Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“She’s not dead,” Perry said with complete calm. “I know. She’s not dead. I saw her in Bad Axe.”

“No. She’s here,” Craig said. “You gotta trust me, man. I saw her, too. She’s—”

“Let’s go, then,” Perry said, and stood up, and Craig did not wait even the length of a heartbeat before grabbing his coat.

“Jesus Christ,” Deb said, and sat back down, defeated. “Please, just—”

Craig tried to turn and smile at her apologetically—she was such a sweet girl—but Perry was pulling him out the door.

The town, the streets, the lawns, the roofs: it was like a moonscape. As if the thing hanging over them in the now-clear sky had projected its surface onto the earth. No one was outside but the two of them, and the snow had swallowed up all the subtleties, all the edges, all the sounds. The branches of the trees looked heavy, but not exactly burdened, with all the snow with which they were loaded down. They appeared renewed, rejuvenated, by their white cloaks. The shadows they cast were smooth and very still on the ground.

Neither Craig nor Perry said a word until they came around the corner of Greek Row and saw it there on the hill:

Not a single light was on in the Omega Theta Tau house. It seemed to swallow up the light of the snow and the moon, casting no shadow, looking, instead, like a shadow of itself. Something scissored out of the air. A house made of outer space, of silhouette, of time past. They stopped walking and stood looking up at it, and Craig said, “You remember the first time we were here?”

Perry looked over at him, and Craig could see that he didn’t.

“Remember? We were here with Lucas? Lucas and I were drunk and screaming and shit, and you were all pissed?”

“No,” Perry said. “But that sounds like the way it would have been.”

Craig meant to laugh, but it came out sounding like a sob. “I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole for a friend, Perry,” he said, and Perry just looked at him, shook his head.

“You’re not,” Perry said. “You never really were. Let’s go.”

Craig and Perry walked on the side of the street opposite to the house, then crossed and trudged uphill along the tree line between the frat next door at the sorority’s rear entrance. Craig walked ahead of Perry because he knew the way. He’d been at this back door before, tossed out of it.

Once or twice Craig turned to look at Perry, and saw that his own footprints in the deep snow seemed to be making a ghostly path for Perry to follow. Perry wasn’t looking up at Craig, though. He was staring straight ahead, at the house beyond them. Still no lights. Maybe only a tiny glow from one room. Maybe the face of an electric clock, an iPod glowing in its dock, a sleeping computer’s screen saver light pulsing.

Craig reached the door and turned the knob, not really expecting anything—or maybe expecting the lights to flash on and sirens and alarms to begin wailing.

The knob turned easily in his hand, and the door opened silently toward him.

God, he thought. All that trouble they went to when they had parties—the bouncers, the girls stationed at every entrance—and now, in the middle of the night, a houseful of beautiful dreamers, and the door was unlocked, like an invitation.

The darkness inside was total. How stupid, he thought, not even to bring a flashlight—and then a bright zero of light shone on the kitchen floor, and he gasped before he realized that it was Perry. Perry had a flashlight. Of course. Eagle Scout. Craig turned, smiled, gave him a thumbs-up, but Perry just walked past him into the OTT kitchen.

It smelled like cookies to Craig. The kind his mother used to bake before she went back to work, sort of, and quit baking. Vanilla, he guessed. Maybe some kind of spice. Nutmeg?

Perry moved the flashlight around on the counters, scanning, and Craig caught glimpses of white china behind glass cupboards—institutional, heavy-looking cups and plates. He could imagine the heft of those. The sound of silverware on the hard, shiny surfaces in a roomful of girls eating salads or noodles or whatever skinny, pretty girls ate when they had meals together. He pictured Nicole—not Nicole as he’d known her then, but this new dark-haired Nicole of now—at the heavy wooden table in the center of the room, sitting down to dinner with her sisters. As Perry’s flashlight skimmed over the clean, bare surface of that table, Craig imagined her bright-white empty plate. Would Nicole, now, need to eat? And if she ate, what would she eat? Snow? Petals? The breath of her sisters?

He looked up then. He must have stared at the kitchen table too long because now Perry was gone, already slipped through a doorway and into a dark room. Somehow he’d gotten far enough ahead that Craig could see only the distant zero of the flashlight against the wooden railing of the stairway, and hear the first few stairs make a muffled groaning under Perry’s steps before he saw something else there on the stairs ahead of him.

Perry must have seen it, too.

He stopped climbing.

The flashlight froze on it.

Something so pale and lacy it seemed to have been created by the light of the flashlight itself—like something crocheted out of a bit of light there on the air. A nightie sewing itself in complicated patterns around a pale form. The pale form of a dark-haired ghost on the stairway.

A ghost holding something trembling into the beam of light. Holding it up, pointing it. Saying something Craig couldn’t hear. A whisper. And then the explosion.

And then the only thing Craig could see was the beam of the flashlight as it bumped down the stairs to the landing, where it blinked out just before all the lights in the house came on at once and Craig could see that Perry was there on the floor in a spreading puddle of his own blood, and the girl with the gun was screaming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, I shot him, I shot him, I killed the burglar!” as a hundred other girls swarmed down the stairs and through the house and all around Craig in their white nightgowns crying and calling to each other as if they didn’t even see him, as if they didn’t even notice that Craig was there.

Jeff Blackhawk was asleep on her couch when Mira got back to the apartment. His socks were off, tossed on her floor. He had his jacket pulled over him as a blanket. She passed him without stopping on the way to the twins, who were just where she’d hoped they would be: in their cribs, asleep. Matty had his cow down at the bottom of the crib, by his feet. Andy’s rested against his cheek. She kissed their heads, breathed in the sweet sweaty scent of them. She closed their door softly behind her.

In the hallway, she hesitated, looking toward the couch. Should she wake him? Let him know she was back and he could go home?

But no one should be driving in this storm anyway, she thought. And, surely, if her opening the door, crossing the room, and clearing her throat hadn’t woken him up, he needed his sleep.

She would not, she decided, wake him.

She changed into a T-shirt of Clark’s and, after brushing her teeth quickly, got into bed.

“Jesus, Jeff,” Mira said to him in the morning. Her hand was trembling as she put the phone back on its cradle. “I can’t believe this. You’re never going to speak to me again. I’m the friend from hell.”

“No.” Jeff was shaking his head, rubbing his eyes. “It’s fine.”

“I’ll tell him twenty minutes . That’s it. I’ll be back before the twins wake up.”

“Believe me, if Fleming hadn’t called, I’d still be asleep until then myself. I may never have mentioned this, Mira, but I sleep like the dead.”