Mira handed him the book she held in her hands, Nils Stora’s Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps, as she felt around in the darkness of her leather bag for her keys, coming up, first, with the purple nipple of one of the boys’ bottles:
Despite everything she’d read or been told about what she should do, Mira still let the twins carry their bottles around with them when she took them to the store, or to the park. Sometimes the nipples were dislodged, or dirtied, or they wound up on the floor of the car. Who knew how long ago she might have stuffed this one into her bag? Perry Edwards looked at it, and then looked away, as if Mira had shown him something intimate—which, she supposed, it was.
She reached in again, and this time snagged the key ring, which was attached to a rubber heart that Clark had given to her years ago. (“Squeeze me,” it read, and when you did, a little mechanical voice said, “I WUV you.”) She unlocked the door and ushered Perry in, and he sat in the chair across from her desk, looked around, and then handed Mira’s book back to her.
“Are you…? Is this… time? An okay…?” he stammered politely.
“It’s fine,” Mira said. She cleared the books she had piled on her own chair, stacking them on the floor at her feet, and then sat down at her desk, folded her hands in her lap, and said, “How can I help you?”
“I’ve been reading,” Perry said, unzipping his backpack on the floor and leaning over it. He took out a book with the Roper Library’s generic brown cover, and held it up as if it would explain something on its own.
She took the book from him. It was G. Melvin’s Handbook of Unusual Phenomena—book twenty-four on the suggested reading list. It was a text Mira had put on loan in the Godwin Hall dormitory library several years before, but that, to her knowledge, no one had ever checked out. She kept it there for students who might want to explore Ukrainian death and burial superstition further—in particular an account (late for such an account) of a teenage girl killed in a farm accident circa 1952 in a primitive village in the foothills. The girl was said to have managed an escape from her tomb, and the proof of this was that, although she was not seen in the flesh, whenever a photograph was taken in the village in the year following her death, the girl’s shadowy image could be seen in the upper left- or right-hand corner.
In the Handbook were several grainy photos of stiff and formally dressed peasants staring expressionlessly into the camera. In the corner of each photograph a dark-haired girl, blurred, seemed to be moving as quickly as possible out of the photographer’s range. And as if that weren’t enough, the girl had appeared to every man in the village, in the night, unclothed, demanding sex. Apparently, the men obliged her, however reluctantly, and during the act she bit them—a few on the neck, a few on the arm, and one, mercilessly, on the nipple, which she bit clean off his torso before disappearing. Each man died in a farming accident within a few weeks of the event.
But what Mira wanted the students to read was the part that followed this:
How the body was dug up, and how the body was found in her coffin, a year after the girl’s death, good as new. Her flesh was pink. Her hair had grown luxuriously around her shoulders. Her mouth was red, filled with blood. Her teeth had grown, and they glistened. Only her clothes had rotted away, revealing, of course, her beautifully gleaming breasts.
The village then managed to engage, at great expense, a cement truck to back up to the grave and fill it in, and the girl, whose name was Etta, never walked through the village again, and the farm accidents mysteriously drew to a halt—a fact the villagers attributed to the cementing-in of this tomb, not to the fact that their agricultural lifestyle was, within a few years, completely eradicated when a cardboard box factory moved into the village.
Melvin, the author, had been an ancient professor at Mira’s undergraduate institution and had given her the only B she’d ever received in college, but she still thought his was a brilliant analysis of the superstitions of the period and the move from an agrarian to an urban culture that fueled them. This story of Etta, he said in the Handbook, was the last real “vampire” story the world would ever know. In only another year or two, all the young adults who might have died tilling the land or harvesting the grain were working in that box factory or in shops in some Soviet metropolis, and the funerary traditions were forever changed. Instead of simple burials in wooden coffins in the churchyard, the whole commercial funeral business moved in, complete with embalming and sealed tombs and caskets that cost more than most families in the area made in a year.
“It’s a good book,” Mira said to Perry, handing it back to him. “I’m glad you thought to check it out.”
“I’ve read all the articles,” he said, “that you assigned, and—”
“Those aren’t assignments,” Mira said. “That’s the suggested list. That’s for supplemental research.”
“I know,” Perry said. “But…” He shook his head, and then he held up one of the photos of “Etta.” He’d had the page bookmarked. Mira looked at it and nodded.
It was possible, she realized, that this student was mentally ill. It was far from unusual. There were always mentally ill students, especially in the Honors College. Intelligence and ambition went hand in hand, it seemed, with some kinds of delusion. These days, too, Mira found that students who were perhaps only minimally depressed (and how many smart twenty-year-olds weren’t depressed?) had been medicated by their family doctors into a state of either apathetic insensibility or manic excitement. These kids carried their bottles of Klonopin and Xanax from class to class, and swigged their pills down by the handfuls with their energy drinks. Who knew what this particular kid might be taking, especially if he had, as he claimed, been close friends with Nicole Werner?
Mira nodded at the book, leaned forward, and considered the photo. The small gray girl in the corner was dashing out of out it while a grim-looking family stared solemnly into the camera, oblivious. Although it was 1952, this photograph was black and white, and there was an aura of antiquated severity about it that made it seem more like an image from the late 1800s. But Mira had been to villages near this one, and even in the mid-nineties, in broad daylight, in the spring, in real life, there was always something black and white about the places and the people, as if their joyless lives had drained the color out of the world around them.
She looked from the photograph to her student. His brow was furrowed. “Yes?” she said.
“I read the whole essay,” he said, “and the author’s analysis. And I understand what he’s saying about the cultural context, and the societal changes, and the folklore, but—” He stopped, seeming to search for words. He closed the book.
“But what?” Mira asked.
He reached into his backpack again, and unfolded a copy of the student newspaper on his lap. It was the front-page article that had run about Nicole Werner a few days after the accident. On one side of the page there was the now-familiar senior portrait of Nicole with a warm halo of studio light pouring over her blond hair, and beside it a photograph of the memorial orchard-planting that took place at her sorority. In that photograph, a group of slender sorority sisters in black dresses and sunglasses held one another’s hands, heads bowed, around one of the blooming cherry trees that had been planted. Perry Edwards pointed to this photograph, his finger on the tree—which looked, even in miniature and in black and white, like the lush icon of lost innocence it was meant to be. He slid his finger over the blossoms and then into the right-hand corner of the photo.