The Raising (4 page)

Clark looked at her blankly. “I need the
bath
,” he’d said.

“P
rofessor Polson?”

This time Mira turned around, recognizing, finally, even in her sleep-deprivation and distraction, her own last name.

How long had he been running after her? The boy was sweating. He had the clean-shaven, buzzed-head look of an ROTC student, or maybe a member of College Students for Christ. But these kids could fool you. Sometimes the conservative look was an ironic statement, right down to the pressed khaki shorts. He could be the lead guitarist in some bad college band. She’d seen flyers around Godwin Hall for an upcoming performance by the Motherfuckers.

“Professor Polson,” he said. “I saw you, and I wanted to ask—” He gasped for breath. “I wanted to ask if I could get into your seminar.”

“I’m sorry. It’s full,” she said, and started to turn from him as quickly and unsympathetically as she could. She always felt bad, sending students away, but these late registers would keep demanding entrance into the class for weeks into the semester if she didn’t stand firm. This was a first-year honors seminar, and Mira couldn’t teach it well with more than fifteen students in it because of the amount of writing and discussion she required. The seminar was called Death, Dying, and the Undead. A
lot
of students wanted in. It was the most popular seminar in the college. This was, Mira supposed, because they were only eighteen, so the death and dying part didn’t faze them—what eighteen-year-old believes in death?—and because they wrongly imagined that the “Undead” part would mean vampires, when that was only the thinnest (and, in Mira’s opinion, the least interesting) thread in the vast tapestry of Undead material.

“But—”

“I have a waiting list,” Mira said. “Twenty-seven students are on it before you, and there’s not a chance that any one of them will get in, but I’ll add your name to the bottom if you insist.”

“Can I just tell you one thing?”

Mira inhaled, but stopped walking. She looked at a spot over the boy’s shoulder so she wouldn’t seem to be encouraging a long explanation of his scheduling problems or credit deficits or financial aid requirements. They were the only two people in the hallway, and the stone floors beyond him were gleaming in the September sunlight as it shone through the windows. Godwin Hall was the oldest building on campus, and where it showed its age most was in its windows, which were an intricate crisscross of glass diamonds and molten lead. The panes were multicolored, warped, and one or two had been cracked and not yet replaced—but these cracked ones added to the prismatic blues and golds when the sun hit them and made dazzling patterns of light and shadow on the walls and floors.

“I’m a sophomore,” the boy said.

“Well,” Mira said, no longer as reluctant to reveal her impatience. “In that case, you’re not eligible for a first-year seminar anyway.”

“But I don’t want to take the class for credit. I just need to sit in. For personal reasons.”

This time Mira looked at him, directly into his eyes, which were dark brown and long-lashed. His hair was so short it was impossible to know what color it was, but she imagined it must also be dark, although his skin was fair. His cheeks were still flushed from him running after her.

“Why?” she asked, but then she stopped herself—why bother to encourage his explanation or excuse?—and held up a hand. “Just so you know, I’m against auditors. I find they’re an intrusion in the closed circle of a seminar, and often they have very little stake in the class. And, the class is
full.
”

Still, she tilted her head, to show him she was listening. It was rare, but there were the occasional students who took Death, Dying, and the Undead because of a trauma in their backgrounds. A car crash involving high school pals. An older sibling who had committed suicide. Twice, she’d had students who’d had childhood leukemia and been cured, but the experience of it had left a strange gray haze over the landscape of their lives. The year before, there’d been a girl in the class who’d revealed, only a few weeks before the end of the semester, that her mother had been murdered by her father:

That, in itself, was enough of a story, but this girl had been in utero when the murder took place, and had been delivered two months prematurely at the Emergency Room in the same hour her mother had died. The girl had been raised by wealthy grandparents who’d told her that her parents had been killed in a tragic car accident when she was a baby—of course, is there ever any other explanation for such things?—but the student discovered the truth on the Internet, her grandparents being of a generation that hadn’t anticipated that one day, thanks to Google, no family secret would be safe.

