The Raising: A Novel Part 2

"I don't know, man," Perry said, dragging out the man in imitation of that East Coast accent. "How'd you get so f.u.c.king cynical?"

"Native intelligence. Born with it," Craig said without missing a beat. He never missed a beat. He had a whole encyclopedia of comebacks on the tip of his tongue at all times.

"Is it a burden," Perry asked, "being so much better than everyone else? Or is it pleasing?"

"I'm so used to it by now," Craig said, "I really couldn't say."

Perry sat down on his own bed and unzipped his backpack. You could have drawn a line straight down the center of the room. Every time some piece of Craig's laundry or a magazine or a discarded protein bar wrapper inched over onto Perry's side, he carefully pushed it back over to Craig's side with his foot.

"Your mom called," Craig said. "I told her you were out trying to score some heroin, but you'd be back in an hour or so."

"Thanks."

"Here," Craig said. "You can call her from my cell in the lounge if you want some privacy." He tossed the phone, slightly larger than a matchbook and just as thin, to Perry. It had been a source of endless surprise to Craig Clements-Rabbitt that Perry didn't own a cell phone and was dependent on the antique mounted to the wall of their room. Craig did not, himself, even know their phone number, and had only touched the telephone in the room to take calls for Perry.

"Thanks," Perry said. He took the phone, stood, and closed the door behind him.

"Mom?"

There was no one else in the second-floor lounge, so Perry lay back on the blue couch, careful to keep his shoes from touching the cus.h.i.+ons.

He and his mother talked about his cla.s.ses, his grandfather, his father's business-a lawn mower shop, the best one in town-and about the weather, which had been beautiful. The leaves in Bad Axe had changed dramatically already, she said, and were starting to fall, and she joked that she supposed she was going to have to do the raking now, with Perry at college.

"I can come home for a weekend," he said, "if I can get a ride."

"Don't be ridiculous," his mother said. "We can handle the leaves. You just get good grades."

Perry was an only child-except that there'd been another, a sister before him, who'd died at birth, a baby his mother had never once spoken of to him. The only reason Perry knew about her was because his grandmother, when he was nine, had decided Perry needed to know.

Since he'd been a toddler, Perry'd had an imaginary sister whose name was Mary.

He was getting too old for imaginary playmates, his grandmother told him one day, and G.o.d knows what it must be doing to his parents, listening to him in his room, talking for hours to that imaginary girl. Unlike the other adults in Perry's life, Grandma Edwards pulled no punches just because he was a child. She was the one who'd told him that his grandfather had been an alcoholic, and that his Uncle Benny took after him, a s...o...b..ring drunk, and that's why he was never invited for Christmas dinner. She was the one who would, eventually, tell him that she herself was dying of bladder cancer, not "recuperating" in the hospital, as his parents had said.

So Grandma Edwards took him to the grave-a flat, s.h.i.+ning stone engraved with "Baby Girl Edwards," and a date that meant nothing to Perry-and that very day, his imaginary friend Mary had vanished, as if the imaginary could die as easily as the actual. Perry almost never thought about her again, except on the rare occasion that her translucently pale skin would come back to him, and the way her soft, cool, imaginary hand had felt on his, guiding it across a piece of paper, teaching him how to draw a dinosaur.

And the scent of her hair-that red tangle of curls-like warm earth.

"I love you, Mom," Perry said before hanging up.

"I love you, Perry," his mother said.

"Tell Dad I love him."

"He loves you, too."

A few more good-byes, back and forth, and Perry snapped Craig's snazzy cell phone shut, rose from the couch, and headed back. A few students pa.s.sed him on the way-strangers, but strangers he recognized now from the hallways, from the cafeteria. One guy, with wire-frame gla.s.ses, Perry recognized from a cla.s.s, although he couldn't remember which one. They nodded seriously, politely, to each other.

The stairwell was empty when he got there. He could hear his own steps ringing around him, and as he climbed to the fourth floor, he suddenly was struck with a terrible grieflike longing for his mother, home alone in their two-bedroom bungalow. What would she do now that their phone call was over? Call her own mother? Watch television?

