“Does Professor Polson spend a lot of time here?”
“We’re working together on—”
“Yeah,” Karess said.
“Look,” Perry said. “She’s never been here before, but this thing, with Lucas—I could tell on the phone, she’s really upset.”
“Fuck her,” Karess said, suddenly completely animated. The jewels and feathers she was wearing started to swing and flutter around her. She stomped the heel of her boot hard enough that Perry felt pretty sure that if anyone had been sleeping in the apartment below them, they weren’t anymore. “She was upset? She had us all set up, Perry. Couldn’t you tell? That’s why she left us all there, and went out in the alley. She knew there was a body in there, that it was a guy our age. I mean, that was her other boyfriend in there, that diener. You didn’t notice the big hug and all that? You think he didn’t bother to tell her there was a dead college kid in the morgue today? Professor Polson’s been trying to scare the shit out of us since day one, and I for one plan to file a complaint about it. This class has been a freak show from the beginning. My parents are not going to be amused.”
“She didn’t know,” Perry said. “I’m telling you, she had no way of knowing. She was as shocked as the rest of us. I was there when she recognized Lucas. I thought she was going to pass out.”
“Yeah. Right,” Karess said, and turned her back to him. He could see her shoulder blades under her sweater and the tank top and sheer blouse she was wearing. It crossed his mind that, undressed, she might be either impossibly beautiful or a skeleton. She was always decorated in so many layers of flowing clothes he could never have begun to guess how much she weighed, but it couldn’t have been much.
From the bathroom, he could hear the shower running, and Craig in there bumping around in the tiny shower stall, and then the intercom buzzed through the apartment, and Perry hit the button to open the apartment house door. Karess snorted out of her nose, and Perry went to stand in the hallway, listening to the sound of what he thought were Professor Polson’s black boots on the stairwell (solid, steady steps in sharp heels, as if she were tired or trying to figure out if she was in the right building, heading toward the right apartment), so he was surprised when the woman turned at the top of the stairwell, and she wasn’t Professor Polson. At first he thought somehow that she was his aunt Rachel. Same coloring. Reddish-blond hair. Pale skin. Maybe forty years old. Pretty, but not trying to be. This woman was wearing a silk dress and a very large black down parka. “Are you Craig?” she asked.
79
“Are you Craig?” Shelly asked the boy who stood near the open door in the hallway, although he didn’t look like the boy she remembered. He was handsome, in that buzz-cut, face-chiseled-from-marble kind of way—the kind of All-American boy she used to fantasize about when she was a teenager, but whom she never actually met. The closest she’d come was Chip Chase, who’d taken her to her senior prom, and he’d had longer hair than her own, which Shelly had pretended to like—running her fingers through the long, dark brown locks—when, in truth, she’d hated it.
This boy didn’t look like the long-haired boy she’d seen at the accident. He looked, instead, like Shelly’s brother. He could have been Shelly’s brother, had Richie lived to be nineteen. If Richie had been a college student instead of a Marine. Josie’s word interchangeable came to mind.
“No,” the boy said. “Craig’s in the shower.”
“Oh. I was hoping to speak to him,” Shelly said to this ghost of her brother, and he opened the door to let her in.
80
When Craig got out of the shower—dried and dressed—he was surprised to find Perry’s professor already in the apartment. She was sitting on their couch. And a slender red-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair that Perry had pulled out for her. Perry and Karess stood next to each other at the window.
“I’m Shelly Lockes,” the red-haired woman said. “I was at the accident. I was the first one there. I’m the one they said didn’t give directions to nine-one-one. I saw you and Nicole the night—”
“The night she died,” Craig said, sinking onto the couch beside the professor. It surprised him how easily he was able to say “she died.” It had taken Dr. Truby four appointments to get those two words out of him, and that first time he’d said them aloud, when his memory had finally started to come back to him, he’d had to stand up fast, feeling as if his own words had somehow slugged him in the stomach. Then he’d collapsed again and wept into his hands until his session with Dr. Truby was over.
Now he could say the words over and over, as if they weren’t the truth.
Shelly Lockes shook her head, as if to contradict him, but she didn’t say anything else. It was like she was waiting for permission to speak again.
There was something familiar about her. She was beautiful. She looked the way he thought angels painted on Christmas cards would look if Christmas card makers had more imagination. She was feminine, but without makeup, and although she was petite and very pretty, she also looked incredibly strong. She looked like the kind of angel who could very easily pick you up from the hundredth story of a burning building and fly you back down to the ground.
He’d seen her before, he realized.
He’d seen her everywhere, he thought.
Again, she shook her head.
Beside him, Professor Polson was shivering. Perry’s friend Karess had been shivering all along, as well. Perry looked cold, too. He had his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. But Craig felt, himself, like he was burning up. Maybe he was sick. He’d slept so solidly (twelve hours?) in the Cookie Girl Deb’s bed, and still he felt sure that if he put his head down now for one second, he would fall straight back into that exhausted, dreamless state. If she hadn’t woken him up to let him back into the apartment with the key the landlord had dropped off, Craig might still be there in her bed.
He might never have woken up at all.
Shelly Lockes looked flushed, too, he thought. Overwarm. A thin film of perspiration shone on her forehead, although she was wearing only a silky-looking dress, black tights, boots that looked more like fashion stuff than winter stuff. She was staring at him intently, as though either trying to read his mind or willing him to read hers
“You were there,” he asked, “the night of the accident? You saw Nicole? The night she died?”
The woman looked around as if the question had been asked of someone else in the room, but everyone in the room was looking at her. She cleared her throat and then touched it, and then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and looked down at her boots.
How many millions of times had Craig seen Nicole tuck a strand of hair like that behind her ears, thinking before she spoke? This woman could have been Nicole, if Nicole had lived long enough to become her. Or Josie. Or any of the other sorority girls Craig had seen or known.
She licked her lips, and then bit them, and then she said, “She wasn’t dead.”
81
Shelly had begun to think that perhaps in the months since the accident she had reinvented the boy in her imagination. There’d been only that one night, and it had been dark except for the moon. Afterward, photographs of Nicole Werner had been everywhere, so she’d had an image of the girl to compare to her memory. But Craig Clements-Rabbitt had appeared again only in her dreams.