The boy was still breathing heavily. He said, “I would participate fully, Professor. I’m a straight-A student. I’ve—” He stopped. A cool, rose-colored diamond passed over his eyes through the broken windowpane—a cloud traveling across the sun—and he blinked it away. “I’ve never gotten a grade lower than an A.”

“That’s impressive,” Mira said. “But it’s a first-year seminar, and if you audit you won’t get a grade anyway, so your special interest in the subject is . . . ?” She waved her hand through the air to indicate that he needed to continue, and then shivered. She was wearing a silk dress—catalog stuff, deeply discounted—and it had short cap sleeves. She knew it looked good on her because Jeff Blackhawk, the poet-in-residence in the Honors College, had nearly spilled his coffee when he saw her walk into the faculty lounge. He was the kind of man who was completely undone by a woman in a sexy dress, or a low-cut blouse, or a nicely tailored pair of black slacks, and Mira was glad, almost relieved, that she’d caught his attention. Still, the dress was too light without a sweater, a cool-weather one, and autumn had come on before she’d expected it—only the first week of September, and that morning the sky had been full of the kind of fat blue clouds Mira associated with snow.

The student inhaled, and wiped a hand across his brow. He said, “I was good friends with Nicole. Nicole Werner. I grew up with her. And Craig Clements-Rabbitt was—
is
—my roommate.”

Nicole Werner.

And that horrible rich boy who’d killed her.

Mira had known neither of them personally, but of course she knew the story. Everyone did. It was last year’s Tragic Incident. Most years, there was at least one, and this year the victim had been perfect for the leading role: Virgin. Girl Scout. Sorority pledge. A devout Christian from a small town. Two married, devoted parents. The youngest child. The baby. A straight-A student, but full of goodwill and vivacity, too. In her spare time she tutored illiterate children. She’d been beloved by her professors and her classmates alike. Until the end of the spring semester, the whole of Godwin Hall had been draped in black.

Mira hadn’t, herself, attended the memorial service in the auditorium, but another professor at the college told her that the girl’s mother had wept so piteously throughout the service that no one could help but join her in sympathy until the four hundred and fifty people gathered around the high school senior portrait of the dead Nicole Werner were sobbing.

And then they’d let her murderer back into the university. Despite the public protests, the outrage, the letters to the editor of the student and local papers, the university lawyers had concluded that since no criminal charges had been filed against him, they had no grounds for keeping him out. Only the Honors College had the balls to ban him, and everyone knew that was only because the dean, who was old pals from Dartmouth with the boy’s father, had bent all the rules to admit him in the first place, and didn’t want that getting any more press than it already had.

There were goose bumps on her arms now. Wrapping her arms around herself, Mira realized that not only had she shivered, but now she was trembling. She worried that her teeth might begin to chatter. It was truly autumn. The sun had clearly slipped a few notches down on the horizon, and the light on the leaves was amber now, not white, not even golden, as it had been the week before, and a breeze seemed to be pouring through the centuries-old windows of Godwin Honors Hall despite the fact that they were all closed. That cold breeze seemed to pour in a steady stream down the hallway, bathing her.

“I know you’re an expert on death,” the boy said to her, “and dying, and the undead. All I know about is Nicole and Craig. But there are . . . circumstances. I could tell you, but you might think I was nuts. Basically, I just need to know more, and I thought your seminar might help me with that.”

5

P
erry had—on purpose, most likely—picked out an apartment for them that was as far from Godwin Honors Hall as you could get within the boundaries of the same circumscribed college town. And since Craig no longer had any classes at the Hall, he had no reason to go there. Still, he found himself standing outside of it within an hour of the dismissal of his first class of the semester, staring up at the window of the room he was certain had been hers—fourth from the end, facing East University Avenue.

