Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“I’m going for a run,” he said, and was gone.

It was the second week of January. She was lying on Craig’s bed when Perry got back to the dorm room after the first winter semester meeting of his International Human Rights seminar. She was on top of Craig’s comforter (Craig had started making his bed since he’d started dating Nicole) in a T-shirt. Her legs were bare. Perry thought, with a jolt that felt a bit like panic, that he’d caught a glimpse of pale blue underpants when she crossed her ankles. She was wearing a silver ankle bracelet. It had what looked like a bell, or an anchor, or a crucifix, hanging from it. She had a book in her hands.

Perry looked away. He strode purposefully to his desk, sat down with his back to her, and said, “What are you doing here, Nicole? Craig’s not going to be back until after dinner.”

“I’m just reading,” she said. “It’s quieter here than in my room. Josie’s always got Norah Jones playing. Drives me nuts. Whine-whine-whine.”

Perry could hear the springs on Craig’s bed squeak. She must have shifted her weight, rolled onto her side. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking over. He turned his computer on, and there was the usual sound of an angelic choir starting up—one discordant but celestial note, which hung in the air.

“No offense, Nicole,” Perry finally managed to say, “but when my roommate’s not here, I actually enjoy my solitude.”

“Well, Craig said you wouldn’t mind,” Nicole said casually. “He gave me his key.”

Perry’s screen saver came up then (comets shooting through a blue-black sky) and, at the same time, something hit his shoulder, sharp and surprising, and it took him only a second or two to realize that it was Craig’s room key clattering on the floor behind him. Before he could stop himself, he was turned around in his chair, glaring at Nicole.

She was, as he’d thought, lying on her side. One leg was slung over the other. One of her bare feet (toenails painted shell pink) was pointed, swinging like a pendulum over the side of Craig’s bed.

“Come on, Nicole,” Perry said. “Why are you here?” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to seem more exhausted than agitated. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming as unnerved by her presence as he was. Since she and Craig had taken up full time, she was, like Craig himself, a constant irritation, mainly because Craig never shut up about her, was in an endless cycle of manic ecstasy and despair about her. When he wasn’t frantically trying to call her, or find her, he was on the phone with her, or in their room with her. They couldn’t hang out in Nicole’s room because Josie hated Craig’s guts, so they were here, or in the hallway waiting for Perry to get dressed so they could get in. Whenever Perry said something to Craig about it, Craig just said, “You’re jealous, man. You’re in love with my girlfriend. The sooner you face it, the better off we’ll all be.” It seemed like a joke now, with Craig, but it was still exasperating.

“I think you know why I’m here,” Nicole said before she stood up and crossed the room—those bare feet, and the toenails, he tried only to look at those—and knelt down at his feet, looked up at him, directly in his line of vision, so he had to look back, and then she reached up for his face, pulled it gently toward her, and before he really understood what she was going to do, and what was happening, kissed him with her mouth open, her tongue slipping warmly, mintily, over his.

Shelly typed Josie Reilly into Google.

It was Monday, and Josie hadn’t made it into work at all. Shelly had come into the office to a raspy message on her machine in the morning:

“Hey, this is Josie (cough, cough) and I’m really sick. I can’t come in. I’m really sorry. I’m going to Health Services now. I’ll be in on Wednesday I’m sure.”

There were an astonishing number of Google hits.

Of course, Josie Reilly wasn’t a completely unique name. One Josefina/Josie Reilly seemed to have been involved somehow in the Salem witch trials. Another Josie Reilly was a CEO of a large, bankrupt corporation. There was also a long list of genealogical connections—Reillys and Rileys and Reileys going back several centuries, traversing the Atlantic, claiming to be related to one another, as if it mattered. (What, Shelly always wondered, did people feel they gained by claiming kinship with strangers, alive or dead?)

But then her Josie Reilly rose to the surface, incontrovertibly the coed sorority sister from Grosse Isle, the one Shelly had hired as a work-study student for the Chamber Music Society:

DEAD FRESHMAN’S ROOMMATE SPEAKS OUT AGAINST DRUNK DRIVER.

There she was—Josie, in all her sloe-eyed Black Irish beauty, holding a microphone on the steps of the Llewellyn Roper Library. The sun shone down on her inky hair, which matched the black halter-top dress she wore. Behind her, the familiar apple tree that seemed to grow out of the foundation of the library (the one they were always threatening to rip out because it was fucking up the plumbing) wasn’t yet in bloom.

The Dead Freshman’s Roommate?

Shelly clearly remembered asking Josie of Nicole Werner, “Did you know her?” And the shrug. We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time, so…

Josie had said nothing about being her roommate. Nothing whatsoever. Nothing about standing outside the Llewellyn Roper Library in May, speaking out against drunk driving and about her dead roommate.

Why?

That night, after a distracted glass of Cabernet Sauvignon and a cursory page-through of the New York Times , Shelly called Rosemary.

For over two decades she had spoken to Rosemary on the phone every few days, and a bit more lately, since Rosemary’s eldest son had become a teenager and there was so much to say about this terrifying passage. For the first half of the conversation, Shelly listened to Rosemary rail against the public schools and the fact that they allowed fourteen-year-old children to neck on the benches outside the building during lunch period.

“Can you imagine if we’d tried to get away with that in middle school?” Rosemary asked.

She wasn’t expecting an answer, so Shelly didn’t say that, actually, she could , and that she remembered, herself, the spring of eighth grade, meeting Tony Lipking (ironically named, since he was her first kiss) out in the parking lot every lunch hour it wasn’t raining, and the warm feeling of Tony’s Ford’s grille against her thighs as he held her between himself and that grille with his face locked onto hers for the entire hour, when she should have been eating her mother’s turkey sandwich and carrot sticks.

When Rosemary was done railing, Shelly told her the story of Josie, and how she’d Googled her on the Internet and discovered her as Nicole Werner’s grieving roommate.

“Why wouldn’t she have told me that, when I asked? Why would it be a secret, especially after I told her that I was at the accident?”

Rosemary seemed to consider this for quite a while, although Shelly could also hear a sink running in the background. (Often it seemed that Rosemary was multitasking while they talked.) “Traumatized?” Rosemary finally offered. “Or maybe she thinks it’s controversial? Maybe she doesn’t want to get into it? Trying to get past all that?”

“No,” Shelly said. She didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s not this girl. This girl would be thrilled to get controversial. Believe me.”

Shelly went on to tell Rosemary everything she knew about Josie Reilly—the boys waiting in the office, the early departures, late arrivals, the excuses. She described the spaghetti-strap tops she wore. The little silver sandals and the black flats with frilly bows. Jeremy, Shelly’s cat, was licking his catnip mouse on the braided rug at her feet as Shelly detailed the habits of her work-study student and this odd mystery surrounding her.