And there was grief for his father, too, still at the shop. He might be trying to fix something, or sell something, or schedule some kid to work on Sat.u.r.day now that Perry was gone.

He thought about his grandfather, too, sitting on the bench in the hallway of Whitcomb Manor, already looking forward to Sunday, when Perry's parents would pick him up to go to Dumplings.

And then he was feeling sorry for the whole town of Bad Axe. The drugstore. The pizza place. The brick facades of the few, desperate businesses downtown. The strip malls at the edge of everything. The cemetery with its little flags and flowers stuck into the soft, green ground. The women at Fantastic Sam's, staring out at the parking lot, waiting for someone with too much hair to come inside.

Homesick. Now he knew what that was. And as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell, eyes fogged with emotion, Perry realized how stupid he was being, and rubbed away his ridiculous, homesick tears. Sentimental c.r.a.p. The only other Eagle Scout from his troop in Bad Axe was already in the Marines, sent off to Afghanistan. That guy had something to get teary about, not Perry.

A girl in a miniskirt rounded the corner of the hallway, laughing hysterically into her cell phone. She didn't even glance at him. When Perry rounded the corner himself, he saw that the door to his dorm room was open, and someone was standing in it.

And then he saw who it was.

The bright blond ponytail. The perfect posture.

Nicole Werner.

She turned when Perry came up behind her, and she said, "Hi!" in that voice so bright and girlish it sounded like it was coming out of a piccolo.

"Hi," Perry said back, sounding like a party p.o.o.per in comparison, but who could compete with Nicole Werner when it came to congeniality? He saw Craig, still in his boxer shorts, no s.h.i.+rt, standing a few feet in front of her.

"I came by to see, you know, how it's going," she said to Perry, but glanced back at Craig as if trying politely to include him in the conversation. "You know, see if you'd want to set up a study time . . ."

"Oh. Yeah," Perry said. He'd forgotten. They'd talked about this back in Bad Axe-after they'd both gotten their acceptance letters, but before she'd been awarded the Ramsey Luke. They'd said they'd keep up the ritual, the weekly study marathons. "Okay," he said, and shrugged.

Craig caught Perry's eye then, and Nicole looked from Perry to him. "You're welcome to join us," she said to Craig.

Craig nodded, appeared to consider it, and then said, "That would be helpful. I could use the support, you know, to keep up the good study habits."

Nicole nodded. She'd obviously missed the false note, and the fact that Craig Clements-Rabbitt was half-naked, having been lying in bed with an iPod and Brain Freeze at eight o'clock on a Tuesday night. "Great!" she said. "So, now we just need a time and a place." She whipped her academic planner out from under her arm in a flash, and slid out a pen conveniently tucked into her ponytail. She stuck the pen in her mouth as she scanned the pages of the planner.

"I'm free anytime," Craig said.

Perry rolled his eyes.

4.

Maybe her students thought she was deaf. They could chase her down a hallway for half a mile calling out, Professor? Professor?"and it did not occur to Mira to turn around.

Professor?

That couldn't be her.

But here she was, a professor at one of the largest universities in the world. They called her a cultural anthropologist, as if that were an occupation. She was an "Expert on the Treatment of Human Remains in Preliterate Civilizations"-the way her father had been an Insurance Salesman, or her mother, a Homemaker.

She was thirty-three, the mother of two-year-old twins, the wife of a Nice Guy who happened to be content in the role of Stay-at-Home Dad. She'd gotten her Ph.D. with honors and kudos and special awards: a Fulbright to Croatia, and even the unheard-of Guggenheim for a graduate student. Her dissertation, Traditional Burial Practices and Their Folk Origins: Fear, Fantasy, and the Cults of Death, had been published by a major academic press just a few months after she'd finished it. There'd been positive reviews in the specialized journals, and even a quick notice in a newspaper or two because of popular interest in her subject.

