S
helly went over it again every morning in her mind, and every night before she went to bed. She thought about it as she drove to work and as she sat behind her desk. When the telephone rang, the sound sometimes startled her. She forgot she was in her office, that she had a phone on her desk that might ring.
First, she’d remember the car, solidifying her own description of it in her mind:
Dark colored. Two door.
Then, the familiar road:
A semirural highway. Two lanes, north and south, just on the outskirts of town. She’d driven that road a million times before, and had driven it a hundred times since.
That
time, she’d been listening to a country station—a guilty pleasure. (If anyone she worked with at the Chamber Music Society knew her secret, she might not actually be fired, but she’d be chastised so relentlessly she’d eventually have to quit. Sure, it was a free country, but not when it came to certain aesthetic preferences or political opinions and you happened to work at the Chamber Music Society at the university.) One of her favorite country stars was singing about how great it was to live in the U.S.A., and Shelly was singing along.
She remembered the yellow line down the middle of the road.
She remembered noting the small, dark-colored car that was just far enough ahead of her that she didn’t need to pay much attention to it. It wasn’t going fast. There were no other cars on the road.
As she sang the words to the country song along with the radio, she realized for the first time (although she’d heard the song a hundred times) that the subtext of it was that if you didn’t like it in the U.S.A., you should leave.
Personally, Shelly Lockes more or less agreed. Her big brother had been killed in Vietnam. Her parents had never gotten over it and had died young of the kind of diseases the grief-stricken die of: heart attack for her father, stomach cancer for her mother.
Still, Shelly was wondering to herself even as she sang the catchy lyrics at the top of her lungs, if you did decide to leave the U.S.A., where would you go? If you were able to think of a country that appealed to you more, would they be willing to let you in? What if, afterward, you wanted to come back?
Then the red lights of the car ahead of her swerved, and blinked, and seemed to dance in the air for a few wild seconds. And then they vanished.
How many hundreds of hours had she logged on Google by now, searching for information on the accident? The girl. The boy. The “investigation,” which seemed to have ended before it ever began.
But every hit Shelly came across that wasn’t the local paper’s colorful misinformation had something to do with the cherry trees in the memorial orchard at the dead girl’s sorority, or quoted sappy things her sorority sisters had to say about her purity. Shelly plugged in her own name, and found nothing. She plugged in the date and
accident
and, on a whim,
the truth
. Nothing. She plugged in
the truth
and the name of Nicole Werner’s sorority, and came up with one surprising detail about a music school student, a violinist named Denise Graham, who’d disappeared in the spring, right around the time of the accident—and many of the same sorority sisters who were quoted as saying that Nicole was “the sweetest girl who ever lived” said of the disappeared violinist, “She was really aloof and strange. No one ever got to know her.”
It almost seemed staged, this juxtaposition, as if to prove that Nicole had, indeed, been an angel in the guise of a sorority girl—the proof being that this other one’s life was of such little concern to anyone. If she’d ever been located, there was nothing about it on the Internet that Shelly could find.
“S
helly?”
Josie was standing in the threshold, wearing her usual surprised expression. It had taken Shelly three months of working with this girl before she realized that Josie wasn’t actually
surprised
by anything, ever. That the expression was some kind of amusement—perhaps at someone else’s expense. Perhaps Shelly’s.
“Yes?”
“Would it be okay with you if I went down to Starbucks? Espresso fix? I could get you something?”
“That’s fine. Go ahead. But I don’t need anything.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
After Josie had clipped away in her little hard-soled shoes, Shelly went back to the file she’d opened on her computer—numbers surging electrically, shimmering, seeming for the moment to be unrecognizable as anything but shapes and dots. She rubbed her eyes and leaned back in her chair, and after she thought it had been long enough for Josie to get down the stairs and out to the street, she looked out the window, found Josie among the hundreds of other students passing (between classes) on the sidewalk, and then watched her sway along the sidewalk with her hands tucked into the pockets of her cashmere hoodie, threading her elegant way toward Starbucks.
