"Professor Polson?" Perry Edwards asked after Mira was silent for a very long time.

She held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else, and then she put the hand over her eyes and forced herself to count to five before she looked at this boy again, and said, "Okay."

Part Two.

18.

It was one of those soul-s.n.a.t.c.hing, deadly dull days at the Chamber Music Society. The offices buzzed with it, literally. A fly caught between the window and the screen in Sh.e.l.ly's office was tossing itself between the two barriers with exhausted fury. She watched it from her desk, its electrical droning competing with the sound of her dozing computer.

It was the end of September, and the weather was making a concerted effort to change. The sky was closer to lavender now than blue, and there was a smell of leaves sweetening, softening, giving way, shifting into a lower gear. As always, the change from late summer to actual autumn brought back for Sh.e.l.ly every September of her life-the dust swirling around her kindergarten desk, bobby socks and shiny shoes, straight through to her last year of graduate school, lugging an expensive textbook back from the store to her little efficiency over the Beer Depot-along with all the Septembers since then, the years pa.s.sing one by one outside the window of her office at the university's Chamber Music Society.

What, she wondered, was September like for people who didn't work at an educational inst.i.tution? Did the melancholy reminiscence of September simply skip them?

If so, Sh.e.l.ly thought, it would be a little like skipping one of the Twelve Trials of Hercules: you'd still be stuck with the Christmas despair, but you wouldn't have to relive the end of every summer vacation of your life, that sad realization of your own mortality, year after year, as the kids swarmed back into your world with their freshly sharpened pencils and new sweaters.

No, she supposed, it wouldn't be like that. They'd all gotten that calendar engrained on their psyches so early. No one escaped the mortality of autumn.

"G.o.d, you depress me," her ex-husband used to say, and said for the last time on the day she left him, shaking his head sadly-and then, as if some switch had been flipped in his head, charging after her, fists whirling around them both as she stumbled out the back door, and he yanked her back in by her hair.

"Sh.e.l.ly?"

"Yes?"

"Do you think, you know, since we're all caught up, I-"

"-could leave early?" Sh.e.l.ly tried not to let out an exasperated sigh.

"Yeah," Josie said. She was twirling a strand of silken black hair around her index finger. She had her face tilted at a right angle, like a sparrow. "It's Greek Week."

"You're in a sorority?" Sh.e.l.ly asked.

"Yeah," Josie said.

"What house?"

"Omega Theta Tau." Josie p.r.o.nounced each Greek letter with irrepressible pride.

Sh.e.l.ly turned around in her chair to face Josie fully in the doorway, and asked, "Isn't that the sorority Nicole Werner was in, the girl who was killed?"

Josie began to nod slowly and melodramatically with her eyes half closed.

"Did you know her?" Sh.e.l.ly asked. How was it possible that she'd not only not known that Josie was in a sorority but in Nicole Werner's sorority?

Josie shrugged. She said, "We all knew her. She and I rushed and pledged at the same time. It's not one of the bigger houses-sixty girls-so, yeah, sure, I knew her. It was a huge shock."

Sh.e.l.ly stood up. She said, "Did you know-?"

"-that you were in a sorority?" Josie brightened. "Yeah. You were wearing that Eta Lambda T-shirt the day I ran into you outside the gym, so I looked you up on their Plaque Wall when I was over there for a party, and found your name! That's so cool. I mean, I'm sure it used to be a better house back when you-"

"No," Sh.e.l.ly said, shaking her head, dismayed to feel rising the familiar defensive self-consciousness related to sororities you'd fully expect a lesbian in her forties to be far beyond by now. "No. That's not what I meant. Did you know I was at the scene of the accident? Nicole Werner's? I was the first one there."

Josie bit her lip, and seemed to look upward, to scan her brain for this bit of information. Not finding it, she said, "No," and then, eyes widening, "That was you. The middle-aged lady, the one who didn't give directions to 911?"

Sh.e.l.ly felt her cheeks redden, burning, and her breath escaping her. She shook her head. She said, "No. I gave perfect directions. I was there when the ambulances arrived. I stayed until they took those kids-"

"Jeeze," Josie said. "That must've been awful. I had no idea."

Of course she hadn't.

How could she have?

