Laura Kasischke - The Raising

They were still far away, but he could see that they were laughing, tossing shaggy wool scarves over their shoulders as they emerged through a scrim of snow.

He took a few steps toward them. They hadn’t noticed him, but they were heading in his direction. When they were less than a block away, Craig rubbed his eyes to be sure, but now he had no doubt:

One of them was Josie.

Craig would have recognized that black silk hair, that pointed chin, anywhere. He could even hear her familiar laughter as she got closer. That high, sharp cackle. “Oh, my God!” she was saying. “You are totally kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding.”

Craig continued to stand in the center of the sidewalk, watching. They were directly ahead of him, and so close now that their shadows, stretched ahead of them on the snowy sidewalk, nearly touched him, would soon envelope him.

Yes.

He knew without a doubt that the one on the left was Josie, but he had to rub his eyes and blink the snowflakes out of them several times, shake his head, before he could be sure of what he was sure of:

That the second girl, the dark-haired one walking with Josie, was Nicole.

Nicole .

“Nicole,” he said.

She didn’t hear him, and she hadn’t seen him.

He stood where he was and watched her, taking all of her in. The way she walked and the corners of her mouth. The little folds at the edges of her eyes. The perfect little bump on the bridge of her nose.

The silky straight hair was dark now, like Josie’s.

But the tilt of her head.

The delicate ear behind which her hair was tucked.

Those were the same.

He’d have recognized them anywhere.

She was wearing a leather skirt. And tights with a silver sheen, and high-heeled boots. More eye makeup than she’d ever worn in—in what? In life ?—and dark red lipstick. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, but her cheeks were bright, either with cosmetics or the cold, or maybe she’d been drinking. She seemed to stagger a little. She held a hand to her mouth to laugh at something else Josie had said, but Josie’s voice shouted over the sound of Nicole’s laughter, and Craig was grateful for that, because if he’d heard her voice, her actual voice, he might not have been able to stand it.

“Nicole,” he said again, and then he was walking straight toward her, saying her name over and over, shouting it, and he was sliding on the slick cement toward them, and then they saw him, and there was no denying it:

Nicole.

She saw him, too. Her eyes filled with alarm. She turned and ran with what seemed like incredible speed back from where she’d come, back up the hill to the OTT house. Craig ran after her, slipping on the sidewalk, stumbling like a drunken man but managing somehow to stay upright, to continue the chase.

But she was so much faster than he was. She did not slip at all. How was that possible? In those high-heeled boots? In his life, Craig had only ever seen a deer run that gracefully, that quickly, that wildly and swiftly and without a backward glance, across the freeway, into the woods, without a sound. He was, himself, a much clumsier, heavier animal, slipping after her, panting, not with exertion but with panic, excitement, ecstasy.

She was ahead of him, but he was closer to her than he’d ever really believed he’d be again. She wasn’t within reach, but she might have been. She might be, eventually. If he could only—

But then Josie Reilly had slammed her body fearlessly into his, knocked him to the ground, and then she was on top of him, pummeling him with her fists, straddling his hips with her legs spread, slamming her small, white, balled-up hands against his face, his head, his eyes. She tore off her soft gloves so she could claw at him. “You motherfucker. You asshole. You murderer. Get out of here. Get out of our lives. Get off this campus you fucking bastard.” He tasted blood, and though he heard the sound of a bone snap somewhere in his face, and although it seemed to Craig that the whole thing lasted for decades, he felt no pain—and suddenly, just as he was getting used to it, he opened his eyes, and she was gone, and he was alone on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon as it seemed to toss cold white flakes down on his throbbing face.

“Holy shit,” a guy in a Red Sox cap said, looking down at him. “You okay, dude? I hope whatever you did to piss her off was worth it.”

“Oh, goodness. That certainly wasn’t the image I intended to show you,” Mr. Dientz said. “I’m sorry.” He sounded as if he were apologizing, belatedly, for having absentmindedly forgotten to offer someone sugar for his tea.

Perry had come back from the men’s room and was standing with his head against the window, looking out onto the Dientz Funeral Parlor parking lot, which was shadowed by the casket-shaped rectangle of the Dientz Funeral Parlor sign.

Both of these things—the parking lot and the sign—he’d passed in cars and on his bike maybe ten thousand times in his life, and yet there was something so unfamiliar, so unreal, about them in that moment that he knew that, if he were asked to, he’d be utterly unable to read the sign, to name the function of a parking lot, to place these things or himself on the surface of the earth. Back in the men’s room, he’d rinsed his mouth out, but he could still taste the bile. Professor Polson came up behind him and touched his arm. “Perry.” She said it firmly, pulling him back from the window.

“Well, that must have been a shocker for you!”

There was no escaping the amusement in Mr. Dientz’s voice, and Perry remembered now Mr. Dientz standing over a table of Cub Scouts in the Bad Axe Elementary School cafeteria chuckling as the Scouts tried to pound nails into boards. What had they been building? Birdhouses? Toolboxes? The pine boards had been thick and incredibly hard, and the Scouts were all under the age of ten, and with every smack of the hammer, a nail would bend over dramatically instead of being driven into the wood. “Hah, hah. We aren’t too good at boys’ work, are we, girls ?” Mr. Dientz had teased, and Perry remembered the screwed-up expression on his son Paul’s face, the watery glare he kept trained on the nail as he prepared to smack it again with a hammer, and the way, when the nail bent over a fourth or fifth time and his father began to laugh, he didn’t throw the hammer down or even drop it, but very carefully placed it next to the boards and walked away as his father watched and continued to laugh.

“ This ,” Mr. Dientz said, “is the image I meant to show you, the post- reconstruction photo. Very good photo, and nice work, if I do say so myself.”

“First, let me see,” Professor Polson said, letting go of Perry’s arm, and leaving him in the corner of the office.

“You can see, Professor,” Mr. Dientz said, “how much work went into this, I hope. There’s really no resemblance between the first face and this one, is there?”

Professor Polson said nothing. She was looking intently into Mr. Dientz’s computer screen. Perry could see that there was a small line of sweat at her spine, gently soaked through the red silk of her shirt. The blouse wasn’t tight, but the material clung to her back, and Perry could have counted the vertebrae from where he stood. The electric glow from the computer illuminated the hair around her face, causing it to look both black and blindingly bright. “Perry?” she said gently, turning toward him. “Do you think you can you look?”

Perry swallowed. He crossed the mauve carpeting again, took the seat beside her, rubbed his eyes, which were watery and blurred from vomiting, and then he leaned toward the computer screen.