Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Eventually, Shelly thought as she approached the shrine, the sorority girls who saw to all this would graduate. Things would dissipate, decay. Maybe every year or two a relative would make the trip to town on Memorial Day, leave behind a bouquet.

She would, herself, Shelly thought, try to avoid this spot from now on. She would leave this town, but when and if she returned to it again, she would arrive from the other direction.

She wouldn’t even drive by.

Her eyes watered in the snow glare.

She hadn’t expected to slow down as she passed. She hadn’t even wanted to see it—but she also hadn’t expected to see someone out there wading through snow four feet deep, wearing no coat, at eight o’clock in the morning, staring straight ahead as he made his way toward the snowed-over photo of Nicole Werner nailed to that tree.

No car was pulled over anywhere on the road that Shelly could see. How had he gotten here?

His shirt was white, and her eyes were watery, and Shelly wondered if maybe she was seeing things. Maybe this was the kind of hallucination people had in Antarctica when there was so little of anything real left to see. She rubbed her eyes.

No.

This was a young man, and he was talking to himself, or to Nicole Werner’s photo, holding out his hands as he drew closer to it, not even glancing up as Shelly’s car came closer—although certainly he must also have noticed her slowing down, approaching, as she was the only thing on the road.

When she did slow down, she found herself nearly letting out a little cry, thinking, looking out at him, Richie, her brother, he was—

No, God.

Of course not. What was wrong with her?

Of course not.

It was that boy who reminded her of her brother, the roommate.

The buzz cut. The nicely pressed white shirt. What was his name?

Shelly braked. She pulled over as far as she could near the bank of snow that was now the shoulder of the road. Like the first time, the last time, like the accident, she unrolled her window, called out, knowing he would never be able to hear her in the great white space between them—the snow and the white annihilating everything, especially the sound of her voice.

Still, he must have heard her pull over, because he turned around. He looked at her. She opened her mouth as he began to shake his head—a slow back-and-forth no, no that made Shelly close her mouth, and put her hand to it. She didn’t need for him to say a word to know what he was telling her:

No.

There was nothing she could do for him.

He was telling her to go.

Shelly lifted a hand before she rolled her window up again, and watched him walk away until she could no longer see him at all in his white shirt in the snow.

Ellen had aged. There was no denying it.

But, of course, so had she. How old must Shelly have looked to Ellen? It had been fourteen years since they���d last seen each other. Still, they managed to recognize one another instantly and simultaneously, and rushed toward one another there in the Las Vegas airport between the escalators and the baggage carousel, with no hesitation.

Ellen tossed down the black leather bag that was slung over her shoulder and threw her arms around Shelly, and said, “I told you so,” into Shelly’s gray hair. They both began to weep—no sobbing, just quiet tears dampening their cheeks.

Shelly nodded at Ellen. It was true. Ellen had always promised she’d come to visit Shelly in Vegas before either of them managed to die. She’d say it at the end of every phone conversation, jot it at the bottom of every email—and there’d been a million of those phone calls, emails, postcards, notes over the years. Time had seemed to create itself out of those exchanges across space.

It was a short drive from the airport to Shelly’s apartment. They were only awkward in the moments of silence, so they kept talking. They talked about Ellen’s flight—four hours beside a woman who stopped blabbing only when she was chewing the cuticles of her fingernails. (“I got up to go to the bathroom three or four times, hoping she’d bother the guy on the other side of her, but she was just waiting for me when I got back.”)

They talked about Las Vegas. Ellen had never been, and Shelly had lived there so long by then that she didn’t even notice how strange it might seem to someone who’d never been out of the Midwest except to go to Manhattan, or France.

It was like moving to Mars, Shelly had told Rosemary on the phone when she first moved. When the plane had landed on the tarmac in Vegas, Shelly had looked through the little plastic window at the desert, and said to herself, I have moved to Mars.

“Good,” Rosemary had said. “In Las Vegas, everyone’s in hiding. And you have to consider yourself in hiding, Shelly. Don’t do anything stupid, like start a Facebook page, okay?”

After that first phone call from her new life, Shelly had hung up, crossed the floor of her fourth-floor apartment, and looked out:

Forever, she’d thought. As in the song, she could see it from the window of her apartment. Forever reached as far as the red-dirt mound of Sunrise Mountain before it abruptly disappeared from view.

And, in all the years, Shelly had never considered moving. Not from Las Vegas (which had become the home she’d never known she hadn’t had—sometimes shabby, consistently inconsistent, but full of a beauty that was that much more lovely because you had to go looking for it) and not from the apartment.

She loved the view from her apartment. At night, the moon hovered over Sunrise Mountain as if it were completely empty up there in the sky, shining light down on light, not seeming to be reflecting anything, but holding its own spot tenaciously up there—a gleaming checkpoint, long ago abandoned.

Directly below Shelly’s balcony, a prickly pear cactus spread its flowering menace between her view and the parking lot.

Once, years before, some member of the maintenance crew had tried to chop it down, swearing as the cactus ripped its barbs through his flimsy windbreaker. Shelly had hurried and called the landlord, who’d agreed to stop the worker, and no one had touched that cactus since.

Now every spring it bloomed as if it were some sort of simple-minded florist’s offering to God. The rest of the year it didn’t try to fool anyone. You knew, if you got close, it was going to rip you to pieces.

In Las Vegas, they said, you never saw the same person twice. And it was true, in its way. Not at the library, not at the gym, not the shopping mall. Even the people Shelly worked with at the hospital kept moving and rotating, coming and going, always keeping their distances so well that it felt, even if it wasn’t strictly true, that she was surrounded by strangers, new strangers every day. And the people in the apartments around hers never lasted more than a few seasons, were easily replaced by brand-new people completely foreign to her, who also left. Every summer, the heat scoured the streets clean of the past.

Only once in all those years did Shelly gasp and turn around, feeling she’d recognized someone. She’d been walking a sand trail through Death Valley in the shadow of the Funeral Mountains, and five girls were walking toward her, coming from the opposite direction. They were swinging their empty water bottles, and stupidly wearing flip-flops through the tough desert terrain, and little spaghetti strap tops under the blasting sun, Greek letters stenciled against the pastel cloth, bare shoulders turning red. It was ninety-five degrees out. (“But it’s a dry heat,” everyone in Las Vegas always joked, “like an oven”).

They will die out here, Shelly thought. Just by being silly, they will die.