Sh.e.l.ly's name had never even made the papers, where not a single detail of the accident had been reported correctly-except, apparently, that Sh.e.l.ly was middle-aged.

"They got the facts wrong," Sh.e.l.ly said. "I was there when they took the kids away."

"Oh. Wow. Okay. Well, this is a b.u.mmer. Would you mind, can I ask you, you know-"

"If you can leave early?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah," Sh.e.l.ly said, and in less than a second, the girl was gone. Sh.e.l.ly stood, looking at the threshold, empty now, and listening to the sound of the front door of the Chamber Music Society opening, then closing, and then the sound of Josie tapping down the stairwell in her black flats. Then, she sat back down, opened one of her desk drawers, and pulled out the file with Josie's name on it.

Her resume, her application-Sh.e.l.ly scanned them for Omega Theta Tau. These girls never left their sorority affiliations off their applications. They were so impressed with themselves that they a.s.sumed everyone else would be, too.

But it wasn't on any of the paperwork, and Josie had given only her home address in Grosse Isle as her contact information.

Grosse Isle?

How had Sh.e.l.ly missed that detail?

The girl was getting financial aid for the "work" she was doing at the Chamber Music Society. Was there anybody in Grosse Isle who needed work-study funds to attend college? When Sh.e.l.ly herself had been at the university, one of her sorority sisters from Grosse Isle had invited her home for a weekend. The house the girl had grown up in had a helicopter landing pad, and her father's helicopter, on its roof.

Well, of course, Sh.e.l.ly had no way of knowing the Reillys' situation, even if they were from the wealthiest suburb in the state. A bitter divorce could have accounted for the need, or a family illness, or parental job loss. It wasn't Sh.e.l.ly's job to a.s.sess the candidate's financial situation. That a.s.sessment was sent over from the Financial Aid Office to the dean of the music school, who gave it his stamp of approval.

Sh.e.l.ly put the file back in her drawer and looked out the window. A white b.u.t.terfly, seeming to try to land on the windowsill, was being jostled around by the breeze, buffeted away from the ledge each time it got close.

Sh.e.l.ly watched, feeling nervous for it-unable to look away and hating the spectacle of it. Her eyes focused on it, as her thoughts fluttered around: Omega Theta Tau.

Those were the Virgin Sisters. Theirs was the house on campus that supposedly advocated chast.i.ty and sobriety. The press had made a big deal of that with Nicole Werner. It was another stratum of the tragedy, that she'd been such a good girl.

Back in Sh.e.l.ly's day, the eighties, there'd been a bit more cynicism than that-strange as it was to think that Americans were getting more innocent as time pa.s.sed.

Back then, Omega Theta Tau had been the sorority of choice for the girls who wanted to go into politics, or marry into politics. It was the keep-your-record-clean sorority. Sh.e.l.ly was fairly certain the governor's wife had been an OTT here. And who knew who else? These more powerful houses had connections that crisscrossed the nation's most important people like telephone lines. Maybe every female judge in the nation had been one. Probably half the female lawyers with ambitions to be judges-or senators, or congresswomen-had been. Most likely some huge percentage of the senators' and congressmen's wives in the country could claim Omega Theta Tau sisterhood, and who knew how many First Ladies.

Sh.e.l.ly's sorority, Eta Lambda, had been nothing like that. Hers had been known as the Friendly Girl's Sorority. In other words, it was not as cool as the other houses; its sisters not as popular, not as pretty.

You might think that would have made it an easier house to live in-with more laid-back sisters, less pressure of all varieties-but you would be wrong. Being on the lower rung of the Greek ladder made the Eta Lambda sisters even more compet.i.tive, even more ruthless, crueler. Sh.e.l.ly's most vivid memory of those days was of coming down the stairs in her formal gown on Pledge Night, and watching as the girls already a.s.sembled below in their own gowns made eye contact with one another and then, in unison, it seemed, rushed their hands to their mouths to stifle their laughter.

