“Nicole, you said you’d be out of that party at—”
“Okay, Craig, but I never told you to pick me up. I told you I was going to walk back with Josie. Why did you come back to the house?”
“Because I was going to make sure you got back to Godwin Hall. I was worried. I was worried about you. Sorry.”
It sounded whiny and pathetic, even to him.
“Well, I was helping with the party. You know, picking up empties, making sure people put their cigarettes out, tossing out cups. Do you know how bad this is Craig, to have a friend crash the party, and make a scene, and—?”
“Is that what I am to you, Nicole? Your friend?”
“Of course,” she said, as she if were consoling him.
“Gee,” he said, “I sort of thought I was more than that.” He felt something behind the bridge of his nose—his sinuses?—fill up with the sarcasm, the self-pity implicit in it, like… Jesus Christ, was he getting ready to cry?
“Well, I mean, we’re dating, sure. We’re more than friends. But I think friendship is really valuable, maybe the most important thing in the world next to family. I want to be your friend, Craig. But—”
She’d slowed down and put her cold hand in his. She squeezed his hand. She was shivering, and so he put both arms around her and pulled her to him, and said nothing, just happy to have her close to him.
He couldn’t have argued with her anyway. He already knew from experience not to argue with her when she was dealing in abstractions: friendship, God, love, patriotism, chastity. He loved that about her.
“Okay,” Craig said, happy enough to lose this argument. “Me, too. That’s not what this is about. I saw you dancing with some guy.”
“No, you didn’t!” Nicole shouted, as if she’d just caught him in a brazen lie, jumping backward out of his arms. “I did not dance with any guys. I danced a little with Josie, and with Abby one time, but when guys asked me to dance, I said, ‘Sorry, can’t,’ and held this up.”
It was the ring he’d bought her from Grimoire Gifts two weeks ago—a little globe of amber, with something ancient, some little black bug, trapped in it forever. She wore it on her right hand, because she wore a ring her father had given her on her left. He’d have preferred the left, but Nicole had made it clear that there was no room for debate.
She stopped walking and turned to him with a stony, hurt expression. Her teeth had actually begun to chatter loud enough that he could hear them—like fingernails tapping across a keyboard, or dice being rattled in a can. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, moved by the sound of those teeth, and her shivering, even though he knew she didn’t like him to say Jesus. “Oh, Nicole.” He unbuttoned his shirt—he was wearing a T-shirt underneath—and wrestled the button-down off his arms, draping it over Nicole’s shoulders and then helping her put her arms through the sleeves, as if she were an invalid, or a toddler. She limply accepted his shirt, his help, and he wrapped his arms around her again and hurried her back to Godwin Hall, whispering words of apology desperately in her ear as they walked.
When they finally got into the dorm, and he’d told her he loved her so many times that she finally started laughing, and she wasn’t shivering any longer, she leaned back against the foyer wall and pulled him to her, and they leaned there kissing one another for a very long time, long enough that time seemed to have stopped, and maybe a hundred people had passed them going up or down the stairs—but it wasn’t long enough for Craig, who was always the one who said, “Just another minute or two,” a hundred times, until Nicole, laughing, finally left him, shaking her head at him, throwing him kisses as she went up to her room. Forgiven.
It was the first thing Craig saw when he rounded the corner of Seneca Lane and West University Avenue: the Omega Theta Tau house casting a shadow down on that orchard that hadn’t been there in the winter, the last time Craig had walked by.
There was a stone angel at the center, lifting her concrete wings and bending over at the same time, as if the wings were what had forced her down to earth in the first place.
It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the brass plaque at the feet of that garden statuary said.
Tomorrow, Craig supposed, there would be mounds of roses, a teddy bear, that sort of thing.
Tomorrow would have been her nineteenth birthday.
22
Clark was asleep when Mira got home. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, but he lay on his back on their bed with his hands folded on his chest, so deeply asleep he never heard her come in the house or the twins’ deafening squealing upon her arrival—the usual tearful reunion, the clinging, the sobbing against her chest. By the time Mira had finally calmed them down enough to stand up from the floor and go looking for Clark, there were two spreading damp circles of their tears on her red silk blouse.
Ruined, she thought. Her mother used to have a trick for getting water stains off silk, but Mira hadn’t been paying attention then, and certainly didn’t remember now what the secret method might have been. Maybe, she thought, as she headed for the bedroom in search of Clark, she could research it on the Internet if she ever found the time—the Internet, which had become the mother lode of folk remedies and feminine advice for those without mothers to consult.
“Clark?”
Clark sputtered, blinked, coughed like a man surfacing in shallow water, and then he gasped and sat up fast. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
He rubbed his eyes, and then he scowled at her with half his face. Somehow, the other half of his face still looked familiar. She recognized the blank expression from a photo in their wedding album. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Of course I’m okay.”
“Well,” Mira said, “you’re in here dead asleep at two o’clock in the afternoon while the twins are hungry and sitting in dirty diapers on the kitchen floor. I thought maybe you were sick.”
“Fuck you, Mira,” he said, and lay back down, staring straight at the ceiling, folding his hands over his chest again, closing his eyes with such finality that Mira almost thought she could hear them click shut with the neat precision of Swiss pocket watches.
She turned around and pulled the bedroom door closed hard behind her.
The poop in the twins’ diapers seemed to have been there a long time. It was hard, and caked into their little butt cracks. Mira changed Matty first because he’d cried the hardest when she got home. He was still hiccupping with it, looking up at her with wide, glassy eyes. She sang the “five little duckies” song to distract him on the changing table, but he whimpered when she had to work too hard with the baby wipes to get the caked-on shit off his tender bottom. It looked red and sore when she was done, but it was clean, and he wasn’t crying. She dusted it with baby powder and tickled his belly before lifting him off the table and placing him back on the floor.
Andy was easier. He’d never much minded a dirty diaper, and as long as she was singing the duckies song, he didn’t seem to mind if she was being a bit rough with his behind. She looked into his eyes as she sang, and he never blinked, as if he were afraid she’d disappear again if he did. As she changed his brother, Matty held on to one of her ankles from his spot on the floor, humming wetly into her shin.
After Andy’s diaper was changed, Mira got back down on the floor and pulled them both to her, and unbuttoned her stained blouse, unclasped her bra, and let her breasts fall out into their mouths.