Mira nodded for him to go on, while resisting the urge to take out her notebook and pen.

"I've seen, for instance, corpses sit up and sound as if they were screaming. Of course, it's biological. It's utterly explainable. But let me tell you-" He laughed, and so did she. "And there have been bodies that seemed to withstand decay for strangely long periods of time, Professor. Others that disintegrated even as I moved them from their deathbed to a stretcher. And the differences have so little to do with age, with disease. Certainly, a more primitive people would have needed a way to explain this, along with other things, such as the sense one sometimes has of a presence. Sometimes malevolent. Sometimes desperate."

"How do you explain it?" Mira asked.

"Well, I don't," Ted Dientz said a little sheepishly. "It might surprise you to know," he added, raising his eyebrows, clearly hoping that it would, "that Mrs. Dientz and I traveled to Thailand after the tsunami and a.s.sisted in the preparation and disposal of bodies. The need for morticians and others in the death arts was extraordinary at that time. It was perhaps the most important work I've ever been able to offer."

It did surprise Mira. It was easier to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Dientz of Bad Axe on a travel tour of Dracula's castle than taking a plane to one of the most devastated places in the world.

Ted Dientz went on to tell Mira that during the weeks he'd spent in Thailand he'd met many people who believed they'd seen drowned corpses rise from the waters, walk onto sh.o.r.e, stride past horrified onlookers, and even hail cabs to be driven away.

"Did they think they were ghosts?" Mira asked.

"Some believed they were ghosts, yes. In fact, most cab drivers refused to make their rounds down by the beach in those early weeks, claiming they were being hailed by ghosts, or that they could see the dead tourists on the beach still looking for each other, or playing obliviously in the sea. One told me, 'They think they're still on vacation.' But most people seemed to think these were actually reanimated corpses. It's not an unusual belief, Professor, as you know. I have to tell you, you'd think a man like me, having spent his whole life in this business, would find that laughable, but I don't."

She nodded.

She felt her eyes welling stupidly with tears.

The simple honesty of this man, with her, a stranger. He had waited, she felt, a long time to tell someone other than Mrs. Dientz about all this. It meant something to him that she was nodding. He rested his hand patiently on the envelope containing the bloodstain card. He was a man made of patience, she thought.

Now she owed him her own story, she felt-or, she realized, too, that she needed to tell it, just as he'd needed to tell someone. So she started, the day she had stayed home from school, the vision of her mother in the pantry, the funeral years later, the strange and terrifying images that had inspired her entire life's work. She had just finished speaking, and Mr. Dientz was nodding, quiet but fully attentive, when Perry came back through the door, out of breath, gasping for breath, holding the handle of a hairbrush wrapped in tissue and trailing a little white blizzard behind him.

91.

Craig was halfway up the stairs to his apartment when he heard a door open and someone clomping unevenly toward the stairwell. "Oh, h.e.l.lo," he said, when he recognized her, and then covered his face in his down jacket, which he'd taken off, when he recognized the look of horror on her face.

"Holy s.h.i.t," Deb said, rushing to him, holding the back of his head in one hand and his coat in the other, pressing his face into the jacket even harder, to the point that he was a little afraid that the tiny, goosey feathers might smother him. "What the f.u.c.k did they do to you?"

She hurried him as quickly as a girl on crutches could hurry someone into her apartment, pulled the door closed behind him, shoved him toward her bedroom, where, it appeared, she hadn't done anything-changed the sheets, made the bed-since rousing him from sleep there the day before.

"It looks worse than it is," Craig told her, but he knew the words were m.u.f.fled by his jacket, and that there was blood all over the top of his head, so who knew what she thought he was saying to her?

"Oh, my G.o.d," she was saying. "Oh, my G.o.d. Oh, my G.o.d. I'll be right back. I'll get some towels."

Craig felt bad about it-he would ruin her towels with his b.l.o.o.d.y nose, he might stain her sheets with the blood running down his neck-but he let himself fall backward, hard, onto her bed, and the room swirled around him like a warm bath. Never in his life had a bed felt this comfortable. It would be fine, he thought, if she came back with the towels, but it would also be fine if someone just came in here and turned off the lights and let him lie like this forever.

"Here!" she screamed, tossing the towels toward him. And then, again, "Oh, my G.o.d!"

"It's just a b.l.o.o.d.y nose, maybe broken," Craig said-although he also knew that with his current nasal intonation, she probably had no idea what he'd said. "No big deal. I've had one before. Just gotta put a bandage on it if it's broken. Maybe I'll have black eyes."

He took the jacket off his face, grabbed a towel, and could tell by the way she inhaled that he must already have black eyes.