So, why, when they called out, "Professor!" did Mira not a.s.sume they were calling out to her? Why, day after day in that place, did she feel like such a fraud?

Because, perhaps, she was a fraud?

Mira Polson had ridden into her position as an a.s.sistant professor at the Honors College on the merit of that first book, and the "promise" the college saw for her future publications. That was three years ago, and now she was two years away from her tenure review, and there was no doubt-the department chair had made sure she had no doubt-that she would not receive it, and would not be kept on at the university, if she did not publish a book between now and then. And, so far, in the last three years allotted to her by the university to write and publish that book, Mira had produced nothing beyond some scrawled notes on a legal pad-notes that had become, in the year and a half since she'd scrawled them, illegible even to her.

And if she did not get tenure, then what?

Then she would be far worse than a fraud. She would be an unemployed expert on an obscure subject with two toddlers and a husband to support.

This Mira had considered as she closed the apartment door behind her and headed off to G.o.dwin Honors Hall, trying not to listen to the twins scream after her, or to Clark's impatient shus.h.i.+ng on the other side of the door. It took every ounce of fort.i.tude she had to keep walking down the hall toward the stairs.

They had been sick in the night. No fevers, but both had barfed over the sides of their cribs around two o'clock in the morning, Andy taking his cue from Matty, as he usually did when it came to vomiting. They had apparently gorged themselves on Doritos while Mira was at a department meeting the evening before. Clark had been dead asleep when she got home, although it was only nine o'clock.

"The twins sleep, you sleep," their pediatrician had advised at their two-year checkup when Clark complained that the twins were still waking up once or twice in the middle of the night. Clark had been doing that anyway-sleeping when they slept-as far as Mira could tell, but after the pediatrician's advice, Clark had made a religion of it. Sometimes he even slept while the twins were awake. Mira would come home to find him out cold on the carpet in the living room beside the playpen while the twins stood inside it, shaking the cus.h.i.+oned edges like bars on a prison door.

They were healthy, active, curly-haired boys who spoke to one another in a rapid chatter that, when she was being irrational, Mira thought might be some linguistic or genetic remnant of her Eastern European forebears in their blood. When they asked for milk, it was milekele; "bye-bye" was gersko; "mama" and "papa" were meno and paschk. Sometimes Mira caught herself wis.h.i.+ng that her grandmother was still alive to translate. Even more irrationally, she'd gone to the Llewellyn Roper Library in the summer to look up the words for milk, good-bye, mother, father, in Romanian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and cross-referenced them to everything-Latin, French, German, and all the dialects-to find, of course, nothing that indicated that her twins were actually speaking a foreign language.

Of course.

Walking away from the library that day-its stiff neocla.s.sical columns pretending to hold it up-Mira had felt silly, at best. Slightly insane, at worst. So, less insanely, she consulted medical books and websites, but when she asked their pediatrician if the twins might be experiencing some kind of language development delay, he'd laughed and said, "You professors all think your kids should be delivering lectures a few months out of the womb. Look, if they're still babbling in a foreign language this time next year, we'll explore the possibilities. But I'm telling you, they won't be."

Clark was becoming more and more frustrated these days by the twins' refusal to speak his language, and Mira knew it was because he was the one at home day after day while she was doing research, going to meetings, teaching. He was exhausted most of the time, wired up with manic energy the rest. There were dark circles the size of half-dollars under his eyes, and in the last three years he'd gone from the h.o.r.n.i.e.s.t man she'd every met-hard inside her again before he'd even pulled out-to the kind of guy women called radio talk shows about: I wonder if my husband's having an affair; he hasn't wanted to have s.e.x for the last three months.

