The Raising (21 page)

(There’s a pause. In the background, Professor Polson: “Nicole?”)

Yeah.

(Another pause. A question is asked that can’t be heard on the tape.)

Okay. Sure. I
knew
. I mean, it wasn’t a matter of wondering if it was her. It was her. I recognized her. She’d dyed her hair, but it was Nicole. She knew it was me, too. The first time, she pretended she didn’t see me, and she turned around and started walking fast in the opposite direction. It was over by Barnes and Noble. It looked like she’d just bought a book. I totally froze. It was like, I don’t know. Not like seeing a ghost. It was like seeing . . . into a crack.

(Pause. Another question.)

Exactly.

(Professor Polson: “I’m sorry to ask, Lucas, but were you stoned?”)

No. I wish I had been. That would have explained it. I was taking a break because I was applying for this seasonal job with the Road Commission, after I realized it would take me at least another year to graduate, and for the application there was going to be a drug test, but I ended up not going for the test anyway. And then that afternoon, I went back and got stoned—I knew I wouldn’t pass it anyway, with all the shit I’d been smoking a couple weeks before—and then I started seeing her everywhere. She was sitting with some guy at the bar at Clancy’s. They were doing something, like, looking at the screen of a laptop, typing things in. I knew it was her again. I mean, the hair was different, but that was it. And then I saw her a couple days later, crossing the street by the Law Quad, and she saw me. She was like, I don’t know, fifty feet away, and I know she saw me because she smiled and gave me this little wave, and then, the last time, it was late, and I was coming back from Murph’s, and I’ll admit it, I was stoned, weed, and there were some other drugs involved, but I know what happened, I know—

(Clears throat. Pause.)

She was a block behind me, following me, and I kept looking behind me, and I could see that it was her.

(Professor Polson: “Wasn’t it dark?”)

Street lights. It was bright out. I knew it was her, and I was trying to hurry, and then I guess I just thought, what am I doing, and I stopped, and I turned around, right outside the door to my apartment building, and I said, I know it’s you.

She laughed, and she kept walking toward me, and I said, I’m going inside, and I kept walking, and went to my apartment and unlocked it, and went inside, but I didn’t lock the door behind me—I guess I wanted her to come in. So I just sat on the couch and never even turned the lights on because, I don’t know, it seemed worse to look at her in the light, and that’s when she came in, and she just kind of hovered in the threshold for a minute, and I could really see her in the light from the hallway, and she was smiling, and she said, “Can I come in?” and I was like, “Yeah. You can come in,” and then she shut the door behind her, and it was just like the first time, she unbuttoned her shirt, which was sort of filmy and white, and took it off, and unzipped her shorts, and then she slid down next to me on the couch and we were kissing, and I think I was even crying, and when we were done she said, Told you, didn’t I?

And then she put all her clothes on and left.

(Question. Pause.)

I don’t know. I don’t remember what I said, or if I even asked her. I—It was like we were somewhere else. I was scared. Excited, too, but really scared, and I was shaking. I remember she laughed about that. My teeth were chattering. She thought it was funny. She was like, I’m the one who’s supposed to be cold.

And now I haven’t seen her since, but it’s like I see her all the time. Every time I turn a corner, but then it turns out not to be her. I sleep with the light on, or I just don’t sleep. I . . .

(Here the interview ends.)

“Lucas,” Professor Polson said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really have to do something now. I’m going to pick up the phone now and call Mental Health Services, and make an appointment for you.”

Lucas nodded, as if he’d seen this coming.

Professor Polson was in the kitchen, on her phone, for what seemed to Perry like a long time, and finally came out with a scrap of paper and the name of a therapist and an appointment time for Lucas in the morning. Lucas looked at Perry, as if questioning whether he should take the scrap, and Perry nodded at him, feeling sad and relieved at the same time.

33

M
ira put a tiny drop of dishwashing liquid into the dead center of each of the three mugs and then let the hot water pour into them, watching as they overflowed with suds.

It was 3:00 a.m.

After the boys had left, she’d walked around the apartment for half an hour—paced, really, a kind of back-and-forth followed by intervals of standing in place, wondering if she was standing in the middle of a particular room for a reason and, if so, what that reason could be. Finally, she’d noticed the three mugs—two on an end table, and one (hers) on the floor in front of the sofa, and was relieved to have a chore, a reason not to be in bed yet.

