Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Oh, my God,” she said, and put her hands over her face. “What does he want, Jeff? Why did he call me in the morning, at seven o’clock? What’s he even doing in his office at this hour? Didn’t he think I got enough of a reprimand yesterday? He’s hauling me back in already?”

Dean Fleming had said, “I need you to be in my office as soon as possible. I would prefer that it be within the hour,” and the tone had taken her breath away. She’d started to shake—although, in truth, she’d woken up shaking when the phone rang, with no idea where she was, and only the vaguest awareness that she had run out of bed to answer it.

“The man’s an administrator, Mira. He probably sleeps in his office. Or he doesn’t sleep. Who knows where administrators go when the lights go out?”

She liked that Jeff was making light of it without trying to make her feel stupid for being worried. Clark would have dismissed it, been annoyed by her “overreaction to every little thing,” but Jeff told her he’d be worried, too. “It’s creepy.”

But he didn’t seem to have any guesses, either, about what the dean could want.

Mira did what she could with her hair, her face. She pulled on a white blouse, black skirt, and a sweater. Jeff was asleep on the couch again by the time she closed, and locked, the door behind her.

Shelly woke in the morning on Ellen Graham’s couch. Outside, the sun had risen fully, and it was as if the volume on the whole idea of light had been turned up. There was so much sun on the snow out there that the curtains couldn’t keep it out. In the living room, everything seemed to be shining. The white carpeting, the knobs on drawers, the down comforter Ellen had given her when she made up the couch—and the cat.

That cat.

Had he (she?) simply come back to the chair and sat on it through the night, watching Shelly as calmly and nonjudgmentally as it seemed to be observing her now?

Shelly made the little kissing noise that always brought Jeremy to her side, but this cat didn’t move. This cat, Shelly thought, was as still as the Sphinx. She had an urge to ask it a question but was afraid Ellen might be awake, already up and around in another room, and if Ellen overheard she’d think she’d let a truly crazy woman spend the night in her house.

Shelly knew she would have to get up soon and use the bathroom, but for now she felt as if she’d entered some kind of eternity. With that sun reflecting so whitely on the snow outside, Shelly felt it wouldn’t surprise her to pull the curtains fully apart and find that everything was gone.

Erased.

Nothing left of the world but herself, and this white cat, and the brightness shining on some motes of dust between them.

The cat continued to regard her. Not even blinking.

This cat was nothing like Jeremy. This cat had none of Jeremy’s scruffy skittishness. Jeremy’s fur had been rough, and his eyes, unlike this cat’s eyes, had been a mottled olive, not this blazing marble green.

But here Shelly was, looking at this cat looking at her, and she felt certain of something she’d once or twice had an inkling of in the past: that each cat is part of some larger cat soul.

That this cat and Jeremy had come from the same place—whatever cat nothingness that was.

Shelly and the cat held that gaze in a trance of that certainty between them, and the incredible comfort it offered, and Shelly didn’t even startle and the cat didn’t move when Ellen called from the top of the stairs, “Are you decent? I was going to come down and make coffee.”

“Thank you,” Shelly called.

She would drink Ellen’s coffee, and then she would head back to town, find Craig Clements-Rabbitt, tell him this new plan, ask for his help.

The campus was empty. The sidewalks were slippery, lonely. The sun had come up on the horizon and turned the untrodden snow—the great mounds and blankets of it—into a blinding moonscape. Now, this was a perfect campus for ghosts, Mira thought. For the invisible. The gone. No one would be able to see them strolling along through this snow. There was no one to see them. The students were all in their beds, asleep. She thought of Perry, dreaming. She imagined his eyes moving rapidly behind his lids—that frantic dancing that was actually complete peace.

It was hard to walk through this much snow, and Mira tried to think but could remember no November snowfall like it in all the years she’d lived in this town. Luckily she’d worn flat leather boots. Although they were cold, with a bad tread, she could march through the snow on the sidewalks, trudge through the slush in the streets. It seemed that a few trucks and cars must have passed already through town, because she could see the tracks of their tires, but she didn’t see any vehicles now. At the corner she didn’t bother to stop for the Don’t Walk sign.

“Professor Polson,” the man said, standing as she stepped into Dean Fleming’s office. She had never seen him in person before, but she knew who he was from the photo on the university website, the photo that came up right next to the gold seal bearing the university’s dates and the Latin motto under its name ( Utraque Unum : “Both and One”) every time she double-clicked on Home.

“President Yancey,” Mira said.

The dean was standing in the corner, as if he’d been banished to it. He didn’t meet Mira’s eyes.

“Sit down, Professor Polson,” the president said, gesturing to the seat across from him. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “This is very serious. Very serious indeed. Serious complaints have been filed against you by your students—” She sank into the chair across from him. He handed her the piece of paper he’d been holding, which she could only glance at before feeling as if she might faint, recognizing a few names and signatures beside them:

Karess Flanagan. Brett Barber. Michael Curley. Jim Bouwers.

“But the real news of the day,” President Yancey said—and there was no mistaking the hysterical little laugh in the way he said it—“is that one of your students has been killed. Shot. After a B-and-E at the OTT house—”

Mira was swimming through the initials, and found herself moving her arms at the same time that she stood up. “Who?” she said.

“Sit down,” the president said, pointing at the chair she’d just stood up from. “Sit down, now, Professor. I have no doubt you’ll be hearing from the police soon enough, but in the meantime you’re to clean out your office. In the meantime, you’re to tell me in all the detail you can come up with why it is that this student of yours, this Perry Edwards, this student with whom you were working closely, might have broken into a sorority at three o’clock in the morning and managed to walk straight into a terrified young lady with a weapon, and gotten himself shot.”

“Oh, my God,” Mira said, and fell back into her chair.

“Oh, my God is fucking right,” President Yancey said. “Do you have any fucking idea what this will mean, Professor Polson, for this fucking university?”

On the drive back to her apartment (snow giving the world the appearance of a moon, another world, an empty, perfect one) Shelly drove by the site of the accident.

Of course, she’d driven by it hundreds of times over the months since, and watched the changes to the shrine it had become to Nicole Werner. The teddy bears were occasionally replaced, the flowers rearranged. The crosses continued to accumulate. There must have been fifty of them out there by now, spread across the spot where the accident had been, lined up along the ditch. At least a dozen had been organized into the shape of an N at the edge of the field.