An affair might have occurred to Mira, too, if she didn't know exactly how Clark spent his days, and how impossible fitting anything extra into them would have been. The twins woke at 5:00 a.m., and did not stop having needs or making demands in their foreign language until 9:00 p.m. If she didn't have cla.s.s, Mira would get up with them in the morning and let Clark sleep. But when she did have cla.s.s, which was most days, he'd be the one stumbling and swearing out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Mira would roll over and pretend to be asleep-even on the occasions when Clark seemed to take forever to wake up and roll out of bed-although her whole body would be screaming as she listened to the twins cry out. Their cries, always the same (Braclaig! Braclaig!), made it impossible to know whose attention they were demanding, but Mira felt certain they were calling for her. It made her feel as if an alarm clock were rattling inside her chest, sending vibrations through every nerve and into every nerve ending of her body.

There were so many nerve endings.

The year before, in the fall, she and Clark had gotten a babysitter and gone to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Natural History Museum in the city.

Dead bodies.

Her specialty.

It was why Clark had thought to buy the tickets. A birthday present. "Right up your alley," he'd said, holding them up.

Except that these weren't historical dead bodies. Folkloric dead bodies. These weren't the kinds of primitive embalmings Mira studied. Instead, these were plastinated, dissected corpses, standing right in front of the viewer, filleted and splayed. A dead guy was set up on horseback, holding his own brain in one hand and his horse's brain in the other. Another was lobbing a basketball into the air, all his muscles on display, stringy and red. There was a corpse reclining in front of a dark television set, and one kneeling in prayer, literally holding his heart in his hands. The worst, the one that haunted Mira for weeks afterward, was the pregnant woman lying on her side like a centerfold-nothing left but tissue and bone and a net of blood vessels, but still with her baby floating eerily in her womb.

Maybe it was because Mira was a cultural anthropologist and had never had the vaguest interest in biology or physiology, but standing in the moving line of gawkers at the Natural History Museum that day, all of them together shuffling past that woman and her child (both of whom looked unborn and undead at the same time), Mira had urgently wanted to know how that woman had died. The brochure they'd been handed when they turned in their tickets insisted that the people who'd donated their bodies for the exhibit had requested anonymity, had donated in the interest of science, and that to reveal the mundane details-age, race, nationality, dates, and circ.u.mstances of their deaths-was to muddy the waters, lessen the message of the exhibit, which was to show the human body in all of its glorious detail.

Bulls.h.i.+t, Mira thought. The only important thing here was who that woman was and what she had been doing on the day of her death. Had she known she would die? Had she lingered for weeks, or had she simply failed to look both ways as she crossed the street? Had she had her throat cut by a husband who suspected the baby she was carrying wasn't his? Had she been stoned to death in some dark corner of the world for some supposed crime-maybe she'd flirted with a man of another religion, or sold some book to his wife that women weren't allowed to read?

"They were executed," Clark whispered into her ear as they stood in line waiting to view the dead Madonna, as if he'd gotten the news firsthand from someone who'd threatened to kill him, too, if he pa.s.sed it on. "The men at least. You can tell. They're all Asian. They're shorter than Americans. Chinese prisoners."

Clark hadn't liked the exhibit either, but he said it was because he'd found it dull. It reminded him of high school health cla.s.s, Mrs. Liebler. "I shouldn't have wasted the money," he'd said, but there was an edge of bitterness in it as if he'd expected Mira to love it even if he hadn't. Instead, Mira had agreed-not that it was dull, but that they shouldn't have wasted the money. G.o.d knows they did not, at the moment, have money to waste. And they so rarely hired a babysitter that Mira felt they should have used the free time to do something more important, like bathe, or sleep.

Still, she had learned something from looking at those corpses. She had learned that nerves were not the invisible, semi-imaginary forces inside the body she'd always thought they were.

No.

Nerves hung off the body in dangling cords, draping like willow switches. They looked damp and heavy. Humans were tangled in them like ropes and pulleys.

No wonder she felt as if every inch of her had been electrified as she lay there listening to the twins cry in the mornings, Clark taking his time shuffling out of the bedroom to meet their demands. She was, Mira realized, wrapped in a curtain of nerves! She was wearing a web of them. She was strung with them, like a Christmas tree in lights.

So, why didn't she get up?

Because that was his job.

His only job.

She had an actual job.