Sh.e.l.ly's heart had begun to pound so hard she was afraid she would pa.s.s out. To this day she had no idea what they were laughing about. Maybe she looked fat, or her gown was too revealing. It could have been her hair, her makeup, her shoes, her little sequined purse. She would never know. She wasn't intended to know. There was not a single girl among all those sisters who would have been kind enough to tell her, or to rea.s.sure her. So Sh.e.l.ly simply continued to descend the stairs (what else could she do?) and then to move through Pledge Night in a cloud of shame, dashing away from the activities every chance she got to check herself in the bathroom mirror: Her teeth, the blond hair over her lip, her eyebrows. She sniffed her underarms. She sniffed her underpants. She checked the front of her dress, the back of her dress, her bra straps, and the worst thing of all was that she couldn't find it. Whatever it was, this thing they could all see on her, she was blind to it.

Sh.e.l.ly had moved through the next two years as an Eta Lambda trying to find it, to see it, to figure it out, unable to and determined, at the same time, to stay and face it, whatever it was, day after day after day.

A complete waste of youthful energy and time, she knew now-although, in truth, she'd made a couple of lifelong friends through Eta Lambda, friends who'd seen her through her graduation, graduate school, an abusive marriage, and a divorce, and who had then accepted her into the new life she'd taken on as a lesbian.

There was a special kind of loyalty born of that strange sisterhood. It wasn't blood. But it was like some kind of precious body fluid, spent and shared between them.

The b.u.t.terfly seemed stuck to the windowsill by the force of the breeze now.

Really, it was unbearable to watch. The breeze, which would have been nearly undetectable to anything not made of tissue paper and thread, as that b.u.t.terfly was, was crushing it into the bricks. Sh.e.l.ly watched for a few more seconds and then decided she had no choice but to open the window and let it in. Luckily she worked in one of the few buildings left on campus that had windows that could actually be opened, although she rarely did so, and she had to push hard and then hold the heavy pane up with one hand while attempting to gently pluck the b.u.t.terfly up with the other.

She got it. She could have sworn she felt its heart beat (atomic whispering, and dusty little particles of time and terror) and she felt terrified, too, trying to shake it off her fingers and onto her desk, where it lay motionless (had she killed it, had she killed it?) She was certain, then, that she'd crushed it, scared it to death, injured it past fixing, but after a few seconds the b.u.t.terfly fluttered its wings, and then it rose into the air, and Sh.e.l.ly stood back, out of its way, as it flew past her and through her office to the door, and then into the outer offices, where it zigzagged from wall to wall, until she opened the office door, and it flew down the stairwell, to the propped-open front door, and disappeared back into the world.

19.

It was Putrefaction Day. As they filed into the room, Mira wrote on the board: He looks like he's asleep.

It's a shame that he won't keep, But it's summer and we're runnin' out of ice . . .

-"Pore Jud Is Daid," Oklahoma!

Perry Edwards was the first one in, already with his notebook open, jotting down the quote from the board (which was really intended more as a joke than something to include in one's notes).

He was wearing a somber-looking pair of black trousers and a white b.u.t.ton-down shirt, as if he'd just come from a Glee Club concert, or a funeral.

"Perry," Mira said before the others were in their places, "would you mind working the slide projector?"

"No, Professor Polson." He rose from his seat and moved to the chair next to the projector.

"Okay," Mira said. "Today's the big day. I'm a.s.signing you your first essay, which will be due next week. I didn't a.s.sign it earlier because I don't believe in giving students, as some professors do, a month to write a paper. The longer you have, in my experience, the longer you'll put it off. But, at the same time, as I state in the syllabus, I accept no late papers, so my suggestion is that you start working on this a.s.signment today. It can be as long as you need it to be to make your points, but it will be no shorter than ten pages."

"Ten pages!" Karess Flanagan blurted, and then blushed and looked around as if trying to pretend someone else had said it.

Under what circ.u.mstances, Mira wondered, would a parent consider naming a child Karess? Of course, they'd had no way of knowing that their infant daughter would turn into a stunningly s.e.xy dark-haired beauty with C cups and glossy pink lips, did they? Mira could only begin to imagine the jokes and riffs the name and the girl had inspired in boys' locker rooms over the years.

Karess continued to look shocked, whether by the number of pages of the a.s.signment or by her own outburst, or both.

"Didn't you read the syllabus?" Mira asked. "Under 'Requirements' "-she whipped a syllabus out of the folder on her desk-"it says pretty clearly, 'five papers, ten pages double-s.p.a.ced or longer, must receive a grade of C or higher to pa.s.s the course.' "

Karess managed to nod and shake her head at the same time.