The window was open. The curtains were closed. They rippled a little, without parting. A flock of starlings circled the roof, landing and rising over and over in a mass that managed to look both fluid and nervous. The wrought-iron gate around the courtyard was freshly painted. Black. And the grass was emerald green. The branches of the walnut tree near the entrance were bowed under the weight of big green fruit, and every few minutes one of those walnuts fell from the tree and onto the lawn with a muffled thump.

Craig didn’t know how long he stood there, but for whatever period of time it was, no one entered or exited Godwin Hall. No one passed him on the sidewalk. No one parted the curtains and looked out a window. And not a sound came from anything except for those occasional thuds of a walnut, and the starlings—but only their wings, very swift and distant, churning up the air around the roof.

It could have been, he realized, a year to the very day that he’d opened the door on that Tuesday night, thinking it would be Perry, who’d left for the lounge with his cell phone to call his mother (did he think he’d locked himself out?), and found
her
standing in the hallway instead.

“Hi. Is Perry here?”

Her hair was pulled back in that ponytail, and he could see how a few brilliant threads had worked loose around her face, and how they were lifting and falling weightlessly with her breathing.

Later, he’d remember the exchange as having taken place in slow motion:

Nicole Werner turned her face away from Craig, and looked down the hallway—for Perry, presumably, but also probably so she wouldn’t have to look at him, naked except for the boxers—and the trick of light on those loose blond strands made him feel as if he, too, were floating brightly in the air around Nicole Werner.

“No,” he said, sounding underwater to himself. By then she’d already raised her hand to Perry, who was walking toward them with Craig’s cell phone in his hand and a desolate expression on his face, as if he’d just gotten news that the love of his life was imprisoned in Turkey.

It amazed Craig then how casually Perry nodded to the heavenly creature who’d come looking for him. As if she were his sister, or as if, in Bad Axe, girls who looked like her grew on trees.

At Craig’s high school in New Hampshire there’d been only seventy-one students in his class at the time of his graduation, and only twenty-nine of them had been girls. Occasionally there’d be a new one, but usually she stayed only a few months, half a year—maybe she’d flunked out of her boarding school or come to town from Boston or Manhattan to live with the noncustodial parent for a while.

Otherwise, Craig had known those twenty-nine girls since he was in kindergarten. His parents knew their parents. He’d taken skiing lessons and swimming lessons and tennis lessons with them. He’d called them names, and had been called names by them. He’d seen them emerge from the girls’ bathroom with eyes swollen red from crying, or dashing into the girls’ bathroom in their prom dresses to vomit up vodka and Fruitopia. He’d fooled around with a few, had sex with a few, been slapped in the face hard by one of them. And he had
never
seen anyone like Nicole Werner:

The pink cheeks, the serious expression, the sincerity radiating off of her so nakedly he wanted to close his eyes, or throw a coat over her.

She was the All-American Girl.

Eventually, he’d had to take a step back.

“Y
ou hate chicks, don’t you?” his best friend Teddy, his only
real
friend back in New Hampshire, had said to him in the high school cafeteria once—and then stuttered, “I-I-I mean, not like you’re a fag, you j-j-just—”

“I like chicks,” Craig had said. “Just not
these
chicks. Not
here.
”

He’d meant Fredonia High, and he’d believed it to be true—that they were, all of them, a special breed of brainless, or bitch.

Except, he had to admit, he didn’t like the chicks at the Quaker camp he went to in Vermont every summer, either. And he didn’t particularly care for the tourist girls who passed through town with their parents. Or the girls his cousin in Philadelphia had introduced him to over winter break.

“Ah,” his father had said once when Craig tried to draw him out on the subject of females. “The war between the sexes. It’s as old as time.” He went on to tell Craig a story about a nurse he’d met in Vietnam. The Perfect Woman. She’d ended up marrying his buddy. “I set it all up,” his father said wearily. “I knew if I had anything to do with her, it would ruin her.”

