Laura Kasischke - The Raising

The alarm in the girl’s voice was, frankly, touching. Shelly could imagine Josie holding the phone to her ear inside the hood of one of her black or gray cashmere hoodies, bent over, wind in her face, black ballet flats exposing the pale tops of her feet to the elements, stopping to hear Shelly more clearly.

“Oh, sure, I’m okay,” Shelly said. “I’m perfectly fine. Just under the weather, I guess. I was going to see if you could take calls in the office this morning without—”

“Oh, no problem,” Josie said. “I can stay all day if you need me to. I only have one class, and it’s—”

“That’s not necessary. You can leave when you were supposed to, at noon, but if, when you do, you could leave a note on the door and…?”

Shelly went on with the instructions, including Security, who would need to come and let Josie in and lock up when she left, and Josie enthusiastically agreed to everything Shelly said, and by the end of the phone call Shelly felt both relieved and confident about choosing that day to call in. Maybe Josie was starting to settle into the semester, and into the routine of the job, and her attitude was changing accordingly. Maybe Shelly wouldn’t need to fire her after all.

She put the phone back in its cradle and looked around the dark kitchenette for a minute, and then turned and peered into the living room (coffee table, overstuffed couch, braided mat for Jeremy next to Shelly’s reading lamp), feeling a little confused about what she was supposed to do next (shower? get dressed? check email?) until she realized it was okay, it was perfectly fine, to go back to bed, and she did.

The pillowcases smelled fresh, and like lavender. The sheets had cooled pleasantly, and the staticky pummeling of the rain on the roof was both calming and deafening, and Jeremy came out from under the bed and found his place at her hip, and Shelly was asleep within seconds.

It must have been about two hours later, in Shelly’s dreams, that the doorbell rang—a pale blue bird opening and closing its mouth in a cage at a mall she used to shop at with her mother as a child. That dream bird was making the muffled chiming noise of a doorbell instead of a whistle. It sounded maybe three or four times before Shelly realized that she was sleeping, and that the doorbell actually was ringing outside of her dream as well as in it, and she swung her legs off the side of the bed. Jeremy, sensing her alarm, jumped off and raced under it, his claws making a desperate scratching noise on the wooden floorboards as he did.

Shelly wasn’t yet sure what time it was, or when the rain had stopped, or even what she was wearing, or why she was in bed instead of at work—and was only slightly less confused by the time she got to the door, got on her tiptoes, pressed her eye to the peephole, and looked out to see Josie Reilly standing there, outside her door.

Josie was wearing one of her skimpy tank tops with a pink hoodie halfway zipped up over it, holding two large Starbucks cups with white lids, and she was looking up at the peephole with a faint little smile on her lip-glossed lips, as if she could see Shelly’s eye peering out at her through it.

Professor Polson’s apartment house looked like a place a student would live, Perry thought, not a professor with a family. In fact, last winter he’d met a guy from his International Human Rights seminar who’d lived in this same building. Around midterms the guy had asked Perry to come over to study with him, but when Perry had shown up the guy had been drunk and didn’t seem to remember that he’d wanted to study, or even who Perry was.

Then, and now, the building’s stairwell smelled like old beer soaked into carpet. Lucas climbed the stairs ahead of him, taking each step as if it were much higher than it was. Perry had to slow down so he wouldn’t charge over him. Lucas looked like an old man, holding tightly to the railing, shoulders hunched and bony in his threadbare T-shirt. There was stenciling on the back of the shirt, but it was so faded Perry couldn’t tell if it read, THE FINAL TOUR or SHE FINDS OUT.

“What’s the number?” Lucas asked for the second or third time when they stepped out into the hallway.

“Two thirty-three,” Perry said, and gave Lucas a gentle push in the direction of the door with 233 on it.

Professor Polson opened it before they knocked (she’d had to buzz them in, so she knew they were in the building, coming up the stairs, and then she must have heard them in the hallway) wearing a ruffly purple blouse, long-sleeved and flowered, and faded jeans with a patch on one knee. This outfit was, Perry realized, exactly what he’d imagined she might wear when she wasn’t wearing professor clothes. To class, Professor Polson always wore black—black dresses, black skirts, black jackets—but it looked to him as if she were playing a role that required these costumes, and that in fact she’d be a lot more comfortable in some kind of hippie dress or skirt, some T-shirt with a Monet painting on it. He could easily picture her in a floppy hat and strappy sandals, some kind of bright silk skirt.

She opened the door wide and motioned for them to come in, and then said, “Sit down, boys. I’ll get some tea.”

Perry wandered in behind Lucas, not sure where to go. Lucas was moving toward a chair in one room, and Professor Polson had disappeared into what must have been a kitchen. He could smell that the tea was already brewing—either that or she’d had a candle burning before they’d gotten there, and had just blown it out. The apartment was what his mother would have called a mess. There were books on the floor, some of them open, and a little pile of what looked like sweaters and dishrags next to the couch. The rug was a bright, Oriental embroidered thing, all blazing reds and yellows where it wasn’t worn away in thready gray patches.

Lucas sat down heavily on a green velvet recliner, and it squeaked when he did, and he made a little face, like maybe something had jabbed him in the back. Perry sat on the couch, which looked old and tired, too, but was comfortable, and had a fancy lamp beside it shedding a warm golden light through a lacy lampshade. It seemed to Perry that everything in the apartment could have been either bought at a garage sale for fifty cents or an expensive heirloom—or both. It was, he thought, about the most interesting place he’d ever seen outside of a movie. He had never been able to picture Professor Polson in her apartment, but now that he was here, he knew this is what he would have imagined. When she came in carrying three mugs, he said, “I like your apartment.”

Professor Polson rolled her eyes a little, handed him a mug. “Be careful,” she said, “it’s hot.” Lucas looked up at the cup as she held it down to him as if he had never seen a mug of tea before. Eventually, he reached up and took it.

Since Perry had gone by his place to pick him up, Lucas had been doing everything this way, in slow motion, and Perry had finally just come out and asked him, after Lucas spent about twenty minutes trying to zip up his jacket, seeming unable to fit the two ends of the zipping apparatus together to save his life, “Are you stoned, man?”

“No,” Lucas said, struggling, albeit languidly, with the zipper. “I’m not doing that anymore. I quit. Bad sleep.”

Perry had been about to offer to zip Lucas’s jacket for him when he’d finally managed to do it himself.

“Thanks for coming over, guys,” Professor Polson said. She sat down beside Perry on the couch and rested her mug of tea on the flowered patch on the knee of her jeans. “How are you, Lucas? I haven’t seen you yet this year, have I? Was your summer okay?”

“It was okay,” Lucas said. He was staring into the swirling steam over his cup with some apprehension. “Yeah.”