Mira wasn't, she thought, a feminist. Not exactly. If she had been, she wouldn't have married a man like Clark-not with his lascivious admiration of women's legs, and his belief in the supremacy of men in all things requiring logic or mechanical inclinations.

But she also felt it would be a terrible precedent to take over these tasks for him on the days she was teaching. It would take away the last thing he seemed to be contributing to the running of the household-attending to the children when she had to work.

Work in the world. For pay. An activity Clark, it seemed, had no plans to engage in again anytime soon.

And then she felt terrible for thinking this.

If Clark were a woman, a housewife, and Mira had heard some man say that the work of caring for two children wasn't real, Mira would have been the first to stand up, waving a banner, shouting the chauvinist down. Of course it was a full-time job. A job she should have been grateful he was doing so that she could do hers.

So why, now, did she wish she were the one staying home with the screaming twins? Why, now, did she resent Clark for not having to get up in the morning, find his notes, pack his briefcase? She'd known exactly what his plans were when she'd married him, and bread-winning hadn't been one of them. Mira had been the one who'd bristled when her father had asked if Clark planned, maybe someday, to go to law school, and proudly explained to her father that they both valued their "freedom to pursue intellectual endeavors" too much for either to take on such a mundane endeavor as law school.

Still, Mira had finished her doctorate, and Clark had dropped out of his master's program in comparative philosophy, finding it to be another "mundane endeavor." Now they were in their thirties, with two children, living in an apartment complex full of undergraduates, many of whom drove much nicer cars than the clunker she and Clark shared. Sometimes, Clark let his beard grow for days before shaving, and Mira occasionally wondered, from the smell of his breath, if he was taking sufficient care of his teeth. She knew he was bathing, because he would spend a long hour every night in the claw-foot tub with the door latched while she put the twins to bed. Once, she'd mentioned to him that their electric bill, $125, might be so high because of the hot water heater, and he'd turned to her with wide, desperate-looking eyes and said, "The f.u.c.king tub is the only thing I have to look forward to all day."

"What about the gym?" she'd asked.

They'd joined the nicest one in town because Clark insisted he needed a place with Nautilus machines and childcare. Mira rarely got to this gym herself, but on the occasions she did, she couldn't help noticing that the parking lot was full of BMWs. You cannot afford this members.h.i.+p, the BMWs said to her.

"And what about Espresso Royale-?" where Clark met a gaggle of stay-at-home mothers many afternoons, and where, as far as Mira could tell, they just let their children climb around on the upholstered cubes in the Kid Corner while they drank coffee and complained.

Clark looked at her blankly. "I need the bath," he'd said.

"Professor Polson?"

This time Mira turned around, recognizing, finally, even in her sleep-deprivation and distraction, her own last name.

How long had he been running after her? The boy was sweating. He had the clean-shaven, buzzed-head look of an ROTC student, or maybe a member of College Students for Christ. But these kids could fool you. Sometimes the conservative look was an ironic statement, right down to the pressed khaki shorts. He could be the lead guitarist in some bad college band. She'd seen flyers around G.o.dwin Hall for an upcoming performance by the Motherf.u.c.kers.

"Professor Polson," he said. "I saw you, and I wanted to ask-" He gasped for breath. "I wanted to ask if I could get into your seminar."

"I'm sorry. It's full," she said, and started to turn from him as quickly and unsympathetically as she could. She always felt bad, sending students away, but these late registers would keep demanding entrance into the cla.s.s for weeks into the semester if she didn't stand firm. This was a first-year honors seminar, and Mira couldn't teach it well with more than fifteen students in it because of the amount of writing and discussion she required. The seminar was called Death, Dying, and the Undead. A lot of students wanted in. It was the most popular seminar in the college. This was, Mira supposed, because they were only eighteen, so the death and dying part didn't faze them-what eighteen-year-old believes in death?-and because they wrongly imagined that the "Undead" part would mean vampires, when that was only the thinnest (and, in Mira's opinion, the least interesting) thread in the vast tapestry of Undead material.

"But-"