"So, here's your paper topic," Mira said.

Out of the same folder, she took her stack of Xeroxed a.s.signments and handed them to Karess to pa.s.s out to the cla.s.s. As the girl stood up with them, every guy in the cla.s.s except Perry (who was studying the slide projector) looked from her ankles to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and lingered there until she sat back down.

"I'll let you read this on your own," Mira said, "but let me go over the basics. In this essay, which is a Personal Reflection piece, you are to examine your own superst.i.tions-personal and cultural-related to death. You might start with why it is you signed up for this cla.s.s, but you might also examine your preconceptions regarding burial, cremation, funeral rites, and the other rituals practiced by your family and community. What is your experience with the dead? Have you been in the presence of a dead body, and if so, what was your reaction? What are your fears related to the dead? What are your attractions?"

There was a snort here and there, and a baffled huff. It was the same every year.

"Because," Mira said, without missing a beat, "you, of all people, can't tell me there's no such thing as an attraction to this subject matter, since you have, yourselves, enrolled in a cla.s.s about death and the dead. You had twenty other cla.s.ses to choose from. Although I'd like to flatter myself that it's my reputation as a stellar educator that makes this the most popular cla.s.s at G.o.dwin Honors College every year, I rather doubt it. There are other reasons, perhaps related to the fascination that, for instance, young women with almost no interest in poetry beyond Hallmark cards have for Sylvia Plath, and why Kurt Cobain, who barely lived long enough to write and sing more than a handful of decent songs, commands so many fans among teenage boys.

"These are the subjects," Mira continued, looking around, catching the eyes of the students who looked the least impressed, "that I want you to explore, in as much depth, with as much critical a.n.a.lysis and personal reflection as you're capable of, in this essay."

She turned and sat back down behind her desk, and said, in a less impa.s.sioned tone, "On the cla.s.s website you'll find papers from previous years. Questions?"

The students were either looking at Mira or staring at their a.s.signment sheets, some with their mouths hanging open. There were questions regarding font, and quotes, and the width of margins. Mira made it clear that ten pages meant ten pages. The frantic questions subsided when it became obvious that there would be no way around this, whether or not their high school teachers had counted the t.i.tle page as a page, or allowed them to use two-inch margins and eighteen-point font.

"Okay," Mira said, exhaling. "Finally. Putrefaction."

There were t.i.tters, and a groan.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I'm afraid we can't begin to understand the folklore and superst.i.tions surrounding the dead until we understand the reality of death and decay. In our particular time and place, it's the rare person who encounters putrefied human remains, but it has been less than a century that the technology and professional services allowing us to avoid this nasty reality have been around, and in most places on earth, they still don't exist. So, the decay of the dead body remains a powerful psychic and cultural memory.

"I'm a.s.suming you've all read the selection in your course packs from W.E.B. Evans's The Chemistry of Death?"

A few heads nodded. Mira flipped the lights and pulled the screen down over the blackboard. "Okay. Perry, can you turn on the slide projector? First slide."

The first image was a still from Dawn of the Dead. A "corpse" in ragged clothing was chasing a beautiful young girl across an emerald green lawn.

"You're probably familiar with this movie. I imagine most of you also know the story 'The Monkey's Paw,' in which a husband comes home to his wife with a monkey's paw he's been told will grant him three wishes. The first wish, which is for a sum of cash, results in their son's death in a mining accident, and a life insurance payoff of that exact sum.

"The wife, several days after the son's burial, in a state of unbearable grief, makes the second wish: for his return.

"She's about given up hope when, late at night, the couple hears something slow and heavy and sc.r.a.ping coming up the walk. The wife rushes for the door, but the husband stops her. He seems to understand, in a way his wife doesn't, what their son, returning after a few days spent in the grave, will be-so he uses the last wish to make his son go away.

"Now, let me ask you-this is your beloved only son, and you are responsible for his death. Would you open the door?"

There was a collective "No!" Karess Flanagan actually put her hands to her rosy cheeks, shaking her head.

"Well, why not?" Mira asked, pretending to be shocked by their callousness. "He's your son. Your loving child. What are you afraid of?"

"He's dead!"