When the bubbles in the mugs stopped flowing, Mira turned the water off, tipped the cups over, poured the clear water out, and set them upside down on the dish drainer. She turned the lights off and then stood staring toward the sink for quite a while before she leaned against the wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor.

When was the last night she’d been at home alone?

Certainly it had been before the twins. But going back even further, it had been, she supposed, only a few times in the early days of her marriage—only in hotel rooms (conferences, job interviews). This was different. This was the place the twins were supposed to be, asleep with their blankets pulled up to their chins (they both did this, rosy fingers grasping the satin edges, lying on their backs, pink-cheeked, eyes moving around in their dreams beneath their vaguely light blue lids).

And Clark.

Mira was supposed to go into the bedroom now and find him asleep on his side, the bed torn to pieces by his shifting and rolling, shirtless. The silver St. Christopher medal she’d given him would catch the light from the hallway.

She’d brought that medal back with her from Romania when Clark was only a fantasy—after having spent only about a week in bed with him before she’d left for her fellowship year—just an intriguing and sexy guy she hoped very much she might be seeing more of. Back then, it had been a gesture that surprised her even as she made it, sliding the paper-wrapped medal into her bag. She could not have called what she had with Clark when she’d left for Eastern Europe a “relationship.” (And what
were
“relationships” during those graduate school years when the most important virtue was negative capability, when you knew better than to even dare ask—such anxious grasping—“Will I be seeing you again?”) She’d bought the St. Christopher at a little wooden stall outside of a church near the shore of the Black Sea, knowing as she bought it that it was for Clark. When the old man who’d sold it to her put it in the palm of her hand, he wrapped her fingers around it for her and then he kissed her fist.

If Clark were there, in bed, in their apartment, he’d grumble when she came in and lay down beside him, and Mira wouldn’t know if he was asleep and annoyed to have been awakened, or awake and simply annoyed that she had entered the room. It had been a long time (a year? two?) since he’d rolled over and put his arms around her waist and buried his face in her hair.

Was this what it was like when you found yourself sliding, impossibly and inevitably, toward a divorce?

And what then?

Would she and Clark and the beautiful miracle of the twins be turned, as seemed the custom now, into one of those joint-custody arrangements? An elaborate plan sketched out, and signed by a judge? Thursday through Monday with Mira. Monday through Thursday with Clark. Or every other week? Or every two weeks? Vacations numbered, accounted for? Holidays divided up like so many shiny pennies?

Back in the days of Mira’s childhood, when there was a divorce, the fathers generally just slipped away to California and were replaced by the mothers’ new husbands. But Clark was not the kind of father who would slip away. He might very well be, in fact, the kind of father who would fight her for full custody. He might very well be the kind of father who would be
granted
full custody by a left-leaning judge who wanted to show that she valued the role of the stay-at-home father as dearly as that of a housewife.

Mira was, she realized, crying.

There were tears running down her neck. There were tears pooling around her lips. She wiped them away. She held her breath to try to make the hiccupping sobs subside. She was being ridiculous, getting way ahead of herself. Clark had said nothing about divorce, had he? He’d only taken the twins to visit his mother. It was his mother’s birthday. His mother’s
seventieth
. He would be back. He’d been right—she couldn’t have come along in the middle of the week.

Mira took her hands away from her face and forced herself to think of something else.

The interview.

She would think about that. Lucas. Her research. Her book. When the boys had first arrived, Mira had been certain that she’d know what to make of Lucas and his account of events. He’d slouched into the apartment looking quite a bit worse for wear than she remembered him—but drugs tended to do that, even to the very young. Jeff Blackhawk had told her that Lucas was in his poetry workshop that semester, and was an interesting writer but seemed unable to speak. Mira remembered him as a
terrible
writer—all adjectives and unsubstantiated opinions—who could not be dissuaded from dominating every class discussion with his opinions. Halfway through the term with her he’d had that trouble with a drug bust, and after that he had gotten quieter, although his papers became even more opinionated and full of purple prose. She remembered one essay he’d written that had nothing whatsoever to do with whatever assignment he’d been given, and had become, instead, a rant against oppressive drug laws:

Why does the United States, perhaps the earth’s most variegated garden, feel it must oppress the very youth it purports to wish to nurture into blossom?

