Nicole got on her tiptoes and kissed his cheeks. "Okay, I guess this is where we say good-bye," she said. "You're going back to Starbucks?"

"Without you?"

"Why not?" she asked. "You'll study better without me there anyway. I'll see you at dinner, okay?"

"Okay," Craig said, feeling a little bit like he'd been duped in some kind of card trick-not an unpleasant one, just confusing-and then she was half-walking, half-skipping away from him in the direction of G.o.dwin Hall.

28.

Professor Polson's lecture that day concerned the soul.

"In some cultures, you can never speak the name of the deceased person again because the soul might hear its name and come looking for its body. Or, worse, the body might come looking for its soul.

"In fact, the tradition of cremation, which seems to us one of the most modern means for dealing with human remains, has its origins in this impulse. If the body is burned to ashes, there can be no reinhabiting, no return.

"Some anthropologists believe that many mourning customs originally served the purpose of keeping the dead at bay. Schneerweiss-you read the translation of the article, right?-hypothesized that the reason widows were instructed to wear black for at least a year and to change their hairstyle was so as to be unrecognizable when their dead husbands came looking for them.

"Why," Professor Polson asked, "might this be? Why would any self-respecting widow not be thrilled to have her dead husband return to her?"

Most of the cla.s.s responded in unison, "Putrefaction!"

"Exactly. The fear, the aversion, that we think of as superst.i.tious or religious is, in fact, based on physical reality. It's based on experience. Difficult experience. So, primitive people, we see, cannot be so easily dismissed as the sort of fools we tend to think of them as. In actuality, they had a much closer, much more intimate experience with the dead than most of us will ever have-unless we go to war or into the mortuary arts. They knew what they were trying to avoid."

She turned to the chalkboard, on which she'd written a quote from Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

Perry tapped his pencil over a sentence from that day's reading: H. Guntert: Larve (Ger. Mask) is etymologically connected with the hidden spirits of the Kingdom of the Dead, the Lares (Lat.), and their name is cognate with latere (to be hidden or to keep oneself hidden) and Latona, the G.o.ddess of death (Leto in Greek), and gives expression to human's immediate feeling about the corpse-the visible presence of the body, and the deepest concealment of the person.

He wanted to ask Professor Polson there in cla.s.s, instead of in her office (where she often seemed too preoccupied about childcare to talk about the subject at any length), if she had any thoughts on this, if she thought that this idea of seeing the dead one's body, and recognizing that his or her soul was no longer animating it, was the basis of even more superst.i.tion and folklore. He had, himself, some ideas about this.

But she was answering some bland question presented to her by Elwood Campbell about why, given the horrors of putrefaction, so many people were not repulsed by the dead, but fascinated by them, wanted to see pictures of them. "What about people who love to look at gore?" he asked, and snickered. Perry suspected Elwood was speaking for himself. He'd been one of the students who hadn't lunged forward to get a closer look at Marilyn Monroe's morgue photograph, and Perry had the impression it was because Elwood was already familiar with it, that he was probably one of those guys trolling the gore.com-type websites, or posting things on them.

"How about necrophilia types? Right?" Elwood prompted. "You know, people who want to have s.e.x with corpses?"

A few of the girls shook their heads and glanced at one another uncomfortably, but Professor Polson didn't bat an eye.

" 'And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side / Of my darling-my darling-my life and my bride / In the sepulchre there by the sea . . .' Poe," she said, "was only one of many poets and philosophers who has described the death of a young woman as one of the most beautiful sights one could behold."

"Yeah," Elwood said, seeming to take this as affirmation of his opinion.

"Kind of puts the 'fun' back into funeral," Brett Barber said, and almost everyone burst out laughing, but none laughed as hard as Elwood.

"On that note," Professor Polson said, shaking her head, "we're done for today. See you Tuesday."

She didn't wait for the students to leave before she herself left, and she wasn't in her office when Perry pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.lo, 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 cla.s.s.) 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, s.h.i.t.

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, hoa.r.s.e, 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 cla.s.ses? Postpone your research? G.o.d forbid, Mira! I mean, the way you go on and on about the importance of those cla.s.ses, 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."

Mira stepped away from him. She tried to imagine herself as the director of this scene. Or as its literary critic. Clark, the main character here, was far too agitated for this to be about his mother's birthday, or even his bitterness about his wife's work schedule.

"Why now?" she asked, attempting the dispa.s.sionate tone she took with students, with colleagues, although every nerve ending in her was vibrating with emotion. "Why are you going now? In all the years I've known you, you've never once-"

"Because my f.u.c.king mother is turning seventy, for G.o.d's sake. I don't want to be like you, Mira, and just show up finally for the f.u.c.king funeral."

Mira looked at her stinging hand to find that she had just slapped Clark hard on the side of his face without realizing it, without realizing that she was even capable of it.

Then she looked to up to see that he was reeling backward, swearing.

It took a few more heartbeats before she could focus enough on her surroundings again to understand that the twins, awakened from their nap in the other room by Clark's shouting, had begun to scream and cry. And a few more heartbeats pa.s.sed before Mira realized that there were tears streaking down her own face, that she was sobbing.

Clark had been the only person to whom she'd ever spoken of it, and it had been the hardest confession she'd ever made, and she remembered him cradling her head in his lap as she wept, years ago, when finally she'd told someone, and the relief that someone knew: "I didn't go home when my father told me that my mother was dying because I was afraid I would flunk my exam . . ."

And the way he'd kissed and consoled her, and stroked her hair, and how he had kissed her tears-how she'd known then that she would marry him, that he was answer to all the prayers she'd never even said, the prayer for forgiveness.

The prayer for self-forgiveness.

"You were just a kid, Mira, really," Clark had said. "How could you have known? You loved your mother. She knew that. She understood . . ."

Now Clark was holding a hand to his cheek, staring at her with narrowed eyes.

"f.u.c.k you, Mira," he said. "f.u.c.k you."

30.

"Who's there? Perry?"

Craig sat up in bed. He was still sleeping, wasn't he? That was it. That was why someone was standing just outside his door, which was open a crack-a bare leg in the dark hallway, the fluttering of some airy material. A girl. This was a dream.

A girl.

She nudged the door open with her foot. A silver sandal. Toenails painted red.

It was going to be a s.e.x dream.

How long since he'd had one of those?