Mira froze in the doorway, hand flat against her chest, heart pounding into her palm. Her mother slowly opened her eyes and said, “Mira?” in a voice a hundred times softer and more full of patience and motherly affection than Mira had ever heard it.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Are you—?”
“What, sweetheart?”
Mira took a step backward, and her mother simply pulled the door closed again between them, and Mira hesitated for only a second or two before returning quickly to her room and getting back into her bed where she belonged.
As the years passed, like so many other incidents from childhood and adolescence, that moment became a confused vision in her memory, and often Mira would think she’d simply dreamed the whole thing, or hallucinated it. (Was it possible the Tylenol she’d taken that morning had codeine in it? Could she have had, in addition to her period, a fever?) But she also never lost the sense that she’d stumbled upon a deep secret that day, a secret in the pantry as well as in her mother, and the distant, irrational suspicion that her mother spent her days in the pantry regenerating, reanimating, shedding cells and making new ones, would make its way into Mira’s dreams for years, until it eventually entered her conscious life, permanently, when her mother succumbed to the breast cancer she must surely have known she had that day in the pantry—must have known she’d had for years. (The physicians who were eventually rounded up to treat her expressed shock and horror that an illness that might have been successfully addressed had been ignored, or concealed, or borne in silence for so long.)
At the funeral parlor on a cool April afternoon, Mira looked down at her mother in the white coffin and remembered that glimpse of her in the pantry in the flush on her mother’s cheeks, the ghoulishly painted red lips, the cool, waxy film of her skin, and the smell of the embalming fluid.
By then, it would seem like a century since that day in the pantry and the diagnosis that had followed a few months later. The breast cancer went on for what seemed like another lifetime, straight through Mira’s high school prom, and then through her graduation (which no one had expected her mother to live to see), and then through her first and second years of college—during which there were four or five exhausting Greyhound bus rides home, because it seemed her mother was in her last days—until, in her sophomore year, just before final exams, Mira’s father called to say that they again expected her mother to die within a few days and that she shouldn’t rush home, but…
So, as it happened, her mother died while Mira was scrawling a response to question number eight: “In Jung’s consideration of synchronicity, he establishes that tertium comparationis is meaning. Explain.”
As her mother left this world, Mira was sitting hunched in an auditorium trying to describe the way an outer event and an inner event might bear equal significance, and the example she’d used was of a woman being reminded one day, by a song on the radio, of a boy she used to love but hadn’t seen or thought of in many years, and then coming across his obituary in a newspaper she did not ordinarily read.
The next week, looking down at her mother in her coffin bathed in funeral home light, it would all come together—the memory and the precognition, the symbolism and the folklore, inherent in that day years earlier when Mira, in her own delirium and bleeding, had come upon her mother in the pantry, and had seen not only her mother’s death in it but also, in a flash, the trajectory of her own career.
Within a few weeks of her mother’s funeral, Mira had read The American Way of Death, and then, of course, eventually, she’d read every book ever written on the traditions and rites and superstitions related to the decomposition and reanimation of the body, until she finally ran out of books to read, and began to write one herself.
With his Nikes in his hands, Clark stood above Mira and said, “Maybe you could take care of their dinner tonight? I’ve had it. I’m going for a run.”
“Clark,” she said, looking up at him—that body, which, one lazy Saturday long ago, after a hot bubble bath, she’d licked the sinewy length of from the tip of the big toe to the crown of the head—and tried not to let her gaze linger on the belly, which was both slack and bulging. (How was it that Clark had recently taken on the physical attributes of a person who had given birth to twins when there was no longer a shred of evidence of it on Mira herself?) She tried to hold his eyes and to keep a steady tone of unexcited objectivity in her voice, even as Matty sank his incredibly sharp new teeth into the flesh of her thigh, as she said, “I have an Honors College thesis committee meeting tonight, Clark. I have to leave in an hour. I told you that this morning.”
He turned from her then, and before she even realized he’d thrown them, the running shoes had sailed across the living room and knocked over their only nice lamp, which Mira could hear shattering even before it hit the coffee table, and the twins began to shriek with what seemed to be all of the hysterical energy of human history channeling itself through their lungs.
13
It was not a dorm known for its great parties, to say the least, but there was a tradition in Godwin Honors Hall of throwing one big blowout the Friday night after midterms.
Craig had, himself, only one exam (Political Science) and a paper due (Great Books). He’d already tracked down on the Internet a “model” for the paper, and had begun to sketch out some tentative plans for the model’s rebirth as his own term paper. The Poli-Sci exam seemed like no big deal. He’d just make it a priority to go over the outline at the back of the book the morning before the test.
Apparently, his fellow students had harder schedules, or approached their studies differently. Beginning the weekend before midterms, Godwin had become a ghost hall, and Perry barely darkened the doorway of their room except to sleep for a few hours in the early morning before he was gone again.
(“Where you been, man?” Craig asked him in passing, to which Perry replied, “The library. Studying,” as if it were a given.)
Even the cafeteria was silent. Instead of the usual clusters, people sat separately, absentmindedly lifting forkfuls of eggs or baked beans to their mouths while staring intently into the textbooks open beside their plates. Craig watched as one kid accidentally speared the page of his book instead of the meatloaf on his plate, and then even brought the fork halfway to his mouth before realizing there was nothing on it.
Jesus Christ. No wonder his father had had to call on his old buddy Dean Fleming to get Craig into this place. These were not his people. They were an entirely different species. Back in Fredonia there’d been professional students, for sure, but theirs had been such a casual superiority that Craig never bothered to pay any attention to how they were doing it. They just waltzed out of their Advanced Placement courses fluttering the A-pluses on their exams, sauntered down the hallway to the meetings of the clubs they were presidents of, or grabbed their violins and headed off to the orchestra room.
That these Godwin Honors College kids worked so hard both frightened and puzzled Craig, and made it even more impossible for him to imagine, somehow, joining them at the library. So far the only thing he’d done at the library was check out an armload of CDs, which he’d downloaded to his laptop.