She didn’t wait for the students to leave before she herself left, and she wasn’t in her office when Perry passed by it a little later.
“Sweetheart,” Perry’s mother said when he talked to her on the phone that evening. “Is everything all right?”
“Of course, Mom. Everything’s fine. Don’t worry so much, okay?”
“Is Craig okay?”
“Craig’s okay. Not great. But he’s definitely okay.”
“You’re a good friend, Perry. I’m proud of you for sticking by him. That poor boy. Tell him we said hello, okay? Bring him to visit, if—”
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Perry said.
“No, of course not. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wish we could do something to—”
Despite the outpouring of animosity toward Craig in Bad Axe (someone had actually put up a Wanted poster in Leazenby Park with Craig’s photograph and “For Murder” scrawled in red Magic Marker underneath, and this had made the papers all over the state), Perry’s mother believed absolutely that the accident that had killed Nicole had not been Craig’s fault. Even before the blood tests came back and showed conclusively that Craig hadn’t been drinking, hadn’t been smoking dope, she’d believed Perry that driving drunk wasn’t something Craig would have done.
“How are things there?” Perry asked. “With you guys? Is business good?”
“Oh,” his mother said. “You know your dad. He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. We could be billionaires or in debt to our eyeballs for all I know. But he’s making enough money to pay for that boat of his. And I got a new winter coat.” (It was a game his mother always played, and they both knew it was a game. She was, after all, the one who kept the books for Edwards and Son. She probably made 90 percent of their business decisions without bothering to let Perry’s father in on them.) “Yesterday,” she said, her tone becoming lower, more somber. “I saw the Werner sisters.”
“Oh,” Perry said. “Where?”
“At the cemetery.”
“Why were you at the cemetery, Mom?”
“I was just driving by. I could see them from the road. They were putting flowers on Nicole’s grave. So I pulled over. It was her birthday, Perry. Her nineteenth.”
“Jesus,” Perry said.
His mother didn’t bother to scold him for taking the Lord’s name in vain. She said, “I know.”
It surprised him that he hadn’t realized, hadn’t remembered, that it was Nicole’s birthday. Now, he recalled all those early-October cupcakes in elementary school and, during middle school, all the girls getting excited about some slumber party Nicole was having. There was a lot of hoopla every year surrounding her birthday. Her locker decorated, singing in the cafeteria, that sort of thing. (She’d always been the most popular girl in every class.)
Now her sisters were gathering in the cemetery to decorate her grave.
“How did they seem?” Perry asked. “Her sisters?”
“Well, about like you’d imagine,” his mother said, and then said no more, as if he could imagine. But he couldn’t. He really could not imagine them in a cemetery. Those perky blondes, and all that laughter. He couldn’t imagine them bent over any grave at all, let alone their little sister’s. “They didn’t have anything good to say about Craig,” she said, “as you’d imagine. I didn’t tell them he was your roommate again. I don’t think they know you even know him, and I think that’s just as well.”
“Yeah,” Perry said, and then thought, Shit.
Had Craig known it was Nicole’s birthday?
Surely, he had.
Was that why he’d hurried out of the apartment so early that morning and Perry hadn’t seen him all day?
Who knew how many anniversaries of this or that thing—her birthday, their first date, their first kiss, the day he’d given her that amber ring—Craig was living through, and would live through? He wasn’t going to tell Perry about them, Perry was pretty sure, but he still felt like a bad friend for not knowing.
“They told me that their parents aren’t doing so well, Perry,” his mother said. He waited for her to go on, but she said nothing more about Mr. and Mrs. Werner. They talked, instead, about the Bad Axe football team—the worst season in a decade, although they never had been very good.
As his mother spoke, Perry walked over to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and took out a folder. He slid the photograph out, laid it on his desk, pulled the chain on his desk lamp, and bent over it, looking straight down into the glossy image, where, in the corner, blurred but familiar, he saw the fleeing form of the girl he knew—he knew—was Nicole Werner.
He stared until his eyes went dry, and he had to blink as his mother told him more of the details of the family business, of her days, of how much she loved and missed him.
“I love you, too,” Perry said.
“You be good. Stay safe. Eat vegetables. Get enough sleep. Don’t—”
He closed his eyes and flipped the photograph over on his desk so he could focus.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Tell Dad I love him. I’ll see you soon.”
29
“What is this?” Mira asked. She was trying to control the alarm in her voice, so the question came out breathy, hoarse, as if she were doing an imitation of Marilyn Monroe.
“Obviously, it’s a duffel bag full of clothes,” Clark said. “I’m sure you won’t remember my having told you I’m taking the twins to visit my mother.”
“What?”
“Twins? You know, those two kids who run around here? I think you gave birth to them?”
“Clark, can you quit with the sarcasm? What are you talking about?”
“I told you weeks ago, Mira. It’s my mother’s birthday. I’m taking the twins to visit her for two days. What do you care? It’ll give you time to work.”
Mira stared at Clark. She’d been preoccupied, she knew, but she would never have forgotten something like this. Clark had never taken the twins anywhere without her, certainly not to visit his mother. Mira herself was the one who had to plan and organize every visit to Clark’s mother, for whom Clark seemed to have nothing but a terrible cocktail of pity and contempt that made it nearly impossible for him to carry on a conversation with the poor old woman without it ending in an argument.
Visiting? With the twins? “No,” Mira said, and shook her head.
Clark let his jaw drop theatrically. For a flash of a second, Mira saw his molars—a little mountain range of bone in the dark. He shut his mouth before she could look more closely, but it had seemed possible to her in that quick glimpse that his teeth looked unhealthy.
A dark spot in the back?
Maybe, she thought, it was why his breath had begun to smell strangely—not bad, exactly, but organic. On the rare occasions they kissed, she thought she could taste clover on him, or the paper of an old book.
“Uh, no?” Clark asked. “Did you just say no, I can’t take my sons to visit my mother for two days? I’m sorry, Mira, but I’m not sure you have the right to grant or deny that permission, especially since if I go without them there will be no one here to take care of them.”
“I could have made arrangements to go to if you’d told me,” Mira said. “I would have.” Even as she said it, she wondered how she could have, whether she actually would have.
“And cancel your classes? Postpone your research? God forbid, Mira! I mean, the way you go on and on about the importance of those classes, and how the whole world hinges on your student evaluations, and how if you lose a research day, the fall of Rome is sure to follow, it certainly never crossed my mind that you ‘would have made arrangements’ to go with us.”