Laura Kasischke - The Raising

Shit, Perry thought. She was going to cry.

“Are you still pissed at me about the scholarship, Perry?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“What?!” Perry took a step back, and nearly stumbled down the stairs. The girls who’d been sitting there had left; now there was only a cigarette butt where they’d been. He put his hand on his chest.

“‘What?’” Nicole echoed, putting her own hand on her own chest, mocking him. She said, “Don’t you know I only got the Ramsey Luke because you got every other award?”

Perry shook his head. He felt he could actually hear something rattling around inside his skull. He said, trying hard to sound convincing, if only to himself, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, get off it, Perry,” Nicole said. “Why are you so competitive? I mean, haven’t you won enough stuff? You still have to begrudge everybody else the few bones they tossed us?”

Perry stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He was pretty sure they were shaking. He said, “Why are we having this conversation? I was just on my way to bed.”

“We’re having this conversation because…” Nicole seemed to choke on whatever she meant to say next, and then, to Perry’s horror, a few fat teardrops actually spilled out of her eyes and onto her cheeks. He opened his mouth, more in protest against the tears than to say something, and then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed, “Because we’re family. We’re like family , Perry. You’re the only person in this whole place who knows me. You’ve known me forever. You’re the only one , and you hate me.”

The two girls who’d been sitting on the steps had wandered back, and were now openly staring at Perry as if he’d committed some crime and was thinking he could get away with it. He looked from them back to Nicole, and then took a step toward her as slowly as he could. She started to sob more loudly. A couple of people on the other side of the doors looked out the window to see what was going on.

“Um, Nicole…” he said. But she didn’t say anything or take her hands away from her face. He could see now that a lot of tears were leaking out from between her fingers, and his heart began to hammer in alarm. He’d never been around a girl really crying before. Mary had never cried except a kind of teary nervousness the day she dumped him, handing him his class ring with an awful little shove. Even his mother only cried when she’d been laughing too hard, too long. Desperately, he patted his pockets, although he already knew he had no tissue.

The girls who’d been smoking were still staring at him, waiting. Perry looked around, as if someone else might be able to step in for him, but no one was going to—so, although his arm felt like it weighed five hundred pounds, he managed to raise it in Nicole’s direction, and to put a hand on her shoulder. She seemed to sag a little when he did this, and then sort of hopped toward him and buried her head in his chest, and then Perry had no choice but to put his hands on her back and pat it.

How long had he been standing there in front of Godwin Honors Hall, staring up at the room that had been Nicole’s the year before?

Had he been talking to himself?

Craig was walking fast back toward his and Perry’s apartment now, staring at his Converse, trying not to look around him at the people he felt pretty sure were looking at him.

On the phone, his father had said from back in New Hampshire, “You call me, bud, the second you feel like you’re losing it, you hear me? I’ll get there, and if I can’t get there fast enough, I’ll find someone who can.”

Losing it.

Even his father, the famous writer, had never been able to find the right words for it—that madness, or confusion, or fog that had enveloped Craig after the accident, and had lasted for months, only to mysteriously evaporate in July when Craig simply woke up one morning, looked around, and understood, perfectly, who and where he was again.

Who was that other person who had inhabited him during those months? Had he really believed that the rehab nurse, Becky, was his grandmother, raised from the dead and fifty years younger?

“Closed head injuries can take years to heal,” Dr. Truby had said when Craig was Craig again. “You got lucky. A few months.”

Lucky.

Was he?

Craig knew where he was now, but would he ever be able to shake the sense that the other world, the one he’d spent months living in, was still there? That back in that world, animals could talk, just not with their mouths? That if you stared at the grass, it spelled messages to you in the breeze? That every blond female was some perverted version of Nicole—face twisted, or wrinkled, or made insipid to torment him?

“Synapses,” Dr. Trudy said. “Misfiring.”

“You were bonkers,” Scar had said. “You were livin’ in Creepyville, man. Welcome back.”

His mother had been horrified when she discovered that his plan was to go back to school in September if they’d let him back in. She’d said the words relapse and what if about five thousand times.

“No one in this family cares what I think, but I am stating for the record that he should not go back to that horrible school,” she’d said to Craig’s father. She was standing in the street talking loudly to the side of the Subaru as if no one were in it. “What if… relapse… or something worse ?”

“What could be worse?” Craig asked from the passenger seat. “I killed my girlfriend.” He even managed a laugh. Beyond his mother, he could see her new boyfriend’s shadow moving around behind the curtains of his parents’ bedroom.

“Lynette, you’re right about one thing,” Craig’s father had said, rolling the car window up as he said it. “No one gives a flying fuck what you think.”

Craig’s mother started screaming at the Subaru as they pulled away from the curb, but his father had turned up his Vivaldi, and Craig didn’t hear from her again until the next week, just before they headed back out to the Midwest, when she came by his father’s apartment and said—subdued, choked with emotion, spilling tears all over the place—“Just come back the second you can’t stand it anymore,” as if it were a foregone conclusion that it would come to that. “If… relapse.”

“And do what?” Craig had asked. “Come back and live with you and Scar and ‘Uncle Doug,’ work at the ski resort?”

His mother turned her back then, and walked out the front door, down the stairs, and crisply back to her car, sobbing openly the whole way, as other apartment dwellers passed her in the parking lot and Craig watched from the balcony. For a second it had crossed his mind to run out there after her, tackle her, press his face into her chest, and sob, too, but she was already driving away in her Lexus before he could.

Now he was back, and wondering if she’d been right.

He shouldn’t be here.

They’d let him back in, but that didn’t mean he belonged here.

Even Dr. Truby had seemed worried, and Dr. Truby had been, from the beginning, all about self-empowerment and complete recovery.

“You may… begin… to have frightening recall,” he’d said. “Please phone me if you do.”

The last time Craig had met with the shrink it was a hundred degrees outside and the air-conditioning in the office was blowing in the smell of an overheated refrigerator. He knew Dr. Truby was about to ask him, for the ten millionth time, the same question:

“Tell me, Craig, anything you can recall at this time about the accident.”