelly thought. She could not tell anyone, now, about Jeremy. That would have to wait. Instead, she said, “After I left here I went home, got on Google, and then I found the boy, the one who was in the accident with Nicole Werner. I went to his apartment, and we talked. There was a professor there, and another student who also knew Nicole. They’re—”
Shelly stopped herself before saying that they had gone to Nicole Werner’s hometown to speak to the mortician who’d buried her because of a suspicion that it might not be Nicole in that grave. Shelly knew that if she were Denise Graham’s mother, she would have known instantly what that meant. She took a deep breath and said carefully, “I believe you might be the only one who can institute any further investigation. I’m not saying that it might even lead us to—”
“Finding Denise.” Ellen nodded. Her eyes looked somehow clearer tonight. Her feet were still bare, and that struck Shelly as the saddest thing of all. It was so cold out, and even in the house, where the thermostat must have been turned up to eighty degrees, the floors were cold. She tried to look away from the feet, but she couldn’t. She thought of
Death of a Salesman.
Willy Loman.
Attention must be paid.
The toenails were clipped neatly, but the toes looked gnarled, red—the toes of a woman who had, until recently, worn high heels every day of her life. Ellen Graham had been a woman who, proud of her long, slim legs, had probably worn knee-length skirts, too, and silk hose, just to go to the grocery store.
“As I told you,” Shelly said, looking from the sad feet to the face, so bright with hope, “I worked at the Chamber Music Society at the university until recently. What I didn’t exactly explain earlier today was that my work-study student this year was Josie Reilly—”
Ellen inhaled, as if willing herself not to scream at the sound of that name.
“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, but it’s complicated by so many things.”
Ellen nodded, but her jaw was working on her anger. God help Josie if she ever crossed this woman’s path again, Shelly thought, not without some satisfaction. Eventually, she knew, she would have to tell Ellen the whole, sordid story, but it wouldn’t help either of them now, and might end with Shelly thrown out the front door and into the snow, having accomplished nothing at all.
Instead, Shelly started by telling Ellen what Josie had told her about the coffin, about the Spring Event. The hyperventilation. The EMT kept on hand for emergencies.
Ellen listened without seeming to be breathing.
She had, of course, like so many other mothers, assumed that the Spring Event was a party, a dance, a princess ball. There would be decorations, and hors d’oeuvres, and pretty dresses, and maybe a bit too much champagne, ending in giggling, and dancing around the OTT house in stocking feet.
Even after all that had happened, Ellen had not yet begun to suspect that this image might be entirely wrong.
“Were you ever in a sorority, Ellen?” Shelly asked.
Ellen Graham shook her head. “I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I married my husband right out of high school, and I worked as a secretary until he finished his MBA. And then I had Denise.”
Shelly nodded. “Well, I was,” she said. “It was over two decades ago, but some things are the same. Hazing, and—”
“Hazing is illegal,” Ellen said. “We would never have allowed Denise to join a sorority if we thought—”
“I know,” Shelly said. “But it happens. And being illegal has made it even more dangerous, even more secretive.” She went on to tell Ellen Graham, who held a hand to her mouth now as Shelly spoke, what she knew about the Pan-Hellenic Society and the pressures that could be put to bear by it on a university—a public university, the funding of which was dependent on the goodwill of the taxpayers, which its administrators understood so well.
“I questioned,” Shelly said, “how someone like Josie Reilly had come to get one of the work-study positions generally reserved for students who pay their own tuition and who come from fairly disadvantaged backgrounds. As it happens, the music school dean’s wife was an Omega Theta Tau sister of Josie’s mother. It took only a little bit of research to find out that the two of them are still very involved in the chapter. They would have a vested interest in preventing any scandal related to, say, hazing.”
“But what does this have to do with my daughter?” Ellen asked. From the change in her posture, the rigid backbone, Shelly suspected she already knew.
“I was at the scene of the accident,” Shelly said. She held her palms open, hands resting on her knees in a gesture she’d been taught to make by her mother when beseeching God to take care of her brother in Vietnam, and which she’d never made again after he died.
She looked down at her open hands then and said to them, “Nicole Werner wasn’t visibly injured. She sustained injury, certainly, since she was thrown from the vehicle. She might have sustained terrible, life-threatening internal injuries, but Nicole Werner was not—”
“Beyond recognition.”
Shelly could not look up from her hands until long after she’d nodded and Ellen Graham had already spoken again:
“But that boy,” she said, “the one who was drunk, why wouldn’t he have said something if—?”
“If there was someone else with them?”
Ellen nodded this time, boring her eyes deeply into Shelly’s, and Shelly felt an incredible wave of wild energy and bravery emanating from her.
To sit so completely still, with her poor feet pressed together, chapped hands folded sadly in her lap, waiting for Shelly’s answer.
“As I said, I spoke to him. Today. Finally. I don’t know what took me so long to go looking for him. He doesn’t remember anything.”
