(“Good Lord, Mira, how long are you going to keep nursing those boys?” Clark’s sister had asked six months earlier, when she’d come to visit from Atlanta. The twins had only just turned two then, but Mira had felt chastised, and stammered something about the boys only nursing once or twice a day. It was more of a habit, she tried to explain, than anything else. A way to calm them, or to get them to sleep on hectic nights. They were eating solid foods, of course. Pretty much anything she and Clark ate, the twins ate, and they ate a lot of it, and since Mira was gone a good part of every day, they certainly did not depend on breast milk for food.
“Jesus,” Rebecca had said, “I quit nursing Ricky at six months when he got his front teeth. I thought he was going to bite my nipple off.”
But Rebecca was married to a packaging engineer. She’d stayed home with Ricky until he went to kindergarten, and even after that she worked only two mornings a week, at a children’s bookstore. She’d never, Mira felt certain, come home and found Ricky wearing a diaper stiff with shit while her husband slept like a dead man in another room.)
As the boys sucked harder, tears sprang into Mira’s eyes. She’d wasted a precious forty-five minutes in her office with Perry Edwards when she should have been home with her babies—and afterward she’d stopped in the doorway of Dean Fleming’s office just to smile and wave, and ended up wasting another half hour. She’d stopped there on purpose, knowing he would ask her how her “work” was going, and for the first time in a long time, she actually had something to say because she was working on something quite promising: a book-length consideration of the folklore of death on the American college campus.
Dean Fleming had raised his eyebrows as if he, too, saw the huge potential in her project. “Interesting,” he said, nodding, clearly pleased and impressed. “I knew you’d zero in on something great in time.” He wished her luck, offered his support. He said, “If you need travel funds or a book allowance, let me know. We’ll see what we can find.”
She left Godwin Hall feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She had a project. Because there’d been a rainstorm that morning, and Clark had grudgingly let her drive the car to campus, she decided to drive by the location of the accident, Nicole Werner’s accident, which she’d begun to think of as material.
Mira had driven by it hundreds of times since the accident because it was on the way to half the places she needed to be (grocery store, drugstore, gas station). Like everyone else in town, she had watched the accumulating expressions of sentimental grief, the mounding of more and more debris at the site. Girlish, and ghoulish.
It had begun with a white cross with the victim’s name on it, and then a few stuffed animals were added, along with some wreaths of pink and white flowers—and then, within a few weeks, it had grown to a full-scale folk monument: A wisteria was planted. A banner was wound around the branches of the tree at the site. Some ornaments were hung in the branches. (Angels? Fairies? Mira couldn’t tell from the road.) More stuffed animals and some baby dolls accumulated around the tree’s trunk, and a laminated blowup of that senior portrait of Nicole Werner leaned against it, staring at the place where she’d lost her life. There were mounds of fresh flowers, and an unfathomable number of silk and plastic bouquets, ever replenishing, although Mira had never actually seen anyone tending to these items or dropping them off. (Did they come under cover of darkness?) Floral wreaths stretched from the side of the road across the drainage ditch to the electric fence, beyond which there were always a few sheep looking dazed and doomed.
Mira slowed down as she drove past. The next sunny morning, she thought, she would bring her best camera out here, and take photos.
The twins had fallen asleep as they sucked, and when Clark came out of the bedroom, he looked down at Mira for a moment, at the two flushed and dreaming twins still clinging to her nipples by their teeth. He must have realized that she was crying—there were tears running down her neck and onto her bare chest—but the expression on his face was unreadable, and far above her.
“I’m going for a run,” he said, and was gone.
23
It was the second week of January. She was lying on Craig’s bed when Perry got back to the dorm room after the first winter semester meeting of his International Human Rights seminar. She was on top of Craig’s comforter (Craig had started making his bed since he’d started dating Nicole) in a T-shirt. Her legs were bare. Perry thought, with a jolt that felt a bit like panic, that he’d caught a glimpse of pale blue underpants when she crossed her ankles. She was wearing a silver ankle bracelet. It had what looked like a bell, or an anchor, or a crucifix, hanging from it. She had a book in her hands.
Perry looked away. He strode purposefully to his desk, sat down with his back to her, and said, “What are you doing here, Nicole? Craig’s not going to be back until after dinner.”
“I’m just reading,” she said. “It’s quieter here than in my room. Josie’s always got Norah Jones playing. Drives me nuts. Whine-whine-whine.”
Perry could hear the springs on Craig’s bed squeak. She must have shifted her weight, rolled onto her side. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of looking over. He turned his computer on, and there was the usual sound of an angelic choir starting up—one discordant but celestial note, which hung in the air.
“No offense, Nicole,” Perry finally managed to say, “but when my roommate’s not here, I actually enjoy my solitude.”
“Well, Craig said you wouldn’t mind,” Nicole said casually. “He gave me his key.”
Perry’s screen saver came up then (comets shooting through a blue-black sky) and, at the same time, something hit his shoulder, sharp and surprising, and it took him only a second or two to realize that it was Craig’s room key clattering on the floor behind him. Before he could stop himself, he was turned around in his chair, glaring at Nicole.
She was, as he’d thought, lying on her side. One leg was slung over the other. One of her bare feet (toenails painted shell pink) was pointed, swinging like a pendulum over the side of Craig’s bed.
“Come on, Nicole,” Perry said. “Why are you here?” He rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to seem more exhausted than agitated. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeming as unnerved by her presence as he was. Since she and Craig had taken up full time, she was, like Craig himself, a constant irritation, mainly because Craig never shut up about her, was in an endless cycle of manic ecstasy and despair about her. When he wasn’t frantically trying to call her, or find her, he was on the phone with her, or in their room with her. They couldn’t hang out in Nicole’s room because Josie hated Craig’s guts, so they were here, or in the hallway waiting for Perry to get dressed so they could get in. Whenever Perry said something to Craig about it, Craig just said, “You’re jealous, man. You’re in love with my girlfriend. The sooner you face it, the better off we’ll all be.” It seemed like a joke now, with Craig, but it was still exasperating.
“I think you know why I’m here,” Nicole said before she stood up and crossed the room—those bare feet, and the toenails, he tried only to look at those—and knelt down at his feet, looked up at him, directly in his line of vision, so he had to look back, and then she reached up for his face, pulled it gently toward her, and before he really understood what she was going to do, and what was happening, kissed him with her mouth open, her tongue slipping warmly, mintily, over his.