The girl’s back was straight, and her long, dark hair whipped around her face. She was gorgeous. As Josie crossed the street, Shelly saw two guys turn around to watch her, and although Shelly was too far away to see their faces, she could see that they were nudging one another the way guys did when they were talking about a girl’s body. Josie bent over and picked something up—a dropped coin?—and put it in her pocket, and then ran her hand through her beautiful hair. The two guys had a hard time walking straight while craning their necks around to observe her ass. Shelly turned back to her computer screen.
She dreaded it, but she was going to have to fire Josie Reilly, who’d worked in the office only since July. She was the most unreliable work-study student Shelly’d ever had, and had gotten hired because, frankly, it was hard to find work-study students living on campus during the summer months. Josie had also seemed so intelligent, so composed, during her interview, that Shelly had been genuinely impressed.
But now, nearly every afternoon, there were guys hanging around in the lobby waiting for her more than an hour before she was supposed to get off work—cracking jokes, talking about parties—until, finally, exhausted by her own annoyance, Shelly would say, “You can leave early if you want to, Josie,” to which Josie never objected.
Then, each Monday, the one day Josie was supposed to come into the office in the morning, she never failed to stumble in an hour late, apologizing profusely but always with that amused look on her face.
And, inexcusably, a few weeks earlier, Shelly had found the expense-reimbursement form for the Marymount String Quartet, which was supposed to have been submitted a month before, collecting dust under Josie’s desk. There was a doodle of a shoe on the back of the form—a high heel with straps and buckles. “Oh, my God!” Josie shrieked when Shelly waved the piece of paper at her, but she offered no real explanation, just a series of false-sounding self-recriminations, and there was always that look on her face.
It was true that all of Shelly’s work-study students over the years had been bad, and she’d tried repeatedly to make a case to the dean that what she needed was a
real
assistant, but every year they foisted a new work-study kid on her. They were all sloppy, unreliable, and empty-headed, for the most part, but Josie Reilly was perhaps the worst. She barely even made an effort to
pretend
she was making an effort.
Shelly looked back out the window just in time to see her come out of Starbucks with a cup in each hand.
She always did that.
Shelly always told Josie she didn’t want anything, and Josie always brought her something anyway. It would have seemed thoughtful if it didn’t somehow also seem like an afterthought, as if Josie had gotten to the Starbucks with no recollection whatsoever of what Shelly had answered when she’d asked her if she wanted anything.
As Josie crossed the street back to the Chamber Music Society offices, she glanced up and Shelly ducked away from the window, looking back at her computer fast, feeling her cheeks flush, her heart beating in embarrassment.
Josie Reilly seemed to her to be precisely the kind of sorority girl who would assume that because Shelly was a lesbian she was attracted to
her
. She was, Shelly thought, precisely the kind of girl who went through the world assuming
everyone
was attracted to her.
Josie would assume she was being watched by her boss from the window of her office because she was so irresistible. She would come back into the offices bearing that paper cup of hot chocolate, or mint tea, or peppermint chai, and Shelly was going to have to look into her amused expression without batting an eye, and take it from her, and thank her, and offer to pay her the outrageous three or four dollars it had cost. And, this time, because she’d been caught watching the girl cross the street—horny old dyke in a position of power at a university so sensitive to such matters that the very air around them felt censored, as if it had actually become possible to neuter the
mind
—Shelly would now have to wait at least another week before she fired her.
T
he twins threw themselves onto the living room floor—Andy on his butt, Matty on his face—when Mira walked in the door. It was a part of the routine.
She came back from her teaching and her office in the afternoons, and they wept and screamed for a solid hour while Clark stomped around the apartment. When she asked him if they’d been fussy during the day, he shook his head with his lips sealed tightly, letting her know that this behavior had to do with
her
, and was, therefore, her problem.
But what, she wondered, did it mean? Were the boys weeping with excitement because she was back, or crying with their just-realized grief that she’d been gone? Mira’s terrible suspicion was that they’d longed to cry all day, but because their father seemed either so unsympathetic in his weariness or so close himself to cracking, they’d suppressed it until she came home.
She pulled off her shoes and sat down on the floor, and gathered them to her. Matty opened his mouth and sucked onto her kneecap, sobbing. Andy grabbed a fistful of her hair, stuffed it into his mouth, and wept into her neck. “Clark?” Mira called to him over their sobbing. She needed a glass of water but couldn’t risk standing up yet, having to disengage the twins.