And she also remembered reading this first line to Clark while grading papers at the kitchen table. It was supposed to make Clark laugh, give him an idea of the mind-numbing work she was doing at the kitchen table as he bounced the newborn twins to sleep in the chair across from her, but Clark had just snorted and said, “
Really
,” in agreement with Lucas’s sentiment.

But the Lucas in her apartment that evening had appeared drained of his saccharine passions. There was a strange quarter-size patch of hair missing just above his left temple, and repeatedly during the interview he’d pressed his fingers to that spot and rubbed it as if he were experiencing sharp pain there. He must have managed to rub the hair away, and then continued to rub enough to prevent it from growing back.

His monologue had been chilling, baffling, incredible. Unless he was a future Academy Award winner, this could not have been an act. Mira had the impression he’d not told a soul the story until then, and that perhaps he’d even managed not to think about it in detail until he’d opened his mouth to speak to her.

But what had actually happened?

Mira knew what she
wanted
to believe—the thing that would fit the thesis she knew she shouldn’t have already developed, but had.

There were
thousands
of accounts of ghosts reported on college campuses. Murdered coeds thumbing rides to the cemeteries where they were buried. Suicides still weeping in dormitory shower stalls, drunken fraternity brothers still prowling around under the balconies they’d drunkenly fallen from. The youthful dead were particularly inspiring when it came to such stories, and the living youth seemed particularly inspired by their dead peers. And Nicole Werner was the perfect campus ghost. The beautiful virgin with that already ghostly senior portrait. The evil boyfriend. The grieving sorority sisters. The dark, cold night of her violent death. Her roommate had to identify her by the jewelry she was wearing because the gorgeous sorority girl had been
unrecognizable.

In a graduate seminar Mira had been invited to take her senior year in college (because Professor Niro had said he thought she was the most serious undergraduate student of anthropology he’d ever encountered), they’d read Charles Mackay’s classic,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
The book had impressed Mira deeply—probably more than it impressed the other students, because she was so young. The professor had expressed some contempt for the shoddy research, the slapdash psychoanalysis, the exaggerations in the book, but Mira had carried the impressions of that text with her through all the years of her education that had followed, and she still felt them. There had been no chapter on ghost sightings on college campuses, but Mira remembered very well Mackay’s chapter on haunted houses, and his conclusion that the weak and credulous people who were drawn to them would be the very sort of people who would see ghosts in them.

Lucas might certainly be one of Mackay’s weak and credulous. Lucas was easy. But what about Perry? Could
both
boys be suffering from the same overstimulation of the imagination?

Mira looked down at the watch glowing green on her wrist: 4:02. She had to teach her class in five hours. And somehow it didn’t even startle her (a movie camera would have captured her only casually looking up from her wristwatch as if she’d been expecting the sound all along) when there was a tentative-sounding knock on the door and a whisper she’d never have heard if she had been in bed: “Professor Polson? It’s just Perry Edwards again, if you’re there.”

34

N
icole was down to her bra, her panties. They matched. Pink. He hadn’t been able to look closely, but Craig thought he’d glimpsed a little heart, or maybe a bird, sewn onto the right-hand corner of the panties. And he was pretty sure he’d glimpsed the palest bit of downy hair between the panties and the high bikini spot of her inner thigh. Her cheeks had gone from a pink that matched the underwear to a deeper shade of pink in the course of their two hours in his bed. God only knew what color his own cheeks were. He was bathed in sweat. His hair was matted against his forehead. His heart had been beating so hard for so long in every part of his body that at least he knew for certain that he had no undetected heart defects. He’d never have lived through this if he did.

Perry was at home in Bad Axe for the weekend, so Nicole had spent the weekend rising from and returning to Craig’s bed in their dorm room.

“No, Craig, not yet. But it feels so good. Oh my God. No, stop. O—”

It was like a refrain now to the loveliest song he’d ever heard. He would have done anything she’d said. He felt certain that if she’d have let him, he could have levitated with her in his arms and they could have made love on the ceiling. He could have unzipped his body and wrapped her in his skin. He could have buried himself in her neck and slipped into the place between her shoulder and her throat, and been soldered by passion to her forever.

But she wouldn’t let him.

“No, oh, Craig, it’s so hard to say no. I want. But, no. Please. I’m not ready. If I were, it would be you, and it would be now. But—”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I know.” He breathed the words into her mouth. “I just want to press against you. Just let me hold you. Can I touch you—”

“There. Yes. Oh my God. O—”