Laura Kasischke - The Raising

There were still a couple of branches of blossoms framing the screen.

Shelly touched one of those without taking her eyes off the girl’s face.

The multiple enlargements had obscured her features, but even through this veil of haze and distorted pixels, Shelly felt she knew exactly who this was, and where she’d seen her before.

With a trembling hand, she hit the left-hand arrow a few times until she was back at the article attached to the image, and the little box to the left of Josie’s pretty feet.

“Craig Clements-Rabbitt has not yet been accused of a crime, inspiring outrage within the grief-stricken Omega Theta Tau community.”

Shelly sat back, put a hand to her forehead, and then over her eyes. She had to find him. Why hadn’t she done it already? What had she been waiting for? There were things this boy needed to know that only she could tell him. Her hand was still trembling as she typed in the Internet address of the university directory, and realized with some chagrin how incredibly easy he was to find. Like the Grahams, like all of them, he was captured there in the Web—his address and phone number and all the public and personal details of his life. Shelly jotted down the address and grabbed her purse, hurrying out the door.

“Professor Polson’s on her way over.”

“Our professor is on her way to your apartment ?” Karess asked. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed over her chest. Since they’d left the morgue and come back to the apartment, she’d never stopped shaking. She and Perry had walked so quickly they might as well have been running, and he was, himself, sweating in his jacket, but when they got to the front door and he saw how pale she was, and how much she was trembling, he took her in his arms and held her as she muttered, “Oh, God, Oh, my God, I remember that guy. Me and my roommate bought weed from him during Orientation. Oh, my God, Perry, that was his dead body.”

Perry had pulled her into the hallway and pressed her up against the mailboxes, trying to warm her, hold her close enough to calm her—or maybe himself—but it hadn’t worked at all. Hours and many cups of hot coffee later, Karess was still shaking, standing against the window with her legs pressed to the radiator. She’d barely spoken until now, except to say hello to Craig when Perry introduced them to each other, and to say no when he asked her if she wanted something to eat.

“Does Professor Polson spend a lot of time here?”

“We’re working together on—”

“Yeah,” Karess said.

“Look,” Perry said. “She’s never been here before, but this thing, with Lucas—I could tell on the phone, she’s really upset.”

“Fuck her ,” Karess said, suddenly completely animated. The jewels and feathers she was wearing started to swing and flutter around her. She stomped the heel of her boot hard enough that Perry felt pretty sure that if anyone had been sleeping in the apartment below them, they weren’t anymore. “ She was upset? She had us all set up, Perry. Couldn’t you tell? That’s why she left us all there, and went out in the alley. She knew there was a body in there, that it was a guy our age. I mean, that was her other boyfriend in there, that diener. You didn’t notice the big hug and all that? You think he didn’t bother to tell her there was a dead college kid in the morgue today? Professor Polson’s been trying to scare the shit out of us since day one, and I for one plan to file a complaint about it. This class has been a freak show from the beginning. My parents are not going to be amused.”

“She didn’t know,” Perry said. “I’m telling you, she had no way of knowing. She was as shocked as the rest of us. I was there when she recognized Lucas. I thought she was going to pass out.”

“Yeah. Right,” Karess said, and turned her back to him. He could see her shoulder blades under her sweater and the tank top and sheer blouse she was wearing. It crossed his mind that, undressed, she might be either impossibly beautiful or a skeleton. She was always decorated in so many layers of flowing clothes he could never have begun to guess how much she weighed, but it couldn’t have been much.

From the bathroom, he could hear the shower running, and Craig in there bumping around in the tiny shower stall, and then the intercom buzzed through the apartment, and Perry hit the button to open the apartment house door. Karess snorted out of her nose, and Perry went to stand in the hallway, listening to the sound of what he thought were Professor Polson’s black boots on the stairwell (solid, steady steps in sharp heels, as if she were tired or trying to figure out if she was in the right building, heading toward the right apartment), so he was surprised when the woman turned at the top of the stairwell, and she wasn’t Professor Polson. At first he thought somehow that she was his aunt Rachel. Same coloring. Reddish-blond hair. Pale skin. Maybe forty years old. Pretty, but not trying to be. This woman was wearing a silk dress and a very large black down parka. “Are you Craig?” she asked.

“Are you Craig?” Shelly asked the boy who stood near the open door in the hallway, although he didn’t look like the boy she remembered. He was handsome, in that buzz-cut, face-chiseled-from-marble kind of way—the kind of All-American boy she used to fantasize about when she was a teenager, but whom she never actually met. The closest she’d come was Chip Chase, who’d taken her to her senior prom, and he’d had longer hair than her own, which Shelly had pretended to like—running her fingers through the long, dark brown locks—when, in truth, she’d hated it.

This boy didn’t look like the long-haired boy she’d seen at the accident. He looked, instead, like Shelly’s brother. He could have been Shelly’s brother, had Richie lived to be nineteen. If Richie had been a college student instead of a Marine. Josie’s word interchangeable came to mind.

“No,” the boy said. “Craig’s in the shower.”

“Oh. I was hoping to speak to him,” Shelly said to this ghost of her brother, and he opened the door to let her in.

When Craig got out of the shower—dried and dressed—he was surprised to find Perry’s professor already in the apartment. She was sitting on their couch. And a slender red-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair that Perry had pulled out for her. Perry and Karess stood next to each other at the window.

“I’m Shelly Lockes,” the red-haired woman said. “I was at the accident. I was the first one there. I’m the one they said didn’t give directions to nine-one-one. I saw you and Nicole the night—”

“The night she died,” Craig said, sinking onto the couch beside the professor. It surprised him how easily he was able to say “she died.” It had taken Dr. Truby four appointments to get those two words out of him, and that first time he’d said them aloud, when his memory had finally started to come back to him, he’d had to stand up fast, feeling as if his own words had somehow slugged him in the stomach. Then he’d collapsed again and wept into his hands until his session with Dr. Truby was over.

Now he could say the words over and over, as if they weren’t the truth.

Shelly Lockes shook her head, as if to contradict him, but she didn’t say anything else. It was like she was waiting for permission to speak again.

There was something familiar about her. She was beautiful. She looked the way he thought angels painted on Christmas cards would look if Christmas card makers had more imagination. She was feminine, but without makeup, and although she was petite and very pretty, she also looked incredibly strong. She looked like the kind of angel who could very easily pick you up from the hundredth story of a burning building and fly you back down to the ground.