“What happened to her? To them?” Craig asked.

His father shook his head. “Don’t know.”

When Craig’s little brother, Scar, turned thirteen and asked Craig for advice about girls, the only thing Craig could think of to say was, “Just forget it, man.”

“Thanks, man,” Scar had said, without irony, and wandered back to his own room, where, it seemed to Craig, the kid had proceeded to take the advice:

By the time Craig left for college, Scar was fifteen, and spent most of his time at the computer, blowing things up. Craig had been waiting for the last two years for one or both of his parents to say something to Scar about the “productive use of time,” or the “mind-numbing soul-sapping” nature of video games, but they never said a word. Maybe they’d used up all their parental energy on Craig.

Or maybe it was because, by the time Craig graduated from high school,
they
seemed to spend all of their time, too, in front of their computers. His father, Craig knew, was writing, or trying to write. His mother, he guessed, was doing something she also considered work, but wasn’t. She’d taken to answering her cell phone by saying, “This is Lynnette Rabbitt,” as if someone besides her friend Helen or her personal trainer might be calling. Occasionally Craig considered asking her what she was doing on the computer, but he always ended up following his father’s advice when it came to his mother:

Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

Still, he sometimes had a bad feeling—jealousy? apprehension?—when he heard her on the other side of Scar’s closed door, talking to his little brother in a tone that, even muffled by oak, sounded alarmingly like confession.

“S
o, is she your love interest?” Craig had asked Perry as the door closed on Nicole Werner’s retreating form.

(Corn silk. That was the color and texture and general impression of the girl’s hair.)

Perry shook his head, and turned his back on Craig.

“Well, she seemed pretty anxious to find you,” Craig said.

“Superstitious.”

“Huh?”

“She’s
superstitious
,” Perry said, louder, as if Craig hadn’t heard him. There was a bitter edge to his voice when it came to Nicole Werner—something Craig had noticed in the cafeteria when he’d first asked Perry who she was. Craig assumed it was the result of unrequited love, or at least unrequited lust.

“Care to elaborate?” Craig asked.

Perry sat down at his desk and opened his laptop. To his computer screen, he said, “We studied together in high school. She always thought that when we did she got A’s, and that when we didn’t, she didn’t.”

“
So
,” Craig said, “you’re the Magic Man? The Buddha? All the girls gotta rub the lucky boner before their tests?”

Perry made a disgusted face, and then shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Have you slept with her?”

Perry looked at Craig for a long time, but from a distance, as if he were counting to ten or twenty before speaking.

“No,” he finally said. “Why?”

“Why not?”

This time Perry turned around and kept his eyes on his computer screen for a long time, waiting for something to materialize, gigabyte by gigabyte, on it. Craig gave up and lay back down, stuck the iPod buds back in his ears.

But that night, waking from a dream in the darkness of the dorm room, he remembered something his brother had said years before at the Petrified Forest. They’d gone there with their father, who was speaking at a writers’ conference in California.

They hadn’t set out to go to the Petrified Forest at all, or even known about it, but on their way to Napa Valley, they’d passed the place, along with six or seven signs urging them to turn left, to see the
WONDERS OF THE PREHISTORIC PAST! STEP BACK IN TIME! 3 MILLION YEARS!
“Hard to say no to that,” their father had said, slowing down, slapping on the blinker.

Craig was fifteen that summer, and he hadn’t wanted to see the Petrified Forest. He’d wanted to get to the hotel where they were staying, to lie down in a dark air-conditioned room, maybe watch MTV, definitely check his text messages, jerk off in the bathroom if his father and brother went out for burgers. But the next thing he knew, they were standing in a gift shop surrounded by shining rocks and plastic dinosaurs, waiting in line to buy tickets, and then they were walking the red, dusty trail into the Petrified Forest.