“But
of course
that’s what he’d say. They could have put him in jail for
years
for what he did.”
“Yes,” Shelly said. “I’m a suspicious woman, too, Ellen. I feel I have good radar for liars, cheats, cons—but I don’t think he’s one. He doesn’t remember. He truly does not know. Or he only peripherally knows. Something happened to him.”
Shelly went on then to tell Ellen Graham what Josie had told her about the ritual. The tequila, the hyperventilation, the coffin, the girl who would be “raised from the dead.” Reborn as an OTT sister. They kept a paramedic on hand. They knew what could happen. Wasn’t it possible, Shelly asked, that sometimes the girl did not come back, that the ritual might—?
“Kill a girl.” Ellen Graham did not nod this time. She closed her eyes.
“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to speak quietly. “And you can imagine the scandal for the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university, and the lengths they might go to cover it up. Isn’t it possible that an accident might be—?”
“Staged?”
“Staged, or made to happen. Created?
Devised
?”
Ellen Graham opened her eyes now and looked from Shelly to the ceiling.
“Ellen, I was there,” Shelly said. “That boy swerved to avoid something, but only seconds later what he’d swerved to avoid wasn’t there. And the girl they say was killed, injured beyond recognition, burned with the car, I
saw
her. I would recognize her anywhere. She wasn’t dead. There was no fire.”
“Why are you telling
me
?” Ellen said, standing up, heading toward a buffet that sprawled in all its shining oaken splendor from one wall of the living room to the other. She yanked open a drawer by a flimsy brass handle and pulled out a pack of Marlborough lights. Her hand was shaking as she put a cigarette between her lips, but she didn’t light it. She turned back to Shelly, eyes blinking and blazing at the same time. “Why did you come here? You know so much. Why haven’t you told someone who can do something?”
“I’ve tried,” Shelly said. “I called the papers, I called the police, I waited for the police to call me, but—”
“Now what?” Ellen asked, tossing the cigarette back into the drawer with the pack, and heading back to the couch, but not sitting down. “You think that was my daughter then, don’t you, in the backseat of that car? Maybe she was already dead? Maybe they set it on fire? Maybe they buried my baby up there instead of this Nicole Werner girl? I’m sorry. I see what this means, what you’re saying about what you saw, except, if it was, if you’re right, where in the fucking hell is Nicole Werner now?”
Shelly took a moment before she spoke, before she could even consider speaking.
She tried to think of a way to phrase this thing, which seemed so insane, so that it would not sound insane. Finally, she said, “She’s still there. She’s at the sorority.”
Ellen Graham started to shake her head so quickly, so wildly, that, remembering those earrings Josie had snitched, Shelly imagined Ellen wearing them, her face lacerated by jewels, and Shelly held up a hand to try to stop her from shaking her head so violently. In the calmest voice Shelly could call forth from the depths of her own shaken self, she said, “I can’t prove anything, Ellen, but I believe they would have sheltered her, Nicole. I know now that they—the sorority, the Pan-Hellenic Society, the university—have enough power to drive the only witness to the accident out of town, to involve a dean in doing so, and who knows—”
“How did Josie drive you out of town?”
Now Ellen stopped shaking her head, and Shelly knew she had to tell her. As she spoke the words of the affair with the girl, of the photographs, of the last conversation she’d had with Josie at the Starbucks, Shelly opened her hands again, looking at her palms, and she thought, for no reason she could fathom, of sheep. Sheep with blood on their fleeces, with flies in their eyes. Maggots in their ears, in their anuses. She finished the story and stopped speaking, and then she brought the hands to her eyes. When she looked up again, Ellen was watching Shelly with a kindness that would have knocked Shelly to her knees if she hadn’t been sitting down. It was not compassion, or empathy, or pity. Ellen Graham was simply looking at Shelly as if the story hadn’t surprised her at all.
As if she’d been hearing such stories all her life.
After the silence, Ellen said, in the voice of the very competent secretary Shelly knew she must once have been, “Okay, Shelly. They got rid of you, if your theory’s right. But the boy was a witness, too.”
“Yes,” Shelly said, trying to regain her composure, to echo the all-business tone of Ellen Graham. “Yes, the boy, too,” she said. She nodded. “He doesn’t remember anything. But they are doing things to try to drive him away, too. Postcards. Ghosts.”
Ellen didn’t ask for elaboration. “Just tell me what to do,” she said. “Your story—frankly, Shelly, I hate your story. I hate everything it might mean. I think it’s crazy. But it’s no worse than all the stories I’ve invented in my mind. And you’re the first help we’ve ever had. We’ve gone everywhere, spoken to everyone. The state police, the FBI, the—”
“The FBI,” Shelly said, an idea forming. “Speak to them again. Tell them you believe there’s been a case of mistaken identity, and demand that Nicole Werner be exhumed, examined. I can’t do anything, Ellen. I have no credibility in this at all. But you’re the parent of a girl who disappeared. They might listen to you.”