It is hard to say afterward why the final beats of her heart go unrecorded by those machines.
3.
The girls: they cry and cry, and they do not sleep. They sit around in their slippers and their sweats on the hard carpet of one another’s rooms. They hold hands. They drink tea. If only they had checked on her sooner, they think. If only they had listened when she said she felt sick. They should have known, is the feeling. They should have done something. Maybe, they think, they could have saved her.
The boys turn quiet and they drink even more—cheap beer bought with fake IDs. They keep their hands in their pockets those first few days and just try to stay out of the way of the girls. It is as if the boys can sense it, even in those girls, in their easy closeness and their interlocking arms: the whole history of women and suffering, the generations of practice at grief.
To the girls, it feels wrong to get dressed. It feels wrong to wear makeup. Hair goes unwashed and legs go unshaven and contacts float untouched in solution. They wear glasses, it is then revealed to the boys. More than half of those girls wear glasses.
Her poor mother, the girls say to one another, their knees clutched tight to their chests, as if the shock has turned them even younger. They picture their own mothers. They imagine the phones ringing in their own kitchens, back home, in other towns in other states: Arizona, Nebraska, Illinois. I can’t imagine it, the girls say to one another, I just can’t imagine.
The funeral is in Kansas. It’s too far to go.
“We should do something for her parents,” says one of the girls. They are coming the next day, the girls have heard, to collect Kara’s things. “We should order flowers.”
The girls all agree right away. There is an intense desire to do the proper thing. This feels like their induction. Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.
They settle on lilies, two dozen, in white. Everyone signs the card.
They can think of nothing else useful to do, but a certain yearning persists. Meanwhile, a new generosity flows between them. How small their other concerns begin to seem, how meaningless, compared. Fights end, and slights are forgiven, and two of the girls reconcile by phone with the faraway boys who they loved so much in high school and who they had thought, until now, they’d outgrown.
But still, the girls want something more. They long to be of use.
When Mei walks down the hall, her arms crossed and her head down and her black hair pulled tight into a braid, the girls notice her as they have never noticed her before.
She shouldn’t blame herself, they all agree. None are sure of her name, the Chinese girl, or maybe Japanese, who lived in the same room as Kara. There is no way she could have known that Kara needed help.
“We should tell her that it’s not her fault,” one of them whispers. “We should tell her that she shouldn’t feel bad.”
But they stay where they are.
“Does she speak English?” says another.
“Of course she does,” says another one. “I think she’s from here, right?”
Somewhere, from another room, there floats the smell of microwave popcorn. No one is going to class.
The basket of lilies arrives that afternoon, but it is less than the girls had hoped, unable, in the end, to accomplish what they had wanted, which is to convey what they can say in no other way, something essential for which they do not know the words.
Kara’s parents: their faces are pale and hollowed. She is a woman in a gray sweater. She is Kara with different skin. The father wears a beard and a flannel shirt. He is a man who thirty years earlier might have been any one of those boys of the floor, slouching in a doorframe, his hands in his pockets like theirs, unaware of what is waiting up ahead.
Slowly, they begin to pack their daughter’s things.
The girls grow shy at the sight of them. They hide out in their rooms, afraid to say the wrong thing. For a while, the only sound on the floor is the harsh crack of packing tape, torn from its dispenser, or sometimes the clinking of emptied hangers, the soft slip of dresses being packed into boxes.
Watching those parents from afar, the girls are quick to mistake all the ordinary signs of midlife—those wrinkles in his forehead, those dark circles beneath her eyes—for evidence of grief instead of age. And maybe, in a way, the girls are right: those faces are proof of the passage of years, and it is the passage of years that has led them right here to this task.
The voices of Kara’s parents are hoarse and wispy, as if they were the ones who were sick. Once, a sudden gasp comes from the mother’s throat, “Stop it, Richard,” she says, and she begins to sob. “You’re ripping it.”
This is the moment when Mei peeks out at the parents, as if watching from a great distance, which, in a way, she is.
The father is struggling to roll up one of Kara’s posters. It’s Paris, black-and-white, tacked to the wall with pushpins, and bought, Mei knows, from the campus bookstore the first week of school. So familiar has the poster become to Mei that she has begun to associate Kara with the girls in the photograph, laughing and glamorous on a cobblestone street in the rain.
“Just stop touching it,” the mother says to the father. “Please.”
After that, the father is quiet.
Mei lingers in the hallway. She should introduce herself to these parents, that’s what her mother would say.
But there is something unbearable about the way that man looks out the window, so like Mei’s own father would, and how he doesn’t seem to know where to put his hands. It is in the way he keeps touching his beard, the way he stands so silently in the corner of that room.
Mei hurries back to her new room without speaking to them.
Only Caleb is brave enough to approach Kara’s parents. Caleb, tall and skinny, brown hair and freckles. Caleb, the English major, a little more serious than the other boys.
The girls watch him shake hands with Kara’s father. They watch the way he holds his Cubs cap at his side while he speaks to Kara’s mother. And the girls—every one of them—long to smooth his hair, which is sticking up on one side and sweaty from where the cap has been.
The girls love him right then for talking to those parents. They love him for knowing what to do.
Caleb helps the father carry the boxes out to the elevator, and any stranger who passes them might think they understand that scene—here is a father helping his son move out of a dorm.
Amanda: two doors down from Kara’s room and the next girl to feel the symptoms. Dizziness, tiredness, a slowly spreading ache. Her roommate has woken up with it, too. They both look pale and feverish. Their eyes are a little red.
“What if it’s contagious?” says Amanda from her bed. “What if we have what Kara had?”
The other girls reassure them from the doorway, but they are too afraid to step inside the room.
“I’m sure you’re fine,” says one of them, barely breathing. Amazing how swiftly adrenaline spreads through the body, how soon the hands begin to shake. “But maybe you guys should see a doctor. Just to be safe.”
The floor soon swells with panic as the news travels from room to room: there are two sick girls among them. It has not occurred to anyone until then that Kara’s is a sickness that could spread.
Phone calls are made. The dorm director arrives. The sick girls are driven to Student Health. It is hard for the others not to wonder if they will ever see those girls again.