"What happened?" she asked, and the way she said it was so serious that he felt, somehow, the need to suppress his own laughter. He pressed the towel harder against his face. He could almost hear the snow falling outside. Those flakes, big as little hands, had slapped him upside the head the entire walk home from Greek Row. The whole way there'd been the gasping of girls when they saw the little trail of blood he was leaving in the snow, and the "Whoa, dude" of the guys, and the whole time he'd felt this same urge to laugh right along with the urge to hit someone, to pummel someone, to punch someone in the face, the feeling he imagined boxers had-a profound love and joy and urge to do violence all wrapped up in one profound physical desire.

But he didn't do it. He'd just kept walking. Laughing, and maybe weeping (was that tears or blood, and what was the difference now?) as he kept walking, thinking of her taking one look at him, running. She wasn't dead. He'd seen her with his own eyes: The f.u.c.king lying, cheating b.i.t.c.h hadn't died.

She was the one who'd been calling. The postcards were hers. The beautiful girl he'd loved and killed had come back to life.

Deb left and reemerged above him with what looked like a washcloth full of rocks, or ice, and sat beside him on the bed, moving the towel gently away from his face and lowering her little frozen surprise toward his nose, making noises of empathy and disgust as she did it and demanding that he tell her something he had no idea how to begin to tell her, or anyone, because there were no words with which to express such a thing.

92.

"I saw her, too," Perry said, holding out the brush to them. "At the same time. Here. I saw her with my own eyes."

"Perry," Professor Polson said, taking a step toward him. "What do you mean?"

"I went back there. I left the car, and I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled through the Barbers' backyard, and I found a window with a little crack in the curtain, and I put my hands up to it-"

At first, he could see almost nothing through that crack, but every other window had a shade pulled so tight he could see nothing at all through those. So he'd stood there with his hands pressed against the pane long after his hands had gone numb, staring at a little place between what appeared to be a china hutch and the dangling chains of a cuckoo clock, watching the shadows come and go against it, listening to the muttering of voices, and a few high notes of laughter, but mostly serious-sounding voices.

Now and then Mrs. Werner pa.s.sed before him-Perry recognized the gray-blue dress she'd been wearing, and then another female form: Mary? Constance?

There was a soft gray sweater.

There was what looked like a plaid skirt.

He saw one pair of female arms bearing what must have been Grouch in her arms, and a few times Mr. Werner came and went in a yellow shirt. Finally, Perry was about to leave. (What the h.e.l.l am I doing? he'd thought.) The snow had soaked through his jacket all the way to his skin, and he realized that he was standing in the perfect place where, if one of the neighbors decided to turn on their porch light, he'd be illuminated for everyone to see, and there would be no way to get away except by scaling their picket fence, and then- And then she was leaning over.

She was picking up something she'd dropped on the floor.

Her hair was the flaxen blond he remembered from elementary school-whispering around her face, curling around the curve of her upper arm.

Volleyball. Reaching up with that arm, to serve, to spike.

His bed.

She'd rolled over and swung it over his chest and said, "Craig would just die if he walked in here now."

And he'd said into the nape of the neck he was staring at now, "And why does that make you laugh?"

And she'd laughed.

Now she laughed. Her familiar laugh. She managed to pick up whatever it was she'd dropped and stick it back into her flossy hair (a comb, a barrette), and just at that moment she turned to the window and fixed him with a look he also knew: Hide and Seek in the c.o.xes' backyard.

I see you.

Her lips were redder than he remembered, and her cheeks were flushed-not that different from the flush on the cheeks of her mother-and her eyes seem to flash in his direction, and she tilted back her head toward the ceiling, and when she laughed he could see her teeth brighten in the overhead light, and he could feel through his whole body the sharp stabbing pain of her laugh.

93.

"Are you fooling around with Perry or something?"

"What?"

"How many times have I pa.s.sed you on the stairwell just as I'm headed up to the room, and when I get there Perry's either asleep or has just left for the shower?"

"I was up there looking for you, Craig."

They were standing in the stairwell, facing one another, and the late winter twilight from the one little window shone on the linoleum, casting the shadow of its diamond panes across Nicole's pale feet.

She was wearing flip-flops. She wasn't planning to go anywhere outside. Her toenails were painted pink. She rested her hand on the wooden rail and began to smooth it with her palm. Craig looked at the hand. Her fingernails were also pink, and the way she was touching that rail-recently varnished, it seemed, so that it shone, while still bearing under that gleaming sh.e.l.lac job all the nicks and scratches and carved initials of about a million students. He wanted to pull her hand away from the railing. Jesus, how many germs from how many hands was she touching as she touched it?

She licked her bottom lip, and suddenly that familiar little tic (when she was nervous or upset or about to cry) seemed almost obscene to him.

Her cheeks looked flushed against the pasty stairwell walls, and her lips were very red. Craig thought he could smell her, too, even though she was standing several feet from him, and it wasn't her usual baby powder smell, or the smell of her flowery shampoo. She smelled, he thought, like s.e.x.