He didn’t answer.
“Clark?”
M
ira had grown up in a traditional family. Her father sold insurance all day while her mother slammed doors and screamed at the kids. Mira had little idea what her mother did with those precious hours when they were at school. Early on she’d imagined her lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over her chest until she heard the school bus pull up to the curb at 3:45.
Later Mira considered other possibilities: A secret life of some sort. Not a lover, surely, but maybe a group of friends to whom her mother confided, over neighborly cups of tea, the disappointments of her marriage, her difficulty with her children. Or maybe she read romance novels, bodice-rippers she kept hidden around the house. Maybe she pursued some passion Mira hadn’t considered: bird watching, poetry-writing.
But no sooner had Mira turned twenty, the age at which she might actually have gotten to
know
this stranger who’d raised her, than her mother died, and the only genuinely revealing scene of her childhood she could remember with clarity was an afternoon when she’d had to stay home from school, suffering as she was from such debilitating menstrual cramps that even her mother, who had no patience at all for female-related troubles, had to admit that Mira looked green, and let her stay in bed.
That afternoon, Mira was fourteen. She’d gone straight back to bed after breakfast and slept until noon, and then she’d woken up to a silent house, and tiptoed into the hallway.
Why had she tiptoed? Had she
expected
to find her mother doing something she wouldn’t want her daughter to witness?
Whatever the reason for it, Mira could still remember her sense of being on a furtive mission—the way she’d stepped gingerly over the floorboard that creaked, and then how she’d slid, rather than stepped, down the hallway in her socks.
Their house was small. There were only three bedrooms, one of which her brothers had to share (an endless source of conflict:
Why does she get her own room?
) She moved from the hallway’s bare floorboards to the living room’s orange shag with only the vaguest of whispered footsteps, and then peered around the corner, to the living room.
Her mother wasn’t there.
She’d held her breath as she passed under the low arched doorway of the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a swinging door (one side of which would no longer swing, since either Bill or Frank—neither of whom would admit to it—had pulled it off the door frame by hanging from it, and because their father, who had no carpentry skills, also refused to hire anyone to do any work around the house.) If her mother was behind that door, she was standing too still to be detected.
Mira pushed open the side that still opened, and stepped into the kitchen.
Nothing.
Only her mother’s half-empty coffee cup on the counter, with a bright red imprint of her lips on the rim.
Mira touched the cup. It was cold.
There were only two other places in the house her mother could be, Mira knew: the half-finished basement (except that Mira didn’t hear the washer or dryer) or the walk-in pantry. They had only one car, and her father would have taken it to work, so unless her mother had walked into town (unthinkable, as she didn’t even own a pair of real walking shoes, and it had rained that morning, so there would be puddles, and what would she do in their small town anyway?), she had to be in the house.
Perhaps, Mira thought, her mother was alphabetizing soup cans in the pantry or checking expiration dates. There was one bare bulb in the pantry, and the space was large enough, even crammed as it was with cans and jars and boxes of pasta and Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes, that her mother might comfortably stand inside it or even sit on a chair if she wanted to, looking around, making lists.
Mira walked to the door and put her hand on the warm solidity of the fake brass knob, and had the sure sense of something beyond the door. But what? Not her mother, exactly, but some suppressed energy, some barely perceptible movement, some silent intense activity, like cell growth or furtive sex. It crossed Mira’s mind that there might be someone behind that door who was not her mother at all—or that her mother might be in there
with
someone.
She hesitated, and then pulled the door open so quickly she felt a rush of wind on her face and neck, and the bright overhead light nearly blinded her after the darkness of the hallway, and she gasped when her mother turned around, seeming less bathed in that light than emitting it, standing as she was in the center of the pantry, directly under the one bare bulb, wearing what looked to Mira at first like some kind of white choir robe made of feathers, or giant wings wrapped around her body, eyes closed but lips and cheeks vividly, garishly, painted red (although in real life Mira’s mother wore makeup only on Sundays, for church, or on the rare weekend nights Mira’s father took her out to dinner). Her skin looked wet, coated with dew or sweat, and Mira got a quick but definite impression that her mother had just hatched or was in the process of hatching, or being born, or being reanimated after death.
