Laura Kasischke - The Raising

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.

“So, 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.

But 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.

It 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.