Laura Kasischke - The Raising

She mixed the flour and water and baking soda, and listened to Mozart. She drank a second glass of wine. The bread came out of the oven looking perfect, but, Mira thought, she wouldn’t slice it until Clark got home. It would be her peace offering. She’d pour him a glass of wine, ask about the meeting. It was late, and the twins would go right to sleep if they weren’t already asleep in his arms when he walked in.

It wasn’t until midnight that her own stupidity began to dawn on her, the time she’d wasted baking bread, the short-sighted relaxation of the wine (how had she allowed herself the evening to relax? Who had she thought she was?) and went back into the twins’ room and realized that the dresser drawers were open because Clark had packed the twins’ clothes when he left with them, and that the sheets were on the floor because he’d taken their blankies with him, too. She stood staring at the room while her heart caught up with her mind, beating wildly, and then she turned to the doorway with her hands held out, empty.

What was she going to do now?

Stupidly, she thought of the cell phone plan she’d intended to sign them up for but hadn’t gotten around to, getting two phones for the price of one. They had only one cell phone, and it was in her purse.

Mira stumbled into the living room and, after some frantic searching through scraps of paper in the junk drawer, found Clark’s mother’s phone number, and punched the digits in as quickly as she could with her trembling hands.

Her mother-in-law sounded startled out of a drug-enhanced sleep when she answered—panicked, confused, panting. “Kay,” Mira said, “it’s just me. Please, is Clark there? Are the twins with him?” After much stammering, Mira finally managed to explain, in the mildest terms and tone she could muster, that she and Clark had argued, that Clark had left with the twins, that Mira supposed they were on their way to Kay’s. “Has he called you?” she asked.

“No,” Kay said, but managed, even in her half sleep, to muster the maternal energy and clarity to comfort Mira. “But he’ll call in the morning, honey, if he’s not home before then. He’s probably bringing the boys here, but it got too late, so he stopped at a motel. You two will make it up. Believe me, sweetie, if I had a dollar for every time Clark’s daddy and I had a fight like this—”

The tone of her voice, quaveringly compassionate, and the image in Mira’s mind of Clark’s mother, her thin hair a mess on a flowered pillow, her slack cheeks creased with sleep, lying on her side talking into a telephone in the dark, wearing a ratty polyester nightie, trying to make her feel better, caused Mira to whimper, audibly, into the phone, and then Kay sounded alarmed, suddenly fully awake.

“Honey? Honey? Don’t worry. Clark’s not going to do anything. Clark’s not like that. Clark loves you, and he loves the babies, and tomorrow you two will talk this out. Now, you get in your bed, okay, and you call me the second you hear anything, and I’ll call you, too, and in a year we’ll be laughing about this. I’m a lot older than you. I know about this stuff. Okay? You’re listening to me?”

“Yes,” Mira said. She held the receiver away from her mouth so Kay couldn’t hear her voice trembling. “Thank you.”

“Yes, of course. Now, you call me if you need me, but you try to sleep, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Thank you, Kay.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

But Mira hadn’t slept, and by the time she had to leave to teach in the morning, she hadn’t heard from Clark, and Clark’s mother hadn’t answered her telephone when Mira called. She considered calling the dean, explaining that she was having a crisis and couldn’t teach her class, but what would she do instead? Drive? Where? In what? Clark had the car. At what point did you call the police to tell them that your completely sane husband, a loving father, a house husband who spent more time with your children on a daily basis than you did, had gone somewhere with the kids without leaving a note?

And what did the police do then?

She brushed her teeth and ran a washcloth across her face, set her cell phone to vibrate mode in a little pocket in her blouse, over her breast, where she would feel it no matter what she was doing, and left a large note on the kitchen counter.

Mira turned from the blackboard shakily to face the class, and then had to steady herself to sit down, and then just told them the truth:

“I had a bad night. I’m sorry. I’d like to start this lecture again another day. In the meantime, can we have a class discussion?”

The look on her students’ faces—profound surprise and concern—made Mira’s heart feel actually heavy. (How many clichés were more accurate in describing the eternal verities than anything poets could come up with? It never ceased to amaze her.) Her heart sank in her like bait at the end of a line, buoyed up only by reverse gravity again, and those expressions on her students’ faces.

“Please, tell me what attracted you to this class. Why are kids your age so interested in death?”

Mira wasn’t even really expecting an answer, just trying to think of a way to manage the rest of the hour without completely dropping it. She knew that Dean Fleming was in his office. He’d certainly notice if she went back to hers before her class could possibly have been over.

Jim Enright spoke first. He was a quiet guy from a small town up north. Mira had already pegged him as the Savior. He was the student who couldn’t stand to see any of the other students stammer, or lose their train of thought. Once, another student had been trying to think of the word cremation , and Jim Enright had offered about ten possible words that he might have been searching for until the student landed on it.

Now Jim Enright said in a tentative tone, “Because we’re not afraid of it yet?”

Mira managed to nod.

Ben Hood said, “Yeah. Or, like, we—”

Melanie Herzog jumped in:

“ I’m afraid. I think it’s just so scary, you know, thinking of never existing —so everybody wants to know about what might happen afterward. I mean, I think the class isn’t about death. I think it’s about the afterlife.”

Mira couldn’t help but feel revived then. These were interesting thoughts. They’d come up with nothing new, but they were earnest, and expressing themselves fairly well. She nodded, and then Karess (who had her long, smooth legs wrapped around each other a couple of times) scooted to the edge of her seat and said, “You know, I think maybe we’re still young enough that we might have it right. Like, we haven’t given up hope. I mean, old people think it’s scary to die because they’ve seen other people die, but we haven’t, so we don’t have all this baggage, so we still know you can, like, maybe, live after you die.”

There was a bit of laughter—mostly inspired by her California accent, Mira thought. Karess couldn’t say anything without sounding like a character in a Disney sitcom.

“Well, okay,” Mira said, and folded her shaky hands on her desk. “I guess I haven’t asked this question yet, and maybe now’s a good time to ask it. How many of you think you will live beyond your deaths?”

It took a little time (some people always took a bit longer to search their souls before answering such a question) but, eventually, every hand was in the air.

Mira looked at her class.

The room was full of hands held above heads, acknowledging the saddest, most personal hope of all the sad, hopeless, personal hopes in this hopeless world, and this caused Mira to put her own hand over her mouth to keep herself from sobbing, or crying out, or even laughing. She shook her head a little, took her hand away, and said, “That’s all. Class is dismissed. We’ll meet here Tuesday to walk together to the morgue.”