Laura Kasischke - The Raising

As Craig stumbled out of his room and crossed the hallway to Perry’s room, he was still in a state of panic, but also shame, turning on the lights as he went, trying not to whimper. ( God, like going to find your Mommy in the middle of the night: I had a bad dream…)

But surely Perry had heard him, and would be wondering what the fuck—

He opened the door to Perry’s room and could see in the light from the hallway that there was no one in Perry’s bed.

“Perry?” he called toward the kitchen, the living room. But it was a tiny apartment—if Perry had been there, of course he would have heard him before this.

Hell, probably everybody in the apartment house had heard him.

Perry wasn’t there. Definitely not there.

So, where the hell was he? Sleeping over at some girl’s he hadn’t mentioned to Craig? (Maybe the Mystery Chick from freshman year—the one whose panties Craig had found on the floor at the foot of Perry’s bed? Perry had refused to acknowledge those, no matter how much Craig made fun of him.) Just because Perry didn’t seem to have a sex life didn’t mean he didn’t.

He was starting to calm down, to feel more pissed and jilted than terrified. He went to the front door and locked it, even hooked the chain. If fucking Perry came home that night, he could knock his ass off, and if Craig didn’t hear him, he could sleep in the hall.

And then he unhooked the chain, because that was stupid. Hell, Perry was entitled to a night out. Still, he thought, he’d have liked to have had Perry there—to laugh with, if nothing else, about the ridiculous dream.

I’m Alice Meyers. It would have been funny if—well, if it hadn’t scared the shit out of him. Craig was back in bed with the lights out and the blankets pulled up over his ear when he realized where he knew that name from.

Of course.

Fuck .

Godwin Hall.

The Alice Meyers Memorial Student Study Room.

His heart was beating hard again, but he wasn’t going to freak out. It had only been a dream. He turned the bedside lamp on, picked up the crappy novel written by his father’s best friend and rival, Dave Cain— The Boiling Point— and decided he’d stay up reading until morning.

It could only be a few more hours until it was light outside.

Right?

It was the second week of October. Until now, the weather had been unseasonably warm—like summer all through September, and like early September at the beginning of October. Then the weather changed, literally, overnight.

Shelly went to bed with the windows wide open because the house was stuffy from having been shut up all day (the morning weather report had predicted rain, so she’d closed everything, although rain never came), and had woken up in the fetal position in one corner of the bed with a sheet and a thin comforter twisted around her. Jeremy was purring, pushed up against her hip as if huddling there for protection from the elements, and the curtains were whipping around in the window frame. The temperature in the room could not have been above fifty degrees.

“Shit,” she said, jumping out of bed, sending Jeremy tearing out of the room as she hurried to the windows to close them. How had she slept through this complete scene change? The clock on her nightstand said 7:02, but it was pitch black outside—huge rolling dark clouds in the sky seemed to be preparing for a battle of epic proportions. Shelly grabbed her robe and wrapped it around her, and followed Jeremy out to the kitchen. Passing the thermostat on the way, she twisted the dial to seventy degrees—five degrees higher than she usually kept it even in the dead of winter, and eight degrees higher than her ex-husband had ever allowed her to turn it.

The weather change was going to be a problem. She’d need to find her down jacket and waterproof boots before she walked to work, and she was already running late, and the cat needed feeding, and she needed a shower—and the disconcerting darkness, accompanied as it was by inky rain, and the unappealing prospect of trekking across town, gave her the idea that she might, this being Tuesday and Josie’s early-morning day, call in sick.

What could it hurt? She was caught up with all the work she had to do for the next four concerts, and she had no new projects that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. She could just call the cell phone Josie kept permanently attached to her ear, say she wasn’t feeling well, and then call Security to unlock the doors so Josie could get in and answer the phones. Surely Josie could handle the one or two phone calls she might get while filing her nails in the office and playing around online.

The plan coursed through Shelly like fresh blood.

She’d had no idea, she realized, until this moment, how badly she wanted a weekday away from that place. Had she become one of those people who hated their jobs? Only once before in nineteen years had she consciously, brazenly, called in sick when she was certifiably in the pink of health, and that was the morning she woke up for the first time beside Paula and realized that it would take a lot more than the Chamber Music Society to pull her out of that bed if Paula was going to be in it.

Even given all that had happened, that snatched day had been a good decision: a stolen, sensuous morning, the details of which (coffee spilled on the pillows, eggs grown cold, the sheets twisted around their legs) were seared onto Shelly’s memory forever. The memory of that day still filled her with pleasure and contentment, even knowing now, as she did, that Paula would, a few months later, go back to her husband when he was diagnosed with clinical depression and when her grown children told her their father might die if she didn’t go back to him and that they would never speak to her again if he did.

True, it had broken Shelly’s heart. But even that seemed somehow beautiful, being proof as it was that she’d been capable of that kind of love at least once in her life. She’d walked through the world like a zombie for an entire season—like the beast in the Stephen Crane poem, eating of her heart and enjoying it, because it was so bitter, and because it was her heart. But she carried within her the deep satisfaction that she had thrown everything she had into that love, had done everything humanly possible to persuade Paula to stay with her.

That, Shelly had learned, was the difference between heartbreak and regret:

Heartbreak could be lived with if it weren’t accompanied by regret.

She watched the storm from the kitchen window and sipped her coffee calmly, even when Jeremy, unnerved by the storm, abandoned his cat food prematurely (usually he licked the bowl until it was shining) and ran back into the bedroom, where, she knew, he would hide under the bed.

It was 8:45, and Shelly decided it was time to call Josie on her cell phone, so she wouldn’t arrive at the Chamber Music Society to locked doors—although, with this weather, it seemed unlikely to Shelly that the girl was dutifully making her way to the office.

“Shelly?”

Josie answered on the first ring—or at the first note of some pop star’s latest single, whatever Josie’s personalized ring tone might be—and Shelly was surprised to think that Josie either knew her phone number by heart, or had her number programmed into her phone. She didn’t remember Josie ever calling her at home.

“Josie? Hello?”

“Yeah! I’m at Fourth and South U. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Oh,” Shelly said, “that’s not why I called. You’re not late—” (for a change, she thought). “I’m calling because—because I’m not feeling very well, and I—”

“Are you okay ?”