Mira froze in the doorway, hand flat against her chest, heart pounding into her palm. Her mother slowly opened her eyes and said, “Mira?” in a voice a hundred times softer and more full of patience and motherly affection than Mira had ever heard it.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Are you—?”
“What, sweetheart?”
Mira took a step backward, and her mother simply pulled the door closed again between them, and Mira hesitated for only a second or two before returning quickly to her room and getting back into her bed where she belonged.
As the years passed, like so many other incidents from childhood and adolescence, that moment became a confused vision in her memory, and often Mira would think she’d simply dreamed the whole thing, or hallucinated it. (Was it possible the Tylenol she’d taken that morning had codeine in it? Could she have had, in addition to her period, a fever?) But she also never lost the sense that she’d stumbled upon a deep secret that day, a secret in the pantry as well as in her mother, and the distant, irrational suspicion that her mother spent her days in the pantry regenerating,
reanimating
, shedding cells and making new ones, would make its way into Mira’s dreams for years, until it eventually entered her conscious life, permanently, when her mother succumbed to the breast cancer she must surely have known she had that day in the pantry—must have known she’d had for
years
. (The physicians who were eventually rounded up to treat her expressed shock and horror that an illness that might have been successfully addressed had been ignored, or concealed, or borne in silence for so long.)
At the funeral parlor on a cool April afternoon, Mira looked down at her mother in the white coffin and remembered that glimpse of her in the pantry in the flush on her mother’s cheeks, the ghoulishly painted red lips, the cool, waxy film of her skin, and the smell of the embalming fluid.
By then, it would seem like a century since that day in the pantry and the diagnosis that had followed a few months later. The breast cancer went on for what seemed like another lifetime, straight through Mira’s high school prom, and then through her graduation (which no one had expected her mother to live to see), and then through her first and second years of college—during which there were four or five exhausting Greyhound bus rides home, because it seemed her mother was in her last days—until, in her sophomore year, just before final exams, Mira’s father called to say that they again expected her mother to die within a few days and that she shouldn’t
rush
home, but . . .
So, as it happened, her mother died while Mira was scrawling a response to question number eight: “In Jung’s consideration of
synchronicity
, he establishes that
tertium comparationis
is
meaning.
Explain.”
As her mother left this world, Mira was sitting hunched in an auditorium trying to describe the way an outer event and an inner event might bear equal significance, and the example she’d used was of a woman being reminded one day, by a song on the radio, of a boy she used to love but hadn’t seen or thought of in many years, and then coming across his obituary in a newspaper she did not ordinarily read.
The next week, looking down at her mother in her coffin bathed in funeral home light, it would all come together—the memory and the precognition, the symbolism and the folklore, inherent in that day years earlier when Mira, in her own delirium and bleeding, had come upon her mother in the pantry, and had seen not only her mother’s death in it but also, in a flash, the trajectory of her own career.
Within a few weeks of her mother’s funeral, Mira had read
The American Way of Death
, and then, of course, eventually, she’d read every book ever written on the traditions and rites and superstitions related to the decomposition and reanimation of the body, until she finally ran out of books to read, and began to write one herself.
W
ith his Nikes in his hands, Clark stood above Mira and said, “Maybe you could take care of their dinner tonight? I’ve had it. I’m going for a run.”
“Clark,” she said, looking up at him—that body, which, one lazy Saturday long ago, after a hot bubble bath, she’d licked the sinewy length of from the tip of the big toe to the crown of the head—and tried not to let her gaze linger on the belly, which was both slack and bulging. (How was it that Clark had recently taken on the physical attributes of a person who had given birth to twins when there was no longer a shred of evidence of it on Mira herself?) She tried to hold his eyes and to keep a steady tone of unexcited objectivity in her voice, even as Matty sank his incredibly sharp new teeth into the flesh of her thigh, as she said, “I have an Honors College thesis committee meeting tonight, Clark. I have to leave in an hour. I told you that this morning.”
He turned from her then, and before she even realized he’d thrown them, the running shoes had sailed across the living room and knocked over their only nice lamp, which Mira could hear shattering even before it hit the coffee table, and the twins began to shriek with what seemed to be all of the hysterical energy of human history channeling itself through their lungs.