Part 24 (2/2)

”He didn't kill his girlfriend,” Perry said. ”He had an accident, and his girlfriend got killed.”

”That's not what I heard,” Karess said.

”Then you heard wrong.”

”I heard he was stoned and drunk, and he picked her up at her sorority because he was jealous of some older guy there, and even though she was screaming and pleading for him not to take her, he forced her into the car, and then he drove off the road at like a hundred miles an hour, to try to kill them both together. It was like some kind of sick love bond he thought they had. He wanted to die with her-and, so, like, she had no choice. And now she's dead and he's back here. Unbelievable.”

Perry had to hold a hand to his forehead because, now that they were outside, the sun was s.h.i.+ning blindingly over Karess's s.h.i.+ning head. They were in the courtyard, and students were pa.s.sing them, talking on cell phones, stuffing protein bars into their mouths, ears plugged into their iPods. Some pink-cheeked girl squealed when she saw Karess and was about to hug her, but must have seen the serious expression on her face, so just wiggled her fingers, made a face, and kept walking.

With no leaves on the trees, no clouds, and the sun so distant in the autumn sky, there was nothing to absorb the light, and Perry felt his eyes filling up with tears. He turned around and started to walk away from Karess. ”Are you crying?” she called after him, and grabbed his elbow. ”G.o.d, I'm, like, so sorry.”

”I'm not crying,” Perry said, but kept walking because he wasn't so sure he wasn't crying, and if he was crying, he had no idea why he was. He tried to walk fast under the archway to G.o.dwin Avenue. It was always forty degrees colder under that arch than anywhere around it. Even when the temperature was ninety degrees outside, under that archway it was cool and damp. Someone had spray-painted the name Jean at the top of the arch, and Perry found himself stopping, putting his hand flat against the bricks, trying to catch his breath. ”I'm not crying,” he said again, although he was even more blind now, having stepped from the sun into this darkness. He rubbed his eyes and said, ”But you shouldn't talk about things you don't know anything about. Where did you hear all this c.r.a.p, about him forcing her into the car, and the death bond or whatever?”

”It's true,” Karess said. She was standing so close to him that he could smell her breath. Cinnamon. ”There was this, like, a.s.sembly for first-year women our second day in the dorm, and these sorority types came from Omega Theta Tau, and it was supposedly supposed to be this meeting about how to avoid getting into abusive relations.h.i.+ps with guys, but mostly it just scared the s.h.i.+t out of us about living in the dorm where the dead girl had lived. They did this slideshow? Of Nicole? And told us how guilty they all felt because they all knew she was dating this stalker dude, Craig Clements-Rabbitt, who was always waiting for her outside the house and wouldn't let her have her own life, and then he killed her, and they were all crying, and by then we were all crying, and then we went back to our rooms, and I heard later that these girls who were living in her old room did the Ouija board in there, and then I don't know what happened, but I guess it scared the s.h.i.+t out of them, and they got a room change.

”n.o.body's living in that room now. It's all locked up. And those Goth girls with the Alice Meyers Club thing are always lighting candles outside of it and burning these smudge stick things, and it sets off the fire alarms, and they make little shrines that the housekeeping people throw away. It's f.u.c.ked up. And you were that guy's roommate?”

”Jesus Christ,” Perry said. A kind of vertigo took over him-the archway seemed to s.h.i.+ft, and suddenly he was feeling the weight in that white coffin again. The dead weight of a body sliding around inside.

Karess looked alarmed. She said, ”Are you okay?” She took a step even closer to him, looking carefully at his face, and slid her arm through his. ”Come on,” she said. ”I'll buy you a hot chocolate. I promise not to talk about this. Don't cry.”

He looked at her.

”I'm not crying,” he said, and having to say it again actually made him laugh.

She laughed, too.

”I think you're a really cool guy,” Karess said, pulling him out of the archway by the arm that she had locked into his. ”I thought so the first day I saw you.”

51.

The walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Sh.e.l.ly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, pa.s.sing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.

What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she'd been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?

What would she have thought if she'd been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair-that she'd allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?

What would she have thought if she'd looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl-this girl that university officials had warned her not to hara.s.s?

