Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Craig was halfway up the stairs to his apartment when he heard a door open and someone clomping unevenly toward the stairwell. “Oh, hello,” he said, when he recognized her, and then covered his face in his down jacket, which he’d taken off, when he recognized the look of horror on her face.

“Holy shit,” Deb said, rushing to him, holding the back of his head in one hand and his coat in the other, pressing his face into the jacket even harder, to the point that he was a little afraid that the tiny, goosey feathers might smother him. “What the fuck did they do to you?”

She hurried him as quickly as a girl on crutches could hurry someone into her apartment, pulled the door closed behind him, shoved him toward her bedroom, where, it appeared, she hadn’t done anything—changed the sheets, made the bed—since rousing him from sleep there the day before.

“It looks worse than it is,” Craig told her, but he knew the words were muffled by his jacket, and that there was blood all over the top of his head, so who knew what she thought he was saying to her?

“Oh, my God,” she was saying. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’ll be right back. I’ll get some towels.”

Craig felt bad about it—he would ruin her towels with his bloody nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood running down his neck—but he let himself fall backward, hard, onto her bed, and the room swirled around him like a warm bath. Never in his life had a bed felt this comfortable. It would be fine, he thought, if she came back with the towels, but it would also be fine if someone just came in here and turned off the lights and let him lie like this forever.

“Here!” she screamed, tossing the towels toward him. And then, again, “Oh, my God!”

“It’s just a bloody nose, maybe broken,” Craig said—although he also knew that with his current nasal intonation, she probably had no idea what he’d said. “No big deal. I’ve had one before. Just gotta put a bandage on it if it’s broken. Maybe I’ll have black eyes.”

He took the jacket off his face, grabbed a towel, and could tell by the way she inhaled that he must already have black eyes.

“What happened ?” she asked, and the way she said it was so serious that he felt, somehow, the need to suppress his own laughter. He pressed the towel harder against his face. He could almost hear the snow falling outside. Those flakes, big as little hands, had slapped him upside the head the entire walk home from Greek Row. The whole way there’d been the gasping of girls when they saw the little trail of blood he was leaving in the snow, and the “Whoa, dude” of the guys, and the whole time he’d felt this same urge to laugh right along with the urge to hit someone, to pummel someone, to punch someone in the face, the feeling he imagined boxers had—a profound love and joy and urge to do violence all wrapped up in one profound physical desire.

But he didn’t do it. He’d just kept walking. Laughing, and maybe weeping (was that tears or blood, and what was the difference now?) as he kept walking, thinking of her taking one look at him, running. She wasn’t dead. He’d seen her with his own eyes:

The fucking lying, cheating bitch hadn’t died.

She was the one who’d been calling. The postcards were hers. The beautiful girl he’d loved and killed had come back to life.

Deb left and reemerged above him with what looked like a washcloth full of rocks, or ice, and sat beside him on the bed, moving the towel gently away from his face and lowering her little frozen surprise toward his nose, making noises of empathy and disgust as she did it and demanding that he tell her something he had no idea how to begin to tell her, or anyone, because there were no words with which to express such a thing.

“Isaw 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.

“Are 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?