Laura Kasischke - The Raising

The car warmed a little, anyway—if from nothing but their body heat and breath—and Mira hoped Perry could stay warm enough to sleep until they got back. It had been wrong, she knew, to bring him here. To encourage or include him in any of this. All of this had gone far beyond what she needed for a book. This had turned into something in which, if she’d really felt she had to take it on (for research purposes? to find Nicole Werner?), she should never have involved a student.

But Perry had been so eager, and he had not seemed to Mira to be what she would have called “troubled” or “impressionable.” In her years of teaching, Mira’d had many brilliant, troubled students—their brilliance fueled by brief intensities, always ready and willing to follow someone else’s lead. They were the kinds of young people who could easily have been seduced by their professors, or inducted into cults, or recruited to build bombs in townhouses for the revolution. But Perry Edwards had seemed different—although perhaps no less vulnerable for it. He had not reminded her of any of those students. If he reminded her of someone, Mira realized, it was herself.

When Ted Dientz had called up the final photo of the dead girl in all her blazing gigabytes, Mira thought instantly of her mother in the pantry that day, so radiantly alive. That image of her mother was with her always, wasn’t it? It was a kind of stubbornness. There was never a day that went by that Mira did not feel that if she could just go back to that childhood house at that moment, she would find her mother still there—shining and crying and studying the cans on the pantry shelf, alphabetizing them as she wrapped her brilliant white wings around her, getting ready to fly away.

Perry had that kind of stubbornness. Another word for it might have been faith . He believed in something, and he saw it. He would be, she knew, an academic. A scholar. A researcher. He would never be able to leave well enough alone, even when it would clearly be better to do so. She’d seen that about him during the very first sessions of the seminar, and already been reminded of herself at that age—how the other students would be headed off to the bars, but how she wanted, herself, to be bent over something dusty in some study room, inventing questions to answer.

Mira rested a hand on his shoulder as she took the exit toward campus. He didn’t stir. She vowed to herself that she would talk to him seriously about his academic pursuits, soon. Degrees and programs and courses of study. Soon she’d have to wake him, but not now. Now her only job was to drive them safely to the next stop. Through the whiteout, as he slept on.

Ellen Graham’s kitchen clock echoed through the rooms of her house as they talked on for hours. In the morning, Ellen would begin to make phone calls—the State Police, the university administration, the FBI—to speak to officials, to lawyers, to journalists, to start her final crusade. But for now she seemed to want company, so Shelly stayed.

Ellen told her about her separation from her husband six months earlier. (“Some couples grow closer with this sort of trauma, they tell me, but most don’t. We didn’t.”) They talked on about their childhoods, their pasts. Shelly told Ellen about her brother—the flag-draped coffin—and then, without intending to, she told her about Jeremy.

Perhaps, Shelly realized even as the story was coming out of her mouth, she’d never intended to tell anyone at all.

Perhaps until this moment, telling it, it hadn’t really happened.

But there was no taking it back now, or denying it, after Ellen’s reaction:

“Oh, my sweet fucking Jesus Christ,” Ellen cried out, and when she leapt to her feet, her own cat, which had sat like a statue through the entire evening, came suddenly to life and ran from the room. Shelly looked at the place where it had been sitting, and felt she could almost see its permanent aura still glowing where it had been.

Ellen began to pace then, and then she went back to the buffet, took out the cigarette she’d tossed into it hours ago, lit it with a shaking match, and dragged on it as if she were trying to smoke it down to the filter all at once. Afterward, she said, “I need a drink, Shelly. What would you like?”

Shelly never had a chance to answer. Ellen returned with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She poured the wine. They drank in silence until Ellen said, “Your life is in danger, Shelly.”

Shelly said nothing.

“You’re not going back to your apartment, maybe ever, and certainly not tonight,” Ellen said.

“No,” Shelly said. “Tonight I thought I’d find a Motel 6.”

“Of course you won’t,” Ellen said. “For one thing, look at the snow.” She nodded toward the tiny crack between the curtains in her front window. “You can’t drive in that. Plus you have nowhere to go.”

Shelly felt the tears coming in to her eyes. Nowhere to go . But also the kindness, again, and from someone who’d suffered things Shelly could not, herself, begin to imagine. Such a surplus of kindness. Had Shelly ever met anyone kinder?

“No,” Shelly said. “I couldn’t.”

“Yes. I’ll make up the couch for you, sweetheart.”

Ellen poured more wine into Shelly’s glass then, and touched her lightly on the shoulder. She never mentioned Jeremy or Josie again—another bit of compassion for which Shelly was incredibly grateful.

Mostly they drank their wine in silence.

The wine was so pale it made the glasses—beautiful crystal goblets, surely another heirloom, or a wedding gift—look emptier than they had when they were actually empty.

“My roommate and I have been calling you the Cookie Girl for so long it’s hard for me to remember your actual name. And also, no offense, Deb, but you sort of don’t seem like a ‘Deb.’”

Deb smiled. Craig liked that there was the tiniest gap between her two front teeth. It was the kind of thing most girls he’d known would have had four thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia work to fix, but it was cute on Deb. She said, “So, what do I seem like?”

Craig shrugged apologetically and admitted, “You seem like a Debbie?”

Her smile faded then, and she looked down into the mug of tea he’d made for her—or, really, that she’d made for herself after he’d nuked the water. When he couldn’t find a tea bag, she’d gone to her own apartment and come back with two.

She said, “I used to be Debbie. I changed to Deb when I came here. I thought it might make it a little harder to Google me. The whole story’s there, of course, and my photograph right along with it. But Richards is a common name. ‘Deb Richards’ confuses it a bit, or so I was hoping. At least it would slow someone down.”

Craig grimaced. “Sorry,” he said. He thought a minute and then said, “Maybe I could call you Debbie, like, in private?”

“If you must,” she said. “But can I call you Craigy then?”

“No,” Craig said. “Sounds like a negative adjective.”

She took a sip of her tea, and then looked at him and said, “You’re really smart, Craig.”

“Thanks,” Craig said. “But you also think I’m crazy.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re crazy… exactly.”

They both laughed, but then she put the mug of tea on the floor and turned to him. She said, “But I do think you’ve been through something terrible. Something crazy- making . I used to see him around, too, Craig. I mean, I saw him every time I closed my eyes, but I’d catch him out of the corner of my eye, too. Like, at the library. I’d be on one side of the shelves and there’d be someone on the other side, and, you know how you can get a little glimpse between the books sometimes? I’d get that glimpse. This happened more than once, and it was always him. So I quit going to the library in town. I made my mom drive me into the city. I mean, it’s different with me. I didn’t know him before I—”