She'd have thought, perhaps, no fool like an old fool?

Or would it have been something harsher? Much harsher.

Now, she thought, imagining looking down at herself from the lofty heights she'd once occupied, she was one of them. The fallen.

She was so lost to these thoughts that, as she approached Starbucks and glimpsed herself in the plate gla.s.s window, she was surprised to see her own reflection. She'd expected, she realized, to see herself as a warted hag, a specter, a creature-lecherous and leering, and that much more repulsive because, although she looked s.e.xless, she wasn't.

But that's not how she looked.

In the window, she looked frantic, even to herself. And pitiable. Harmless. Maybe sad. Her hair was messed but s.h.i.+ning in the dim November sunlight. A man in a black suit and red tie looked her over appreciatively as he held the door for her. She did not, it seemed, appear to be a monster to him. To him, she looked like the reflection in the plate gla.s.s window.

But there was no mistaking the horror on Josie Reilly's face as she turned at the counter, holding her white cup, and saw Sh.e.l.ly walking through the door.

52.

Mira had never shared anything about her personal problems with a colleague before. Even in graduate school when her fellow students regularly wept late into the night in one another's arms over their breakups and their breakdowns, Mira had kept a close check on what she told others about herself.

One of her best friends, Tessa, another doctoral candidate in anthropology, had told Mira about the years of incest abuse she'd endured as a child by a much older half-brother, and then had reacted with bitterness that seemed to border on rage when Mira told her, many years into their friends.h.i.+p, about her mother's death.

”You never told me your mother was dead.”

”She died years ago,” Mira tried to explain. ”I was an undergraduate. You and I hadn't met.”

”But we've discussed your mother on about five hundred occasions,” Tessa had said as Mira recognized in her friend's eyes a dawning apprehension, a withdrawal, a dismissal that heralded the end of their friends.h.i.+p, ”and you never once indicated that your parents weren't both still happy and healthy and living in Ohio. I told you all about my father's death. It seems like that might have been a good time to mention that you, too, had a parent who'd died.”

Mira hadn't intended to shrug. She knew that a shrug indicated that either it didn't matter or she couldn't comprehend the big fuss. But she'd felt herself doing it anyway-and, as she shrugged, she felt as if something shawl-like (her friends.h.i.+p with Tessa?) was slipping off her shoulders, discarded behind her.

So it was that much more surprising to find herself now weeping into her hands as Jeff Blackhawk sat across from her, watching, rubbing his knees with his palms. She could not suppress the sobs.

Truly, Mira had meant to tell him only that she was in a hurry because she had to rent a car, that her husband had theirs, that she was going to drive up north to get her children from their grandmother. But the second she uttered their names (Andy, Matty) her lungs had seemed to fill instantly with tears, and she'd found herself choking, gasping, spluttering. Finally, after what must have seemed to him to be an alarming amount of time, Jeff said, ”Mira,” the way you might call a dog that was running toward the road, and she looked up, and the expression of doomed embarra.s.sment on his face snapped her back.

Mira turned around quickly in her chair and grabbed a handful of tissues from the box on her desk, and hurriedly began to wipe her eyes and nose, her cheeks, her lips. G.o.d only knew what she must look like, she thought, or what the condition of her eye makeup might be, but she finally managed to take a deep, trembling breath, and speak.

”Jeff,” she said. ”I'm so, so sorry. I haven't slept and-”

He waved his hand as if to clear the air of smoke or tear gas. ”No,” he said. ”You don't have to apologize, but I'd like to know what I can do to help. Certainly you're not in any shape to drive up north, are you? Let me call someone for you. Or, I don't really have anything to do until I teach on Thursday, except read bad student poetry. I could take you in my car. I like kids. I'd like to meet yours.”

”Oh, that's so-” Mira felt the shame of her relief in that moment like an implosion. ”But I-”

”Just let me, okay, Mira. They're predicting the first snowfall of the year today. Or tonight. It might even be a big one. The roads'll be slippery, and in your condition?” He held up his hands at the obviousness. ”You owe it to your kids not to get killed on the road. Let me-”

”Okay,” she said.

53.

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