It was just past noon, and there was an unnerving insect drone taking place somewhere overhead and, at the same time, all around them. The shadow of a bird crossed the path in front of their own shadows, and made Craig jump backward. He was tired from the drive up from San Francisco, and that insect drone was like having your head inside a computer that was perpetually booting up, or like the feeling you had after a blow by a basketball to the ear. It made him think of bad sleep, the kind of nap you wake up from on a summer afternoon, realizing you’re sick. They stopped in front of a plaque nailed to a post beside a fenced-in pit. The plaque explained that the log lying in the pit had been, millions of years before, a towering “Redwood Giant” that had been knocked down and buried in ash by a volcanic eruption.

Big deal.

After three more pits like it, with logs like the first lying at the bottom, Craig said, “I’ve got to find the crapper.”

His father, standing before a plaque, reading closely, waved him away without looking at him. “Go,” he said.

But Scar, who was eleven then and not yet nicknamed Scar, turned with big kid eyes to Craig and said, “Don’t you think this is cool?”

Craig shook his head. Maybe he rolled his eyes. He said, in a voice that he remembered consciously trying to make sound adult, “Looking at logs that have turned to stone doesn’t seem much different to me than looking at logs.”

As he walked away, toward the gift shop and, hopefully, the restrooms, Scar said to his back, “That’s because you always decide what you think about things before you see them.”

Craig’s father chuckled at that and rested his hand on Scar’s head as if the kid had just performed some good trick. It was how Craig knew his father thought Scar was right, and it crossed his mind then that, possibly, the thing Scar had said was something he’d overheard their father say about Craig to their mother, or to one of his writer buddies:
That son of mine, his problem is he always decides what he thinks about something before he sees it
.

Craig had turned his back to them both and muttered, “Fuck you,” under his breath, and didn’t bother to go back out to the path and find them after the bathroom, just waited for them at the rental car, leaning against the burning hot chrome, every once in a while yanking on the handle of the door as if it might spontaneously decide to unlock itself. He didn’t speak again until that night, over dinner at some fancy restaurant in St. Helena, when some beautiful woman leaned across the table and asked him what it was like to have such a famous writer for a father.

“It sucks,” Craig had said, and everyone at the table laughed as if that were a really witty response.

B
ut that night, the night after Craig met Nicole Werner up close and personal at the threshold of his dorm room, those words of his little brother came back to him, as if on a dusty California breeze over the miles and years—and, with them, the sight of that giant redwood, turned to rock, at the bottom of that pit.

In truth, a log that had turned to rock looked nothing like a log.

The million-year-old trunk of that tree had appeared to be laced with diamonds, had seemed to be bathed in powdery pink-and-green gems. It was as if the volcanic ash, burying it, had turned it into something celestial, instead of arboreal. The pressure and the time and the isolation of death had entirely changed the nature of the thing. Had made it
eternal.
Had made it not just rock, but
space.

Craig had already decided that Nicole Werner was a bitch, hadn’t he? A dumb blonde. A tease. An empty, pretty vessel. A single glimpse in the cafeteria, and he thought he knew what she was all about.

Lying in the dark, listening to his roommate’s steady breathing, Craig knew that if he wanted, he could still let himself think that—think it and think it all the way back down the path and through the gift shop to the men’s room, so to speak. But he could also still see and feel the brilliant image of her in his doorway burning against his eyelids, like something so obvious it might blind you if you really let yourself look at it.

If he slept at all that night, he didn’t remember it.

I
t was the screaming of a blue jay that broke Craig’s trance. The jay was perched on the low branch of a crabapple tree in the Godwin Honors Hall courtyard, yawping unattractively, frantically, maybe even directing its harsh warnings at Craig, who looked up at the bird for a minute as it hopped mechanically up and down the branch.

He’d never seen them arrive, but now there was a cluster of homely girls standing around the bike rack, casting furtive glances in Craig’s direction. And a guy was looking out of a second-floor window at Craig, one hand on the curtain, the other absentmindedly scratching his bare stomach.