He looked down again at her hand rubbing the railing, and had to stop himself from grabbing the hand, making her stop.

"I went up there to tell you I've got to do laundry tonight. Josie and I are picking out dresses for the Spring Event."

"But you knew I wasn't there. You knew I was at the lecture I was a.s.signed to attend."

(Awful: An old professor who mumbled into a microphone for over an hour about the Post-Copernican Double Bind and the epistemological consequences of the Cartesian cogito-whatever the h.e.l.l all that was. The undergraduates had started to file out at the same moment, like a timer had gone off or something in the middle of the lecture, and Craig had followed them, as the professor droned on. He'd hurried back to the dorm, imagining the poor guy still going on and on back there for the benefit of the two graduate students in the front row.) "I just happened to be back early. You had no reason to think I'd be back in the room yet."

"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your schedule well enough, Craig."

"But this isn't the first time."

"You're saying you think I'm-?"

Was he? Was that what he was saying? Did he really think she was-what? f.u.c.king Perry? Was he really looking at Nicole and thinking to himself that there was even the remotest possibility that all this sweet virginity business, the promise ring she wore on her left hand-the amber ring, he noticed now, was not on her right hand tonight, but she said she had to take it off sometimes when she did a lot of typing-that it was all a joke? That not only wasn't she a virgin, but she was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his roommate?

Perry?

He knew Perry wasn't crazy about him, but they'd been getting along a lot better lately. Perry, the Boy Scout. Even if Nicole would do it, Perry wouldn't.

Still, there was one thing Craig remembered from the lecture that night, and it bothered him at the moment, just as Nicole took a step toward him, and he could see that her eyes were filled with tears, and her blazingly red lips were trembling, and he knew that she was about to put her head on his shoulder, or press her face into his chest-something about Kant. How the human mind orders reality subjectively. The geezer had called it the "relative and unrooted nature of human knowledge."

It was the only thing Craig had bothered to write down.

It was stuck now in his mind like a disturbing image, a catchy song.

But when Nicole lifted her tear-streaked face to his, he shook his head and took her in his arms.

94.

For miles hers seemed to be the only vehicle on the freeway. Now and then a truck pa.s.sed in the opposite direction, its wipers sloshing snow off the windshield with what looked like elaborate, sloppy showgirl boas and sweeps. Sh.e.l.ly imagined the drivers in those cabs. They would be hypnotized by the sound of their own wipers. They might be listening to talk shows, to the voices of strangers phoning in from other corners of the country, asking personal questions or expressing heartfelt convictions. Those truckers might be nearing sleep, or jangled up with caffeine and those energy pills they sold at the counters of gas stations. The snow seemed frenzied, suicidal, tossing itself into her path, but Sh.e.l.ly herself wasn't lulled into any kind of sleep by the sound of the wipers.

She was more awake and alert than she had ever been in her life.

And although she realized that, really, she'd spent all of her adult years alone (or maybe every year of her life since her brother had died and her parents had fallen apart), this was the first night that she was acutely, completely, aware of how utterly alone she was.

She thought of Jeremy.

She thought of the James Joyce story.

The snow falling on the living and the dead.

There was no sense listening to the radio.

It was just more living and dying.

A few more miles, and she pa.s.sed a truck jackknifed in the center median, surrounded by orange flares, and could see, heading toward it on the opposite side of the freeway, a police car's flashing red and blue lights beyond the heavy veil of what now could only be described as a nearly total whiteout.

She should get off the freeway. If she could have stood to listen to the radio, she knew that was the advice she would have heard. She had just seen a sign for a Motel 6, a Cracker Barrel, a Quik Mart (Exit 49), and although she did not recall ever having pulled over on this particular exit, or being at this particular town (Brighton), she took comfort in knowing exactly what it would be like.

How many hundreds of Motel 6's had she experienced in her life?

How many Cracker Barrels? Quik Marts?

Unlike many of her fellow academics, Sh.e.l.ly actually went to these places. She stayed in them. Ate in them. Purchased her snacks and beverages in them. She loved them for the very things for which her colleagues disdained them. Their kitschy sameness, and the way the girls at the cash registers always said something like, "Hi there! What's up? Find everything okay?"

Sh.e.l.ly could pull off at this exit she'd never pulled off at before in her life, step out of her car blindfolded, and find her way to everything. The laminated menu. The check-in counter. The Slushy machine.

No. She wouldn't pull over yet. Not at Exit 49. She would keep driving, and she did. Exit 49 blurred right past, and then Sh.e.l.ly realized where she'd wanted to go all along-and although she hated other people who scrolled through the addresses in their cell phones while driving in perilous conditions, she did it herself until she'd found Ellen Graham's phone number, and then was hearing herself ask this poor woman, this nearly perfect stranger, if it would be okay if she stopped by (in the dark, in a blizzard) for the second time in a day.